Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Rock Band lets independent artist add own songs (cnet.com)

Submitted by Bakkster
Bakkster writes: Independent artists will be able to use the XNA to produce the note-charts for their music and sell them in game later this year. Bands will use their original song masters and generate a MIDI file that produces the game 'gems' that players follow along to. Tracks must pass a review process with other XNA members, then a final approval from MTV Games. Songs can be sold between 50 cents and $3, with the artist getting a 30% cut after MTV and Microsoft take their cut. The best tracks will also make their way to the PS3 after a 30 day exclusive period.
Businesses

Retired Mainframe Pros Lured Back Into Workforce 223

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the come-back-so-we-can-fire-you-again dept.
itwbennett writes "Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"

Beware the Airport Wireless 120

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the far-too-trusting dept.
schwit1 writes to tell us that a recent study by a Silicon Valley-based security company shows that black-hats have been ramping up their use of tempting free or unsecured wireless access points in high travel areas like airports and hotels. "According to their study, even the 'secure' networks weren't all too safe. Eighty percent of the private Wi-Fi networks at airports surveyed by Airtight were secured by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which was cracked back in 2001. Almost as many — 77 percent — of the networks they surveyed were actually private, peer-to-peer networks, meaning they weren't official hotspots. Instead, they were running off someone else's computer."
Cellphones

Cell Phones That Learn the Sounds of Your Life 121

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the soon-to-be-ad-supported dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed new software that uses the microphone on the iPhone to track and interpret a user's everyday activities using sound. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. SoundSense can recognize completely unfamiliar sounds and runs entirely on the phone. It automatically classifies sounds as 'voice,' 'music,' or 'ambient noise.' If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high 'sound rank' and asks the user to confirm that it is a significant sound and offers the option to label the sound. In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM and a fan in a particular room. The results [PDF] of the experiments were recently presented at the MobiSys 2009 conference."

New Router Manages Flows, Not Packets 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the let-the-injections-begin dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new router, designed by one of the creators of ARPANET, manages flows of packets instead of only managing individual packets. The router recognizes packets that are following the first and sends them along faster than if it had to route them as individuals. When overloaded, the router can make better choices of which packets to drop. 'Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.'"
Music

Submission + - Camara Goes on Offense Against the RIAA

Submitted by whisper_jeff
whisper_jeff writes: Ars has an excellent write up outlining how Kiwi Camara (Jammie Thomas(-Rasset)'s new lawyer) is taking a page from the "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" book and going on the attack against the RIAA. Not content to just defend his client, he is laying siege against the RIAA's entire campaign and beginning the work of dismantling it from the bottom up, starting with questioning whether they actually do own the copyrights that were allegedly infringed. And, if you're thinking this is good for everyone who's been harrassed by the RIAA, you'd be right — Camara, along with Harvard Law professor, Charles Nesson, plan to file a class action suit seeking to force the RIAA to return all the (ill-gotten) money they've earned from their litigation campaign. To paraphrase NewYorkCountyLawyer, could this be a sign of the end?

Slashdot Top Deals

"Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system] made for the PDP-11 by Bell Laboratories." - Ted Nelson, October 1977

Close