macx666 - Slashdot User

Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation 875

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @10:18AM from the thank-god-we're-all-safe-from-pirates dept.

KrispySausage writes "After weeks of grueling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA — something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation. Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour."

Submission + - Brazilian pop music scene thrives on piracy (cnn.com)

Submitted by langelgjm on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @10:15AM

langelgjm writes: When people talk about the failing business model of the traditional record company, they often only offer vague suggestions as to how things would work otherwise. But a concrete example of a music scene that thrives on piracy is to be found in Brazil, in the form of tecnobrega. From the article: 'While piracy is the bane of many musicians trying to control the sale of their songs, tecnobrega artists see counterfeiters as key to their success. "Piracy is the way to get established and get your name out. There's no way to stop it, so we're using it to our advantage," explains Gabi Amarantos... Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Brazil's respected Getulio Vargas Foundation, an elite Rio de Janeiro think tank and research center, says tecnobrega and other movements like it represent a new business model for the digital era, where music is transformed from a good to a service.'

Submission + - A technology report from San Diego fire shelter

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @10:12AM

netbuzz writes: "Retired journalist and mobility expert Jim Forbes is among the quarter-million San Diego-area residents driven out of their homes by the horrific wildfires. Forbes has taken the opportunity to "fire blog" from his shelter and discuss via e-mail with Network World how his personal technology and the shelter's wireless networks are holding up under the strain. "The shelter set up a dedicated computer room with an 802.11 a,b, and g network which worked like a charm," says Forbes.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20911"

Submission + - SPAM: Cisco gives WiMAX big boost via $330M buyout

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @09:33AM

alphadogg writes: The rumors were right: Cisco has signed a deal to buy WiMAX radio vendor Navini Networks for $330 million. The buy is a milestone and it changes the competitive landscape, says Daryl Schoolar, senior analyst, networking group, In-Stat, a market research firm. "First the ITU [International Telecommunications Union] accepts WiMAX as a 3G standard, and now one of the largest networking vendors in the world shows its faith in the technology and in business models behind WiMAX."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Oink.cd, shut down ! (ifpi.org)

Submitted by mvictoras on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @09:29AM

mvictoras writes: The biggest music private tracker shut down! Ifpi.org reports, 'British and Dutch police today shut down the world's biggest source of illegal pre-release chart albums and arrested a 24-year old man in an operation coordinated between Middlesbrough and Amsterdam. The raids, which were coordinated by Interpol, follow a two-year investigation by the international and UK music industry bodies IFPI and BPI into the members-only online pirate pre-release club known as OiNK. OiNK specialised in distributing albums leaked on to the internet, often weeks ahead of their official release date. More than 60 major album releases have been leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal pre-release music. The site, with an estimated membership of 180,000, has been used by many hardcore file-sharers to violate the rights of artists and producers by obtaining copyrighted recordings and making them available on the internet. It is alleged that the site was operated by a 24-year-old man in the Middlesbrough area, who was arrested today. The site's servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week. OiNK's operator allegedly made money by setting up a donations account on the site facilitated by PayPal. Cleveland Police and the FIOD-ECD SCHIPOL branch of the Dutch police undertook the raids, supported by Interpol, as part of a carefully-planned international investigation with anti-piracy investigators from IFPI and BPI.'

Submission + - Interpol Raids Oink.cd (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Faust on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @09:19AM

Faust writes: A flat on Teesside and several properties in Amsterdam were raided as part of an Interpol investigation into the members-only torrent website OiNK early Tuesday morning as part of a two-year investigation by music industry bodies the IFPI and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). The site has a claimed 60 major leaked pre-release albums this year alone and the bust is being touted as a victory against the "biggest source of illegal pre-release chart albums".

Submission + - Weird Al turns 48 (yankovic.org)

Submitted by

Skip

on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @08:58AM

Skip writes: "It's Weird Al Yankovic's 48th birthday today. I can't imagine that there's anyone reading Slashdot that doesn't know Weird Al, but just in case, here's some video links. One of the genius artists of our generation."

Submission + - SOA could change the way you buy electricity (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

StonyandCher

on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:36PM

StonyandCher writes: "Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), with IBM as a partner, have built a demonstration network called GridWise that showed how an event-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be used to build a power marketplace that lets residential and commercial customers change their electricity consumption nearly in real time, based on price and other factors. During the yearlong, Energy Department-sponsored marketplace demonstration, customers spent less money on power, and utilities easily accommodated spikes in demand without affecting service levels. The marketplace ran on an IBM WebSphere Application Server at PNNL and received data in real time from various Web services about electricity's current wholesale price and most recent closing price, as well as whether those prices were trending up or down. It communicated with specialized, "smart" appliances at participants' sites via IBM-developed middleware built within what IBM calls its event-driven architecture (EDA) framework and running on the WebSphere server. The EDA middleware provided the link between the transaction-oriented marketplace and the more physical world of the controls-based appliances."

Submission + - Firestorm 2.0 - Using Social Media to Track Fires

Submitted by babooo404 on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:15PM

babooo404 writes: With all of the fires in California today, how are the social services such as Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc. covering the crisis? Flickr and Wikipedia appear to have the best coverage overall and several local TV stations are using Twitter to get the news out.

Submission + - LoggerFS: a revolutionary take on logging (itauth.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:14PM

An anonymous reader writes: LoggerFS is a FUSE-based virtual file system written in C++ using the FUSEXX C++ bindings. It seamlessly passes log data through the file system and directly into a database. Unlike existing log parsers, which often run periodically and scan the entire file for changes, LoggerFS takes a unique approach by masking the database backend with a filesystem frontend. When log lines are appended to a virtual file on the LoggerFS file system, lines that match a regex pattern are directly stored in a database. Read on for an Introduction to LoggerFS.

Submission + - AT&T Vs. Vonage 'VoIP' Patent Questioned

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 22, 2007 @09:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: The patent at issue in AT&T's new lawsuit against Vonage isn't a VoIP patent at all, according to InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe. AT&T Suit Against Vonage Makes Mockery Of U.S. Patent System says that the patent is Patent 6,487,200, awarded to AT&T in 2002. It's for a packetized telephone network, and is accompanied by a diagram of an ATM network. The abstract says that the set-up "makes it possible to build a telephone system with fewer and cheaper switches and fewer links for a given volume of traffic than heretofore possible and also permits substantial savings in provisioning and maintaining the system." If I set up an packet-based extraterrestrial communications network five years from now, should AT&T "own" the rights to it, the blogger asks? By extension (assuming patents didn't expire), should Alexander Graham Bell?

Submission + - Ethernet Zooms to 100 Gigabit Speeds

Submitted by Doc Ruby on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @01:04PM

Doc Ruby writes: As reported at GigaOM, 'Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver', bridging 100Gbps ethernet over 10 10Gbps optical WAN links:

Infinera, a San Jose, Calif.-based start-up, along with University of California, Santa Cruz, Internet2 and Level3 Communications, today demonstrated a 100 gigabit/second Ethernet connection that could carry data over a 4000 kilometer fiber network. The trial took place at the Super Computing Show in Tampa, Florida. The experimental system was set up between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas, and back again. A 100 GbE signal was spliced into ten 10 Gb/s streams using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. This algorithm preserves packet order even as individual flows are striped across multiple wavelengths. [...] [A]bout 14 months ago we wrote about the 10 GB/s network4 that connected the University of California, San Diego and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center over a dedicated optical path. [...] [Infinera co-founder and CTO Drew Perkins] said that the trial today shows that you can build scalable systems that can achieve higher speeds.
With most data we prosume now large multimedia objects/streams, mostly networked, we're all going to want our share of these 100Gbps networks. The current network retailers, mainly cable and DSL dealers, still haven't brought even 10Mbps to most homes, though they're now bringing Fiber to the Premises to some rich/lucky customers. Are they laying fiber that will bring them to Tbps, or will that stuff clog the way to getting these speeds ourselves?

The Moon's Magnetic Umbrellas 125

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @01:01PM from the living-on-the-mooooon dept.

eldavojohn writes "When it comes to space exploration, there are things that are good for humans (water) and things that are bad for humans (radiation). In order for exploration of the moon to occur, its lack of a global magnetic shield to block solar radiation must be addressed. Luckily, scientists have discovered that there are highly magnetized areas of the moon's crust that could shield settlements." From the article: "Current evidence suggests that impact-basin ejecta materials [material blasted out by huge asteroid or comet impacts] are the most likely sources of many or all of the magnetic fields ... These ejecta contain microscopic metallic iron particles that are the carriers of the magnetization."

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