DreadN - Slashdot User

Replacing Fiber With 10 Gigabit/Second Wireless 107

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday October 03, 2008 @01:02PM from the beam-will-also-cook-your-tv-dinner dept.

Chicken_dinner writes "Engineers at Battelle have come up with a way to send data through the air at 10 Gigabits per second using point-to-point millimeter-wave technology. They used standard optical networking equipment and essentially combined two lower bandwidth signals to produce a 10Gb signal from the interference. They say the technology could replace fiber optics around large campuses or companies or even deliver high-bandwidth streaming within the home."

An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 03, 2008 @11:20AM from the gpl-means-what-it-says dept.

jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."

MS Reportedly Adds 6 Months of Vista Downgrade 244

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 03, 2008 @09:07AM from the charting-a-course-to-windows-7 dept.

LiteralKa sends in a poorly sourced Reg story claiming that Microsoft has granted OEMs six more months to sell PCs using Windows Vista with the support to downgrade to Windows XP. OEMs can now offer such arrangements until July 31, 2009 — the previous deadline was January 31, 2009. The article claims as source "a Reg reader" without further details. Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up.

Training Bacteria To Deliver Drugs? 29

Posted by timothy on Friday October 03, 2008 @03:08AM from the please-don't-teach-them-to-fetch-the-paper dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "While it may seem unlikely that single-celled organisms could be trained to salivate like Pavlov's dog at the sound of a bell, researchers say that bacteria can 'learn' to associate one stimulus with another by employing molecular circuits. This raises the possibility that bioengineers could teach bacteria to act as sentinels for the human body, ready to spot and respond to signs of danger. As with Pavlov's dog, the bacteria in the model learn to build stronger associations between the two stimuli the more they occur together. Now called Hebbian learning, it's often expressed as a situation in which 'neurons that fire together wire together.'" (More below.)

Can Static Electricity Generate Votes? 377

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 02, 2008 @08:39PM from the dc-elections-crack-me-up-and-barry-too dept.

artgeeq writes "A recent local election in Washington, DC resulted in 1500 extra votes for a candidate. The board of elections is now claiming that static electricity caused the malfunction. Is this even remotely possible? If so, couldn't an election be invalidated pretty easily?"

Cell Chip Coming To the PC Via a PCI Express Card 164

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 02, 2008 @07:15PM from the buy-one-for-every-prisoner dept.

arcticstoat writes with an excerpt from Custom PC: "After developing a brand new CPU architecture from the ground-up, you'd expect that Toshiba, Sony and IBM would have more uses for the Cell architecture than the PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has been quick to make use of the architecture's HD video transcoding abilities in its new Qosimo laptops. However, Leadtek is now taking Toshiba's efforts a step further by putting the chip onto a PCI-E card for desktop PCs. The WinFast PxVC1100 is based on Toshiba's SpursEngine SE1000 processor, which is a cut-down version of the Cell chip. The SpursEngine chip features four SPEs (synergistic processing elements) based on 128-bit RISC cores, along with H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, but it doesn't contain its own CPU as the chip in the PS3 does. The chip is capable of encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware."

Tor Open To Attack 109

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @04:58PM from the peeling-the-onion dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers have written a paper that lays out an attack against Tor (PDF) in enough detail to cause Roger Dingledine a fair amount of heartburn. The essential avenue of attack is that Tor doesn't verify claims of uptime or bandwidth, allowing an attacker to advertise more than it need deliver, and thus draw traffic. If the attacker controls the entry and exit node and has decent clocks, then the attacker can link these together and trace someone through the network."

Comment ...maybe they haven't the money? (Score 1) 365

by DreadN on Sunday October 08, 2006 @03:56AM (#16353419) Attached to: Teens Don't Buy Legit MP3s Because They Can't?

Teens (or just people) don't buy mp3 because they haven't the money, or they don't want to spend money for. ...there are more important things before mp3 & dvds: - mobile connectivity - garments - drinks & food - fuel and tickets for mobility - periodicals & magazines Digital content is just not too much important to share a high percentage of founds from the weekly family income or some extra bucks from daily working, expecially at the thief prices it's sold. I mean: people all over world how many mp3 from P2P have donwloaded since the era of FTPs and P2Ps? Billions? Hundred billions? Multiply them by 0.99$ (the medium price at wich you can buy legal musc) by one trillion: you get 1/6 the public debt of an european country, it is worth to spend this money in music? I think no. I've got about 10-15.000 illegal mp3 (lot of them are in full rar discography) and 60-70 xvid on my media, and -i give you a hint- i'm not teenager, but university student, simply i'm not so stupid to spend the value of a car in mp3s when i can take them for free. If P2P one day will be completely erased, simply I'll stop listen music for something more useful.

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