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Star Wars: The Old Republic Sarlacc Enforcer Class Unveiled 27

Posted by Soulskill from the thinking-big dept.
Today BioWare unveiled the most impressive new class yet seen for their upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Sarlacc Enforcers are "paragons of patience and planning, always waiting for the right moment to pounce on their quarry – even if it takes one thousand years." Gamespot had an interview with the game's developers to get a clear picture on how such a unique and innovative class was designed. Quoting: "Well, this is a stealth class, so the soloing experience of the Sarlacc enforcer is going to be a little slow. [This character] spends a lot of time slowly sneaking into position before unleashing potent close-ranged attacks, such as 'devour.' But once exposed, the enforcer heavily relies on companion characters to lure enemies close, so he/it can unleash his/its close-ranged attacks. However, the enforcer shines in a group, especially when paired with a Jedi consular that can knock enemies toward him. At this point, the Sarlacc enforcer can use his/its powerful suite of damage-over-time abilities, like 'digest' and 'regurgitate.'"
Science

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.
ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

Comment Whitehat Security (Score 1) 68

by MandoSKippy (#31048026) Attached to: Web App Scanners Miss Half of Vulnerabilities
I noticed Whitehat Security Declined to participate. I wonder why that is? We just purchased there service, I like there concept, especially as they sold it, we haven't gotten into full use of the product yet, but I can tell you some of the execution of there service could be improved. There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between the sales force and the operations team. I would have been very interested to see how they fare in a test like this.

Comment Intel (Score 1) 344

by MandoSKippy (#30874856) Attached to: Crazy Firewall Log Activity — What Does It Mean?
I would have to say that the countries of interest on the graph seem to be the countries of interest from a malware/hacking perspective. Perhaps it's bot net activity where there is a large amount of port scans that kickoff from all over the world and then some of the "increase" after the lines would be further recon activity. All very interesting.
Data Storage

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability 267

Posted by Zonk from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.
oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"

Classic Star Wars Trilogy Finally on DVD 673

Posted by samzenpus from the Han-shoots-first-again dept.
chinton writes "From starwars.com: 'In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie, as well as the original theatrical edition of the film. That means you'll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.'"

Community Calls For OSS Contributions by Banks 106

Posted by Zonk from the also-the-mailmen-and-firemen dept.
Erikson Wright writes to mention a ZDNet article, covering a call by open-source vendors to banking institutions. The groups are asking powerful financial firms to contribute more code to the open source community. From the article: "Concerns over competitive advantage mean that it can be difficult to persuade companies to share code with the open-source community, as it can then be easily accessed by competitors. But for technologies that have little impact on competitive advantage, financial companies could probably be encouraged to contribute code, the conference panel agreed ... 'If you're using open-source technology on Wall Street, unless you're completely reliant on a vendor to provide a certified version, you will probably invest extra time to fix it,' he said. 'What will you do with your fix? You can keep it to yourself, but if you move it upstream by passing it on to the vendor or submitting it as a patch, you know it will be available in the next version of the product. That's what drives most open- source development--collective self-interest.'"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Sveasoft illegally uses OpenWRT 2

Journal by TheIndividual

Ok I admit it, I have been lazy recently. Not much had happened in the WRT scene in a while.
OpenWRT now has a great Web-Interface, DD-WRT got better on a daily basis while Sveasofts lost all its developers except James and the quality of their firmware releases declined even more.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Freeman 1.04 released 1

Journal by TheIndividual

The new version of Freeman (1.04) is now available for download!

Last time Sveasoft apparently had unintentionally released an unprotected binary on which Freeman 1.02 was based. This time Sveasoft didn't make the same mistake, the MAC protection had to be hacked and removed.
Kudos to the people responsible for that!

User Journal

Journal Journal: Alchemy 1.0 released to the public 5

Journal by TheIndividual

Sorry for not updating this journal in a while. On April 21st, Sveasoft decided to drop work on Alchemy and release it to the public as it is. It is called final and it should be somewhat stable.

Also, after not releasing any source code to the subscribers for 5 months, they finally made the Alchemy sources available.

Both files will appear on the mirrors shortly.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Tag-free Sveasoft Alchemy pre7a 11

Journal by TheIndividual

Hello everybody,
thanks to two fellow suppliers I had the chance to make a tag-free version of Alchemy pre7a. You may notice the name change, apparently Sveasoft decided that having seven release candidates durin a feature freeze is a little embarassing.

This version, as always, has been tested before release. Please read the included text files for further information, post questions or comments in this forum thread

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