Slashdot Mirror

I guess I must guess well then.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11588
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25591
There is a ton more, but that is all I feel like looking up for now.

            -Charlie

P.S. You are not that stupid for real, are you?

I guess I must guess well then.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11588
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25591
There is a ton more, but that is all I feel like looking up for now.

            -Charlie

P.S. You are not that stupid for real, are you?

Your dates are a tad out of la-la land, but your heart is in the right place.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24638
It was linked here, but I can't find it.

The short story is that Intel's new VIIV boxes are crushingly DRM infested, and can load more. There is remote key revocation and all the things MS wanted, they are playing AMD off of Intel. Don't look to AMD to be any better, they are being screwed too.

I predict massive failure and egg on Intel's face here.

                  -Charlie

The article is full of problems. Whitefield was canceled a couple of months ago:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27192
There is a lot wrong with the 45nm code names, and in general, it is lacking a lot of info.

If Intel gave him this info, it is blurring the lines for PR purposes, and somewhat flat out wrong. As of Friday, Whitefield was still dead, and the roadmap didn't match up with Intel's internal ones.

There is a bit of right there, but few if anything that can't be found at the usual places.

                  -Charlie

I couldn't help but think that this is just the newest assult as part of a press-release war between Intel and AMD. Recently, it seems AMD has been taunting Intel about the performance of its dual core technology. So it appears Intel's reponse is to say "your manufacturing process couldn't lithograph its way out of a paper bag."

http://www.theinquirer.net/ (online computer journal)
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (online electronics journal)
Just to name two of many journals with lots of external citations. Journals like PCWorld with their low standard are rather the exception than the norm.

My favourite recent example of The Register misinformation: it is "difficult or impossible" to use "mainstream" websites with Firefox!

Incidentally for people who believe that FUD here are some facts:

1) I had someone working for me make a list of the investor relations sections of the websites of all FTSE350 companies (UK listed blue chips and mid-caps). He used Firefox, he only had problems with one site (Rank).

2) In the last year a team that has varied between two and four heavy users of the web found only one other site (apart from Rank) that failed to work with Firefox or Opera: a third world branch of HSBC.

I emailed this to The Register, and did not get a reply. The Register is true to its tabloid roots and just wants to put stuff up, without regard to facts. I only read it for BOFH stories - The Inquirer has a lot more actual news content and it recently replaced The Register in my live bookmarks (next, I am going to replace /. with Digg for carrying time-wasting stories like this).

The Register has always been like this. I remember a review of Red Hat a few years ago that gave the impression that, ext 3 was too unstable for use on a desktop (not by the time it was an option in RH it wasn't) and that an ext2 file system would be irretrievably broken if you pulled the power cable. Combining these two "facts" it came to the conclusion that Linux (unlike Windows!) did not have a file system that was ready for the desktop.

I do not think that They are MS shills. It is simply not possible to report accurately on something as complicated as an OS without ever using it yourself.

actually theres a sue to microsoft about this
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27873

I found the link, "Microsoft Xbox burnt our house down...", from the original Inquirer article to be much more interesting. See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27873> for details.

This is certainly NOT normal for the console industry.

This is a myth.

This article has responses from a few game devs stating that their launch titles are multi-threaded and a M$ threading person said: "Six months ago, we had only looked at a handful of games. Most of those games were single-threaded. Today, we've evaluated most launch titles and the majority are using multiple threads."

The Xbox smashing is also featured in an article by The Inquirer. They also wrote that Xbox geeks take this matter too serious. I just find it amazing how people go balistic over a toy like the Xbox.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27893

80 or 110W CPU (I have heard both ways), a GPU equivalent to the ~100W R520, a HD, RAM and a constantly spinning DVD in a box how big?

And people wonder why they crash. Anyone who has one want to comment on how hot they get?

          -Charlie

I know whe all thought he bailed the case...

...Thompson received, at his home address, a tube of vaginal lubricant, courtesy he feels, of Rockstar.

After that you'd think he'd be a bit more easy-going...

then to a Cell and NVidia system when the Cell couldn't be adapted fast enough to do the quality of video they wanted, and now we are finding out the PS3's NVidia subsystem is in the 6800 Class of PC Cards, not even the current 7800s.

This is completely FALSE. I can't believe how garbage like this could get modded +4 interesting.

Wow you are so informed, and yet show you know nothing...

So you are calling NVidia liars, ok sure, you know everything, right? *wink

Here, see if you can click, since you don't know what research is...
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25838

FAT licensing. If this hadn't been stopped on time, what do you think would have happen if someone refused to accept their "license" scheme?

If Microsoft decide to take over the AJAX market with a patent, they will find one.

FAT

The java tip is a good one since the java slowdown is apparently much larger in 2.0 as compared to earlier versions. In earlier versions, you'd get faster startup times by increasing the memory that OOo uses by default. You can do this in OOo 2.0 as well, and it will help with startup times also. Someone recently blogged about the tremendous amount of memory OOo is using. But the memory settings in the options menu are set conservatively. If you have the memory to spare, increasing the settings allowing OOo to use more memory will get you noticeably faster start times.

Tools -> options -> OO.org -> memory -> Graphics cache -> Use for OO.org (increase this one, try increasing 8 mb at a time, experiment, don't remember the default setting). - Graphics Cache -> Memory per object (try increasing this one also, it is set low, so try doubling, then adding 4-8 mb, first setting above should give better results).

Don't forget that once started and shut down, subsequent startup of OOo will be faster because some processes are still running or in memory. You'll need a reboot for windows, and for you GNU/Linux users, you'll either need a reboot or for you individuals that only reboot during blue moons, you'll need to wait a few hours or days depending on usage for most of OOo to clear out before you can reliably test startup times.

While OOo quickstart process running in the background allows OOo to startup faster, it also uses up resources, so I don't run it since I don't use OOo that much. If you are a regular office user and can spare the resources (not much but on some systems every bit counts), then by all means use the quickstarter.

It's a shame what Sun has done to OOo because they feel the need to push that pos java on us. That's the tradeoff to using a FOSS suite. Luckily Debian systems don't install java by default, and I haven't had luck in getting it to work on my server, so neither OOo nor the web browsers have java functionality (or its slowness) so it isn't a big issue. The only complaint I've had on the lack of java is the inability to do speed tests at third party sites when troubleshooting voip or connectivity issues.

OpenOffice memory/startup tips: here

and the blog about the memory hog that OOo is:

here

Intel Yonah specs have just been leaked. What I find most surprising is the prices - 2.16GHz will set you back $640 for the processor alone. Making it rather unlikely that the iBook will ship at that speed.

More likely, it will ship at 1.66GHz which is the lowest-spec Yonah. If it's dual core, it will still be faster than the Powerbook for native apps. But it will also still be slower than the Powerbooks for professional apps, e.g. Photoshop.

Unless they ship a dual core Powerbook 2.16 right along with it.

I wonder if one could use one core to do a prefetch-translate in rosetta, leaving the other core to run the translated app at native speed.

Rumor, probably, but here you go.

Oh Canada!
My online spying land!
Telco intercept at CSIS's command

With packet sniff and account info
The True North now South and "free"

From net and mobe,
Oh Canada, we foil(*) our heads for thee.

ISAKMP our tunnels to the free(**)
Oh Canada, we foil our heads for thee

Oh Canada, we foil our heads for thee!

----
*
a) Tin Foil - Aluminum Foil has been shown not to work.

**
a) Patch to avoid DOS
b) Avoid tunneling to the US or China both have stronger anti-communication laws


Canadian Government Information Site

I see Sony attached to all of them, and that's what guilty by association is all about. Boneheaded moves by a completely unrelated group under the Sony umbrella is all the justification I need to never trust a product with the name Sony attached to it.

I can't wait to see the DRM infecting the Playstation 3.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12145 8 Cores! IBM had that years ago....then again maybe not as fast. Maybe AIX will run on Sun Hardware?

Don't forget the stories online about the Playstation 3 being infected with DRM worse than what they tried with their music.

Not just Sony music, Sony playstation has equally rediculous terms of use, if the internet rumour mill can be believed.

This Article, and others, suggest the playstation3 will be released infected with DRM as bad as the music media.

If the rumours are true, there will be no second hand sales of ps3 games, no playing your games at your friends home, no rentals from the video store, and consumers will be blessed with the pleasure of renewing of content licenses after a fixed number of hours of game play.

This article presents Sony's position nicely.

it's true !This Article says so.

Acrobat Reader loads in a flash for me. It just takes a bit of Liposuction (Plug-in requirements slightly different for Acrobat7, but not by much).

Yes. They are also said to offer Linux as an end user OS on the PS3.

"Until you can point to a single person who can actually use this service..." Oh look: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27565

Yes sir, you may go swivel on my middle finger.

No need, Thompson has just bailed the case!

Sounds like you're talking about the P.A. Semi chip recently announced. =]

Well, sans GPU. But given the PCI express interface, a custom one off wouldnt be that hard to tack onto the board. Given the perposterous ram bandwidth on the PA Semi chips, a solution like nVidia's TurboCache would work great: just have one unified ram for processor and GPU.

Thats one other thing I dont expect to see integrated any time soon: RAM. As for storage in general, hopefully flash will continue growing in capacity at a vaguely exponential rate. 32gb flash would almost be sufficient to make the hd unnecessary for most systems.

Just remember though, AMD isnt doing this for integration sakes, they're in it for the I/o. Which, I should note, the P.A. Semi people have in spades. Some smart people are calling the new multi-core age "throughput" computing, which is rather apt; we are going to need a whole new architecture to support our processors.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17617
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17652
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17681
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17709

More than you would care to know about LGA.

          -Charlie

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17617
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17652
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17681
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17709

More than you would care to know about LGA.

          -Charlie

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17617
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17652
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17681
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17709

More than you would care to know about LGA.

          -Charlie

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17617
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17652
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17681
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17709

More than you would care to know about LGA.

          -Charlie

http://theinquirer.net/?article=27493

Nice of them to cut the price. I would like them to keep the SKU so I didn't have to keep up with anotherone: Although I suppose if they hadn't rebadged it, everyone who bought the 6800 would be pissed at the price cut.

SysInternal's Mark Russinovich has posted a new entry about Sony's XCP DRM technology.

According to his post, it seems Sony's fix "patch" makes a little "contact home" contacting Sony servers. This even when sony claims that their software didnt made contact with them.

Slashdot covered previously the intial XCP rootkit story.

The inquirer has an interesting article on the Sony DRM technology overall.

And it seems community have found several alternate uses for the XCP technology which include hiding game cheating software and even to bypass DRM technology

You're absolutely right. Just last week FFII and Nutzwerk settled in a German court about, amongst others, FFII referencing to the translation of a Dutch article by WebWereld, also published in English on the site of the author, Brenno de Winter. De Winter published statements by Nutzwerk CEO Holzer where he called FFII Chairman Pilch a "catagoric lyar".

WebWereld reports(Dutch) that in the settlement FFII and Nutzwerk agreed that FFII stops commenting on Nutzwerk and Nutzwerk stops sueing them.

An interesting detail about Nutzwerk is that they used to maintain a link farm in order to get high ranks in Google. Amongst the files in the farm, was a file scheiss_juden.htm which was apparantly meant to increase the probablility googling jew haters would find their anonymity services. According to a German article, the link farm was set up as to allow only web-crawlers to the farm contents and at some point Google had 51.000 links pointing to the Nutzwerk site. At this moment only 908 remain, after apparantly the Google cache has been wiped.

Now some fun: Google for the combination of "Rene Holzer" (Nutzwerk CEO) and "Michael Koustiniko". You'll probably find this post, where Mr. Koustiniko signs as "Rene Holzer". Digging a little further shows that our friend used this alias to advertise his products.

What's also interesting is that in their previous legal actions against Cobion AG, during which 2 of Nutzwerk's software patents were invalidated, Nutzwerk was represented by Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, an attorney well known in the computer scene. For instance, he was was behind the much publicised Tanja campaign where he tricked computer users into sending a list of pirated software to "Tanja", on the receiving of which he sent them a cease and desist notice along with a request for payment, he shut down emule.de (German), extorted SuSE, demanded Linus Torvalds to drop the Linux name and last but not least was involved in the cases around MobiliX as the registrar of the trademark Obelix.

I personally produced a RSS->HTML feed. Instead of implementing the solution as an application I wrote a PHP script using the XML parser to convert RSS feeds to HTML. Customisation of the output is often as simple as a CSS file, more "complex" arrangements can be made by modifying the PHP code.

There really isn't very much more to it than that, the page auto-updates every 30minutes. The only feature missing are the user configurable persistent storage of your favourite rss lists, but for the environment it was needed this was no major problem.

Maybe I'm wrong. It's just that I didn't see the point in creating a seperate app + GUI when all the portability I needed was already present on the host machines. I doubt there are many places where there is access to RSS but not to an HTML browser.

For an example go to... http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/rss.html and cut n' paste this into the box.

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition /front_page/rss.xml
http://www.juno.co.uk/all/feeds/rss
http://www.spacedaily.com/spacedaily.xml
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer.rss

then hit "feed". Yes, it's not very pretty and the one major disadvantage is being able to get a user click on an RSS feed to auto open in the webpage. This I have never discovered how to do and this sort of feature could be considered a security flaw IMNSHO. I wanted to implement user storage with the ability to maintain a global list of all RSS feeds, typed and rated.

> As an ex-CS college professor, let me suggest that it would be better to spend that $100 on the
> developing world on more teachers, education for teachers, roof for schools, etc

You have a fairly limited idea of what the developing world is. Argentina is one of the countries that has committed to buying .5 million to 1 million of these $100 laptops:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27242

In many countries of the developing world, there are plenty of teachers, the teachers are well educated, schools have rooves, but computers are a luxury that few afford or even think they need (think back to 1980's in the US). Unless the population is made computer literate and understand the importance of computers, the digital divide will grow wider.

Microsoft also takes care of Her Majesty's Government computer security. Fits, eh?
UK government and MS attempt security

Dunno, I see things like this Mac Mini clone selling for more than a Mini ($900 for the clone vs. $600 for the Mini), and I have to wonder. I think that Apple will pick up the economies of scale from the x86 component vendors and run with it. Sure, they'll still set a 30%+ profit margin, but I imagine they'll save enough money that prices should be "roughly" comparable. C.f. the Dell XPS systems, which seem to have a solid following despite their price premium.

Just FYI, I think you may have started something... check out this Inquirer story.

The dead birds could be turned in to Biodiesel http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26177

the X1800XT ties almost exactly with the 7800GTX @ stock of 430 core in most gaming benchmarks.

with nVIDIA's 512mb implementation of the G70 core touted to be at 550mhz core, it should theoretically thrash the living daylights out of the X1800XT.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=27400

the decision is between aVIVO's encode and transcode abilities for h.264, or superior performance by nVIDIAs offering?

Here, here and here.

WARBLER and jiggler Britney Spears is highly miffed that pictures of her new baby have appeared on the world wide wibbly web before they could be flogged to a magazine.

Spears and her husband Kevin Federline posed with the sprog in what has been called a private photo session.

However, now some snaps all over the net and Spears has instructed briefs to seek and destroy the sites that put them up.

Briefs for Jive Records have said that anyone who publishes, sells or otherwise exploits any of these images in any way will be subject to liability and damages for willful infringement of copyright, and will be liable for invasion of privacy.

Among those who apparently in the soup is TangibleBrit.com, a Britney Spears fan site. It has already apologised over the weekend after posting the pictures and taken then down as has WorldOfBritney.com and BritneySpears.org, which took them down earlier.

Until the web pictures appeared there had been no clear pictures of Spears junior and magazines have been negotiating for huge wodges of cash for pics for readers to coo at.[The baby isn't called Google, is it Nick? Ed.]

(reprinted without permission, against copyright rules, willfully, hell, flagrantly, from The Inquirer. Fuck em.)

...and make $600 million. I always hated IGN and their half-hearted attempt to make a games site for each and every game that comes out. Nothing could compare to a site made by a dedicated fan, such as Shlonglor's Warcraft 2 page, which was built before this gamespy/ign/daily radar/plan revolution.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26097
I believe you are right (Canonical being based on the Isle of man, and linux /GNU pretty much an international effort )

I did a Google search http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ubuntu+linu x+south+africa&btnG=Google+Search&meta= andhttp://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ubuntu+l inux+developed+in&btnG=Search&meta=
Which pretty much the top few sites stating it was developed in south Africa .. So there is perhaps where that false impression came from

Here is some more information about what the proposed shortage is causing people to do.