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Software

Casting Doubt On the Hawkeye Ball-Calling System 220

Posted by timothy from the nudging-the-odds-means-smarter-bets dept.
Human judgment by referees is increasingly being supplemented (and sometimes overridden) by computerized observation systems. nuke-alwin writes "It is obvious that any model is only as accurate as the data in it, and technologies such as Hawkeye can never remove all doubt about the position of a ball. Wimbledon appears to accept the Hawkeye prediction as absolute, but researchers at Cardiff University will soon publish a paper disputing the accuracy of the system."
Unix

Submission + - SCO Goes Private with $100 Million Backing 1

Submitted by AmIAnAi
AmIAnAi writes: Just when you thought it was all over, the SCO story takes a new twist.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that SCO have received $100 million financing from Stephen Norris Capital Partners to take tehm out of Chapter 11 and go private.

The move gives Stephen Norris, whose namesake founder was a co-founder of private equity giant The Carlyle Group, a controlling interest in SCO, which now has a platform to continue its court battle with Novell Inc. over royalties from the Unix server operating system, SCO's main business.
Games

Games That Could Have Been 99

Posted by Zonk from the sparks-in-their-creators-eyes dept.
Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Only 2 activations of Bioshock ever?

Submitted by Tinman_au
Tinman_au writes: Theres a lot of people posting on the 2k Games forums that the copy protection used in Bioshock, (SecuROM), only allows 2 activations.

How many installs do we get? Transfer of ownership?
Re-use of activation code on new PC?

I'm all for companies protecting their income/IP, but only allowing 2 activations seems a tad draconian.

The company has yet to respond to anyone in the forums about the activation issue (though they have responded that they are looking into some of the other problems that usually go with a new release).

Hopefully they'll address the "2 activation's" issue somehow, as it's the only reason I'll be waiting before getting a copy of what looks like an absolute cracker of a game otherwise.
Portables

Submission + - PSP custom firmware team fights back against theft

Submitted by Brianech
Brianech writes: What happens when a a website steals credit for a software release, and the release team makes modifications to recent revisions to prevent such theft at the cost of end user? In recent days M33, a PSP custom firmware team, modified their firmware to include an encryption scheme based off of the md5 hash. This was done to prevent sites, namely PS3News.com (WARNING:A LOT OF ADS) from editing their release. The problem was that once the ps3news did edit the firmware, it became useless, and resulted in the site's user's PSP's being "bricked," a term to describe a nearly ruined PSP. The debate over whether the action taken by the M33 team was ethical is raging on in PSP community sites such as PSP Hacks , and MaxConsole . The M33 team also included the name of the owner of ps3news.com site, and the name and home address of the person who receives advertising payments from the site, in their firmware's readme file. They also included a warning not download the firware from the above mentioned site, along with accusations that ps3news.com posted IP addresses and full names of well known PSP hackers Lan.st . These accusations can no longer be validated as ps3news have taken their PSP forums and files offline for the time being.

Feed Engadget: Michael Bay "drinks the Kool Aid," now supports HD DVD (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Ha, so much for standing up to the boss-man. Michael's latest post now says that, "I drank the Kool Aid" blah blah blah "so I think I might be back on to do Transformers 2!" Whatever, wuss.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
IBM

Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial 114

Posted by Zonk from the bidding-is-just-another-super-element dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."
AMD

Inside AMD's Phenom Architecture 191

Posted by samzenpus from the behind-the-curtain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today's hype for AMD's announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD's 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD's will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?"
Google

Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell 303

Posted by Zonk from the argh-my-pancreas-the-demons-poke-it-so dept.
whoever57 writes "Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'supplemental index', also known as 'Google Hell'. It uses the example of Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, which has dropped in Google's rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'supplemental index' may be visited by Google's spiders as infrequently as once per year. The problem? Google's cache shows that Google's spiders visited the site ss recently as late April. 'Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"
Movies

Kaleidescape Triumphant in Court Case, DVD Ripping Ruled Legal 213

Posted by Zonk from the only-when-you-own-it-netflixers dept.
Jim Buzbee writes "Ever wanted to rip all your DVDs to a big network server so that you could select and play them back to your TV? Up until now, manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they've been afraid a lawsuit. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, 'nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs. Nothing requires that a DVD be present during playback.' Kaleidescape has finally won their long-standing lawsuit, a case we first talked about early in 2005."
Microsoft

Microsoft Is Sued For Patent Violation Over .NET 288

Posted by Zonk from the is-it-weird-to-root-for-the-megacorp-on-this-one dept.
randomErr writes "As reported by Info World, Microsoft was issued a cease and desist order on February 7 of this year by Vertical Computer Systems. The order was for patent infringement by the current implementations of the .NET framework. Both the .NET framework and Vertical Computer Systems' SiteFlash use XML to create component-based structures that are used to build and operate web sites. Vertical Computer Systems is requesting a full jury trial. If VCS prevails, .NET technology implementations as we know them may completely change and Microsoft would probably have to pay out a hefty sum."
Security

Submission + - JavaScript Hijacking

Submitted by
bvc
bvc writes: "There's a new kind of vulnerability in town: JavaScript Hijacking allows attackers to steal confidential data from vulnerable Ajax-style webapps. The details involve the fact that Web browsers don't protect JavaScript the same way they protect plain-ol' HTML, but the bigger picture is that open Web standards haven't kept up with the cutting edge, and eventually all of the hacks and kludges came tumbling down. Can open standards catch up, or does the future belong to proprietary standards like Adobe's Flash/Flex/ActionScript?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: April Fool's Submissions Overboard and Underfunny 2

Journal by evought

I agree with some of the comments and submissions I have seen today that the yearly stupidity on Slashdot is just plain dumb. Unfortunately, these comments are drowned out. One or two good hoaxes would have made my day. ("Google Paper" was actually quite good). A score of idiotic and unbelievable posts just ruins the site and real news is buried. Having looked through the Firehose at several points today, there have been several serious submissions that have been voted up but have never made
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Who/what should a hero fight?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Due to a weird radioactive accident in my lab a few months ago, I have acquired some superpowers that people usually only dream of. I always thought that what I saw in comics were just fiction, but now I know better. Being a nerd and a nice guy, I followed the lesson from the heroes in comics, and started to fight crime in my region. Everything is going nicely, but the more I fight crime, more it seems that the world is getting worse and worse. Poor people are poorer, people keep dying of hunger and people keep on killing each other. So, I decided to ask Slashdot: since I have power enough to change the world and fight injustices, what should I do to make this world better? Also, heroes cannot work alone, since the world is so big and there is a lot to fight, so who should I unite with? I think you can understand why I'm not signing this summary.

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