Month: March 2010

Mozilla confirms 0-day Firefox flaw

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via bit-tech.net]

The Mozilla Foundation has confirmed the existence of a critical zero-day vulnerability in its popular Firefox web-browser – but says a fix won’t arrive before the end of the month.

Posting on its official security blog, the Foundation confirmed a vulnerability which it has “determined to be critical and [which] could result in remote code execution by an attacker.”

The good news? The Foundation has already developed a fix, which is currently undergoing quality assurance testing prior to a general roll-out. The bad news? That roll-out isn’t due for at least a week, potentially leaving Firefox users vulnerable to attack.

Read the full post

Zodiacal Light Vs. Milky Way

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via APOD]

Ghostly Zodiacal light, featured near the center of this remarkable panorama, is produced as sunlight is scattered by dust in the Solar System’s ecliptic plane.

In the weeks surrounding the March equinox (today at 1732 UT) Zodiacal light is more prominent after sunset in the northern hemisphere, and before sunrise in the south, when the ecliptic makes a steep angle with the horizon.

In the picture, the narrow triangle of Zodiacal light extends above the western horizon and seems to end at the lovely Pleiades star cluster. Arcing above the Pleiades are stars and nebulae along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Read the full post

Switzerland to ban violent games?

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via bit-tech.net]

The Swiss parliament has reportedly passed a law to ban any violent videogames from going on sale within the country, with further proposals in the pipeline which could see all first-person shooters for adults being banned specifically.

Specifically the law calls for a ban on any videogame which “requires cruel acts of violence against humans and human-like creatures for in-game success“, according to GI.biz.

The new law was initially put forward last month and has just been passed into law, though the government is still in the process of deciding the specifics of how the law will operate and what exactly will and won’t be allowed. You’d think they’d establish that before that passed the motion though…

Read the full post

The Nearby Milky Way in Cold Dust

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via APOD]

What shapes the remarkable dust tapestry of the nearby Milky Way Galaxy? No one knows for sure. The intricate structures, shown above, were resolved in new detail recently in a wide region of the sky imaged in far infrared light by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.

The above image is a digital fusion of three infrared colors: two taken at high resolution by Planck, while the other is an older image taken by the now defunct IRAS satellite. At these colors, the sky is dominated by the faint glow of very cold gas within only 500 light years of Earth.

Read the full post

The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’

Posted by Nexus – 20/03/2010

[via datacenterknowledge.com]

A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar." (Photo: Foundry Networks Inc.)

It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar. Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.

Read the full post

HP flexible display unfurled on video

Posted by Nexus – 20/03/2010

[via engadget.com]

HP has been working on flexible displays for some time now, but it looks like things are starting to get a bit more real. Not real as in actual products, mind you — but real like a big, flexible display spotting out in the wild.

Doing the honors for this one is Hardware.info, which not only snapped shot above, but captured some of the action on video (head on past the break for that). Interestingly, HP doesn’t actually see these panels being used in truly flexible or rollable displays — the material itself would only survive being rolled up about a half dozen times — but instead sees them mostly being used to make displays thinner and lighter.

Read the full post

NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance

Posted by Nexus – 20/03/2010

[via techpowerup.com]

A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.

Read the full post

Retired general: Gays made Dutch weak in Bosnia

Posted by Nexus – 19/03/2010

[via seattletimes.nwsource.com]

Retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan

A retired U.S. general says Dutch troops failed to defend against the 1995 genocide in the Bosnian war because the army was weakened, partly because it included openly gay soldiers.

The comment by John Sheehan, a former NATO commander who retired from the military in 1997, shocked some at a Senate Armed Services Committee, where Sheehan spoke in opposition to a proposal to allow gays to serve openly in the U.S. military. Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin told Sheehan he was “totally off-target.”

Read the full post

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

Posted by Nexus – 19/03/2010

[via theregister.co.uk]

Dell has told a Linux-loving Reg reader that he can’t receive a refund on the copy of Windows 7 that shipped with his new Dell netbook because it was bundled with the machine for “free”.

In October, another Reg reader succeeded in gaining a $115 (£70.34) refund from the computer maker after he rejected the licence for Microsoft’s OS and installed Linux instead. Microsoft’s EULA, you see, provides for such a refund.

“By using the software, you accept these terms,” it reads. “If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit.”

Read the full post

Secrets of Antarctica’s 15-Million Year-Old Lake

Posted by Nexus – 19/03/2010

[via dailygalaxy.com]

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

Lake Vostok is located beneath four kilometers of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 250 km long and 50 km wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

Read the full post