Slashdot Mirror

dhopton writes "The first public review of the PMC that I've seen is interesting. It's critical in places, but also praises. It also covers Windows Media Player 10 to some extent. Overall, I'm looking forward to reviews of the non-Creative devices."

Myrmi writes "The four-hour Farscape miniseries will be aired on the Sci-Fi Channel starting October 17th. The trailer for the miniseries is to be hosted at Apple Trailers and starting today at 3PM EST." Here's the trailer page. As eve11 writes, "Apple.com agreed to host the trailer after a write-in campaign from Farscape fans. Until today this trailer had only been shown during the July 24th Farscape panel at Comicon in San Diego. More info here."

Anonymous Coward writes "Just when we thought the dust settled on the last format war between CD-R's we see a new one brewing with DVD recordable discs. DVD -R9/+R9 will apparently be the next technological slugfest where there are no rewards for second place. With all of these new recording format options made available to the public, how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"

elgatozorbas writes "The basic color elements of television have not changed much since 1954; a half-century after RCA introduced the first color set, the RGB (red, green and blue) system used then still prevails. But Israeli company Genoa Color Technologies has broken the RGB barrier by adding one to three primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta, thus expanding - from 55 to 95 percent - the coverage of the visible color gamut. The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video. Also covered in IEEE Spectrum."

drakyri asks: "I've been running a server for a small company for a few months. Recently, the number of attempted intrusions has jumped from about one every week to several per day - and these are only the really obvious attempts, like idiots who try to log in as root from the outside. The problem is that I'm not sure what to do about this. I've got their IP addresses and can usually tracert their ISP's - is there an accepted type of letter to send them without seeming like one of the corporate cease-and-desist gnomes?"

antimatt writes "Everyone knows WAP is dead. It was dead on arrival. Right? Wrong. WAP use, at least in the UK, is up 42% in the last year. Are we seeing postmortem twitching, or a phoenix rising from the wireless ashes?" While the first incarnation was pretty rough, WAP is slowly growing into what people had hoped the first version would be. Now if only it just lost the stigma attached to it.

orion024 writes "From the official Half-Life 2 website - the Half-Life: Counter-Strike Source beta '...will be playable [starting tomorrow, Wednesday] at all cyber cafes that subscribe to the Valve Cyber Cafe Program. Later this month, the beta will be extended to owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero; and ATI Fulfillment Coupon holders.' Hopefully, this beta, using the Source engine Half-Life 2 is built upon, will ease those HL2 jitters many fellow gamers are experiencing." We previously reported on some friction between cybercafe owners and Valve - as for CS:Source, IGN PC also has an updated preview on the title, which sports "the same specs that Doug Lombardi mentioned for Half-Life 2... minimum system requirements appear to be a 1.2 gigahertz processor with 256 megabytes of RAM and a DirectX 7 video card."

Tycoon Guy writes "Is that the sound of desperation I hear? TrekToday is reporting that, according to a trailer shown at CBS Television City, William Shatner will be appearing on Star Trek: Enterprise for a two-episode guest stint - as James T. Kirk! The most likely writers of his episodes are Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who already resurrected Kirk in their books, and were just hired as story editors for Enterprise's fourth season." We reported a rumor to this effect a couple of months back.

legrimpeur writes "Anandtech has a nice performance comparison under Linux (AMD64) between the recently introduced 3.6GHz EM64T Xeon processor and an Athlon 64 3500+. It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks. No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though." Update: 08/09 23:34 GMT by T : As the Inquirer reports, many Anandtech readers take issue with the comparison.

o0zi writes "A Canadian scientist has created another game-playing machine, designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool. The world's first pool-playing robot consists of a slim box that glides along tracks above a pool table, and shoots using a camera-guided cue. Deep Green pots only half the shots it plans for - supposedly the same as a below average player - but this is expected to improve."

KD5YPT writes "According to a story on Wired, Adam Laurie and Martin Herfurt demonstrated that they can hack a Bluetooth enabled phone from up to a mile away using a sniper rifle with yagi antenna. Kinda gives a new meaning to '1337 hAx0r2'."

TheHedgehog writes "A sunspot group aimed squarely at Earth has grown to 20 times the size of our planet and has the potential to unleash a major solar storm. 'The implications of this spot have scientists on the edge of their seats,' NASA said in a statement Friday. 'If the active region generates coronal mass ejections (CMEs), massive explosions with a potential force of a billion megaton bombs, it will be a fairly direct hit to Earth and its satellites and power grids.'"

Didion Sprague writes "A bug in recently released DirecTv/TiVo software is allegedly causing major chaos with many TiVo users -- forcing many users over the past few days to upgrade their Series 1 Tivo boxes to newer, Series 2 models (which retail for $79). Apparently lots of folks on the TiVo Community forum and DBS forums are frustrated and angry. The bug has apparently been reproduced and causes the video stream to freeze when a combination of factors are met. DirecTv has been offering users who complain a $79 credit -- but hasn't admitted the problem, let alone offered up a timetable for a fix. The problem only occurs with the DirecTv TiVo boxes -- not the standalone models."

grocer asks: "Due to a piano, the living room suddenly has too much furniture and the TV is going upstairs. I just got a Dell Dimension 4600 with DVD (ROM and RW), 17" Flat screen, and the good speakers and it's staying downstairs. The Dell is under warranty and I'm not opening it, so card based solutions are out. I know it has enough power/space (2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM, 60+ gig free) to run MPEG-2 and do PVR, I just can't find a good review/comparison on the web of USB PVR hardware. I've it gotten down to the Adaptec VideOh! DVD Media Center USB 2.0 or the AVerMedia UltraTV USB 300. Any other recommendations for USB tuners? Anybody else move the TV and replace it with a computer?"

Moryath writes "Ever wonder how to quantify a game's camera, or why some videogame genres tend towards problems while others never see it mentioned? Glide Underground has some basic attempted quantification up in their Weekly Musings column for this week - they break possible game camera views down to six categories, and go over which are the most likely to have issues." Are there obvious steps that can be taken to improve some game cameras?

neile writes "Microsoft just announced some of their plans for their large cash reserves. This includes moving to quarterly dividend payments of $0.08 a share (up from $0.16 annually), and a special one-time dividend of $3.00 a share in December. The Board of Directors also approved a four-year, $30 billion, stock buyback plan."

The Llama King writes "The Houston Chronicle's Computing column has got the Doom 3 minimum system requirements. Biggest eye-opener: 384 MB of memory. Lots of mainstream PCs have been sold with 256 MB of RAM, so upgrades will be in order. RAM chip manufacturers should be salivating about now. You'll also need a 1.5-GHz processor and a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 graphics card or better."

supersandra writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that Nokia is struggling to offer features, such as cameras and flip-phones, that are luring customers away to phones by other brands such as Motorola, Samsung, and Siemens. While Nokia used to account for 1 in every 3 phones sold worldwide, they are down to 28.9 percent. Nokia plans to bring 35 new phone models to market this year to win back more users."

supersandra writes "Looks like eBay has been inspired by all those millions of iTunes song sales. They're running a six-month test offering downloadable music through authorized sellers, who would have to 'ensure copyright protection for the content and meet service-level agreements.' Also of note, 'music buyers won't be allowed to resell the files on eBay.'"

EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has a preview of S3's budget DeltaChrome S4 graphics chip for PC graphics cards. While not the fastest option for games, the S4 looks like a credible alternative to ATI and NVIDIA's dominance of the graphics market - there are some handy analysis graphs comparing performance in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry. Better still, the S4 has component HDTV output built right into the chip, making it an intriguing option for home theater systems."

bryan writes "'Junior' has regained the title of best computer chess program for 2004. Deep Junior previously drew Gary Kasparov 3-3 last year. From chessbase.com: 'Two programs went into the final round with equal scores: title defender Shredder and the home team of Junior. Interestingly it was another Israeli program that brought Junior the overall victory: Falcon held Shredder to a draw, while Junior demolished ParSOS.'" But, more interestingly: "The other favourite in the field, Fritz, did not have a good tournament. In round three it lost a very promising position against Falcon on time, when the computer froze and the operator did not notice this soon enough."

Space-Bot asks: "I remember back in high-school photography the simple and very basic homemade cameras that we made that surprisingly worked fairly well. Amazing how something so great started so basic. These days we have all these high tech gadgets that do it all so quickly you never really think about any of the work behind it. Well I would like to start to understand the modern digital cameras more and I figure what better way then to make a homemade webcam of some sort. Might some of you Slashdot guru's have some ideas or experience for my project?"

jarhead4067 writes "Article snippet: "Up until recently, most researchers in the fight against spam have failed to classify it as an artificial living organism, hindering the development of effective tools and techniques to kill it. While this classification may sound strange, consider the following..." A novel approach to filtering spam, and hey, there's free source included."

Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that the next Star Trek movie will deal with the war between Earth and the Romulans that led to the founding of the Federation. According to Rick Berman, the film will be 'set before the time of Kirk, but will not be connected with Enterprise.' So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?"

BatonRogue writes "Slashdot posted a Tomshardware article talking about Intel's 10% overclock limit on their new chipsets not too long ago. The situation has just become even more interesting. AnandTech just posted a roundup of DDR2 memory that sheds some light as to why Intel may have implemented the lock. It seems that on the Abit board they tested, which supposedly bypasses the overclock limit, the first generation of DDR2-533 memory modules had no problems working at 667MHz. Could it be that Intel is keeping DDR2-667 support for yet another revision of their new chipsets even though the memory support is clearly here today?"

Kracs writes "HP are supplying their low-cost multi-user 441 desktops to African schools. Running Mandrake Linux, and sporting four screens (1xTNT2 AGP, 3xTNT2 PCI), keyboards and mice (1 PS2 set, 3 USB sets) they provide relatively cheap computer access for up to four users (of particular interest to schools in low economic zones). However, according to this article on New Zealand's Xtra news page they've only manufactured enough to outfit schools in South Africa. HP has commented that they're talking to several organisations and are hoping to bring the PC to market in other regions but have stated they will only be marketed to developing countries." (Remember, there are also home-grown methods to achieve similar results.)

ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it? "If Linux can be configured this way, I would need no hard drive, and the created docs/info could be saved on the USB drive memory stick. This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life, and I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US after taxes, shipping, etc. And how cool would it be to run a laptop off of a memory stick! Unfortunately, I know nothing about Linux, but this might be a cool problem to solve for those smart and knowledgeable enough to figure it out. Thanks for any help you can provide!"

bettiwettiwoo writes "A New York Times article (free reg. req.) highlights a new trend in games, and political marketing: openly political games. Both Republicans and Democrats are developing games with political messages, albeit using slightly different strategies. A featured developer, Persuasive Games, is open about their not-so-objective objective: 'We design, build, and distribute electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism.' But would that be declared on the games so produced? And would it matter if it did? In such times of artful manipulation, it is actually quite a relief to find that not all politicos are sophisticated high tech geeks: the Long Island Political Network invites you to play... Tic Tac Toe."

SeriousEyePanda writes "With this year's edition of RoboCup now taking place in Portugal (June 27-July 5), and many of us not able to attend, I'd like to ask for on-site reports from the event. The official site seems a bit lacking in this respect. What are your experiences and thoughts so far? Links to videos depicting game play would be especially appreciated (Freecached for Pete's sake)"

DonaldGelman writes "Apple has just announced a 30-inch Studio Display capable of displaying a resolution of 2560x1600. The display requires a new Nvidia card with 2 parallel DVI connections. The display is going to retail for $3299 in August, and the Nvidia card for around $599." Jobs also announced new 20- and 23-inch displays, for $1299 and $1999 in July. All three feature a new aluminum enclosure, and DVI. Also from WWDC... Jobs also previewed Tiger, with Spotlight (fast iTunes-like searching in all apps, and systemwide), Dashboard (Konfabulator-like widgets combined with Exposé for fast showing/hiding), Automator (visual AppleScript, combining prewritten actions into scripts), H.264 code for QuickTime (high definition scalable video from MPEG), iChat AV conferencing (up to 10 for audio, four for video), RSS reading in Safari, Core Image and Core Video (realtime filters at the core OS level), and system-wide Sync Services. All of this is extensible (except for iChat conferencing), with SDKs available for developers. There's a lot here, and a more detailed description is forthcoming. Tiger will be available in the first half of 2005.

Durt_b1ker writes "Check this link out for a highly mobile FreeBSD computer with obligatory pics and video."

Fennario writes "According to Stars and Stripes Pacific's translation of a North Korean government newspaper article, UbiSoft's forthcoming Ghost Recon 2 videogame, which envisions a near-future North Korea/China conflict with US involvement, has already attracted the reclusive country's attention. In a curt review, a North Korean government-run newspaper called the game proof of U.S. warmongering. 'Through propaganda, entertainment and movies,' read a recent online commentary in the Tongil Newspaper. Americans 'have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now, but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths.' Given the steep learning curve of previous incarnations of Ghost Recon, it's conceivable many may face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths anyhow."

Tycow writes "Valve is finally getting tough on Counter-Strike cheat creators, according to a post by Gabe Newell on HL2-Fallout, who confirms: 'We've started taking legal action against cheating (cheat-sites, cheat creators,...) both in the US and abroad.' The makers of OGC, one of the mainstream cheat software sites for online games, are apparently seeking legal advice. CS-Nation also has a story noting: 'This is just another front in Valve's anti-cheating campaign. Back in April, Valve began a significantly more aggressive banning methodology, that came as a byproduct of a rapid series of VAC updates silently distributed to all CS servers.'"

not-so Anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "A few years ago, while finishing our basement, we wired each room of our house with two CAT-5 and two RG-6 cables. All of the cables were run to a central place in the basement, with the intent of building a "cabinet" to house and better organize the cables. Well, it is time. As you can see from the pictures, it is a jumbled morass of spaghetti. So I'd like to get ideas from the Slashdot crowd as to how to finally organize this mess, build the cabinet, etc., etc. No doubt there are many other readers in a similar situation, wanting ideas for organizing all the communications/network cables in their home."

sellthesedownfalls writes "Scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will announce on Friday, June 18 the observation of an unexpected new member of a family of subatomic particles called 'heavy-light' mesons. The new meson, a combination of a strange quark and a charm antiquark, is the heaviest ever observed in this family, and it behaves in surprising ways -- it apparently breaks the rules on decaying into other particles. See the Fermilab Press Release."

SilentBob4 writes "Mad Penguin is one of the first to review the latest Mozilla Firefox release, numbered 0.9. According to the reviewer, there's a lot to be thankful for, as this release is far more stable than its earlier versions and sports some new features along with a new interface. My new all-time-favorite line: 'Look out Internet Explorer... your days have been numbered for some time now, but Firefox 1.0 will surely leave you shaking on your already shaky foundations and standing in a small warm puddle'. Nicely put."

TheRaindog writes "Serial ATA RAID has become a common check-box feature for new motherboards, but The Tech Report's chipset Serial ATA and RAID comparison reveals that the performance of Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, and VIA's SATA RAID implementations can be anything but common. There are distinct and sometimes alarming performance differences between each chipset's Serial ATA and RAID implementations. It's also interesting to see performance scale from single-drive configurations to multi-disk arrays, which don't offer as much of a performance gain in day-to-day applications as one might expect."

TheTXLibra writes "Robert Roy Britt reports on Space.com that we may now be witnessing the earliest stages of black hole development. Star SN 1986J, began to collapse in 1983 into a neutron star, resulting in a supernova explosion in 1986. If the mass of the neutron star reaches 1.4 times the mass of Earth's Sun, it will theoretically collapse into a black hole, if not, it will stabilize as a neutron star."

ackthpt writes "CNN is reporting two people, one in Los Angeles and one in Canada, were caught recording The Day After Tomorrow in cinemas, while a third got away. No mention if night-vision goggles, as previously mentioned, were of assistance." Reader azmatsci writes "Tuesday Sony was issued a patent for technology that will attempt to block camcorder recordings in movie theaters. Funny to me because I just came up with the same idea and discovered it while doing a patent search. Only problem with the idea is it will only block camcorders that use CCD recorders, which are sensitive to IR light. Another jamming idea which probably work for all camcorders can be found here."

lpangelrob2 writes "It looks like someone in Chicago finally found a use for Dean Kamen's Segways. The Chicago Sun Times is reporting that a three hour tour of Chicago's lakefront will be guided by Segways traveling on Chicago's sidewalks at 5mph. The cost of the tour is $65, and an instructional class and helmet is provided -- just in case."

Rick Zeman writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft's Hotmail service has lost customers' files 'due to 'system events.' The particular user cited, of course, has no recourse because of the broad disclaimers companies such as Microsoft hide behind; however, you are getting what you pay for. The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."

dummkopf writes "CNN reports how Scandinavian banks issue one-time passwords to protect customers' accounts when these use the same password for other, i.e., more insecure email accounts. Having a bank account in the U.S. (with a trusted and well known Bank OF nAtional reach) I always wondered why the security was soooo poor: while it has changed slightly now (better usernames/passwords) it used to be the case that your username was your SSN and your password a number code (!). I am sure most of you will agree with me that this is scary... I live now in Switzerland where one-time passwords for online banking are a must and where my current bank is one of the 'crappy' ones with a little card with one-time passwords like mentioned in the CNN Story. The nicer ones even give you credit-card-size RSA password generator which is combined with a calculator you can keep in your pocket. Hence my question: are others also worried about poor security of online banking in the U.S.? Are there banks which are better than the ones mentioned above?"

apsmith writes "Scaled Composites has just announced their first attempt at breaking 100 km, scheduled for June 21. This would make it the first commercial manned vehicle to officially enter space. This is not quite an Ansari X prize attempt since it will carry only one person without the extra mass corresponding to the 3-person prize requirement; they have to give at least 30 days' notice for that. Past flight history is available from their site; the Discovery Channel is producing a documentary on the whole project, 'Rutan's Race For Space.'" Roger_Explosion adds "If successful, the craft - named Space Ship One - will become the world's first commercial manned space vehicle. Space Ship One will temporarily leave the earth's atmosphere, and the pilot (yet to be announced) will experience about three minutes of weightlessness."

Anon! A Mouse Cowered! asks: "I work in a 10 x 10 ft. cubicle that's about as low-end as it can be (my back wall is made of my filing cabinets). I have a cheap set of speakers on my desktop for internet radio, but if I play anything other than light jazz or classical at anything above a squeak, it's annoying to my coworkers. Are there any other Dilberts (or Wallys, even), who can offer ideas on making a workspace more livable so that I can enjoy my Primus albums at an audible volume while working?"

DJAdapt writes "The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the organization that represents the large radio and television owners, is using its lobbyists, campaign contributions and political influence to have Congress and the Federal Communications Commission limit XM's ability to provide you with 'locally oriented' content, including the new XM Instant Traffic & Weather channels .... this is seriously what our government should be worried about? We're taking a trip back to the 70s, where AM was fighting FM."

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."

BigFire writes "Professor Tanenbaum responds to the slashdot effect and a small critique of Ken Brown's forthcoming book in his followup. A small gem is where he disclosed that Ken Brown can't multiply simple positive integers."

Linker writes "CNN/Money has interviewed Satoru Iwata, where the president of Nintendo Ltd. says the gaming industry is in the midst of a crisis of innovation, which could lead to its demise. The idea, of course, is to justify the existence of the upcoming Nintendo DS, but Iwata does point out that the gaming market in Japan has been shrinking in the past few years - and the U.S. and Europe may do so soon."

Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that 'Enterprise' has been renewed for a fourth season. UPN will make the official announcement on Thursday, but production executives already told the SaveEnterprise.com fan campaign the show will be back, and the show's actors have been ordered back to work. The only snag? It looks like 'Enterprise' might be moved to Fridays next year, and Firefly fans can tell you what a great place that is..."

trs9000 writes "Going a step further than your average case mod, Tubby includes not only a nice wooden casing, but also a built-in refrigerator! You dont have to get up for a refill! Tubby's homepage has specs and pics of the process. Images are also here and here."