Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Epic's Tim Sweeney Rips Google And Apple In Defense Of NVIDIA's GeForce NOW (hothardware.com)

Submitted by bigwophh
bigwophh writes: As the number of publishers pulling out of NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud game streaming service continues to grow, the company has found an ally in Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, who vowed on Twitter to "wholeheartedly" support the company's efforts. He also took potshots at Apple and Google over the royalty rate each one charges on their respective app stores and expects them to go to battle as game streaming gains momentim. "Just waiting till later this year when Google is lobbying against Apple for blocking Stadia from iOS, while Google blocks GeForce NOW, xCloud, and Fortnite from Google Play, and this whole rotten structure begins collapsing in on itself," Sweeney added. It remains to be seen how things will pan out with GeForce NOW. NVIDIA maintains that "game removals will be few and far between" and that it has 1,500 additional games queued up. However, NVIDIA only has so much control over the developers willing to continue supporting the platform.
Security

Ask Slashdot: Where To Report Script Kiddies and Other System Attacks? 241

Posted by timothy from the needs-a-good-whippin' dept.
First time accepted submitter tomscott writes "So I've been using using Linux for over ten years now and I'm sure like most Linux users I've got SSH running on my box and port 22 open on my cable modem so that I can access my system no matter where I am. Over the years I've seen people try to gain access to my system but — knock on wood — I've never had a breach. What I am wondering: Is there a website where I can report these attempts and even supply the details of where the break-in attempt originated from?" The FBI is interested, but probably only if you've actually suffered a loss.
Censorship

Submission + - An HTTP Status Code for Censorship? (shkspr.mobi)

Submitted by Tryfen
Tryfen writes: UK ISPs are being forced to block The Pirate Bay. One is using "HTTP 403 Forbidden" to tell users that they cannot access the site. So, should there be a specific HTTP status code to tell a user that they are being censored?

Comment Re:hey! (Score 2) 289

This is seriously, seriously wrong.

Why on earth would someone spend the effort to be a lawyer if they just get paid the same? How do you think exceptional employees would feel about carrying everyone else like that? Everyone's going to be HAPPY to be a carbon copy cog in the great machine? If everyone has the same disposable incomes... people would be fighting for the easy jobs. The unhappiness has only moved from feeling taken advantage of due to differences in wages to feeling taken advantage of due to the vast differences in job difficulty across the entire company's payroll for the same disposable income. )".

Maybe, if pay was the same, people would actually be able to focus on doing the jobs that they ENJOY, instead of feeling like they had to take a different position to afford to eat. This has the added benefit of the fact that people who are doing jobs they enjoy/care about tend to do better at those jobs and try harder, so the company better results as well. Bottom line, some people enjoy the work of lawyers, they would still go through the trouble to become lawters. Other people enjoy managing, they would still take the time to be managers. Some people enjoy being janitors, they would feel free to do that without feeling like they were missing out on a paycheck.
Science

Submission + - Ask Slashdot. An online science course which makes full use of the Web?

Submitted by blubadger
blubadger writes: Having slept through chemistry at school, I'm looking to fill in the gaps in my science education by following a short online course or two. I've been searching for "Chemistry 101", "Basics of Physics", "Biology Primer", and so on. There's some high-quality stuff on offer – from Academic Earth, MIT and others – but it tends to take the form of videos of traditional university lectures. I was hoping to cut through the chit-chat and blackboards and get straight into the infographics and animations that will help me understand complex ideas. Flash and HTML5 Canvas seem wasted on videos of lectures. If the quality were high enough I would be willing to pay. Have Slashdotters seen anything that fits the bill?
Social Networks

Submission + - Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population (arxiv.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new algorithm developed by researchers at West Point seems to break new ground for viral marketing practices in online social networks. Assuming a trend or behavior that spreads in an online social network based on the classic “tipping” model from sociology (based on the work of Thomas Schelling and Mark Granovetter), the new West Point algorithm can find a set of individuals in the network that can initiate a social cascade – a progressive series of “tipping” incidents — which leads to everyone in the social network adopting the new behavior. But the real good news for viral marketers is that this set of individuals is often very small – a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded. The trick is finding the seed set – which the West Point algorithm often does in only a few minutes. The algorithm is described at a paper to be presented later this summer at the prestigious IEEE ASONAM conference. A copy of the paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4431. Further info on this new algorithm can also be found at http://blog.netsciwestpoint.org/2012/05/30/online-social-networks-can-be-tipped-by-as-little-as-0-8-of-their-population/.
Australia

Submission + - What is a patent troll? (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Australian tech publication iTnews is defining ”patent trolls" as those who claim rights to an invention without commercializing it, and notes that government research organization CSIRO could come under that definition.

The CSIRO in April reached a $220 million settlement over three US telcos’ usage of WLAN that it invented in the early 1990s. Critics have argued that the CSIRO had failed to contribute to the world’s first wifi 802.11 standard, failed to commercialize the wifi chip through its spin-off, Radiata, and chose to wage its campaign in the Eastern District courts of Texas, a location favored by more notorious patent trolls.
Businesses

Submission + - Worst Design Ever? Plastic Clamshell Packaging 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Rebecca Rosen writes that iIf you've recently opened up — or, more specifically, tried to open up — an CFL light bulb, you can sympathize with the question posted on Quora last year, "What is the worst piece of design ever done?" to which the site's users have given resounding support to one answer: plastic clamshell packaging. "Design should help solve problems" — clamshells are supposed to make it harder to steal small products and easier for employees to arrange on display — but this packaging, says Anita Schillhorn, makes new ones, such as time wasted, frustration, and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out. The problem is so pervasive there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to "wrap rage," "the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-remove packaging." Amazon and Wal-Mart are prodding more manufacturers to change their packaging to cut waste. “We’ve gotten e-mails from customers who’ve purchased scissors in a clamshell, which would require another pair of scissors to open the package,” says Nadia Shouraboura, Amazon’s vice president of global fulfillment. Other worthy answers to the Quora question include the interfaces on most microwaves, TV remotes, New York City's parking signs, and pull-handles on push-only doors, but none gained even close to the level of popular repudiation that clamshells received."

Submission + - House Appropriators want to limit public availability of pending bills (washingtonexaminer.com)

Submitted by Attila Dimedici
Attila Dimedici writes: The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am sorry that I cannot write a better summary of these articles, but I think this is an important issue about improving the ability of people to understand what Congress is doing. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
NASA

Submission + - Andromeda on collision course with the Milky Way (nature.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: From the Nature story: The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies.

Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.
OS X

Submission + - Humble Indie Bundle V (humblebundle.com)

Submitted by Splintercat
Splintercat writes: The Humble Indie Bundle V has just been released featuring Psychonauts, LIMBO, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, and Bastion for Windows, OSX and Linux.
Ubuntu software center support has also been added as a method of downloading.
The Internet

Submission + - UN Takeover of Internet Must be Stopped, US Warns (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted. Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, the summit would consider proposals including "[using] international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a 'per-click' basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe" and allowing ""governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows." Concerns regarding the possible proposals were both aired at a congressional hearing this morning and drafted in a congressional resolution (pdf)."
NASA

Submission + - NASA tool shows where forest is being cut down (mongabay.com)

Submitted by terrancem
terrancem writes: A new tool developed by NASA and other researchers shows where forest is being chopped down on a quarterly basis. The global forest disturbance alert system (GloF-DAS) is based on comparison of MODIS global vegetation index images at the exact same time period each year in consecutive years. GloF-DAS could help users detect deforestation shortly after it occurs, offering the potential to take measures to investigate clearing before it expands.

Slashdot Top Deals

FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America.

Close