Wacky_Baccy - Slashdot User

Submission + - FBI used FedEx to sneak Dotcom information out of New Zealand (stuff.co.nz) 1

Submitted by bpkiwi on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @04:57PM

bpkiwi writes: FBI agents, working with New Zealand police on the Megaupload case, took a copy of Kim Dotcom's hard drives and then immediately sneaked out of the police facility and FedEx'ed them back to the USA. Despite the fact that removal of evidence in this manner without official approval (and a chance for the defendant to challenge it) appears to be illegal, the New Zealand government is now left arguing on a technicality — that the law only covers 'physical' items.

Submission + - Carmageddon: Reincarnation Linux Version confirmed (kickstarter.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @04:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: Stainless Games have been fundraising for Carmageddon: Reincarnation, a modern day remake of the classic Carmageddon racing games, on Kickstarter.com for weeks. Stainless said that if they hit 600,000 Dollars in pledges before time runs out, the would commit themselves to creating a Linux port of the game, as well as a MacOS port. Today they made it official: The fundraising has come so close to netting 600K overall, with a few more hours left to go, that they are officially committing themselves to creating a Linux port of the new game. PC gamers will get to play Carmageddon 4 first, with a February 2013 release date. The MacOS & Linux versions will follow the PC version later in 2013.

Landmark Calculation Clears the Way To Answering How Matter Is Formed 205

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Monday May 28, 2012 @10:11PM from the universal-decay dept.

First time accepted submitter smazsyr writes "An international collaboration of scientists is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors. 'This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,' says a co-author of the paper."

Autonomous Road Train Project Completes First Public Road Test 148

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 28, 2012 @05:58PM from the follow-the-leader dept.

theodp writes "Covered earlier on Slashdot, but lost in the buzz over the Google driverless car is Project Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), Europe's experiment with 'vehicle platooning,' which has successfully completed a 125 mile road test on a busy Spain motorway. Three Volvos drove themselves by automatically following a truck in the presence of other, normal road users. The Register reports that on-board cameras, radar and laser tracking allow each vehicle to monitor the one in front, and wirelessly streamed data from the lead vehicle tells each car when to accelerate, break and turn."

350-Year-Old Newton's Puzzle Solved By 16-Year-Old 414

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 27, 2012 @09:31AM from the top-of-the-class dept.

First time accepted submitter johnsnails writes "A German 16-year-old, Shouryya Ray, solved two fundamental particle dynamic theories posed by Sir Isaac Newton, which until recently required the use of powerful computers. He worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance. Shouryya solved the problem while working on a school project. From the article: 'Mr Ray won a research award for his efforts and has been labeled a genius by the German media, but he put it down to "curiosity and schoolboy naivety." "When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, 'well, there's no harm in trying,'" he said.'"

Reusing Old TiVo Hardware? 197

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 08, 2009 @01:17PM from the self-warming-feline-nap-station dept.

buss_error writes "I have old TiVo hardware that I'd like to reuse — however, I find in searching that the most frequent reply is: 'Don't cheat TiVo!' I don't want to cheat TiVo — in fact, I'd like to nuke the drive with a completely open-source distro with no TiVo drivers at all. Some uses I think would be interesting: recording video for security cameras or a drive cam; a unit for weather reporting; fax/telephone; a power monitor for the home; or other home automation. I would prefer a completely TiVo-free install — this is because I have major issues with TiVo and don't want the slightest taint of their intellectual property. But, since I paid for the hardware, I'd like to wring some use out of it rather than simply putting it in the landfill."

Multi-Button OpenOfficeMouse At OOoCon 2009 265

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday November 06, 2009 @05:05PM from the flying-in-the-face-of-simple-design dept.

An anonymous reader writes "WarMouse has announced their new multi-button OpenOfficeMouse for OpenOffice.org at the 2009 OOoCon in Orvieto, Italy. The mouse, which features 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and an analog joystick, has double-click functionality on every button and stores up to 63 application and game profiles in its 512k of flash memory. The OpenOfficeMouse runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X; its customization software will be released as free and open source software." We couldn't decide if this was a protest against Apple's new magic mouse, an elaborate practical joke, or just plain insanity run amok. In any case, it is hard to imagine a world in which so many tiny buttons on a mouse make sense.

After Links To Cybercrime, Latvian ISP Cut Off 116

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 06, 2009 @04:51AM from the people-interpret-jerks-as-damage-and-route-around-them dept.

alphadogg writes with this Network World story, excerpting "A Latvian ISP linked to online criminal activity has been cut off from the Internet, following complaints from Internet security researchers. Real Host, based in Riga, Latvia was thought to control command-and-control servers for infected botnet PCs, and had been linked to phishing sites, Web sites that launched attack code at visitors and were also home to malicious 'rogue' antivirus products, according to a researcher using the pseudonym Jart Armin, who works on the Hostexploit.com Web site. 'This is maybe one of the top European centers of crap,' he said in an e-mail interview. 'It was a cesspool of criminal activity,' said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro."

A GNU/Linux Distro Needing Windows To Install? 174

Posted by kdawson on Sunday July 19, 2009 @01:17AM from the for-some-values-of-instant dept.

dgun writes "I recently put together a new PC. When I purchased the motherboard, I noticed that it came with an instant-on OS, a small GNU/Linux distro called Splashtop. I assumed that the OS was on a ROM chip on the motherboard. To my great annoyance, when I tried to boot to this OS, a message said that it was not installed. It turns out that motherboard comes with an install disk for this GNU/Linux OS — that you can only run from Windows, to install Splashtop on the hard drive. First of all, doesn't installing it on the hard drive defeat the point of having an instant-on OS? If I wanted to dual-boot a small GNU/Linux OS, there are plenty that I could choose from. Second, if distributing GPL'ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?"

A Sony Camera Running Linux 209

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @02:28PM from the answer-is-yes dept.

jonr writes "At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show, Sony presented the new camera from its Cyber-shot product line. The DSC-G3 comes with a Zeiss lens with 4x zoom, a large 3.5" touch display, and 4GB of internal memory. Most interesting is the camera's software that includes, among other things, face and scene recognition, based on Busybox and Kernel 2.6.11 for the Access Linux Platform. The camera also has built-in Wi-Fi."

Campaign to Open Source IBM's Notes/Domino 255

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 29, 2008 @03:42PM from the if-you-can't-sell-it-use-it-for-free-advertising dept.

Ian Tree, an IT consultant from the Netherlands, has started a campaign to convince IBM to open source the code for Notes/Domino. Hoping for results similar to the push for Sun to open source Solaris, which finally saw success in 2005, Tree makes the simple point that it won't happen until someone asks. "By being an open source product, Tree is also hoping that Domino becomes something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts, which is the holy grail for future market adoption. This is how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized. While the idea of open sourcing any proprietary program is appealing, in as much as it sets a program free to live beyond the commitment (or lack thereof) of its originator, it is hard to see why open Notes/Domino would have any more impact than OpenSolaris."

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 432

by Wacky_Baccy on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @06:37PM (#25475669) Attached to: Linux Kernel Surpasses 10 Million Lines of Code

It seems not to be specifically for AppleBASIC, but is this possibly the one?

This part sounds promising:

Pages and pages of program listings in tiny, all-caps, dot matrix type, with brief introductory paragraphs. Plus, funny illustrations of strangely plausible robots. Don't underestimate the appeal of the robots.

A commenter on that entry also says this, lending plausibility:

I remember checking out of copy of that book from the libray and typing games into an Apple II, making minor adjustments so Applebasic would be happy.

Amazon.com has some used ones listed -- even a couple listed as "new", with a price-tag to match! ;)

If it's not this one, then I hope you find it eventually. I've had similar somewhat frustrating experiences trying to remember kids' TV shows and various books I read as a child, and it's always pleasantly nostalgic to finally pin something down.

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