Slashdot Mirror

l_bratch writes, quoting from the BBC, "'British computer chip designer ARM has unveiled its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices. The Mali-T658 offers up to ten times the performance of its predecessor." ARM claims that its latest GPU, which will be ready in around two years, will have graphics performance akin to the PlayStation 3. If this has acceptable power consumption for a mobile device, could we be seeing ultra-low power hardware in high-end PCs and consoles soon?"

l_bratch writes "Since December 22nd DICE have been running a competition between each target platform of their latest Battlefield expansion — Bad Company 2: Vietnam. Players were required to complete a large number of 'team actions' in game, in order to unlock a hidden, remastered version of the Operation Hastings map from the original Battlefield: Vietnam. PC gamers have completed the task, whereas gamers on both console platforms are only about halfway there."

l_bratch writes "A malicious backdoor was added to the UnrealIRCd source archive some time around November 2009. It was not noticed for several months, so many IRC servers are likely to be compromised. A Metasploit exploit already exists."

andylim writes "Recombu.com has pitted the iPod Nano's video capabilities against an iPhone 3GS, a Nokia 5530 XpressMusic and Flip Mino HD. This simple test shows how the camera deals with motion, colour and audio. The iPod Nano's camera seems to offer a basic yet decent video experience and some might say delivers a higher picture quality than the iPhone 3GS's camera. What's interesting is how well it deals with close-ups."

We're catching up on two stories of municipal engagement with open source software: Munich (which decided to go OS in 2003) and Vienna (2005). E5Rebel brings us news that Munich has stayed the course. But bkingaut informs that Vienna has decided to migrate back to Windows (Google translation) — to Vista no less. The migration of 720 computers used in kindergartens will cost the city about €8M. The given reason for all this is a language test application for the kids that only works with MS IE and won't be made compatible (by the producer) with Firefox until 2009.

E5Rebel writes "Microsoft will spend $235m in schools worldwide over the next five years, part of a plan to triple the number of students and teachers trained in its software programs to up to 270 million by 2013. 'Microsoft's investment shows how important it views developing markets to its future business. Last year, Microsoft introduced the Student Innovation Suite, which includes the XP Starter Edition plus educational applications, for $3 for qualifying countries. Microsoft faces heated competition from companies supporting the open-source OS Linux and associated software in developing countries. "I think as a company we welcome choice," [Orlando Ayala] said. "Frankly, we welcome the competition." The company's educational funding comes with a hitch: "Of course, that includes the fact they [the schools] use Windows," Ayala said.' If you don't use Windows you don't get the cash." Microsoft has long been interested in the education of children.

e5rebel writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has announced they they will be creating a reward program in order to compensate open source programmers for their work in a hope to boost open source efforts. The program will involve communities like OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org according to Simon Phipps, Sun's open source officer. "Phipps' post comes some months after Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, voiced skepticism over the open-source status quo, where developers who contribute to various efforts go uncompensated while corporations are enriched. 'It really is a worrisome social artifact,' Green said at the time. 'I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do.'"

E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"

Mytob writes "Today is the last day of service for NCSoft / Net Devil's Auto Assault. The game, which has never proved that popular, will have its service terminated at midnight central time. Refund emails have already been sent out, and end-of game events have been happening since last week. From the Auto Assault Website: 'We are now in the final week of Auto Assault and to mark this occasion on Friday night we'll be doing all sorts of nutty things in-game — whatever you request, we'll try to make happen. Most of the fun will be in and around Ground Zero (don't worry if you don't have a high-level character, we'll boost you), but we'll be doing other stuff all around the game. We plan on starting around 9PM CDT (if not before) and should last right to midnight when the servers are shut down for the final time.'"

E5Rebel writes "Business is embracing open source like never before, but the effective demise of SCO's claims against Linux doesn't mean an end to licensing problems, an analyst warns. The debate on Slashdot seems to focus on the GPL and its virtues, but there are 1,000-plus open source licenses (according to analyst Saugatuck), and businesses face having to manage multiple licenses within a single open source product. What can be done to minimize multiple-license pain for corporate open source adopters?"

E5Rebel writes "Novell has promised not to sue anybody over the Unix copyrights that a US court last week ruled it owned. They said there was no Unix in Linux and now they are sticking by it. Perhaps they had no option, but Novell deserve praise for taking on the fight with SCO...."

E5Rebel writes "Gary McKinnon, the UK-based ex-systems administrator accused of conducting the biggest military hack of all time, has won the right to have his case against extradition to the U.S. heard by the House of Lords."

E5Rebel noted that Don Marti has a piece that talks about "Core Linux developers are finding themselves managing and checking, rather than coding, as the number of kernel contributors grows and the contributor network becomes more complex."

Hypertwist writes "Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans, and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system. Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access. From the article: '"We'll see malware developing its own elevation techniques," Russinovich said. He demonstrated a social engineering attack scenario where a fake elevation prompt can be used to trick users into clicking "allow" to give elevated rights to a malicious file.'

jginspace writes "As per the advance notification, Microsoft's monthly security bulletin, released yesterday, addressed five general Windows issues and one in Visual Studio. It also included a fix for a problem in Outlook Express for a total of seven updates. As patch Tuesdays go it was fairly unremarkable. The only general Windows update labeled 'critical' is for a flaw in Media Player. As usual, there's a cumulative update for Internet Explorer, but significantly, the only versions of IE affected are 5 and 6. Version 7 is clean — which is welcome news in this first update since the upgrade was pushed to the world last month. Microsoft was silent on the two zero-day Word holes, one reported here and a new one. Sans is calling this 'Black Tuesday' and recommends patches be applied urgently for the Visual Studio and Media Player vulnerabilities. Sans is recommending the Heise Offline Update utility covered in a previous story."

Tyburn Franklie writes "Second Life is entering its 'second phase'. With big-name brands colonizing its virtual earth and the media getting worked up into a frenzy of hype, the alternative world is looking more and more like the old one. There are even worries about virtual office etiquette (sorry guys: no guns in the office). And now Linden Labs has words of warning for would-be corporate warriors seeking a Second Life: 'If you are not authentic and do not offer anything to the community, you are likely to be ignored, at best.' Sage advice — whatever world you're in." A lot of overhype here, I think.

Coffin Black writes "Apple only has to look askance at a piece of hardware and people are falling over themselves to slap an 'i' all over it and slavering about how cool the theoretical gadgetry is gonna be. So the iPhone may not even exist — beyond a 'just once more thing' gleam in Jobs' eye — but already the column inches are stacking up. Think the iPod is dying? Never fear, says this columnist, it's merely evolving from one form into another (clue: from portable to mobile). This writer, meanwhile, is sticking the boot in early — she says she won't be buying an iPhone, when it of course finally makes it onto the shelves... Though she does add: "If Microsoft created a Phune (a phone and a Zune in one, geddit?), I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole either but that's a different story."" We also covered this story a couple months back.

Gungadin writes "Eweek.com has a story about a British security researcher figuring out a way to manipulate legitimate features in Adobe PDF files to open backdoors for computer attacks. David Kierznowski, a penetration testing expert specializing in Web application testing, has released proof-of-concept code and two sample PDF files to demonstrate how the Adobe Reader program can be rigged to launch Web-based attacks without any user action. He claims there are least seven different ways to backdoor a PDF."

bear pimp writes "Indie gaming mecca Game Tunnel has announced 'Game Tunnel Magazine', a quarterly journey into the world of indie games. Game Tunnel Magazine has everything you'd expect from a print gaming publication but with an indie-centric focus. In particular, the well-researched previews section of upcoming indie games is something that to my knowledge no other site has ever done. Issue 1 of GTMag is available for free as a downloadable ezine in PDF format"

robzster1977 writes "Judges in the UK have given the go-ahead to the extradition of UK hacker Gary McKinnon. McKinnon is accused of breaking into US Navy, Army and Department of Defense computers in 2001 and 2002." From the article: "On 4 July the secretary of state signed an order for Mr McKinnon's extradition to the United States for charges connected with computer hacking. Mr McKinnon had exercised his right to submit representations against return but the secretary of state did not consider the issues raised availed Mr McKinnon."

yermoungder writes "Reuters is reporting that 'Sony Pictures on Tuesday said it aims to deliver its new Blu-ray DVD format to U.S. stores on May 23 to coincide with the entry of compatible disc players, a new step in an industry war for control of home movie viewing.'"

Drachan writes "A seminar at the UK's (BBC sponsored) technology conference 'Open Tech 2005' (organised by the fantastic 'Need To Know' (NTK) team as a follow on to last year's "Notcon 2004"event) posed the question 'Where is the British EFF?' The answer, as prompted by those attending the seminar was, of course 'Nowhere! so... uhh.. well... why don't We create it?' A PledgeBank page was set up within a few hours (available here) which states that the pledging person will donate £5 (GBP) per month to the support of a British EFF-style organisation provided that 1000 others also agree to do so. There is considerably more information at Danny O'Brien's Oblomovoka. Maybe this is a step in the right direction, after all the controversy over ID cards, the Anti-Terrorism Bill and general UK political disaster?"

fenimor writes "PhysOrg reports, that Mitsubishi is going to introduce next year a headset with a small liquid-crystal display screen which is positioned in front, slightly below eye level so as not to obstruct normal vision. Designed for users who need to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, this tiny wearable heads-up display is expected to cost only US $400."

fenimor writes "NASA's next mission to Mars to be launched on Aug. 10, 2005 - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - will examine potential landing sites and provide a high-data-rate communications relay for for future surface missions. Weighing 2,180 kilograms, the spacecraft will be the largest ever to orbit Mars and with the largest telescopic camera ever sent into orbit around another planet, will reveal Mars surface features as small as a kitchen table."

fenimor writes "Airships - known today mainly for advertising flyovers at football games - are the core of a new coastal surveillance system in development for the the U.S. Department of Defense. These stationary platforms 25 times the size of a Goodyear blimp will be equipped with an array of cutting-edge equipment for remote sensing, communications, and risk analysis, providing surveillance coverage over a surface area of 500,000 square miles from an altitude of 70,000 feet."

Paul Bawon writes "A company in UK called Node has developed the world's first consumer PDA designed for use specifically in outdoor environments. The device is fully waterproof to 3 meters, has a 8 hour battery life, built in DGPS receiver and 1 Gig of storage. Bluetooth and WiFi come as standard as does a touch screen and either a PocketPC or Linux operating system. I bumped into them at a tourism conference in Edinburgh where they were demo'ing the unit and I was impressed. It's smaller than a standard postcard."

fenimor writes "Physicists at Imperial College London described a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD. Maybe it won't be as large, as 100TB holographic optical storage, but still should be enough to fit every episode of The Simpsons on one disk. Dr Török, Lecturer in the Department of Physics, believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015."

fenimor writes "The deepest optical view of the universe, obtained by Hubble Space Telescope, may turn out to be some of the earliest star-forming galaxies. The telescope has looked 95 percent of the way back to the beginning of time, to glimpse whether the hottest stars in these early galaxies may have provided enough radiation to 'cool' the universe after the big bang."

fenimor writes "Sony announced today that it had begun preparations to adopt Blu-ray Disc ROM (BD-ROM) format as a medium for the next generation PlayStation. Single side double layer Blu-Ray discs have a huge memory size of 54 GB, being an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications. Next month Sony plans to announce a 200GB 8-layer version of BD-ROM according to MacWorld."

fenimor writes "A lot of electric energy could be produced from a city's wastewater, researchers at University of Toronto have discovered. The research revealed that the wastewater contained enough organic material to potentially produce 113 megawatts of electricity - 5 times more than required to operate wastewater treatment plants."

fenimor writes "Panasonic today unveiled new DVD-recoders with astonishing 709 hours video recording capacity. The top model has onboard components of a good PC: 400GB hard drive, Ethernet port, broadband receiver, SD Memory Card slot, and a PCMCIA card. The DVD recorder is the fastest in the industry as it can record a one-hour program onto DVD-R disc in just 56 seconds. Internet access allows users to program recording through cell phones or PCs while away from home."

fenimor writes "UK particle physicists claim that they will demonstrate the world's largest, working computing Grid with over 6,000 computers at 78 sites internationally. The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is built to deal with 15 Petabytes of data each year from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under construction at CERN in Geneva. 'This is a great achievement for particle physics and for e-Science,' says Professor Tony Doyle, leader of GridPP. 'Our next aim is to scale up the computing power available by a factor of ten'."

fenimor writes "The results of the study by researchers at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, suggests that natural genetic selection has provided women with a frequent ability to better discriminate between colors than men. 'Normally, this degree of genetic variation is suppressed through natural selection,' says Brian Verrelli, a researcher at ASU. 'In this case, nature is supporting a high degree of variation instead.' Because women have two X chromosomes, women can receive one chromosome with the typical configuration of the red vision gene while the other chromosome receives a slight variation. By contrast, men have one X chromosome, and any variation in the single red gene that they receive reduces their ability to distinguish between red and green."

Olivier Van Acker asks: "Since I started working at my current job a year ago I've installed on average one (Gentoo) Linux machine a month. Included are developer desktop machines, development servers, router/firewall, web servers, video server, MPEG encoders, etc. (It's a platform for interactive television). Since I'm the only one who is able to maintain them I want to train two of my colleagues. I've got three days dedicated time, three computers to work with and they are both Linux/Open source newbies (A technician and a programmer). What should this crash course include, what is the best learning method and what resources are available online?" "My background: I'm a programmer, a systems engineer and I used to give IT training. I have been using Unix-based operating systems since 1995.

My list so far:

Linux system Installation

Software installation

General Linux system administration

Network administration

Web server configuration

Database administration

Video server administration

History of Unix and Linux

Philosophy of open source software"

Paul Bawon writes "A company called PSAND have just installed a wireless link between Tarifa in Spain and Tangiers in Morocco, thus linking the African and European continents together with a free wireless link. The link went across the Straits of Gibraltar with a total distance of 32 km over the sea. Images can be found here and notes from the work can be found here."

Spad writes "The Register is reporting the launch of iTunes in the UK, France and Germany. "iTunes will carry 700,000 songs from the five major record labels and independents, and prices for the download service start at 79 pence or 99 euro cents per song." It's not ideal (99c is about 55p) but it's better pricing than expected. I for one will be signing up to use it."

StuWho writes "The Register is reporting a trial of Biometric ID Cards in Glasgow, Scotland. The trial is one of several tests prior to the implimentation of a universal UK ID card. It also carries reports of how you can evade the sensors by doing something as simple as crying. 'It costs the UK 1.3 billion a year, and facilitates organised crime, illegal immigration, benefit fraud, illegal working and terrorism,' Home Office Minister Des Browne said. He then said that the ID card would fix all this, but did not say how. It's not only in the US where governments are using the excuse of terrorism to infringe on civil liberties."

Tmuk writes "The second part of Jeff Minter's Complete History of Llamasoft has just gone up over at The Way of the Rodent. Straight from the man himself, it's a fantastic read after the previously Slashdot-covered first part. Enjoy!"

Tmuk writes "Just thought I'd bring to your attention the first of a new series of articles by Jeff Minter over at the mighty Way of the Rodent. For the first time ever, the complete history of Llamasoft is being brought together by the man himself, with new articles appearing regularly. Enjoy!"

WebfishUK asks: "Pretty simple question really, does anyone know when we might expect some decent cameras with bluetooth built-in to arrive on the scene? I know there are a couple out there, like the Concord Eye-Q Go Wireless and the Sony DSC-FX77 as well as all those camera phones but wondered if there where any others people knew about in the pipeline? Alternatively what about bluetooth adaptors that could be plugged into any camera with a mini USB connection?"

sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.

silent_tyr asks: "I am going to re-install my Linux box and being security conscious I am looking for a secure distribution. After a couple of Google searches I found a version called Secure Linux, which sounded ideal. So I followed this link, which turned out to be what I assume is a genuine NSA web-site. All in all, it looks like a good idea and I can play around with it as I wish, but eventually I will be using this machine as my base-system. So before I start I want to ask two questions: 1) Do you think that it is a good idea to trust the NSA not to put in back-door/spy-ware type code to enable them to snoop my personal information? 2) What other security-patched distro's can people recommend? I don't want to open up the floor for generic NSA-bashing, but I also don't want to have to work my way through every line of code before I install." There was a similar question that was asked a while ago, but there wasn't much to the discussion. For those of you who are running SELinux, what have your experiences been, so far?

kanad writes "Who says that Linux on desktop is dead. Well maybe in the developed markets where people are using windows since last 10 years and are used to it. But in nascent markets it maynot be the case. From this story at Times of India , IBM is launching a linux based desktop model (A30) for about US$ 850. The specifications of the A30 is available from zdnet india site although the price mentioned is about US$ 1100. IBM CEO recently visited India generating news and smoke about big blue taking some serious linux initiative in India. Here is a more practical story on Linux in India"

alnya writes "BBC Online are reporting a story of a York-based company called SkyLinc who are floating baloons connected to a fibre optic pole which, they say, can deliver broadband access at "more than double the speed of most broadband services currently available" - whatever that means. Only 18 balloons would be necessarily to blow BT out the water (according to the article). Is this on the horizon?"

nickco3 writes "The Economist is telling the business world that Linux is a worthy adversay to Windows and Unix. It is free, runs on almost any hardware, and generally more secure than Windows As result it is dividing the industry into winners that offer Linux (e.g. IBM and HP), and losers that don't, (e.g. Microsoft). Sun is probably doomed."

jomaree writes "The SMH Online reports that Sony, EMI and Universal will be in the Federal Court today, in an attempt to stop students using uni computers to swap music files. Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, is quoted as follows: 'And we're not talking about one track here, one track there,' he said. 'We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy.' By contrast, Sydney Uni says it knows of one student with a handful of files on a website, which does actually sound quite a bit like one track here, one track there."

jomaree writes "The SMH Online reports that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have developed a robot (to run on Linux) with voice and face recognition capabilities. The robot would be able to connect to the Internet, contact you by e-mail or a mobile phone and, say, send you a message if it 'hears' a strange noise inside your home. It can also remember the side effects of medication. Reportedly, Mitsubishi claim that the robot 'will become a future house-sitter, caretaker, nurse and friend for the family'. Unfortunately the robot can also be programmed to ask 'You're home late. What have you been up to?' Don't we already have people for that?" The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun has a story with pictures.

jomaree writes "The SMH online reports that some DVDs are starting to corrode or "rot". Although somewhere between 1 and 10 per cent of DVDs are affected, it seems the distributors don't want to know. One list of affected movie titles reveals what might be a sinister pattern emerging: "One DVD website lists 18 titles known to have at least one bad batch, among them Planet of the Apes (1968), Men in Black: Collectors Edition, Independence Day and the Alien Legacy box set." Or maybe the person compiling the list only buys sci-fi movies."

Stuee asks: "Isn't it about time my friend and I could sit opposite each other on the train and share documents or images without having to build a small network?! I mean, what's the point of both systems having infrared, and software to bridge the platform gap, if we can't connect? It's so frustrating that my XP laptop reports that my friend's iBook is in range, but cannot do anything about it, especially when my phone (which was a fraction of the cost of either laptop) and pocket device can communicate with both machines without any problem! If anyone knows of a workaround for this (other than cables), I think there would be a lot of people interested in hearing about it. Thanks for listening."

Ruatha asks: "We've recently had a problem with a ReiserFS RAID-5 array - two of the disks failed and, of course, some of the people using the array didn't have backups of their data...Ontrack have returned the disks because they can do nothing with them due to the FS we used on the array. Does anyone know of a company that can deal with data recovery from a ReiserFS RAID-5 array?"