Tout (en)

• Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968 (Slashdot)
  harrymcc writes "Forty-two years ago, Russian scientists created an impressive sequence of a cat walking about — and it was all the more impressive given that the 'CGI' involved rendering hundreds of images of the cat as ASCII art, then printing out the sequence image by image and photographing it."

  

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• Phoronix To Tour Chernobyl Nuclear Site (Phoronix)
  While a slight deviation from our usual roundabout with Linux news, benchmarks, and graphics driver articles, two weeks from today I have the unique opportunity to tour the Chernobyl disaster site and surrounding areas like the deserted Pripyat and Red Forest. As those into technology (like those reading Phoronix) seem to have interest in Chernobyl whether it be due to computer games they have played that are based around the Chernobyl site or simply due to the history and fascination by nuclear power and the unfortunate disaster in Ukraine, I will be posting some photographs and HD videos from what Chernobyl looks like in 2010. This will be on Phoronix and potentially a new Phoronix Media site for hosting the high resolution versions and the media may be potentially CC-BY-NC-ND licensed...

  
  

  
• Switzerland Passes Violent Games Ban (Slashdot)
  BanjoTed writes with a followup to news from February that the Swiss government was pursuing a ban on violent video games. He writes "Sadly, Switzerland has now passed the law that paves the way for an outright ban on violent video games in the country. The full implications of the ruling will not be known until the government reveals the exact requirements that will be laid down by the new legislation – a decision that has not yet been made. What is certain though is that the Swiss authorities have now obtained the power to introduce any measures they see fit. The likeliest outcome seems to be an outright ban on the production, distribution and sale of any games deemed to be unsuitable – most likely anything with either a PEGI 16+ or PEGI 18+ certificate."

  

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• With Fermi Coming, NVIDIA Releases CUDA 3.0 (Phoronix)
  With the first of NVIDIA's GeForce 400 "Fermi" graphics cards arriving later this month, their software engineers have put out the release of CUDA 3.0. Version 3 of the Compute Unified Device Architecture has a wealth of changes including Fermi support, C++ support, a new unified interoperability API for Direct3D (including Direct3D 11.0) and OpenGL (including OpenGL 3.x/4.0), up to a 100x performance increase when debugging with cuda-gdb, a new CUDA memory checker, and support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package...

  
  

  
• Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4 (Linux Today)
  Howtoforge: "This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on CentOS 5.4. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem."

• Bad BitDefender Update Clobbers Windows PCs (Slashdot)
  alphadogg writes "Users of the BitDefender antivirus software started flooding the company's support forums Saturday, apparently after a faulty antivirus update caused 64-bit Windows machines to stop working. The company acknowledged the issue in a note explaining the problem. 'Due to a recent update it is possible that BitDefender detects several Windows and BitDefender files as infected with Trojan.FakeAlert.5,' the company said. The acknowledgment came after BitDefender users had logged hundreds of posts on the topic. Some complained of being unable to reboot their systems."

  

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• Google Hands Out Web Security Scanner (Slashdot)
  An anonymous reader writes "Apparently feeling generous this week, Google has released for free another of their internally developed tools: this time, a nifty web security scanner dubbed skipfish. A vendor-sponsored study cited by InformationWeek discovered that 90% of all web applications are vulnerable to security attacks. Are Google's security people trying to change this?"

  

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• Open Source is Not a Democracy (Linux Today)
  IT World: "While user/developer input is valued, someone has to steer the ship."
• Chinese Researcher Says US Power Grid Is Vulnerable, Strategist Overreacts (Slashdot)
  An anonymous reader writes with a story about Wang Jianwei, a grad student in China who recently released a paper detailing a vulnerability in the US power grid. Despite the paper being rather typical for security research, its origin set off alarm bells for military strategist Larry M. Wortzel, who testified before Congress that the student was a threat, despite the fact that the published attack wasn't really feasible. Quoting: "'We usually say "attack" so you can see what would happen,' [Wang] said. 'My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.' And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid. The difference between Mr. Wang's explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction. 'Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the US power grid,' said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group."

  

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• Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System (Slashdot)
  Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"

  

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• Open Source Gets Political (Linux Today)
  Linux User and Developer: "In response to a petition, the Prime Minister has dropped Mandelson’s plans for a controversial ‘three strikes’ rule forcing ISPs to permanently disconnect those repeatedly accused of illegal file sharing by copyright holders."
• US Law Firms Targeted By Cyberscams (Slashdot)
  Hugh Pickens writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that last year a Long Beach law firm received an e-mail from a Hong Kong businessman seeking help collecting debts from American customers. After a month of signing paperwork and exchanging telephone calls, the attorney received word that one debtor had sent a $200,000 cashier's check to pay off his balance. The attorney deposited it in his firm's account, subtracted his $10,000 fee and wired the remaining $190,000 to his Hong Kong client. Then the attorney's bank called and told him the $200,000 check had bounced. 'They send me a nice, big, worthless check,' says the attorney. In this case, the bank was able to prevent the wire transfer from reaching its destination, but attorneys say they are on the receiving end of sophisticated scams with increasing frequency that include attacks to steal client data that can be sold or used to learn the details of future litigation."

  

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• Auto-Scanning the Names People Choose For Their Wireless APs (Slashdot)
  MichaelSmith writes "I code on the tram, going to and from work, and I noticed that there are a lot of WiFi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it online. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space." Why can't "Dress Me Slowly" and "Domestic Bliss" just share an AP?

  

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• Server Room Smells Can Be an Early Warning (Slashdot)
  Barence writes "As embarrassing as it may seem, an eggy smell in a server room needn't mean broaching the delicate subject of hygiene with a colleague. It can actually be a signal that something is about to go wrong with your server setup, as this consultant discovered after days of assuming questionable personal habits were to blame. The culprit? An expiring UPS device, sending out its own unique warning signal."

  

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• Anti-Gamer South Australian Attorney General Quits (Slashdot)
  dogbolter writes "South Australian Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, infamous for the banning of R18+ rated games and the censoring of political comment in Australia, has quit. The recent South Australian election provided a massive swing against Atkinson's governing labor party. As a direct result of the South Australian election result, he is standing down. Hopefully someone with half a clue will assume the vacant post and overturn the decision to ban adult oriented computer games."

  

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• Open source and the Morevna project (Linux Today)
  LWN.net: "Konstatin Dmitriev's Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation's Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms."
• Nintendo Developing DS Apps For School Systems (Slashdot)
  MojoKid writes "Shigeru Miyamoto, who has had a hand in some of Nintendo's most popular titles, recently offered that he is working hard to turn Nintendo's DS line of handheld gaming machines into tools for schools. The DS already has a nice line of educational software titles that help users learn, and he thinks that this could really be a huge benefit to schools looking for alternative ways to educate students of a new generation. The company has already managed to get them into Japanese elementary schools."

  

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• Android market going down the drain? (Linux Today)
  Ian's Thoughts: "You can search the Android Market for the following keywords and see quite a bit of content that I feel shouldn't be available to customers, and definitely not to children: nude, sex, porn, 18+, adults only, boobs, the android market seems to be turning into a porn hub."
• Novell Rejects "Inadequate" $2B Takeover Bid (Slashdot)
  alphadogg writes "Novell's CEO wrote to customers Saturday telling them that the software company has rejected a $2 billion bid by hedge fund Elliott Associates to take it private. He called the offer 'inadequate' and said Novell will review alternatives. Novell has struggled financially even as it has reinvented itself from its NetWare network operating roots into an open source (SUSE and Ximian) and management and security software company. Revenue fell 10% during its most recent fiscal year (wrapped up in October) and its net losses widened. CEO Hovsepian's total compensation fell 17% to $5.7 million."

  

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• KDE Partying Around the World for New Release (KDE)
  

  On February 9th 2010 the KDE community released the a new major version of the KDE Software Compilation to the world. As this provided an excellent excuse for throwing a good party, the last 7 weeks have seen hundreds of KDE enthusiasts gather at over thirty release parties around the world. Most parties featured demos and talks about the new release and the majority included beer, other drinks, food (including KDE cake!), some had karaoke and all of them were about meeting cool people and having some fun.

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• GPU Offloading PRIME May Get Improvements (Phoronix)
  A week ago we reported on open-source GPU offloading, which allowed multiple GPUs from different vendors that were backed by open-source graphics drivers to offload the 3D rendering work to a secondary GPU and then to pass the rendered result back to the primary GPU driving the display. This open-source work referred to as PRIME was based on NVIDIA's Optimus Technology. This work was done by David Airlie just as a proof of concept and he doesn't intend to get the work completed and shipped in the upstream packages, but is hoping to hand off this task to someone else...

  
  

  
• All Done With Ubuntu (Linux Today)
  IT News Today: "Unfortunately, Ubuntu and I must part ways, as well as any community involvement I once had with it. What strained this relationship? Read on for a first hand account."
• Autoscanning The Names People Choose For Their Wireless APs (Slashdot)
  MichaelSmith writes "I code on the tram, going to and from work and I noticed that there are a lot of wifi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it on line. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space." Why can't "Dress Me Slowly" and "Domestic Bliss" just share an AP?

  

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• Every British Citizen To Have a Personal Webpage (Slashdot)
  Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is about to announce that within a year everyone in Great Britain will be given a personalized webpage for accessing Government services as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online. The move could see the closure of job centers and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefits within 10 years as services are offered through a single digital gateway. [This] 'saves time for people and it saves money for the Government — the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically,' says Tim Berners-Lee, an advisor to the Prime Minister. However, the proposals are coming under fire from union leaders who complain that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data. 'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader."

  

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• Mozilla Labs To Bring Address Book To Firefox (Slashdot)
  suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. ... After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form. ... To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification."

  

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• 5 Reasons Tablets Suck, and You Won't Buy One (Slashdot)
  Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."

  

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• Google Offers Migration Tool for Microsoft Exchange Data (Linux Today)
  Enterprise Mobile Today: "Google is ratcheting up its efforts to woo Microsoft customers with what it says is a simple, four-step migration process to its cloud-based suite of applications."
• Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques? (Slashdot)
  NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know if there good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."

  

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• Linux 2.6.34-rc2 Kernel Released (Phoronix)
  Some 18 hours ago the Linux 2.6.34-rc2 version was tagged and is now available, but oddly we have yet to come across a kernel release announcement from Linus Torvalds. However, for those interested in the Linux 2.6.34-rc2 change-log is available...

  
  

  
• Sci-Fi Writer Peter Watts Convicted of Assault (Slashdot)
  SJrX writes "CBC news is reporting that Peter Watts has indeed been convicted of Assaulting border guards, (discussed here). He will be sentenced April 26th."

  

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