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Comment Re:hmmm... (Score 5, Informative) 212

Bitcoin is mined on ASICs these days but there are other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum that are designed to be "ASIC resistant" by involving a very large number in their mining algorithms that needs to be stored in RAM, and changes periodically. Currently for ETH I believe that number is ~3GB. The result is that it makes ASICs unlikely to be worthwhile since a GPU is already a massively parallel processor with access to high speed ram. So yeah, GPU mining is back and reasonably profitable. Even after electricity costs many cards would pay for themselves in 3-5 months at current rates.
Bug

Bug Opens Chrome to Easy Remote Code Execution 61

Orome1 writes "ACROS Security notified Google about a peculiar behavior of the Chrome browser that can be exploited for execution of remote code outside Chrome sandbox under specific conditions. It is another case of file planting, where an application loads a data file (as opposed to binary file, leading to binary planting) from the current working directory. Google decided that this was not a vulnerability, but rather a 'strange behavior that [they] should consider changing.' The reason they provided was that 'the social engineering level involved here is significantly higher than "Your computer is infected with a virus, download this free anti-virus software and run the exe file to fix it."'"

Comment Good Idea? (Score 1) 200

Hmm, like in Jedi Knight 2 and many other games, where you start with all your powers and lose them early in the game then have to earn them back... It might work. That or it would just be annoying than your run of the mill 30 minute gameplay demo.
Businesses

Treading the Fuzzy Line Between Game Cloning and Theft 235

eldavojohn writes "Ars analyzes some knockoffs and near-knockoffs in the gaming world that led to problems with the original developers. Jenova Chen, creator of Flower and flOw, discusses how he feels about the clones made of his games. Chen reveals his true feelings about the takedown of Aquatica (a flOw knockoff): 'What bothers me the most is that because of my own overreaction, I might have created a lot of inconvenience to the creator of Aquatica and interrupted his game-making. He is clearly talented, and certainly a fan of flOw. I hope he can continue creating video games, but with his own design.' The article also notes the apparent similarities between Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games). Is that cloning or theft? Should clones be welcomed or abhorred?"

Comment Sunny California (Score 1) 1127

Last year I was working on my teams MATE ROV competition entry, and the electronics box onboard the submersible robot flooded during our first of two trials. I spent the next two days sitting on a concrete pool deck in beautiful, sunny, June California at UCSD trying to rewrite the embedded system's code, squinting at the screen to route around FUBAR'd components such as the onboard computer system that was supposed to handle networking with the dry side control computer.

We did win the guts and glory award though :)

It was so bright that even 10 feet underwater the cameras went blank white until we covered them with five layers of windshield tinting film :D

Comment Re:interesting times (Score 1) 911

I find Safari to be snappier on my mac, probably due to webkit and the rest of the UI being native components.

I have my mac and my pc sitting side by side and I find the Windows version of firefox to be noticably nicer to use (faster, better UI integration) than the mac version.

Recently though, I've become a fan of chrome on windows. I'm curious to see if the Mac version is any good.
Sci-Fi

Antimatter Molecule Should Boost Laser Power 211

Laser Lover writes "Molecules made by combining an electron with their anti-particle positron have been created by researchers at the University of California Riverside. The team's long term goal is to use the exotic material to create 'an annihilation gamma ray laser', potentially one million times more powerful than existing lasers. 'An electron can hook up with its antiparticle, the positron, to form a hydrogen-like atom called positronium (Ps). It survives for less than 150 nanoseconds before it is annihilated in a puff of gamma radiation. It was known that two positronium atoms should be able to bind together to form a molecule ... '"
GNU is Not Unix

New Method To Detect and Prove GPL Violations 218

qwerty writes "A paper to be presented at the upcoming academic conference Automated Software Engineering describes a new method to detect code theft and could be used to detect GPL violations in particular. While the co-called birthmarking method is demonstrated for Java, it is general enough to work for other languages as well. The API Benchmark observes the interaction between an application and (dynamic) libraries that are part of the runtime system. This captures the observable behavior of the program and cannot be easily foiled using code obfuscation techniques, as shown in the paper (PDF). Once such a birthmark is captured, it can be searched for in other programs. By capturing the birthmarks from popular open-source frameworks, GPL-violating applications could be identified."

Microsoft's Multitouch Coffee Table Display 466

longacre writes "Popular Mechanics takes the Microsoft Surface system for a hands-on video test drive. To be announced at today's D5 conference, the coffee-table-esqe device allows manipulation from multiple touch points, while infrared, WiFi and Bluetooth team up to allow wireless transfers between devices placed on top of it, such as cameras and cell phones. Expected to launch before the end of the year in the $5,000-$10,000 range, the devices might not make their way under many Christmas trees, but will find the insides of Starwood hotels, Harrah's casinos and T-Mobile shops."

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