Slashdot Mirror

michaelmalak writes "Wednesday night, Google Groups announced in a thread the rollout of their revised 20-year Usenet archive search engine. Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post. See the announcement thread for others' reaction." An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published some interesting insights into what makes Google tick. In this lengthy article, Google's vice-president of engineering, Urs Hölzle delves into the nuts and bolts behind Google's operations, what back-up mechanisms and hardware setup is in place and even some interesting homegrown technology like the Google File System (GFS)."

elhaf writes "There is an article running in the Chronicle on Higher Education about the new trend of creating political-message video games for the next round of campaigns. TechNews has commentary on the situation as well. The article mentions that there are actually a few available already, but they mainly just allow opposition-bashing. This is not, I think, to be confused with Serious games, even though both groups seem interested in health care policy."

blamanj writes "A lot of discussion has been focused on the lack of security in electronic voting systems. What hasn't been as widely discussed, is just how tiny the voting manipulations have to be to have an effect. In this months CACM (cite, pdf of original paper is here), some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. Changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states."

Milo_Mindbender asks: "So, geek that I am, I have several computers at home and several at the office, these come in both Windows and Linux flavors. Most have a copy of Firefox but for various reasons some have Mozilla and Internet Explorer too. Naturally, I'm going crazy trying to keep all the bookmarks in sync. Has anyone seen anything that can do this AUTOMATICALLY? I'd really like to just be able to use the 'add bookmark' feature in any browser and have them all sync up every now an then (each launch or at least each day). Various searches return tons of hits on bookmark managers, far too many to try them all out...so has anyone found anything that works?"

dadop writes "ACM's position is that while computer-based e-voting systems have the potential to improve the electoral process, such systems must embody careful engineering, strong safeguards, and rigorous testing in both their design and operation [something they don't do right now!]. Press release is here."

Karl the Pagan writes "Following on the heels of a previous Steam-related story, Vivendi Universal may block Half-Life 2 distribution via Steam. Additional motions can be filed until November 18th, but since Sierra/VU have final QA approval on the HL2 gold is it possible they could delay the game until after the court decides on these motions?"

while(true) writes "The ACM is preparing to take a policy position on electronic voting in government elections. It has a poll page up to get feedback from it's members and where they also explain their proposed position. The proposed position calls for a paper trail to ensure a physical record of the vote. Go there and place your vote if you are a member. The ACM Public Policy Committee could be a valuable ally in many questions that are dear to Slashdot readers in the US. They have already spoken out on issues such as the DMCA, DRM, and private policing of P2P networks."

while(true) writes "The ACM is preparing to take a policy position on electronic voting in government elections. It has a poll page up to get feedback from it's members and where they also explain their proposed position. The proposed position calls for a paper trail to ensure a physical record of the vote. Go there and place your vote if you are a member. The ACM Public Policy Committee could be a valuable ally in many questions that are dear to Slashdot readers in the US. They have already spoken out on issues such as the DMCA, DRM, and private policing of P2P networks."

while(true) writes "The ACM is preparing to take a policy position on electronic voting in government elections. It has a poll page up to get feedback from it's members and where they also explain their proposed position. The proposed position calls for a paper trail to ensure a physical record of the vote. Go there and place your vote if you are a member. The ACM Public Policy Committee could be a valuable ally in many questions that are dear to Slashdot readers in the US. They have already spoken out on issues such as the DMCA, DRM, and private policing of P2P networks."

An Ominous Coward asks: "The University of Florida student chapter of ACM hosts a yearly programming competition for students throughout the state of Florida. It is based on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and for the past ten years has been very successful, currently drawing a crowd in the hundreds. However, this year was the first we had a problem with wireless networks. We doubt that cheating was the intention, as no one had SSID broadcasting turned off (as far as we know). Wireless networking gear is quite inexpensive now. And while we don't believe it affected the contest this year, we would like to take precautions for future contests. Is there any way to disable all wireless networking in an area about the size of a large lecture hall?"

An anonymous reader writes "This month's Communications of the ACM (does not seem to have a link to online text) has an article about The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom, a security visualization tool that I first saw at SC2003. The cube displays data from Bro along 3 axes and creates interesting visual results (port scans, barber poles, lawnmower). This definitely makes patterns in all that 'boring log data' jump out. This is a very interesting development, the ability to monitor in real time and replay historical security related information. Definitely a step towards the new types of tools we will need to secure hosts and networks."

An anonymous reader writes "Adi Shamir and crew gave a talk on preliminary results in extracting a private RSA key just by listening to the computer!. Similar to power analysis and LED leakage, this is a non-invasive, side channel attack that may have applications to tamper-resistant systems. It appears to be related to noisy capacitors on the motherboard, an effect which has been observed when CPU power saving is enabled on laptops."

TheAncientHacker writes "Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk computer language (and a good deal of what we call Object Oriented Programming) is the winner of this year's Turing Award from the ACM. Kay is also the co-winner of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more, check out the website of Kay's latest project, Squeak - an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation go to the Squeak homepage or the page of the SqueakLand community which uses Squeak in schools. For more on Kay's Turing Award, see this article on the SqueakLand site." Couple of other awards to announce: bth writes "The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award." And finally, squidfrog writes "Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED, is being awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. Edith Flanigen, 75, was also recognized, with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of 'molecular sieves,' porous crystals that can separate molecules by size."

TheAncientHacker writes "Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk computer language (and a good deal of what we call Object Oriented Programming) is the winner of this year's Turing Award from the ACM. Kay is also the co-winner of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more, check out the website of Kay's latest project, Squeak - an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation go to the Squeak homepage or the page of the SqueakLand community which uses Squeak in schools. For more on Kay's Turing Award, see this article on the SqueakLand site." Couple of other awards to announce: bth writes "The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award." And finally, squidfrog writes "Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED, is being awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. Edith Flanigen, 75, was also recognized, with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of 'molecular sieves,' porous crystals that can separate molecules by size."

Amigan asks: "Looking for a gift for my parents who live 1500+ miles away, I came across the Vialta Beamer TV. This device, with its claimed ease of use, would be helpful for my parents to see my son via the phone, but I'm wondering if the glowing WSJ review or Tech TV review are for real. Is 4-15 fps viable for conversation?"

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Cory R writes "Although many of us may hate to admit it, aesthetics matter even to hard-headed techies. Our software is skinnable, our email is filled with HTML, and our cases glow with colorful lights. Graphic design is pervasive and expected. Programming style is debated endlessly and many of us lust after Apple hardware which can command a premium price in part because of its styling. The age of aesthetics is here and in The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, Virginia Postrel explains where it came from and what it means." Read on for the rest of Cory's review. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness author Virginia Postrel pages 237 publisher HarperCollins rating 8.5 reviewer Cory R. ISBN 0060186321 summary Postrel says this is an age of aesthetics. Style is important because it has genuine value. Functionality and style may be equally important. Postrel points out:

"Those old sci-fi movies were wrong. the 21st century doesn't look at all the way they said it would. We citizens of the future aren't wearing conformist jumpsuits, living in utilitarian high-rises, or getting our food in the form of dreary-looking pills. On the contrary, we are demanding and creating a stimulating, diverse, and strikingly well-designed world. We like our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our backpacks and laptops to express our personalities."

Postrel's writing is easy to read and the text flows effortlessly. Her opening chapter ("The Aesthetic Imperative") describes how manufacturers and other businesses cannot escape style issues. Starbucks is a recurring example: she says "Curmudgeons may grouse about the price of its coffee, but Starbucks isn't just selling beverages. It's delivering a multisensory aesthetic experience, for which customers are willing to pay several times what coffee costs at a purely functional Formica-and-linoleum coffee shop." In a crowded and incredibly competitive marketplace, style is one of the few ways to differentiate yourself.

In chapter two, "The Rise of Look and Feel," Postrel describes the changing role of aesthetics over the past century. She discusses the rise of mass production, 1930's trends of streamlining everything (why should a toaster be aerodynamic?), wartime utilitarianism, and businesses' changing emphasis on style. Much of this, she says, was spurred by the rural-to-urban population shift. As cities grew, niche markets became concentrated enough that businesses could cater to them. Markets fragmented and elements of niche styles were adopted and transformed by the mainstream.

Chapter three ("Surface and Substance") looks at the power of pretty surfaces. The discussion ranges from Hilary Clinton's hair, to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Do surfaces have genuine value? Postrel definitely thinks so.

The fourth chapter ("Meaningful Looks") studies the messages that can be conveyed by aesthetics. "Identity is the meaning of surface," Postrel says. "Before we say anything with words, we declare ourselves through look and feel: Here I am. I'm like this. I'm not like that. I associate with these others. I don't associate with those." Look at punk rockers for a great example: at the same time punks are rebelling against society, they are conforming to tenets and garb of their sub culture.

Chapter five ("The Boundary of Style") explores the impact of aesthetic choices on those around you. Much of the chapter deals with architectural issues and building codes or deed restrictions. I think it is one of the more balanced chapters and, as someone who has just bought his first home in a deed-restricted community, had a lot of material that I found very interesting. By the end of the chapter, I disliked deed restrictions even more.

The final chapter is called "Smart and Pretty." It revolves around the idea that "pretty or smart" is a false dichotomy. Making things beautiful or interesting is as important as making them work. Postrel goes one step further and cites the work of usability guru Donald Norman, who argues that attractive things actually work better. I have a hard time explaining it, but I agree. Hammering out text on my iMac is a different experience than doing the same on my Windows or Linux box. The Apple machine oozes with creativity. Maybe it's contagious?

Postrel's argument for the value of aesthetics is definitely one-sided, but I wouldn't go so far as to call her a cheerleader. Her logic is solid, intertwined, and backed up with thirty-two pages of notes at the end of the book. The flaw in the book lies in the arguments she doesn't make -- specifically, she doesn't spend much time on dealing with misleading surfaces (facades). For a few pages she talks about people who dress not for who they are, but for who they aspire to be. I would have liked to see more about those who display whatever it is they think you want to see. Politicians do this for a living.

Unless you belong to the adornment-is-for-fools camp, you will enjoy this book. Its subject is one that I have never devoted much thought to, but after reading The Substance of Style, I can't help but be more critical of the surfaces around me and I can better appreciate the ones that are well designed.

You can purchase The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

vinsci writes "According to CNET News, 'The European Parliament has delayed voting on a controversial software-patents directive, following protests and criticism by computer scientists and economists.' ZDNet UK adds: 'Warnings that a controversial directive could devastate European software businesses have struck a chord with MEPs. The European Parliament has delayed voting on a controversial software-patents directive... the vote, originally planned for Monday, will now take place at a plenary session starting on 22 September.' Wired also has a story on the protests."

An anonymous reader writes "A paper from Rice University appearing at the 2003 ACM Sigcomm Conference presents a new denial of service attack where the attacker only needs to send at a low rate to shutdown TCP flows. The trick exploits the retransmission timeout mechanism in TCP. By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency, the attacker can cause all TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link to simultaneously stop indefinitely. And because the attacker only needs to burst periodically, the attacker will not be distinguishable from normal hosts. The presentation, and other presentations from the conference, are available online (live streaming)."

An anonymous reader writes "A paper from Rice University appearing at the 2003 ACM Sigcomm Conference presents a new denial of service attack where the attacker only needs to send at a low rate to shutdown TCP flows. The trick exploits the retransmission timeout mechanism in TCP. By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency, the attacker can cause all TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link to simultaneously stop indefinitely. And because the attacker only needs to burst periodically, the attacker will not be distinguishable from normal hosts. The presentation, and other presentations from the conference, are available online (live streaming)."

silkySlim writes "EETimes has a short article about a combination data goggles and earpiece device to replace big manuals and reduce training time for assembly line workers. 'In one possible scenario, a technician with data goggles bends over the engine block of a luxury car and removes the covering. He is receiving instructions through an ear piece telling him what to do next while his data goggles mark the screws and bolts on which he must next place his tool.' Apparently, it's already in use by several automotive companies. There's some additional papers also available."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, the Economist explains that "sentient computing systems are likely to be everywhere within five years -- listening and watching, and ready to anticipate their users' every need." "By adding sensors to today's computing and communications technology, sentient computing seeks to take account of a machine's environment in order to make it more responsive and useful. Sentient computing systems are always on, ubiquitously available, and can adapt to their users. In short, they seek to become real help-mates." ACM TechNews also wrote an analysis of sentient computing: "Challenges to sentient computing include the seamless integration of wireless networks, the spread of sensors throughout products and the environment, the accurate provision of location data, and the ability of sentient systems to merge vast volumes of widely disseminated data and customize its delivery for users. Other problems researchers will have to tackle include scalability, the development of cooperative file systems, and sentient applications' ability to find screens and network devices in close proximity to users." And of course, there are privacy concerns... Check this summary for additional details."

obiwan2u writes "ACM's Queue magazine has a moderately dense article describing how new intelligent radios may free up under-utilized spectrum bandwidth, possibly providing solutions to the last mile bottleneck."

prostoalex writes "While the Simplex algorithm is considered to be one of the most widely used algorithms in complex networks, the reason for its efficiency has been so far not too clear. Daniel Spielman and Shanghua Teng discovered the secret of why the Simplex algorithm works so well by introducing imprecision into the worst-case scenario analysis. Their article will be published in Journal of ACM, although MIT Technology Review at the aforementioned link quotes Spielman expressing his doubts whether anyone will be able to make it through 80-page document filled with equations and formal explanations of the method."

thyristor writes "'Researchers at MIT document the ultimate control over light: a way to shift the frequency of light beams to any desired colour, with near 100 per cent efficiency. This technology could revolutionise a range of fields, from turning heat into light, or even into prized terahertz rays - which hold great promise for medical imaging. It could also make it possible to focus a wide range of frequencies into a narrow band, make devices such as light bulbs and solar cells more efficient, and help to keep optical telecommunications networks moving.' These are probably the most exciting results in photonics in the last decade."

Frisky070802 writes "The NY Times has an article on how Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (the inventors of the eponymous RSA public-key encryption algorithm) have won the ACM's Turing award for contributions to computer science. You mean they didn't win already?"

Verity Stob writes "There is a turning point in the emergence of a programming methodology. It doesn't matter how big and popular the website is, nor how many papers have been published in the ACM journals or development magazines, nor even whether the first conferences have been a sell-out. A methodology hasn't made really made it until somebody has published a Proper Book. With Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ author Ivan Kiselev is bidding to drag AOP into the mainstream. He is motivated, he says in his introduction, by the recollection of the 25 odd years it took for the object-oriented concept to spread from its Simula origins in frosty Norway to being the everyday tool of Joe Coder. He aims to prevent this delay happening to AOP." Read on for Verity Stob's review of Kiselev's book. Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ author Ivan Kiselev pages 274 publisher SAMS rating Excellent reviewer Verity Stob ISBN 0672324105 summary Introduction to a new programming technique using an extension to Java

He has divided the book into four parts. Part I provides a brief sketch of AOP and introduces its concepts. AOP builds on OOP, asserting that we need a new programming entity called, wait for it, an aspect. Mr Kiselev's explanation of aspects reminded me of that bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the planet Golgafrincham divided its population into A types (who were the leaders, the scientists and the great artists), the C types (who were the people who did all the actual making of things and doing of things), and the B types, who comprised everybody left over: telephone sanitizers, advertising account executives and hairdressers. As I understand Mr Kiselev, the AOP view of things is that objects and classes (A type thinkers) and low-level procedures and APIs (C type doers) can be nicely encapsulated using traditional components. But aspects, software's little hairdressers, get their fingers into everything, and until now there has been no way to encapsulate them. This of course is what AOP in general and specifically the AspectJ superset of the Java language set out to do.

AspectJ's eponymous aspects are constructs not unlike ordinary classes. Mr Kiselev has not resisted the temptation to make an aspect Hello World example, and it looks reassuringly so-whatish:

package intro;

import java.io.*;

public aspect HelloWorldA
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println(Hello, world!);
}
}

Mr Kiselev then lays out his stall of New Things. A join point is any point in execution flow that AspectJ can identify and -- to get slightly ahead of ourselves -- execute some extra code. The most frequently used kind of join point being the call to a method. Pointcuts specify collections of join points; as a regular expression is to an instance of matched text, so a pointcut is to a matching join point. An advice (with horrid plural 'advices') is the code to be executed when a given pointcut is matched. If you are familiar with Eiffel's pre- and post-conditions, then you'll understand if I say that it is common for advices to run in the same way, topping and/or tailing the execution of a method. The differences are that aspects are specified from outside the method without touching the method or its class's code, and that aspects can be applied to multiple methods in one go. Mr Kiselev concludes this section of the book with a few simplistic examples of 'here is class A, here is class B' kind.

In Part II Mr Kiselev rolls up his sleeves and takes us through an extended, realistic example. I did wonder if perhaps it weren't a wee bit too realistic, as it is a miniature website application for news story submission and reading -- sort of Slashdot Ultralite -- all done using JSP and a MySQL database. Just explaining this setup, without even using any AspectJ, consumes a 15-page chapter. Since I am a C++ programmer who has not had any contact with JSP, I was initially anxious that I might not be able to follow this. However, recalling that www.[name withheld].com, the clumsiest, ugliest corporate website on the Internet, is programmed in JSP, I reasoned that if the dolts that programmed that site could understand JSP then it couldn't be very hard. So it proved.

The first example comprises adding password protection to the application. This is achieved by adding an advice that intercepts calls to doStartTag() methods. The advice can test if the user is logged in and, if he isn't, throw an exception that will dump him back at the login page. (Who says exceptions aren't 21st century gotos?) At this point Mr Kiselev admits that the cute 10-line implementation that he initially shows is in reality a non-starter; for one thing not all pages that must be secured define doStartTag() methods, for another the aspect can't reach an instance variable it needs to read because it is declared in protected scope. The second problem is easily overcome. AOP offers a mechanism by which extra classes can be bodged ('introduced' is the preferred verb in the AOP community) into the hierarchy as parents of existing classes. He uses this to add an accessor method for the field in question. The other problem is not so neatly smothered, and it is somewhat ruefully that Mr Kiselev produces his final, two-page solution. But I think that it is greatly to Mr K's credit that he does this - it tastes like programming in the real world as I have experienced it.

For the rest of Part II, Mr K demonstrates other applications of AOP using the AspectNews code. This includes Eiffelish design-by-contract stuff, improved exception handling, various debugging and tuning techniques (specifically logging, tracing and profiling) and a chapter on runtime improvements - stream buffering, database connection pooling and result caching - which show the AOP way to do things, usually where I would expect to be putting in proxy classes.

In part III we get down and dirty with the AspectJ language. This is the part where the book explains the obscure stuff: how to make a pointcut that picks up object preinitialization, or make an advice that goes off only when you are exiting a method on the back of an exception. I skimmed this bit - I guess it will become vital when I start using AspectJ in earnest. It looked good and clear on a flick through. A brief part IV contains some patterns, to give one a start when engaging AspectJ in earnest. Apparently it is horribly easy to create infinitely recursive situations, so if you here a faint popping sound from your machine it will be the stack colliding with the heap. There are seven appendices, supplying such things as a summary of the API in AspectJ's packages and hints on obtaining and using the Open Source supplementary tools mentioned in the book (Tomcat JSP container, MySQL database and Ant make replacement). AspectJ itself, now escaped from Xerox PARC, can be downloaded from the Eclipse website.

Complaints? None really. Oh all right, here's a nitpicklette because it's you: at page 75 Mr Kiselev adopts the irritating Internet habit of writing 'loosing' when he means 'losing'. Note to publisher SAMS proofreaders: do I win 25 cents?

For the rest, this is a lucid and readable book that describes the Next Big Methodology. I'm a bit alarmed at the prospect of squeezing new actions into the cracks of existing code, but I dare say I'll grow to love it.

A word of warning to the eager: since this technology is currently implemented as a species of preprocessor that relies on having all the source code available at once, so it is rather slow and probably isn't going into production shops for a while. There again, I seem to remember the comparable Cfront C++ compiler doing rather well, before we had platform-native C++ compilers.

And to the sceptics: if you think you can ignore AOP, don't forget the fate of the A and C type inhabitants of Golgafrincham, who having sent their B type telephone sanitizers into exile were all wiped out by a germ caught from a particularly dirty telephone.

You can purchase Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

NPV writes "January ACM Communications has an article on the use of DNA in genetically modified bacteria to store information. This is an attempt to achieve the ultimate in archival storage (one of the modified bacteria can tolerate 1000X more radiation than a human being). Now just suppose that the "junk DNA" in the human genome is the documentation package for the machine code. Who wrote that manual?" Here's the article abstract.

vinsci writes "Sometimes, reader comments to reporter-written stories are just as good as the stories themselves. Such as David Mohring's comment yesterday on ZDNet.com's story Mono & .Net: The odd couple. Since Microsoft are now using their licensing terms to stop GPL and LGPL free software, it would be a welcome sign of free software maturity at Microsoft if they actually resolved the Mono issue. The gist of his comment: 'Microsoft's CEOs have made it 'patently' clear that they intend to restrict competing .Net implementations by cultivating Microsoft's patents, [...] Mono also implements parts of .NET that have NOT been submitted to ECMA and ISO standards. Those parts of Mono lack even the protection for IP infringement with re-implementation that ISO documentation licensing implies. [...] There [are] those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET re-implementation represents a pending legal mindfield.' While on the subject of C# development, users of the GPL'd C# development environment SharpDevelop may also want to try Eclipse together with the Open Source Improve CSharp plugin for Eclipse. Eclipse also support C/C++ these days using GCC and GDB, thanks to the CDT. There are about two hundred add-on plugins available for Eclipse. Eclipse itself is available for many platforms, including Linux with native GTK 2 support."

Makarand writes "Leave an operating laptop unattended on your desk and your sensitive data is accessible to anyone who gets hold of it. To limit this risk many users configure their systems to fall into a "sleep" mode after a period of inactivity and ask for a password before the system can be awakened. This constant re-authentication proves to be a headache for many users. Now a Professor and his graduate student at at the University of Michigan have come up with a system called Zero-Interaction Authentication (ZIA), described in this article in The Age, to protect data on mobile devices. The system works by starting to encrypt data the moment the owner walks away from the system. The owners wear a token with a encrypted wireless link with the laptop. If the token moves out of range the ZIA re-encrypts all data within 5 seconds. If the cryptographic token moves within range the system decrypts the information for the owner. The token, which could take many forms, is currently a wristwatch with a processor running Linux designed by IBM."

jonmason00 writes "Just checked the Transmeta webpage, and discovered that they are now offering a Crusoe TM5800 System Development Kit. It's a bit expensive ($995) and you gotta register before you can buy one, but they need your support." How about an Astro development kit instead? :)

Jason Bennett writes "The Java Developer's Almanac is an interesting cross-breed of a book. On one hand, it's a reference book for the entire Java 1.4 API, complete with a listing for every method in every class in the API. On the other hand, it's a mini-tutorial, as it comes with myriad examples of how to use various Java classes. In the end, though, it's a book geared toward the advanced Java developer, especially one facing a new part of the API who needs a little guidance." Read on for his review. Java Developers Almanac 1.4 Vol. 1 author Patrick Chan pages 1007 publisher Addison Wesley rating 7/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0201752808 summary A concise reference to every class and method in Java 1.4, with examples for many.

What's the Book About?

The Almanac is divided into four main parts: packages, which covers every package in the core Java distribution, with the exceptions of the AWT, Swing, and printing; classes, which lists every class in alphabetical order, including all of its methods and fields; topics, which details the changes between each version of Java; and cross-reference, which allows you to look up every class, interface, and member type in Java 1.4.

Section 1, the package list, gives you every package in Java 1.4, every class inside those packages, the top-level description of the classes (from Sun's JavaDoc), a note of what JDK version the class was born in, an abstract/final indicator, and a hierarchy of the classes in the package. If this were all, it might be a nice, basic Java reference.

In addition to the strict listing, however, are hundreds of examples of how to use the classes; some basic, some obvious, and some you probably haven't seen.

The examples are extremely handy, if only to point out various utilities included with Java that you might otherwise not know about. With over 500 examples in the book, there's probably one you haven't seen or want to understand better.

There's also a website with all the code available at javaalmanac.com, so you don't have to type in every example you want to use in your code.

Section 2 provides a listing of every class in the covered packages in alphabetical order, along with all the signature of every public method in those classes. The book also cross-references every example in part 1 for each method. So, if you want to know how to better use ResultSet.afterLast(), you only need find the ResultSet class, and next to the afterLast() method are the two examples that use that method. With this easy organization, it's very straightforward to find any example you're looking for.

Part 3 goes through every major JDK release, starting at 1.0, and tells you everything you could possibly want to know about that release. You can find a statistical analysis of each release, including how many packages, classes, and members there are, how many classes in each package, new and removed classes and methods, deprecations, and all defined exceptions. I've certainly never seen a better or more compact reference on the differences between the JDKs.

Finally, part 4 gives a complete cross-reference for every class, interface and member mentioned. If you want to find every class that throws a ParseException, this is the place to find it.

What's Bad?

The one bad thing that strikes me about this book is actually just a simple question: Why should I use it when most of this information is at my fingertips in an IDE? Sun's JavaDoc is nicely thorough, and includes most everything in this book, the examples being a notable exception. Parts 3 and 4, of course, are not at all included in the JavaDoc, but I'm not sure how often I might need those sections.

So What's In It For Me?

If you're a down-and-dirty professional Java programmer, this book may very well be useful to you. The examples are quite handy, and as a reference to Java, it covers most anything you might need. Much of the information in the last two sections is hard to find in one coherent compilation. At $25 MSRP, it's an excellent value for all the information packed into the book.

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Part 1: Packages
3. Part 2: Classes
4. Part 3: Topics
5. Part 4: Cross-reference

You can purchase Java Developers' Almanac 1.4 Vol. 1 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Missing Bookmarks asks: "I accidentally deleted my bookmarks. I lost my 'Lore' folder, where I was collecting links to the classic folklore of the computer science subculture - things like Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate, Dijkstra's Go To Statement Considered Harmful, and The Alice and Bob after-dinner speech. I don't need anything from The Jargon File (like The Story of Mel), because that stuff is obviously easy to find. I've listed all the things I could remember; please help me find the ones I've forgotten."

Missing Bookmarks asks: "I accidentally deleted my bookmarks. I lost my 'Lore' folder, where I was collecting links to the classic folklore of the computer science subculture - things like Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate, Dijkstra's Go To Statement Considered Harmful, and The Alice and Bob after-dinner speech. I don't need anything from The Jargon File (like The Story of Mel), because that stuff is obviously easy to find. I've listed all the things I could remember; please help me find the ones I've forgotten."

gnat writes "Two New Zealand computer scientists have a paper accepted for OOPSLA called Notes on Postmodern Programming, which identifies shortcomings in traditional views of computer science. With a section on the difference between "The Matrix" and the net, a bulleted list of new approaches called "We're All Devo", and a section called "Messy is Good" consisting of nothing but a scan of a hand-drawn diagram, this is not your father's computer science paper. It's thought-provoking stuff, though. And you know they did their homework--they cite Larry Wall's Postmodern Perl talk."

redtail writes "The original authors of the classic vulnerability analysis of Multics have revisited the lessons learned almost thirty years later. Their new paper, along with the original vulnerability analysis is published here by IBM. The original vulnerability analysis inspired the self-inserting compiler back door described by Ken Thompson in his Turing Award Lecture. "

Order writes "Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the famous "Go To Considered Harmful", has died on Aug. 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer."

Isthistakenyet? writes "CNN is running a story about a series of FAA webcams designed to give fliers in Alaska pictures of current weather conditions around the state. I can even get current conditions near where I used to live - check out the 'Clear Day Image' :)" Hopefully the slashdotting won't keep a legit pilot from checking conditions.

Sonam asks: "Despite the relative cheapness of Wifi cards (available here for US$35) nobody seems to use Wifi for the ultimate killer app: short-range handheld voice terminals -- a.k.a. cordless phones. The competing, lower bandwidth DECT standard is widely used in Europe and elsewhere to provide good quality, digital voice and data links at home and about. Like Wifi, DECT terminals can operate in peer-to-peer mode -- some people even use their home DECT phones as walkie-talkies in camping trips. Does anyone know why Wifi isn't used for voice? Would a biscuit PC with a Wifi PCMCIA card work as a voice+data terminal? (Note, the second cheapest price on the pricewatch page above seems to be for a DECT module)" For the most part, voice is covered, we have cell phones, short wave radios, walkie-taklies with a 2 mile range and more! These things are all entrenched, they work, and they are now fairly cheap. Do we need anything else? Would WiFi voice provide better communication than those voice-based devices we are already using?

DenialS writes: "Congratulations to the OpenOffice.org team! Version 1.0 of the open office suite has been released. I'm downloading it now; I've had good luck with the previous stable builds. Release notes haven't been posted yet, so I can't say what the major differences are between 1.0 and the previous stable build, 641d, but I'm looking forware to finding out!"

Long-time reviewer clampe writes with this piece on Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium. This is not a book you're likely to find at the corner bookshop, but if you're serious about keeping track of goings-on in the field of HCI, Cliff argues this one is worth seeking out. Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium author John M. Carroll (Editor) pages 703 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer Cliff Lampe ISBN 0-201-70447-1 summary Academic HCI lovefest.

Reviewer's Note:

Most of the people in the book I'm reviewing could crush me beneath their heels, given I'm a lowly doctoral student in the HCI field. However, it's not a simple question of whether the collection is good or bad, but whether it will be good for the reader in their context. Besides, I can give you good inside information on lots of the authors. Like George Furnas, as cool a cat as you'll meet, gets nervous when he does magic tricks and Paul Resnick picks a mean fiddle. Yep, I got tons of dirt.

The Scenario

Anyone who has taken an HCI class has probably come across a gigantic blue paperback book called Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, which has acted as a de facto text in HCI classes in the past. In 1998, leaders in the HCI field realized that this book would soon be obsolete, and started organizing the players who would contribute to this worthy successor. This book is a collection of 29 articles from the lead researchers in the HCI academic research community, and it attempts to outline the research programs that will dominate the HCI field, if not for the next millennium as advertised, then at least for the next 10 years. The book is divided into seven sections:

1. Models, Theories, and Frameworks
2. Usability Engineering Methods and Concepts
3. User Interface Software and Tools
4. Groupware and Cooperative Activity
5. Media and Information
6. Integrating Computation and Real Environments
7. HCI and Society

Each section has 3-5 articles on the section's topic. Examples of the research included:

• Terry Winograd proposes a conceptual framework for the design of interactive spaces, or more basically computing environments built into the architecture of a space and seamlessly integrated with personal context.
• Hollan, Hutchins and Kirsh follow up some of Hutchins work on distributed cognition as an HCI research area, including a call for more ethnographic studies in the area and a better understanding of how people and tools interact.
• Olson and Olson outline the problems of distant work collaboration, and outline situations in which distant work makes more sense than not.
• Terveen and Hill give a great review of work in collaborative filtering, and then outline several approaches to making recommender systems better able to return positive hits.
• Doug Schuler in one article and Paul Resnick in another argue how HCI issues go beyond desktop computing or small groups and can be applied to larger groups, including communities both online and off.

Other topics include situated computing, participatory design, new user interfaces like tangible user interfaces or gesture recognition, cognitive modelling and so on. Some common themes that emerge are the expectation that user interface needs to go beyond the desktop environment, the application of HCI principle to things other than the individual or small group, the importance of groupware and the development of a unifying theory for the field.

Really, one could write a pretty long review on any of the 29 chapters, since each one does have serious weight, as well as an innovative edge as these investigators attempt to outline directions for the next several years. Some of the articles included here have already struck a chord in this research community and have become widely cited in their draft forms, or from appearances in special journals. Each section of the book typically appeared as as journal article in Human-Computer Interactions, or were specifically solicited by John Carroll.

The Good and the Bad

These are some heavy hitters. The authors list reads like my general prelims, and it takes someone like Carroll to pull together a group like this. Each of the 29 articles stands strong on its own, though one may quibble with claims here and there, yet still manage to paint a remarkably cohesive picture of the area as a whole. This book contains serious research in a single bound volume that should grace the desk of any person interested in HCI issues. It is simply unarguable that this is going to be the HCI book for the foreseeable future.

The book bears some of the problems of the field, which is that it comes from a specific set of disciplines like cognitive psychology and computer science, so may preclude applicable theories from other disciplines. That is the nature of academic boundary making, and is not the specific fault of the book. Just so you are aware of it.

And speaking of academics, some readers may be turned off by the academic edge of this book. HCI in general has always had a foot in both the university and the corporate sector, as evinced by the list of speakers at this year's ACM-SIGCHI conference, but this book tends towards the academic side. Although specific applications get mentioned here, large parts of the book may be a turn off to people like my brother-in-law who is a sysadmin and definitely not interested in new macrotheory for HCI research. Or shaving.

This book takes commitment. It is not for lily-livered pedants who want something to fill the space until the next Harry Potter book comes out. That's neither good nor bad, just fair warning. Don't expect this to be as eminently accessible as a Don Norman book. Still, like in most things the work is very worthwhile.

So What's In It For Me?

It seems that in every field there is That One Book that people will point you to as the ultimate source to quickly get a sense of what it is all about. This book plays that role for the HCI field. If you are at all interested in the state of HCI research, mostly in the U.S. of course, then this is the book you should get. Even if you are already some tricked out, super-HCI guru, there is likely to be some research in here from outside your specific area that you will get value from.

This is not a book for someone who has to do a usability test for the boss next week and needs to know how to conduct one. Nor will this book tell you how to make your website look really cool. What it will do is give you incredible insight into the history and future of an exceedingly interesting field of endeavor.

Cliff is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information, studying in their Human-Computer Interaction program. He plans to be a contributing author in the next version of this book. You can purchase the Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

ALundi writes "A really great read from Andrew Orlowski over at The Register on how Benoit Schillings and Dominic Giampaolo created the 64-bit journaled and attribute based Be File System. Schillings and Giampaolo discuss a variety of design and implementation issues, including data integrity and file system performance. " Interesting in the context of MSFTs plans to implement a DB filesystem in future versions of MS Windows.

elfdump writes: "In an article (pdf) soon to be published in ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security, security researchers have discovered that data transmitted through modems and routers can be remotely reconstructed from the equipment's LED status indicators. According to experiments, their light-to-information retrieval method is successful even when the light is captured 'at a considerable distance' from the source. If you want to prevent people from spying on your data, you may want to tape up those blinking LEDs!"

Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.

WalterGR asks: "There are plenty of resources available for writing operating systems, e.g. Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, the Dinosaur Book, and countless web sites. For those of us who aren't interested in low-level issues, and prefer focusing on human-computer interaction, what resources are available for designing windowing systems (a la X Window)? Issues like the object hierarchy, event management, modularity, redefining behavior at runtime (e.g. for skins) etc. Any suggestions?"

Milo_Mindbender asks: "For some time now I've been wanting to build an RC car with an on-board computer and an 802.11 link back to the PC in my office for telepresence experiments (and just plain fun). As I'm planning on doing this on my own dime, the big problem has been finding a reasonablly cheap and low power embedded system board with 802.11 and the right 'ins' and 'outs' to handle controling the motors (a parallel port at minimum)." Many seriously cool devices could come from an embedded 802.11 system, and I'm sure computer controlled RC cars are just the beginning. Has the Embedded Computing camp hopped on the wireless networking bandwagon? If not, what's the delay?

"I'm interested in doing two versions of the gadget, one using a system with a less powerful CPU that could do simple preprogramed moves and a second one that would have a CPU with enough power to do low-res video and two-way audio. I figure it would be a riot to remote drive one of these things anyplace in the office complex that has 802.11, stick a high-gain antenna on it and you could probably send it down the elevators and out into the parking lot! Has anyone seen an embedded system with 802.11 of either power level that might fit the bill?"

Sarah (sadukie) writes: "Hello! My name is Sarah, and I'm the Reviews Editor for ACM Crossroads. Our magazine is for students by students related to things in computing. We have run into a shortage of articles for our upcoming Open Source and Free Software issue, and we're asking to see if anyone in the community may be able to help us out by contributing. More information on this can be obtained by emailing Bill Stevenson, our editor in chief. Thanks to anyone who can help us!"

Sarah (sadukie) writes: "Hello! My name is Sarah, and I'm the Reviews Editor for ACM Crossroads. Our magazine is for students by students related to things in computing. We have run into a shortage of articles for our upcoming Open Source and Free Software issue, and we're asking to see if anyone in the community may be able to help us out by contributing. More information on this can be obtained by emailing Bill Stevenson, our editor in chief. Thanks to anyone who can help us!"

krow writes: "Embedded.com is running an article where the author is making some assumptions of Linux's use in the embedded markets based on the opinion of one consultant and the fact that Lineo had to lay off some people this year. It's still interesting reading though for some insight into a different world for Linux and there is a nice reference in the comments to the interview of Victor Yodaiken of RTLinux fame by by Kevin Fu on the ACM site."

krow writes: "Embedded.com is running an article where the author is making some assumptions of Linux's use in the embedded markets based on the opinion of one consultant and the fact that Lineo had to lay off some people this year. It's still interesting reading though for some insight into a different world for Linux and there is a nice reference in the comments to the interview of Victor Yodaiken of RTLinux fame by by Kevin Fu on the ACM site."