Slashdot Mirror

kukyfrope writes "In the spirit of the Revolution controller, GameDaily takes a look at the history of motion detection in console games, including U-Force and the infamous NES Power Glove, to name a few." From the article: "When the Sega Genesis came around a few years later, Sega decided to try their hand- and legs and feet- in the motion-sensor game with the release of a device called the Activator. This was a grid-like octagon that laid on the ground and allowed the user to stand in the middle of it, and then use a number of motions to convey actions in a series of games that worked with it, including Sega's brawling titles Streets of Rage 2 and Eternal Champions. But, again, it took too much effort to really figure out how to make it work in a comprehensive manner, and many folks just ended up taking a pass on it."

An anonymous reader asks: "I had a sort of out-there idea for computer hardware, and wanted to investigate design and manufacture. I figure the first step would be to patent the idea so that I am protected from it being stolen, while I confer with contractors about fabrication and circuit design. Does anyone know of ways to check for prior art, other than hitting up Google for something similar? I believe this idea is unique, but you never know what could have been out there, and I didn't know if there were any good resources on the web. Since the readership seems to be an inventive bunch, I think discussion on this topic may help more people than myself."

evdubs writes "15 states and the District of Columbia currently tax online media, with others eager to begin their own taxes. The RIAA estimates that domestic sales totaled $503 million last year, but that figure doesn't include movies, e-books, online video games and other forms of digital media. Perhaps the most interesting point in this article is the way states, looking to start taxing online media, are trying to use the interpretation of previous law and apply it to digital media. In Washington, politicians are using their definition of software (already taxable), 'a set of coded instructions designed to cause a computer...to perform a task,' to justify taxation of online media because 'they cause some action by a piece of hardware to play them.'"

Ant writes to mention an SFGate article about the increase in laptop theft in the world of ubiquitous wifi. From the article: "San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year. 'It's a changing culture, and crime is following it'"

Syberghost writes "There are two major theories about the composition of the Sun. One says that it has similar composition to the planets. The other, that it has enriched levels of oxygen-16. NASA has been doing research on the soil samples Neil Armstrong brought back from the moon, to determine which of those theories is correct. Today, we have the results; they're both wrong. It looks like we're going to have to look more closely at the composition of everything in the solar system to figure this one out."

Sabah Arif writes "Michael Spindler was supposed to be the savior of Apple. After four years at Apple, he was an executive vice president and had built Apple Europe to the point where it was providing 25% of Apple's revenues. Just the same, at the end of the day Spindler couldn't handle the stress or control the Apple organization. Low End Mac has an extensive biography of this figure in Apple's History." From the article: "Apple Europe ran out of a cramped 100 ft. office in Brussels and had only a few employees. Spindler had never worked at the startup before, but he liked it a lot. He had freedom to try almost anything he wanted. There were problems with working for such a young company, though. Spindler went without payment for almost six months because Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium."

kosamae writes "Businessweek has an interesting article about Marc Fleury. It's more about the business and personal end of his life than about the technology he's helped to create." From the article: "But while Fleury, like Neo, is something of a cult figure, few people in the old or new software world want to think of him as their savior. Brash, outspoken, and frequently insulting, Fleury has clawed his way to the top of the open-source pile over the past six years. Part of the dislike arises because he's a threat. Even though JBoss brings in only $50 million a year in revenues, at most, from providing training, support, and maintenance services to its users, it has siphoned off some hundreds of millions in market value from the likes of BEA Systems and IBM by giving away free software."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a large article up exploring the increase in 'pork barrel'-style technology projects floating through government spending bills. The water-free urinals discussed on Slashdot last year are one such project, as is a 'Virtual Reality Spray Paint Simulator'." From the article: "Earmarks for favored recipients--known colloquially as pork--have become easier than ever for politicians to secure because of the rapid growth in homeland security and military spending, especially if they can find some plausible technological veneer. Exact figures are difficult to obtain, mostly because spending bills tend to be intentionally obfuscated and specifics are usually absent from legislative text. Government watchdogs, however, say earmarks ostensibly related to technology are clearly on the rise."

G)-(ostly asks: "Recently, I've been plagued by a number of calls that were mis-dialed to my cell phone. They're particularly annoying because, being on a cell phone, the wrong number calls follow me everywhere as opposed to just being ignored in an empty house during the day. Verizon, of course, has scripted their drones to claim they can't do anything about it except change the number (or we can turn off the phone), which of course probably wouldn't change anything since we'd just get different mis-dials. However, since it's in my possession, would it be possible to build a software package that could be used to 'screen' unwanted numbers right on the phone? If so, how would one even begin to find APIs for phones, or load the software, once built, onto it?" How long do you figure it will take phone makers to recognize the need for this feature? A cheap and dirty way to do this would be to add the numbers you wish to block to your phone's contact list and give them a silent ring. However, you then waste the phones memory with a phone-book entry (which can be hundreds of bytes), when all you really need is a list consisting of 10-12 digit numbers (depending on locality). The other drawback to this method is that you might need to use those contact slots, so it isn't a solution for everyone. Still, this sounds like a useful feature, but there is still the issue of how much control the cell phone's OS will give you over its basic operations (blocking messages sent from a specific number, for example). Has anyone tried doing this on their phone? What kind of luck did you have?

jayintune writes "2old2play is reporting on a new Nintendo emulator for the Xbox 360. Someone has apparently figured out a way to stream emulation via Media Center to the 360 in 480p. At this time sound is not currently available, but they are said to be working on a fix as well as other emulators including GEN and TG16. You can check out the emulator in action from this link to a YouTube video."

anaesthetica writes "The Washington Post is carrying a story on a young man suspected to be the al-Qaeda hacker 'Irhabi 007'. From the article: 'Celebrated for his computer expertise, Irhabi 007 had propelled the jihadists into a 21st-century offensive through his ability to covertly and securely disseminate manuals of weaponry, videos of insurgent feats such as beheadings and other inflammatory material... The Internet has presented investigators with an extraordinary challenge. But our future security is going to depend increasingly on identifying and catching the shadowy figures who exist primarily in the elusive online world.'"

Ben writes "Science Blog reports a team from Penn State and the UK has built electronic compenents inside optical fiber. As the story describes it, if you think of the fiber as a water main, the structure places the pumping station inside the pipe. The goal is to figure out how to most efficiently exchange info between the fibers that carry data and the devices that manipulate it."

Gamespot reports that Senators Clinton and Lieberman have asked the Centers for Disease control to investigate how games impact us poor deluded citizens. From the article: "Even though the legislation--called the Children and Media Research Advancement Act--does not include restrictions, it appears to be intended as a way to justify them. That's because a string of court decisions have been striking down antigaming laws because of a lack of hard evidence that minors are harmed by violence in video games. The original version of the bill earmarked $90 million for the study, but Lieberman press secretary Rob Sawicki said that the committee had approved the measure without any dollar figure and that such a figure would be added later during the appropriations process." Gamasutra has some background on the bill, which was originally proposed in 2003.

Albanach writes "Singer songwriter Sandi Thom is one of a growing band of new musicians using the internet to circumvent the traditional and traditionally expensive tour circuit. Thom described her free online concerts as a Web Tour, saying 'A web tour is basically what you do when you have a lack of money and no car.' Services such as The Streaming Tank have grown to satisfy the need for broadcast services and the figures are impressive. Just 74 people watched Thom's first concert on February 24th. The concert on March 2nd drew 62,138 viewers."

TasosF writes "The New York Times published a feature on the strategy guide publishing. Strategy guide sales reportedly generated about $90 million in 2004, with the guide to GTA San Andreas having sold 748,000 copies to date." From the article "'It's like writing a travel guide to a place that doesn't exist,' Mr. Hodgson said. 'Whereas Frommer's guides tell you what hotel to stay in, I tell you which hotel not to stay in because you're going to get dragged down by a gangster.' By most measures, strategy guides are not a huge business. They generated about $90 million in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm; the figure dropped to $67 million in 2005, but that decline was expected as a cyclical moment, paralleling a transition in the industry to a new generation of advanced game consoles."

PktLoss asks: "I recently got hit with a worm/trojan, it was my own fault, I got sloppy. Anyways, once I got hit with the virus it was time to get rid of it. It had infected my system while my A/V program was running, so I presumed it was rather new. I already knew a bunch about it: it was a Messenger Worm; it killed regedit, msconfig or taskmanager upon being run; and it turned off viewing hidden/system files, in Explorer. This information in hand, I thought I would have an easy time figuring out what it was, and hopefully locating a dedicated cleaner, I was wrong. In my mind I envision a page with an advanced search allowing you to give it the information you have (attack vector/type, symptoms, etc) one at a time, each new piece of information cutting down the list of possibilities. Does such a page exist? If not why not?" "Instead of an easy search, I started off Googling in the dark, dropping key words in the hope they would point me in the right direction. When that failed I moved to the websites of major anti-virus vendors, either continuing to search based on key words I felt were relevant, or just listing viruses in reverse chronological order and reading their summaries.

No dice.

For the curious, I think it was Chode-e. I cleaned it manually."

SirWraith writes "In case anyone hasn't realized Apple has had a counter going up to a billion for a few weeks now. Apparently last night, they hit the mark. From ABC News: 'Apple says Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Mich., was the lucky audiophile who downloaded "Speed of Sound" by Brit pop band Coldplay, giving the Cupertino, Calif., company bragging rights to the 10-figure milestone. Thanks to a generous prize package from Apple, Ostrovsky will now use a $10,000 iTunes music card to keep those downloads flowing on his new 20-inch iMac computer, and listen to his favorite tunes on one of the 10 60GB iPods.'"

GameSetWatch has a humorous lampoon of an ABC-6 Action News report on the dangers your child can face in the seedy world of Mario Kart. From the article: "We've been struggling in trying to figure out how kids can be 'lured into dangerous chat rooms' while using the Nintendo DS, considering that the DS's chat program, PictoChat, can not be used over the internet, and also keeping in mind that the only way to interact with a living being over the internet through your Nintendo DS is to do so through a game that supports Nintendo WiFi Connection, all of which require both parties to input 'friend codes' before they can play with each other."

A Joystiq post has some commentary on the popularity of Alternate Reality Games. Specifically, they reference some statistics gathered to give quantifiable metrics to game popularity. From the post: "Based on official numbers, the volume of forum posting and the number of hits on Google, these figures are pretty impressive. Two of the better-known ARGs -- The Beast and I Love Bees -- attracted upwards of two million players, according to their designers." For folks who play: What is your sense of their popularity? How many people do you know who play?

jZnat asks: "I own hundreds of gigabytes of binary data, usually backed up from other mediums such as CDs and DVDs. However, I cannot figure out which filesystem would be best for storing all this reliably. What I'm looking for is a WORM-optimized FS that also has good journaling methods to prevent data loss due to some natural disaster while data is being shifted around. Trying something new for once, I tried using SGI's XFS due to its promising details, but I was met with countless IO errors after trying to write large amounts of data to it. I feel that Ext3 is not optimal for this; ReiserFS is too slow when it comes to reading large data files; and Reiser4 isn't mature enough to entrust my digital assets to. What filesystem would be most appropriate for these needs?"