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Comment Re:Use Full Tunnels (Score 5, Informative) 264

by L0stm4n (#27941271) Attached to: Dealing With ISPs That Use NXDomain Redirection?

This is called split tunneling. If he disables split tunneling and specifies the DNS servers in the VPN config his problems would go away.

His users however would tunnel all their traffic through the corporate lan while connected so you may need to setup some kind of filtering or route the traffic through whatever filters you already have. Otherwise these remote workers in hotel rooms will be pulling buckets-o-pr0n through your corp network.
Education

Mixed Outcome of Texas Textbook Vote 646

Posted by kdawson from the compromising-on-established-mainstream-science dept.
The Texas Board of Education — as discussed here last week — has voted on the guidelines for textbooks in that state, which represents a large enough market to have influence nationwide. The good news is that the board dropped a 20-year-old requirement that both "strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories be taught; score one for the teaching of evolution. The not-so-good news is that in a "compromise," the board also voted to require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations ... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Score one for the Discovery Institute. A Republican board member explained that the words "strengths and weaknesses" have become "code for creationism and [the similar theory of] intelligent design. So by being more clear in the language and using words that aren't seen as code words, we were able to get all of the 15 board members to agree that this is how we'll teach all sides of scientific explanation, using scientific evidence." Reporting on the Texas vote is all over the map, as a US Today blog summarizes. Some reports claim that an amendment was passed that preserves a requirement that students study the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of common ancestry and natural selection. Other reports claim that the board also adopted language that would have students study the "different views on the existence of global warming."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision 205

Posted by kdawson from the look-sharp dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "According to a new study, people who played fighting games on their PCs became up to a 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, an important aspect of eyesight. The breakthrough is significant because it was previously thought that the ability to notice even very small changes in shades of grey against a uniform background could not be improved. Contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The improvements lasted for months after game play stopped. The new finding suggests action video games could be used as training devices as a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since gaming may teach the brain's visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives."
The Almighty Buck

Sony Bringing RMT To Vanguard 39

Posted by Soulskill from the saga-of-ka-ching dept.
Eurogamer reports that Sony Online Entertainment will be adding the ability to do real money trading to at least some of their Vanguard: Saga of Heroes servers. It's the same service they opened for a pair of Everquest II servers a while back. Quoting: "The service, offered by Live Gamer, allows players to sell items, currency and characters for real cash through a secure channel, authorised by the game operator. Most real-money trading in MMOs is a 'grey' market that doesn't have the operator's consent. ... Sony Online Entertainment recently said that it had no intention to bring its other real-money trading initiative — the Station Cash item shop — to Vanguard."

Comment IBM is terrible (Score 1) 195

by L0stm4n (#27120985) Attached to: Packing Algorithms May Save the Planet

I work for a school that is a self maintainer of ibm/lenovo laptops. We order the parts and do the work ourselves. We joke about the massive boxes for little parts all the time. The worst I have seen is a box that was roughly 1'6"x1'6x1' that contained a single CMOS battery. I've also seen large boxes like that with bubble packing and peanuts that contain a little bag of maybe 10 screws.
Power

Wind Farms To Receive Future Wind Forecasts 57

Posted by timothy from the as-well-they-ought dept.
An anonymous reader writes "If the US plans to develop wind farms across the country they need a better way to predict the wind direction and the duration. NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) is looking to do just that. In December, NCAR signed an agreement with Xcel Energy to develop a wind prediction system for the company's wind energy farms in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas. Experimental forecasts may start as early as May. At present, most wind forecasts rely heavily on statistical forecasting methods, since the numerical weather forecast products available from operational centers are produced with coarse-grid, larger-scale models. The RTFDDA system, however, is designed to provide a birds-eye view of local weather for small areas of special interest, like wind farms, through a multiple level downscaling algorithm." I hope that decentralized weather-data gathering stations (like many people have feeding data to The Weather Underground) would be useful for this purpose.

Comment Re:Fix the graphics! (Score 1) 170

by L0stm4n (#26667649) Attached to: "Live Expansion" Announced for <em>Warhammer Online</em>

Athlon XP 3000+, Radeon X800 XT, 2 GB RAM

Game plays like shit. I loved the game, but it choked the hell out of my machine. Lowest settings It would let me do and it was just a step above a slide show. CPU was constantly maxed at 100%. It was reasonably ok in solo PVE but any PVP scenario was dreadful. I had to give the game up and went back to WOW with some friends. I miss my little Ironbreaker. Little bastard was almost indestructible.

WOW plays fine on the box, except Dalaran turn into a lagfest.
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 6.4 Released 64

Posted by timothy from the unsung-but-nicely-free dept.
hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Black Mesa Nearing Completion, Trailer Released 103

Posted by Soulskill from the silencing-naysayers dept.
Today, the Black Mesa Team released an impressive trailer for their remake of Half-Life . The remake is a total-conversion mod for Half-Life 2, bringing the updated graphics and AI of the Source engine to the original game. The team has been dropping hints lately that the project, which began in 2004, is almost done, and the trailer confirms that it will be out in 2009. They also recently announced that they've "dropped Counter-Strike: Source as a requirement for Black Mesa, and from now on, the only thing you'll need to play the mod is a Steam account with any Source engine game installed! Black Mesa is now running completely off of our own content and base Source shared content, and we felt the vastly increased user base more then [sic] justified creating all the extra assets needed to make this switch."

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