XCorvis - Slashdot User

The Future is Plastic ... Bridges 72

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 03, 2006 @08:29AM from the good-enough-for-gaston-glock dept.

ches_grin writes "BusinessWeek reports on the latest in bridge-building technology, where new materials and techniques are allowing bridges to be built in places that were previously thought impossible. New plastics are allowing bridges to be lighter and stronger than concrete, and 'using cables and new suspension techniques, these bridges traverse bodies of water that were once too deep, too soft-floored, or too earthquake-prone for conventional methods.' The article also includes a slideshow of some of the most innovative bridges, some still under construction."

How Long Till Virtual Currency Taxation? 166

Posted by Zonk on Monday May 01, 2006 @01:46PM from the please-stop-talking-about-it dept.

GameDaily has a piece on the thorny issue of taxing virtual currency. From the article: "The current tax law has a clause, #525 to be exact, entitled 'Taxable and Nontaxable Income.' This verbose, meandering clause describes all manner of abstract (legal, illegal and otherwise) means by which you can earn income. Some of these obscurities can only be taxed by the speculative and vague term, 'fair market value.' ... This clause also includes a statement about goods acquired through barter or won (prizes or cash) in a game. Technically speaking this means those 'earnings' are taxable the very moment someone comes into possession of them, regardless as to whether or not they are sold for money. While no one knows the exact worth of all the virtual assets floating around the MMO gaming-verse, estimates for the sale of these goods range as high as $880 million a year. Step back and think about that for a minute... EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION! That's a crapload of real world money! Money made during what can be considered the infancy of the genre. Can you imagine how exponentially greater this amount will be in a few short years? "

Torvalds Has Harsh Words For FreeBSD Devs 571

Posted by Zonk on Friday April 21, 2006 @12:03PM from the end-of-the-week-frustrations dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a relatively technical discussion about the merits of Copy On Write (COW) versus a very new Linux kernel system call named vmsplice(), Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some harsh words for Mach and FreeBSD developers that utilize COW: 'I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home.' The discussion goes on to explain how the new vmsplice() avoids this extra overhead."

Comment Universal Imaging Utility (Score 5, Informative) 95

by XCorvis on Thursday April 20, 2006 @02:29PM (#15167520) Attached to: Creating XP Disk Images w/ Company Applications?

UIU was a pleasant suprise for us. We use it all the time and it actually works pretty well. The short version is that it rips out all your hardware information and uses sysprep and preinstalled drivers to automatically detect and install the new system's hardware on the next boot. So basically, you build one computer, run UIU, image it (with Ghost or something) and then dump it on to all the other computers, regardless of their hardware setup (well, not including SCSI or RAID). There usually isn't even any post-install configuration necessary.

Lenovo Under U.S. Probe for Spying 327

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 30, 2006 @10:21AM from the seekrit-agent-man dept.

BigControversy writes "The DailyTech has a report indicating that Lenovo, the giant Chinese PC manufacturer, is under a probe by the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) for possible bugging. Apparently, the government has ordered 16,000 PCs from Lenovo but is now requesting that Lenovo be investigated by intelligence agencies. The fear is of foreign intelligence applying pressure to Lenovo to equip its PCs so that the U.S. can be spied on." From the article: "Despite the probe, Lenovo says that its international business, especially those that deal with the US, follow strictly laid out government regulations and rules. Lenovo also claims that even after purchasing IBM's PC division, its international business has not been affected negatively. Interestingly, in an interview with the BBC, Lenovo mentioned that an open investigation or probe may negatively affect the way that the company deals with future government contracts or bids." There just has to be better uses of our intelligence community's time.

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