Comment Re:The Register... (Score 1) 181
"But fair play to The Register, I frankly thought it was dead already, they've done well to keep such a useless publication going even this long."
Oh the irony posting this on Slashdot!
Comment Re: Upstart? Scarebus? Comparison to Concorde? (Score 2) 345
As someone who is English I understand that Slashdot is US centric at times....however this is an article in a UK publication by a UK author from a UK perceptive. I know no one RTFA to still.
Comment DNS hack, some ok some down still, (Score 3, Informative) 192
Using Just-Ping to check from 50+ locations around the world only 5% have what is traditionally the correct IP (212.100.234.54 according to Netcraft) or so have the current IP most say the DNS is down.
http://just-ping.com/index.php?vh=www.theregister.co.uk&c=&s=ping!
I forced an update with Netcraft it now has a record of the another IP 68.68.20.116 with different server headers which I presume is the broken site.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.theregister.co.uk
The hackers could have done more damage if they also increased the TTL of the domains they poisoned. 24 hours seems to be the time atm.
Banks Faulted For Fake Antivirus Scourge 117
krebsonsecurity writes "Merchant banks that process credit card payments for fake antivirus or 'scareware' exhibit a distinctive pattern of card processing that could be used by Visa and MasterCard to weed out the rogue processors, according to a new study by the University of California, Santa Barbara. From the study: 'The UCSB team found that the fake AV operations sought to maximize profits by altering their refunds according to the chargebacks reported against them, and by refunding just enough to remain below a payment processor's chargeback limits. Whenever the rate of chargebacks increased, the miscreants would begin issuing more refunds. When the rate of chargebacks subsided, the miscreants would again withhold refunds.' The study also highlights how few customers ever request a refund, and how affiliates pushing this junk software made more than $133 million."
Submission + - Skype Crashes and Burns in Worldwide Outage (thinq.co.uk) 1
Stoobalou writes: VoIP and instant messaging service Skype has disappeared from the Internet, nary a fortnight after Microsoft snaffled up the outfit in an overpriced $8.5 billion deal.
Comment Fake but some fact behind it?! (Score 1) 104
Obviously you say April Fools however the best jokes are based on some fact and the fact is I know of at least 2 senior and talented devs that worked on MS Kinect project and around release time jumped ship to Google.
eg My old friend Ryan Geiss is one who co-wrote the skeletal tracking for Kinect is now at google.
http://www.geisswerks.com/about_natal.html
Split Screen Co-op Is Dying 362
kube00 writes "Split-screen co-op and local multiplayer are becoming things of the past. What happened to cramming a bunch of gamers into a room with two TVs and doing a system link match in Halo? Where have the all-night GoldenEye matches gone? Like the arcades of gamers' youth, the local multiplayer and co-op bonding experience has been replaced with individual gamers and a network."
Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention 79
donniebaseball23 writes "Reporting on new research from WIREs Cognitive Science, IndustryGamers writes: 'Action games like Call of Duty and Halo can enhance visual attention, the ability that helps us focus on relevant visual information. The mental mechanism allows people to select pertinent visual information and ignore irrelevant information. It suggests that action titles can be used to augment military training, educational tools, and correct visual deficits.' Shawn Green, co-author of the study, commented, 'At the core of these action video game-induced improvements appears to be a remarkable enhancement in the ability to flexibly and precisely control attention, a finding that could have a variety of real-world applications. For example, those in professions that demand "super-normal" visual attention, such as fighter pilots, would benefit enormously from enhanced visual attention, as their performance and lives depend on their ability to react quickly and accurately to primarily visual information."
Epic Games Predicts Console, Mobile Convergence 104
An anonymous reader writes "After taking the stage at the Apple iPhone event in September, game developer Epic Games has finally revealed more about its plan to release Unreal Engine for the iOS devices. UE3 is incredibly popular on consoles, and its free UDK has been really great for us modders. In this new interview, engine boss Mark Rein says the developer envisions a future where all game devices are handhelds, with high-end processors inside: 'It feels like there's a great opportunity for game consoles to cease to be something you plug into the wall and rather become something you take with you. Of course it will be more than just your game console; you can have your productivity apps, your documents, and your media collections on it as well.'"
Comment Re:HTML5 is not a standard yet - it is in dev (Score 3, Insightful) 108
So they are apps designed for a browser platform specfic implementation of a dev version of HTML5. Hardly standards like what was implied........
Comment HTML5 is not a standard yet - it is in dev (Score 1) 108
"let them access sites and Web applications that rely on standards that IE doesn't support, primarily HTML5."
What does this mean? HTML5 is still in dev. Are there really sites or app that *rely* on it?
The only things that browsers can support is the latest betas of this of HTML5.
MS basing is one thing about standards but is it is another to quote standards that do not exist yet.........
Comment Not really increasing compared to domain names (Score 4, Informative) 183
According to netcraft in the last year there has been about 40% increase in fully qualified domain names out there (includes subdomains not just top level so not a perfect stat but a good indication)
June 2008 172,338,726 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/06/index.html)
June 2009 238,027,855 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_server_survey.html)
So really you could say that cyber squatting is decreasing relative to the increase in domain names........
Not really increasing compared to domain names
Panasonic Begins To Lock Out 3d-Party Camera Batteries 450
OhMyBattery writes "The latest firmware updated for Panasonic digital cameras contains one single improvement: it locks out the ability to use 'non-genuine Panasonic' batteries. It does so for safety reasons, it says. It seems to indicate that this is going to be the norm for all new Panasonic digital cameras. From the release: 'Panasonic Digital Still Cameras now include a technology that can identify a genuine Panasonic battery. For the protection of our customers Panasonic developed this technology after it was discovered that some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.' The firmware warning is quite clear as to what it does: 'After this firmware update your Panasonic Digital Camera cannot be operated by 3rd party batteries (non genuine Panasonic batteries).'"
On the Feasibility of Single-Server MMOs 316
GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.
Comment Re:Corporate users (Score 1) 409
I agree, many corps have a similar attitude and therefore the stats are become more meaningless. There area a lot of corp workers that use older browsers and cannot/will not upgrade. What use is a message on Google for those people.
I atm work for Vodafone running their intranet. The browser policy is IE6.
Also how are they a browser can be out of date and unpatched and there is no way for the website to know this. They can only look at the user agent string to find this out and that will only tell you what browser version they are using not the patch level of it in say IE. It will just say 5.5, 6 or 7 or 8, etc.
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