_Mustang - Slashdot User

Submission + - Crowther's Original Adventure Source Code Found!

Submitted by drxenos on Monday August 13, 2007 @05:05PM

drxenos writes: I don't know how many of you are fans of old-school text adventures (interactive fiction), but Will Crowther's original Fortran source code has been located in a backup of Don Wood's old student account. For fans like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail. link: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fictio n/browse_thread/thread/607acaf1a279d4dd/bd53b672a1 85d177#bd53b672a185d177

Submission + - Are Electric Vehicles Really Cleaner? (lincolnev.com) 1

Submitted by on Saturday August 04, 2007 @07:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: It's easy to forget that much of our power comes from dirty sources. After factoring in the pollution from power plants, are electric vehicles really cleaner? This article compares the CO2 and NOx emissions of both a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) and an internal combustion engine passenger car.

Submission + - Procedural Programming: The Secret behind Spore (bonafidereviews.com) 1

Submitted by

imashoe

on Saturday August 04, 2007 @05:08PM

imashoe writes: "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming. Read on to learn what exactly it is and how it differs from the traditional way games are made."

Submission + - OpenBSD patched BIND9 10 years ago (heise-security.co.uk) 1

Submitted by

juct

on Friday July 27, 2007 @07:07PM

juct writes: "News from the "they-could-have-known-better-department": As heise Security reports OpenBSD changed the buggy implementation of the pseudo random number generator before switching from BIND 8 to Bind 9 back in 1997. So OpenBSD was not affected by the recent Cache Poisoning problem in Bind 9. According to Theo deRaadt the OpenBSD team even told ISC that their PRNG was flawed — but "the didn't listen"."

Submission + - Man called 'nerd' torched web taunter's trailer (msn.com)

Submitted by

mytrip

on Friday July 27, 2007 @06:41PM

mytrip writes: "Petty Officer Russell Tavares traveled 1,300 miles to torch rival's trailer

Russell Tavares, 27, was sentenced to seven years for the 2005 arson of John Anderson's mobile home after a squabble on the Internet.

ELM MOTT, Texas — A Navy man who got mad when someone mocked him as a "nerd" over the Internet climbed into his car and drove 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

As he made his way toward Texas, Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares posted photos online showing the welcome signs at several states' borders, as if to prove to his Internet friends that he meant business.

When he finally arrived, Tavares burned the guy's trailer down.

I always considered 'nerd' to be a compliment."

Submission + - Assembly Language in Linux (jojodi.com)

Submitted by

Brandon Pelfrey

on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @09:01PM

Brandon Pelfrey writes: "Assembly Language, especially in the 8086 family has seen a wide berthing throughout the last couple of decades. Whether you're programming in C++, Java, Ruby, or any other programming language, the code that you spend hours slaving over eventually becomes mangled into assembly code that often times, developers simply don't truly understand or have a grasp on. At jojodi.com, there has been a revival in my interests and in the mind of some others in what some see as a lost art. With RAD design methodologies and complex libraries, some elements of programming have been lost. Programmers in this day, even with increasing hardware at their disposal, need to learn optimization and proper debugging which comes only with experience and learning the Assembly code behind their compiled binaries. Head over to jojodi.com and brush up on assembly code: your programming will be better from it!"

Submission + - Are Mobile Phone Masts Responsible For Illness?

Submitted by drewmoney on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @08:55PM

drewmoney writes: According to a major UK study, symptoms of illness caused by mobile phone masts is "all in the mind".

Excerpts from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6914492.stm

Dozens of people who believed the masts triggered symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials.

However, the Environmental Health Perspectives study stressed people were nonetheless suffering "real symptoms".

Campaign group Mast Sanity "http://www.mastsanity.org/" said the results were skewed as 12 people in the trials dropped out because of illness.

Farscape (Kinda) Returns 140

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @10:42AM from the what-the-frell dept.

westlake writes "In a weekend press tour, Sci Fi announced that Farscape would be resurrected on-line in ten short webisodes to be produced by the Jim Henson Company. There are hints that Ben Browder and Claudia Black will both be both "available." Browder has another project to keep him occupied, at least part of the time: Sci Fi also announced that it had picked up Going Homer, a miniseries he developed with "Farscape" director Andrew Prowse. Greek and Roman deities walk among us, but only 12 year old Homer Ulysses Jones can see them for what they truly are. When Homer and his father are forced to flee a custody battle that would likely separate them, they journey from Los Angeles to the home of their ancestors — in Ithaca, N.Y."

Submission + - Seeing Yellow: fighting printer tracking dots (miscmeta.com)

Submitted by

jkrobin

on Tuesday July 17, 2007 @04:21PM

jkrobin writes: "MIT's Computing Culture research group has established the 'Seeing Yellow' project, which wants to preserve the right to anonymous communication by fighting both printer tracking dots and the government bullying used to sustain them.

We've known for years that color laser printers can embed a series of tiny yellow dots on pages they print. The dots — almost invisible under normal circumstances — can be used to determine which particular printer produced the image. Essentially, each printer outputs its own serial number. This is great for busting counterfeiters but raises all sorts of privacy concerns. Now, MIT students are getting involved in the campaign against the dots with the new Seeing Yellow project.

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer — and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.

More at: http://www.shadowmonkey.net/articles/privacy/seein g-yellow.html"

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