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Software

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here 284

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-office-anyway dept.
SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - GoDaddy Lets Their SSL Certificate Expire (superubergeek.com)

Submitted by
SuperUberGeek
SuperUberGeek writes: "GoDaddy Lets Their SSL Certificate Expire

Of all the biggest blunders you do not want to do, GoDaddy.com has let their security certificate expire and is now taken offline. As of 4:10 PST, Dec 19, 2007 Godaddy.com has ceased to exist. This is a major blooper for a company that prides itself in reselling SSL Certificates, and in providing web based tools to manage your domain names, websites, and auctions for domain names. All three which can expire in the time godaddy is down, presenting a huge problem for anyone who has a domain name expiring tonight, or who needs to manage something for a client using the tools at godaddy."
Sony

Submission + - Sony silently drops PS3 linux support. (ps2dev.org) 4

Submitted by
t0qer
t0qer writes: "Up until this week, hackers at the PS2dev.org forums have been hot on the trail of writing a hardware accellerated driver for the PS3 RSX chip until Sony released thier new firmware. Now it seems that updating to the new 2.10 version of PS3 firmware not only blocks RSX access completely, but breaks linux installs as well. This is a harsh blow to the PS3 linux community."

Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks 128

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bee-all-that-you-can-bee dept.
prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."
Programming

Submission + - What happens to your brain when you're coding?

Submitted by youthoftoday
youthoftoday writes: Discussions with friends have shown that we all have slightly different mental approaches to coding. I personally find that often the code just appears under my fingers. Sometimes when trying to code something complex (usually with pointers) I have to actively stop thinking about the problem and some more abstract part of my brain over which I have no control writes the code for me. This seems to raise a few eyebrows.

So how do slashdot readers write code? Cold and logical? Subconscious and inexplicable? Is there some truth in http://xkcd.com/323 ?
Portables

Submission + - Penny-sized flash module holds 16GB (linuxdevices.com) 1

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: Intel describes its new 2GB to 16GB SSDs (solid state disks) as "smaller than a penny, and weighing less than a drop of water." The parts are "400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard drive," Intel boasts, "and at 0.6 grams, 75 times lighter." Sampling now, with mass production set for Q1, the Z-P140 is described as an "optional" part of Intel's Menlow chipset, built in turn as part of Intel's vision for Linux-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).
Privacy

Submission + - Judge:Man can't be forced to divulge passphrase (news.com) 2

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury's subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide "any passwords" used with his Alienware laptop. "Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him," the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. "Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop."

Especially if this ruling is appealed, U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled "Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.")"

Tech Gifts for the Holidays 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tis-the-season-to-blah-blah-blah dept.
MrCopilot pointed out that every year there are a slew of gadgets geeks desire for Christmas, and approximately 7 million web pages dedicated to compiling lists of them. So why shouldn't we join in the fun. Here are stories from Dallas News, CBS News, Seattle Times, E Media Wire, Detroit News and MSNBC. So lets take a crack at your own list. There's still another day or two where things could conceivably be shipped on time for the holidays. I highly recommend Rock Band, although my aching hands might disagree.
Biotech

Submission + - Grid.org distributed project shut down

Submitted by
MCW
MCW writes: "The Grid.org distributed project, which ran computational chemistry programs in an effort to fight cancer, smallpox, and anthrax, among other things, has closed its doors after approximately 5 years. Their website says that "Grid.org announced it has completed its mission to demonstrate the viability and benefits of large-scale Internet-based grid computing, and will be retiring its famous efforts to support critical health research."

A message posted in the Grid.org forums to its users stated that there were various reasons why efforts to keep the project running fell through. So much for corporate philantrophy."
XBox (Games)

Submission + - What Happened To Cheat Codes On Game Consoles?

Submitted by
RCTrucker7
RCTrucker7 writes: "NOTE: I only selected "XBox (Games)" as my Topic, because I couldn't find a Topic that entailed video games in general, or as a whole, and I currently own and play on an X-Box 360. My Video Game Background; I'm a 37 year old male, who now plays games on the X-Box 360 and PC, but started out with an "Intellivision" as my first video game system. My Question; Back when the PS1 came out and carried thru to the PS2 (I didn't have or play on the first X-Box or any of Nintendo's systems after the NES), it was quite common, especially in games that had "attributes" associated with your character ( say, Strength, Agility, and Speed for a Sports Game) or items that had fluctuating values associated with them (say, the number of bullets left in your clip, the number of health points left, or being invulnerable for a FPS game) to have codes put in place by the developers of a game, that either automatically changed the associated value, or allowed you to change it to your own desired level. For example, maybe you would push Up then Down on the Directional Pad, then hit Triangle, Square, Circle, X, X, Circle, Square, Triangle in a FPS game, and that would unlock all the weapons that were available in the game, with unlimited ammo for all of them too. Or you'd do some other sequence and that would allow you to fully jack up all the stats of your player in a football game. Then along came "outside" codes, via third-party hardware, such as the Game Shark and Code Breaker. These typically gave you all the developer codes and then some. But it seemed that even with these devices, games still had the tried-n-true developer codes in them. If you couldn't figure them out, then you could always buy "the book" or ask your video game playing God friend what the codes were. Then came along sites such as GameFaqs, where you could look up a game title, hit the "Cheats/Codes" link for it, and have the "keys to the kingdom" for your chosen game. It was great. But now, especially since I've been on the X-Box 360, I've noticed that when I hit that "Cheats/Codes" link for a game, all I get are "Unlockables" and what accomplishment/task/quest/etc needs to be done to unlock it. This is not including the "Achievements" for an X-Box 360 game. To me these are not Cheats or Codes. These are things already included in the game which "open" as part of the expected normal playing of the game. What happened to my "Up/Down/Up/Down/B/X/B/Y" developer code to give me unlimited ammo in "Rainbow Six: Vegas"? Or my "Left/Right/X/Y/X/Right/Left" developer code to give me "99" in all the stats of my SuperStar in Madden NFL '07? What happened to my beloved codes? I've only seen a couple of games in this "Next-Gen" of gaming that have them; "Saints Row" comes to mind as an excellent example. You pull out your in-game cell phone; enter a certain phone number and BAM! Unlimited Ammo. Call another number and BAM! Free cash in my pocket. So what happened? Where did all the codes go? Was there some secret developer summit that no one knows about, where they all decided that "From now on...there will be...NO...MORE...In-Game...CODES!!!"?"
Encryption

Submission + - AACS Compromised Again

Submitted by drrck
drrck writes: Days after the WinDVD patch hit the internet Engadget reports here here that AACS has been "hacked" again this time by using the VolumeID and XBOX 360 HD DVD drives.

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