Slashdot Mirror

CheshireCatCO writes "The first pictures from yesterday's flyby of Enceladus are now public. At closest approach, Cassini was set spinning to cancel out the apparent motion of Enceladus so as to capture unsmeared images during the 40,000-mph flyby. Although it wasn't clear that this would work (errors in pointing could easily have made the cameras miss their targets), the maneuver panned out beautifully, producing spectacular images of the surface. Images show the 'tiger stripes' at the south pole, including at least one location that has been identified as a source of a jet, as well as considerable vertical relief, easily visible thanks to the low sun-angle near the south pole at present. Processed, enhanced images should follow shortly."

RevWaldo writes "The International Olympic Committee filed a copyright infringement claim yesterday against YouTube for hosting video of a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan Thursday night. The video depicts demonstrators conducting a candlelight vigil and projecting a protest video onto the consulate building; the projection features recent footage of Tibetan monks being arrested and riffs on the Olympic logo of the five interlocking rings, turning them into handcuffs. YouTube dutifully yanked the video, but it can still be seen on Vimeo. (Be advised; there is some brief footage of bloody, injured monks.)"

Thomas Matysik writes "I'm attempting to de-clutter my house and I've hit a rough patch: the computer room. I've got a bunch of wires, hardware and software that (I think) were useful at one point in time, but these days it doesn't do much more than take up space. Selling it seems like it'd be a huge hassle and it seems really wasteful for me to just pitch all of this stuff in the dumpster. I've considered giving it away to Goodwill, but I'm afraid that's not the right sort of outlet for this stuff. My question: what should I do with all of my tech junk?"

gormanw writes "Just outside Shanghai, there is an island about the size of Manhattan. China is going to build its first-ever 'green city', complete with no gasoline/diesel powered vehicles, 100% renewable energy, green roofs, and recycling everything. The city is called Dongtan and it should house about 5,000 people by the end of 2010, with estimates of 500,000 by 2050. The goal is to build a livable city that is energy efficient, non-polluting, and protects the wildlife in the area."

mikesd81 writes "Engadget reports Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your device. It seems the new 2.x firmware contains a URL which points to a page containing a list of 'unauthorized' apps — a move which suggests that the device makes occasional contact with Apple's servers to see if anything is amiss on your phone. Jonathan Zdziarski, the man who discovered this, explains, 'This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down. I discovered this doing a forensic examination of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep inside CoreLocation.'" Update: 08/11 13:07 GMT by T : Reader gadgetopia writes with a small story at IT Wire, citing an interview in the Wall Street Journal, in which this remote kill-switch is "confirmed by Steve Jobs himself."

TheJerbear79 writes "I recently accepted a work-from-home job that will involve using my landline to talk to customers. When I log into the phone queue, my landline will ring, I'll put in a three digit code, and then calls are routed to the phone line I'm on. It essentially turns my landline into a softphone. Rather than using a regular handset or obtaining a nice business phone with a headset and speakerphone, I would like to use my PC's modem in conjunction with a normal PC headset and soundcard. I know the hardware is capable, but the modem didn't come with appropriate software. Has anyone found anything cheap/free that would suit this kind of usage? Just for clarity, I don't want to use a VOIP solution; I need to use my plain old landline. My reason is this: if I'm watching a movie or listening to an MP3 while I'm waiting for a call, I don't want it to ever be apparent to the person who is on the phone with me, and I want to route all the audio I use through a single headset. I've scoured Google for anything close to this application, and all I've managed to find is information on VOIP software or programs that turn my PC into an answering machine, neither of which will work."

avatar4d writes "Networkworld is reporting about a warballooning operation (similar to wardriving) that was disallowed by the management at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, but was covertly launched anyway. The team found approximately 370 networks, and about a third of those were unsecured. In addition to that, the project managed to show how trusting the local law enforcement agencies really were: 'Near the end of the operation, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police cruiser drove by the parking lot to see what was going on. Hill and his team waved. The police officers waved back and drove off.'"

shadeshope writes "Slowly but surely Google has taken over my computing life. How can I back it up? Bit by bit with their mantra, hip image and brilliant services, Google has gained my trust and all my data. I am doing almost all of my computing in the cloud. Google Reader, Calender, Email, Docs and Notes have become my tools of choice; even to the point where my day book, research notes, etc., are all on Google's servers. It was just so easy, enabling me to effortlessly work from multiple computers, operating systems and locations. I know, I know, this is foolish — all my eggs are firmly in one basket. It has crept up on me. As a long-time computer user and committed pessimist, I have used many schemes over the years to ensure my data is safe. Now I have ceded all control to Google. How can I regain some control and back this all up? Is there a one-touch solution that will take all my data from the various online apps and archive it on my home server?"

snocrossgjd writes "In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers — they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. Their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software."

Calopteryx notes a New Scientist article on the discovery of "supercritical" water emerging from a vent in the Atlantic Ocean at 407 deg. C (765 deg. F). One of its discoverers actually said, "It's water, but not as we know it"; it's the hottest water ever found on earth. The cause seems to be a huge bubble of magma beneath the ocean floor, 3 km below the sea surface. Meanwhile Nymz shares a journal entry on a hot spot on land: a 2-acre patch in Ventura county, in California, that has heated up to 433 deg. C (812 deg. F). Here geologists blame buried hydrocarbons burning as they get access to air through cracks in the ground. That high temperature was measured a foot below the ground surface.

Adrian writes "Zack Anderson, an MIT student, created a solution to wardriving on a budget: warcarting. The Warcart is a shopping cart retrofitted with just about every sort of wireless sniffing device available. It has pivoting antennas and a smoke grenade launcher. It can even dispense infected USB flash drives. It's part of a talk about subway fare-collection-system vulnerabilities that will be given at Defcon 16 in a few days." "Mostly as a joke," says the site — but only mostly.

the-s-dog writes writes to mention that while there have been many people wishing on a star for an iPhone nano, it seems that at least one UK news pub is confident that it will happen, and in time for this Christmas no less. Still completely unfounded rumor, but an interesting possibility. "Apple is about to launch a 'nano' version of the hugely successful iPhone. It is expected to be in the shops in time for Christmas. The product will be launched in the UK at up to £150 for pay-as-you-go customers by O2, the mobile phone group owned by Spain's Telefonica. 'This will be a big one,' said an industry source."

negRo_slim writes "AMD has pushed Fusion as one of the main reasons to justify its acquisition of ATI. Since then, AMD's finances have changed colors and are now deep in the red, the top management has changed, and Fusion still isn't anything AMD wants to discuss in detail. But there are always 'industry sources' and these sources have told us that Fusion is likely to be introduced as a half-node chip."

mactard submitted a collection of insanely beautiful pictures of the Large Hadron Collider. I've always had a warm place for amazing photgraphs, and these really don't disappoint. Science really is beautiful sometimes.

mmacx writes "Technology Review has up an article about Shapeways, a new online rapid-prototyping service that allows users to upload digital designs which are then printed on 3-D printers and shipped back. A spinoff from Philips Research, the service gives small businesses, designers, artists, and hobbyists access to prototyping tools that were once available only to the largest corporations. The fee for a typical printed object is $50-$150. Their video shows the steps behind the process." We've been talking about 3D printing for years.

eldavojohn writes "To combat piracy, the MPAA's latest idea involves a site that would allow users to search for a movie and then provide links to legit legal downloads or ticket purchases for it. Why are they doing this? Because their research showed 'many users have a hard time differentiating between legal and illegal content online.' And all this time I thought people pirated movies because it was cheaper to do! Turns out they were just confused."

JobSeeker writes "Now that subversion has merge tracking my boss wants to save money by dropping our expensive commercial solution. I've pretty much convinced myself that subversion can do the job. I like it. But what about integrated issue tracking? Version control without issue tracking is only half a solution. The TortoiseSVN docs say a little about bugzilla and not much else. What ready-to-play options (commercial or open source) exist for deploying subversion on commercial projects?"

director_mr writes "Tom's Hardware is running a story with an interesting description of a 28-qubit quantum computer that was developed by D-Wave Systems. They intend to open up use of their quantum computer to the public. It is particularly good at pattern recognition, it operates at 10 milliKelvin, and it is shielded to limit electromagnetic interference to one nanotesla in three dimensions across the whole chip. Could this be the first successful commercial quantum computer?"

mcgrof writes "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC license, so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required!"

perlow writes "While Solid State Drives are expensive and shouldn't be used exclusively for primary storage, they perform exceedingly well for things like MySQL databases, provided you tweak your kernel, BIOS, and filesystems accordingly. Here's a few tips to get excellent performance out of your new $500-$900 investment on a Linux system."

BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear part."

Multiple readers, including koavf, have written to tell us the FCC has finally approved the Sirius-XM merger that has been in the works for quite a while now. CNN has picked up AP coverage as well. We discussed approval of the merger by the Justice Department a few months ago. From CNN: "The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to approve the buyout, with the tiebreaker coming Friday night from Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate. Tate had insisted that the companies settle charges that they violated FCC rules before she would approve the deal. The companies agreed this week to pay $19.7 million to the U.S. Treasury for violations related to radio receivers and ground-based signal repeaters. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin confirmed the final vote Friday night. 'I think it's going to be, in the end, a good thing for consumers and be in the public interest,' he told The Associated Press."

Anita Kuno writes "JavaScript: The Good Parts is about the good parts of JavaScript and how to use them. This book takes a realistic look at the strengths and weaknesses of JavaScript and tells you how to use it to its best advantage. The code samples deal with the language and its merits — creating web pages is not discussed. How to understand the language, to execute the operations you want, is the focus of the book, not how to make rounded corners. The author, Douglas Crockford says, 'My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.'" Keep reading for the rest of Anita's review. JavaScript: The Good Parts author Douglas Crockford pages 153 pages includes the index publisher O'Reilly Media Inc. rating 8 reviewer Anita Kuno ISBN 9780596517748 summary The Good Parts of JavaScript. Intended for those familiar with object-oriented programming, who understand inheritance, functions, variables, arrays, and enumeration, it identifies its audience as programmers new to JavaScript as well as those with some familiarity who wish to improve their interaction with the language. People who want to have a good relationship with JavaScript and those who wish to improve the relationship they have will find it most useful. There are lots of books and tutorials that deal with JavaScript but this approaches the language from the point of view of a survivalist.

I expect this little field guide to retain its usefulness for many years. As Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, states on his blog, "What was needed was a convincing proof of concept, AKA a demo. That, I delivered, and in too-short order it was a fait accompli." JavaScript was a mock up that got a stamp of approval. His first draft became the language. I find that rather shocking. But Brendan alludes in his blog to the idea that there were many other considerations in play at the time, so the story-boarded code got the go-ahead. Crockford's book fills a niche for users explaining how to code with JavaScript and be a better programmer because of the experience.

Douglas Crockford writes in a relaxed, conversational style establishing a connection with the reader that continues through the book's contents (all 100 pages) and the five appendixes ( 50 pages total for the appendixes). I read the book in an evening-away-from-the-screen kind of mood and only followed one piece of code as outlined in the book. The book is approachable with a cursory acknowledgment of the code and it is also informative with a detailed examination of said code.

Special mention goes to Chapter 7: Regular Expressions. There are some topics which are so complex that other authors either skip over them, or use so much jargon as to render the effort useless. Douglas Crockford gives a guided tour of a regular expression designed to parse a url and it is intelligible and informative. He identifies the shortcut he uses in his regular expression code and acknowledges the risks he accepts by using it. I found his twelve and a half pages on regular expressions gave me a reasonable introduction to the subject.

He uses quotes from Shakespeare as an icebreaker for each chapter and appendix. The book contains code snippets and some recipes for adding your own functions and methods which Douglas feels should have been in the language and aren't. This I find to be a very interesting feature of the book. Like the staples for a good kitchen: ganache, bechamel, mirepoix; Crockford identifies the staples of a scripting language and gives the reader the recipes for the features that JavaScript doesn't have; .integer, .trim, and .curry (which allows the creation of a new function by combining a function and an argument).

One of the things that is missing from this book is the DOM (the Document Object Model). I couldn't be happier about that. Every other reference I have approached mashes JavaScript to the DOM so fast that as a newcomer to the language I thought that aspects of the DOM were properties of JavaScript. Douglas Crockford has an episode on Yahoo! Video talking about that very topic and it was a breath of fresh air for deciphering JavaScript. By the way, the amount of characters, in the above sentences about the DOM, is about the quantity of characters dedicated to the topic in JavaScript: The Good Parts. For me, this is a plus.

The author states that the necessary equipment for writing JavaScript programs is a browser and a text editor. Since both are readily available in a variety of flavors and styles, I am fairly confident that every programmer wanting to learn about the good parts of JavaScript can do so.

My previous attempts to learn JavaScript had not gone well and I didn't have an understanding about why the topic was proving so confusing for me. Knowing the history of the language and the environment at its birth, I now have a better appreciation for the abilities of this language as well as a higher level of acceptance for its quirks. I understand now why I should use "var" when assigning a variable, and also why it is a good idea to conclude the line containing "return" that is followed by a block, with the left curly brace that begins the block. I didn't have the patience to accept these idiosyncrasies before and now that I know the history of JavaScript, I can see why it is a good idea to use Crockford's suggestions as a consistent coding style.

Charles Jolley suggested that I read JavaScript: The Good Parts as a basis for learning JavaScript. His tag line was: "I read it in three hours." Now, that may be an inappropriate reason for reading a book, but after spending hours and hours with various media trying to understand JavaScript, three hours seemed like a reasonable investment of time. (It took me a little longer reading at home with the occasional interruption but I still did my first pass in an evening.) The author wrote the book as an enumerable (the recipient of an action one or more times) with each reading revealing layers of understanding.

In the appendixes, there is an appendix entitled "Awful Parts" and one entitled "Bad Parts". Global variables head the list in "Awful Parts". There are discussions throughout the book about why to avoid JavaScript's default to global variables and how to do this in your coding style. The explanation, of why global variables should be avoided in JavaScript, is detailed in the "Awful Parts" appendix. Also making an appearance in "Awful Parts": scope, semicolon insertion, and reserved words. The "Bad Parts" appendix includes: == (double equal sign) which can be evaluated unpredictably depending on the circumstances, "with" which can also have unpredictable results, and "eval" which passes a string to the JavaScript compiler and executes the result. "eval" slows the result when compilation isn't required and can also compromise the security of your application. But what about its use in JSON you ask? Crockford suggests using the JSON.parse method instead of "eval". The file which creates the JSON object with the parse method can be found here. If this is of interest to you, I suggest you check the link and access the book to hear it from Crockford directly.

I find Douglas Crockford's perspective on JavaScript in JavaScript: The Good Parts to be useful in my own relationship with JavaScript. His style is accessible and intelligent.

You can purchase JavaScript: The Good Parts from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"

99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."On Thursday the Book of Psalms and the Gospel According to Mark will go live at the Codex Sinaiticus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now.

eldavojohn writes "After seeing some applications from Google and participating in the Google Codejam (which seems to be built using the GWT), I kind of expected to see websites spring up left and right based off the GWT. Well, it's been a year and a half since they open sourced it and I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed by its low profile in the UI community. I've been trolling their blog and have seen a few books out on it. But the one thing I'm not seeing is its use outside of Google. I've worked through the examples and tutorials at home and though I've been impressed with the speed, I am disturbed by the actual result — a whole ton of generated Javascript. But this is the first UI technology I've found where I can write in the native language of the server (Java) to generate and unit-test the UI code. Aside from Google's use and the games of Ryan Dewsbury like KDice & GPokr, does anyone know of major sites using the GWT? If you don't and you've used it yourself, why isn't it taking off? Is it too immature? Is it a solution to a problem that already has too many solutions? Is it fundamentally lacking in some way?"

chareverie writes "General Motors is forming a team with utility companies nationwide to create a charging infrastructure for electric cars. Their goal is to improve the design of charging stations — making them weatherproof and child-proof, for example — in locations such as public garages, meters, and parking lots. They're also working on ways to avoid overwhelming the utilities during peak hours. Their goal is to have these improved charging stations implemented by 2010, when the Chevy Volt is introduced. Everyone recognizes however that a national car-charging infrastructure would be far from complete at that time."

chareverie writes "Fortify Software released a study where they concluded that open source software poses a large security risk to corporations who have implemented it. They reason this by stating that the fault lies within the open source communities and their failure to adhere to minimum security practices. Fortify Software studied 11 open source software packages, where the application server Tomcat was determined to be the best. The other 10 were found to have poor results, with those being Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts. Jacob West, manager of Fortify's research group, reminds that purpose of the study was 'not to condemn open source software, but rather to point out that the security practices need to improve because open source adoption by enterprises and governments is growing.'"

chareverie writes "Researchers at Harvard University have been working towards a goal of replacing some types of heart surgery with injections of cells that would grow into blood vessels for damaged hearts. The cells that would be used are progenitor cells obtained from the blood or bone marrow, as opposed to stem cells that are obtained from human embryos. The research team was successful with their tests on growing heart blood vessels in mice. Joyce Bishoff, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the report, says, 'Our next goal down the line is to use them in humans.' She also notes that more studies need to be done on animals to see how these cells would react and behave with other types of tissues. A similar human experiment was done two years ago in Germany, during which a few people from a group of 75 heart attack victims were given injections of progenitor cells from their own bone marrow or blood. The report concluded that there were improved heart functions." Reader w1z4rd points out related coverage with some more information at BBC News.

Kristl writes "I have called AT&T and walked into several AT&T stores to ask 'How much will an AT&T phone plan cost per month with taxes and fees and everything?'. No one can answer this question. They are evasive and become testy when I push them on it. Their answer is they can't tell me what the government is going to charge me as the fees can vary month to month, but I've been an AT&T customer for several years, and my taxes and fees have not varied more than a dollar in all of that time. So I question them: 'Can you just tell me what the taxes and fees will be for a 3G plan in California that has the basic calling plan, basic data plan, and the basic text plan?' I even do the math for them, that's $75. Okay AT&T, what are the taxes and fees on $75? Oh, they can't tell me that, as the taxes and fees can vary from month to month." There's more to this justified rant (below); real-world numbers in comments could help answer the questions that cell carriers seem content to sidestep as completely as possible. "Okay ATT, can you tell me what the taxes and fees were on $75 plan last month? No.

Okay AT&T, cn you tell me what my taxes and fees were last month on my current $40 plan ... that only requires reading my bill right? Oh good! They can read! Yes they can tell me what the taxes and fees were on my $40 account last month.

Okay AT&T, we have progress ... can you now pull up a plan that has a $40 calling plan, a $30 3G data plan, and a $5 text plan? The answer? No, they can't do that, that would be an invasion of privacy.

So I ask, can they go through the motions of setting my account up for the iphone plan I described above and then tell me what the taxes and fees amount to? Oh, of course not!

This doesn't seem like it should be so hard. What is the conspiracy that ATT refuses to tell me what the my bill would cost per month were I to switch to a new plan?"

chareverie writes "With how the internet has become, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become a tool for crime solvers, employers, and now, lawyers. Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunk driving case, the college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner, with the words 'jail bird' on his costume. Not surprisingly, his prosecutor was able to obtain photos of him at the party that were posted on Facebook, and claimed he was an 'unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital.' The photos were presented in a slideshow, with one of them showing Lipton holding a can of Red Bull in one hand, and an arm draped around a girl bearing sorority letters. The judge agreed with the prosecutor, and changed Lipton's sentence to two years in prison. The article also cites other instances of people getting harsher sentences from pictures of them posted online."

jaypaulw writes "I've owned a WRT54G, some cheap D-Link home Wi-Fi/firewall/routers, and now an Apple Airport Extreme (100/10 ethernet ports). In the context of the discussion about the worst uses of Windows — installation in places where an embedded device is superior — I've gotten to wondering why it's necessary to reboot these devices so frequently, like every few days. It seems like routers, purpose-built with an embedded OS, should be the most stable devices on my network."

Todd writes "I've been looking around at 'help wanted' advertisements for programming jobs, and almost all of them demand that you not only have professional experience, but also that you show samples of your work. This got me wondering; with the work product, trade secret, and non-disclosure laws/agreements, how exactly can you show work that you've done in a professional capacity to a prospective employer without violating the privacy of the company for which the code was written? For instance, I can't say I've written many BASH scripts (at least, not large ones) for myself personally, but the assortment of such scripts written for my current job is wide and varied indeed. I can't very well just deliver these scripts, or even small portions thereof, to third parties to help demonstrate my scripting prowess. With that in mind, what am I supposed to show them?"

bigplrbear writes "I found an interesting article revealing the many places that Microsoft products reside, and what they're used for, ranging from elevators to ticket scanners." From the article: "Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent." Note: I'm making no claim of criminal negligence!

Matthew Fluet writes "The 11th Annual ICFP Programming Contest begins July 11 (12:00 Noon PDT) and runs through July 14 (12:00 Noon PDT). As in the previous ten editions, this is your chance to show that your favorite programming language (or your team) is better than all others! In addition to prize money, the winner's programming language is declared the 'programming language of choice for discriminating hackers.' Contestants may use any programming language (or combination of languages) to show their skill. How will your favorite language fare?"

benuski writes "Today at GUADEC, the Gnome User and Developer European Conference, the gtk+ team announced their plans for gtk+ 3.0; immediately after, the Gnome release team announced their plans for Gnome 2.30 to be changed into Gnome 3.0. This would mean a release date a year and a half to a year in the future. Details are short at the moment, but the Gnome team seems to be following in KDE's footsteps, but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."

Ken E. writes "Asus seems to have completed its Eee PC laptop line-up, at least for the time being. The Taiwanese manufacturer has now confirmed both specifications and UK pricing of the Eee PC 904 and Eee PC 1000 — its two latest models. The Eee PC 904 is essentially an Eee PC 900 in an Eee PC 1000 chassis (big keyboard, 8.9in screen, Celeron-M 900MHz, Windows XP) and will cost £269 inc VAT. The Eee PC 1000 will cost £349 inc VAT for an Intel Atom (1.6GHz) chip, 10in screen, 80Gb HDD and Windows XP. Looks like those early Eee PC 900 adopters (£329 inc VAT, initially) have been stiffed. Still, that's progress, I guess ..."

thatskinnyguy sends news of Merriam-Webster's 2008 list of new words and, to no-one's surprise, a good number of them come out of geek culture: words like webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting, and fanboy are now official words according to M-W. The CNet article pulls out one "new" word for special appreciation — mondegreen — and, while the article gets the origin right, it ends with a lame call for readers to send in their favorite mondegreens. (CNet does have the good grace to link the Kiss This Guy site.) SFGate columnist Jon Carroll has been collecting readers' mondegreens since 1995 and his list is bound to be better. Quoting Carroll, in a prophetic mode: "This space has been for some years the chief publicity agent for mondegreens. The Oxford English Dictionary has not yet seen the light, but it will, it will." Would you believe, Merriam-Webster's?

Bandman writes "My business just purchased a couple dozen blades, and with our existing servers, this brings us to around 60 machines. We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters). We used to use theme-based naming schemes, but we've been migrating to a more utilitarian system. I think it's clearer and more concise, but I've had some feedback from users who didn't find it understandable. What do you use for your internal DNS schemes? How big is your network, and what do you recommend for future expansion? Does it matter to your users at all?"

NotNormallyNormal writes "CBC picked up an AP story about ICANN recently losing control over two of their domain names on Thursday, June 26. A domain registrar run by the group transferred the domains to someone else. ICANN's press release had this to say: 'As has been widely reported, a number of domain names, including icann.com and iana.com were recently redirected to different DNS servers, allowing a group to provide visitors to those domains with their own website. It would appear the attack was sophisticated, combining both social and technological techniques, but was also limited and focused.' Comcast has had similar troubles lately as well."

davidphogan74 writes "I have some stolen computers checking in with a server we have (software pre-loaded), and I have full access to the systems. What's the best way to deal with this situation? The local police (to the theft) have been contacted several times and seem to be clueless. I personally have no financial interest in these computers, I just don't like atom-thieves. What's the best way to handle knowing the IPs, email addresses, MySpace sites, the Google login, etc. when working with law enforcement? The officer I spoke with (who genuinely seemed to care) didn't know an IP address from a mailing address, so I called others. Nobody cared. Anyone have any ideas?"

Marzubus writes "I tend to do a lot of code editing in vim and sometimes get the 'burning eyes' or headaches. I have been trying to find a background / foreground combination for my terminal sessions which is easiest on the eyes but cannot seem to find any real data on this subject. Does anyone know of a study / data on this topic?"

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.

Ken E. writes "UK mobile tech site Mobile Computer has posted a nice 10-minute video that gives a tour of the MSI Wind, and shows it alongside the two other Intel Atom-powered netbooks, the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC 901. The site also has photos that show the three netbooks together to give a good idea of the differences in size. The MSI Wind goes on sale today in the UK (a week ahead of the US) for £350 (around $700). Not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop, but the MSI Wind looks like the best of the bunch so far."

jyosim writes "A site called Textbook Torrents is among the many sites popping up offering free downloads of expensive textbooks using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer networks. With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase." Having just completed graduate school, I can attest that quite a few books are in that more-than-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.

SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day blogger Nate McFeters has asked the question, 'Should vulnerabilities be treated as defects?' McFeters claims that if vulnerabilities were treated as product defects, companies would have an effective way of forcing developers and business units to focus on security issue. McFeters suggests providing bonuses for good developers, and taking away from bonuses for those that can't keep up. It's an interesting approach that if used, might force companies to take a stronger stance on security related issues."

benst writes "Here's yet another way to measure the success of GPS: by the efforts to negate it. While unintentional jamming continues to rise, intentional jamming by both foreign military forces and at-home miscreants of various stripes has shown increased vigor in the past six months. Related here are recent instances of intentional jamming on each side of the border, and (briefly outlined) one initiative mounted by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) to counteract it. Also, here are some ways to detect and prevent jamming."

gzipped_tar contributed a link to Moonlight Blog, which says that "SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to be blocked in Mainland China. The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which will begin on 8 August. Some days before, a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008. The project's developer said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government's repression against Tibetan unrest earlier in this year. SF.net has once been banned by China in 2002. However, the ban was lifted later in 2003." gzipped_tar adds: "As a SourceForge user in Beijing, I can confirm this first-hand. I also tried traceroute to sourceforge.net, only to find the connection being dropped at a Beijing ISP's gateway router. It appears that the projects' respective homepages are available even if they are hosted by SF, but the summary and download pages are blocked." (As you probably know, Slashdot and Sourceforge share a corporate overlord.)

Now.Imperfect writes "In its last day of session, the Supreme Court has definitively clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment. The confusion is whether the Second Amendment allows merely for the existence of a state militia, or the private ownership of guns. This ruling is in response to a case regarding the 32-year-old Washington DC ban on guns." This is one of the most-watched Supreme Court cases in a long time, and Wikipedia's page on the case gives a good overview; the actual text of the decision (PDF) runs to 157 pages, but the holding is summarized in the first three. There are certainly other aspects of the Second Amendment left unaddressed, however, so you can't go straight to the store for a recently made automatic rifle.

s31523 writes "All of us have one time or another been completely frustrated by certain Windows usability issues, and in many cases our experiences have driven us over to Linux, or kept us there. For anyone that has ever been frustrated, you will be happy to know you aren't the only one. After reading this leaked Microsoft memo from Bill Gates back in 2003, you will surely have more insight into why Vista is a complete disaster due to Microsoft not learning anything from their experiences from XP."