arcanehl - Slashdot User

Moblin 2 First Impressions 100

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 31, 2009 @09:11PM from the fast-boot-coming-to-a-distro-near-you dept.

nerdyH notes a DesktopLinux.com first look at the alpha of Intel's Moblin 2 toolkit for Linux distributors to create distributions for netbooks and other Atom-based kit. "A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too. Some of the quick-booting environments out there are enough to give anyone a lasting hatred of Linux. Like those free bicycles that liberal, well-intentioned municipalities release into the wild from time to time, hoping to get drivers out of their cars, fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause. But pretty soon, even full-featured Linux will boot in seconds. That's because Intel's built some mighty whizzy read-ahead boot technology into Moblin 2."

Submission + - OpenBSD's Systrace broken by Cambridge researcher (lightbluetouchpaper.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @03:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology (WOOT07) in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG, and that the technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release.

Submission + - BitTorrent Closes Source Code (slyck.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @01:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: "There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client." As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license.

NYT Exposes the Identity of Fake Steve Jobs 166

Posted by Zonk on Sunday August 05, 2007 @09:18PM from the hard-to-be-anonymous-if-someone-is-determined dept.

mattatwork writes "NY Times writer Brad Stone figured out the real identity of Fake Steve Jobs. With classic nick names like 'freetards' and 'beastmaster' Fake Steve captured an audience of 700,000 visitors to the site and around 50 emails a day. According to Daniel Lyons, the senior editor at Forbes magazine who maintained the blog, there is no definite plan for the future of the site. 'Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it." Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.'"

Submission + - Procedural Programming: The Secret behind Spore (bonafidereviews.com) 1

Submitted by

imashoe

on Saturday August 04, 2007 @05:08PM

imashoe writes: "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming. Read on to learn what exactly it is and how it differs from the traditional way games are made."

Submission + - Dateline NBC Mole Caught at DefCon (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2007 @06:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dateline NBC allegedly attempted to infiltrate the DefCon hackerfest with a producer using a hidden camera. The show allegedly hoped to tape hackers admitting to illegal activities, but DefCon got wind of the plot and displayed the would-be-mole's photo before every presentation. Dateline refused to deny the planned infiltration.

Submission + - The science of bridge collapse prevention (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

toddatcw

on Friday August 03, 2007 @05:54PM

toddatcw writes: "In the wake of the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge collapse this week, Computerworld investigates ongoing research that is underway even as the collapse occurred which could someday help to prevent future disasters. Acoustic emissions detection systems, which listen for the sounds of metal snapping on structures, already are being sold and fitted, while a new generation of detector systems that include sensors that monitor for tilting of bridge columns and piers are being designed, prototyped and researched. Get the scoop here."

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:12PM

Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."

Company Claims New Chip Converts Heat To Electricity 346

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday November 22, 2006 @05:24PM from the confirmed-skeptics-unite dept.

Dster76 writes to tell us that the startup, Eneco, has invented a solid state energy conversion chip which they claim will be able to convert heat directly into electricity or reach temperatures of -200 C when given an electrical current. While such a device could revolutionize many aspects of computing I'll keep my skeptic hat on for the time being.

Comment Not directly... (Score 1) 1062

by arcanehl on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:00AM (#10707253) Attached to: How has the USA PATRIOT Act Affected You?

But I know six people who were arrested for walking down the road at night and held for 48 hours before being released with no charges. They were able to claim their belongings a few months later.

In addition to that, two people (one of them included in the above group) were told be security guards that they couldn't photograph a hospital. Reason the guard gave? PATRIOT Act. When the police were called they instructed the two people to delete the photos and hand over the film.

And lastly a friend was told by FBI(?) agents that photographing an oil refinery, from public property, was not allowed.

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