Morgan Schauerte - Slashdot User

Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction? 411

Posted by timothy on Monday March 22, 2010 @07:59PM from the erasing-the-analog-hole dept.

SlashD0tter writes "Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia. I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection. Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?"

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 07, 2010 @08:23PM from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Stephen Colbert vs The Hungarian Government 554

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday August 10, 2006 @01:04PM from the under-our-skin-we're-all-colberican dept.

jefu writes "The Hungarian government is sponsoring an internet vote to name a new bridge. So far naming the bridge after acter Chuck Norris has been the most popular. However, last night Stephen Colbert (of Comedy Central's "Colbert Report") suggested that viewers vote to name the bridge after him. Remembering the effect that a Colbert segment had had on Wikipedia, I visited the voting page (in Hungarian when it works) soon after that and it was completely non-responsive. This morning (8:00 Thursday Pacific time) it is showing a "Horrible exception" and a Jetspeed/tomcat stack trace. " I believe Colbert's straight-talking sensibilities have earned him far more than just a bridge in whatever continent Hungaria is in. Instead I think we should consider renaming one of our lesser used states as an honor more appropriate to his grippy contributions to America. We're not doing anything with Colorado these days anyway, but imagine the appeal of a new and improved state with a virile name like Colberado. Book your tickets today!

Totally Random One Time Pads 265

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 30, 2006 @07:39PM from the random-is-as-random-does dept.

liliafan writes "Scientists in Japan have come up with a way of harnessing a truly random datasource for generating one time encryption pads: Quasars. One time encryption pads are widely accepted as being the most secure form of encryption, but this new technology from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology makes the pads even more secure."

Comment Computer Recycling and New Electronics (Score 1) 323

by Morgan Schauerte on Friday February 04, 2005 @10:16AM (#11571453) Attached to: National PC Recycling Plan Proposed, Again

Last year for the hell of it I took a class that actually looked at computer recycling. Not only did we look at what currently happens in a lot of places (eg. monitors sent to China, environmental disaster ensues) but at the other options as well.

I took a tour Noranda Recycling where they use an environmentally friendly process to recycle the electronics, but here is the thing. Almost everything they were sending throgh the shredder was new. I guess when something is returning twice to a store, functioning or not it is marked for desstruction. You can imagine the pain of watching hundreds of digital cameras sent into the shredder. After wards I asked the foreman if they ever took things home. He said that there was a strict policy to not take anything, working or not and that someone was fired every week for taking things. Laptops, memory, cameras it all went into the shredder. Enough to make a grown geek cry.

I just wanted to add, this place was hemoraging money as well.

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