Comment Re:Can someone proof read? (Score 3, Informative) 28
You must be new here. This is Slashdot. Nobody proof reads summaries, or bothers to read the articles before launching into commenting, bickering, flaming, and trolling.
Comment But will they keep (Score 5, Interesting) 59
stealing ideas from the community and patenting them? IMO that's more damaging than their crappy extruder and other quality problems, and is something they need to publicly address.
AT&T To Allow Xbox 360 As U-verse Set-Top Box 62
suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about U-verse subscribers soon gaining the ability to use an Xbox 360 as a set-top box:
"A so-called Wired Release will roll out to AT&T U-verse customers next Sunday, and it'll bring the long awaited feature with it (though you'll have to wait until November 7th for that particular aspect). This means an AT&T U-verse customer's Xbox 360 will have a Dashboard app, and when launched, it'll let it function exactly like any other U-verse set-top. The only major catch is that it can't be the only set-top — you'll need at least one DVR at another TV in the house to enjoy one of the four HD streams that could be funneled into your home."
Xbox Live Pricing To Go Up To $60 Per Year 199
donniebaseball23 writes "Microsoft has raised the annual price of Xbox Live Gold to $60, which is a price hike of $10. The new price goes into effect on November 1, but gamers can lock in the current Xbox Live price by renewing now. EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich is not surprised by the move, nor does he think it will really have much impact on the Xbox momentum."
First Halophile Potatoes Harvested 117
Razgorov Prikazka writes "A Dutch-based company from Groningen is trying to create a potato race that is able to survive in a saline environment. The first test-batch was just harvested (English translation of Dutch original) on the island Texel and seem to be in good shape. The company states that rising sea-levels will create a demand for halophile crops. I do wonder if one still has to put salt on ones potatoes when they are grown in salt water."
Comment Re:Painful (Score 1) 572
Sorry, not quite:
$ echo bar > FOO.txt
$ cat foo.txt
cat: foo.txt: No such file or directory
$ ls *.txt
FOO.txt
$ cat FOO.txt
bar
And the disk utility reports my filesystem as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice 110
Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."
Submission + - Chessboxing Storming the Athletic World
samzenpus writes: Have you been craving an athletic competition that combines the raw physical energy of a chess match and the cognitive discipline of boxing? Crave no more. Chessboxing is here. No really, Chessboxing. As the name suggests, Chessboxing combines rounds of chess alternating with rounds of boxing. If there is no winner after 11 rounds, the match is awarded to the fighter with the most points in the boxing ring. Dutch artist, Iepe Rubingh, created chessboxing in 2003. He says, "I got the idea from a Serbian comic. It looked great. I wanted to see if it would work."
Researchers To Build Underwater Airplane 263
coondoggie writes to tell us that DARPA seems to still be having fun with their funding and continues to aim for the "far out." The latest program, a submersible airplane, seems to have been pulled directly from science fiction. Hopefully this voyage to the bottom of the sea is of the non-permanent variety. "According to DARPA: 'The difficulty with developing such a craft come from the diametrically opposed requirements that exist for an airplane and a submarine. While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater. In addition, the flow conditions and the systems designed to control a submarine and an airplane are radically different, due to the order of magnitude difference in the densities of air and water.'"
Compressor-Free Refrigerator On the Way 67
Iddo Genuth writes "Scientists from Penn State University are designing the future of refrigerators and other cooling devices through magnetic field refrigeration. The investigation pertaining to electrically induced heat effects of some ferroelectric polymers might one day replace electrically powered refrigerators and their compressors and coils. The researchers are focusing on ferroelectric polymers that exhibit temperature changes at room temperature under an electrical field. The same technology might also find its way into computers and other devices in the future, making them run cooler without complex cooling mechanisms."
Comment Wow, only 13 years after my first 64-bit desktop! (Score 0) 484
That Microsoft really has to be commended for their foresight, it's only been 13+ years since the Alpha 64 bit desktops came out, and now they have something that will run on part of a 32/64 bit processor! No wonder they have so many people looking to them for technology leadership.
Yes, technically, they did support part of windows NT on the Alpha, but it didn't work well and had no backing from any application providers.
I just think it's strange that people are seeing this 64-bit thing as if it were something new. I like the fact that you can now finally get 64-bit boxes in a normal computer store, but it's taken far too long to get it to market. Think where we'd be with databases with 64-bit transaction IDs, wraparound wouldn't be very likely and the DBAs could stop worrying about it. Oh well, eventually....
In any case, I think I'll crank up one of my old alphas today just to see if it still works. I haven't used it in a couple of years although the last time I had it on it racked up a 700 day uptime. I've had that box for 8 years now and the technology was kind of old when I got it.
Yes, technically, they did support part of windows NT on the Alpha, but it didn't work well and had no backing from any application providers.
I just think it's strange that people are seeing this 64-bit thing as if it were something new. I like the fact that you can now finally get 64-bit boxes in a normal computer store, but it's taken far too long to get it to market. Think where we'd be with databases with 64-bit transaction IDs, wraparound wouldn't be very likely and the DBAs could stop worrying about it. Oh well, eventually....
In any case, I think I'll crank up one of my old alphas today just to see if it still works. I haven't used it in a couple of years although the last time I had it on it racked up a 700 day uptime. I've had that box for 8 years now and the technology was kind of old when I got it.
Comment OpenFirmware (Score 5, Interesting) 284
I read this article a couple months ago when my issue of Linux Journal arrived. I had a couple questions about it then, guess this is a good time to ask them. :)
As I see it, half the point of LinuxBIOS is to provide a fast, open-sourced BIOS for x86 machines. It gets extra cool points for being Linux.
But I have to ask, why not just use OpenFirmware? Or at least, give LinuxBIOS some of the features of OpenFirmware. As far as I know, there is no such thing as OpenFirmware for the x86. It's got lots of neat benefits, like booting your machine off of another one on your network, or debugging a non-bootable machine remotely. Serial console, anyone? It has other benefits as well, that I can't remember; my brain is shot for the week.
For those of you that haven't heard of OpenFirmware, it's basically the "BIOS" on Macs.
As I see it, half the point of LinuxBIOS is to provide a fast, open-sourced BIOS for x86 machines. It gets extra cool points for being Linux.
But I have to ask, why not just use OpenFirmware? Or at least, give LinuxBIOS some of the features of OpenFirmware. As far as I know, there is no such thing as OpenFirmware for the x86. It's got lots of neat benefits, like booting your machine off of another one on your network, or debugging a non-bootable machine remotely. Serial console, anyone? It has other benefits as well, that I can't remember; my brain is shot for the week.
For those of you that haven't heard of OpenFirmware, it's basically the "BIOS" on Macs.
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