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Comment Re:Bad Hacking (Score 5, Insightful) 251

by sbayless (#33155364) Attached to: ReCAPTCHA.net Now Vulnerable to Algorithmic Attack

No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one

You couldn't be more wrong. Sure, breaking reCAPTCHA would create a headache for website admins (including me, for example), but in order to break reCAPTCHA someone has to devise a better text recognition program. And that's great news! This is an example of a general side effect of the cat and mouse game that are captchas. Captcha's are a simple form of Turing Test, where website admins are trying to determine who is a computer and who is a real human being. Every time a captcha gets broken, we get a sophisticated new algorithm for doing something that previously only humans could do (or only humans could do well, at least).

Comment Re:With Scale Will Come Gov Intervention (Score 1) 491

by sbayless (#32869422) Attached to: Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3
There are other possible problems, aside from the legal ones. Don't get me wrong, this is a neat idea; the laissez-faire anarchist in me is salivating. But its not immediately clear if the claims these guys are making are valid (or even possible). One warning flag though: I can't help but notice their prediction of expected deflation (from the wiki article). Before you go invest real money in this (however it is one would go about doing that...), you'd better be sure this isn't a very clever pyramid scheme.

Maingear Touts New Rig As "Planet's Greenest Gaming PC" 136

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bold-claims dept.
Maingear has just unveiled what they are calling the "planet's greenest gaming PC." Built using a small form factor and coming with Intel's new Ion graphics as the default option, this little powerhouse is built with a definite eye toward energy consumption. "Said configuration is available with Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and an 80+ certified 300-watt power supply; those who care more about frame rates than Ma Earth can opt for a GeForce 9800 GT ECO, which — despite being a discrete, power-hungry GPU — still swallows some 40 percent less power than a standard 9800 GT. You'll also find WiFi support, room for an optional Blu-ray drive and TV tuner, upwards of 8GB of RAM and room for a single 2.5-inch HDD or SSD. The whole box checks in at just 7.6- x 8.3- x 11.4-inches, and it's available for order right now starting at $799."

Comment Re:The forces of darkness (Score 1) 1161

by sbayless (#27095139) Attached to: Oklahoma, Vatican Take Opposite Tacks On Evolution

Please don't forget that it is a subset of "religious people" who are fighting to discredit science and impose their beliefs via government and laws.

While I agree it is important to stress that it is just a subset, when the elected representatives of a state work towards the interests of that subset, then we have a problem. http://xkcd.com/154/
Movies

Uproar Over Netflix's New Instant Viewer 575

Posted by kdawson from the one-way-beta dept.
almechist writes "Many Netflix customers are up in arms over the new instant-watch player powered by Microsoft's Silverlight. The official Netflix blog is full of complaints from users who decry not only the new player's quality but also the way it's being distributed, with many claiming they were deceived into downloading it. Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account. The new player is supposedly still beta, but NF members are strongly encouraged (some say tricked) by NF into the so-called 'upgrade,' which is permanent — there is no way to opt out. The marked decrease in video quality seen by those who have switched is perhaps not surprising, since the old player could utilize bit streams up to twice as fast as the new one, but this information is nowhere given out by NF. So far NF has been answering all complaints with variations on 'tough luck pal, you're stuck with it,' but many customers are so disgusted they're ready to cancel their NF membership. This could be a public relations disaster in the making for Netflix."
Businesses

Restauranteurs Say Yelp Uses Extortion To Ply Ad Sales 202

Posted by timothy from the not-kosher dept.
Readers Mike Van Pelt and EricThegreen point out a story in the East Bay Express alleging that online restaurant review site Yelp is doing more than providing a nice interface for foodies to share their impressions of restaurants. Instead, says the article, representatives from the site have called restaurants in the Bay area to solicit advertising, but with an interesting twist: the ad sales reps let restaurant owners know that, if they buy advertising at around $300 a month, Yelp can "do something" about prominently displayed negative reviews of their restaurants. If the claims are true, it sure lowers my opinion of Yelp, which I'd thought of as one of the good guys (and a useful site). I wonder how many other online review sites might be doing something similar.

Comment Re:Games? (Score 1) 499

by sbayless (#26775131) Attached to: Sacrificing Accuracy For Speed and Efficiency In Processors
And in-game physics, where performance is hugely important (and expensive), whereas the exact floating point accuracy of a given force will make a negligible difference. Most rigid body physics systems that you'd find in a game will settle towards an equilibrium regardless of small random perturbations anyways. And many physics simulators introduce this kind of slight randomness in the first place, so there really is nothing to be lost here.
Programming

Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects 378

Posted by timothy from the take-that-25-other-letters dept.
svonkie writes "C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many."
Privacy

Matt Blaze Examines Communications Privacy 44

Posted by Soulskill from the still-a-lot-left-to-lose dept.
altjira writes "Matt Blaze analyzes the implications of a recent Newsweek story on the Bush administration's use of the NSA for domestic spying on communications, and questions whether the lower legal threshold for the collection of communications metadata is giving away too much to the government: 'As electronic communication pervades more of our daily lives, transaction records — metadata — can reveal quite a bit about us, indeed often much more than a few out-of-context conversations might. Aggregated into databases with other people's records (or perhaps everyone's records) and analyzed by powerful software, metadata by itself can paint a remarkably detailed picture of connections, relationships, and other patterns that could never be recovered simply from listening to the conversations themselves.'"
Data Storage

100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography 117

Posted by timothy from the powers-of-10-are-nice dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"

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