halsver - Slashdot User

Submission + - Valve now sells in Euro, USD to EURO rates: 1:1

Submitted by nautsch on Friday December 19, 2008 @07:20PM

nautsch writes: The online distribution platform of valve, Steam (Steampowered.com), has just introduce new pricing for big parts of the rest of the world outside of the US. Steam News. The funny thing is, that the rates between Euro and USD are 1:1, which is kind of a price increase of up to 50%. European customers feel ripped of and theres a thread in their forum which got 1000 replies in under two days (Steam forum thread.

Anyone else thinks, that valve has made a horrible mistake?

Submission + - EA is Now Officially on Steam; Spore Loses SecuROM (gamecyte.com)

Submitted by

Trevor DeRiza

on Friday December 19, 2008 @07:06PM

Trevor DeRiza writes: "Today, Valve and EA revealed that this week's earlier rumors were true: Spore (and other EA games) are coming to Steam. As of today, Spore, Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect, Need for Speed: Undercover, and FIFA Manager 2009 are all available for download on Steam. In the coming weeks, EA will add Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Red Alert 3. On the official Steam forums, when asked whether or not Spore would contain the dreaded DRM that "caused" it to be the most pirated game of 2008, a moderator replied, "It does not have third party DRM.""

Submission + - Student Invention Extends Battery Life by 12x (carleton.ca)

Submitted by imamac on Friday December 19, 2008 @06:08PM

imamac writes: From the article:

Atif Shamim, an electronics PhD student at Carleton University, has built a prototype that extends the battery life of portable gadgets such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, by getting rid of all the wires used to connect the electronic circuits with the antenna.

Unlike many of the breakthroughs we read about on Slahdot and elsewhere, this seems like it has a very high probability of market acceptance and actual implementation.

Submission + - Mechanical AI made in Little Big Planet

Submitted by Laurens on Friday December 19, 2008 @12:13PM

Laurens writes: Despite slow sales of Little Big Planet in the USA, you might have heard of the calculator made in Little Big Planet, but now that has been topped. I found a fully-functioning AI machine which plays Tic-Tac-Toe against the player. Considering that you can't actually program in LBP, this feat is impressive: it is a machine wich has mechanical AND and OR ports made of pistons and proximity detectors, a phyically moving Program Counter, and hundreds of wires. The level is called 'Tic Tac Toe' and is by author Cristel

Submission + - SPAM: Unmanned machines fight to the death

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday August 26, 2008 @04:13PM

coondoggie writes: "What happens when science-fiction becomes reality? In what certainly could be a precursor to future battles, the Air Force said this week its unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aircraft destroyed and unmanned, remotely controlled vehicle containing an explosive device in Iraq. While the event was extraordinary in that it was the first time a Reaper had blown something up since arriving in Iraq in late July, it was also one of the first documented cases of two unmanned vehicles doing battle. The Reaper is a faster, larger, higher-flying version of the highly successful MQ-1 Predator. The Reaper has engaged enemy forces in Afghanistan, the Air Force said. Such battles are likely to accelerate in the future. According to the Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2013 the US said it will spend an estimated $4 billion by 2010 on unmanned systems technology. The total spending is expected to rise above $24 billion. Over 4,000 robots are currently deployed on the ground in Iraq. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Solar nanoantenna energy collectors

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Monday August 11, 2008 @01:07PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "U.S. researchers have developed a cheap way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect solar energy. As said one Idaho National Laboratory (INL) scientist, 'these antennas are good at capturing energy, but they're not very good at converting it.' In fact, the team estimates these individual nanoantennas can absorb close to 80% of the available energy from the sun. So these sheets of 'nantennas,' as the team calls them, might first be used as cooling devices that draw waste heat from buildings or electronics without using electricity. According to the research team, nanoantennas have the potential to be a more efficient alternative to solar cells and we might be only a few years away of the next generation of solar energy collectors. But read this overview for many additional details, references and pictures about these 'nantennas.'"

Submission + - Vista memory protections rendered useless (techtarget.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Thursday August 07, 2008 @05:25PM

Trailrunner7 writes: Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system, an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks. In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they've found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers.

Submission + - DOJ: Card Thefts Aided by 'Well Designed' Software (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Wednesday August 06, 2008 @03:28PM

CWmike writes: "Following a bust in May that was related to yesterday's charging of 11 people in one of the largest and most organized credit card theft operations ever, the feds asked the CERT Coordinating Center to give an opinion of the software it found. CERT told the U.S. investigators that the "core sniffer program" used for wardriving — driving around in a car with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop computer seeking access — is "efficient, well designed and uses some algorithms and data structures that reflect college-level knowledge of computer programming skills. ...""

Submission + - Open-source E-voting Goes for Whirl at LinuxWorld (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Wednesday August 06, 2008 @02:49PM

CWmike writes: "After Florida in 2000, Alan Dechert decided that there had to be a better way to safely and accurately cast ballots. More than seven years later, Dechert is at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, publicly displaying the open-source e-voting system he helped develop. "I watched the 2000 election, and I was stunned that we didn't know how to count ballots," Dechert said. That December, Dechert co-founded the Open Voting Consortium to develop an electronic voting system that allows voters to make their candidate selections on a screen, then print their ballots and have them scanned and tallied by reliable machines. The system runs on PCs loaded with Ubuntu Linux and the free, open source e-voting application created by the consortium. More than 300 people tried out the system at LinuxWorld yesterday. Dick Turnquist, an IT manager at the Association of California Water Agencies in Sacramento, test-voted on the proposed system and said he liked what he experienced. "It certainly was easy enough to use. I probably would prefer it" to existing e-voting systems."

Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft's open source guru faces tough fights

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @03:39PM

coondoggie writes: "Microsoft's Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving's door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft's representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises. Ramji's Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week's LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

GM, Utilities Partner To Advance Plug-In Hybrids 582

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @03:05PM from the quart-of-oil-and-ten-kilowatts-please dept.

chareverie writes "General Motors is forming a team with utility companies nationwide to create a charging infrastructure for electric cars. Their goal is to improve the design of charging stations — making them weatherproof and child-proof, for example — in locations such as public garages, meters, and parking lots. They're also working on ways to avoid overwhelming the utilities during peak hours. Their goal is to have these improved charging stations implemented by 2010, when the Chevy Volt is introduced. Everyone recognizes however that a national car-charging infrastructure would be far from complete at that time."

Submission + - SPAM: First paper-based transistors

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @12:55PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "Portuguese researchers have created the first paper-based transistors. To be more precise, they've made the first field effect transistors (FET) with a paper interstrate layer. According to the research team, these new transistors offer the same level of performance as 'state-of-the-art oxide based thin film transistors (TFTs) produced on glass or crystalline silicon substrates.' Possible applications for these paper-based transistors include new disposable electronics devices, such as paper displays, smart labels, bio-applications or RFID tags. But read more for additional details and see a picture of the first paper interstrate TFTs."

Comment Re:CACert (Score 4, Insightful) 529

by the_olo on Friday July 18, 2008 @06:14PM (#24248069) Attached to: What Would It Take To Have Open CA Authorities?

The fact is that any cert can be compromised within seconds after it is issued, and so can browsers, hosts lists, and a long list of other target; therefore, certs provide NO assurance you're connected to who the URL indicates you are. The idea that doubtful protection against "man in the middle" attacks are worth the cost of the CA infrastructure is ludicrous.

Would you care to somehow substantiate that claim? How are you going to compromise that cert? What do you mean by "compromise"? Without serious arguments and proofs you really sound like that crazy Time Cube guy.

Do you even have any understanding of how PKI works? Could you prove it by elaborating on it and presenting real attack scenarios? Because without that you just seem to be a troll.

Submission + - SPAM: Wii is the new US Console Leader

Submitted by

stoolpigeon

on Friday July 18, 2008 @05:13PM

stoolpigeon writes: "Nintendo said Thursday that its globally popular Wii has become the top-selling video game console in the United States, a crown coveted by rivals Microsoft and Sony. Market-tracking firm NPD Group reports that 666,000 Wii consoles were sold in the United States in June, raising the total sales count in the country to nearly 10.9 million units."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - OCZ Announces Fast, More Cost Competitive SSD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Tuesday July 01, 2008 @08:11PM

MojoKid writes: "Memory manufacturer OCZ announced what appears to be a breakthrough product today in the area of SSD technology. OCZ's Core Series Solid State Disks reportedly will have blistering 143MBs/80-90MBs read/write performance with a competitive life expectancy of 1.5 million hours MTBF. The kicker is these drives will retail from $169 to $479 for the 128GB model, which is just about the cheapest SSD seen hit the market to date. Hopefully reviews will hit the web soon and this drive is all it's cracked up to be."

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