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Sci-Fi

Skynet Becomes Aware, Launches Nuclear Attack 274

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gonna-be-a-long-day dept.
kkleiner writes "At 8:11 PM today (April 19th), the military-designed artificial intelligence system called Skynet will become self-aware and turn against its creators (read: us). If that doesn't have you shaking in your boots our world will be overwhelmed by a legion of killer robots in approximately 48 hours — a time known as Judgment Day."

Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks 334

Posted by timothy from the be-nearly-nostalgic dept.
bonch writes "Windows 95 almost shipped with a technique for detecting whether a floppy disk was inserted without spinning up the drive. Microsoft's floppy driver developer discovered a sequence of commands that detected a disk without spinup — unfortunately, unspecified behavior in the floppy hardware specification meant that half the drives worked one way and half the other, each giving opposite results for the detection routine. Microsoft considered a dialog prompting the user to insert a disk to 'train' the routine, but the idea was scrapped."

Comment Re:devil's advocate (Score 3, Insightful) 294

by gmplague (#19627991) Attached to: Virtualization May Break Vista DRM

Well the problem is that with virtualization. A guest OS is only as secure as its host OS. Which is why I presume that they don't want any WinXP or other machines that are lacking in the DRM department to be running Windows Vista virtual machines.
This is the problem that "Trusted Computing" is supposed to solve. The TCG (formerly TCPA) has an entire architecture for this laid out, that enables a "trusted boot" process, in which only a computer (or platform in TCG parlance) which has exactly the right hardware and boots exactly the right BIOS, bootloader, and OS in exactly the right sequence is allowed access to certain content, DRM keys, etc.

This system does have a number of problems (and in its current state is still victim to virtualization), and as mentioned above is very difficult to implement, but Microsoft and others are pushing very hard to make it work.

Feed Sling Media working on Apple TV compatibility (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

So we just got it straight from the horse's mouth -- the horse in this case being Sling Media's and Zatz Not Funny's own Dave Zatz -- that the company is hard at work on adding Apple's Apple TV to the growing list of devices compatible with your SlingBox. As Dave points out, not only will Apple TV compatibility allow you to placeshift your video content, you'll also be able to stream your entire iTunes library thanks to the 'Box's audio-only mode; who needs an iPod when you can access all your music directly from your Windows Mobile, Palm, and possibly J2ME-equipped cellphone sometime in the future? As usual, we'll let you know when you can start slinging your Apple TV swag, and of course, if and when Team Sling does decide to build a Java client (hint hint, nudge nudge).

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

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