Nerd Systems - Slashdot User

Blockbuster Working on Set-Top Box 138

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @06:14PM from the everybody-jump-in-the-pool-the-water's-fine dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Hollywood Reporter and news.com, Blockbuster will soon be announcing yet another reason not to go to a rental store. A media-delivering set-top box is in the works for the company, leveraging the store's existing competence in the industry to provide a viable alternative to iTunes, Xbox Live, and Amazon. 'There was no mention of price or how such a service would work in the report. But let's think about this: to compete with Apple TV or Vudu, the device would have to cost around $200, and rentals of movies and TV shows should be around $3 to $4 each, which would be slightly cheaper than rentals of new releases from Blockbuster currently. The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.'" I still think they're kinda doomed.

Submission + - Inside The Secret War Against Internet Spies (businessweek.com)

Submitted by ahess247 on Thursday April 10, 2008 @05:32PM

ahess247 writes: The U.S. government, and its sprawl of defense contractors, have been the victims of an unprecedented rash of similar cyber attacks over the last two years, say current and former U.S. government officials. "It's espionage on a massive scale," says Paul B. Kurtz, a former high-ranking national security official. Government agencies reported 12,986 cyber security incidents to the U.S. Homeland Security Dept. last fiscal year, triple the number from two years earlier. When the deluge began in 2006, officials scurried to come up with software "patches," "wraps," and other bits of triage. The effort got serious last summer when top military brass discreetly summoned the chief executives or their representatives from the 20 largest U.S. defense contractors to the Pentagon for a "threat briefing." BusinessWeek reports that the U.S. government has launched a classified operation called Byzantine Foothold to detect, track, and disarm intrusions on the government's most critical networks.

Psychologists Don't Know Math 566

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @05:32PM from the one-plus-one-equals-your-mother dept.

stupefaction writes "The New York Times reports that an economist has exposed a mathematical fallacy at the heart of the experimental backing for the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. The mistake is the same one that mathematicians both amateur and professional have made over the Monty Hall problem. From the article: "Like Monty Hall's choice of which door to open to reveal a goat, the monkey's choice of red over blue discloses information that changes the odds." The reporter John Tierney invites readers to comment on the goats-and-car paradox as well as on three other probabilistic brain-teasers."

Submission + - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Alpha (wowinsider.com)

Submitted by

simrook

on Thursday April 10, 2008 @05:26PM

simrook writes: "World of Warcraft's next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has entered closed alpha testing according to anonymous sources as reported by WoW Insider. World of Warcraft has a player base of over 10 million active subscribers, and is the most successful MMORPG on the market. Wrath of the Lich King, which will follow the previous expanion The Burning Crusade, will raise the level cap to 80, introduce new PvP warfare, new zones, raids, and instances. It is expected to be released in Fall of 2008."

Smallest Planet Outside Our Solar System Found 91

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @04:41PM from the hard-to-spot-with-all-the-space-dust dept.

mikkl666 writes "Following the recent story about the discovery of the youngest planet outside our solar system, Spanish researchers now report that they found the smallest exoplanet observed so far. The planet, known as GJ 436c, was found by analyzing distortions in the orbit of another, larger planet, and its radius is only about 50 percent greater than the Earth's. The scientists are confident that their new method will lead to a series of further discoveries: 'I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth.' You can also reference the the original paper online for further details."

Top Botnets Control Some 1 Million Hijacked Computers 250

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @04:00PM from the not-many-linux dept.

Puskas writes "Joe Stewart is the director of malware research at SecureWorks, and presented a dire view of the current botnet landscape at the RSA conference this week. He conducted a survey of the top spamming 'nets, extrapolating their size from the volume of emails that flow across the internet. By his calculations, the top 11 networks control just over a million machines, hitting inboxes with some 100 billion messages a day. 'The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names "Cbeplay" and "Exchanger" — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day. While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it's built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm's botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart's list.'"

AOL Jumps Into the Ring with Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google 109

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @03:18PM from the now-we-have-a-real-fight dept.

mikkl666 writes "Even just since this morning, there's much to report in the ongoing fight between Microsoft and Yahoo!. After Yahoo! announced yesterday that they are testing Google AdSense, Microsoft reacted with a comment pointing out that 'any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google's hands.' Ironically, they complain that 'this would make the market far less competitive.' Both companies try to team up with strong partners, as well. Yahoo! and AOL are now closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations. And of course, this morning's news was that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is apparently in talks for a joint bid for Yahoo!"

Asus Crams Three GPUs onto a Single Graphics Card 115

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @02:43PM from the when-isn't-cramming-a-good-thing dept.

Barence writes "PC Pro has up a look at Asus' concept triple-GPU graphics card. It's a tech demo, so it's not going to see release at any point in the future, but it's an interesting look at how far manufacturers can push technology, as well as just how inefficient multi-GPU graphics cards currently are. 'Asus has spaced [the GPUs] out, placing one on the top of the card and two on the underside. This creates its own problem, though: attaching heatsinks and fans to both sides of the card would prevent it from fitting into some case arrangements, and defeat access to neighbouring expansion slots. So instead, Asus has used a low-profile heat-pipe system that channels the heat to a heatsink at the back of the card, from where it's dissipated by externally-powered fluid cooling pipes.'"

GPS Trackers Find Novel Applications 185

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @02:05PM from the where-did-i-put-that-eggo dept.

Pickens writes "Inexpensive GPS devices like the Zoombak (which costs just $200 plus $10 a month) have becomes so prevalent that some people are using them routinely to keep tabs on their most precious possessions. Kathy Besa has a Zoombak attached to the collar of her 5-year-old beagle, Buddy. If Buddy wanders more than 20 feet from the house, she gets a text message on her phone that says, 'Buddy has left the premises.' The small size made possible by chip advances over the last two or three years is enabling many novel uses of GPS tracking. An art collector in New York uses one when he transports million-dollar pieces, a home builder is putting them on expensive appliances to track them if they disappear from construction sites, a drug company is using them after millions of dollars in inventory turned up missing, and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves."

IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth 410

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 10, 2008 @08:41AM from the glixchip-of-tau-alpha-ceti-still-beats-it-in-lab-tests dept.

HockeyPuck writes "The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"

Submission + - MS Clearflow to Help Drivers Avoid Traffic James 1

Submitted by

Pioneer Woman

on Thursday April 10, 2008 @07:28AM

Pioneer Woman writes: "Microsoft announced plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets and will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the United States. The new service will on occasion plan routes that might not be intuitive to a driver and in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour, because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam. The Microsoft researchers designed algorithms that modeled traffic behavior and collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry GPS units in their cars. In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data and 16,500 discrete trips covering over 125,000 miles effectively creating individual "personalities" for over 819,000 road segments in the Seattle region."

MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life 219

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday April 09, 2008 @07:34PM from the now-we-need-a-hud-to-go-with-it dept.

Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.

Microsoft Discloses 14,000 Pages of Coding Secrets 217

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday April 09, 2008 @06:52PM from the super-seekrit-secrets dept.

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."

US Does Surprisingly Well in Internet Survey 123

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday April 09, 2008 @06:17PM from the oh-man-we're-good-at-something-awesome dept.

Herman's hermit writes "A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the US number four when it comes to 'network readiness,' despite the fact that the same report has the US 17th broadband subscribers and 19th in bandwidth. 'While good news overall for the US, which is poised to take full advantage of information technology gains, the report probably won't change many minds when it comes to talking specifically about US broadband deployment.'"

Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming? 255

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday April 09, 2008 @05:35PM from the awesome-to-get-to-the-fourth-level-math dept.

netbuzz writes "A new survey finds that more than half of K-12 students believe that educational video games in school would help them learn (no surprise), although only 15% of teachers and 19% of parents agree. Adults might not want to scoff, however, because 11% of teachers are already using video games in class and they report great results. 'Only 3% of elementary school students say they do not play video games of any kind. Students surveyed say learning via video games would help them better understand difficult concepts, become more engaged in the subject matter and practice skills. There's no mention of the games being fun, but that goes without saying.'"

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