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Comment Prior Titles with Scroll (Score 1) 200

by canowhoopass.com (#37004956) Attached to: Bethesda Tells <em>Minecraft</em> Creator: Cease and Desist

I did a quick Google search and found several game titles with 'Scroll'. Several pre-dating the 1994 release of the first Elder Scrolls.

I suspect Bethesda will have troubles winning this one, but courts can be funny sometimes.

Comment Study too small... (Score 5, Interesting) 185

by canowhoopass.com (#34879862) Attached to: Research Suggests E-Readers Are "Too Easy" To Read

The study had 28 participants... and they were asked to remember species of aliens...

While this may be a sign that it's worth looking into the differences a font makes in learning, I'll wait until a bigger study comes out where participants were asked to read a more likely and involved subject matter like the history of the Ottoman Empire.

I have a feeling many participants will be less likely to read past the first chapter if it was written in Comic Sans.
Government

Senate Panel Approves Website Shut-Down Bill 390

Posted by timothy from the best-interests-at-heart dept.
itwbennett writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 19-0 in favor of a bill that would allow the Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright. 'Rogue websites are essentially digital stores selling illegal and sometimes dangerous products,' Senator Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. 'If they existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested. We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas. The Internet needs to be free — not lawless.' However, the internet will likely remain 'lawless' for a while longer, as there are only a few working days left in the congressional session and the bill is unlikely to pass through the House of Representatives in that short amount of time."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Better than the O'Reilly book (Score 1) 117

by canowhoopass.com (#28520009) Attached to: Unlocking Android
I'm subscribed to O'Reilly Safari, where I have both Unlocking Android and O'Reilly's Android Application Development in my bookshelf. The O'Reilly book uses the "build a big application" approach to teaching. So each chapter goes into adding a different feature. There is an expectation that the reader has the examples installed, but unfortunately they don't work with Android v1.5(cupcake). I was lost since I couldn't follow. Luckily I found this book which does a much better job of explaining things. The reviewer is absolutely correct on one thing though. It isn't great at explaining the initial install, and doing a hello world example. If you want to learn Android Development I recommend the following order:
  1. 1) Follow the Eclipse install guide from the Android dev site.
  2. 2) Complete the various Hello World, Hello Views, and Notepad tutorials from the Android dev site. They are kept updated and are well written.
  3. 3) Then read through this book. It really is a good one.

-Rod

Comment Re:Funny (Score 2, Funny) 232

Hockey is our national sport.

Actually, it's Lacrosse.

It's both. Hockey is the official winter sport, Lacrosse is the official summer sport. Check out the National Sports of Canada Act:

http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/ShowFullDoc/cs/N-16.7///en

You have to wonder how much time the politicians used up drafting this. The curling lobby must be pissed.
Security

Distributed, Low-Intensity Botnets 167

Posted by kdawson from the slow-probe dept.
badger.foo writes "We have seen the future of botnets, and it is distributed and low-key. Are sites running free software finally becoming malware targets? It all started with a higher-than-usual number of failed ssh logins at a low-volume site. I think we are seeing the shape of botnets to come, with malware authors doing their early public beta testing during the last few weeks."
Announcements

Submission + - GM to unveil new electric car prototype

Submitted by
brasscandlestick
brasscandlestick writes: "General Motors Corp., vilified by environmentalists for killing the electric car, is hoping to bring one back. But the new electric won't be an emissions-free vehicle, unlike the initial GM electric, the EV1. The new car, to be unveiled as a prototype early next year, would use an onboard internal-combustion engine as a generator to produce electricity to extend the range of the vehicle's rechargeable batteries."
AMD/OSTG

Journal Journal: AMD achieves target of 15% Notebook CPU Market Share

Journal by OSTG Marketing
Last year, AMD set a goal of sharing 15% of total Notebook CPU market . In the first three quarters of 2006, AMD has shipped 2.85M Notebook CPUs, achieving their goal. "In the value market, the most common products are AMD Turion 64 and budget 32 bit Semperon processors. While in the mainstream market, Turion 64x2 formed the flagship range. By the advance of technology, pricing of mobile computer has reached a lowest point and
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Best Video Capture Solution?

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: I am in the process of building a system for a friend. She would like a video capture/TV tuner card of some sort. I have no experience with these devices, so I would like to get the opinion and advice of the Slashdot community. What are the advantages/disadvantages of using PCI based cards vs USB devices? Are there features to look for, such as mpeg encoding? Any caveats, thing to avoid?
Databases

Submission + - Firebird 2.0 final released

Submitted by Samyem Tuladhar
Samyem Tuladhar writes: After 2 years in development, the Firebird Project today officially releases the much-anticipated version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software during the opening session of the fourth international Firebird Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
Networking

Submission + - VPN with single tunnel: best workaround?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: When my VPN connection client is engaged, my web, email, and IM become disconnected (ALL traffic is forced to tunnel through the VPN). What alternatives do I have to regain those connections?

In other words, given a VPN policy that enforces a single tunnel on a client (contrast with a "split tunnel" wherein only VPN-bound traffic goes to VPN while other traffic goes out through normal internet gateway), what's the best workaround to get back some internet connectivity on the client side?

The VPN connection client is locked down — I receive a Cisco binary for windows only, and there are no settings I can change on it to allow split tunneling. I have no access to the VPN server itself, but I can set up relatively harmless software on servers behind the VPN (i.e., on the intranet that the VPN allows me to access).

For example, the setting up of proxy server(s) IS possible on the "intranet side" of the VPN, so I assume that one alternative (call it "Alternative A") would be to go through proxy(s). But that means that each time VPN connection gets made, I need to change at least three applications (web, email, IM) to go through a proxy, and vice-versa to undo the proxying. Is there an easy way to turn on/off proxying in Firefox (web), Eudora (mail) and Trillian (IM)? Or could I do some kind of local proxy server for these, and just change an address in the "hosts" file to make the switch?

Alternatively, could some kind of routing on the client side help here? (The ipconfig output implies that the VPN client changes the nework gateway into the VPN local address, which forces all traffic into the VPN tunnel; I doubt that the gateway can be changed.)

Alternatively, is there something useful to ask the VPN admins? The policy is clear that split tunneling is out of the question, but they might help is there were some relatively easy and safe way to provide connectivity to me.

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