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They're GOOD for children to play! Improved hand-eye coordination, visual skills, and possibly critical thinking skills.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003May/bga20030 530020205.htm

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester found that people who play fast-paced action video games have improved visual skills when compared to those who don't play. According to the study, people who played such video games were able to able to better track objects appearing simultaneously, and processed fast-changing visual information more efficiently.

This benefits a wide range of activities, from playing sports to driving. Also, (although I can't find any studies on it) it makes sense that children who play certain types of games (puzzle/strategy games) would develop better critical thinking skills than those who spend their time watching TV or playing hide-and-go-seek.

Obviously, children shouldn't be staying inside every hour of every day just to play games, but they're definitely not worthless, and are actually more beneficial than a lot of recreational activities.

I've been very happy carrying around an HP49G emulator on my Sony Clie. It's free, though it takes a bit of room on an external card. It's not limited to Sony devices. Check it out.

Apple's iPod support page says you can get your battery replaced for $99 - not cheap but not $250 either.

PDA Smart offers $69 replacement service or a do-it-yourself kit for $59. Which Geek.com raved about

If the guys can't Google, they shouldn't buy expensive toys.

It amazes me that most of you really can't be constructive at all any time 'security' and 'microsoft' are uttered together.

What's more, the moderators encourage this lack of constructive talk by modding up things purely because they decry microsoft. How many days in a row are we going to hear the same old tired MS jokes?

Just because you run linux/bsd doesn't mean you're safe. Hell, by being connected to the internet at all you're at risk. Anyone with enough time, education and willingness to exploit you is going to eventually find a way in.

Anyone running any operating system can be attacked and comprimized. Security is only as good as the people who maintain the machines. You people sometimes seem to forget that despite MS's faults, they do employ some of the best and brightest in the world. I imagine some of you may not believe that, but I do.

Personally, I think that if linux were a home desktop platform that had enough popularity to be a significant enough player in that market you'd be seeing a whole lot more hackers focusing specificly on linux. Realisticly, what is the point of trying to exploit linux? Why exploit the little guy when you can go after the big fish? Especially when the majority of people running the big fish's stuff couldn't secure _any_ box to begin with, regardless of what it was running.

Same thing with the mac. I love it when macos users say "I never get viruses/worms!" well, who would write a virus/worm for such a miniscule percentage of computer users? The whole point of a virus/worm is to propigate, and if you don't have the userbase for it to propigate well, what's the point?

I apologise if I've offended people here, but I really felt this needed to be said. This persistant catscrap between linux and windows users doesn't help anything, or anyone.

Linux/BSD ARE good operating system
MacOS/OSX ARE good operating systems
Windows IS a good operating system

and they ALL have faults.

I am a fan of Dr Kaku (4:26pm EST Fri Jun 27 2003)
But, I need to respond with a resounding, HUH? to this blurb. Dr. Kaku has giving me invaluable insights into string theory, and his ideaas for public policy are well reasoned and logical, but what's with the report on needed to turn off artificial monkey brains? Heck, I am as liberal and prohuman as the next guy, but I feel that I could really use some murderous sim simians. - by IA my eye

Quack (5:06pm EST Fri Jun 27 2003)
I read Visions and had a high opinion of Dr. Kaku, until I realized he was the central figure organizing and supporting the protests against the launch of the Ullyses Saturn Probe.
He did this because he believed that the RTGs on the probe would contaminate the earth if they re-entered the atmosphere. The probability of this happening is beyond remot

Disposable Cell Phones have been on slashdot many times before, and isn't Hop-On the same company cited for repackaging $200 Nokia's and calling them "Hop-On" phones 18 months ago? I still haven't seen Hop-On phones in retail stores years after they were first announced, and I have a feeling I won't see them for many more years. Might as well start advertising disposable computers too, since I'm sure we'll see those in the next 10 years... probably before the disposable cellphone.

Just make 'em out of diamond and all your problems are solved. Great heat transfer coeficient so you don't have to worry about heat anyway.

Microsoft don't write software, they assimilate :)

Microsoft made their name through DOS - but did they write DOS? No, they bought Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS operating system. Microsoft wrote Internet Explorer, right? Well, no, it was born out of code licensed from the Spyglass browser. Did they write SQL server? Nope - that was again developed with code licensed from Timeline.

Infact, whatever the latest bandwagon is, Microsoft buys out the competition? Instant messaging becomes in vogue? Microsoft buys an instant messaging developer. Holes in file security? Microsoft buys a XDegrees, a security specialist. Worried that Mac's can emulate Windows? Microsoft buys Connetix, the makers of Virtual PC. Microsoft worried about viruses negative effects on OS sales? Don't worry, Microsoft have just bought GeCAD, an AV vendor...

from here:

On Apple and OS X
I never much liked Macs. All the interesting stuff is hidden away. They made the base of the house open source, but all the rest of the stuff, the wiring, is their own stuff. I don't want that to happen with Linux.

[Mac OS X] doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzies. I actually dislike Mach a lot. I think they made a lot of bad design choices.

• Does not break down and trap you in your car
• Nor, does it turn your engine off on the highway
• Nor does it need to be replaced

It's perfect quality software. I want it in my DVD, my camera and my nuclear core monitoring hardware. Make it run submarines and life support systems. Can you f**k me harder? Please?

Fair enough, but I did specify the OS division for a certain period, not the entire company for a different period. Microsoft's cash cows feed the money-losing divisions: XBox, MSN, Windows CE, and business services. (They might as well spend it; with something like $40 Billion in the bank already, they can't justify witholding dividends from investors any more.) Funny how they have such trouble turning a buck on products when people have other choices.

You can't just go around making claims like that!

Atleast, not without backing it up!

-r

= 9J =

You mean like this one from Casio, or this unit from Timex (Warning: annoying flash)?

The RIAA has been steadfast in trying to kill P2P networks altogether and haven't gone after Apache, Netscape or MS because there are big players involved with the server architecture who have extensive legal and market battles under their belts (MS especially).

If this is really the case, I wonder what will happen when MS enters the P2P market? Back in the spring they announced a some software called threedegrees. Yes, it only facilitates groups of 10 people, but a user can be in multiple groups so a lot of filesharing can still occur. I haven't heard anything about this project in months, so maybe it fizzled out.

It would be great to see M$ and the RIAA battle it out, but I wouldn't be surprised if threedegrees included some invasive technologies to aid the RIAA in tracking down pirates.

So you bought xbox live, and you're a fan - good for you. I was a fan of Dreamcast, yet I can accept the fact that it was a failure.

Failure as it was, the Dreamcast still managed 300,000 more subscribers than X-Box live.

No, they don't dare do this.
It's a federal offence to redirect a misspelling to a porn site as it's "illegal to deceive children into viewing harmful material". This is a provision of the "Amber Alert" legislation and will land you in jail for 4 years.
Relevant Link

There are many, many methods of hashing out there and different p2p apps use different methods. The newest, and arguably best is the Secure Hashing Algorithms (SHA1, SHA2, SHA256....), that have been defined by NIST. Link

It's been done before - remember "Code Red"?

A guy called Herbert HexXer wrote an anti-worm called Code Green.

He got into a LOT of trouble over that I believe.

Very interesting, here it is reformated:

I'm part of a group that put a proposal in for LifeLog. This project seems like a good tie-in. More info on LifeLog: DARPA page

Please see the following articles if you are interested in reading what others have to say about it:

* CBS News: A Diary That Never Sleeps

* Geek.com: DARPA looking to record lives of interested parties

* The Oregonian: Step into one man's world, as recorded by the Pentagon's planned LifeLog

* Timesunion: Your diary's got nothing on LifeLog

A law like that wouldn't last 10 years, let alone 100.

We are already moving away from storage that involves moving parts and headed towards solid state storage. In 10 years a HD will be considered a backup device (like tape is now) and a CD/DVD/Blue Laser DVD will be absoulete just like floppies are now. We will all be using some form of flash memory (probably that nanotube ram).

In a hundered years, when we are all using holographic memory or whatever, the notion of spinning a disk to read data will seem ridiculous.

For any electronic data archive to stay useful you just have to migrate it to a new platform every 10 years or so. Luckily each migration to a new medium increases the speed at which you can access the data, so the process gets faster as long as you don't add more data. Punch Paper-->Magentic Tape-->Hard Drive-->So on...

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002may/chi20020 521011824.htm

It's not just Microsoft. See Sun embraces DRM for Java".

It used to be like that when the G4 came out, but the policy has long since been revised.

To get this back on topic: AFAIK, all of Apple's online stores (it has them for various countries) only sell to people living in the respective countries, and I'm afraid the feeling in Cupertino is that the Mac market share in Hungary is too small to warrant a localized online store with all the additional costs. (Call center, etc.)
And the ITMS is, as you probably know, all tangled up in complicated European licensing issues - there's no European equivalent for the RIAA and even within single countries, the labels can't seem to agree on a common policy.

Will Amazon.com sell you DVDs? They should - there isn't that much of a warranty issue with them and I can get them overe here in Germany without any problem.

(BTW, if you're in the market for US-DVDs and Amazon won't sell them to you, try play.com or dvdboxoffice.com )

As for the earlier post that mentioned Hungary's countryside: I sure hope it's beautiful; I'll be visting Budapest a month from now. :-)

I know one of the articles said they had a working prototype last year, but I wouldn't be surprised if both wow-com.com and pdacortex.com reprinted the company press release without checking any of the facts.

Funny, just before seeing this posted, I had just finished reading a review of the 5600 at geek.com . Since the review posted is slashdotted, maybe you can check that one out.

This is actually the fifth version of Windows CE. Windows CE 3.0 has been out for years. Reviews of WinCE devices came out in 2000, for cryin' out loud.

Since the state-controlled banks in South Korea seem to be willing to perpetually forgive, extend, or renegotiate Hynix's tremendously large debt burden, the USA (and EU) are only protecting their companies from unfair competition. The South Korean government is basically subsidizing Hynix through their banks. The headline is somewhat misleading because this tariff (if I understand it correctly) only effects Hynix's products, not all South Korean memory manufacturers (if there are any others) and certainly this doesn't effect Taiwanese manufacturers.

Here's a couple links to Hynix's most recent multi-billion dollar bailout.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,57 71168%255E15316,00.html
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Dec/wbc20021 230017953.htm

" I doubt they are using old 8088's."

Incorrect.
Quoth the article: "Auction sites such as eBay and Yahoo! sell just about everything and have been used by NASA for some of the more hard-to-find items."

about this sort of thing?

now with free spyware!

It also seems that the Transmeta processor has an average power usage of around 7W whereas the Nehamiah (according to Digit Life) has an idle power usage of ~5W and a max of around 15-20W.

try www.geek.com under ChipGeek for processor/chipset specs, among other useful info.

Figures that mods are just getting to 1.0 when Half-Life 2 is just around the corner.

"Some were produced, sure, but they were not workable in that they were expensive. In the real world price is an integral component of usability."

"You're right, DEC wasn't any of those things."

"People used to buy Alphas because they were bloody fast. But they lost that advantage by not keeping up with their otherwise inferior competitors."

"Took a whole quarter in at school. I hated it then"

"particularly when you had to pay for the CPU by the second"

"beginning programmers can grok procedural programming faster than functional programming."

Go ahead, everyone else has done it.

"iPimp. The digital pimp for your digital lifestyle."(tm) Yes, Apple has avoided DRM so far, but it's coming.

I have no way to know what Apple is and isn't going to do with regard to DRM. Neither do you. All we have is what they have (and haven't) done in the past. I refer you again to this link. What reason do you really have for insisting that Apple is all about DRM all of a sudden?

MP4 has the necessary DRM capabilities that MP3 doesn't.

I wasn't aware that it had DRM capabilities. What do you mean by this? Apple has been almost alone standing against DRM since the beginning even though it has paid a business price for it.

Linux does support hyperthreading. 2.4.20 recognizes four processors on my dual Xeon servers, without any tweaks. I think it's pretty nice -- I'd say there's between a 5% and 25% pickup in performance, depending on what you're using it for (generic vs. optimized integer code).

According to a geek.com article, Linux was actually the first operating system to officially support hyperthreading, and that was in late 2001.

although it woudl be quite amusing to see that happen, i think that the ruling would be that the makers of the nat boxes are not accomplices because you just need to make the judgement as to whether or not you can use one legally according to your isp's tos. it's like that marker trick to get around those copy protected cd's (http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002may/gee2002 0521011807.htm). you can't sue the marker-makers just because you can use a marker to do something illegal. and since there are isp's that do allow you to have home networks at no extra charge, selling nat boxes would be completely legal. just buy at your own discresion.

Or to use a corollary closer to home:

Software will not be able to be resold. If you need new software, you will have to buy a new copy from some evil company. This will ensure you get the highest quality software that will ensure the maximum life of your computer. A lawyer will prevent manual reselling.

Sorry if this was offtopic.

Apparently, DirecTV did something similar: they sent a signal legitimate viewing cards couldn't decode (hence ignored) saying something like "You've won a free holiday! Call 1-800-555-1234". The non-legit cards happily decode the signal, display it, and the dumber users turned themselves in to DirecTV by mistake. Whoops. I don't know if that's an urban myth or not, but DirecTV certainly have a history of using clever technical tricks to screw users with bent cards, rather than getting lawyered up for a fight: here, for example.

See yesterday's story here

And a followup story on Trend Micro's new antispam gateway here

..and I thought /. was meant to be up to date..? ____ [smug_grin.com]

See yesterday's story here

And a followup story on Trend Micro's new antispam gateway here

..and I thought /. was meant to be up to date..? ____ [smug_grin.com]

First we have Napster and other services being attacked and now we have companies like apple and AOL starting up services.

Remember how everyone a year or two ago mentioned how the RIAA is behind the times and are playing catch up? Well.. seems they are still playing the game while other's are moving forward.

Slashdotters were right. It's a great idea. Our prophecy has been proven correct :-)

the patents to OpenGL from SGI in 2002 if they don't want to even be on the guiding board?

Sure is a good thing that MS isn't abusing their monopoly position in the computer markets. Otherwise this move could be considered harmful to any competition that needs cross platform graphics capability. A developer would be crazy to interpret this as a strengthening of Microsofts position with OpenGL.

I still find it funny that the healthiest lifestyle is to be filthy; the more crap your exposed to the stronger your immune system becomes. This includes allergies too Of course, it's still a double edged sword because, if your immune system gets knocked out for some other reason (injury, AIDS, etc) then you're really hosed.
I mean, how ofter does your dog get sick? Nearly never, probably because he has his nose in all kinds of shit on a daily basis.

There is at least 500 systems from NewiSys already delivered as test to various clients, incl MS so that is not the issue. Something else is going on.

Didnt you read the last Linux Uprising article?, Linux is getting hot in the handhelds world and i belive GPE Palmtop (GPL license) will become its best UI in a few years.

Dont get stuck with an useless and outdated OS, meet the future and get a Zaurus (or wait for the IBM Linux handhelds).

Or maybe the other company figured they could make some easy money in an out-of-court-settlement by preemptively filing a trademark on a name they knew Microsoft was using but hadn't trademarked yet. It could happen.

Won't they feel silly when they discover that "Palladium" was just a code name, and MS never had any intention of trademarking it as a brand name anyway!