Slashdot Mirror

TRNick writes "The old home-computing art of hacking elaborate graphics and camerawork into tiny amounts of memory has been lost, right? Not so. The demoscene is keeping ingenious coding skills alive, and TechRadar finds out the latest developments. Winner of the 4kb competition at 2009's Breakpoint party was RGBA's demo 'Elevated,' a gorgeous scrolling demo featuring photo realistic landscapes and music, which fits into the memory used by one of your PC's desktop icons. This is really impressive stuff."

An anonymous reader writes "German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called 'Deepz0ne' who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium."

Ooobles writes "The main Open Source Playstation 2 developer site, ps2dev.org, is now three years old. And much like a three year old, it wants attention - it's now promoting its achievements, and asking, what next? Having never been recognized by Sony, it's wondering if or when Sony will allow commercial games developers to join the community." The site explains that "...the ps2dev community have created open source tools which allow developers to use nearly every aspect of the Playstation 2", and also mentions there's a major multi-part PS2 demo in progress for the Breakpoint 2004 demo party to be held later this week in Germany.

scamp was one of the folks who wrote from Europe with the news that an administrative board for the European Patents Office has voted 10-9 to allow patents for software in Europe. There's still a final conference to be held in Novemeber to ratify the decision - so there's still time to sign the petition against it. The conference in November should be close - the multinationals, US and Japan are applying heavy pressure. BTW, if you can't read German, use the fish.