Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Media

Submission + - Is Bully really so controversial?

Submitted by GoingTurbo
GoingTurbo writes: It's not often that you get to watch a videogames reviewer getting beaten up, but this video review of Rockstar's contraversial new game Bully (Canis Canem Edit) is more violent than the game itself. While describing high-school violence, the reviewer is thrown to a desk by another journalist, and then delivers his thoughts while being crushed half to within an inch of his life. The reviewer describes the game as "exceptionally novel" and "not nearly as morally corrupt as the naysayers feared". Is it, however, a bit gruesome watching the school children beat each other up — apparently "the gameplay can't be faulted". If you've been wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a pretty funny and informative video. It's also refreshingly completely advert-free. It might have upset some people, but Bully looks ingenious.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Giving In to the Terrorists

Journal by Dorozhand

Are we giving the terrorists what they want?

What do terrorists want? They want to "terrorize." The people they kill are only collateral damage; the point of terrorism is not what they do, but our reaction to it: terror. They also kill and destroy so that they can become infamous - to glorify their goals of world domination, to bask in the glory of false importance that is terrorism's reward, and thus to recruit more terrorists.

Software

Submission + - Origin of Quake3's Fast InvSqrt() - Part Two

Submitted by
geo
geo writes: "The end of Beyond3D.com's original article on this topic finished off with us opining about the author, saying that the last man we'd probably ever find that'd touched the code is Gary Tarolli, ex SGI, ex 3dfx, now at NVIDIA. After passing by coding luminaries such as John Carmack, Michael Abrash and Terje Mathison, attributing at least some part of it to Gary seemed pretty fitting given his history and contributions to modern 3D graphics, not least the fact he's a seriously good programmer too, and we left it at that. Thinking that was it, we published and publicised and Slashdot picked it up, giving the piece some very hefty exposure. Exposure enough, it transpires, to have the real author say hello and own up to it. So it's not quite Gary, but rather another Silicon Valley veteran with a name beginning with G. Step forward, Greg Walsh."
Security

Submission + - Securing the endpoints

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As every admin knows, controlling what your users can actually do on your network is an uphill task. The latest attempt to deal with the endpoint security, with tools appearing from a variety of directions — from Microsoft itself, from NAC (network access control) suppliers, and from developers specialising in system deployment and management, such as Altiris, LANdesk, ScriptLogic and others. http://www.techworld.com/networking/features/index .cfm?featureID=2964
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Neuros OSD Review

Submitted by Derat
Derat writes: The Neuros OSD promises a lot — it claims to be the first open source Linux-based embedded media center and it "records video and links your PC, portables and entertainment center". Bold claims, but can it live up to them? Linuxlookup.com has a two page review of the Neuros OSD from both a developer and user perspective.
Censorship

Submission + - Senators squelch debate on climate, U.K. responds.

Submitted by
JohnnyGTO
JohnnyGTO writes: "Nice to see some people understand that freedom of speech means both sides of an opinion!

British Lord Stings Senators Rockefeller and Snowe: Uphold Free Speech or Resign Lord Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, has sent an open letter to Senators Rockefeller (D-WV) and Snowe (R-Maine) in response to their recent open letter telling the CEO of ExxonMobil to cease funding climate-skeptic scientists.

Lord Monckton, former policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, writes: "You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to senior elected and appointed government officials who disagree with your opinion.""
Security

Submission + - The Month of Apple Bugs

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: From the man who brought us the Month of Kernel Bugs comes the Month of Apple Bugs! Details in the Washington Post Security Fix Blog.

Opera Running on the OLPC 193

Posted by Zonk from the music-in-the-strangest-of-places dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"
Portables

Submission + - OLPC runs out-of-the-box Opera browser

Submitted by
Mark Schenk
Mark Schenk writes: "When Opera Software's CTO Håkon Wium Lie received a prototype of the OLPC, the first thing he did was install the latest Opera browser, which runs straight-out-of-the-box on the OLPC. He makes a very good point about the importance of a good browser on a device such as this, as an application platform. And for low-end devices Opera is surely the best choice around."
Announcements

Submission + - Humans sense of smell "Underestimated" - B

Submitted by Benjamin Long
Benjamin Long writes: The study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, led by Noam Sobel of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail. They found evidence of a human smelling ability that experts thought was impossible.
Bug

Submission + - Effective operations of a small helpdesk system

Submitted by
El Presidente
El Presidente writes: "I'm the department head of a small IT helpdesk in a not-quite-so-small business. The department's small in the sense that (a) there's only three people (including me), and (b) not only do we do helpdesk, but develop all the in-house systems, build our own servers, etc.

We're supposed to log every helpdesk call that comes in (we've previously developed our own software for this), log notes on each call, and log the resolution. However, although I do set a good example by logging (most!) of my calls, the other two don't, even though I've talked to them numerous times.

Although they do the job well, this is the one area that is letting the department down, and now management want full stats on what we do every day, so obviously a full helpdesk log for each day would go a long way to prove what we do (or don't do!!)

I don't want to come down on them with the Big Iron Fist (tm) and check up on them every few minutes (because I've got better things to do with my time, like real work) how can I actually get them to buy into logging calls, and not "forget" or be "too busy to log properly""
Games

The Future Playground 40

Posted by Zonk from the where-is-the-power-glove dept.
eldavojohn writes "The BBC has an article on the London Science Museum's exhibit 'The Future Playground' which showcases some new technologies that may transform gaming. You may recognize some of these technologies as 'old news' but it's the way they're being utilized for gaming that makes this interesting. The most interesting one is the inflatable display which the article describes: 'The Puffer Sphere is an inflatable ball on which images can be projected, said Oliver Collier — one of its creators. Mr Collier said the idea of using the inflatable as a display grew out of an undergraduate project at the University of Edinburgh to use it as the basis for an interactive art installation.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Heisenberg may have been here.

Close