Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Power

MIT Building Batteries Using Viruses 98

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the i've-caught-a-battery dept.
thefickler writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are now using viruses to build cathodes for Lithium-Ion batteries. Three years ago these same researchers found they could build an anode using viruses. Creating both the anode and cathode using viruses will make batteries easy to build. This nanoscale battery technology will allow batteries to be lightweight and to 'take the shape of their container' rather than creating containers for the batteries, which could open up new possibilities for car and electronics manufacturers."
Games

FileFront Reopens Its Doors 25

Posted by Soulskill from the flip-flopping-file-foisters dept.
boarder8925 writes "FileFront, who announced on March 24th that they would be shutting down, has been given new life. The original owners of the website bought it back from Ziff Davis Media, who shut down FileFront because it had become financially unviable. 'We're happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.' They repeatedly state that this is not an April Fool's Day joke, and indeed the site appears to be up and running as usual."
Music

Alpine Legend Revolutionizes Music Game Genre 45

Posted by Soulskill from the haven't-the-foggiest dept.
Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of Alpine Legend for the Xbox 360. Building upon the established titles of the music game genre, Alpine Legend takes you to the Swiss mountaintops, where you and your friends play up to three Alpenhorns at a time while a fourth yodels along. When you're done playing, you can disassemble the 8-foot horns for easy storage. "Jam with alpine legends like Franz 'The Manz' Lang and Johann Hornbostel. Shake the mountain tops with 100 classic Alphorn tracks including, 'Whose spit is in my horn?' and 'More goat bell (It needs).'"
Worms

Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In 508

Posted by Soulskill from the be-on-the-lookout dept.
Nieriko writes "Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — '... shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. ... A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'"

Slashdot Launches User Achievements 1582

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-believe-it-took-so-long dept.
In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft, we've decided to add an Achievement system to Slashdot. We've retroactively granted around 900,000 achievements to our logged in users. You can view them from your user page, or you can see my list if you're curious what a REAL achiever looks like. Many achievements have been sprinkled throughout the system and are awaiting discovery by dedicated Slashdot users, but a starter list of achievements is in the FAQ. I'll toss you one freebie: you can register your wow main for points if you're that kind of person. Now go forth and achieve!
Software

Opera Launches Facial Gesture Capability 199

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
cstrep writes "Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what's important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we've worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the 'Wiimote' and later, the touchscreen in the DSi. Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed 'Face Observation Opera Language,' we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser."
NASA

NASA In Colbert Conundrum Over Space Station 398

Posted by kdawson from the doing-the-right-thing dept.
After Stephen Colbert won the vote in NASA's contest to name a new module on the International Space Station, NASA found itself in a tough spot. According to Reuters, "Contest rules stipulate that the agency retains the right to basically do whatever it wants," but it may not be all that easy. At first NASA floated the idea of naming the new module's toilet "Colbert." But Last Thursday Congressman Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., urged the agency to respect the people's wishes. And Colbert turned up the heat on yesterday's weekly show: "So NASA, I urge you to heed Congressman Fattah's call for democracy in orbit. Either name that node after me, or I too will reject democracy and seize power as space's evil tyrant overlord. Ball's in your court."
Movies

Star Trek Sequel Already Planned 213

Posted by kdawson from the boldly-going-again dept.
bowman9991 writes "Paramount Pictures are so confident about the box office potential of the upcoming Star Trek reboot directed by J. J. Abrams that they're already working on a sequel. They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay. We're looking at a possible 2011 release for the next Star Trek movie with the same cast. Now that they've committed themselves, let's hope it lives up to expectations."
Censorship

Irish Domain Registry Banning Adult Domains 222

Posted by kdawson from the p.orn dept.
Karate Sid writes "An Irish adult website has blogged about the Irish domain registry banning adult domain names, including porn.ie and pornography.ie. The IEDR's reasoning is that the words 'porn' and 'pornography' are offensive and immoral. Of interest is how Sex.ie took legal action against the IEDR — and proved that neither word is offensive — yet still lost the case, as the IEDR are the highest authority in Ireland when it comes to deciding what is and isn't an offensive domain."
Programming

Blizzard Asserts Rights Over Independent Add-Ons 344

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-there's-no-wow-app-store dept.
bugnuts writes "Blizzard has announced a policy change regarding add-ons for the popular game World of Warcraft which asserts requirements on UI programmers, such as disallowing charging for the program, obfuscation, or soliciting donations. Add-ons are voluntarily-installed UI programs that add functionality to the game, programmed in Lua, which can do various tasks that hook into the WoW engine. The new policy has some obvious requirements, such as not loading the servers or spamming users, and it looks like an attempt to make things more accessible and free for the end user. But unlike FOSS, it adds other requirements that assert control over these independently coded programs, such as distribution and fees. Blizzard can already control the ultimate functionality of add-ons by changing the hooks into the WoW engine. They have exercised this ability in the past, e.g. to disable add-ons that automate movement and facilitate 'one-button' combat. Should they be able to make demands on independent programmers' copyrighted works, such as forbidding download fees or advertising, when those programmers are not under contract to code for Blizzard? Is this like Microsoft asserting control over what programmers may code for Windows?"

Comment Re:So, how does one accumulate that much gold? (Score 2, Insightful) 479

by Kalroth (#22111146) Attached to: World of Warcraft Gold Limit Reached, It's 2^31
One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.

The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.

A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.

This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
The Almighty Buck

Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? 162

Posted by Zonk from the argh-i've-got-a-quarter-in-my-eye dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
Programming

Submission + - Open Source alternative to Java/Flash/Silverlight

Submitted by dgym
dgym writes: Having applications that can be deployed on the net and run either in a browser or from a standalone player is an old idea, but still not one that has been done really well.
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).

So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
  • A sand boxed virtual machine for running client side code.
  • A means to display information, i.e. graphics drawing primitives.
  • Event handling for user input.
  • Networking back to the originating server.
Can we not have an open standard for these, and open source plugins implementing it? The "virtual machine" could either be defined in terms of a language (e.g. ECMAScript), or be a true byte code engine such as Parrot or Mono. The graphics are straight forward, and using a cross platform library such as Cairo would help make these plugins extremely portable. Networking is almost trivial, although being able to make HTTP requests using the browser's proxy settings would be an important consideration.

The need is there, where is the open standard?

Slashdot Top Deals

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Close