It’s going on two weeks since the RadeonHD driver was made available, which is AMD’s sanctioned open-source driver for the Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) series (as well as future generations of AMD GPUs). In this time, we have seen some great progress made with this open-source driver and have a few additional remarks to share about its status and the first bits of this driver’s roadmap.

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I am fairly excited by several new books which arrived at my door last week. The first is Security Data Visualization by Greg Conti. I was pleased to see a book on visualization, but also a book in visualization in color! I expect to learn quite a b…

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I have managed to check in from my hotel room in Columbus, OH. If you’re not here, you’re missing out!

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Now people with limited or no vision can enjoy the multimedia content on the Internet with IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia. Instead of searching in the content for button that control the video, simply select predefined shortcut play button. Users can also adjust the volume of an individual source, and if a content creator wants to provide a voice narrative for a video, he can write a text script as a piece of metadata.

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Your website is up and running but can everyone access it?

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The creator of the Suse distribution says its Linux sales have grown by 243 percent, largely due to partnership with Microsoft.

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My friend Dave just built a machine to run CentOS. Last night he lamented that he didn’t like the video player. I cringed, “Is it well-known free software video player? I’ve not had much luck dealing with the developers and I recommend another well-known free software video player.”

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Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it. Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it’s alive, but close up it’s the walking dead.

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This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of her daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern.

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Do you find open source licenses a puzzle? Does reading stories about the legal side of open source give you the heebie-jeebies? If so, then we have the document for you. A couple of years ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I’d gone from writing about technology to the law. Lord knows I hadn’t planned on it. I’d come into technology journalism by being able to translate from techno-babble to English.

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I don’t really remeber when and where, but once I have read that GIMP isn’t suitable for pseudo 3D graphics. Nothing more fallible! I will try to prove it wrong.

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[ Translated & summarized by hkwint ]
Normally, an Acer customer who doesn’t wish to use Windows XP can only receive €30 as a reimbursement. However, Acer doesn’t reimburse pre-installed software other than Windows XP. Not willing to pay for any of the pre-installed software, an Acer client living near Paris went to the court to receive a reimbursement for all pre-installed software, and the judge decided in favour of the client.
The judge decided, Acer should reimburse all pre-installed software, including Windows XP, Norton Antivirus, MS Works, Power DVD, and NTI CD maker. This added up to a total of over €300, and the judge ordered Acer should pay a total sum of €500 to the client to include indemnification.
Another case in which the UFC Que Choiser pressed charges against HP is still waiting for a decision by the judge.

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Rubinius is important. A whole lot of folks agree. Ola Bini wrote up a whole post about how important he thinks it is. In it, he writes:

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InstallBuilder makes packaging cross-platform applications faster and easier than ever before.

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Yes I know, curiosity killed the cat, but I can’t help myself when it comes to packets. …(more)…

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2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Confucius asked Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "What is Tao?" Lao-tzu opened his mouth but said nothing. Confucius left with a smile, but his students were puzzled. Confucius explained, "Lao-tzu…

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Filed under: cellphones hacks, handhelds hacks, misc hacks, wireless hacks

Figuring out the JTAG pinout on a device turns out to be the most time consuming hardware portion of many hacks. [hunz] started a project called JTAG Finder to automatically detect the JTAG pinouts on arbitrary devices using an 8bit AVR ATmega16/32L microcontroller. Check out the slides (PDF) from the talk as they break down how one finds JTAG ports on an arbitrary device, with or without a pinout detection tool. [hunz] is looking for people to pick up the project where he left off.

Once you determine the correct pinout, you will need a JTAG cable: there are two main types, buffered and unbuffered, both of which I have soldered up and tested from these circuit diagrams (image of completed buffered cable here). The software most hardware people use today are the openwince JTAG Tools. To get the JTAG Tools to compile, grab the latest source directly from their CVS repository.

The last time we featured JTAG was with regards to Linksys devices, but the tools listed above can be applied to any device with JTAG.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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Filed under: cellphones hacks, handhelds hacks, misc hacks, wireless hacks

Figuring out the JTAG pinout on a device turns out to be the most time consuming hardware portion of many hacks. [hunz] started a project called JTAG Finder to automatically detect the JTAG pinouts on arbitrary devices using an 8bit AVR ATmega16/32L microcontroller. Check out the slides (PDF) from the talk as they break down how one finds JTAG ports on an arbitrary device, with or without a pinout detection tool. [hunz] is looking for people to pick up the project where he left off.

Once you determine the correct pinout, you will need a JTAG cable: there are two main types, buffered and unbuffered, both of which I have soldered up and tested from these circuit diagrams (image of completed buffered cable here). The software most hardware people use today are the openwince JTAG Tools. To get the JTAG Tools to compile, grab the latest source directly from their CVS repository.

The last time we featured JTAG was with regards to Linksys devices, but the tools listed above can be applied to any device with JTAG.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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How the pitch for cosmetic surgery co-opts feminism.

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Bush is fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. They fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq and cooked the books to keep us there.

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When 40 kids were asked to create a new town, was it possible for them to escape the model of cutthroat competition, class divisions and unrelenting consumerism?

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The new documentary TRADE shows the dark world of human trafficking, a crime that exists in our own backyards.

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Our discussion on pornography revisited. Second of two parts.

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Say goodbye to French wines, baseball and the Great Barrier Reef. Say hello to massive amounts of mosquitoes, the northwest passage and hurricanes.

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Say goodbye to French wines, baseball and the Great Barrier Reef. Say hello to massive amounts of mosquitoes, the northwest passage and hurricanes.

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How the pitch for cosmetic surgery co-opts feminism.

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