An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the excitement over Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU, there is still a distinct lack of DirectX 11 games on the market. This article points out that while the PC has returned to favor as a gaming platform, consoles are still the target for most developers, and still provide the major limitations on the technological sophistication of game graphics. Inside the Xbox 360 sits an ATI Xenos GPU, a DirectX 9c-based chip that bears similarity to the Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards (cards whose age means that they aren't even officially supported in Windows 7). Therein lies the rub. With the majority of PC games now starting life as console titles, games are still targeted at five-year-old DirectX 9 hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Art3x writes "When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "In the US alone, more than 8 million smart meters, designed to help deliver electricity more efficiently and to measure power consumption in real time, have been deployed by electric utilities and nearly 60 million should be in place by 2020. Now the Associated Press reports that smart meters have security flaws that could let hackers tamper with the power grid, opening the door for attackers to jack up strangers' power bills, remotely turn someone else's power on and off, or even allow attackers to get into the utilities' computer networks to steal data or stage bigger attacks on the grid. Attacks could be pulled off by stealing meters — which can be situated outside of a home — and reprogramming them, or an attacker could sit near a home or business and wirelessly hack the meter from a laptop, according to Joshua Wright, a senior security analyst with InGuardians Inc, a vendor-independent consultant that performs penetration tests and security risk assessments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes "After a networking error first reported on Wednesday last week caused computers in Chile and the US to come under the control of a system that censors the Internet in China, the 'root DNS server associated with the networking problems has been disconnected from the Internet,' writes Robert McMillan. The server's operator, Netnod, has 'withdrawn route announcements' made by the server, according to company CEO Kurt Lindqvist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krou writes "The BBC covered the most recent Newcastle Maker Faire, an event which Slashdot first covered last year. From racing power tools, to making music using electric sparks, or a robot that solves the Rubik's Cube in 20 seconds, makers, crafters and hackers were out in force. YouTube has a selection of videos available, and there are some pics on Flickr. And, while it may not be a hover board, there was a self-balancing skateboard."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1sockchuck writes "Happy Feet animator Dr. D Studios has packed a large amount of supercomputing power into a smaller package in its new render farm in Sydney, Australia. The digital production shop has consolidated the 150 blade chassis used in the 2007 dancing penguin feature into just 24 chassis, entirely housed in a hot-aisle containment pod. The Dr. D render farm has moved from its previous home at Equinix to the E3 Pegasus data center in Sydney. ITNews has a video and photos of the E3 facility."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jonklinger writes "The Israeli Supreme Court ruled this week that there is no civil procedure to reveal the identity of users behind an IP address, and that until such procedure shall be legislated, all internet postings, even tortious, may remain anonymous. The 69-page decision acknowledges the right to privacy and makes internet anonymity de facto a constitutional right in Israel. Justice Rivlin noted that revealing a person behind an IP address is 'an attempt to harness, prior to a legal proceeding, the justice system and a third party in order to conduct an inquiry which will lead to the revealing of a person committing a tort so that a civil suit could be filed against him.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tazzbit writes "The storage vendors have been crowing about data deduplication technology for some time now, but a new open source project, Opendedup, brings it to Linux and its hypervisors — KVM, Xen and VMware. The new deduplication-based file system called SDFS (GPL v2) is scalable to eight petabytes of capacity with 256 storage engines, which can each store up to 32TB of deduplicated data. Each volume can be up to 8 exabytes and the number of files is limited by the underlying file system. Opendedup runs in user space, making it platform independent, easier to scale and cluster, and it can integrate with other user space services like Amazon S3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When developing a mobile app, be it for the iPhone, an Andriod phone or a Blackberry, having dynamic data sprinkled in the app is important. DogParkUSA.com has recently sponsored the Dog Park Finder iPhone app and they wanted a thumbnail photo in each dog park listing.

One key is that if a park gets its first photo, or a better photo, the editors wanted to be able to promote the photos to the top of the photo page, and to have it show up as the thumbnail in the iPhone app. To do this without updating the app, we used a static URL that points to a View, which displays a Imagecached image.

Imagecache was used to exactly size photos to fit in the frame used in the app, while Views allows us to have a static URL, even though the photo displayed can be changed by the editors (by using the Sticky flag). This flexibility is key to pushing the photos they select into the app without an app update.

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I promised a while back that I would make the theme I use on this site available for free download.

Well, here it is. Called GerryBot, it's  a very minimalist one-column Drupal 6 theme. The original concept behind this theme was to have as little as possible on the page to distract from the content. Some of the features are:

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DISCLAIMER:
I DO NOT GET ANYTHING FOR MENTIONING THIS WEBINAR.
I BELIEVE THERE IS VALUE IN USING THE PRODUCT, THERE IS A FREE VERSION, AND I LIKE IT!

THAT SAID...
There are a number of tedious tasks when working in web development. Sometimes I get an idea, or want to experiment with something, and I have to take the time to set-up the site, configure the details, ect.... Now, I use WebEnabled, start up an instance of Drupal, use drush to get the modules I need... then start tinkering.

I noticed today that one of my sites returned 403 Access denied on various pages with URLs like format/<foo>, although it was an alias for a taxonomy/term/<tid> taxonomy path which was actually available when not aliased. What could be going on ?

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CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This short video shows you how to create a cron job using the Dreamhost web panel that will allow you to execute cron on a Drupal site. As I have noted previously execution of the cron file is an important task for any Drupal site. Many modules rely on cron for periodic processing of data including the core search and aggregator modules. Running cron also prompts the system to check for module updates. 

Here's what I entered in the video. Be sure to replace the url with url of your site. wget -qO /dev/null http://yoursite.com/cron.php

This video is one in a series of videos I created called Getting The Most Out Of Dreamhost. If you're a current Dreamhost customer you probably already know how to do things like set up a domain or create a MySQL database so it may not be relevant to you. If you're considering Dreamhost I think the series offers a very good preview of how the web panel functions make it easy to launch new Drupal sites. There's also a discount code (LEARNDRUPAL2010) on that page that will save you $50 on a new Dreamhost web hosting account.

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krou writes "A team from Surrey Space Centre has developed a device called a CubeSail, designed to be attached to satellites and rocket stages in order to drag space debris from orbit. CubeSail is a nanosatellite, weighing 3kg (6.6lb), and measures 10cm x 10cm x 30cm. Within its frame is a polymer sheet that unfurls itself once in space. 'The simple deployment mechanism features four metal strips that are wound under tension and will snap into a straight line when let go, pulling the sheet flat in the process.' The overall idea is that 'Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft's low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull the object out of the sky much faster than is normal.' Sir Martin Sweeting, the chairman of SSTL, who supported the research, said, 'We would be looking to put it on our own satellites and to put it on other people's spacecraft as well. We want this to be a standard, essential bolt-on item for a spacecraft; and that's why it's very important to make it small, because if it's too big it will interfere with the rest of the spacecraft.' The team is also hoping that CubeSail can act as a propulsion system, using 'solar sailing' to help satellites keep their orbits more efficiently."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People often want to create a backup copy of their site database and give it to someone else to create an environment similar to the live environment for testing or development. However, doing so exposes all of your site data being leaked if that backup copy is ever placed on a CD that gets lost or a harddrive which is not destroyed at the end of its life or a laptop which is stolen.

I blogged about one solution to this problem earlier with using Virtualbox and an encrypted disk image on Mac for easier and more secure development. However, another simple solution exists: munge the data.

Sanitizing a Drupal database export

The basic idea of this strategy is five easy steps:

1. Export your database
2. Import it into a new temporary place
3. Overwrite sensitive information with dummy data
4. Export from the temporary place
5. Share this new export

-- CAUTION: DO NOT RUN THIS ON DATABASE WHERE YOU CARE ABOUT THE INFORMATION!!!

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theodp writes "New York City is reportedly paying 230 consultants an average annual salary of $400K for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission that the computerized timekeeping and payroll system — dubbed CityTime — is 'a disaster.' Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600K annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000. The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500K a year. Some of the consultants have been working at these rates for as long as a decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users. From fake 4G salespitches, to mobile payment systems that hide text-messaging payment confirmation fees, to the inevitability of tier pricing for mobile data usage, no facet of smartphone use is beyond providers' latest profit-engineering push. Even IT's concerns over the invasion of mobile devices at their companies has become 'a great excuse to sell warmed-over management tools to fearful IT and security execs.' And make no mistake, mea culpas, like AT&T admitting to falling short on relieving 3G congestion, will result in additional opportunities to pad providers' bottom lines by, say, buying a $150 femtocell from AT&T to help AT&T 'solve' its problem. 'Of course, in typical Big Brother fashion, [AT&T] told the US government to stay out of wireless — meaning don't regulate prices or impose Net neutrality — while also asking the government for more spectrum. You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services but bad when it tries to impose regulation to prevent abusive behavior: doublethink ungood.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Introductory Seminar

The Drupal Intro Seminar is the best way to - in a single day - get your feet wet with Drupal. From the basic concepts and terminology to site building strategies, we'll begin to get you "thinking Drupal". If you're just beginning with Drupal or are having a hard time making heads or tails of the documentation, join us for this day and make sure you can get the most out of a week at DrupalCon!

» DrupalCon San Francisco - April 18th, 2010

Hands-On Training

Drupal Theming focuses on the look and feel of a Drupal site. We look at all of the tools available to override the default output and make Drupal beautiful. (Yes! It can be beautiful.) In several cases there can be more than one way to accomplish a task and we will provide guidelines and tools for making themes that stand up over time. Attendees of this course should be familiar with HTML and CSS (some PHP knowledge is also recommended for advanced topics).

» DrupalCon San Francisco - April 18th, 2010