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Nintendo

Submission + - NESBot: Tool Assisted Speedrun on Real Hardware (instructables.com)

Submitted by Xistic
Xistic writes: For many years tool assisted speedruns (TAS) were purely theoretical and the domain of emulators. No longer! Using an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller to drive an actual Nintendo console, pjgat09 plays back prerecorded input to beat Super Mario Brothers in record time. The selection of possible games is limited. 'If the game relies on any uninitialized memory for randomness, or if it is heavily based on console timing, it may not work. In the case of Super Mario Bros however, as long as the button presses start play back at the right time, the movie will play back correctly.' The author includes complete instructions on how to setup the device.
Graphics

Submission + - MPEG continues with royalty-free MPEG video codec (robglidden.com)

Submitted by yuhong
yuhong writes: From the press release: "In recognition of the growing importance that the Internet plays in the generation and consumption of video content, MPEG intends to develop a new video compression standard in line with the expected usage models of the Internet. The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC “Type-1 licensing”, i.e. intended to be “royalty free”."
Media

Submission + - DailyMotion Now Streaming Live News (www.beet.tv)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Beet.TV reports that DailyMotion has begun streaming live news from Al Jazeera, BBC, and France 24 among others. They write, 'Paris-based Dailymotion, the world's second biggest online video site, has integrated with London-based live news portal Livestation to provide a number of live streaming television news networks including Al Jezeera, Bloomberg, the BBC, France 24 and sources from other nations as well as from oganizations including the United Nations and NASA.'
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft to work with windows phone 7Jailbreakers (osnews.com)

Submitted by markass530
markass530 writes: Microsoft had a sit down with the first people to jailbreak their windows phone 7. Seems like good progress was made. This seems like a good approach to me. It would be great if Sony, Apple, Microsoft, and several Android phone makers would implement a simple development switch in their phones — these would obviously void the warranty, but it would give hackers the opportunity to actually own their devices without fear of having to jailbreak all over again whenever an update arrives.
Science

Submission + - Sandia Helps Secure Kazakh Nuclear Material (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: One of the ongoing problems with unclear non-proliferation efforts is what to do with nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. A group from Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a project in Kazakhstan, and managed to take another step towards securing it.

A large cache of enriched nuclear fuel – some 13 metric tons — was stored in a nuclear reactor in the port city of Aktau, on the Caspian seacoast. The reactor was a Soviet-era fast breeder reactor, designed to make nuclear fuel for both weapons and power plants. The reactor, which started operations in 1973, also provided 135 megawatts of electricity, 9 million gallons of water per day and steam for hot water and heating for Aktau. It was shut down by the Kazakh government in 1999.

Getting the material out of a seaport was one way to make it harder to steal, Barber said. So the U.S. and Kazakh governments embarked on a project to move it to a guarded — and remote — facility in the interior.

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/111697/20110211/sandia-labs-team-secures-nuclear-material-in-kazakhstan.htm

Comment Re:$500,000 or $200,000,000 ?! Which is it ? (Score 5, Informative) 77

by NigelBeamenIII (#30341360) Attached to: Air Force Extends Plug-and-Play Spacecraft
It's a question of how government contracts are awarded. They typically will have at least two things for each contract: the amount of money on the contract and the contract ceiling. The amount on the contract is the amount the company actually has in their accounts to spend. the ceiling is more like a "credit limit" which says the maximum amount of money the AF *can* ever put on the contract. Hope that explanation helps some.
Government

Quebec Govt Sued For Ignoring Free Software 388

Posted by samzenpus from the what-about-the-cheap-stuff dept.
Mathieu Lutfy writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. ... Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.' The group also has a press release in English."
Businesses

Changing Customers Password Without Consent 435

Posted by samzenpus from the leave-my-words-alone dept.
risinganger writes "BBC News is reporting that a customer had his password changed without his knowledge. After some less than satisfactory service the customer in question changed his password to 'Llyods is pants.' At some point after that, a member of staff changed the password to 'no it's not.' Requests to change it back to 'Llyods is pants,' 'Barclays is better,' or 'censorship' were met with refusal. Personally I found the original change funny, like the customer did. After all, god forbid a sense of humour rears its ugly head in business. What isn't acceptable is the refusal to change it per the customer's requests after that."
Space

New Map From Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope 34

Posted by samzenpus from the the-incredible-telescope dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "NASA has received interesting results from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, originally known as GLAST, which has allowed them to create new map of the gamma-ray sky. The secret to its ability to resolve gamma-rays is that they use layers of tungsten interleaved with silicon detectors. When a gamma-ray strikes tungsten, it produces an electron/positron pair due to the photoelectric effect, which cascades as it goes through further layers of tungsten. Meanwhile, they record which silicon detectors had electrons or positrons pass through them to determine the direction of the source and they also record the total energy of the electron/positron pairs to calculate the wavelength of the gamma-ray using Planck's Law. The data gathered in just its first few hours of operation is reportedly comparable to the data from the Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope, which gathered data for nine years back in the 1990's and there are hopes that it could detect dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)."
Mozilla

Firefox 4 Will Push Edges of Browser Definition 501

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the all-kinds-of-fun-new-toys dept.
Chris Blanc writes "Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. 'Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he's cribbing from.'"
The Internet

Scientology's Credibility Questioned Over Video Channel 450

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the scientology-and-shady-almost-synonyms-these-days dept.
stonyandcher writes to share that the Church of Scientology has come under fire for some items on their recently launched video channel. Most notably, claims have been leveled that dignitaries in one of their videos were faked and at least one of the people featured in the video is claiming their statements were taken out of context.
Microsoft

Possible Manipulation of OOXML Process In Poland 94

Posted by kdawson from the politicizing-the-technical dept.
michuk writes "IBM's representative for KT182 (the committee empowered to vote on OOXML in Poland) accused the committee's chair of intentionally manipulating the process. A letter from the president of the body overseeing KT182, sent a month ago to the committee chair for distribution to all committee members, was never distributed. The letter recommended that, if consensus were not achieved on the OOXML vote, then Poland should abstain. This follows up my recent report on the OOXML process in Poland (also covered by Groklaw), it looks like things are going bad this time, at least as bad as in October." The EU is already investigating the Polish process based on complaints last fall. Is anyone tracking all of the allegations and investigations surrounding OOXML?
Microsoft

NVIDIA's Drivers Caused 28.8% Of Vista Crashes In 2007 344

Posted by Soulskill from the it-wasn't-me-it-was-the-one-armed-driver dept.
PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica: "NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."

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