Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Graphics

OpenGL 3.0 Released, Developers Furious 643

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the community-management-derailed dept.
ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"

Comment Re:KDE and Gnome (Score 1) 369

by anirudhvr (#22828034) Attached to: From GNOME to KDE and Back Again
Agree; and I'm one of the 1% you are referring to. Although I started using ratpoison 4 years ago because my computer was too slow to run KDE or Gnome, I'm still using it for my beefy desktop and my two laptops. TFA talks about muscle memory, but he's referring to *clicking* on some corner for god's sake! Muscle memory means keyboard shortcuts, and ratpoison (and window managers in the same vein like Ion) are completely keyboard-oriented. Whenever I'm forced to use a non-ratpoison machine, I find myself crippled by the convoluted gestures to perform simple tasks. Ratpoison does not have a "Desktop", no desktop background, no icons to click, nothing. It just shows your apps in fullscreen windows. I find that this suits me perfectly: I use a tabbed browser (firefox), a tabbed terminal (mrxvt), a tabbed IM client (pidgin), amarok, and occassionally open a few other apps. I have them all bound to my numpad giving me 1-key switch to an app (e.g., 1 for firefox, 2 for amarok, etc.). Plus, ratpoison handles 2 LCDs beautifully. It has just about everything that KDE or Gnome does (e.g., shortcut to display time, execute commands, etc.) Moreover, you can write scripts in your favorite language to make the currently executing window manager do stuff, like dcop for KDE. Better still, the codebase is *really* small, and it's quite easy to add some functionality if you want to. All in all, my 2 cents: WMs like Ratpoison and Ion are the extreme in "cutting to the chase". If you want to look at photos of your florida beach or family, or if you a nice-looking desktop with hundreds of applets showing you things you can see with top or netstat or df, sure, use KDE or Gnome (btw, you can set backgrounds in ratpoison too, but that's not the point). But if you talk about muscle memory or personalization, you should not gloss over these keyboard-oriented window managers.
Security

Remote Exploit Discovered for OpenBSD 338

Posted by samzenpus from the patch-it-up dept.
An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD is known for its security policies, and for its boast of "only one remote exploit in over 10 years". Well, make that two, because Core Security has found a remotely exploitable buffer overflow in the OpenBSD kernel. Upgrade your firewalls as soon as possible."
Windows

Activating Vista Enterprise Using a Spoofed Server 291

Posted by Zonk from the so-close dept.
Ruvim writes "It has been mentioned in previous Slashdot discussions as possibility, and now it became a reality: Information Week reports that a spoofed server has been released that can be used to activate Microsoft's Vista Enterprise versions. It is being made available on several pirate Web sites and spoofs a Key Management Service server, used to activate a large number of copies of Windows Vista in enterprise environments." From the article: "Vista is the first version of Windows that Microsoft requires volume license customers to activate. Besides KMS, the Redmond, Wash. developer also offers Multiple Activation Key, which resembles the retail version's activation process. PCs activated using KMS must reactivate at least once every six months. The MelindaGates hack uses a VMware image of a KMS server to activate -- and keep activated -- a pirated edition of Windows Vista Business. 'Looks like Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0 is a big bust,' wrote a user identified as 'clank' on the PirateBay Web site Friday. "
Microsoft

Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office 281

Posted by Zonk from the bully-for-them dept.
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."

9th Annual AUV Competition Results 110

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the below-the-water-line dept.
Sean.D.Matthews writes "This weekend the 9th Annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition was held in San Diego. This year, teams were challenged to complete three tasks including finding a docking station, dropping markers in marked bins along a pipeline, and surfacing in a recovery zone marked by an acoustic pinger. Teams from MIT, Cornell, Duke and eighteen others competed for the grand prize. After an intense final round, the University of Florida's Team SubjuGator walked away with the victory for a second year in a row. Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP embedded on SubjuGator's on-board computer."

Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite 343

Posted by samzenpus from the coming-or-going dept.
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target. Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."

Dell Protests 'Not Wintel's Lapdog' 449

Posted by Zonk from the doth-protest-too-much dept.
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net is reporting on a protestation by Dell's CTO, Kevin Kettler, who says quite loudly that they are not Microsoft and Intel's puppet." From the article: "Essentially, Kettler argued, Dell was responsible for selecting, if not necessarily developing, many of the technologies in today's desktop computers and servers. Among standards for which he said Dell deserves credit are 802.11 wireless networking, PCI Express communications technology and 64-bit extensions to Intel's x86 line of processors."

ESA to Send Spacecraft to Venus 195

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-being-neighborly dept.
teeto writes to tell us The International Herald Tribune is reporting that the European Space Agency is planning to send a spacecraft to peer at Venus." From the article: "If the robot craft pulls off the complex maneuver of slowing down enough to swing into orbit, scientists hope it will help solve the mystery of how the shrouded, churning atmosphere of Venus formed and how it maintains the planet's broiler-like temperatures."

ARM Offers First Clockless Processor Core 351

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the timeless-decisions dept.
Sam Haine '95 writes "EETimes is reporting that ARM Holdings have developed an asynchronous processor based on the ARM9 core. The ARM996HS is thought to be the world's first commercial clockless processor. ARM announced they were developing the processor back in October 2004, along with an unnamed lead customer, which it appears could be Philips. The processor is especially suitable for automotive, medical and deeply embedded control applications. Although reduced power consumption, due to the lack of clock circuitry, is one benefit the clockless design also produces a low electromagnetic signature because of the diffuse nature of digital transitions within the chip. Because clockless processors consume zero dynamic power when there is no activity, they can significantly extend battery life compared with clocked equivalents."

Jan Schaumann Talks About NetBSD on the Desktop 29

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-depends-on-how-much-work-your-willing-to-do dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Continuing his series of interviews, Emmanuel Dreyfus asks NetBSD's Jan Schaumann about his experience with NetBSD on the desktop. From the article: 'Jan Schaumann has been an important contributor to the NetBSD project for several years. He spent a lot of time working on the NetBSD package system, known as pkgsrc, and he currently uses NetBSD as his desktop system. We will try to learn from his experience during this interview.'"

The State of Digital Music in 2006 127

Posted by Zonk from the iknew-that dept.
wh0pper writes "Designtechnica has an excellent article on the state of digital music in 2006. Digital music accounted for only six percent of total music sales in 2005. Yet even that is a massive increase over the year before, a whopping 194 percent, which is fiscally valuable as the sales of CDs continue to decrease (although even with digital sales, the record labels experienced another downturn in 2005). While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there's been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank--or blame--Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores.

Slashdot Top Deals

Staff meeting in the conference room in %d minutes.

Close