Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Following the /. story on the Feds demanding SSL keys, now comes news that the feds are demanding user passwords, and in some cases, the encryption algorithm and salt used. From the article: 'A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'" ... Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. ... Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.' I'm next expecting to see the regulation or law demanding that all users use plain text for all web transactions, to catch terrorists and for the children."

Nerval's Lobster writes "The idea of Samsung as a Google rival isn't unprecedented. For the past several quarters, Samsung has progressively molded Android to its own vision: layered with TouchWiz and sprinkled with all sorts of Samsung-centric apps, the software interface on Samsung devices is deviating rapidly away from the 'stock' Android that runs on other manufacturers' devices. During this year's unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S4 at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, Samsung executives onstage barely mentioned the word 'Android,' and played up features designed specifically for the device. Establishing its own brand identity by moving away from 'stock' Android has done Samsung a lot of good: its smartphones and tablets not only stand out from the flood of Android devices on the market, but it's given the company an opportunity to position itself as the one true rival to iOS. While other Android manufacturers struggle, Samsung has profited. If Samsung continues to gain strength, it could become a huge issue for Google, which has its own eye on the hardware segment. Although Google purchased Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billion, it hasn't yet remolded the brand in its own image, claiming that the subsidiary's existing pipeline of products first needs to be flushed into the ecosystem. But that reluctance could be coming to an end: reports suggest that Google will pump $500 million into marketing the Moto X, an upcoming 'hero' smartphone meant to reestablish Motorola's dominance of the Android space. If the Moto X succeeds, and Google decides to push aggressively into the branded hardware space, it could drive Samsung even further away from core Android. Never mind issuing TouchWiz updates until the original Android interface is virtually unrecognizable—with its industry heft, Samsung could potentially boot Google Play from the home-screen and substitute it with an apps-and-content hub of its own design. That would take a lot of work, of course: first, Samsung would need to build a substantial developer ecosystem, and then it would need to score great deals with movie studios and other content providers. But as Amazon and Apple have shown, such things aren't impossible. The only questions are whether (a) Samsung has the will to devote the necessary time and resources to such a project, and (b) if it's willing to transform its symbiotic relationship with Google into an antagonistic one."

An anonymous reader writes "The latest major release of the LibreOffice office suite has just been published, including an experimental improved sidebar based on the work of Apache OpenOffice, embedded fonts, better Microsoft Office compatibility (improving their exclusive capability in the free software world of not only being able to read but also write .docx and .xlsx files) and many further Improvements."

miller60 writes "The U.S. government keeps finding more data centers. Federal agencies have about 7,000 data centers, according to the latest stats from the ongoing IT consolidation process. The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year. The process has led to the closure of 484 data centers thus far, with another 855 planned over the next year. The GAO continues to call for the process to look beyond the number of facilities and focus on savings."

miller60 writes "The U.S. government keeps finding more data centers. Federal agencies have about 7,000 data centers, according to the latest stats from the ongoing IT consolidation process. The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year. The process has led to the closure of 484 data centers thus far, with another 855 planned over the next year. The GAO continues to call for the process to look beyond the number of facilities and focus on savings."

cold fjord writes "Break out the tin foil hats, and make them double thick. Forbes reports, 'The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah ... the center will be up and running by the "end of the fiscal year," ....Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive,... Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers .... "So we are talking $1 billion in machines." Kahle estimates each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data. ... all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, ... If Kahle's estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes – ... but is not of the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would allow the data center to easily hold hypothetical 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year. The data center's capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area. Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high given the space allocated for data in the facility. ... he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. That would only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. Still, he says that's a lot of data pointing to a 2009 article about Google planning multiple data centers for a single exabyte of info. '" Update: 07/25 16:33 GMT by T : For even more, see this story.

New submitter transam writes "After a long stint at Apple doing all kinds of Unix-y goodness, Jordan Hubbard has moved onto iXsystems to lead engineering and development, including heading up the FreeNAS project. Apple's loss is their gain."

MojoKid writes "In addition to the anticipated performance gains that Intel's new Haswell CPU architecture might bring to the table for their new MacBook Air, there are additional component-level upgrades that Apple baked in to their latest ultra-light notebook; namely a higher capacity 54 Whr battery and a PCI Express-based Solid State Drive (SSD). Apple still hasn't seen fit to up the ante on the MacBook Air's display, opting instead to stick with the 1440x900 TN panel carried over from the previous generation 13-inch machine, with the 11-inch variant sporting a 1366x768 native res. But in terms of performance, this is Apple's fastest Air yet, with storage throughput in excess of 700MB/sec for reads and 400MB/sec for writes, along with graphics horsepower that rivals entry level discrete GPUs, thanks to Intel's HD Graphic 5000 core in Haswell. Battery life has been improved dramatically as well, with the new Air lasting over 9 hrs on a charge, playing back 1080p video content. Apple also reduced their MSRP by $100 versus last year's model." Not too bad at around $1100. The 54Wh battery looks it improves the portability a bit.

Lauren Weinstein writes "With further confirmation of the longstanding rumor that the U.S. government (and, we can safely assume, other governments around the world) have been pressuring major Internet firms to provide their 'master' SSL keys for government surveillance purposes, we are rapidly approaching a critical technological crossroad. It is now abundantly clear — as many of us have suspected all along — that governments and surveillance agencies of all stripes — Western, Eastern, democratic, and authoritarian, will pour essentially unlimited funds into efforts to monitor Internet communications." If this is true it means that SSL/TLS to any Internet service could be useless — the authorities could simply man-in-the-middle anyone. Without knowing who has given keys over, or if anyone has given keys over... The NSA does claim encryption poses a problem for them, but honesty isn't their best attribute. The source claims that major providers at least have resisted (assuming it is happening), but that smaller companies may have folded to the pressure.

cycoj writes "The NSA says that there is no central method to search its own email. When asked in a Freedom of Information Act request for emails with the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period, the agency, which has been collecting and analyzing the data of hundreds of millions of Internet users, says it can only perform person-per-person searches on its own email."

New submitter duSoliel wrote in with news that another musician is complaining about a lack of royalties from streaming music services. This time, however, the musician is going after MediaNet (once known as MusicNet) which acts as an intermediary source for licensing songs to streaming music services that did not manage to gain compulsory licensing from the Copyright Royalty Board. MediaNet has a storied history riddled with lawsuits from the Harry Fox agency among others; a suit brought last year alleged that around a quarter of MediaNet's catalog was improperly licensed, but was settled privately out of court. Now, Aimee Mann is suing them for failure to properly license 120 of her songs, seeking $18 million in damages. From the article: "... she entered into a license agreement in 2003 with MediaNet (then known as MusicNet). The term of the license agreement was scheduled to end in 2006 but had automatic two-year extensions unless terminated by either party. Mann's representative is said to have sent a termination notice in 2005, but nevertheless, 'MediaNet continued after the Termination Date to transmit, perform, reproduce and distribute the Compositions as part of MediaNet's service, despite having no right or license to do so.' ... Besides suing for direct infringement, Mann is also claiming that MediaNet induced its business partners to commit copyright infringement. Mann also says she has not been paid any royalties by the company since Sept. 30, 2005 with the exception of a $20 advance this past March that was returned." The perils of not having sane compulsory licensing for Internet radio?

wiredmikey writes with this tidbit from Security Week: "Earlier this month, researchers from Bluebox Security uncovered a serious vulnerability in Android that allowed for the modification of apps without affecting the cryptographic signature, making it possible for attackers to turn legitimate apps into Trojans. ... Now, Symantec says it has uncovered the first malicious apps making use of the exploit in the wild. Symantec discovered two mobile applications that were infected by an attacker, which are legitimate applications used to help find and make doctor appointments and distributed on Android marketplaces in China. 'An attacker has taken both of these applications and added code to allow them to remotely control devices, steal sensitive data such as IMEI and phone numbers, send premium SMS messages, and disable a few Chinese mobile security software applications by using root commands, if available,' Symantec explained in a blog post. ... Google has fixed the security hole in Android, but it is now in the control of handset manufacturers to produce and release the updates for mobile devices to patch the flaws."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Astrophysicists at MIT and the Pawsey supercomputing center in Western Australia have discovered a whole new role for supercomputers working on big-data science projects: They've figured out how to turn a supercomputer into a router. (Make that a really, really big router.) The supercomputer in this case is a Cray Cascade system with a top performance of 0.3 petaflops — to be expanded to 1.2 petaflops in 2014 — running on a combination of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors. The machine, which is still being installed at the Pawsey Centre in Kensington, Western Australia and isn't scheduled to become operational until later this summer, had to go to work early after researchers switched on the world's most sensitive radio telescope June 9. The Murchison Widefield Array is a 2,000-antenna radio telescope located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, built with the backing of universities in the U.S., Australia, India and New Zealand. Though it is the most powerful radio telescope in the world right now, it is only one-third of the Square Kilometer Array — a spread of low-frequency antennas that will be spread across a kilometer of territory in Australia and Southern Africa. It will be 50 times as sensitive as any other radio telescope and 10,000 times as quick to survey a patch of sky. By comparison, the Murchison Widefield Array is a tiny little thing stuck out as far in the middle of nowhere as Australian authorities could find to keep it as far away from terrestrial interference as possible. Tiny or not, the MWA can look farther into the past of the universe than any other human instrument to date. What it has found so far is data — lots and lots of data. More than 400 megabytes of data per second come from the array to the Murchison observatory, before being streamed across 500 miles of Australia's National Broadband Network to the Pawsey Centre, which gets rid of most of it as quickly as possible."

coolnumbr12 writes "A 2009 study (PDF) by the McAfee estimated that hacking costs the global economy $1 trillion. It turns out that number was a massive exaggeration by McAfee, a software security branch of Intel that works closely with the U.S. government at the local, state and federal level. A new estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and underwritten by McAfee) suggests the number is closer to closer to $300 billion (PDF), but even that much is uncertain. One of McAfee's clients, the Department of Defense, has used the $1 trillion estimate to argue for an expansion of cybersecurity, including 13 new teams dedicated to cyberwarfare. Despite the new data, Reuters said McAfee is still trying to exaggerate the numbers." The $1 trillion study has seen other criticism as well, so the new data is a step in the right direction.

An anonymous reader writes "Atari declared bankruptcy earlier this year, and part of that process involves selling off its property in order to pay as many entities holding its debt as possible. The latest round includes a $30 million claim from Atari's parent company in France, and a $261 million claim from another subsidiary of that parent company. The $30 million debt is secured (in other words, they get priority on whatever's left in the U.S. Atari's coffers), but the $261 million debt is not, so they'll have to wait in line with everybody else." The article also lists some interesting sell-offs. The old Accolade brand got sold for $50,000, the Battlezone Franchise was sold to Rebellion Interactive for $566,500, and Wargaming World Limited purchased the Total Annihilation and Masters of Orion franchises. Stardock Systems, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, picked up the rights to the Star Control franchise, which they intend to reboot. (Those who played it will recall that StarCon2 was the Best Game Ever. And it's been remade after the creators released the source code.)

New submitter Ajay Anand writes with news that Eolas's web patents are really dead (the infamous browser plugin patent that forced Internet Explorer to change how it activated plugins). After Eolas sued a number of companies, last fall a jury found the patents invalid; Eolas naturally mounted an appeal. But a panel of judges simply affirmed the jury decision (PDF). A quiet ending to a decade of patent trolling.

New submitter Ajay Anand writes with news that Eolas's web patents are really dead (the infamous browser plugin patent that forced Internet Explorer to change how it activated plugins). After Eolas sued a number of companies, last fall a jury found the patents invalid; Eolas naturally mounted an appeal. But a panel of judges simply affirmed the jury decision (PDF). A quiet ending to a decade of patent trolling.

Via Ars comes news that the OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 2.0 were released yesterday. OpenGL 4.4 features a few new extensions, perhaps most importantly a few to ease porting applications from Direct3D. New bindless shaders have access to the entire virtual address space of the card, and new sparse textures allow streaming tiles of textures too large for the graphics card memory. Finally, the ARB has announced the first set of conformance tests since OpenGL 2.0, so going forward anything calling itself OpenGL must pass certification. The OpenCL 2.0 spec is still provisional, but now features a memory model that is a subset of C11, allowing sharing of complex data between the host and GPU and avoiding the overhead of copying data to and from the GPU (which can often make using OpenCL a losing proposition). There is also a new spec for an intermediate language: "'SPIR' stands for Standard Portable Intermediate Representation and is a portable non-source representation for OpenCL 1.2 device programs. It enables application developers to avoid shipping kernel source and to manage the proliferation of devices and drivers from multiple vendors. OpenCL SPIR will enable consumption of code from third party compiler front-ends for alternative languages, such as C++, and is based on LLVM 3.2. Khronos has contributed open source patches for Clang 3.2 to enable SPIR code generation." For full details see Khronos's OpenGL 4.4 announcement, and their OpenCL 2.0 announcement. Update: 07/23 20:17 GMT by U L : edxwelch notes that Anandtech published notes and slides from the SIGGRAPH announcement.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Last week, Microsoft announced that it would take a $900 million write-off on its Surface RT tablets. Although launched with high hopes in the fall of 2012, the sleek devices—which run Windows RT, a version of Windows 8 designed for hardware powered by the mobile-friendly ARM architecture—have suffered from middling sales and fading buzz. But if Microsoft decides to continue with Surface, there's one surefire way to restart its (metaphorical) heart: make it the ultimate bargain. The company's already halfway there, having knocked $150 off the sticker price, but that's not enough. Imagine Microsoft pricing the Surface at a mere pittance, say $50 or $75 — even in this era of cheaper tablets, the devices would fly off the shelves so fast, the sales rate would make the iPad look like the Zune. There's a historical precedent for such a maneuver. In 2011, Hewlett-Packard decided to terminate its TouchPad tablet after a few weeks of poor sales. In a bid to clear its inventory, the company dropped the TouchPad's starting price to $99, which sent people rushing into stores in a way they hadn't when the device was priced at $499. Demand for the suddenly ultra-cheap tablet reached the point that HP needed weeks to fulfill backorders. (Despite that sales spike, HP decided to kill the TouchPad; the margins on $99 obviously didn't work out to everyone's satisfaction.) In the wake of Microsoft announcing that it would take that $900 million write-down on Surface RT, reports surfaced that the company could have as many as six million units sitting around, gathering dust. Whether that figure is accurate—it seems more based on back-of-napkin calculations than anything else—it's almost certainly the case that Microsoft has a lot of unsold Surface RTs in a bunch of warehouses all around the world. Why not clear them out by knocking a couple hundred dollars off the price? It's not as if they're going anywhere, anyway."

An anonymous reader writes "Late last night, MulticoreWare released an early alpha build of the x265 library. x265 is intended to be the open source counterpart to the recently released HEVC/H.265 standard which was approved back in January, much in the same way that x264 is used for H.264 today. Tom's Hardware put x265 through a series of CPU benchmarks and then compared x265 to x264. While x265 is more taxing in terms of CPU utilization, it affords higher quality at any given bit rate, or the same quality at a lower bit rate than x264." (Reader Dputiger writes points out a comparison at ExtremeTech, too.)

sfcrazy writes "Aaron Seigo, a lead KDE developer, says that the ambitious KDE tablet Vivaldi is shipping to the team for quality testing. Seigo writes on his Google+ page, 'A great start to the week with a warm, sunny, quiet Monday. Well, almost quiet. The first Vivaldi tablets, new dual-core engineering boards and the custom EOMA68 developer workbenches we commissioned have all been shipped out. Don't get too excited: the tablets are pre-certification (EC/FCC) and are on their way to us so we can verify the Q/A targets we set out. Still ...'" It looks like long-time reader lkcl's EOMA-68 initiative is working out; in related news the first batch of Allwinner A10 EOMA-68 cards is shipping to the "...20 Free Software developers brave enough to take one of these at this very early phase." Update: 07/23 17:16 GMT by U L : Correction from lkcl: the first batch of EOMA-68 cards are actually using the Allwinner A20, a bit of an upgrade from the original design.

Nerval's Lobster writes "In June, Steven Spielberg predicted that Hollywood was on the verge of an 'implosion' in which 'three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing to the ground.' The resulting destruction, he added, could change the film industry in radical and possibly unwelcome ways. And sooner than he may have thought, the implosion has arrived: in the past couple weeks, six wannabe blockbusters have cratered at the North American box office: 'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.' These films featured big stars, bigger explosions, and top-notch special effects—exactly the sort of summer spectacle that ordinarily assures a solid run at the box office. Yet all of them failed to draw in the massive audiences needed to earn back their gargantuan budgets. Hollywood's more reliant than ever on analytics to predict how movies will do, and even Google has taken some baby-steps into that arena with a white paper describing how search-query patterns and paid clicks can estimate how well a movie will do on its opening weekend, but none of that data seems to be helping Hollywood avoid shooting itself in the foot with a 'Pacific Rim'-sized plasma cannon. In other words, analytics can help studios refine their rollout strategy for new films—but the bulk of box-office success ultimately comes down to the most elusive and unquantifiable of things: knowing what the audience wants before it does, and a whole lot of luck."

The Northside Independent School District (NISD) of Texas, has decided to drop their controversial student RFID card plans and settle on hundreds of cameras to monitor students. Apparently, the technology wasn't quite the attendance silver bullet administration thought it would be, as Slate's Will Oremus discovered. 'Northside Independent School District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez told me that the microchip-ID program turned out not to be worth the trouble. Its main goal was to increase attendance by allowing staff to locate students who were on campus but didn't show up for roll call. That was supposed to lead to increased revenue. But attendance at the two schools in question a middle school and a high school barely budged in the year that the policy was in place. And school staff found themselves wasting a lot of time trying to physically track down the missing students based on their RFID locators. "We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed at John Jay High School and the 100 that are installed at Jones Middle School. Plus we are upgrading those surveillance systems to high-definition and more sophisticated cameras. So there will be a surveillance-camera umbrella around both schools," Gonzalez said."'

An anonymous reader writes "With Firefox OS version 1.0 out the door, Mozilla has decided that it's time to unveil its strategy for new versions. The company is planning to make feature releases available to partners every quarter and push out security updates for the previous two feature releases every six weeks. 'As far as I know, that's the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy out there,' Alex Keybl, Mozilla's Manager of Release Management, said in a statement. 'This sort of alignment across multiple browser products, and now an OS, is unprecedented at the pace we're moving.'"

Taco Cowboy writes with news that Microsoft's stock price dropped over 11 percent yesterday. The selloff was the biggest since 2009, and during the day the price was down more than 12 percent at one point, making it the biggest single day drop since April, 2000. Analysts believe the drop was due primarily to the company missing its quarterly earnings projections in addition to taking a massive, $900 million write-down on unsold Surface RT tablets. "Microsoft’s decline is both a consequence of the changing dynamics of the tech world and the incredible surge in its stock price this year. Shares in the maker of Windows had rallied nearly 30% this year, leaving both the broader stock market and the technology sector in the dust. It was, it seemed, Steve Ballmer’s year. Until Friday. The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units. Being the world’s largest software company, 'over 80% of its revenue and nearly all of its profits continue to be derived by its ubiquitous Windows OS, its server business (Windows Server), and the business division (Office),' according to UBS. And indeed that decline in the PC industry is hurting the company’s bottom line."

New submitter robp writes "After a link to VLC showed up in one of HBO's DMCA takedown requests, I recalled how often I've linked to VLC in my own copy, and how often I've seen that app noted across traditional-media outlets — even though you could make the same arguments against linking to it that Judge Kaplan bought in 2000. Now, though, even the House's own IT department not only links to this CSS-circumventing app but endorses it. Question is, what led to this enlightenment?"

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton proposes a new use for online, anonymous voting: helping sort skill from luck in the cheek-by-jowl world of best-selling (and would-be best-selling) authors: "J.K. Rowling recently confirmed that she was the author of a book she had published under a pseudonym, which spiked in sales after she was outed as the true author. Perhaps she was doing an experiment to see how much luck had played a role in propelling her to worldwide success, and whether she could recreate anything close to that success when starting from scratch. But a better way to answer that question would be to strike a deal with an amateur-fiction-hosting site and use the random-sample-voting algorithm that I've written so much about, to test how her writing stacks up against other writers in the same genre." Read on for more. Update: 07/20 01:23 GMT by T : Note: An editorial goof (mine) swapped out the word "confirmed" for "revealed" (above) in an earlier rendering of this story.

Rowling confirmed (after the information leaked accidentally) that she had authored a new book, The Cuckoo's Calling, under the male pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which went on to sell only about 1,500 copies before she announced that she was the real author and sales of the book spiked 150,000%.

Stephen King actually tried something similar in the 1970s, publishing a series of books under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman," which he later said was partly an attempt to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. (The Richard Bachman books sold 10 times as many copies after King was revealed as the author.) Rowling has not said whether she was attempting a similar experiment, having issued a statement that before the revelation, it had been "wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name."

But if either J.K. Rowling or Stephen King really wants to find the answer to the question of talent vs. luck, the solution lies in the random-sample voting algorithm that I've been advocating in occasional articles for years now, going back to "Censorship By Glut" in 2006. Here's how the experiment could work, for evaluating the quality of fiction writing:

1. Rowling or King could approach a pre-established amateur fiction hosting site with a large number of registered users. Or they could create their own fiction hosting site and announce it to the world for the purpose of running the experiment, which would almost certainly attract a large number of users to sign up. (The experiment only works if the site has a large number of users, for reasons that will become clear.)

2. When a user submits a new short story to the site, the site randomly selects a small subset of other users on the site (say, 20 other users), emails them a link to the new story, and invites them to read it and rate its content. There are several ways you could incentivize those users to read the link and rate the story on a scale of 1 to 10. You could bill it as the "civic duty" of registered users of the site (in the same way that it's the civic duty of registered Wikipedia editors to maintain the quality of articles, even though the editors are working for free). You could require registered users to read and rate any stories that are emailed to them (although of course there'd be no way to stop someone from lazily submitting a rating without even reading the story). You could actually require payments from users who submit stories, and then use that money to distribute small payments to the raters as compensation for reading the story (although that seems like it would be the biggest headache, since you'd have to jump through legal and logistical hoops to set it up, and it would attract cheaters who would try to abuse the system just for the free small payments). But in any case, you don't need every user who gets emailed a story, to actually click through to read the story and rate it. All that matters is that out of those 20 users, enough of them click through to read the story, that you get a statistically representative sample of what users think of the quality.

   Optionally, the story raters could also submit written feedback about why they liked or did not like a story. But the important part is collecting the numeric ratings so that they can be averaged into a single overall rating for the piece of content.

3. If a story gets a high enough average rating in the first round of voting, then it gets emailed out to a larger random sample of voters, say, 200. The ratings given by this larger sample can be used to distinguish the very best stories from the merely good. (We expect that for good stories, the ratings would tend to cluster around the high end of the scale, so with that smaller variance, it would take a larger sample size to find a statistically significant difference between the quality of two stories.)

4. The stories that get the highest ratings can be featured on the front page of the site, so that everybody can have the benefit of enjoying the "best" stories. Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling and Stephen King have the benefit of finding out how their stories compare against stories written by unpublished amateur writers.

It all sounds deceptively simple, but the important feature is that you've taken the arbitrariness out of the outcome. As long as your sample sizes are large enough, the rating that a story obtains in this system, will be approximately equal to the average rating it would get from all users across the site. "Luck" is no longer a factor, because you could re-run the experiment twice with the same set of stories, and get approximately the same outcome.

This is important, because numerous experiments and real-world studies have shown that in any environment where users can recommend content to each other and browse content that is already known to be popular — in other words, how most of us discover content in the real world — luck plays a much greater role in which content becomes wildly successful. The generally accepted explanation is that an initial stroke of luck can have a self-reinforcing snowball effect — if a few key influencers happen to discover and recommend a piece of content at the same time, their friends and followers will be drawn to that content as well, and once it crosses that threshold, the content has now become "popular" enough that even more users will be drawn to it just because it's popular.

This is also why any of the existing fiction-rating sites would not work for this experiment — because most such sites allow authors to invite their friends to sign up and give high ratings to their stories, or to form cliques that all give high ratings to each other's writings. It's usually in the site's best interests to allow these tricks, because it gives authors the incentive to promote the site to their friends in order to get them to sign up. But it also means that (a) authors can easily game the system, and the highest-rated stories may not be the highest-quality ones but the ones whose authors simply play the game the best, and (b) even without "gaming the system", the fact that users can see other users' ratings and can seek out "most popular" or "trending" stories, creates the snowball effects discussed above, and introduces a huge amount of arbitrariness into the process.

Duncan Watts' excellent book Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer) is an excellent introduction to the arbitrariness phenomenon, but if you don't have time to read the whole book, just read about the Matthew Salganik 'many-worlds' experiment", which Watts co-authored and which I've linked to in pretty much every other article I've written about the random-sample-voting algorithm. The gist was that if you divide users into multiple artificial "worlds," where users can recommend content only to other users within those worlds, and seed all artificial worlds with the same content (in this case, songs), then songs which become wildly popular in some worlds will become duds in others.

The whole of Everything is Obvious is at least as insightful as anything ever written by Malcolm Gladwell, and would appeal to the same people, but it never became a bestseller, because — well, probably because we live in one of the many possible worlds of a Salganik experiment, and in the world we happen to live in, the luck of the draw meant that book didn't take off.

But back to the proposed experiment. It is true that the votes of the average users would not tell us anything about whether the winning stories were "artistically" good, however you define that. But in King's case, he was not trying to answer questions about artistic merit. he was trying to find out if his bestselling-author status was due to talent or luck, so the average rating from regular readers would be quite on point. Rowling said that she wanted to write without any hype and receive honest feedback, and it's hard to imagine a better place to do that than writing under a pseudonym for a fiction site that distributes your content directly to the public.

Both King and Rowling deserve some credit for even addressing the question of whether their success was due to talent or luck. It would have been easy for them to assume that their global success was due to their innate skill and hard work, and 99% of the world would have accepted that explanation, so it took no small amount of courage to even raise the question of how luck might have played a role. (We all know plenty of successful people who take umbrage if you even mention "the L word".)

But King did say that he thought he was outed too early to obtain any conclusive results from the experiment (and Rowling also said she wished she could have kept writing under the pseudonym, although she didn't say whether she had any similar "experiment" in mind). The random-sample-voting algorithm would provide instant feedback, not just to King and Rowling, but to any other writer who wanted to see how their writings would stack up against others in the field, from unpublished amateurs to worldwide bestselling authors.

My prediction, if such an experiment is ever conducted: King's and Rowling's writings would be rated very good, but so would many other writers' stories, including struggling writers who have never been published. Or as economist Daniel Kahneman put it: "success = talent + luck; great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck." (That took a certain amount of modesty on his part too, having achieved "great success" himself in the form of a Nobel Prize.) If J.K. Rowling or Stephen King ever launched such an experiment, the biggest favor they'd be doing for the world would not be to boost the egos of a few struggling writers, but to call more attention to the role that luck plays the world.

It's not as if their own egos would have to be bruised in the process. Donald Trump, the last person in the world that I would have guessed to have uttered these words, actually said that "Everything in life is luck," but it didn't seem to deflate his opinion of himself. You don't have to be a jerk like Trump, but just because some unpublished author's story gets a higher rating than yours, doesn't mean you have to let him come live in your mansion.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Last fall, Microsoft launched its Surface RT tablet with high hopes. The sleek touch-screen ran Windows RT, a version of Windows 8 designed for hardware powered by the ARM architecture, which dominates the mobile-device market; it also included a flexible keyboard that doubled as a screen cover. Microsoft executives told any journalist who would listen that Surface RT would position their company as a major player in the tablet arena, ready to battle toe-to-toe with Apple and various Android device manufacturers. Fast-forward to this week, and Microsoft announcing its financial results for the quarter ended June 30. Amidst metrics such as operating income and diluted earnings per share, one number stood out: a $900 million charge (the equivalent of $0.07 per share) related to what Microsoft called 'Surface RT inventory adjustments.' Microsoft had already slashed Surface RT prices by $150, so that nearly-billion-dollar charge wasn't a total surprise — but it did underscore that Surface RT is a bomb. From the outset, Surface RT had an issue with the potential to mightily trip up Microsoft: While Windows RT looks exactly like Windows 8, it can't run legacy Windows programs built for x86 processors, limiting users to what they can download from the built-in Windows Store app hub. While the Windows Store launched with 10,000 apps, that seemed paltry in comparison to the well-developed Android and iOS ecosystems. There's likely nothing that Microsoft could have done about this—every platform has to start somewhere, after all—but the relative lack of apps put Surface RT between the proverbial rock and the hard place: it couldn't rely on Windows' extensive legacy, and it didn't have enough content to make it a true contender from the outset against the iPad and Android tablets. Then there was the matter of price. Microsoft could have taken the Amazon route and sold Surface RT at a relative pittance in order to drive adoption—something that made the Kindle Fire a sizable hit. However, that sort of pricing scheme isn't in Microsoft's corporate DNA: it only cut Surface RT's price several months after release, as a defensive maneuver, when it's likely to do much less good."

Nerval's Lobster writes "a 'broad alliance' of 63 technology companies and civil liberties organizations plan on demanding more transparency about U.S. government surveillance programs, according to a new report in AllThingsD. Those companies and organizations will reportedly ask the government to allow them to report more accurate information about user-data requests. At the moment, federal agencies forbid Google, Microsoft, and other tech vendors from reporting more than a broad numerical range; for example, Google might announce as part of its Transparency Report that it received between 0-999 National Security Letters (issued by agencies as part of national security investigations) in 2009. 'We seek permission for the same information to be made available regarding the government's national security–related authorities," reads a portion of a letter that will be reportedly published July 19 and signed by all those tech companies. "This information about how and how often the government is using these legal authorities is important to the American people, who are entitled to have an informed public debate about the appropriateness of those authorities and their use.' This is all continuing fallout from Edward Snowden's leaks of top-secret documents alleging that the NSA maintains a program called PRISM that allegedly siphons personal information from the databases of the world's largest tech companies. Ever since, those companies (which have all denied participation in PRISM) have been anxious to show the world that they only give the government as little user data as possible. This new push for more 'transparency' plays to that strategy, and the stakes couldn't be higher—if consumers and businesses lose faith in their IT providers' ability to preserve privacy, the latter's very existence could be at risk."

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast engineers want to put WiFi transceivers in rental cars, taxis, buses and even on humans to extend reach of its Xfinity WiFi network. They also detail an idea for offering incentives to drivers to move WiFi-enabled cars to areas where it needs WiFi coverage. The plan was detailed in a patent application published today by the USPTO (I wrote a story about it for FierceCable)." Speaking of extension, this sounds like a logical outgrowth of using wireless routers to grow the network. (I hope they choose their humans carefully, if this plan bears fruit.)

An anonymous reader writes with news that a California Senate Bill would authorize the state's Department of Motor Vehicles to test a digital registration plate system patented by San Francisco-based Smart Plate Mobile on as many as 160,000 cars. An article on the proposed trial in the Modesto Bee says, in part: "The state hopes the technology will improve efficiencies in vehicle registrations and potentially save the DMV some of the $20 million spent each year in postage for renewals. Privacy advocates say the approach could leave motorists vulnerable to government surveillance by undoing a Supreme Court ruling that required authorities to obtain search warrants before using vehicle tracking devices. 'It means everyone driving in California will have their location accessible to the government at any time,' said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2010, the Legislature considered a similar bill supported by Smart Plate Mobile, with the noted addition of allowing for scrolling advertisements when a vehicle comes to a stop for four seconds or longer." If only it took smart plates to track you.

eldavojohn writes "According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting at a meeting in Atlanta. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leaks — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize."

crazyvas writes "The New York Times has published an article on the FTC's plans to investigate the patent system, and likely patent trolls such as Intellectual Ventures. From the article: 'To its defenders, Intellectual Ventures is a revolutionary company unfairly viewed, in the words of its co-founder Peter N. Detkin, "as the poster child of everything that is wrong with the patent system." To its critics, it is a protection racket otherwise known as a patent troll. This summer, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to begin a sweeping investigation of the patent system after the agency's chairwoman, Edith Ramirez, urged a crackdown. She has singled out a particular kind of miscreant, one that engages in "a variety of aggressive litigation tactics," including hiding behind shell companies when it sues.'"

Nerval's Lobster writes "BitTorrent Sync has reached its Beta milestone. The tool, which allows for secure file-syncing between devices, has been under development for quite some time: BitTorrent released a limited pre-Alpha program in January, planning to use any feedback to refine the software before release. Key features include the use of peer-to-peer technology for direct synchronization, rather than storing files in the cloud—a key differentiator from similar storage services on the market. 'It fits into our overall goal of making a better Internet using P2P,' BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak when that pre-Alpha rolled out. In the intervening months, of course, former federal contractor Edward Snowden leaked a variety of top-secret documents about NSA surveillance to The Guardian, kicking off several weeks' worth of discussions and handwringing over government snooping. Several of those documents suggested that an NSA program codenamed PRISM siphoned user data from nine major technology companies, including Google and Microsoft; the named companies have stridently denied any involvement. Those revelations about the NSA—even if totally unsurprising to the paranoid—could kick off renewed interest in software tools capable of securing data against prying eyes. In other words, this could be just the moment for something like BitTorrent Sync to hit the market. 'Sync is a response to what we see as real, fundamental challenges to personal data movement: the limitations on speed, size, space, privacy, and security that come with cloud dependency,' read a July 17 note on the BitTorrent Blog."

Nerval's Lobster writes "BitTorrent Sync has reached its Beta milestone. The tool, which allows for secure file-syncing between devices, has been under development for quite some time: BitTorrent released a limited pre-Alpha program in January, planning to use any feedback to refine the software before release. Key features include the use of peer-to-peer technology for direct synchronization, rather than storing files in the cloud—a key differentiator from similar storage services on the market. 'It fits into our overall goal of making a better Internet using P2P,' BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak when that pre-Alpha rolled out. In the intervening months, of course, former federal contractor Edward Snowden leaked a variety of top-secret documents about NSA surveillance to The Guardian, kicking off several weeks' worth of discussions and handwringing over government snooping. Several of those documents suggested that an NSA program codenamed PRISM siphoned user data from nine major technology companies, including Google and Microsoft; the named companies have stridently denied any involvement. Those revelations about the NSA—even if totally unsurprising to the paranoid—could kick off renewed interest in software tools capable of securing data against prying eyes. In other words, this could be just the moment for something like BitTorrent Sync to hit the market. 'Sync is a response to what we see as real, fundamental challenges to personal data movement: the limitations on speed, size, space, privacy, and security that come with cloud dependency,' read a July 17 note on the BitTorrent Blog."

DavidGilbert99 writes "Marissa Mayer has been in charge at Yahoo for one year now. In that time she has seen the share price rise 70% and she's made some headline grabbing acquisitions — notably Tumblr for over $1 billion last month. However, look beneath the surface and things are not going so well. In this week's quarterly results, we saw ad sales fell by 12% year-on-year and as Alistair Charlton says in IBTimes UK: ' Yahoo earned $846m in cash by redeeming its shares in the group, representing a significant chunk of Yahoo's $1.07bn revenue for the quarter, down 1% on last year. ... The next few years will be a balancing act as the stabilizing wheels are removed and Yahoo, with dozens of acquired startups patching up the rust, will have to make progress under its own steam.'"

theodp writes " The lack of education in computer science is an example of an area of particularly acute concern,' Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith told Congress (PDF) as he sold lawmakers on the need to improve 'America's access to high skilled foreign talent'. Smith added that Microsoft also wants to 'help American students and workers gain the skills needed for the jobs that will fuel the innovation economy.' Towards that end, Microsoft will award $100,000 worth of donations to five technology education nonprofits 'who teach programming and provide technical resources to those who might not otherwise get the chance.' So, how will Microsoft determine who's most worthy? With a popularity contest, of course! At the end of October, the top five vote-getting nonprofits — only Windows AzureDev Community members are eligible to vote — will split the Microsoft Money. By the way, currently in second place but trying harder is Code.org, the seemingly dual-missioned organization advised by Microsoft's Smith which has reached out to its 140,000 Facebook fans, and 17,000 Twitter followers in its quest for the $50,000 first prize."

theodp writes " The lack of education in computer science is an example of an area of particularly acute concern,' Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith told Congress (PDF) as he sold lawmakers on the need to improve 'America's access to high skilled foreign talent'. Smith added that Microsoft also wants to 'help American students and workers gain the skills needed for the jobs that will fuel the innovation economy.' Towards that end, Microsoft will award $100,000 worth of donations to five technology education nonprofits 'who teach programming and provide technical resources to those who might not otherwise get the chance.' So, how will Microsoft determine who's most worthy? With a popularity contest, of course! At the end of October, the top five vote-getting nonprofits — only Windows AzureDev Community members are eligible to vote — will split the Microsoft Money. By the way, currently in second place but trying harder is Code.org, the seemingly dual-missioned organization advised by Microsoft's Smith which has reached out to its 140,000 Facebook fans, and 17,000 Twitter followers in its quest for the $50,000 first prize."

MojoKid writes "Microsoft is smarting in the wake of the Guardian's discussion of how chummy it's gotten with the NSA over the past few years, and the company wants permission to clarify its relationship with the federal government. To that end, the company has sent a follow-up letter (PDF) to the Attorney General's office, asking it to please address the petition it filed in court back on June 19. Redmond is undoubtedly cringing at the accolades being heaped on Yahoo and its repeated court battles on behalf of its users, and wants an opportunity to clear the air. But Microsoft has gone farther than simply asking the government to hurry up and rule on its petition — it has also issued a series of clarifying remarks regarding its relationship with the NSA. Microsoft refutes some of the Guardian's claims strongly. It insists it does not provide encryption keys or access to Outlook's encryption mechanisms, and that the government must petition MS to provide information via the legal process."

An anonymous reader writes "Picking up the code from a failed Direct3D 10/11 implementation for Linux, a working Direct3D 9 state tracker has been implemented for Linux. The Direct3D 9 support works with open-source Linux GPU hardware drivers via Mesa's Gallium3D and can run games for the open-source Radeon and Nouveau drivers without simply converting the Direct3D commands into OpenGL. Unlike the experimental D3D10/11 code from the past, this D3D9 state tracker is already running games like Skyrim, Civilization 5, Anno 1404, and StarCraft 2. With Linux games not natively targeting D3D, Wine was modified for using this native Direct3D implementation."

chicksdaddy writes "The saga of the application-signing flaw affecting Google's Android mobile phones took another turn Tuesday when a Silicon Valley startup teamed with graduate students from Northeastern University in Boston to offer their own fix-it tool for hundreds of millions of Android phones that have been left without access to Google's official patch. Duo Security announced the availability of an Android utility dubbed 'ReKey' on Tuesday. The tool allows users to patch the so-called 'Master Key' vulnerability on Android devices, even in the absence of a security update from Android handset makers and carriers who service the phones, according to a post on the Duo Security blog. Jon Oberheide, the CTO of Duo Security, said that ReKey provides an in-memory patch for the master key vulnerability, dynamically instrumenting the Dalvik bytecode routines where the vulnerability originates, patching it in-memory. Oberheide said that ReKey will also 'hook' (or monitor) those routines to notify you if any malicious applications attempt to exploit the vulnerability. Despite the availability of a patch since March, many Android users remain vulnerable to attacks that take advantage of the application signing flaw. That is because Android handset makers have been slow to issue updates for their handsets. For platforms (HTC and Samsung) that have been patched, carriers delayed the rollout to customers further. 'The security of Android devices worldwide is paralyzed by the slow patching practices of mobile carriers and other parties in the Android ecosystem,' said Oberheide. However, the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem is significant enough that it is no longer feasible for Google to take over responsibility for distributing patches. Third parties may need to step in to fill the void." A related article makes the case that the release of the Master Key vulnerability started an important conversation within the open source community.

We've already done two video interviews with Peter Wayner. Third time being the charm, his latest book, Future Ride, is now out and available for purchase. If you've followed and possibly even enjoyed this string of interviews with Peter, Future Ride might be valuable reading material for you. It's what I call a "futureproofing" book, and in today's fast-changing world being prepared for tomorrow -- even just in the sense of thinking about the many ways our society might change if our cars and trucks drive themselves -- is valuable for business and career reasons, aside from the sheer joy of speculating about what the future may hold.

We've already done two video interviews with Peter Wayner. Third time being the charm, his latest book, Future Ride, is now out and available for purchase. If you've followed and possibly even enjoyed this string of interviews with Peter, Future Ride might be valuable reading material for you. It's what I call a "futureproofing" book, and in today's fast-changing world being prepared for tomorrow -- even just in the sense of thinking about the many ways our society might change if our cars and trucks drive themselves -- is valuable for business and career reasons, aside from the sheer joy of speculating about what the future may hold.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell is back with a comparison of Eclipse and Visual Studio, picking through some common complaints about both platforms and comparing their respective features. 'First, let's talk about usability,' he writes, 'and let's be frank: Neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio is a model for sound usability.' That being said, as an open-source project, Eclipse wins some points for its customizability and compatibility with languages; it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years. Microsoft choosing to eliminate macros in recent versions of Visual Studio has also led to some programmer frustrations (and a need for external tools)."

Lauren Weinstein writes "In a clear demonstration that actions do have consequences, often unintended ones, 'The New York Times' reports that Russia is again demanding a UN Internet takeover of exactly the sort repressive governments around the world have long been lusting after, and using Edward Snowden's continued presence in Russia as a foundation for this new thrust. Acting as a catalyst for a crackdown against freedom of speech on the Net was certainly not Snowden's intention — quite the opposite, it's reasonable to assume." Not to worry.

Lasrick writes "John Mecklin explores the context that was missed when the LA Times and the San Diego Union Tribune reported on the closing of the remaining two San Onofre nuclear reactors: 'U-T San Diego published a similar flurry of well-reported stories that covered the basics of the reasons for the closure, as well as the impact on consumers, workers, and the electricity supply. At both papers, coverage included infographics that effectively explained the problem that forced the plant to close—vibration that caused wear in tubes for the plant's steam generators. (The Times's tick-tock takeout on the history of the steam generator snafu, published in July, is especially comprehensive.) The specifics of the San Onofre closing were covered well and thoroughly. The context within which those basics reside, however, was far less well-examined, and the two major newspapers closest to the San Onofre plant both therefore missed a real opportunity to inform readers about the major energy choices California and the country will need to make in the coming decade.' Excellent work at the Columbia Journalism Review."

Michael Ross writes "Of all the computer programming languages, JavaScript may be enjoying the most unprecedented renaissance ever. Once derided as a toy language suitable only for spawning bothersome popups in browser windows, JavaScript is rapidly developing into a first-choice web technology on both the client side and the server side. One way to get started learning this ubiquitous language is the book Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming author Marijn Haverbeke pages 224 publisher No Starch Press rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Ross ISBN 978-1593272821 summary A concise and lighthearted tutorial on this popular web programming language. Written by Marijn Haverbeke, the book was published by No Starch Press on 3 February 2011, under the ISBN 978-1593272821. On the publisher's page for the book, visitors will find the table of contents and some reviews. (My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.) The author's book website offers much more, including HTML versions of the book (whose content differ from the print edition), errata (applicable only to the first printing of the paper edition), and an interactive code sandbox where you can run the examples (or at least some of them).

At a slender 224 pages, this volume might at first glance appear inadequate for covering such a sizable and rich language as JavaScript — and yet the table of contents suggests otherwise, with a dozen chapters covering language basics, functions, objects, arrays, error handling, functional programming, object-oriented programming, modularity, regular expressions, web programming, the DOM, browser events, and HTTP requests. In addition, readers may be reminded of how much information Kernighan and Ritchie were able to pack into the 228 pages of the first edition of their classic The C Programming Language.

Following a pleasant introduction, the first three chapters present the basics of JavaScript. In the first one, the author presents the language's fundamental grammar, specifically: values, data types, arithmetic operators, expressions, variables, control statements, the JavaScript environment, and program structure. The material assumes no prior knowledge of computer programming or even data representation.

In the second chapter, the author does a thorough job of explicating all aspects of functions, including definition form and order, variable scope, arguments, the call stack, closure, and other topics. The subsequent chapter addresses an area important to any programming language, namely, data structures — which in JavaScript are of two varieties, objects and arrays. The author illustrates some best practices, such as modularizing code.

Most programming books underemphasize or even completely neglect the critical topic of error handling, and thus it is encouraging to see the author of this book address it, as early as Chapter 4. He focuses on exception handling, and also touches upon the value of unit testing (incorrectly termed "automated testing"). The subsequent chapter describes functional programming, which is not to be confused with procedural programming, but rather refers to combining functions in order to achieve higher levels of abstraction in one's code, thereby reducing its size and better exposing its functionality amidst the syntactical clutter. One apparent technical flaw is the claim that, in HTML documents, the special characters <, >, and & always must be replaced by their entity values, even when surrounded by whitespace characters (page 78). (Incidentally, any book that mentions the KGS Go Server can't be all bad.)

Object orientation is the subject of the sixth chapter, the longest in the book. Despite the author's efforts, this material will likely prove to be the most challenging to readers, given the numerous idiosyncrasies of JavaScript's objects and their built-in methods. The next chapter explores a related topic, modularity, which unfortunately is not supported natively by JavaScript; the author presents some ideas to work around this limitation.

Of all the data processing performed by web sites and apps, a significant portion of it is text manipulation, where the use of regular expressions can be extremely valuable, despite the potential pitfalls. This is tersely covered in Chapter 8, which, in my opinion, should instead be located far earlier in the book, after the discussion on strings. The next chapter is a fast-paced examination of just some of the key aspects of client-side scripting using JavaScript. The only confusing portion is the reference to "the document tag" (page 155), with no explanation as to what that is. The last three chapters continue the discussion of in-browser programming, focusing on the Document Object Model (DOM), browser events, and HTTP requests. Some of the material feels dated, but it is a decent survey of relevant information.

The narrative is well written, aside from the use of long dashes when semicolons are called for and the occasional strange phrasing, such as "two backslashes follow each other" (page 12). Also, the book contains several erratum, most of them a simple mismatch of singular and plural forms: "The example show" (page 11), "executing a statements" (20), "is a special kind of objects" (46), "special type of objects is" (68), "with is em" (89; should read "is em"), "than of an" (90; should read "than an"), "new type of objects" (123), "used as to map" (146), "on [the] current field" (185), and "touched on [in] Chapter 9" (190).

The author wisely makes use of numerous examples, which are of two types: Most if not all of the fundamental concepts are illustrated with pithy examples — particularly in the first half. In Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 11, the author utilizes extended, fictional examples. Some readers may argue that these longer ones are excessively so — especially the terrarium — but there are many nuggets to be found in those pages. In fact, the book overall is largely free of fluff.

In terms of technical information, the book does not attempt to cover all the details of the language itself. Readers will appreciate that the author does not shrink from pointing out the weaknesses in JavaScript, as well as explaining the problems they may cause. One blemish is that many of the small sections of code contain a mixture of complete lines of code as well as standalone expressions (in bold), and usually those expressions are terminated with semicolons, giving them the appearance of lines of code. No doubt some readers will be confused by this convention.

From a production standpoint, the text is quite readable, except for the quite annoying and obvious problem that the font to indicate in-line source code looks almost identical to the non-code text font. There are few diagrams and even fewer screenshots, but that poses no difficulties.

At times this book is even fun to read, partly because of the use of non-silly humor, especially in the two examples of the eccentric (and cat-centric) aunt, and an unsocial reclusive programmer (imagine that).

If you choose to start your JavaScript journey with this book, it can quickly teach you a lot of technical information (relative to its size), and also programming wisdom.

Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael Ross writes "Of all the computer programming languages, JavaScript may be enjoying the most unprecedented renaissance ever. Once derided as a toy language suitable only for spawning bothersome popups in browser windows, JavaScript is rapidly developing into a first-choice web technology on both the client side and the server side. One way to get started learning this ubiquitous language is the book Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming author Marijn Haverbeke pages 224 publisher No Starch Press rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Ross ISBN 978-1593272821 summary A concise and lighthearted tutorial on this popular web programming language. Written by Marijn Haverbeke, the book was published by No Starch Press on 3 February 2011, under the ISBN 978-1593272821. On the publisher's page for the book, visitors will find the table of contents and some reviews. (My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.) The author's book website offers much more, including HTML versions of the book (whose content differ from the print edition), errata (applicable only to the first printing of the paper edition), and an interactive code sandbox where you can run the examples (or at least some of them).

At a slender 224 pages, this volume might at first glance appear inadequate for covering such a sizable and rich language as JavaScript — and yet the table of contents suggests otherwise, with a dozen chapters covering language basics, functions, objects, arrays, error handling, functional programming, object-oriented programming, modularity, regular expressions, web programming, the DOM, browser events, and HTTP requests. In addition, readers may be reminded of how much information Kernighan and Ritchie were able to pack into the 228 pages of the first edition of their classic The C Programming Language.

Following a pleasant introduction, the first three chapters present the basics of JavaScript. In the first one, the author presents the language's fundamental grammar, specifically: values, data types, arithmetic operators, expressions, variables, control statements, the JavaScript environment, and program structure. The material assumes no prior knowledge of computer programming or even data representation.

In the second chapter, the author does a thorough job of explicating all aspects of functions, including definition form and order, variable scope, arguments, the call stack, closure, and other topics. The subsequent chapter addresses an area important to any programming language, namely, data structures — which in JavaScript are of two varieties, objects and arrays. The author illustrates some best practices, such as modularizing code.

Most programming books underemphasize or even completely neglect the critical topic of error handling, and thus it is encouraging to see the author of this book address it, as early as Chapter 4. He focuses on exception handling, and also touches upon the value of unit testing (incorrectly termed "automated testing"). The subsequent chapter describes functional programming, which is not to be confused with procedural programming, but rather refers to combining functions in order to achieve higher levels of abstraction in one's code, thereby reducing its size and better exposing its functionality amidst the syntactical clutter. One apparent technical flaw is the claim that, in HTML documents, the special characters <, >, and & always must be replaced by their entity values, even when surrounded by whitespace characters (page 78). (Incidentally, any book that mentions the KGS Go Server can't be all bad.)

Object orientation is the subject of the sixth chapter, the longest in the book. Despite the author's efforts, this material will likely prove to be the most challenging to readers, given the numerous idiosyncrasies of JavaScript's objects and their built-in methods. The next chapter explores a related topic, modularity, which unfortunately is not supported natively by JavaScript; the author presents some ideas to work around this limitation.

Of all the data processing performed by web sites and apps, a significant portion of it is text manipulation, where the use of regular expressions can be extremely valuable, despite the potential pitfalls. This is tersely covered in Chapter 8, which, in my opinion, should instead be located far earlier in the book, after the discussion on strings. The next chapter is a fast-paced examination of just some of the key aspects of client-side scripting using JavaScript. The only confusing portion is the reference to "the document tag" (page 155), with no explanation as to what that is. The last three chapters continue the discussion of in-browser programming, focusing on the Document Object Model (DOM), browser events, and HTTP requests. Some of the material feels dated, but it is a decent survey of relevant information.

The narrative is well written, aside from the use of long dashes when semicolons are called for and the occasional strange phrasing, such as "two backslashes follow each other" (page 12). Also, the book contains several erratum, most of them a simple mismatch of singular and plural forms: "The example show" (page 11), "executing a statements" (20), "is a special kind of objects" (46), "special type of objects is" (68), "with is em" (89; should read "is em"), "than of an" (90; should read "than an"), "new type of objects" (123), "used as to map" (146), "on [the] current field" (185), and "touched on [in] Chapter 9" (190).

The author wisely makes use of numerous examples, which are of two types: Most if not all of the fundamental concepts are illustrated with pithy examples — particularly in the first half. In Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 11, the author utilizes extended, fictional examples. Some readers may argue that these longer ones are excessively so — especially the terrarium — but there are many nuggets to be found in those pages. In fact, the book overall is largely free of fluff.

In terms of technical information, the book does not attempt to cover all the details of the language itself. Readers will appreciate that the author does not shrink from pointing out the weaknesses in JavaScript, as well as explaining the problems they may cause. One blemish is that many of the small sections of code contain a mixture of complete lines of code as well as standalone expressions (in bold), and usually those expressions are terminated with semicolons, giving them the appearance of lines of code. No doubt some readers will be confused by this convention.

From a production standpoint, the text is quite readable, except for the quite annoying and obvious problem that the font to indicate in-line source code looks almost identical to the non-code text font. There are few diagrams and even fewer screenshots, but that poses no difficulties.

At times this book is even fun to read, partly because of the use of non-silly humor, especially in the two examples of the eccentric (and cat-centric) aunt, and an unsocial reclusive programmer (imagine that).

If you choose to start your JavaScript journey with this book, it can quickly teach you a lot of technical information (relative to its size), and also programming wisdom.

Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

First time accepted submitter digiti writes "In response to Drew Crawford's article about JavaScript performance, Shai Almog wrote a piece providing a different interpretation for the performance costs (summary: it's the DOM not the script). He then gives several examples of where mobile Java performs really well on memory constrained devices. Where do you stand in the debate?"

cold fjord writes that, as promised last month, telegraph service in India is being honorably retired: "Only 7 years behind the US. From Forbes: '... in India, where I'm now sojourning, telegraph service has survived as a basic means of communication since the British East India Company sent the first telegram from Calcutta to nearby Diamond Harbor in 1850... As of July 15, the state company that runs the telegraph service is shutting it down. ... "For long, the telegraph was eyed with suspicion as an emblem of imperial rule," editorialized The Indian Express ... "Yet it brought various parts of the country together and eventually entered the traffic of everyday life. When the telegraph winds up, one of the oldest markers of a modern India will be lost. Stop" — the word that typically ended brief telegraphic phrases rather than periods. Until fairly recently, several hundred thousand messages a day moved over the wires of the telegraph system ...' From NBC: 'When it was completed in 1856, the Indian telegraph stretched over 4,000 miles ... Tom Standage, author of "The Victorian Internet" writes, the early telegraph networks were responsible for "hype, skepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace."'"