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Android

OUYA Android Game Console Available In June 196

Posted by Soulskill from the just-in-time-for-national-adopt-a-cat-month dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ reports that OUYA, the $100 Android-based gaming console, will reach retail availability in June. The makers have partnered with Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target for distributing the devices. The console will come with a controller (which has the traditional thumbsticks, D-pad, buttons, and triggers as well as a built-in touchpad), and additional controllers will be sold for $50. OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman said, 'For the last year or two years all we've been hearing is that the consoles are dead. The reason is there isn't new, innovative intellectual property. It's expensive to develop on it. You're seeing a major shift of games being developed on the television. Our viewpoint has always been that console gaming isn't dead, the way we think about it hasn't changed. We're bringing the best screen and the best device to interact with that by creating a platform that is open.' There was a recent 'Game Jam' to create game prototypes for the console; you can browse the 166 entries."
Microsoft

Life After MS-DOS: FreeDOS Keeps On Kicking 255

Posted by Soulskill from the the-nineties-never-left dept.
angry tapir writes "FreeDOS — the drop-in, open source replacement for MS-DOS — was started after Microsoft announced that starting from Windows 95, DOS would play a background role at best for users. Almost two decades later, FreeDOS has survived and, as its creator explains in this interview, is still being actively developed, despite achieving its initial aim of an MS-DOS compatible OS, which quite frankly is somewhat amazing."
AMD

AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver 117

Posted by Soulskill from the getting-out-ahead-of-the-game dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The hardware hasn't been released yet, but AMD has made available early open-source Linux GPU driver patches for supporting the future Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards. At this time the Radeon HD 8800 'Oland' series is supported with the Mesa, DRM, X.Org, and kernel modifications. From the driver perspective, not many modifications are needed to build upon the Radeon HD 7000 series support."
Media

Software That Flagged HBO.com For Piracy Will Power U.S. 'Six Strikes' System 292

Posted by Soulskill from the raise-your-hand-if-you're-at-all-surprised dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A copyright monitoring program called MarkMonitor mistakenly flagged HBO.com for pirating its own shows, and sent automatic DMCA takedown notices to the network. It's a funny story, until you realize that MarkMonitor is the same software that will power the U.S. Copyright Alerts System (a.k.a. "Six Strikes"), due to be rolled out by the five largest U.S. ISPs sometime in the next month."
Businesses

Dell Going Private In $24.4 Billion Agreement 217

Posted by timothy from the next-month-back-in-the-old-dorm-room dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dell is going private again, as the result of a $24.4 billion deal involving private-equity investors and Microsoft. The deal will close before the end of the second quarter of Dell's fiscal 2014, according to Reuters. Dell founder and namesake Michael Dell, who owns roughly 14 percent of the company's common shares, will continue to lead the newly privatized venture as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He will contribute his existing shares to the new company, on top of a 'substantial' additional cash investment. As with other hardware manufacturers in the space, Dell faces the specter of a softening PC market. And while Dell has made significant efforts to penetrate other markets—including the launch of a private cloud architecture based on the open-source OpenStack—that weakness has affected its bottom line: for its fiscal 2013 third quarter, the company reported an 11 percent decrease in revenue from the previous year; while it enjoyed an increase in revenue from its servers and services businesses, revenue from its Consumer division dipped 23 percent. Its Large Enterprise, Small and Medium Business, and Public revenue also declined." Another take at the New York Times.
The Military

Leaked: Obama's Rules For Assassinating American Citizens 800

Posted by timothy from the how-much-different-were-the-previous-tenants'-rules? dept.
cathyreisenwitz writes "For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama's targeted killing program. While the White House continues to deny that such memos exist, NBC is reporting that it has acquired the next best thing: A secretish 16-page white paper from the Department of Justice that was provided to select members of the Senate last June." Spencer Ackerman at Wired says the leaked rules "[trump] traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process" by redefining the concept of "imminence."
Australia

Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work 84

Posted by timothy from the locking-doorknobs-on-revolving-doors dept.
New submitter oztechmuse writes "Australian Telco Telstra is planning to trial shaping some BitTorrent traffic during peak hours. Like all other telcos worldwide, they are facing increasing traffic with a long tail of users: 20% of users consume 80% of bandwidth. The problem is, telcos in Australia are already shaping BitTorrent traffic as a study by Measurement Lab has shown and traffic use continues to increase. Also, the 20% of broadband users consuming the most content will just find a different way of accessing the content and so overall traffic is unlikely to be reduced."
Books

Amazon Patents 'Maintaining Scarcity' of Goods 240

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the moldy-bits dept.
theodp writes "Back in Biblical times, creating abundance was considered innovative. That was then. Last Tuesday, GeekWire reports, the USPTO awarded Amazon.com a broad patent on reselling and lending 'used' digital goods for an invention that Amazon boasts can be used to 'maintain scarcity' of digital objects, including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else."
The Courts

Piriform Asks BleachBit To Remove Winapp2.ini Importer 305

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the you-always-need-a-lawyer dept.
ahziem writes "As author of the BleachBit system cleaner, I received a polite but firm request from Piriform, makers of the similar application CCleaner, to remove a two-year-old feature from BleachBit that allows individual BleachBit users to import winapp2.ini data files created by the community that define which files to delete for applications. Does Piriform's request have merit? Do I need a lawyer? What is a good response to avoid any ugly situation?"
Canada

Royal Canadian Air Force Sees More Sims In the Future of Fighter Pilot Training 125

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the in-case-of-cyber-war dept.
dakohli writes "Currently, Canadian Fighter Pilots spend about 20% of their 'stick' time in Simulators. RCAF General Blondin states that this will rise to 50/50 in the future. The article goes on to state that the U.S. Army is moving in this direction, although the U.S. Air Force is a little more skeptical. Aircraft are expensive to fly, and if the fidelity of a simulator is good enough then perhaps real pilots will spend even less time actually in the air. Slashdotters, do you think that this will actually make recruiting pilots more difficult, or is it a sign of the things to come beyond Military Aviation?"
Software

Untethered iOS 6.1 evasi0n Jailbreak Arrives For iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch 112

Posted by Soulskill from the freeing-software dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The jailbreak tool evasi0n for iOS 6.x, meaning currently iOS 6.0 and iOS 6.1, has finally been released. It can perform an untethered jailbreak of the iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, and iPod touch running either of those two mobile operating systems. Most of Apple’s latest devices can run iOS 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, and 6.1: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2, third-generation iPad, fourth-generation iPad, iPad mini, fourth-generation iPod touch, and fifth-generation iPod touch. Unlike previous jailbreak tools, this one should work on all of them as long as they have been updated to iOS 6.x. The tool won’t work for other Apple devices. Aside from your iOS 6.x device and the tool on your computer, you’ll also need a USB cable to connect the two. Backup first to ensure you won’t lose any data if something goes wrong, disable the lock passcode, and “be patient while the jailbreaking process is running.” That means don’t start iTunes or Xcode while it’s running; in fact, the creators recommend that you don’t touch the computer until the process is complete.."
Firefox

Firefox and Chrome Can Talk To Each Other 121

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-nice-with-others dept.
The Firefox and Chrome teams have announced that their respective browsers can now communicate with each other via WebRTC for the purpose of audio and video communication without needing a third-party plugin. WebRTC is a new set of technologies that brings clear crisp voice, sharp high-definition (HD) video and low-delay communication to the web browser. From the very beginning, this joint WebRTC effort was embraced by the open web community, including engineers from the Chrome and Firefox teams. The common goal was to help developers offer rich, secure communications, integrated directly into their web applications. In order to succeed, a web-based communications platform needs to work across browsers. Thanks to the work and participation of the W3C and IETF communities in developing the platform, Chrome and Firefox can now communicate by using standard technologies such as the Opus and VP8 codecs for audio and video, DTLS-SRTP for encryption, and ICE for networking. To try this yourself, you’ll need desktop Chrome 25 Beta and Firefox Nightly for Desktop. In Firefox, you'll need to go to about:config and set the media.peerconnection.enabled pref to "true." Then head over to the WebRTC demo site and start calling."
GNOME

Gnome Goes JavaScript 387

Posted by timothy from the hola-world dept.
mikejuk writes "Much to most programmers' shock and dismay Gnome has made JavaScript its main language for apps. It will still support other languages and it still supports C for libraries, but for apps it is JavaScript that rules. JavaScript seems to be a good choice for Gnome 3, as the shell UI is written in the language. It is also consistent with the use of JavaScript in WinRT, Chrome Apps, and FirefoxOS apps, and generally the rise of web apps. As you might expect, the initial reactions are of horror at the idea that JavaScript has been selected rather than the favorite language of the commenter. There is a great deal of ignorance about (and prejudice against) JavaScript, which is often regarded as an incomplete toy language rather than the elegant and sparse language that it actually is."
The Internet

FCC Proposal Would Cover the US With Public Wi-Fi 299

Posted by timothy from the beggar-thy-neighbor dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public. The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing 'super wi-fi,' as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks – especially light users and the poor – could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether."
United Kingdom

DNA Confirms Parking Lot Remains Belong To King Richard III 212

Posted by timothy from the it's-just-like-poltergeist-for-drivers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It turns out that the remains found in a parking lot in Leicester, England belong to none other than King Richard III, one of the most reviled monarchs of English history. Scientists announced on Monday that they were able to confirm the identity of the skeleton through DNA testing."
Crime

Researchers Demo Hack Against African Micro-Finance Accounts 52

Posted by timothy from the and-such-small-portions dept.
mask.of.sanity writes "Security researchers have shown how to raid Africa micro-finance bank accounts en masse using fake audio one time passwords. The banks use audio one-time passwords to authenticate users logging into their accounts, but failed to implement properly security controls across numerous systems. Crucially, the researchers did not reveal how they cracked the encryption in order to protect users."
Books

Startup Offers Pay-Per-Page E-Books 81

Posted by timothy from the neal-stephenson-costs-more-than-cocaine dept.
judgecorp writes "TotalBoox, a startup from Tel Aviv, plans to sell pay-as-you-read eBooks, charging for each page read. 'We are trying to rid the world from outdated, expensive ritual of buying a book before you read it,' says founder ~Yoarv Lorch, saying that readers can save money and move on if they start a best-seller on the spur of the moment and it turns out to be a turkey. But what about slow-burning classics that you have to 'get into'? What about reference books? And all the bits of a reference book that you don't actually need? The company has a beta app on Google Play for Android tablets."
Australia

Australian Economists Predictions No Better Than Flipping a Coin 290

Posted by samzenpus from the best-guess dept.
First time accepted submitter ras writes "The Reserve Bank of Australia did some investigation into the accuracy of their economic predictions — the ones they use to run the country — with less than flattering results. '70 per cent of the RBA's forecasts for underlying inflation for the year ahead were close to the mark, but its predictions of economic growth were less accurate, and its unemployment rate estimates no better than [chance] ... The Reserve Bank employs numbers of people on very high pay and what they're admitting now is that their — all of this so-called science — has produced nothing more than what a roll of the dice could produce.'"
Earth

NASA Planes Fly Over Bay Area To Measure Air Pollution Levels 57

Posted by samzenpus from the air-up-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is trying to measure the air pollution by flying a plane at various altitudes over the bay area. The tests are a part of a larger effort led by the DISCOVER-AQ campaign — a multi-year program launched across the United States in 2011 by NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. DISCOVER-AQ stands for Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality. NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is the lead center for the mission."
Sony

Sony To Make Its Last MiniDisc System Next Month 263

Posted by samzenpus from the way-of-the-eight-track dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Sony, the creators of the MiniDisc audio format, are to deliver their last MiniDisc stereo system in March. Launched over 20 years ago in late 1992 as a would-be successor to the original audio cassette, MiniDisc outlasted Philips' rival Digital Compact Cassette format, but never enjoyed major success outside Japan. Other manufacturers will continue making MiniDisc players, but this is a sign that — over ten years after the first iPod — the MiniDisc now belongs to a bygone era."

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