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Comment Re:2D vs. 3D platforming - why not both? (Score 1) 249

by cleatsupkeep (#28080443) Attached to: What Made Those Old, 2D Platformers So Great?

Mario 64 - hardly a platformer? Excuse me? Did we play the same Mario 64?

Anyways, some of my favorite 3D platformers were the Jak and Daxter series and the Ratchet and Clank series, both a lot of fun - one of my favorites being Jak II, which was set in an immersive city with fun platforming levels and other challenges.

Comment Re:drawbacks of more RAM (Score 1) 345

by cleatsupkeep (#27941655) Attached to: IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years

Agreed, there are drawbacks, but he said he already has 9 gigs, so once you already have it, the drawbacks are now irrelevant. What I was arguing is that it's not bad behavior for a program to use more RAM if you have more. I'm not saying that is what Firefox is doing, but if you have 9 GB's, hell, Firefox can use a Gig if it will cause performance enhancements. The problem comes with you have a gig and a half and firefox is using a gig.

Additionally, 9 GB of RAM and keeping more things in RAM does not use more power than paging things to/from disk. Accessing memory from RAM is much cheaper (power and CPU wise) than getting it from disk, nullifying that argument.

Comment Re:Yeah, but I don't really like Firefox (Score 1) 345

by cleatsupkeep (#27939827) Attached to: IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years

I am calling bullshit on this. I love firefox but it's definitely a memory hog.7 tabs open and it's at 400mb. Granted I have 9GB of RAM but still.

Then who cares about 400 MB, when you have that kind of RAM to spare. The more data you have stored in RAM => the less you have to page to/from disk => better performance.
Security

Researchers Sniff Keystrokes From Thin Air, Wires 217

Posted by timothy from the making-a-tempest-of-themselves dept.
narramissic writes "Two separate research teams have found that the electromagnetic radiation that is generated when a computer keyboard is tapped is actually pretty easy to capture and decode. Using an oscilloscope and an inexpensive wireless antenna, the Ecole Polytechnique team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops — with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters. Using similar techniques, Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco picked out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables. On PS/2 keyboards, 'the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna,' Barisani said. That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building's power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about $500 worth of other equipment. Barisani and Bianco will present their findings at the CanSecWest hacking conference next week in Vancouver. The Ecole Polytechnique team has submitted their research for peer review and hopes to publish it very soon."
Cellphones

Is the Bar of Soap Tomorrow's Smarterphone? 141

Posted by timothy from the next-generation-uses-earwax-proximity dept.
Barence writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a gadget that knows whether you want to use it as a camera or smartphone, just by the way you're holding it. So, if you hold the device, dubbed the Bar of Soap, out in front of you like a camera it will automatically bring up an LCD viewfinder. However, if you then switch to holding it as you would a mobile phone, it will bring up a touchscreen keypad instead. The Bar of Soap utilises a three-axis accelerometer and 72 surface sensors to track the position of the user's fingers and its position."
Music

Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal 331

Posted by Soulskill from the seems-low dept.
Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"
Handhelds

Debian For Android Installer Released 160

Posted by timothy from the full-plethora dept.
dooberrymctavish writes "You can now download an installer and bootloader for getting Debian running on your Android (G1 at the moment) device; the whole install process will take you about 10 minutes, and leaves you with access to the full plethora of programs available in Debian and lets you continue using your phone as it was intended to be: as an Android device with all the capabilities thereof. Here's a look at it running.

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