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Slashdot

• 

  Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking

  Posted: August 9th, 2010, 7:46am MDT by CmdrTaco

  siliconbits writes "According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. 'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think. 'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'"

  

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  Flash Ported To iOS and iPhone 4

  Posted: August 9th, 2010, 7:00am MDT by CmdrTaco

  An anonymous reader noted that there is a simple HOWTO explaining how to install flash on an iPhone4. Mad props for using Strong Bad as the demo. Of course, step one is to use the JailBreakMe. Once installed, Flash inside Safari loads in a stopped state so it won't even hurt performance unless you decide to actually execute the program.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Some LA Coffee Shops Are Taking Wi-Fi Off the Menu

  Posted: August 9th, 2010, 6:15am MDT by kdawson

  As New York is putting Wi-Fi on wheels, reader Hugh Pickens notes a counter trend in Los Angeles coffee shops. (We remarked on a similar backlash in Seattle in 2005.) "Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, but Jessica Guynn reports in the LA Times that now some owners are pulling the plug after finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line. Oher owners strive to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into 'Matrix'-like zombie shacks where people type and don't talk. 'There is now a market niche for not having Wi-Fi,' says Bryant Simon. After Dan and Nathalie Drozdenko turned off the Wi-Fi at their Los Angeles cafe, the complaints poured in, but so did the compliments: Lots of customers appreciated a wireless cup of joe at the Downbeat Cafe, a popular lunch spot in Echo Park. 'People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted.'"

  

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  TorrentReactor Reportedly Buys, Renames a Russian Town

  Posted: August 9th, 2010, 3:07am MDT by kdawson

  baronvoncarson and a few other readers sent in the unconfirmed report that the Russian torrent site TorrentReactor had bought the Russian town of Gar for $148,000, on the condition that the town rename itself Torrentreactor.net. Torrent Freak notes circumspectly that TorrentReactor has been known in the past for — how best to put this? — publicity stunts and hoaxes. And Torrent Freak at the time of writing had no confirmation from any Russian authority that the purported cash-for-renaming deal is genuine. Here is the announcement on TorrentReactor's site, which contains this explanation of how Gar was chosen: "We've picked a few thousands of godforsaken places around the world that are close to operating nuclear reactors to make a connection to the name of our company. The list was numbered and a random number was picked by a generator. The number 377 was a lucky one for Gar village. We think it was a good choice since Gar citizens are very kind and generous people." The whole (purported) transaction is reminiscent of the dot-com boom, when in 1999 the not-yet-launched Half.com offered $100,000 to a small town, Halfway, Oregon, if it would rename itself for the company. It did. The record is vague as to whether the money was ever actually paid, as Half.com was acquired by eBay just over a year later.

  

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  Microsoft & Intel Get a Pass On Higher H-1B Fees

  Posted: August 9th, 2010, 12:02am MDT by kdawson

  theodp writes "Criticizing companies that outsource high-paying American jobs, Senator Charles Schumer described Indian IT company Infosys as a 'chop shop'. (Nine Indian companies accounted for 20,000 H-1B visas as of 2007. In 2008, Infosys held 4,500 of the visas; the number was down by a factor of 10 in 2009.) The comments came as the Senate scrambled to fund the $600M Mexican Border Security Bill by hiking application fees for H-1B and L-1 visas. The Senate measure increases H-1B visa fees by $2,000 per application on firms that have 50% or more of their employees on this visa. Schumer pointed out that the bill would not affect high-tech companies such as Intel or Microsoft 'that play by the rules and recruit workers in America,' although they are among the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B program."

  

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  New York To Get Free Wi-Fi Network Via Livery Cabs

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 8:54pm MDT by kdawson

  AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "NYC may finally have a viable plan for free, ad-supported public Wi-Fi service. A company named LimoRes Car & Limo plans to roll out 1,000 cars with transmitters by the fall, and 20,000 by 2011, providing in-car Wi-Fi and externally with a radius of 200 feet. Each car will be able to support up to 16 separate connections. It may be a long shot to say this will provide complete coverage in Manhattan, but if each cab company in New York got onboard... although the brief article notes that the tougher regulation environment for taxicabs means that Wi-Fi won't be coming to Yellow Cabs any time soon."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  The 'Net Generation' Isn't

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 6:43pm MDT by kdawson

  Kanel introduces this lengthy review in Spiegel Online this way: "Kids that grew up with the Internet are not 'digital natives' as consultants have led us to believe. They're OK with the Net but they don't care much about Web 2.0 and find plenty of other things more important than the Internet. Consultants and authors, mostly old guys, have called for the education system to be reworked to suit this new generation, but they never conducted surveys to see if the members of 'generation @' were anything like what they had envisioned. Turns out, children who have known the Net their whole lives are not particularly skilled at it, nor do they live their lives online." "Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users. ...they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of 'going online.' ... Tom and his friends just describe themselves as being 'on' or 'off,' using the English terms. What they mean is: contactable or not."

  

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  Claimed Proof That P != NP

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 4:30pm MDT by kdawson

  morsch writes "Researcher Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs claims proof that P != NP. The 100-page paper has apparently not been peer-reviewed yet, so feel free to dig in and find some flaws. However, the attempt seems to be quite genuine, and Deolalikar has published papers in the same field in the past. So this may be the real thing. Given that $1M from the Millennium Prize is involved, it will certainly get enough scrutiny. Greg Baker broke the story on his blog, including the email Deolalikar sent around."

  

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  Google Testing an Airborne Camera Drone

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 3:13pm MDT by kdawson

  mbone writes "The Blogoscoped site carries news that Google has purchased a German 'Microdrone' for evaluation (here is the original German version). These devices can take off, fly a mission, and land automatically using GPS. They can carry night-vision cameras or even 'see-through-walls' Far IR cameras. Of course, the maker of these drones assures us that they cannot be a 'Big Brother in the sky' because that is 'verboten.' Is it just me, or is Google entering dangerous airspace here? It seems like the ruckus from a backyard-after-dark addition to Street View could completely overshadow the legal tussles Google has already encountered with its street-level photography." Reader Jaymi clues us to another airborne effort a couple of Google employees are mounting with some help from NASA Ames: the NexusOne PhoneSat project — to determine if low-cost mobile phone components can withstand space travel.

  

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  Highly Directional Terahertz Laser Demonstrated

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 2:01pm MDT by kdawson

  eldavojohn writes "A new paper published this week in the journal Nature Materials announces a successful demonstration of highly directional terahertz semiconductor lasers. You might not think it's a big deal that some Harvard and University of Leeds researchers (funded partially by the US Air Force) figured out how to better direct lasers; but this means the ability to see what's in someone's pockets and clothing, at a distance of possibly hundreds of meters, or farther. The big benefit is that they are lower in energy than X-Rays and are less invasive, since they cannot pass through water or metal. Coming soon to an airport near you or buzzing around on board a drone in civilian airspace?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Kmart Briefly Offers $149 Android Tablet

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 12:48pm MDT by kdawson

  pickens writes in with word that Kmart put an Android tablet on sale for $149 — and quickly sold out. "A Kmart circular came out last week with an uber-geeky product that perked up a few ears in the gadget community. Augen's 7-inch Gen-78 Android tablet which runs Android 2.1 is on sale for $150 (normally $170). The tablet is as bare bones as it gets, but it does work and has some features which may interest those who can't reconcile the $500+ price of Apple's iPad. Features include Android 2.1 (no skinning), 7" 800x480 Display, WiFi 802.11G, 2GB of storage +SD card slot (up to 32GB), 256MB of RAM (same as iPad), HDMI out for 720P viewing on an external display, an eBook reader, YouTube app, and Maps. ... 'I'll be honest,' writes Seth Weintraub. 'I don't trust my toddler with an iPad but this thing will be great for watching Gumby (don't ask) at home and Sesame Street in the car.'" It seems that Kmart offered rainchecks to those who found the item sold out at their local store — up until July 31. It is not clear whether after the retailer restocks the pipeline, they will stop at fulfilling the rainchecks, or will offer the Augen tablet again to new buyers. An update to the article notes that Augen does not have a license for Android from Google, and therefore the Android Store is not supported on it.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Forget University — Use the Web For Education, Says Gates

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 11:31am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates attended the Techonomy conference earlier this week, and had quite a bold statement to make about the future of education. He believes the Web is where people will be learning within a few years, not colleges and university. During his chat, he said, 'Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.'" Of course, the efficacy of online learning is still in question; some studies have shown a measurable benefit to being physically present in a classroom. Still, online education can clearly reach a much wider range of students. Reader nbauman sent in a related story about MIT's OpenCourseWare, which is finding success in unexpected ways: "50% of visitors self-identified as independent learners unaffiliated with a university." The article also mentions a situation in which a pair of Haitian natives used OCW to get the electrical engineering knowledge they needed to build solar-powered lights that have been deployed in many remote towns and villages.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  DRM-Free Game Suffers 90% Piracy, Offers Amnesty

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 10:17am MDT by Soulskill

  bonch writes "Independent game Machinarium, released without DRM by developer Amanita Design, has only been paid for by 5-10% of its users according to developer Jakub Dvorsky. To drive legitimate sales, they are now offering a 'Pirate Amnesty' sale until August 12, bundling both the cross-platform game and its soundtrack for $5. Ron Carmel, designer of DRM-free puzzle game World of Goo, stated that his game also had about an 80-90% piracy rate, claiming that the percentage of those pirating first and purchasing later was 'very small.' He said, 'We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!'"

  

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  What Are Google and Verizon Up To?

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 9:00am MDT by Soulskill

  pickens writes "Robert X. Cringley has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he contends that Google has found a way to get special treatment from Verizon without actually compromising net neutrality, by beginning to co-locate some of their portable data centers with Verizon network hubs. 'With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay,' writes Cringley. 'This would save space for other traffic — and money for both Verizon and Google, as their backbone bills decline (wishful thinking, but theoretically possible). Net neutrality would be not only intact, but enhanced.' So why won't Google and Verizon admit what they're up to? 'If my guess is right, then I would think they're silent because it's a secret. They'd rather their competitors not know until a few hundred shipping containers are in place — and suddenly YouTube looks more like HBO.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Genetically Modified Canola Spreads To Wild Plants

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 7:46am MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "A research team conducting a survey has found that about 86% of wild canola plants in North Dakota have genetically modified genes in them, and 'two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants.' Canola usually has little competition when cultivated but does not fare well in the wild. The Roundup Ready and Liberty Link strains of genetically modified canola appear to be crossing over to wild plants and helping it survive. The University of Arkansas team claims that the ease in which genetically modified canola has 'escaped' into the wild should be noted by seed makers like Monsanto because this is proof that it will happen." Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Is AOL Finally Crashing and Burning?

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 6:33am MDT by kdawson

  An anonymous reader writes "AOL's disastrous quarterly report showed cash from continuing operations was down 44% from a year ago (adjusted operating income was down 37%), as it continues a rocky transition from monthly subscription fees to advertising. (Their quarterly report also notes 'the cessation of large-scale access subscriber acquisition campaigns' — investor-speak for the fact that AOL will finally stop mass mailings of free trial accounts.) Unfortunately, AOL's advertising business 'did even worse. Its revenues declined by $110 million... every single segment is down.' AOL has already lost 86% of the 30 million subscribers it reported in 2001 — down to just 4.3 million — but advertising hasn't yet filled the gap (possibly because many AOL ads had been displayed to the users AOL no longer has). But at least, as one technology blogger notes, AOL has finally released a mobile application, 'in the new definition of "late to the party."'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Artificial Life Forms Evolve Basic Memory, Strategy

  Posted: August 8th, 2010, 3:14am MDT by kdawson

  Calopteryx notes a New Scientist piece on how digital organisms in a computer world called Avida replicate, mutate, and have evolved a rudimentary form of memory. Another example of evolution in a simulation lab is provided by reader Csiko: "An evolutionary algorithm was used to derive a control strategy for simulated robot soccer players. The results are interesting — after a few hundred generations, the robots learn to defend, pass, and score — amazing considering that there was no trainer in the system; the self-organizing differentiated behavior of the players emerged solely out of the evolutionary process."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  New Spacecraft Set For Dangerous Jupiter Trip

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 11:56pm MDT by kdawson

  solaGratia passes along word of the equipping of Juno, the most heavily armored craft ever to be launched to another planet. The launch is scheduled for a year from now. "In a specially filtered cleanroom in Denver, where Juno is being assembled, engineers recently added a unique protective shield around its sensitive electronics. ... 'For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays,' said... Juno's radiation control manager... [The] titanium box — about the size of an SUV's trunk — encloses Juno's command and data handling box..., power and data distribution unit..., and about 20 other electronic assemblies. The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (500 pounds)."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Chip Guru Papermaster Loses Signal At Apple

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 8:39pm MDT by kdawson

  ColdWetDog writes "Computerworld reports that Mark Papermaster has left his job as Apple's Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering. He was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4 and thus responsible in some unknown fashion for 'antennagate.' His name may ring bells from previous coverage of his jump from IBM to Apple. From a brief blurb on Daring Fireball: 'From what I've heard, it's clear he was canned. Papermaster was a conspicuous absence at the Antennagate press conference. Inside Apple, he's "the guy responsible for the antenna" — that's a quote from a source back on July 23. (Another quote from the same source: "Apparently the antenna guys used to have a big chip on their shoulder. No more.")'" Update: 08/08 03:01 GMT by KD : Swapped out a registration-required NY Times link for a Computerworld one; corrected the direction of Papermaster's career move.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Ringleader of RBS WorldPay Heist Faces Charges in US

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 6:23pm MDT by kdawson

  Late in 2008, the most sophisticated and well-coordinated international e-crime yet pulled off netted $9 million for its perpetrators. We discussed the RBS WorldPay heist when news about it emerged, and the indictments some months later. Now one of the accused ringleaders has been extradited from Estonia to face charges in the US. "...in the span of 12 hours around Nov. 8 [2008], the group hit 2,100 ATM terminals in 280 cities spanning the world, from the United States to Russia to Italy to Japan. ... Despite the technical and international challenges of the case, US investigators believe they were able to trace the scheme back to its origin. On Friday they brought one of the accused ringleaders from Estonia to Atlanta to face arraignment on several fraud charges — a rare appearance in US courts for an accused international hacker. Sergei Tsurikov, 26, of Tallinn, Estonia, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment to conspiracy to commit computer fraud, computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. ... The increasing scope of foreign attacks comes as college students around the world are focusing heavily on technology degrees only to emerge into a difficult job market with low pay, officials said."

  

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  Ringleader of RBS WorldPlay Heist Faces Charges in US

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 6:23pm MDT by kdawson

  Late in 2008, the most sophisticated and well-coordinated international e-crime yet pulled off netted $9 million for its perpetrators. We discussed the RBS WorldPlay heist when news about it emerged, and the indictments some months later. Now one of the accused ringleaders has been extradited from Estonia to face charges in the US. "...in the span of 12 hours around Nov. 8 [2008], the group hit 2,100 ATM terminals in 280 cities spanning the world, from the United States to Russia to Italy to Japan. ... Despite the technical and international challenges of the case, US investigators believe they were able to trace the scheme back to its origin. On Friday they brought one of the accused ringleaders from Estonia to Atlanta to face arraignment on several fraud charges — a rare appearance in US courts for an accused international hacker. Sergei Tsurikov, 26, of Tallinn, Estonia, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment to conspiracy to commit computer fraud, computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. ... The increasing scope of foreign attacks comes as college students around the world are focusing heavily on technology degrees only to emerge into a difficult job market with low pay, officials said."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  100-Sq.-Mile Ice Island Breaks Off Greenland Glacier

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 4:11pm MDT by kdawson

  suraj.sun sends word of a 100-sq.-mile (260-sq.-km) ice island that broke off of a Greenland glacier on Thursday. "The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland. It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962... The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. ... [NASA satellite] images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to 'keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,' said Prof Muenchow." The Montreal Gazette has more details and implications for Canadian shipping and oil exploration, along with this telling detail: "the ice island’s thickness [is] more than 200 metres in some places... [or] half the height of the Empire State Building." The NY Times has a good satellite photo of the situation.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Microsoft Losing Big To Apple On Campus

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 2:58pm MDT by kdawson

  destinyland writes "Apple is closing in on Microsoft's share of operating systems among the computers of incoming freshmen at the University of Virginia, confirming earlier reports of an ongoing trend. A yearly survey shows that among 3,156 freshman who own computers, Microsoft's share is just 56% (down 6%), with Apple's share rising to 43% (up 6%), continuing a six-year pattern. In 2004, it was Microsoft 89% vs. 8% for Apple. 'It seems likely that the Mac-using students will outnumber their Windows cousins this school year,' notes one technology blog, citing a new study showing that 70 percent of college freshman are choosing the Mac. Other interesting data from the Virginia study: In 1997, 26% of incoming freshmen said they didn't own a computer, a number which has now dropped to 0. Laptops now comprise 99% of the computer population. And Linux use has dropped from a high of 2.5% in 2004 to a rounding error this year."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 1:43pm MDT by kdawson

  jamie found this piece, at Wired's Danger Room from a couple of days back, about an encouraging sign for the growth of open source in the military / intelligence sphere. "For three years, Matthew Burton has been trying to get a simple, useful software tool into the hands of analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency. For three years, haggling over the code’s intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley. So now, Burton’s releasing it — free to the public, and under an open source license."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  
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  Researchers Pinpoint Cause of Gluten Allergies

  Posted: August 7th, 2010, 12:28pm MDT by kdawson

  An anonymous reader writes "When patients with celiac disease consume foods containing gluten — a protein present in wheat, barley and rye — their immune systems send out an alarm, triggering a response that can damage their intestines and prevent them from absorbing certain nutrients. Now, scientists have pinpointed the culprits most responsible for this harmful reaction: three small fragments within the gluten protein that spark chaos in the gut."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

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  Microsoft Tires of IronRuby; Jimmy Schementi Jumps Ship

  Posted: August 6th, 2010, 9:12pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  In April, we wrote about IronRuby hitting 1.0 and Microsoft's "3 years with Ruby [paying] off." It's sad, then, to read today that program manager Jimmy Schementi is leaving Microsoft citing a rapidly decreasing interest in dynamic languages (other than JavaScript) at the software giant.

  [..] a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. [..] In short, the team is now very limited to do anything new, which is why the Visual Studio support for IronPython took so long. IronRuby’s IDE support in Visual Studio hasn’t been released yet for the same reasons. [..] many other roadblocks have cropped up that made my job not enjoyable anymore.

  Overall, I see a serious lack of commitment to IronRuby, and dynamic language[s] on .NET in general. [..] The bad-news is I will no longer be working on IronRuby full-time, but in the near future I’m definitely staying active. Also, Tomas will definitely continue working on IronRuby when he can; we weren’t the last two people left for no reason. :-)

  Given that Tomas and I will only be working part-time on IronRuby now, I invite the Ruby and .NET communities to come help us figure out how to continue the IronRuby project, assuming that Microsoft will eventually stop funding it. I’ll start a thread on the IronRuby Mailing List shortly, so keep an eye on that if you’d like to help.

  Jimmy Schementi

  Schementi left Microsoft at the end of July and is on his way to work at a NYC-based financial technology consulting firm. I'm sure most Rubyists would be quick to join me in congratulating Schementi and the rest of the IronRuby team (including John Lam, who left in 2009) for making significant strides in a company and environment where the obstacles were piled high. We've wondered for years whether Windows is a first class platform for Ruby and now we know that Ruby certainly isn't even a second class language for Microsoft.

  Schementi seems keen for people from outside of Microsoft to get involved with IronRuby to keep it alive. These sorts of efforts aren't often successful, because contributors usually bubble up over time to become more important, and he notes that he is now the first non-MS contributor merely by virtue of no longer working for MS. If, though, you're a .Net and Ruby hotshot and have the time and passion to become a hero in the worlds of DLR and "Ruby on Windows", there's a significant opportunity here for the taking.

  
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  Lyle Johnson Retires from the FXRuby GUI Toolkit

  Posted: August 5th, 2010, 11:10pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  Yesterday, Lyle Johnson of the FXRuby GUI toolkit project stood aside as the project's maintainer, effectively retiring the project:

  When Jamis Buck wrote last year about ceasing development on Capistrano, his post really struck a chord with me. If this post reminds you of that one, it’s because I re-read it before sitting down to compose this one. [..]

  It is with mixed feelings that I announce that I’m stepping away from FXRuby development, effective immediately. I will no longer be accepting bug reports, support requests, feature requests, or general emails related to FXRuby. [..]

  Someone on the mailing list asked whether FOX and FXRuby are “pretty much dead.” I can’t speak for Jeroen or the FOX project. As for FXRuby, however, that’s up to you. FXRuby is, and always has been, an open source project. If you are interested in hacking on FXRuby, or even taking over maintenance of the project, please feel free to fork the project on GitHub and release updates as you see fit.

  Lyle Johnson

  The undertone here is that the FOX Toolkit, upon which FXRuby operates, isn't underseeing significant development and, perhaps, there is little more for FXRuby to be doing (at least, little in the way of exciting or interesting) and Lyle wants to shuffle the project off his plate.

  Lyle cites Jamis Buck's dropping of his Capistrano deployment system project as an inspiration, though Capistrano's story turned out to be a happy one after being adopted, for the most part, by Lee Hambley.

  
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  “and” vs && and “or” vs || in Ruby

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 6:55pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [avdi.org] (or on Ruby Inside)

  If you use Ruby long enough, you will discover the and and or operators. These appear at first glance to be synonyms for && and ||. You will then be tempted to use these English oprators in place of && and ||, for the sake of improved readability. Assuming you yield to that temptation, you will eventually find yourself rudely surprised that and and or don’t behave quite like their symbolic kin...

  Avdi Grimm

  Avdi Grimm presents a concise guide to a matter that confuses the majority of Ruby developers from time to time.

  

Slashdot

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  Indian Police Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 9:05am MDT by samzenpus

  New Delhi police have a new weapon in the battle against bad drivers, Facebook. Two months ago the police created a Facebook page that allowed people to inform on others breaking traffic laws, and upload pictures of the violations. The page has more than 17,000 fans, and 3,000 pictures currently. From the article: "The online rap sheet was impressive. There are photos of people on motorcycles without helmets, cars stopped in crosswalks, drivers on cellphones, drivers in the middle of illegal turns and improperly parked vehicles. Using the pictures, the Delhi Traffic Police have issued 665 tickets, using the license plate numbers shown in the photos to track vehicle owners, said the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, Satyendra Garg."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
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  Does Net Neutrality Violate the Fifth Amendment?

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 9:00am MDT by CmdrTaco

  SonicSpike writes "A forthcoming paper from Boston College Law Professor Daniel Lyons offers an even stronger basis for challenge: The Fifth Amendment. Under Prof. Lyons's theory, net neutrality would run afoul of eminent domain. It would constitute a regulatory taking, requiring just compensation. Under US Supreme Court precedent, any governmental regulation that results in "permanent, physical occupation" of private property constitutes a per se taking. This is true even where the government itself is not doing the occupying. If the government grants access to other parties to freely traipse across private property, it's still a taking. In effect, the government has forced one party to give a permanent easement to another party, destroying the first's "right to exclude.""

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Defeating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 8:18am MDT by CmdrTaco

  eldavojohn writes "As we strive closer and closer to quantum computing, physics may need to be improved. A paper released in Nature Physics suggests that the limit defined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be beaten with quantum memory. From the article, 'The cadre of scientists behind the current paper realized that, by using the process of entanglement, it would be possible to essentially use two particles to figure out the complete state of one. They might even be able to measure incompatible variables like position and momentum. The measurements might not be perfectly precise, but the process could allow them to beat the limit of the uncertainty principle.' Will we find out that Heisenberg was shortsighted in limiting the power of quantum physics or will the scientists be surprised to find that such a theoretical scenario — once conducted — performs unexpectedly in Heisenberg's favor?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Is Starcraft II Killing Graphics Cards?

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 7:39am MDT by CmdrTaco

  An anonymous reader writes "One of the more curious trends emerging from last week's Starcraft II launch is people alleging that the game kills graphics cards.The between-mission scenes onboard Jim Raynor's ship aren't framerate capped. These are fairly static scenes, and don't take much work for the graphics card to display them. Because of this, the card renders the scene as quickly as possible, which then taxes your graphics card as it works to its full potential. As the pipelines within your graphics card work overtime, the card will heat up and if it can't cope with that heat it will crash."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Browser-based Jailbreak For IPhone 4 Released

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 6:56am MDT by CmdrTaco

  WrongSizeGlass writes "Apple Insider is reporting on a browser-based 'jailbreak' for iPhone 4. Hackers on Sunday released the first "jailbreak" for the iPhone 4, a browser-based exploit that allows users to run unauthorized code. Unlike previous jailbreaks, which required users to run software on their Mac or PC and tether their iPhone to their computer, the latest hack is done entirely within the Safari browser. Users simply visit the URL to begin the process, which modifies the iOS mobile operating system found on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Some users have reported that the modification results in broken MMS and FaceTime functionality. This jailbreak does not work on iPads running iOS 3.2.1. "

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Equatorial Mounts For Budget Astrophotography?

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 6:36am MDT by timothy

  Timoris writes "With the Perseids approaching rapidly, I am looking for a good beginner's motorized equatorial mount for astrophotography. I have seen a few for $150 to $200, but apparently the motor vibrations make for poor photographs. Orion makes good mounts, but are out of my price range ($350) and the motor is sold separately, adding to the price half over again. Does anyone have any good experience with any low- or mid-priced mounts?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Microsoft's Ad Team Trumps IE Developers' Privacy Aims

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 6:11am MDT by timothy

  phantomfive writes "The company everyone loves to hate is after your private information, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users. From the story: 'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology For India's $35 Tablet

  Posted: August 2nd, 2010, 2:59am MDT by timothy

  angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned US$35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Mozilla Finds Flaw With Black Hat Video Stream

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 11:55pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla web security researcher Michael Coates found a flaw in Black Hat's paid video feed. The flaw allowed him to watch a live feed of the conference for free instead of the $395 a head to connect. Unlike many presenters at Black Hat, Michael responsibly disclosed the flaw to organizers, who quickly fixed the issue."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  A How-To Website For Australian Voters

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 10:26pm MDT by timothy

  Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.)

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Linux Kernel 2.6.35 Released

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 8:47pm MDT by timothy

  eldavojohn writes "Linus has announced the release of 2.6.35 for people to download and test after he found not a lot of changes between this week and last. The big features to look out for include: 'Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables' as well as various performance and graphics improvements. Linus also praised the community saying that 'regression changes only' after rc1 improved this time around and gave numbers to back it up saying 'in the 2.6.34 release, there were 3800 commits after -rc1, but in the current 35 release cycle we had less than 2000.' Good to see the process is becoming more refined and controlled after the first release candidate — hopefully there's no impending burnout."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  RubyConf 2010 Registration Just Opened – Be Quick

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 6:23pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  

  Early bird registration for RubyConf 2010 - to be held in New Orleans November 11-13 - has just opened and you need to get in fast if you want to go. RubyConf has a reputation for selling out very quickly and even though some waiting list folks usually make it in, if you're dead set on going, buy your tickets immediately. They're $300.

  Not got a second to waste? Go direct to the ticket ordering page by clicking here.

  Note: I don't get a cut of ticket sales or even get asked to post about RubyConf. I just remember reading a torrent of endless misery on Twitter when it sold out so quickly last year ;-)

  

Slashdot

• 

  Chernobyl Area Survey Finds Lasting Problems For Wildlife

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 5:50pm MDT by timothy

  ninguna writes "The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. While some stories seem to indicate Nature recovering, the actual picture isn't quite so great."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 4:41pm MDT by timothy

  DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Electric Car Subsidies As Handouts For the Rich

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 3:36pm MDT by timothy

  Atypical Geek writes "Charles Lane, writing for Slate, argues that subsidies for electric cars are an example of 'limousine liberalism' — a lavish gift for well-off Americans to buy expensive cars for the sake of appearing green. From the article: 'How rarefied is the electric-car demographic? When Deloitte Consulting interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers, it found that from now until 2020, only "young, very high income individuals" — from households making more than $200,000 a year — would even be interested in plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars.' Lane also takes issue with the billions of dollars in subsidies offered to automakers for the manufacture of batteries, arguing that research (warning, PDF) concludes that the money will not help in jump-starting the economies of scale that will drive down prices. At least, not as much or as quickly as the President has argued."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  RIM's Encryption 'Too Secure' For Indian Government's Taste

  Posted: August 1st, 2010, 2:33pm MDT by timothy

  climenole writes "Research in Motion, the creator of the widely used enterprise-cum-consumer BlackBerry device, has an uncertain position in India. The Indian government's internal security and intelligence services cannot break the encryption of the device, which makes countering terror threats and national security matters difficult — especially for a region which faces constant threats and attacks from domestic Maoist insurgents and extremist Islamic groups." Does it make you wonder how much safer everyone would be if parkas, mailing envelopes, cash, and superglue were all evaluated on the same basis?

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  Michael Hartl’s Rails 3 Tutorial Book

  Posted: July 28th, 2010, 5:33pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  The Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (a.k.a. railstutorial.org) by Michael Hartl has become a must read for developers learning how to build Rails apps. Michael has put together a great Rails 2.3 tutorial, releasing it all for free online chapter by chapter. Now, Michael's going three steps further:

  1 — A new, Rails 3.0 focused version. The free online book previously covered Rails 2.3 but Michael's updated it to cover Rails 3.0 too. He's also selling it as a DRM-free PDF for $39 (you get a PDF of the Rails 2.3 version too). As a gesture of goodwill to Ruby Inside's readers, he's made a coupon code that works till the end of August - it's rubyinside01 and gets you 20% off (so a total of $31.20 in the end).

  2 — Creative Commons licensing of the existing online text. Like all of us, Michael needs to make some money, but a side benefit is that he's making the existing Rails 2.3 focused text Creative Commons licensed! This will allow you to distribute it, translate it, put snippets on your blog, and so forth. (Update: Michael notes that this is sort of in the air at the moment pending more resources. He has more preparation to do to make this work properly, but the spirit is there.)

  3 — A print book, published by Addison-Wesley. A print edition, Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example, is due out in the fall as part of the Professional Ruby Series (the same series as The Rails 3 Way by Obie Fernandez), and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.

  As a bit of a "geek aside", the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book is written using PolyTeXnic, a pure-Ruby markup system built on top of the LaTeX typesetting system. PolyTeXnic converts a select subset of LaTeX to HTML, while also producing PDFs via the pdflatex command.

  In addition to supporting code-heavy programming books such as Ruby on Rails Tutorial, PolyTeXnic can also produce mathematical documents; see, for example, Michael Hartl's anti-pi propaganda piece called The Tau Manifesto. Michael hopes to release PolyTeXnic as an open-source project some time later this year. I keep nagging him about it.

  
• 

  Mailman – Like Sinatra for E-mail

  Posted: July 28th, 2010, 12:06am MDT by Peter Cooper

  [blog.titanous.com] (or on Ruby Inside)

  Mailman is an incoming email processing microframework. You point it at a source of email, such as a POP3 account or a Maildir, and it will execute routes based on the messages that come in.

  For instance if you had a ticketing system, and wanted to add replies via email to the database, this application would be a good start:

  require 'mailman'
  
  Mailman.config.maildir = '~/Maildir'
  
  Mailman::Application.new do
    to 'ticket-%id%@vipsupport.com' do

      Ticket.find(params[:id]).add_reply(message)
    end
  end

  Jonathan Rudenberg

  This is very nice. I love these microframeworks. The Sinatra style is always good to ape.

  
• 

  Exploiting Enterprise Software (like Hazelcast) with JRuby

  Posted: July 27th, 2010, 6:08pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [cogitations.arbia.co.uk] (or on Ruby Inside)

  Due to the nigh insurmountable work of Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Ola Bini and Nick Sieger along with their team we have direct access to Java libraries and thus to a plethora of usefulness. Sometimes I think we forget how lucky we are, the Ruby community, to have such awesome people simplifying our lives, anyway, thats quite enough arse kissing. So, on with the show...

  Anthony Buck

  In Distributed Ruby - Exploiting Enterprise Software, Anthony riffs on using JRuby as a way for Rubyists to "exploit" robust, enterprise-grade libraries. This isn't a new topic but his demonstration is particularly compelling (and worth scrolling down for).

  Hazelcast is an "in memory data grid" that's fail-safe (with regard to crashes) and that automatically scales across the number of nodes within the system. Anthony's code works fine out of the box with JRuby 1.5.1 running under RVM (yep, I tested) and demonstrates what is a particularly powerful Java library I'd never heard of before. It's excellent we have access to this from Ruby, and Anthony's right - the JRuby team deserves credit for giving Rubyists opportunities to both "exploit" enterprise technologies and to deploy systems in enterprise environments without having to jump ship with Ruby.

  
• 

  RubyConf Uruguay – October 29-30 in Montevideo, Uruguay

  Posted: July 26th, 2010, 7:30pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  We'd like to invite you to RubyConf Uruguay, which will take place this October on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th, in Montevideo. This will be a single-track conference aimed at developers who want to learn or get up-to-date with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Testing, SCRUM, JavaScript, SQL vs NoSQL, etc.

  If you're interested in speaking at this event, we'll be happy to accept your proposals

  RubyConf Uruguay organizers

  You can learn more at the official RubyConf Uruguay site or follow the news about the conference on Twitter @rubyconfuruguay.

  
• 

  Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Candidate 1 Available

  Posted: July 26th, 2010, 6:55pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [weblog.rubyonrails.org] (or on Ruby Inside)

  High off Baltimore Pandemic and Yellow Tops, I believe we promised a release candidate shortly after RailsConf. As things usually go in open source, we gorged ourselves on fixes and improvements instead. But all to your benefit. We’ve had 842 commits by 125 authors since the release of the last beta!

  Now it’s time to just say good is good enough, otherwise we could keep on with this forever. So please welcome the Rails 3 release candidate! You install, as always, with gem install rails --pre

  David Heinemeier Hansson

  Over on the official Rails blog, DHH talks about today's release of the first release candidate of the much awaited Rails 3.0.

  Note: You might still find RI's Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources to Get You Going useful too.

  
• 

  14 Ruby and Rails Jobs for August 2010

  Posted: July 23rd, 2010, 4:35pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  It's been a couple of months since the last job round up but the Ruby Inside job board has been hopping! There are 14 live listings to go over today and they're not all in San Francisco. Jobs in Denver and Maryland bring in a bit of interesting variety.

  A tweak to the format now that Ruby Inside has gone all "tumblelog" on you: I've decided not to include blurbs about every job in the listings since if you're interested in a company or the location is suited to you, you're going to click through and read the extended information anyway. Most companies give quite a lot of detail so click through and check them out.

  Ruby on Rails Developer(s) (Entry-level-to-Senior)
  CreaTek Solutions, Inc. —Boulder, Colorado

  Ruby on Rails Developer
  Foraker —Boulder, Colorado

  Senior Ruby on Rails Developer
  Get Satisfaction —San Francisco, California

  Sr. Ruby Engineer- CoTweet
  ExactTarget + CoTweet —San Francisco, California

  Ruby On Rails Developer
  On-Site.com —Lafayette, Colorado

  Front End Developer
  SingleFeed —San Francisco, California

  Rails Developer
  Context Optional, Inc —San Francisco, California

  Sr. Ruby on Rails Programmer (or perl/python/django/catalyst)
  Insight —Birmingham, Alabama

  Software Engineer, Scalability
  Zendesk —San Francisco, California

  Software Ruby/Rails leader Engineers
  RotoHog —Los Angeles, California

  RoR Engineer
  Zendesk —San Francisco, California

  User Interface Software Engineer
  BoxTone —Columbia, Maryland

  Front End Developer
  Zendesk —San Francisco, California

  Frontend Engineer
  Onehood, Inc —San Francisco, California

  Want your job(s) to appear on Ruby Inside and on the sidebar of Rails Inside? Check out our "Post a Job" page for info on how it all works and how much it costs.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Microsoft Says No To Paying Bug Bounties

  Posted: July 23rd, 2010, 6:07am MDT by timothy

  Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors in the security community that Microsoft soon would follow suit and start paying bounties as well. However, a company official said on Thursday that Microsoft was not interested in paying bounties. 'We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don't think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren't always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher's contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update,' Microsoft's Jerry Bryant said."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Buckyballs Detected In Space

  Posted: July 23rd, 2010, 2:54am MDT by timothy

  Rhodin writes "Fullerenes, also known as buckminsterfullerenes or 'buckyballs,' were detected about 6,500 light years from Earth in the cosmic dust of Tc 1 (PDF; abstract), an object known as a planetary nebula. 'We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,' said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. 'We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.'" (More, below.)

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Digital Distribution Numbers Speak To Health of PC Game Industry

  Posted: July 23rd, 2010, 1:14am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority: "Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  World's First Molten-Salt Solar Plant Opens

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 11:49pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Sicily has just announced the opening of the world's first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Alien Swarm Can Be Played As a Terrifying FPS

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 8:41pm MDT by timothy

  AndrewGOO9 writes "With a few simple commands from the developer console, Alien Swarm can go from being played as an isometric top-down shooter to a first-person perspective. Surprisingly easy, it does make the game, which was released for free via Steam earlier this week, a lot more terrifying. But, anyone who is at home playing games like Modern Warfare or Halo should have no problem slaughtering their way through wave after wave of creatures. In fact, it poses the potential to make the game easier for people who would've otherwise struggled with the overhead view."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  SFLC Wants To Avoid Death by Code

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 5:37pm MDT by timothy

  foregather writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has released some independent research on the safety of software close to our hearts, that inside of implantable medical devices like pacemakers and insulin pumps. It turns out that nobody is minding the store at the regulatory level and patients and doctors are blocked from examining the source code keeping them alive. From the article: 'The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for evaluating the risks of new devices and monitoring the safety and efficacy of those currently on market. However, the agency is unlikely to scrutinize the software operating on devices during any phase of the regulatory process unless a model that has already been surgically implanted repeatedly malfunctions or is recalled. ... Despite the crucial importance of these devices and the absence of comprehensive federal oversight, medical device software is considered the exclusive property of its manufacturers, meaning neither patients nor their doctors are permitted to access their IMD's source code or test its security.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Sony's Blue-Violet Laser the Future Blu-ray?

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 4:50pm MDT by timothy

  JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese researchers from Sony and Tohoku University announced the development of a 'blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser,' which Sony is aiming to use for optical disks. The new technology, with 'a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region' and a power out put 'more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology, while retaining a practical size. Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Feds Bust Chinese Firm's Hybrid Car Data Heist

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 4:03pm MDT by timothy

  coondoggie writes "An FBI investigation has led a Michigan couple to be charged with stealing hybrid car information from GM to use in a Chinese auto outfit. A federal indictment charged Yu Qin, aka Yu Chin, 49, and his wife, Shanshan Du, aka Shannon Du, 51, of Troy, Michigan with conspiracy to possess trade secrets without authorization, unauthorized possession of trade secrets, and wire fraud. One of the individuals was also charged with obstruction of justice, said Barbara McQuade, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan in a statement. GM estimates that the value of the stolen documents is over $40 million."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Safari Privacy Bug May Be Leaking Your Data

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 3:18pm MDT by timothy

  richi writes "If you use Safari, your browser may be leaking your private information to any website you visit. Jeremiah Grossman, the CTO of WhiteHat Security, has discovered some Very Bad News. I have some analysis and other reactions over at my Computerworld blog. The potential for spam and phishing is huge. A determined attacker might even be able to steal previously-entered customer data." In short, autofill for Web forms is enabled by default in Safari 4 / 5 (and remotely exploitable), and the data that this feature has access to includes the user's local address book — even if the information has never been entered into a Web form.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 2:33pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Since Wired's Jeff Howe coined the term in 2006, 'crowdsourcing' has been a buzzword in the tech industry, and a business model on the rise. 99designs.com is a site that hosts design contests for small businesses requiring relatively smaller design projects. Anyone can submit their near finished pieces of work to the contests, but only one winner gets paid. Forbes covers just why established graphic designers are so angry at this business model's catching on."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  WordPress Creator GPL Says WP Template Must Be GPL'd

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 1:48pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Matt Mullenweg (the creator of open source blog software WordPress), after review by various legal experts, is sticking to his guns that themes and plugins that 'extend' WordPress violate the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL. Matt has gone so far as to post this on Twitter. According to Matt, the premium template called Thesis should be under the GPL and the owner is not happy about it. WordPress is willing to sue the maker of Thesis theme for not following GPL licensing. The webmasters and Thesis owners are also confused with new development. Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn't copy-and-pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 1:21pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Microsoft Makes Major Shift In Disclosure Policy

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 1:02pm MDT by timothy

  Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft is changing the way in which it handles vulnerability disclosures, now moving to a model it calls coordinated vulnerability disclosure, in which the researcher and the vendor work together to verify a vulnerability and allow ample time for a patch. However, the new philosophy also recognizes that if there are attacks already happening, it may be necessary to release details of the flaw even before a patch is ready. The new CVD strategy relies on researchers to report vulnerabilities either directly to a vendor or to a trusted third party, such as a CERT-CC, who will then report it to the vendor. The finder and the vendor would then try to agree on a disclosure timeline and work from there." Here's Microsoft's announcement of the new strategy.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  The World's Strongest, Most Expensive Beer Served Inside a Squirrel

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 12:48pm MDT by samzenpus

  If you have $765 burning a hole in your pocket, and a penchant for drinking alcohol out of a taxidermied animal, the good folks at BrewDog have just the drink for you. Their latest creation, called The End of History, is a 110 proof beer that comes packaged in a variety of small stuffed animals.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Brain Scans May Help Guide Career Choice

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 12:14pm MDT by timothy

  GisG writes "General aptitude tests and specific mental ability tests are important tools for vocational guidance. Researchers are now asking whether performance on such tests is based on differences in brain structure, and if so, can brain scans be helpful in choosing a career? In a first step, researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Research Notes have investigated how well eight tests used in vocational guidance correlate to gray matter in areas throughout the brain." The researcher's (provisional) paper is available as a PDF.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  The 2010 Ruby Implementation Performance Shootout

  Posted: July 19th, 2010, 7:28pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  

  Hot on the heels of his Windows Ruby implementation shootout comes Antonio Cangiano's Great Ruby Shootout of July 2010 where Antonio pits 8 different Ruby implementations against each other in a performance shootout!

  Antonio's findings and observations are interesting and well worth a read (particularly the parts about memory consumption) but if you're in a hurry, the conclusion is that Ruby 1.9.2 RC2 and JRuby 1.5.1 are almost joint first place for fastest Ruby implementation (but 1.9.2 takes it by a hair.) Ruby 1.9.1 and Maglev are then very close behind.

  
• 

  Redmine 1.0 Released: Ruby’s Top Project Management Webapp Hits Maturity

  Posted: July 19th, 2010, 1:53pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [redmineblog.com] (or on Ruby Inside)

  It's out, it's out. Redmine 1.0 is released!

  The first release candidate for Redmine 1.0 has been released to Rubyforge. This is a major release which includes many new features and bugfixes since the last major release, (0.9 in 2010-01-09).

  This is still considered a release candidate (RC) release. The code has been stabilized over the past 6 weeks and we believe it is ready to be tested in production, but there still might be some rough edges. We are using this release to get some for final feedback, both for 1.0.1 (bug fixes) and our next major release 1.1.0.

  Eric Davis

  I don't understand the odd release candidate vs "1.0 is released" situation, but I've been following Eric's progress for months and he's put a lot of effort into making Redmine - a Ruby and Rails-based project management system used by the Ruby, RubySpec, Puppet and Typo3 projects, amongst others.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Irish Gov't Invests In Color-Coded Fiber Optics

  Posted: July 16th, 2010, 2:52am MDT by timothy

  c0mpliant writes "The Irish government has invested a further €5 million, after already having invested €5 million one year ago, in a new system of fiber optics which heralds an era of virtualization of fiber networks, using color coding to enable multiple fiber providers to serve businesses and homes, often on a single strand of fiber. The technology, which has already sparked interest from companies such as BT and IBM, is already in its first phase and boasts an impressive 2.5 terabytes capacity, double the capacity of the London phone system. The company behind the technology, Intune Technology, is comprised of a group of ex-UCD photonics researchers and has been around since 1999 and are based in Dublin. The project is set to be completed by 2020."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  3M Says Its Multi-Touch System Means Almost No Lag

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 11:47pm MDT by timothy

  jonniee writes "3M has rolled out a 22-inch digital display capable of 20-finger multi-touch input with less than 6 millisecond response time. The monitor incorporates 3M's 3M Projected Capacitive Technology based on mutual capacitance operation theory. The result produces a silky smooth response that has almost no lag in execution."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  New Oddworld Games In Development

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 10:19pm MDT by Soulskill

  Game developer Just Add Water announced today that the Oddworld series, dormant since 2005, will be getting multiple new titles in the near future. Quoting: "... for the past 12 months we have been working extremely closely with the fantastic people at Oddworld Inhabitants, from what started off as brief discussions in June 2009, to now working on multiple projects, across multiple platforms. Whilst we cannot go into specifics right now, we can tell you that over the coming weeks and months we will be announcing these exciting projects starring all of your favorite Oddworld characters."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Aussie Lasers To Stop Satellite Collisions, Death

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 8:36pm MDT by timothy

  bennyboy64 writes "An Australian company is developing a laser tracking system that will help prevent collisions between satellites and space debris, ZDNet reports. 'The trouble is it's [debris] in orbit and travelling at orbital speeds, which means that it is travelling at about 30,000 kilometres an hour," said the CEO of the Australian company. 'If even a tiny little piece runs into a satellite it'll destroy it or punch a hole through a person if they're out there space walking.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  First 'Malaria-Proof' Mosquito Created

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 5:59pm MDT by timothy

  Gisg writes "The University of Arizona team reported that their genetically modified mosquitoes are immune to the malaria-causing parasite, a single-cell organism called Plasmodium. Riehle and his colleagues tested their genetically-altered mosquitoes by feeding them malaria-infested blood. Not even one mosquito became infected with the malaria parasite."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  iPhone DSLR Prototype 1.0

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 5:34pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "Here are Photos/Pictures of my iPhone DSLR Prototype 1.0. This is my first attempt at putting together an iPhone DSLR. You might ask 'Why pair an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens?' Why not!" Prototype or not, it's a cool project.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 5:00pm MDT by timothy

  imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Senate Bill Adds Shuttle Flight, New Shuttle-Derived Vehicle

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 4:40pm MDT by timothy

  simonbp writes "The Senate Commerce Committee this morning marked up a compromise NASA Authorization Act that rolls back some of Obama's plans for NASA, while keeping others. The bill adds at least one more shuttle flight, keeps Obama's technology demonstrators and commercial access to ISS (albeit at reduced funding), restores the Orion crew capsule, and replaces the Ares rockets with a Shuttle-Derived 'Space Launch System' for going to the ISS and Beyond, which could be ready as soon as 2015."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  Free “Secrets of Superstar Programming Productivity” Videos from Giles Bowkett

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 4:38pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [gilesbowkett.blogspot.com] (or on Ruby Inside)

  Giles Bowkett (Ruby Inside's top Ruby presenter of 2008) has released a series of free videos called "Secrets of Superstar Programming Productivity" that could interest some of you:

  Flow (22 minutes)
  Metrics (17 minutes)
  Habit (22 minutes)

  Giles' style isn't for everyone, but he shares some great tips in these videos and they've been very well received on Twitter. Enjoy!

  

Slashdot

• 

  BP Claims Gulf Well Has Been Stopped

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 3:52pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes with word that BP has announced the Gulf oil spill has been stopped. Another reader adds more detail: "The last valve on the new cap has been closed, and the flow of oil and gas into the sea has stopped. That doesn't mean it's over. It is unclear whether the steel casing deep in the well can contain the pressure. The risk is that it could burst, which would eventually cause a rupture on the sea floor that would make things much messier to deal with. However, they're monitoring the pressure buildup carefully and if the pressure holds over the next 48 hours (indicating there is no leak below the sea floor), they'll assess what to do next. If it doesn't hold at the expected readings, then they'll re-attach the pipe used for producing to the surface and start collecting again. Regardless of what happens the relief well still has to be completed to permanently plug the well with cement, which could take a couple more weeks."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Malware Targets Shortcut Flaw In Windows, SCADA

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 3:09pm MDT by timothy

  tsu doh nimh writes "Anti-virus researchers have discovered a new strain of malicious software that spreads via USB drives and takes advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in the way Microsoft Windows handles '.lnk' or shortcut files. Belarus-based VirusBlokAda discovered malware that includes rootkit functionality to hide the malware, and the rootkit drivers appear to be digitally signed by Realtek Semiconductor, a legitimate hi-tech company. In a further wrinkle, independent researcher Frank Boldewin found that the complexity and stealth of this malware may be due to the fact that it is targeting SCADA systems, or those designed for controlling large, complex and distributed control networks, such as those used at power and manufacturing plants. Meanwhile, Microsoft says it's investigating claims that this malware exploits a new vulnerability in Windows."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Latest Version of ACTA Leaks

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 2:23pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid points to a freshly leaked version of ACTA available on La Quadrature Du Net. While the text will need further analysis, the most recent look at the text suggests that there is no Three Strikes law, but anti-circumvention laws have a new twist to them with regard to exceptions in that 'they do not significantly impair the adequacy of legal protection [...] or the effectiveness of legal remedies for violations of those measures.' Overall, the text still hints at a global DMCA with notice-and-takedown."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Why 'Gaming' Chips Are Moving Into the Server Room

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 1:37pm MDT by timothy

  Esther Schindler writes "After several years of trying, graphics processing units (GPUs) are beginning to win over the major server vendors. Dell and IBM are the first tier-one server vendors to adopt GPUs as server processors for high-performance computing (HPC). Here's a high level view of the hardware change and what it might mean to your data center. (Hint: faster servers.) The article also addresses what it takes to write software for GPUs: 'Adopting GPU computing is not a drop-in task. You can't just add a few boards and let the processors do the rest, as when you add more CPUs. Some programming work has to be done, and it's not something that can be accomplished with a few libraries and lines of code.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 1:19pm MDT by timothy

  lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Leaving a Comment? That'll Be 99 Cents, and Your Name

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 12:54pm MDT by timothy

  netbuzz writes "Anxious to lift a ban on comments brought about by incessant trolling and anonymous slander, a Massachusetts newspaper has begun requiring two things of online readers who want to leave their thoughts on stories: a one-time fee of 99 cents and a willingness to use their real names. Says the publisher: 'This is a necessary step, in my opinion, if The Attleboro (MA) Sun Chronicle is going to continue to provide a forum for comments on our websites.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Tokyo Rail Billboards Scan Viewer's Age, Gender

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 12:05pm MDT by timothy

  eldavojohn writes "The AFP is reporting on digital billboards in Tokyo that scan for a viewer's age and gender to tailor the message to them. It's a Digital Signage Promotion Project that 11 railway companies are debuting. The head of the project said 'The camera can distinguish a person's sex and approximate age, even if the person only walks by in front of the display, at least if he or she looks at the screen for a second.' Philip K. Dick's Minority Report draws closer every day."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  Euruko 2010 Presentations

  Posted: July 14th, 2010, 3:39am MDT by Peter Cooper

  Florian Hanke got in touch to tell me that presentations and photos from the recent Euruko 2010 European Ruby conference are now online.

  [euruko2010.heroku.com] shows off the presentations awesomely! Videos and slides are available for most of them and the video/audio is of a high quality.

  

  Highlights include:

  • Continuous Integration and Why You Need It — Nicolas (foca) Sanguinetti
  • Getting and loading code: current state of packaging & best practices — Mislav Marohnić
  • Building a search engine with Ruby — Florian Hanke
  • Why Bundler? — Yehuda Katz
  • Remodelling a Facebook game — Tim Lossen
  • Putting the static back into Ruby — Tomasz Stachewicz
  • Anatomy of Ruby i18n — Sven Fuchs
  • Matz's Keynote — Matz!

  More can be found on Vimeo and if you'd rather just read a write up of what happened, Markus Prinz has writeups for Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Hollywood Accounting — How Harry Potter Loses Money

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 10:43am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Techdirt has the details on how it was possible for the last Harry Potter movie to lose $167 million while taking in nearly $1 billion in revenue. If you ever wanted to see 'Hollywood Accounting' in action, take a look. The article also notes two recent court decisions that may raise questions about Hollywood's ability to continue with these kinds of tricks. For example, the producers of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' now have to pay $270 million for its attempt to get around paying a partner through similar tricks."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Two ESA Craft To Observe Asteroid 21 Lutetia

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 10:03am MDT by kdawson

  japan_dan writes "Two ESA spacecraft will observe 21 Lutetia during Rosetta's flyby on 10 July: Rosetta from 3,160 km and Herschel from 450 million km. Herschel's PACS and SPIRE spectrometers will view Lutetia in far infrared, while Rosetta will gather data in a variety of wavelengths. Since the observations will be coordinated during and at closest approach, scientists will later be able to correlate the data to produce a map of the thermal radiation emitted by Lutetia. There are a pair of animations modelling the expected temperature distribution over Lutetia at the link. The joint observations are part of a series of 8 sessions planned in the next couple of years by Herschel scientists to study objects that will be visited by spacecraft."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 9:23am MDT by kdawson

  Bruce Schneier's blog highlights a New York Times piece on high-tech methods for detecting student cheating. Schneier notes, "The measures used to prevent cheating during tests remind me of casino security measures." "No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student's speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside. The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot. Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later. When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student's real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence." The Times article quotes from research published a few months back suggesting that the more you copy homework, the lower your grades.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  China Renews Google's Content Provider License

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 8:42am MDT by kdawson

  snydeq writes "The Chinese government has renewed Google's Internet Content Provider license (announcement), enabling the company to continue to provide Web search and other local products to users in China. If Google had been unable to renew its license, it could have meant the end of the company's operations in China, leaving search engine rival Baidu to dominate the market. Last week Google began making efforts to win over Chinese officials. Rather than automatically redirecting Google.cn visitors to Google's Hong Kong search engine (a strategy the Chinese government found unacceptable), the company now sends visitors to a 'landing page' where they can choose to click on a link leading to the Hong Kong site, or stay to use unfiltered services such as music or text translation."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Some Birds Can See Magnetic Fields

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 8:04am MDT by kdawson

  jamie found a post on the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog on research indicating that some birds can literally see magnetic fields, but only if the vision in their right eye is sharp (abstract at Current Biology). "The magnetic sense of birds was first discovered in robins in 1968, and its details have been teased out ever since. Years of careful research have told us that the ability depends on light and particularly on the right eye and the left half of the brain. The details still aren’t quite clear but, for now, the most likely explanation involves a molecule called cryptochrome. Cryptochrome is found in the light-sensitive cells of a bird’s retina and scientists think that it affects just how sensitive those cells are. ... The upshot is that magnetic fields put up a filter of light or dark patches over what a bird normally sees. These patches change as the bird turns and tilts its head, providing it with a visual compass made out of contrasting shades."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Hotels Lead the Industry In Credit Card Theft

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 7:21am MDT by kdawson

  katarn writes "A study released this year found that, of the credit card hacking cases last year, 38 percent involved the hotel industry. At hotels with inadequate data security, the greatest amount of credit card information can be obtained using the simplest methods. It doesn't require brilliance on the part of the hacker. Most of the chronic security breaches in the hotel industry are the result of a failure to equip, or to store or transmit this kind of data properly, and that starts with the point-of-sale credit card swiping systems."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  AI Predicts Manhole Explosions In New York City

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 6:42am MDT by kdawson

  reillymj writes "Every so often, a 300-pound manhole cover blows sky high in Gotham, followed sometimes by a column of flame and smoke. (There are a few hundred 'manhole incidents' per year in the city, not all of them this dramatic.) Researchers from Columbia University applied machine learning algorithms to Con Edison's warren of aging electrical wires and sewage access points around Manhattan. As the system learns where dangerous mixtures of sewer gas and decrepit wiring are likely to come in contact, it makes forecasts about trouble spots, including where the next explosion may occur. The team has just completed rankings for manholes in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and plans to return to Manhattan's grid, armed with the most recent inspection and repair data." The research was published in the July issue of Machine Learning.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Microsoft Opens Source Code To KGB's Successor Agency

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 6:00am MDT by timothy

  Jack Spine writes "Microsoft has struck a deal with the Russian government which will give the FSB, successor to the KGB, access to the source code for Windows 7, among other products. The agreement is an extension of Microsoft's Government Security Program, according to a source with links to the UK government."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 4:39am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "20 years after the original game launched, a fan-developed Ultima 6 remake has finally been released! The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Major ISPs Challenge UK's Digital Economy Act

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 3:02am MDT by timothy

  Techmeology writes "TalkTalk and BT, two of the UK's largest ISPs, seek to legally challenge the UK's Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through parliament during its last days prior to the election. TalkTalk and BT argue that the DEA infringes human rights and places large ISPs (with over 400,000 customers) at a disadvantage. They also believe the DEA could conflict with existing European Legislation such as the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive, and the E-Commerce Directive — the latter stating that ISPs are not responsible for the actions of their customers. The Act, which saw twenty thousand letters sent to MPs in protest, contains measures to see websites suspected of distributing illegal material blocked, and Internet users disconnected or reported to copyright holders."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Where Are the Joysticks For Retro Gaming?

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 1:12am MDT by Soulskill

  Doctor O writes "With all those nice emulators for classic gaming around (such as MAME, VICE or Stella) I want to establish monthly retro gaming evenings with some friends. The problem is I can't find any good joysticks for that purpose. There's a new version of the legendary Competition Pro, but judging from the many one-star reviews on Amazon, it's terrible. I found the USB version of the classic Atari Joystick, but it doesn't seem to be available and would have prohibitive shipping costs to Germany anyway. So, Slashdot to the rescue — where are the suitable USB joysticks for retro gaming?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Australia Waters Down, Delays Internet Filter Policy

  Posted: July 8th, 2010, 11:53pm MDT by timothy

  An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Australia's government is running a bit scared of a population enraged by its controversial mandatory filtering project. The Government today announced a suite of measures designed to provide controls around the filter project, including independent oversight and a review of content which would be included. In addition, some Australian ISPs will voluntarily censor any child pornography URLs. But the whole project is still going ahead — it's just been delayed and slightly modified."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  OLPC's XO-1.75 Laptop To Have a Multitouch Screen

  Posted: July 8th, 2010, 8:35pm MDT by timothy

  angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child has revealed it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware. The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012. Fedora will continue to be the base Linux distribution for XO-1.75 as the laptop changes from the x86 to Arm architecture."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  Rails Magazine Issue 6: 10 Great Articles for Free

  Posted: July 8th, 2010, 6:14pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  [railsmagazine.com] (or on Ruby Inside)

  

  Rails Magazine is a well designed magazine dedicated to "fine articles on Ruby & Rails" and the recently released issue #6 is special in being nearly entirely Ruby focused. Topics covered include Haml, Sass, Capistrano, Hpricot, RubyConf India and RVM, as well as interviews with Sarah Allen and Michael Day (of PrinceXML).

  The PDF version of Rails Magazine is free, but you can buy a print edition through MagCloud for less than $10.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram

  Posted: July 8th, 2010, 5:30pm MDT by timothy

  Nushio writes "The code wasn't even released, and yet Roy van Rijn, a Music & Free Software enthusiast received a C&D from Landmark Digital Services, owners of Shazam, a music service that allows you to find a song, by listening to a part of it. And if that wasn't enough, they want him to take down his blog post (Google Cache) explaining how he did it because it 'may be viewed internationally. As a result, [it] may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world.'" Update: 07/09 00:31 GMT by T :Story updated to reflect that Shazam is multiplatform, not Android-only, as implied by the original phrasing.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Good Database Design Books?

  Posted: July 8th, 2010, 4:39pm MDT by timothy

  OneC0de writes "I am the Director of IT for a small/medium sized marketing company, where I personally write the code that runs our applications. We use a variety of technology at our office, the majority of which rely on MS-SQL and MySQL databases. I am familiar with tables, SQL queries, and have a general understanding of how the SQL databases work. What I'm looking for is a good book, particularly a newer book, to explain general database design techniques, and maybe explain some relational tables. We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.