Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 586
Avast have a tendency to nag about harmless software... (Like nmap, mdcrack, etc.)
Submission + - Ray tracing for gaming explored (pcper.com) 3
Vigile writes: "Ray tracing is still thought of as the 'holy grail' for real-time imagery but because of the intense amount of calculations required it has been plagued with long frame render times. This might soon change, at least according to an article from Daniel Pohl, a researcher at Intel. With upcoming many-core processors like Intel's Larrabee he believes that real-time ray tracing for games is much closer than originally thought thanks in large part to the efficiency it allows with spatial partitioning and reflections when compared to current rasterization techniques. Titles like Valve's Portal are analyzed to see how they could benefit from ray tracing technology and the article on PC Perspective concludes with the difficulties combing the two rendering techniques as well as a video of the technology in action."
Submission + - Has AT&T Lost its Corporate Mind?
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications" — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content" but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. "As the world's largest gatekeeper," Wu writes, "AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits." ATT's new strategy "exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders," concludes Wu."
Submission + - Vista's changes rob Creative of PC audio crown 4
Dr. Damage writes: Creative has ruled PC sound almost since the beginning, but Vista's new audio layer changes the game by essentially killing off 3D positional audio acceleration. The Tech Report has reviewed a pair of post-Vista sound cards, with surprising results. Motherboard maker Asus saw the opening and created perhaps the best consumer-level sound card yet, the Xonar D2X, with quality components, an EMI shield, color-illuminated ports, the best objective measurements and subjective listening test scores we've ever seen, and (finally!) a PCI Express x1 connector. Could the Sound Blaster era finally be over?
Submission + - Robot Cannon Kills 9, Injures 14 (wired.com) 2
An anonymous reader writes: An auto-targeting, auto-reloading cannon goes out of control during a South African military drill — killing 9 soldiers, and wounding 14 more. Officials can't figure out whether to blame jammed hardware, software glitches... or the start of the robot uprising. One thing's for sure: it's not the first time robo-weapons have started acting dangerously odd.
Submission + - Slashdot Reverses Facts about Radiohead 1
Apro+im writes: The popular news aggregation website, Slashdot today reported that the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows was pirated more than it was procured via legitimate means, setting off a flurry of speculation on their online discussion board as to the implications of this "fact". Strangely overlooked in much of the discussion, however, was the fact that the article they linked contained the exact opposite information, stating:
Questions about what this implies about Slashdot's editorial practices and readership remain unanswered."The file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day — adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads. That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com"
Submission + - Law firm claims copyright on viewing HTML source 2
An anonymous reader writes: A law firm with all sorts of interesting views on copyrights has decided to go the extra mile. As reported on Tech Dirt, they've decided that viewing the HTML source of their site is a violation of copyright. Poorly timed April Fools joke, or just some fancy lawyering?
Submission + - AMD/ATi to release graphics specs
Ganesh999 writes: A recent Phoronix article hinted that despite the large number of substantially improved AMD/ATi drivers just released, there was more exciting news in the pipeline.
This seems to have been confirmed at the Linux kernel summit yesterday. From LWN :
'AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and "that is better for everybody." Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come.'
General reaction from the kernel developers seems to be positive :
'It's definitely not a 'you're on your own' kind of proposition: this is exactly what was asked for, giving the community all the information it needs to complete a proper driver.'
This seems to have been confirmed at the Linux kernel summit yesterday. From LWN :
'AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and "that is better for everybody." Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come.'
General reaction from the kernel developers seems to be positive :
'It's definitely not a 'you're on your own' kind of proposition: this is exactly what was asked for, giving the community all the information it needs to complete a proper driver.'
Submission + - First looks at SmoothWall Express 3.0 "Polar&# (linux-noob.com)
anyweb writes: "Smoothwall Express 3 has finally been released to the public after a few years in various stages of alpha/beta. I have tried (please read that as 'used/using') both the Grizzly and Panda pre-releases prior to this, so I felt that I had a good idea of what Smoothwall Express 3 final was going to be like but boy was I was wrong.
Smoothwall Express 3 has far exceeded my expectations, the sheer amount of features they've crammed into a 69MB download is unreal, and I hope to cover some of this in the article below. If you'd like to try Smoothwall then please download the iso (both 32bit and 64bit) from here and see for yourself. You won't regret it.
read the whole review > http://linux-noob.com/review/smoothwall/express/3/ "
Submission + - iPhone easy hack with Super SIM module
Mr.Tweak writes: "Last night we had the opportunity to experience in person just how easy it is to hack and modify an Apple iPhone to work on networks other than AT&T in the United States. We have the full run down including first photos of the Super SIM module in detail and exactly how everything works and operates."
Submission + - Unencrypted passwords at "secure" sites 1
linear a writes: I've noticed that quite a few web sites do *not* encrypt user passwords. I've gotten into the habit of hitting the "email me my password" from them to see what happens. So far I've found maybe 6 that must store passwords in clear since they were able to return the original password back to me. Clearly this is Bad Security Practice. Also, I've had notably bad progress when I ask them to fix this practice. Some of these are sites one would clearly expect to have better security (e.g., a software vendor and an online bank).
Do you have thoughts on how to better encourage better password practice at these places? Also, is this is really as common as it seems to be for me?
Submission + - Court upholds warrantless Internet snooping (pressesc.com) 1
amigoro writes: "Federal agents can snoop on an individual's web surfing, email and all other forms of Internet communication habits without a warrant, a US appeals court ruled on Friday. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in its judgment on USA vs Alba concluded that cyber-surveillance was analogous to the use of a pen register that the Supreme Court held in Smith v. Maryland (1979), and did not constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes."
Submission + - Music industry demanding money from coffee shops (floridatoday.com)
realjd writes: The music industry has started demanding "protection money" from coffee shops with live music. One was even fined for having the TV on while the Monday Night Football theme played. And the owners pay up to one licensing company, all of the others start harassing them demanding payment too. What's a small business to do? It sounds like they don't even check whether any copyright violations occurred, they're just sending bills to any business that may or may not have live music.
Submission + - Internet's about to be stolen by pirates in Norway (ajaxwidgets.com)
polterguy writes: "Telenor the biggest ISP in Norway is no longer neutral towards content providers. Their excuse is that some content providers uses too much bandwidth. This path will lead to censorship and monopoly in content which again leads to monopoly in ideas and opinions as we saw from the Radio censoring in the 20th Century. I think this might be the most important debate to have since the end of the second world war in 1945, but most of the big media corporations in Norway are silencing this. Probably because they hope to become that _one_ provider of content and thereby adds and revenue on the net further down the road. Freedom of internet in Norway threatened — Piracy of Telenor"
Submission + - Slashdot and the tagging fad 2
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a question for the slashdot crowd. Tagging is one of those fads that seems to be everywhere, and slashdot has picked it up too. After watching how people use tagging since it's introduction here, it appears that it's mostly useless though, given that nearly every article gets tagged with either contradictory tags ("yes","no","yesno", all on one post) or ones that are opinions of the tag posters ("slownewsday", "whoopeef*ck", "wewerenotmeanttobe", as a sampling from the current front page). The remaining tags of any value seem to be solely for the purpose of categorizing, and can be achieved without tagging by editors simply putting articles in the right category/subcategory. So my question: why bother with the tagging thing? Can we get that useless garbage off of the front page so we don't have to see "whoopeef*ck* and other childish noise?
