Dexter77 - Slashdot User

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 07, 2010 @08:23PM 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."

Linux Action Show Returns 61

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 18, 2010 @04:37PM from the for-your-time-on-the-elliptical-machine dept.

BJ writes "The Linux Action Show, the Linux-podcast to end all Linux-podcasts, is returning with their 11th season after over 7 months off the air. Kicking it all off with a live streaming event this Saturday at 5pm. Topics are set to include: Maemo/Moblin merging into Meego, Open Source Nividia drivers with 3D, KDE 4.4 and much, much more."

Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera 218

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 15, 2009 @07:13PM from the nuts-and-bolts dept.

future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

Sacrificing Accuracy For Speed and Efficiency In Processors 499

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 08, 2009 @02:11PM from the whi-mnds-a-fwe-erorsr dept.

Skudd writes "Modern computing has always been reliant on accuracy and correct answers. Now, a professor at Rice University in Houston posits that some future applications could be revolutionized by 'probabilistic computing.' Quoting: 'This afternoon, Krishna Palem, speaking at a computer science meeting in San Francisco, will announce results of the first real-world test of his probabilistic computer chip: The chip, which thrives on random errors, ran seven times faster than today's best technology while using just 1/30th the electricity. ... The high density of transistors on existing chips also leads to a lot of background "noise." To compensate, engineers increase the voltage applied to computer circuits to overpower the noise and ensure precise calculations. Palem began wondering how much a slight reduction in the quality of calculations might improve speed and save energy. He soon realized that some information was more valuable than other information. For example, in calculating a bank balance of $13,000.81, getting the "13" correct is much more important than the "81." Producing an answer of $13,000.57 is much closer to being correct than $57,000.81. While Palem's technology may not have a future in calculating missions to Mars, it probably has one in such applications as streaming music and video on mobile devices, he said.'

Comment Way to go, Nokia! (Score 4, Insightful) 828

by Dexter77 on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @11:01AM (#26448479) Attached to: Qt Becomes LGPL

I love to see when a company understands that giving something away they will get ten times more in return. And nowadays that happens too rarely.

For a while it seemed that Nokia is about to lose to its competitors, because of Symbian and bad software. This will totally remedy it. I've also heard from Nokia insiders that they're actively dumping everything related to Symbian. It won't take more than couple of years and all their phones use Qt.

Seeing how well Apple has been selling iPhone applications, I can only imagine the potential Qt phones have in future. With Symbian that just wasn't possible, it was a total nightmare for the developers.

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