West Nile Virus Outbreak Puts Dallas In State of Emergency 167

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 16, 2012 @08:24AM from the those-mosquitoes-are-obviously-lost dept.

Penurious Penguin writes with news from the BBC that the city of Dallas "is experiencing a widespread outbreak of mosquito-borne West Nile Virus that has caused and appears likely to continue to cause widespread and severe illness and loss of life," and writes that the city "has declared a state of emergency. West Nile virus can be asymptomatic or produce multiple symptoms, but can also lead to fevers, and the potentially fatal meningitis or encephalitis. Birds are the most common carriers and mosquitoes are the vector for human infection."

Comment Re:40+ not counting VMs... (Score 1) 374

by skywise_ca on Saturday October 22, 2011 @11:31AM (#37804022) Attached to: Devices on my home network (less modem):

43, forgot my IP based KVM

Comment 40+ not counting VMs... (Score 1) 374

by skywise_ca on Friday October 21, 2011 @09:23AM (#37790404) Attached to: Devices on my home network (less modem):

I had to count this recently as my free for home router software started complaining I was reaching the 50 IP limit.

Xen servers 2 (and 10 more counting VMs
stratum 1 NTP server 1
NAS server 1
managed gigabit switches 2
VOIP related 6
Home Automation related 4
Airport express units 5 (whole house audio)
Airport extremes 2 (acting as access points only)
iPhones 2
iPads 3
Macbook 1
Mac mini 1
Apple TVs 2
Home entertainment 4 (Wii, PS3, TV, TiVo)
Picture frames 2
Printers 2
M$ boxes 2 (one desktop, one laptop)

That adds up to 42 (and nicely over 50 counting the VMs
This is only IPs on the network all the time, doesn't count various servers, desktops, netbooks N such that aren't on often.

Do I win something?

How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port 244

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 02, 2011 @06:11AM from the all-the-myriad-ways dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ars goes through some of the biggest sins game publishers commit when porting a console game to the PC. At the top of the list, predictably, are annoying DRM and inconvenient game settings. From the article: 'PC gamers like to play with their mouse settings, adjust the amount of detail in the characters or environment, and change the audio mix between the music and the sound effects. We want to adjust the resolution, the aspect ratio, and even the field of view settings. The more options given to PC gamers, the better. While some engines support more options than others, there is a minimum amount of tweaking that should be available when we jump into the game. For an example of how badly PC gamers can get screwed on this issue, we can take a look at Bulletstorm when it was launched. Not only was mouse smoothing turned on as a default, but there was no way to turn it off. You had to find the configuration files, which were encrypted for some insane reason, and then install a third-party program to be able to turn off mouse smoothing and get the game feeling like it should on the PC."

New "Last Dinosaur" Find Backs Asteroid Extinction 157

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @04:26PM from the sky-is-falling dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact, and did not go extinct gradually due to climate change or changes in sea level, as previous theories have proposed."

Touchpad Patent Holder Tsera Sues Just About Everyone 168

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @05:15PM from the how-about-a-first-known-infringement-filing-deadline-link dept.

eldavojohn writes "Okay, well, maybe not everyone but more than twenty companies (including Apple, Qualcomm, Motorola and Microsoft) are being sued for a generic patent that reads: 'Apparatus and methods for controlling a portable electronic device, such as an MP3 player; portable radio, voice recorder, or portable CD player are disclosed. A touchpad is mounted on the housing of the device, and a user enters commands by tracing patterns with his finger on a surface of the touchpad. No immediate visual feedback is provided as a command pattern is traced, and the user does not need to view the device to enter commands.' Sounds like their may be a few companies using that technology. The suit was filed on July 15th in the favoritest place ever to file patent claim lawsuits: Texas Eastern District Court. It's a pretty classic patent troll; they've been holding this patent since 2003 and they just noticed now that everyone and his dog are using touchpads to control portable electronic devices."

Comment Re:Answers (Score 1) 724

by skywise_ca on Monday March 30, 2009 @01:26PM (#27390645) Attached to: Reliability of Computer Memory?

You must be pretty gentle with your system.
firefox all by itself can be pretty memory hoggy.
I'm only using 128 Meg at the moment but last week the whole system (2G RAM Ubuntu) was getting pretty laggy and when I checked, firefox was using well over 1Gig of RAM.
Added to the normal system (900 Meg right now) and I had used up my 2G easy.
I personally stick 8G into anything I run at home, just a nice round number. :)
But, run OS X with a greedy firefox and a parallels session, crossover and a few other greedy tasks (itunes anyone) and I'm eating into that 8G pretty good.

I doubt I'll be running 16 Gig next year, but I'll be using a good deal of the 8G I already have.

Comment Re:How to run Kopete in Gnome (Score 1) 338

by skywise_ca on Friday September 12, 2008 @03:08PM (#24982793) Attached to: Cross-Platform Video Chat For Linux?

Hold on, you missed a bit here..

Step 2: ......

Step 3: Profit!!