July 29th, 2010
The latest hole in WiFi security is quite serious, but it's unlikely to cause widespread disruption in the corporate and government networks for which it would have the potential to cause the biggest headaches.
In fact, the exploit continues to demonstrate a lack of any effective method of cracking the WiFi Alliance WPA/WPA2 certified versions of IEEE encryption standards found in WiFi gear of the past seven years. Brute force and dictionary attacks against short passphrases used typically on home and small-business networks are still the only means of key recovery.
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July 29th, 2010
Mindteck, a company that offers embedded software development and consultancy services, has released power consumption data after testing sleep, idle, low-use, and high-use scenarios of various Windows PCs. The researchers also built a model to estimate cost savings (pictured above) by using a centralized power management policy. What really piqued our interest, though, was that Mindteck looked at the effect of processor chipset drivers on the power consumption (in watts) of Windows XP and Windows 7 with varying driver configurations and older hardware:
|
| Power consumption (Watts) |
|
| OS |
Windows XP |
Windows 7 |
Percent improvement |
| PC Configuration |
Idle |
Low |
High |
Idle |
Low |
High |
Idle |
Low |
High |
| P4 Updated Drivers |
64.2 |
69.7 |
89.8 |
57.3 |
66.1 |
79.4 |
10.75 |
5.16 | 11.58 |
| P4 Out-of-box |
64.2 |
68.7 |
106.2 |
57.3 |
66.1 |
79.4 |
10.75 |
3.78 |
25.24 |
| High-end Updated Drivers |
47.2 |
48.0 |
67.7 |
45.2 |
49.1 |
66.8 |
4.14 |
2.29 |
1.33 |
| High-end Out-of-box |
50.5 |
54.3 |
78.0 |
45.2 |
49.1 |
66.8 |
10.50 |
9.54 |
14.36 |
As you can see, the results favor Windows 7 in every single scenario. The out-of-box differences are particularly high. For Windows 7, the consumption levels are actually the same as with the updated drivers—this means that Windows 7 is taking care of the chipset drivers, even on older hardware. The same cannot be said for Windows XP, and even with updated drivers (obtained manually), it still performs worse than Windows 7.
The whitepaper actually focuses on explaining how to "maximize the impact of effective power management with Windows 7," but the comparison to Windows XP was included in the appendix. Mindteck Smart Energy analysts quantified power consumption on five basic hardware platforms: a high-end desktop such as those used in engineering design or media processing, both a business desktop and business laptop, a Pentium 4 class business desktop to investigate prior-generation hardware, and a netbook. If you've already rolled out Windows 7 in your company, or are planning to, the 11-page report should help your CIOs and IT managers alike learn about leveraging Windows 7 to implement a comprehensive power management strategy. Check it out at the link below.
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July 28th, 2010
Ars is on the ground at SIGGRAPH for the first time. Over the next couple of days, keep your eyes peeled for news from the world's largest conference on computer graphics and 3D.
NewTek software is at the conference showing off the newly announced LightWave 10. It's a bit light on the new, with the new viewport preview rendering, which offers realistic views of scenes and objects with interactive light, nodal shading, and scene set-up, really the only standout from the list.
There's also CG hardware real-time viewpoint shading and linear workflow support. Version 10 also adds support for the Autodesk Geometry Cache, COLLADA, FBX, and ZBrush interchange, along with handful of new real-time and game tools.
Although the inclusion of the renowned and speedy Bullet Physics is encouraging, the rest of the feature list reads like a padded résumé that isn’t going to help LightWave get out of the funk it's widely perceived to be in. While there are still many people who like the application, it has lost most of its relevance in film and television. NewTek has lost a lot of face after after key engineers defected and created Luxology, and its well-respected modeler, modo. At this point, NewTek needs to just release something to stay relevant. If the linear workflow hits the market by the end of the year, at least it will beat Autodesk’s Maya.
LightWave 10 will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2010 in both 32- and 64-bit versions for Windows and Mac OS. Suggested retail price is $1,495 and upgrades will be US$695.
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July 28th, 2010
On Tuesday, Toronto's Side Effects software announced the 11th release of its high-end animation package Houdini. If you clicked to read about Harry Houdini's 11th escape, we're sorry—Houdini is not the household name that Max and LightWave are, but it has become a staple of high-end 3D in film and increasingly in game production.
Houdini's specialty is procedural effects, and the crumbling buildings of Killzone 2 and Spiderman 3's Birth of Sandman sequence are a couple examples of the power of this program, out of the box. This isn't a program that relies on plug-ins to make it useful—but it's always demanded input via scripting and other building block schemes, which gives it a steep learning curve. Version 11 adds more turn-key elements like a simpler one-size-fits-all material model and built-in Voronoi mesh destruction.
The full feature list for version 11 includes
- User Interface
- New, bezier-style connectors in the network editors
- New tool palette in the network editor offers a gallery of nodes which can be dragged into the network.
- Seamless integration of particles into dynamics networks and dynamics into geometry networks. This makes it easier to focus simulations on particular networks instead of simulating everything at the same time.
- Enhancements to bundles to strengthen light-linking workflow
- Z-up support
- Vertex Normals
- Support for vertex normals in OpenGL
- Network Rendering
- Network-distributed IPR
- HQueue for Windows and Mac
- Gold release of Houdini Cloud rendering tools
- Volumes
- Support for multi-resolution volumes with merging, feathering and surfacing tools
- VEX Volume Procedural
- Volume Quality setting in viewport
- Camera frustum volumes with tapering values.
- Higher quality viewport visualization of volumes
- Texturing
- Support for Disney's "Ptex" format
- Point clouds
- New point cloud surfacer with adaptive controls (generates a better surface than the existing particle fluid surfacer; more applicable to games)
- New point cloud functions
- Fluids
- New Fluid Shelf tools—target smoke, source from surface, resize voxel grid
- SPH particle fluid solver up to twice as fast
- Ability to rotate voxel grid to create non axis-aligned fluid container
- Fur
- More shelf tools for hair grooming
- Control over guide hair distribution for faster interactivity while grooming
- Combing direction can now be controlled by skin shaders
- No need for rest attribute
- Distributed wire solver output node
- Cloth
- Support for cloth pinching and layering
- Direct support for non-stretchy cloth (stretch/shear/bend constraints)
- Ability to simulate 0D cloth particles and to attach 1D cloth strings to 2D cloth surfaces.
- Distributed cloth solver output node
- Crowd Control
- New CHOPS (foreach, iksolver, objectchain, transformchain, vector)—for crowds and more
- New Python module that lets developers easily embed C++ code into python code
At $6,695 for the Master version, Houdini 11 is priced well out of the reach of most consumers, but there is an Apprentice version that's available for free. Anyone looking for Hollywood-level animation software, who doesn't mind a watermark and resolution limit on their final renders, can get their feet wet.
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July 28th, 2010
The hacker believed responsible for the Mariposa botnet has been arrested in Slovenia.
Read More:
BBC
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July 25th, 2010
The C#, VB, C++ and F# Keybinding Cards are Now Available in Letter (8.5x11in) and A4 (210×297mm) Print-Ready Sizes.
Categories: MSDN, Syndicated |
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July 23rd, 2010
Four new extensions added to this popular set of power tools. Update includes tools options support, solution navigator, quick access, and auto brace completion.
Categories: MSDN, Syndicated |
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July 23rd, 2010
Four new extensions added to this popular set of power tools. Update includes tools options support, solution navigator, quick access, and auto brace completion.
Categories: MSDN, Syndicated |
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July 22nd, 2010
Demand for new PCs is on the upswing, and most new PCs sold run Windows. How will that impact Microsoft's earnings? Tune into our live coverage of Microsoft's fourth quarter FY 2010 earnings call, which will begin on July 22, 2010 at 2:30pm PDT/5:30pm EDT (see it in your timezone).
Sign up below to receive an e-mail as the event begins or simply bookmark this page and come back at the time above.
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July 21st, 2010
Prerelease testing is definitely the least glamorous part of software development, but the drudgery aspect isn't really the reason why cloud applications are commonly "load tested" for the first time when millions of users start hammering them simultaneously. No, the real problem is that existing tools aren't made to simulate millions of users simultaneously taking different paths through a cloud-hosted Web application. That's where a startup called Mu Dynamics comes in.
This past Monday, Mu Dynamics introduced Mu Studio Scale, which aims to let developers test cloud and mobile applications at Internet scale before deployment, not after. If you need to simulate 4 million iPhone users with a brand-new app banging on your system, Mu's new product is the only one we're aware of that lets you do this.
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