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Books

Submission + - Amazon disables 3G web browsing for their 3G Kindl

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Amazon's going to disable 3G web browsing on their upcoming "Kindle Touch 3G" — even though it was a prominent feature of the last generation of Kindles. Amazon will still allow web browsing on the Kindle Touch 3G using a local wifi connection, but it's one of many unsettling details emerging from Amazon's announcement last week. Apparently Amazon's cloud will now also include a list of personal documents that you're mailing to your Kindle. And the on-screen keyboard for Amazon's bargain $79 Kindles won't be a touchscreen keyboard, so users will have to nudge the controller repeatedly to gradually navigate from one key to the next.
Data Storage

Submission + - Hitachi-LG Fined $21M for Price-Fixing Drives (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: "Hitachi-LG Data Storage, a joint venture between Hitachi and LG Electronics, has agreed to plead guilty and to pay a $21.1 million criminal fine for its part in a scheme to rig bids and fix prices of optical disk drives.

According to the Department of Justice, the company had conspired with others to rig the bidding process on optical disk drives sold to Dell, HP, and Microsoft.

According to court documents, Dell and HP hosted optical disk drive procurement events in which bidders would be awarded varying amounts of optical disk drive supply depending on where their pricing ranked. The company and co-conspirators held meetings and discussed bidding strategies, enabling it to bypass the competitive bidding process as a result of the information shared....
PC Games (Games)

The Future of Indie MMOGs 69

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-have-to-have-ten-million-subs-to-succeed dept.
Karen Hertzberg writes "Ask any 10 gamers what constitutes an 'indie MMO' and you'll probably get 10 different answers. But one definition that most can agree on is that an indie game lacks the financial support of a well-funded publisher. But do smaller budgets mean greater freedom? Ten Ton Hammer asked Nathan Richardsson, Executive Producer for CCP (developers of EVE Online), and Todd Harris, Executive Producer of Global Agenda, to share their thoughts on the bright future of independent MMOG development. 'By definition a niche market is a segment that is currently underserved by the mainstream providers. So, to serve that audience a developer typically needs to deliver something really different and innovative vs. just more of the same thing available elsewhere,' says Harris. 'With a big budget there could be a temptation to cover up stale gameplay by shoveling out more content or simply pumping up the marketing hype. However, for an indie developer such as Hi-Rez Studios, the game must stand on its own merits and we find that liberating.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Lawsuit Claims WGA is Spyware. (electronista.com)

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft's euphemistically named digital restrictions scheme, is the target of another spyware and false advertising lawsuit.

Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily ip address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user].

The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.

There were at least two other lawsuits launched in 2006 over WGA. According to the Wikipedia article, none of them have been resolved. The system is built into Vista and Windows 7. It is something that should be avoided by people who value their privacy and any business that has to follow laws such as HIPPA."
Upgrades

Kernel 2.6.31 To Speed Up Linux Desktop 360

Posted by Soulskill from the zoom-zoom dept.
Dan Jones writes "As the Linux community looks forward to another kernel release, the kernel hackers have been working on improving the memory management so that the X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. The result is an improved desktop experience. Benchmarks on memory-tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. Another improvement coming with 2.6.31 is kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards, enabling faster user switching and a more seamless startup experience. Peripheral developments that will also improve the Linux desktop experience include support for the new USB 3.0 specification and a new Firewire stack. Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!"
Security

Submission + - Mozilla to protect Adobe Flash users (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by
juct
juct writes: "Firefox is going to check the version of installed Adobes Flash plug-ins and warn users if it discovers an outdated version with potential security holes. Mozilla confirmed this new security feature and said that the Flash version check was part of a wider commitment to "protect users from emerging threats online". Only recently a study confirmed, that 80 per cent of users surf with a vulnerable version of Adobe's plug-in."

Highly-Paid Developers As ScrumMasters? 434

Posted by Soulskill from the madness-to-our-method dept.
An anonymous reader writes 'At my company, our mis-implementation of Agile includes the employment of some of our most highly-paid, principal engineers as ScrumMasters. This has effectively resulted in a loss of those engineering functions as these engineers now dedicate their time to ScrumMastery. Furthermore, the ScrumMasters either cannot or do not separate their roles as Team Leads with those of ScrumMastery and — worse — seem to be completely unaware that this poor implementation of Agile development is harmful to our velocity. To date, I have chalked this up to poor leadership, a general lack of understanding of Agile, and an inability to change from traditional roles left over from the waterfall development mode. In addition, I have contended that, for a given Scrum Team, the role of ScrumMaster should be filled by someone of lower impact, such as an intern brought in specifically for that purpose. But I would like to put the questions to Slashdotters as to whether they have seen these same transitional difficulties, what the results have been at their respective companies, or whether they just plain disagree with my assertion that principal engineers should not be relegated to the roles of ScrumMasters.'
The Internet

First American Internet Addiction Treatment Center 278

Posted by timothy from the cure-for-what-doesn't-quite-ail-ye dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Taking their lead from China, two Americans have opened the first US-based Internet Addiction treatment center in Fall City, Wash. — ironically close to Redmond (Microsoft's hometown). The center, called reStart: Internet Addiction Recovery Program, is a 45-day treatment center where, for a steep set of fees, people can be cured of their addiction to the Web. After paying the $200 application fee, addicts are charged $14,500 for the 45 days, an additional $800 for a screening, and more for extra services, like kayaking ($1,575)."
Idle

Submission + - Team Aims to Create Pure Evil AI (scientificamerican.com) 1

Submitted by puroresu
puroresu writes: Scientific American reports on the efforts of Selmer Bringsjord and his team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who have been attempting to develop an AI possessed of an interesting character trait: pure evil.

"To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing."
Games

The Right Amount of "Challenge" In IT & Gaming 103

Posted by Soulskill from the inversely-proportional dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "In an essay entitled 'An Epiphany I Had While Playing Pac-Man,' the author talks about how smart people need to find a certain amount of intellectual challenge from day to day. If they don't find it in their workplace, they'll end up playing complex, 'smart' games, like Civilization IV or Chess — and if they do find it in their workplace, they're more likely to sit down with a nice game of Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, or Peggle. Quoting: 'When I look back on my life, and I compare the times in my life when I was playing simple games compared to the times in my life when I was playing complex ones, a pattern emerges. The more complexity and mental stimulation I was getting from other activities — usually my day job at the time — the less I needed mental stimulation in my free time. Conversely, in times when I was working boring jobs, I'd be playing games that required a lot of thinking and mental gymnastics.' The author then goes on to speculate that some IT workers might subconsciously be giving themselves more challenges by choosing to deal with difficult problems, rather than performing simple (but boring) preventative maintenance and proactive network management."
Power

Breakthrough in Electricity-Producing Microbe 177

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the devil-in-the-dark dept.
University of Massachusetts researchers have made a breakthrough with "Geobacter," a microbe that produces electric current from mud and wastewater. A conservative estimate puts the energy output increase at eight times that of the original organism, potentially allowing applications far beyond that of extracting electricity from mud. "Now, planning can move forward to design microbial fuel cells that convert waste water and renewable biomass to electricity, treat a single home's waste while producing localized power (especially attractive in developing countries), power mobile electronics, vehicles and implanted medical devices, and drive bioremediation of contaminated environments."
Music

Guitar Hero III the First Game to $1 Billion In Sales 106

Posted by Soulskill from the rock-out-with-your-pocketbook-out dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog reports that Guitar Hero III has reached a financial milestone, becoming the first individual video game to reach $1 billion in total sales. The number is even higher if you consider the rest of the franchise. In addition to helping drive the video game industry during tough economic times (much like the Wii), it's helping other industries as well: "... aside from the fact that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith had sold three times as many copies as the band's last album during their respective first weeks, musicians whose music is featured in the game has seen a rise in music sales to the tune of 15-843 percent." And CVG notes, "... two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years." Also, Rock Band creator Harmonix may be looking into a partnership with the record labels to sell music for use outside of the games.
Hardware Hacking

Fast-Booting OS for Usually-Off Appliance PCs? 523

Posted by timothy from the zero-to-sixty-in-zilch-dot-two dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I have some older computer equipment at work that I want to re-purpose as application appliances. The machines will sit, unpowered, until needed, then powered up. No way around the 'sitting powered off' — company directive. What is the quickest-booting OS I could use for them? I know about LinuxBIOS, but that would require new hardware, which does not go along which the re-purposing theme. Some of them do not need to be connected to a network, so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 are possible. DOS is too old to consider. So what are my options?"
The Internet

The Pirate Bay's Plans To Encrypt the 'Net 297

Posted by timothy from the pretty-ned8bdrnki(bdr## dept.
Keeper Of Keys writes "According to newteevee.com, The Pirate Bay, those fun- and freedom-loving Swedes, have embarked on a project to encrypt all internet traffic, probably by means of an OS-level wrapper around all network connections, which would fall back to an unencrypted connection when the other end is not similarly equipped. The move has been prompted by a recent change in Swedish law, allowing the authorities to snoop on network traffic. This will be a boon to filesharers and anyone else concerned about authorities and trade groups' recent moves towards 'policing' network traffic at the ISP level."

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