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Nintendo

Submission + - NESBot: Tool Assisted Speedrun on Real Hardware (instructables.com)

Submitted by Xistic
Xistic writes: For many years tool assisted speedruns (TAS) were purely theoretical and the domain of emulators. No longer! Using an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller to drive an actual Nintendo console, pjgat09 plays back prerecorded input to beat Super Mario Brothers in record time. The selection of possible games is limited. 'If the game relies on any uninitialized memory for randomness, or if it is heavily based on console timing, it may not work. In the case of Super Mario Bros however, as long as the button presses start play back at the right time, the movie will play back correctly.' The author includes complete instructions on how to setup the device.
Graphics

Submission + - MPEG continues with royalty-free MPEG video codec (robglidden.com)

Submitted by yuhong
yuhong writes: From the press release: "In recognition of the growing importance that the Internet plays in the generation and consumption of video content, MPEG intends to develop a new video compression standard in line with the expected usage models of the Internet. The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC “Type-1 licensing”, i.e. intended to be “royalty free”."
Media

Submission + - DailyMotion Now Streaming Live News (www.beet.tv)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Beet.TV reports that DailyMotion has begun streaming live news from Al Jazeera, BBC, and France 24 among others. They write, 'Paris-based Dailymotion, the world's second biggest online video site, has integrated with London-based live news portal Livestation to provide a number of live streaming television news networks including Al Jezeera, Bloomberg, the BBC, France 24 and sources from other nations as well as from oganizations including the United Nations and NASA.'
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft to work with windows phone 7Jailbreakers (osnews.com)

Submitted by markass530
markass530 writes: Microsoft had a sit down with the first people to jailbreak their windows phone 7. Seems like good progress was made. This seems like a good approach to me. It would be great if Sony, Apple, Microsoft, and several Android phone makers would implement a simple development switch in their phones — these would obviously void the warranty, but it would give hackers the opportunity to actually own their devices without fear of having to jailbreak all over again whenever an update arrives.
Science

Submission + - Sandia Helps Secure Kazakh Nuclear Material (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: One of the ongoing problems with unclear non-proliferation efforts is what to do with nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. A group from Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a project in Kazakhstan, and managed to take another step towards securing it.

A large cache of enriched nuclear fuel – some 13 metric tons — was stored in a nuclear reactor in the port city of Aktau, on the Caspian seacoast. The reactor was a Soviet-era fast breeder reactor, designed to make nuclear fuel for both weapons and power plants. The reactor, which started operations in 1973, also provided 135 megawatts of electricity, 9 million gallons of water per day and steam for hot water and heating for Aktau. It was shut down by the Kazakh government in 1999.

Getting the material out of a seaport was one way to make it harder to steal, Barber said. So the U.S. and Kazakh governments embarked on a project to move it to a guarded — and remote — facility in the interior.

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/111697/20110211/sandia-labs-team-secures-nuclear-material-in-kazakhstan.htm

Comment Re:$500,000 or $200,000,000 ?! Which is it ? (Score 5, Informative) 77

by NigelBeamenIII (#30341360) Attached to: Air Force Extends Plug-and-Play Spacecraft
It's a question of how government contracts are awarded. They typically will have at least two things for each contract: the amount of money on the contract and the contract ceiling. The amount on the contract is the amount the company actually has in their accounts to spend. the ceiling is more like a "credit limit" which says the maximum amount of money the AF *can* ever put on the contract. Hope that explanation helps some.
Power

Submission + - MIT Secretly Built Mega-Efficient Nano Batteries (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: There was plenty of chatter last week about an MIT announcement that researcher Angela Belcher had developed a way to create virus-based nanoscale batteries to power mini gadgets of the future. In a fascinating followup at Popular Mechanics, Belcher now says that her unpublished work includes full-scale models of the batteries themselves, and that they could power everything from cars and laptops to medical devices and wearable armor. Quoting: "We haven't ruled out cars. That's a lot of amplification. But right now the thing is trying to make the best material possible, and if we get a really great material, then we have to think about how do you scale it."
Windows

Submission + - Black screens for pirate copies of Windows (custompc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes: "In a bid to deter people from using pirate versions of Windows XP, Microsoft is now updating its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool to introduce a few uncomfortable niggles for users of pirated versions of Windows. These include replacing the desktop wallpaper with a black screen every 60 minutes, although you can still replace it with your wallpaper of choice in the intervening period. As well as this, copies of Windows deemed to not be genuine will also have a translucent watermark above the system tray, which Microsoft calls a 'persistent desktop notification.'"
The Courts

Submission + - Case against video-sharing site dismissed (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "A California copyright infringement case brought by an adult video maker against a video sharing web site, Veoh Networks, has been thrown out, based upon the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ('DMCA'). In a 33-page decision (PDF), the Court concluded that Veoh was covered by the DMCA, and had carried out its duties to comply with takedown notices in a reasonable manner. The Court rejected the plaintiff's arguments showing possible ways that users could do an end-around, saying that the law requires 'reasonable' compliance, rather than perfection, and noted that the DMCA is 'designed to facilitate the robust development and world-wide expansion of electronic commerce, communications, research, development, and education in the digital age'."
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Bitten By The Red Hat Perl Bug? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. But 'what if "the slowest thing" is actually the code supplied by your vendor?' Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister asks. That was exactly the situation Vipul Ved Prakash discovered when he tinkered with a company Linux box on which Perl code was running at least 100 times slower than expected. The code, he found, was running on CentOS Linux, using Perl packages built by Red Hat. So Prakash got rid of the Perl executable that came with CentOS, compiled a new one from stock, and the bug disappeared. 'What's more disturbing,' McAllister writes, 'is that this Red Hat Perl performance issue is a known bug,' first documented in 2006 on Red Hat's own Bugzilla database. Folks affected by the current bug have two options: sit tight, or compile the Perl interpreter from source — effectively waiving your support contract. If a Linux vendor can't provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?"
Medicine

Submission + - Direct Cell Type Conversion Method Demonstrated

Submitted by n2hightech
n2hightech writes: Harvard University scientists figured out how to activate a trio of dormant genes that commanded non-insulin producing pancreas cells to switch to the Beta type insulin producing cells

Harvard University scientists figured out how to activate a trio of dormant genes that commanded non-insulin producing pancreas cells to switch to the Beta type insulin producing cells. The method uses an engineered virus to infect the cells and deliver special proteins that activate the dormant genes. This technology has the potential to make all stem cell based methods obsolete because it does not pose the risk of rejection and cancer associated with stem cells. A simple injection into the area where cells need to be reprogrammed is all that is required.
Microsoft

Submission + - Will W3C accept DRM for webfonts?

Submitted by dotne
dotne writes: Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?
Privacy

Wikileaks To Sell Hugo Chavez' Email 313

Posted by samzenpus from the how-much-to-look-through-his-garbage dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Wikileaks seems to be a bit hard-up for cash, so they're trying a little experiment. They plan to auction off an archive with three years worth of Hugo Chavez' email. The winner will get a period of embargoed access to break any stories they can find in the files, while Wikileaks will later publish the archive in full. Wikileaks plans to use the profits for their legal defense fund, but they may run into trouble because most reputable news outlets have policies against paying sources."
Businesses

Submission + - Abit to bow out of mainboard market (hexus.net) 1

Submitted by
Steve Kerrison
Steve Kerrison writes: "Taiwanese technology firm Abit will be pulling out of the mainboard market at the end of this year. HEXUS.channel, citing sources close to South East Asian distributors, reports that the company will continue to deliver mainboard products until the end of 2008 and will still honour all warranties in subsequent years. Rumours of this decision circulated in May but were dismissed. Apparently the decision was made in the last couple of weeks. Abit is a popular brand amongst PC hardware enthusiasts, many of who will be disappointed to see it leave the market."

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