creature124 - Slashdot User

Submission + - WD Scorpio Drive, 250 Gigs For Notebooks (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Monday September 03, 2007 @11:39PM

MojoKid writes: "Mobile hard drives don't get nearly as much exposure as their more common 3.5 desktop counterparts, but there have been significant advances made in this space that warrant some attention. Western Digital, for example, has released a high-capacity 250GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, the Scorpio WD2500BEVS, that sports a few proprietary technologies dubbed WhisperDrive, ShockGuard, and SecurePark, that improve the drive's acoustic profile, power consumption, and durability. And despite being a 5400RPM drive, its performance characteristics put it well ahead of most other 2.5" drives with similar spindle speeds and just behind a full-sized desktop hard drive running at 7200RPM. With hard drive speeds being the limiting performance factor in many instances, a drive like this could make for a worthwhile notebook upgrade"

Submission + - The Redneck Humor Zone (angelfire.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday September 03, 2007 @11:33PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Howdy Pardners! Look like the holidays is commin' up faster than a bobcat with a bur under its tail. If yer like me, yer probably plannin' a big ol' Thanksgivin' barbacue. Yer kin folks will show up and et ya outta house n' home. If yer kin is like mine, thars gonna be one or two who act like a squirrel crawled up thar crawl space."

Submission + - Separation of Church and Microsoft Needed?

Submitted by

theodp

on Monday September 03, 2007 @09:04PM

theodp writes: "Last week, the USPTO published a rather odd Microsoft patent application for Content Ratings and Recommendations, which describes how religious-based communities and other 'subcultures' can use the patent-pending process to prevent their members from viewing undesirable television programs and movies."

Submission + - Egyptian blogger identifies his torturer (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by mocost on Monday September 03, 2007 @08:23PM

mocost writes: Egyptian journalist, blogger and Muslim Brotherhood member Abdel Monim Mahmoud has identified a prison officer who allegedly tortured him for 13 days in 2003.

Submission + - Creative Labs' Vista driver team feeling stressed? (creativelabs.com) 2

Submitted by

regular_gonzalez

on Monday September 03, 2007 @07:32PM

regular_gonzalez writes: "While the X-Fi's issues under Vista have been widely reported, that doesn't prevent a flood of complaints pouring into the Creative Labs website, posted for all to see. What is more surprising is the employees' responses. A sampling:

# The drivers will be released when we are good and ready and happy with them
# Bitching like a 5 year old won't magically solve all our problems on the drivers.
# Call us hopeless and whatever else all you like, noone else is going to fix these drivers but us, demoralizing us won't bring it faster
# There are already reasonably working drivers supplied with the card, legally our responsibility stops there, think yourselves lucky we even bother updating the drivers at all.
# Anymore of these derogatory posts and we might well just flush the whole XFi/Vista64 saga to the toilet and move on.
Is Creative Labs obliged to treat even the most obnoxious of whiners with a certain level of respect, or is it refreshing to have a company actually state opinions that normally would be kept to themselves?"

Submission + - Doctor Who goes on hiatus for a year (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

BigBadBus

on Monday September 03, 2007 @10:51AM

BigBadBus writes: "Looks like Dr.Who fans will have to go without their hero in 2009 after the BBC revealed the Time Lord will take a gap year. Might be a good idea considering the unpopular choice of Catherine Tate as the new companion. However, to please die-hard Whovians, there will be three specials in 2009."

Submission + - Modern Hydra - the new tricks of spammers and phis (heise-security.co.uk)

Submitted by

juct

on Monday September 03, 2007 @09:23AM

juct writes: "To shut down a botnet used to be easy: find the central Command&Control server and close it down. Fast Flux networks any more. heise Security describes how bot masters start to implement a new flexible layer of proxy intermediaries. These are numerous, and several replacements are available in the background should one of them be shut down — catch one, and two new ones will appear."

Submission + - DIRECTV freaks out and blocks everything (typepad.com) 1

Submitted by eagl on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:32PM

eagl writes: It seems as if DIRECTV has jumped on the DRM bandwagon in a big way. Wil Wheaton finds himself with 57 channels (plus or minus a few hundred) and nothing on, quite literally. Is the inevitable result of forcing restrictive standards that do not benefit consumers?

Submission + - Australian ISPs Reject Calls To Police Their Users

Submitted by jon_cooper on Thursday August 30, 2007 @09:16PM

jon_cooper writes: After recent setbacks in the RIAA's lawsuits, AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) has decided to try a different approach in Australia and want ISPs to do their dirty work for them. However, Australian ISPs have soundly rejected calls from AFACT to slow down or terminate user accounts that AFACT has determined are being used to distribute copyrighted works. Telstra had this to say, "... we do not believe it is up to the ISPs to be judge, jury and executioner in relation to the issue when the content owners have any number of legal avenues to pursue infringements."

Submission + - Man Arrested for Post on craigslist.com (grupthink.com)

Submitted by

davidthedrake

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @04:44PM

davidthedrake writes: "Kevin Zimmerman posted his eye-witness account of an arrest by Kalispell police (which occurred on July 28th, 2006) on a Montana craiglist.com site. The official police report stated the prank-pulling kids, whom Zimmerman witnessed, were arrested without incident. Zimmerman's post on craigslist.com painted a different picture saying police:

"...yanked the boy down, twisted him sideways, then grabbed his arm and cuffed him. He then kicked the boy in his leg twice, patted him down then shook the boy really hard." Zimmerman went on further in his post to insult the officers associated with the arrest.

Nearly a year later, police showed up at his door and arrested him for 'criminal defamation.' The police obtained Zimmerman's information by first sending a subpoena to craigslist.com and then sending a subpoena to Zimmerman's ISP."

Submission + - Internet growing too large for current hardware?

Submitted by

rkohutek

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @01:30PM

rkohutek writes: "There has been a very interesting discussion happening on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailling list about the scalability of today's Internet routers. A vast quantity of those routers support only 256,000 unique networks. According to the CIDR-Report, there are ~233,216 routes on the Internet, and at the current rate of 3,500 additional routes per month, we are going to be bumping into those hardware limits very quickly. Not many people are aware of the situation, and even fewer are prepared to perform the expensive upgrades. Has anybody already dealt with this and have solutions?"

Submission + - "Viacom hit me for infringing my own copyright (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by

Chris Knight

on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @02:23PM

Chris Knight writes: "Long story short: I ran for school board where I live this past fall and created some TV commercials including this one with a "Star Wars" theme. A few months ago VH1 grabbed the commercial from YouTube and featured it in a segment of its show "Web Junk 2.0". Neither VH1 or its parent company Viacom told me they were doing this or asked my permission to use it, but I didn't mind it if they did. It was great to see the commercial was being enjoyed by a far wider audience than I'd expected. I was honored that they chose to use it and thought that Aries Spears's commentary about it was pretty hilarious, so I posted a clip of VH1's segment on YouTube so that I could put it on my blog. This morning I got an e-mail from YouTube saying that the video has been pulled because Viacom is claiming that I'm violating its copyright. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright! Talk about chutzpah! Needless to say, I would like to fight this: not for any kind of monetary compensation, but just for the right to employ my own self-created material per Fair Use."

Submission + - Newest Version of Storm Worm in "BETA Testing& (robertmcardle.com)

Submitted by

Robert McArdle

on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @05:02AM

Robert McArdle writes: "There is a new wave of the now infamous Storm Worm doing the rounds. This time the mail attempts to convince users to download a program that is currently undergoing Beta Testing. In return the helpful victim receives their own Free Edition (lucky them) and from 5 years to a lifetime of free updates. Oh ... and their computer joins a massive P2P Botnet, and starts generating massive amounts of SPAM to help spread the worm...still no BETA software comes without the odd bug. Read More"

Submission + - U.S. Government plans three-week test pandemic (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Tuesday August 28, 2007 @11:59PM

Lucas123 writes: "The U.S. Government is co-sponsoring a three-week exercise that will simulate the impact of a flu pandemic on financial services firms, including their ability to support telecommuters, according to Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld. The exercise, estimated to be the largest in history, will involve more than 1,800 organizations. The test will cover telecommunications issues, but is not supposed to cause any service disruptions with ATMs or online banking sites."

Submission + - Ultimate Censorship? China and Reincarnation.

Submitted by

michaelcole

on Tuesday August 28, 2007 @07:00PM

michaelcole writes: ":
"China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission"
— http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek /

This article is both hilarious and sad, looking at the lengths to which a government will go to regulate thought through censorship. It also goes into some of the more subtle politics of the current 72 year-old Dalai Lama as he thinks about his political and spiritual successor.

The Dalai Lama's response: "he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control.""

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