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Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson 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."
Bug

Calendar Bug Disables Older PlayStation 3 Models 342

Posted by Soulskill from the probably-just-ubisoft-drm-kicking-in dept.
JohnWilliams writes "The Sony PlayStation Network appears to be inaccessible to older ('phat') PS3 units. Players cannot play games that require a connection, even in single-player, offline mode, e.g. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Also, the system date resets to January 1, 2000. Sony is 'looking into it.' Speculation abounds that it is a bug related to 2010 being incorrectly flagged as a leap year. The newer PS3 Slim models seem to be working properly."
Sony

Submission + - Sony PlayStation Network is Down (twitter.com) 4

Submitted by JohnWilliams
JohnWilliams writes: The Sony PlayStation Network appears either to be down, or inaccessible to older ("phat") PS3 units. Players cannot play games that require a connection, even in single-player, offline mode, e.g. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Also, the system date resets to January 1, 2000. Sony is "working on it ..."

Speculation abounds that it is a bug related to 2010 being a leap year.
IT

Submission + - How Do You Get Users to Read Error Messages? 3

Submitted by A BOFH
A BOFH writes: The longer I do desktop support, the more it becomes obvious that my users don't read anything that appears on their screen. Instead, they memorize a series of buttons to press to get whatever result they want and if anything unexpected happens, they're completely lost. Error logs help a lot, but they have their limits. I've been toying with a few ideas, but I don't know if any of them will work and I was hoping my fellow Slashdotters could point me in the right direction. For example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors. They might not remember that an error about "uninitialized data" but they might be more able to remember that they got the "puppy error" if I showed a puppy picture next to the error message. Or for times when finding images is too time consuming, you could create simple logos from letters, numbers, symbols, colors or shapes, so you could have the "red 5" error or "blue square" error (or any combination of those elements). I've even wondered if it would be possible to expand that to cover the other senses, for example, playing a unique sound with the error. Unfortunately, haptic and olfactory feedback aren't readily available. I like to think that my users would remember the error that caused them to get a swift kick in the balls. And if they forgot it anyhow, I could always help them reproduce it. Does anyone else have experience with ideas like these? Did it work?
Bug

Scaling Algorithm Bug In Gimp, Photoshop, Others 368

Posted by kdawson from the black-is-black-sometimes dept.
Wescotte writes "There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms. All software tested has the problem: The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome, Paint, and Krita. The problem exists across three different operating systems: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (These exceptions have subsequently been reported — this software does not suffer from the problem: the Netpbm toolkit for graphic manipulations, the developing GEGL toolkit, 32-bit encoded images in Photoshop CS3, the latest version of Image Analyzer, the image exporters in Aperture 1.5.6, the latest version of Rendera, Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1, Pixelmator for Mac OS X, Paint Shop Pro X2, and the Preview app in Mac OS X starting from version 10.6.) Photographs scaled with the affected software are degraded, because of incorrect algorithmic accounting for monitor gamma. The degradation is often faint, but probably most pictures contain at least an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I believe this has happened since the first versions of these programs, maybe 20 years ago."

Submission + - Junctionless transistor could simplify chip making (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A novel transistor archiecture has been developed by a team of researchers led by Jean-Pierre Colinge at Tyndall National Institute at Cork, Ireland. Not many technology developments can be truly described as a "breakthrough" or "revolutionary" but this might just fit the bill. It does depend on the extremly small dimensions of silicon nanowires just a few dozens of atoms wide. EE Times picked up on an announcement of a paper on the topic being published by Nature Nanotechnology.

Submission + - Free Software Foundation urge Google to free VP8 (fsf.org)

Submitted by jamesswift
jamesswift writes: The FSF have written an open letter to Google urging them to free the VP8 codec with an irrevocable royalty-free licence.

"With its purchase of the On2 video compression technology company having been completed on Wednesday February 16, 2010, Google now has the opportunity to make free video formats the standard, freeing the web from both Flash and the proprietary H.264 codec."
Graphics

Submission + - Real-time movie-quality CGI for games? (hplusmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Intel-owned development team can now render CGI-quality graphics in real time! "Their video clips show artists pulling together 3D elements like a jigsaw puzzle, making movie-level CG look as easy as following a recipe." It's hoped that the simplicity of "Project Offset" could ultimately give them the edge in the race to produce real-time graphics engines for games.

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