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Comment Re:Really (Score 1) 379

by meregistered (#33749538) Attached to: Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You?
I know there have already been a large number of comments on this one but giving corporations ANY of the rights of individuals is a very bad idea (look @ copyright law and the lameness with which corporations utilize it). It's already scary enough that our insane judicial system has granted them the rights of Freedom of Speech...
Media

Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player 356

Posted by kdawson from the now-to-optimize dept.
Tumbleweed writes "How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175KB, 8,000-line JavaScript-based Flash player written by Chris Smoak at RevShock, a mobile ad startup, and to be open-sourced 'in the near future.' From Simon's blog: 'It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio, and turns them into base64 encoded data: URIs, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. ... Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter.' Badass!"
Microsoft

Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista 375

Posted by CmdrTaco from the developers-developers-developers dept.
Stoobalou writes "In a chat with fellow CEOs at Microsoft's 14th annual CEO Summit, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer came close to admitting Vista was a dog. 'How do you get your product right? How do you help the customer? How do you be patient?' he asked, as if he knew the answer. What he did know was that Microsoft spent too many years building Windows Vista. 'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,' he said." You can also watch video of the speech, but 31 minutes of Ballmer is a lot of Ballmer.
Displays

HP Making a Dick Tracy Watch For the Military 66

Posted by samzenpus from the time-peace dept.
eldavojohn writes "HP announced a device like Dick Tracy's watch, with a target user base being the US military. CNN describes it as 'a flexible display that shows maps and other strategic information to soldiers in remote combat fields. The watch's screen will be made of plastic and it will run on solar energy, making it less likely to malfunction or run out of power in a tense scenario.' HP says a prototype will be done within a year. This new device hinges on recent display technology that HP says it has been developing for 10 years. The flexible displays are a mere 50 microns thick."
Power

10,000 Cows Can Power 1,000 Servers 221

Posted by samzenpus from the cattle-computing dept.
CWmike writes "Reducing energy consumption in data centers, particularly with the prospect of a federal carbon tax, is pushing vendors to explore an ever-growing range of ideas. HP engineers say that biogas may offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers. Researchers at HP Labs presented a paper (download PDF) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other 'digested farm waste' to generate electricity to an American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference, held this week. In it, the research team calculates that 'a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows' could power a 1 MW data center — or on the order of 1,000 servers. One trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas. But there are some practical problems, not the least of which is connecting a data center to the cows. If it does happen, the move could call for a new take on plug and play: plug and poo."
Image

Scientists Implant Biofuel Cells Into Rats 164

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-the-matrix dept.
RedmondChris writes "A team of scientists from Joseph Fourier University in France have successfully implanted biofuel cells into rats, generating 6.5 microwatts by harnessing the power of glucose. From the article: 'The device uses enzymes to harvest energy from glucose and oxygen found naturally in the body. Past attempts at using such a device in animals have failed because the enzymes have required acidic conditions or were inhibited by charged particles in the fluid surrounding cells. But Philippe Cinquin and his team from Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, overcame these obstacles by confining selected enzymes inside graphite discs that were placed into dialysis bags. Glucose and oxygen flowed into the device, but enzymes stayed in place and catalyzed the oxidation of glucose to generate electrical energy.'"
Earth

New Estimates Say Earth's Oceans Smaller Than Once Believed 263

Posted by timothy from the deeper-than-my-love-for-you dept.
Velcroman1 writes with this snippet from Fox News: "Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big? As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume — the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute set out to more accurately answer that question — and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles. And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor."
Earth

"Argonaut" Octopus Sucks Air Into Shell As Ballast 72

Posted by timothy from the 8-legs-good dept.
audiovideodisco writes "Even among octopuses, the Argonaut must be one of the coolest. It gets its nickname — 'paper nautilus' — from the fragile shell the female assembles around herself after mating with the tiny male (whose tentacle/penis breaks off and remains in the female). For millennia, people have wondered what the shell was for; Aristotle thought the octopus used it as a boat and its tentacles as oars and sails. Now scientists who managed to study Argonauts in the wild confirm a different hypothesis: that the octopus sucks air into its shell and uses it for ballast as it weaves its way through the ocean like a tiny submarine. The researchers' beautiful video and photographs show just how the Argonaut pulls off this trick. The regular (non-paper) nautilus also uses its shell for ballast, but the distant relationship between it and all octopuses suggests this is a case of convergent evolution."
Firefox

76% of Web Users Affected By Browser History Stealing 130

Posted by CmdrTaco from the seems-like-it-should-be-more dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Web browser history detection with the CSS:visited trick has been known for the last ten years, but recently published research suggests that the problem is bigger than previously thought. A study of 243,068 users found that 76% of them were vulnerable to history detection by malicious websites. Newer browsers such as Safari and Chrome were even more affected, with 82% and 94% of users vulnerable. An average of 63 visited locations were detected per user, and for the top 10% of users the tests found over 150 visited sites. The website has a summary of the findings; the full paper (PDF) is available as well."
Security

Submission + - Microsoft blocks Windows pirates from getting free (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Microsoft will block users running counterfeit copies of Windows from installing the free Security Essentials antivirus software, said Alex Kochis, director of Microsoft's Genuine Windows team, in a post to a company blog. On-again, off-again debates about the wisdom of blocking security-oriented downloads like patches or defensive software have centered around the argument that Microsoft should protect all users, including pirates, since hijacked PCs threaten the entire Windows ecosystem. In this case, though, one analyst isn't buying that line. "I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users]," said John Pescatore, Gartner's primary security analyst. "Those people have many other choices, including free. There are plenty of alternatives to Security Essentials," he said, adding that that makes a difference. Windows patches, on the other hand, aren't available from anyone but Microsoft."

Comment Overview (Score 2, Informative) 357

by meregistered (#27532605) Attached to: How Does Flash Media Fail?

So, I will pass on what I have discussed with my brother-in-law who is an Electrical Engineer that writes software to test flash memory:

1. Flash memory is built with additional fail over storage (so a 1GB SD card actually has a certain % more memory than 1GB).
When a section of memory fails it is marked bad by the flash controller and some of the fail over memory comes into service (marked bad much like failures on standard hard drives... although I get the impression the flash controller may be the thing remembering it's bad... wasn't clear on this now I have something else to ask him)

2. Flash memory will fail... it can only be written to so many times before it will no longer be able to be written to... and the number of times is definitely not as high as a standard hard drive
So it's likely that you can extend the life of a flash device by writing to it less often.

And, not from my brother-in-law discussions, I personally had a flash drive fail (I was using it as the master copy of documents as I moved data between my work machine and home machine while working toward an online degree). When it failed there was no warning previously. It simply stopped working... wouldn't be read and wouldn't write. I suspect my batch file that performed the backups to it must have written to it too many times (it was a smaller 128MB drive so, considering the above discussion about fail-over memory a smaller drive SHOULD fail faster...)

Hope that helps
Games

Believable Stupidity In Game AI 378

Posted by Soulskill from the much-more-common-in-real-players dept.
Gamasutra is running a feature written by Mick West, co-founder of Neversoft, about creating game AI that is dumb enough to defeat, yet intelligent enough that its "mistakes" are similar to those a real player would make, thus preserving the illusion that the AI is not just throwing the game. "The simplest way to introduce stupidity into AI is to reduce the amount of computation that it's allowed to perform. Chess AI generally performs billions of calculations when deciding what move to make. ... The problem with this approach is that it decreases the realism of the AI player. When you reduce the amount of computation, the AI will begin to make incredibly stupid mistakes — mistakes that are so stupid, no human would ever make them. The artificial nature of the game will then become apparent, which destroys the illusion of playing against a real opponent. ... By reducing the amount of computation, we create an AI opponent that is trying to win, but has been crippled in a way that leads to unrealistic gameplay."

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