Slashdot Mirror

Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in 2005, RAND Corporation published an analysis suggesting that hospitals and other health-care facilities could save more than $81 billion a year by adopting electronic health records. While e-records have earned a ton of buzz, the reality hasn't quite worked out: seven years later, RAND's new study suggests that health care providers have largely failed to upgrade their respective IT systems in a way that allows them to take full advantage of e-records. Meanwhile, the health care system in the United States continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year, by some estimates. 'The failure of health information technology to quickly deliver on its promise is not caused by its lack of potential, but rather because of the shortcomings in the design of the IT systems that are currently in place,' Dr. Art Kellerman, senior author of the RAND study, wrote in a Jan. 7 statement. Slow pace of adoption, he added, has further delayed the productivity gains from e-records."

MassDosage writes "I first heard about the Scratch programming language a few years ago and the idea of a simple language designed to teach kids to program in a fun, new way has always appealed to me. For those of you who don't know, Scratch was developed by the wonderfully named "Lifelong Kindergarten Group" at the MIT Media Lab. It's a programming language that allows programs to be built by dragging, dropping, configuring and combining various blocks that represent common coding concepts such as if/else statements and while loops. Scratch also provides tools for doing simple animation, playing audio and controlling sprites. The idea behind it is to make programming simple, fun and accessible to first time programmers so they can understand the key concepts without first needing to learn complex syntax which can come later when they move on from Scratch to other languages. It has been very successful and there are literally millions of Scratch programs freely available from the Scratch website and many others." Read below for the rest of Mass Dosage's review. Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games author The LEAD Project pages 160 publisher The LEAD Project rating 7/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-59327-409-2 summary Learn to Program By Making Cool Games The Super Scratch Programming Adventure book has recently been translated from the Chinese original and is in keeping with the Scratch ethos of bringing programming to a new generation of programmers. It is hard to tell what the age group for this book is as children have such varied technical skills but I would say it's best for relatively computer savvy youngsters who know the basics of computing and are comfortable with a mouse and keyboard and know how to drag, drop, open, save, cut, paste etc. It should be suitable for ages from 8 up to young teenagers but even those a bit older looking to learn programming could find it useful while younger children might also be able to get something out of it if guided by someone older.

The book starts of with a bit of background and points the reader to where they can freely download and install the Scratch application which is used to create Scratch programs. This is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and was a breeze to install on Ubuntu Linux. All programming is done via a GUI to avoid having to deal with typos and syntax errors. The Scratch environment is fairly simple and intuitive and easy to get started with. A downloadable zip file accompanies the book and contains skeleton programs with sound and images that are used for creating applications as well as fully complete programs which can be used for reference if you get stuck creating your own versions. The zip file also contains a "Getting started with Scratch" guide that is a very useful prelude to the book if you've never used Scratch before and covers the main concepts and tools that are used in the book itself. It is important to note that this book is not a manual for Scratch and doesn't provide exhaustive coverage of what Scratch can do or how to use all of its features. Super Scratch Programming Adventure takes a "learn by doing" approach by guiding you through the creation of a few programs and leaves you to figure the rest out yourself. Given the target audience this makes a lot of sense — most youngsters would much rather build some cool applications right away than wade through lots of dry documentation first.

Super Scratch Programming Adventure is divided into various "stages" (computer game speak for "chapters") that are linked by a colorful cartoon adventure story. Each stage guides the reader through creating a computer game from... err... scratch and teaches them some fundamental concepts along the way. Later stages build on lessons learnt earlier so they should be read in order and the book steers one towards this with the cartoon linking what you do in the various stages together as you build games which in turn become part of the story. The early stages start off showing how to use sprites and move them around and how to use the palette to build up programs and attach behaviors to things. Later stages cover user input, broadcasting and reacting to events, flow control, collision detection, variables, animation and audio with each stage harder than the previous one right up until the final stage which involves creating a fighting game with numerous sprites and interactions between them and the user. I found all the games fun to build and use and could definitely see the distinct lessons each one was designed to teach.

The learning curve is a bit higher than I expected and there is little hand holding, at some points you just have to look at the included code blocks and figure out yourself how to build them up. It's not always easy and readers will need to be fairly computer literate and able and willing to figure a fair amount out on their own but ultimately this is probably a good thing as explaining everything in minute detail would take a lot longer, be quite boring and would lead some to just blindly copying things instead of being forced to understand what they are doing. I could imagine that some young readers might find this a bit challenging so it's probably a good idea to have a computer literate adult around to help out if they get stuck. The included complete source for each game also helps although looking at this does feel a bit like cheating. Each stage ends with suggestions for further programming on ones own and I felt that these are really the key for this book to succeed as a learning tool as these make one think about and apply what was just read. Again I think this would be a good point for a parent or someone older to step in and encourage a younger reader to build on what they've learnt and suggest creating something new for themselves. The book contains plenty of pointers to online resources where readers can learn more, ask questions and share their creations with others.

I would definitely recommend Super Scratch Programming Adventure for those eager to learn programming but be aware that to really get the most out of it it's probably best if someone who already knows how to program is around to read along, help out and encourage further creation outside of what the book shows. There is a wealth of Scratch related information on the internet but this book provides a good way to get started by demonstrating how to build fun applications and hopefully this in turn will encourage readers to move on to creating more on their own.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion.

You can purchase Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

MassDosage writes "I first heard about the Scratch programming language a few years ago and the idea of a simple language designed to teach kids to program in a fun, new way has always appealed to me. For those of you who don't know, Scratch was developed by the wonderfully named "Lifelong Kindergarten Group" at the MIT Media Lab. It's a programming language that allows programs to be built by dragging, dropping, configuring and combining various blocks that represent common coding concepts such as if/else statements and while loops. Scratch also provides tools for doing simple animation, playing audio and controlling sprites. The idea behind it is to make programming simple, fun and accessible to first time programmers so they can understand the key concepts without first needing to learn complex syntax which can come later when they move on from Scratch to other languages. It has been very successful and there are literally millions of Scratch programs freely available from the Scratch website and many others." Read below for the rest of Mass Dosage's review. Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games author The LEAD Project pages 160 publisher The LEAD Project rating 7/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-59327-409-2 summary Learn to Program By Making Cool Games The Super Scratch Programming Adventure book has recently been translated from the Chinese original and is in keeping with the Scratch ethos of bringing programming to a new generation of programmers. It is hard to tell what the age group for this book is as children have such varied technical skills but I would say it's best for relatively computer savvy youngsters who know the basics of computing and are comfortable with a mouse and keyboard and know how to drag, drop, open, save, cut, paste etc. It should be suitable for ages from 8 up to young teenagers but even those a bit older looking to learn programming could find it useful while younger children might also be able to get something out of it if guided by someone older.

The book starts of with a bit of background and points the reader to where they can freely download and install the Scratch application which is used to create Scratch programs. This is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and was a breeze to install on Ubuntu Linux. All programming is done via a GUI to avoid having to deal with typos and syntax errors. The Scratch environment is fairly simple and intuitive and easy to get started with. A downloadable zip file accompanies the book and contains skeleton programs with sound and images that are used for creating applications as well as fully complete programs which can be used for reference if you get stuck creating your own versions. The zip file also contains a "Getting started with Scratch" guide that is a very useful prelude to the book if you've never used Scratch before and covers the main concepts and tools that are used in the book itself. It is important to note that this book is not a manual for Scratch and doesn't provide exhaustive coverage of what Scratch can do or how to use all of its features. Super Scratch Programming Adventure takes a "learn by doing" approach by guiding you through the creation of a few programs and leaves you to figure the rest out yourself. Given the target audience this makes a lot of sense — most youngsters would much rather build some cool applications right away than wade through lots of dry documentation first.

Super Scratch Programming Adventure is divided into various "stages" (computer game speak for "chapters") that are linked by a colorful cartoon adventure story. Each stage guides the reader through creating a computer game from... err... scratch and teaches them some fundamental concepts along the way. Later stages build on lessons learnt earlier so they should be read in order and the book steers one towards this with the cartoon linking what you do in the various stages together as you build games which in turn become part of the story. The early stages start off showing how to use sprites and move them around and how to use the palette to build up programs and attach behaviors to things. Later stages cover user input, broadcasting and reacting to events, flow control, collision detection, variables, animation and audio with each stage harder than the previous one right up until the final stage which involves creating a fighting game with numerous sprites and interactions between them and the user. I found all the games fun to build and use and could definitely see the distinct lessons each one was designed to teach.

The learning curve is a bit higher than I expected and there is little hand holding, at some points you just have to look at the included code blocks and figure out yourself how to build them up. It's not always easy and readers will need to be fairly computer literate and able and willing to figure a fair amount out on their own but ultimately this is probably a good thing as explaining everything in minute detail would take a lot longer, be quite boring and would lead some to just blindly copying things instead of being forced to understand what they are doing. I could imagine that some young readers might find this a bit challenging so it's probably a good idea to have a computer literate adult around to help out if they get stuck. The included complete source for each game also helps although looking at this does feel a bit like cheating. Each stage ends with suggestions for further programming on ones own and I felt that these are really the key for this book to succeed as a learning tool as these make one think about and apply what was just read. Again I think this would be a good point for a parent or someone older to step in and encourage a younger reader to build on what they've learnt and suggest creating something new for themselves. The book contains plenty of pointers to online resources where readers can learn more, ask questions and share their creations with others.

I would definitely recommend Super Scratch Programming Adventure for those eager to learn programming but be aware that to really get the most out of it it's probably best if someone who already knows how to program is around to read along, help out and encourage further creation outside of what the book shows. There is a wealth of Scratch related information on the internet but this book provides a good way to get started by demonstrating how to build fun applications and hopefully this in turn will encourage readers to move on to creating more on their own.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion.

You can purchase Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

In January, 2012, Slashdot carried a story about the launch of a $10 million X-Prize for Tricorder design. This year, at CES, Timothy Lord met Alan Zack, who works for the X PRIZE Foundation, and learned a little more about the Tricorder prize and what it's going to take to win it. "Ultimately," says the www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org page, "this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements." If the success of the Ansari X PRIZE is any indication, it's a rational goal -- and the competition will be exciting to follow as it cranks up.

An anonymous reader writes "After the Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT warned users to disable Java to stop hackers from taking control of users' machines, Oracle issued an emergency patch on Sunday. However, HD Moore, chief security officer of Rapid7, said it could take two years for Oracle to fix all the security flaws in the version of Java used to surf the web; that timeframe doesn't count any additional Java exploits discovered in the future. 'The safest thing to do at this point is just assume that Java is always going to be vulnerable,' Moore said."

zacharye writes "The Sunday evening Wall Street Journal article claiming that Apple had cut its iPhone 5 display orders drastically for the March quarter made quite a splash. The way WSJ wrote its piece seemed to support the original Nikkei claim about Apple cutting its iPhone 5 display orders in half from the originally planned order of 65 million units. This would be a massive adjustment. But Apple uses the same new display type for both iPhone 5 and the latest iPod touch. Neither WSJ nor Nikkei addressed this, however — both seemed to be referring to just iPhone 5 displays. The math just doesn't add up."

L3sPau1 writes "For five years, it hid in the weeds of networks used by Eastern European diplomats, government employees and scientific research organizations, stealing data and infecting more machines in an espionage campaign rivaling Flame and others of its ilk. The campaign, called Rocra or Red October by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, focused not only on workstations, but mobile devices and networking gear to gain a foothold inside strategic organizations. Once inside, attackers pivoted internally and stole everything from files on desktops, smartphones and FTP servers, to email databases using exploits developed in Chinese and Russian malware, Kaspersky researchers said."

The untimely death of Aaron Swartz has raised a lot of questions over the weekend. Now MIT is launching an internal investigation to determine what role the school played in his suicide. From the article: "In a statement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif offered his condolences, saying that the school's community was 'extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,' Reif said. 'I have asked professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.'"

The untimely death of Aaron Swartz has raised a lot of questions over the weekend. Now MIT is launching an internal investigation to determine what role the school played in his suicide. From the article: "In a statement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif offered his condolences, saying that the school's community was 'extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,' Reif said. 'I have asked professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.'"

RocketAcademy writes "A petition on the White House website is calling for the United States to rapidly develop a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Nuclear rockets are a promising technology, but unless NASA develops a deep-space exploration ship such as Johnson Space Center's Nautilus X, a nuclear rocket would be wasted. Launching nuclear rockets may pose regulatory and political problems as well. Practical applications may depend on mining uranium or thorium on the Moon."

Thorfinn.au writes "Authorities are warning lives and property are under immediate threat as a large bushfire burns out of control near communities in northern New South Wales. The Rural Fire Service has issued an emergency warning for the large, fast moving blaze near Coonabarabran, which has already destroyed two properties. Siding Springs, the principal optical observatory is under threat. The MtStromlo observatory was destroyed in a bush fire in 2003."

iComp writes with a story about how it will cost you $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. "Got something you'd like to say to Mark Zuckerberg? The Facebook CEO still maintains a profile on the social networking site he founded, but beginning on Friday, sending him a personal message could cost you. Mashable was the first to notice that some users who weren't otherwise on the Behoodied One's Friends list were being asked to pony up before they could send a message to his Inbox, to the tune of $100 a pop. As El Reg reported in December, Facebook has been conducting a limited test of a feature that requires users to pay a fee to send messages to people with whom they have no direct connection. The idea is that the type of users who like to send spam, hate speech, and otherwise frivolous messages typically aren't willing to pay for the privilege. Impose a fee – however small – and they probably won't bother."

theodp writes "The e-mail that Defendant Swartz's supplemental memorandum (pdf) cites as paramount to his fifth motion to suppress [evidence against him] is relevant, but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be,' quipped United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz (pdf) in a court filing made on the same day Aaron Swartz committed suicide. In the 1-7-2011 e-mail Ortiz refers to, which was not produced for Swartz until Dec. 14th — almost two years after his 1-6-2011 arrest — a Secret Service agent reported to the Assistant U.S. Attorney that he was 'prepared to take custody anytime' of Swartz's laptop, although no one had yet sought a warrant to search the computer. In Prosecutor as Bully, Larry Lessig laments, 'They [JSTOR] declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron.' Swartz's family also had harsh words for MIT and prosecutors: 'Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron.' With MIT President Emeritus Charles M. Vest currently serving as a Trustee of JSTOR parent Ithaka as well as a Trustee of The MIT Corporation, one might have expected MIT to issue a statement similar to the let's-put-this-behind-us one JSTOR made on the Swartz case back in 2011."

New submitter fractalVisionz writes "The White House has officially responded to the petition to secure resources and funding to begin Death Star construction by 2016, as previously discussed on Slashdot. With costs estimated over $850,000,000,000,000,000 (that's $850 quadrillion), and a firm policy stating 'The Administration does not support blowing up planets,' the U.S. government will obviously decline. However, that is not to say we don't already have a Death Star of our own, floating approximately 120 miles above the earth's surface. The response ends with a call to those interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields of study: 'If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.'"

maijc writes "Computer activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday in New York City. He was 26 years old. Swartz was 'indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury for allegedly mass downloading documents from the JSTOR online journal archive with the intent to distribute them.' He is best known for co-authoring the widely-used RSS 1.0 specification when he was 14, and as one of the early co-owners of Reddit."

An anonymous reader writes "After news broke on Thursday that a new Java 0-day vulnerability had been discovered, and was already being included in multiple popular exploit kits, two new important tidbits have come in on Friday. Firstly, this whole fiasco could have been avoided if Oracle had properly patched a previous vulnerability. Furthermore, not only is the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, but it is being used to push ransomware." Meanwhile, writes reader Beeftopia, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is getting in on the action, and "has warned users to disable or uninstall Java software on their computers, amid continuing fears and an escalation in warnings from security experts that hundreds of millions of business and consumer users are vulnerable to a serious flaw."

Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Department of Science has presented a difficult challenge to vendors: deliver a supercomputer with roughly 10 to 30 petaflops of performance, yet filled with energy-efficient multi-core architecture. The draft copy (.DOC) of the DOE's requirements provide for two systems: 'Trinity,' which will offer computing resources to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), during the 2016-2020 timeframe; and NERSC-8, the replacement for the current NERSC-6 'Hopper' supercomputer first deployed in 2010 for the DOE facilities. Hopper debuted at number five in the list of Top500 supercomputers, and can crunch numbers at the petaflop level. The DOE wants a machine with performance at between 10 to 30 times Hopper's capabilities, with the ability to support one compute job that could take up over half of the available compute resources at any one time."

SchrodingerZ writes "A new video was released yesterday by NASA from the GRAIL mission probes, which ended their mission last month as they impacted the lunar surface. 'Dramatic' footage was captured by the probe Ebb on December 14th. The video was taken from the 'MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school Students) cameras. It shows the view of Ebb flying at an altitude of 6 miles (10 km) above the Moon's northern hemisphere in the vicinity of Jackson crater (22.4N 163.1W).' Two videos were released, one from the fore and one from the aft of the probe, showing a forwards and backwards time lapse containing 931 and 1,489 pictures each of the lunar terrain. The footage was part of the probes' final systems check before they shut down and were sent into a controlled impact to a predetermined location."

Dupple sends word from the BBC that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration will be conducting a safety review of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner after a number of incidents have called the aircraft's hardiness into question. "An electrical fire, a brake problem, a fuel spill and cracks in the cockpit's windshield have affected Dreamliner flights in the past week. ... The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is one of the most advanced aeroplanes ever created. Much of it is made from very strong, light carbon-fibre composite material. However, a spate of technical issues has hurt its image. On Friday, two new problems were found, adding to Boeing's woes." A spokesman for Boeing said they were "absolutely confident in the reliability and performance of the 787," and were cooperating fully with the FAA's investigation. The 787 went into service in 2011, and 50 have been delivered to various airlines since then, with hundreds more on order. Qatar Airways has received five of them, and it has criticized Boeing for manufacturing faults.

angry tapir writes "Australia's Classification Board today announced the first video game to receive the new R18+ classification which came into effect at the start of 2013, indicating the title is to be sold only to adults. Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge, developed by Team Ninja, is published by Nintendo for the company's new Wii U console. The R18+ classification was created after a long campaign by gamers and game publishers. Previously games had a maximum rating of MA, and titles that didn't meet the criteria had to be reworked or not released in Australia."

Dupple writes "It looks like the EU is coming close to a decision regarding its investigation of Google. While saying he's 'still investigating,' the head of the European Union's antitrust regulatory body has said that he's convinced Google is 'diverting traffic' and that it will be forced to change its results. From the article: 'Despite the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's move earlier this month to let off Google with a slap on the wrist -- albeit, a change to its business practices, a move that financially wouldn't dent Google in the short term but something any company would seek to avoid -- the European Commission is looking to take a somewhat different approach: take its time, and then hit the company hard.'"

redletterdave writes "IBM's super-computer Watson briefly went from smart to smart ass with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant, he and his 35-person team wanted to get Watson to sound more like a real human. After teaching IBM's super-computer the entire Urban Dictionary, however, Watson simply couldn't distinguish polite discourse from profanity. Watson unfortunately learned all of the Urban Dictionary's bad habits, including throwing in overly-crass language at random points in its responses; in answering one question, Watson even reportedly used the word 'bullshit' within an answer to one researcher's question. In the end, Brown and his team were forced to remove the Urban Dictionary from Watson's vocabulary, and additionally developed a smart filter to keep Watson from swearing in the future."

Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, reports surfaced that the Windows RT operating system had been jailbroken to allow for the execution of unsigned ARM desktop applications. Microsoft quickly issued a statement saying it does not consider the findings to be part of a security vulnerability, and applauded the hacker for his ingenuity. Now, a Windows RT jailbreak tool has been released."

dcblogs writes "General Motors CIO Randy Mott Thursday said the automaker plans to have the 'best jobs in the IT industry' at its four 'IT Innovation Centers' in the U.S., as it announced its third one in Roswell, Ga., near Atlanta... As part of its effort to insource its IT work, GM recently hired 18 HP employees from its IT organization, who left 'en masse,' prompting HP to go to court to seek depositions from two former IT managers who left for GM. Mott, the CIO at HP before moving to GM last year, said HP's move is 'not the best use our legal system.' Mott called HP's court filing a 'fishing expedition' that 'feels very retaliatory and harassing to the individuals. I think talent will go where talent sees opportunity.' GM is building a tech staff of about 10,000. As part of it, HP is transferring over about 3,000 employees. HP is a longtime services provider for the automaker via its services unit, the former EDS."

New submitter Antoine.Stroll writes "Microsoft's concept of the living room's future doesn't include Master Chief apparently. In fact, it's starring several FOSS games including Red Eclipse and SuperTuxKart (video). Does FOSS just allow more possibilities for research and experimentation? SuperTuxKart had their 0.8 release last month. Go check out the website and download the game that Redmond's researchers couldn't resist. STK gets its Microsoft closeup at 48 seconds into the demonstration." This is the full room projection tech detailed in an earlier story about the patents Microsoft filed relating to it.

SomePgmr writes with a story about an online gambling site planning to use Bitcoin to sidestep U.S. regulations that effectively ban online gambling. From the article: "Michael Hajduk had sunk one year and about $20,000 into developing his online poker site, Infiniti Poker, when the U.S. online gambling market imploded. On April 15, 2011, a day now known in the industry as Black Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the three biggest poker sites accessible to players in the U.S., indicting 11 people on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. ... Infiniti Poker ... plans to accept Bitcoin when it launches later this month. The online currency may allow American gamblers to avoid running afoul of complex U.S. laws that prevent businesses from knowingly accepting money transfers for Internet gambling purposes. 'Because we're using Bitcoin, we're not using U.S. banks — it's all peer-to-peer,' Hajduk says. 'I don't believe we'll be doing anything wrong.'"

McGruber writes "ABC News/ESPN broke the story that a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) analyzed the brain tissue of renowned NFL linebacker Junior Seau and have concluded that the football player suffered a debilitating brain disease likely caused by two decades worth of hits to the head. From the article: 'In May 2012, Seau, 43 — football's monster in the middle, a perennial all-star and defensive icon in the 1990s whose passionate hits made him a dominant figure in the NFL — shot himself in the chest at his home in Oceanside, Calif., leaving behind four children and many unanswered questions.' As Slashdot earlier reported, more than 30 NFL players have in recent years been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition once known as 'punch drunk' because it affected boxers who had taken multiple blows to the head."

Nerval's Lobster writes "One of the first servers used by notorious torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has ended up at the Computer Museum in Linköping. A picture of the exhibit sent to TorrentFreak shows the server in its original tower casing. The hardware will headline an exhibit on 50 years of file sharing. As the exhibit notes, The Pirate Bay is one of the focal points for the file-sharing phenomenon, used to share both copyrighted works (such as music and movies) and free-for-all material (open-source Linux distributions and the like). The sharing of the former has created a worldwide cat-and-mouse game, with governments doing their best to block file-sharing sites, capture their servers, and prosecute their operators. 'In less than ten years The Pirate Bay has become a contemporary historical phenomenon, due to its distinguished position in the file-sharing debate,' according to the museum exhibit. 'The discussions that have sprung from this simple computer server concerns serious subjects as freedom of speech, global democracy and of course the sole existence of copyright.'"

A week ago, you read the other side of the same question. Now, an anonymous reader writes "I have been with my company for 10+ years and have seen many development cycles on our projects. We have a developer intern who has not been on the team for very long. On day one he started ripping into my code on how terrible it is. We have a code base of roughly 50,000 lines of code. When he comes to me with a complaint about the code it is simply because he does not have the experience with it to actually understand what the code is doing. He is a smart guy with lots of promise, he is asking good questions, but how do I get him to look past his own self perceived greatness enough to slow down and learn what we are doing and how we have pulled it off?"

An anonymous reader writes with an update to an earlier story about a group wanting to destroy your violent video games. "Southington, a town in Connecticut, has canceled its plans to collect and destroy violent games, stating that it has already succeeded in raising attention." Perhaps the real reason: "Backed by the Southington Chamber of Commerce, SouthingtonSOS originally planned to offer citizens $25 gift certificates in exchange for their violent games, films, and CDs, which the group would collect for 'permanent disposal.'"

Jolla's Sailfish, Canonical's recently announced Ubuntu Phone, and KDE's Plasma Active environments are all using Qt5's QML for interface design. Unfortunately, the set of UI components provided by each, although similar, are incompatible with the others. After a chat on IRC between developers of all three platforms, they've decided to discuss the reasons behind each implementation, in the hopes that they can work toward a common architecture. "There are also discussions underway regarding other aspects of the bigger puzzle such as common package formats and delivery strategies. We are poised, should we keep our heads straight and our feet moving, to evolve that holiest of grails in the mobile space: an open and vendor neutral application development strategy built around the commonality of QtQuick and Linux. This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."

Jolla's Sailfish, Canonical's recently announced Ubuntu Phone, and KDE's Plasma Active environments are all using Qt5's QML for interface design. Unfortunately, the set of UI components provided by each, although similar, are incompatible with the others. After a chat on IRC between developers of all three platforms, they've decided to discuss the reasons behind each implementation, in the hopes that they can work toward a common architecture. "There are also discussions underway regarding other aspects of the bigger puzzle such as common package formats and delivery strategies. We are poised, should we keep our heads straight and our feet moving, to evolve that holiest of grails in the mobile space: an open and vendor neutral application development strategy built around the commonality of QtQuick and Linux. This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."

Jolla's Sailfish, Canonical's recently announced Ubuntu Phone, and KDE's Plasma Active environments are all using Qt5's QML for interface design. Unfortunately, the set of UI components provided by each, although similar, are incompatible with the others. After a chat on IRC between developers of all three platforms, they've decided to discuss the reasons behind each implementation, in the hopes that they can work toward a common architecture. "There are also discussions underway regarding other aspects of the bigger puzzle such as common package formats and delivery strategies. We are poised, should we keep our heads straight and our feet moving, to evolve that holiest of grails in the mobile space: an open and vendor neutral application development strategy built around the commonality of QtQuick and Linux. This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."

judgecorp writes "Nokia has admitted that it routinely decrypts user's HTTPS traffic, but says it is only doing it so it can compress it to improve speed. That doesn't convince security researcher Gaurang Pandya, who accuses the company of spying on customers." From the article, Nokia says: "'Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them. When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users' content, it is done in a secure manner. ... Nokia has implemented appropriate organisational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.'"

cervesaebraciator writes "Tim Lee over at Ars Technica recently interviewed Derek Khanna, a former staffer for the Republican Study Committee. As reported on Slashdot, Khanna wrote a brief suggesting the current copyright law might not constitute free market thinking. He was rewarded for his efforts with permanent time off of work. Khanna continues to speak out about the need for copyright reform as well as its potential as a winning electoral issue and, according to Lee, he's actually beginning to receive some positive attention for his efforts. 'I encourage Hill staffers to bring forth new ideas. Don't be discouraged by the potential consequences,' Khanna told Ars. 'You work for the American people. It's your job, your obligation to be challenging existing paradigms and put forward novel solutions to existing problems.' Would that more in both major parties thought like this."

cervesaebraciator writes "Tim Lee over at Ars Technica recently interviewed Derek Khanna, a former staffer for the Republican Study Committee. As reported on Slashdot, Khanna wrote a brief suggesting the current copyright law might not constitute free market thinking. He was rewarded for his efforts with permanent time off of work. Khanna continues to speak out about the need for copyright reform as well as its potential as a winning electoral issue and, according to Lee, he's actually beginning to receive some positive attention for his efforts. 'I encourage Hill staffers to bring forth new ideas. Don't be discouraged by the potential consequences,' Khanna told Ars. 'You work for the American people. It's your job, your obligation to be challenging existing paradigms and put forward novel solutions to existing problems.' Would that more in both major parties thought like this."

BeatTheChip writes "The day Andrea Hernandez lost her federal case against expulsion for refusing a school mandated RFID badge, Rep. Lois Kolkhorst moved to file two bills on the first day of the Texas Legislative session. Kolkhorst has sponsored several anti-RFID bills for schools over the years. This year they are HB 101 and HB 102."

stevew writes "Following up our earlier discussion about whether guns should be self-aware comes the announcement of the world's first Linux-powered rifle. A startup attending CES was showing how their 'Precision Guided Firearms' would use customized, computerized scopes to assist with aiming. 'The Linux-powered scope produces a display that looks something like the heads-up display you'd see sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet, showing the weapon's compass orientation, cant, and incline. To shoot at something, you first "mark" it using a button near the trigger. Marking a target illuminates it with the tracking scope's built-in laser, and the target gains a pip in the scope's display. When a target is marked, the tracking scope takes into account the range of the target, the ambient temperature and humidity, the age of the barrel, and a whole boatload of other parameters. It quickly reorients the display so the crosshairs in the center accurately show where the round will go.'"

skade88 writes "Boston has seen 10 times more flu cases this year than last. They are now up to 700 cases and counting, with 18 deaths in the city. The city of Boston has declared a public health emergency in the wake of the epidemic. 'The CDC said the proportion of people visiting health care providers with flu-like symptoms climbed from 2.8 percent to 5.6 percent in four weeks. By contrast, the rate peaked at only 2.2 percent during the relatively mild 2011-2012 flu season. The estimated rate of flu-related hospitalizations in the U.S. was 8.1 per 100,000 people, which is high for this time of year, according to Dr. Joe Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch of the CDC’s influenza division. The agency’s next advisory will be issued Friday.' As previously discussed on Slashdot it would also be nice for your friends and coworkers for you to stay home if you are sick."

eldavojohn writes "I kickstarted a project undertaken by Daniel Shiffman to write a book on what (at the time) seemed to be a very large knowledge space. What resulted is a good book (amazing by CC-BY-NC standards) available in both PDF and HTML versions. In addition to the book he maintains the source code for creating the book and of course the book examples. The Nature of Code starts off swimmingly but remains front heavy with a mere thirty five pages devoted to the final chapter on neural networks. This is an excellent book for Java and Processing developers that want to break into simulation and modeling of well, anything. It probably isn't a must-have title for very seasoned developers (unless you've never done simulation and modeling) but at zero cost why not?" Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review. The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing author Daniel Shiffman pages 520 publisher The Nature of Code rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0985930806 summary A book concentrating on the simulation of natural elements through both basic and advanced programming concepts in Processing. First off, I feel like defining the audience of this book is very important to avoid disappointment. This book is not for someone who's already developed games or modeled highway traffic or knows how to build their own physics engine. No, this book is geared at the people who are familiar with one language (preferably Java or Processing) and want to get a taste of all of the above. This book is possibly suitable for a someone new to the world of programming who is willing to put in the extra effort of coming up to speed on Processing in tandem with the text. After all, Processing is a comparatively forgiving language with a dead simple API to interact with the mouse and draw/animate objects.

I'd also like to address the "exercises" that are found throughout chapters and at the end of chapters in this book. They are excellent. I picked a couple and invested actual time in fleshing them out and I feel like Shiffman succeeded in inserting a wide range of difficulty. Leading along through each chapter, it is easy to successively complete each new exercise while the end of the chapters present stretch exercises. In addition to that, applicable chapters urge and provoke the reader to utilize newly learned concepts into what Shiffman calls "The Ecosystem Project." Where the user is basically defining an ecosystem and continually adding new animals, new movement patterns, new behaviors like predation and finally artificial intelligence.

Lastly this book can be found in many formats and I read the first half as HTML with animated diagrams. While the animated diagrams were awesome and added greatly to the text, I still found myself enjoying the dead tree book much more. I know I will soon be a dinosaur with shelves of needless weight that people will mock but I cannot make the jump to reading on a screen. The book's binding and paper quality is average as it appears to be from Amazon's CreateSpace. Diagrams that would animate are shown in the book as having progressively darkening shadows of the paths of objects and is fairly easy to envision movement. I did love the HTML version's moving examples though!

The introduction of this book brings up a few fundamental concepts on randomness like random walks and Perlin noise as well as a bit of statistics. For being labeled "Introduction" this chapter is fundamentally important and the aforementioned concepts are referred back to throughout the rest of the book. The book immediately dives into code snippets of a very simple nature that are easy to run and understand. Great detail and careful explanation are found throughout these opening chapters. The user is given informational boxes going further in depth to certain concepts. This was done really well in the first five or so chapters and was rare if even present in the final chapters.

The first chapter is devoted to vectors. It does an excellent job of explaining why they are so important as well as define and code mathematical concepts that affect vectors. A great aspect of this chapter is that the author fleshes out PVector functionality before your eyes to better understand Processing and object oriented programming. New (to beginners) ways of representing and implementing velocity and acceleration using vectors are explored at their most basic levels.

The second chapter moves naturally enough to forces on objects and begins to delve in basic physics formulas. Newton's Laws are modeled as well as friction, aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and gravity. Shiffman does a great job of keeping these unruly topics in easy to understand language while at the same time offering the scary looking formulas. He even goes so far as to insert an informational box imploring the reader to not be afraid of scary looking formulas by breaking down friction. I feel like one of the strengths of this book is showing how a complex looking formula can be deconstructed to easy English and then further implemented roughly in a model in Processing. While this modeling is by no means completely accurate or state of the art, it is a good introduction and would likely suffice for simple games and web design.

The third chapter brings angles into the mix by concentrating on oscillations. While it does a great job of talking about the important aspects of trigonometry, the text does really follow through with recalling these concepts. For instance, the mnemonic device SOHCAHTOA from geometry class is briefly explained and subsequently dropped. We use it in later chapters but it is used implicitly and may be difficult for people who are not intimately familiar with it to see the trigonometric reductions employed for simplified coding of the visualizations. Shiffman does an excellent job at starting with something that looks like a complex system, breaking it down to its component vectors and showing incremental changes to the code that iteratively improve on the visualization at hand. In doing so he gives an example of how a modeling programmer should think and work through known physical behavior to derive something that works visually in Processing.

Next up is particle systems. The reader is introduced to simpler ways of maintaining a set of particles as we start to focus on multiple particles with complex interactions. Shiffman opts to keep it simple and shies away from coding aspects like ArrayList versus LinkedList versus HashMap. Instead minimal space is spent on side ventures and the particle systems are surprisingly easy to get off the ground. The user is introduced to polymorphism, inheritance and more advanced class constructs so that the user can reduce the amount of code required to activate, handle and delete heterogenous groups of particles. For a beginning developer this chapter is great at walking them through these more advanced concepts and helping them see a direct benefit to the code.

So far, Introduction through Chapter Four of the book, everything has been great. Shiffman points out that there are a plethora of physics libraries out there in any imaginable language of any imaginable quality. And, consequently, it's unlikely you're going to forge forward with the aforementioned concepts and find yourself making the next engine for latest blockbuster space shooter game. As a result, Chapter Five is an overview of how to interact with physics libraries and use your Processing sketch as a facade that just queries said library for position. Box2D is the first library he tackles and with good cause — it's the same engine used by Angry Birds. And that's great because it is certainly empowering to know that if you can skin a simple game that adds a few game rules to physics, you can make a billion dollars. I learned a lot from this. I have never interacted with a physics library like this before and it was easy to produce fluid and impressive results. But it felt like glue code and it also felt like this text could be deprecated with a large update to Box2D (or it's Java and Processing equivalents). This really is a necessary and helpful chapter for this book but I felt sad that we had so quickly given up on rolling our own physics library. After Box2D, Shiffman presents VerletPhysics and provides a helpful resource for when you should use one over the other. Also, the terms for interacting with the libraries are slightly different but represent the same concept (side note: I wasn't a big fan of the convoluted names these two libraries used to designate objects and object types).

Chapter Six shows the reader how to emulate an autonomous agent by introducing "desired" vectors to each object. In this case it is a race car trying to reach a target. As the object moves, the desired vector is a updated. Examples of code are provided that show the object overshooting its target and Shiffman progresses on his path of slightly improving it by algorithmically adjusting the desired vector by introducing a slowing magnitude upon approach of the target. The actions of the object become more complicated as a flow field is suggested instead for behavior. The author explores path following and how to introduce a bit of wandering around straight line like an ant following a pheromone trail or a person walking along a wall. Simple examples of group behavior like even spacing in a crowded group or flocking in a sparse population within a large space. Lastly this chapter covers a very important aspect of code: performance. By now the reader has seen many examples where code can run slowly and this chapter's continual pairwise updating of all objects on the screen brings up Big O Notation. I wish Shiffman would spend more time on this or at least provide a separate box with more technical information on it like he did with other concepts.

The seventh chapter takes an interesting turn into cellular automata. While an interesting chapter and an interesting concept, it feels a bit disjoint from the rest of the text. While there is a way to tie it back into the long running ecosystem project. The most important aspect of cellular automata is that they are fun visualizations where as other concepts in programming that revolve around mutating state might not be as readily visible (like finite state machines or Markov models). This is the first chapter that feels a little rushed and more like a brief foray into a potentially deep field. The Game of Life is covered but only in its simplest aspects and I feel like this chapter could be better.

Chapter Eight dives into fractals. Again, like the last chapter, it is a bit short but I enjoyed this chapter. They are a great visual way to introduce newcomers to recursion and get them excited about it. On top of that, Shiffman shows how fractals appear in nature. Koch curves and Sierpinski triangles as fractal visualizations. Shiffman has a great informational box discussing the "monster" curve and tantalizes the reader with the paradox that an infinite recursion of the Koch curve results in an infinitely long line in a finite area of paper. This sort of stuff is what makes reading a book like this enjoyable and drives people to delve deeper into this concepts. I only wish the book had more of this. Also crucial to recursion in this chapter is a processing feature new to me: pushMatrix() and popMatrix(). As these are built out into trees, the author moves on to L-systems as devised by Aristid Lindenmayer. It's amazing how this simple grammar could result in a simulation of an algal growth.

The ninth chapter helps the user through a high level overview of genetic algorithms. I think one thing this book lacks is caution or warning about jumping into concepts or using concepts just because they sound cool. While genetic algorithms sound cool and futuristic, I have rarely found them to be at all useful on a professional level. Shiffman does a great job of explaining precisely how selection is determined by defining the constraints of the environment as well as the evaluation function. Unfortunately I find that these things are often hard to define and it's warnings like these that the text lacks. Nevertheless, there are a few good examples picked out for coding — unsurprisingly they use the laws of physics we just discussed and a number of computable variables for valuation. The best example is the rocket ship which is introduced after the standard monkeys trying to type the works of Shakespeare at a typewriter. Shiffman does a great job of explaining genetic algorithms and it's certainly a neat topic that's fun to think about but I'm not sure it's a good practical fundamental aspect of coding. It definitely works for the simulation side of coding so it should stay in the book but again it feels rushed with a lot of the simulation application left to the reader in the ecosystem project. I think that a much longer chapter that models predation — like wolves and rabbits — might work a lot better. You could even tie in a little bit of math and show situations where not enough mutations cause the hunter or prey to settle in on local maximums.

The tenth and final chapter briefly covers neural networks. Again, this chapter felt rushed and was missing a lot of the great explanations that were present in the first half of the book. The scant thirty five pages covers peceptrons, neural networks, training vehicles with them and even backpropagation of multilayered neural networks to hand more complex classification demands. In an effort to give this chapter some fun visualizations, the last thing Shiffman covers is the animation of the operation of a neural network. I'm intimately familiar with all these topics but the pace at which this chapter moves might be too much for a starting developer. I feel like there's a huge opportunity in this chapter to more thoroughly explain neural networks and to get readers more excited about classification systems in code.

All in all, the book was thoroughly enjoyable and I really enjoy that it is a creative commons work with both a github for the source code and the raw book. Although the latter chapters could use a lot of additional work this book is a great beginning tool for people who wish to start modeling nature in visualizations quickly and easily.

You can purchase a physical copy of The Nature of Code from amazon.com or you can name your price on a PDF directly. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."

eldavojohn writes "I kickstarted a project undertaken by Daniel Shiffman to write a book on what (at the time) seemed to be a very large knowledge space. What resulted is a good book (amazing by CC-BY-NC standards) available in both PDF and HTML versions. In addition to the book he maintains the source code for creating the book and of course the book examples. The Nature of Code starts off swimmingly but remains front heavy with a mere thirty five pages devoted to the final chapter on neural networks. This is an excellent book for Java and Processing developers that want to break into simulation and modeling of well, anything. It probably isn't a must-have title for very seasoned developers (unless you've never done simulation and modeling) but at zero cost why not?" Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review. The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing author Daniel Shiffman pages 520 publisher The Nature of Code rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0985930806 summary A book concentrating on the simulation of natural elements through both basic and advanced programming concepts in Processing. First off, I feel like defining the audience of this book is very important to avoid disappointment. This book is not for someone who's already developed games or modeled highway traffic or knows how to build their own physics engine. No, this book is geared at the people who are familiar with one language (preferably Java or Processing) and want to get a taste of all of the above. This book is possibly suitable for a someone new to the world of programming who is willing to put in the extra effort of coming up to speed on Processing in tandem with the text. After all, Processing is a comparatively forgiving language with a dead simple API to interact with the mouse and draw/animate objects.

I'd also like to address the "exercises" that are found throughout chapters and at the end of chapters in this book. They are excellent. I picked a couple and invested actual time in fleshing them out and I feel like Shiffman succeeded in inserting a wide range of difficulty. Leading along through each chapter, it is easy to successively complete each new exercise while the end of the chapters present stretch exercises. In addition to that, applicable chapters urge and provoke the reader to utilize newly learned concepts into what Shiffman calls "The Ecosystem Project." Where the user is basically defining an ecosystem and continually adding new animals, new movement patterns, new behaviors like predation and finally artificial intelligence.

Lastly this book can be found in many formats and I read the first half as HTML with animated diagrams. While the animated diagrams were awesome and added greatly to the text, I still found myself enjoying the dead tree book much more. I know I will soon be a dinosaur with shelves of needless weight that people will mock but I cannot make the jump to reading on a screen. The book's binding and paper quality is average as it appears to be from Amazon's CreateSpace. Diagrams that would animate are shown in the book as having progressively darkening shadows of the paths of objects and is fairly easy to envision movement. I did love the HTML version's moving examples though!

The introduction of this book brings up a few fundamental concepts on randomness like random walks and Perlin noise as well as a bit of statistics. For being labeled "Introduction" this chapter is fundamentally important and the aforementioned concepts are referred back to throughout the rest of the book. The book immediately dives into code snippets of a very simple nature that are easy to run and understand. Great detail and careful explanation are found throughout these opening chapters. The user is given informational boxes going further in depth to certain concepts. This was done really well in the first five or so chapters and was rare if even present in the final chapters.

The first chapter is devoted to vectors. It does an excellent job of explaining why they are so important as well as define and code mathematical concepts that affect vectors. A great aspect of this chapter is that the author fleshes out PVector functionality before your eyes to better understand Processing and object oriented programming. New (to beginners) ways of representing and implementing velocity and acceleration using vectors are explored at their most basic levels.

The second chapter moves naturally enough to forces on objects and begins to delve in basic physics formulas. Newton's Laws are modeled as well as friction, aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and gravity. Shiffman does a great job of keeping these unruly topics in easy to understand language while at the same time offering the scary looking formulas. He even goes so far as to insert an informational box imploring the reader to not be afraid of scary looking formulas by breaking down friction. I feel like one of the strengths of this book is showing how a complex looking formula can be deconstructed to easy English and then further implemented roughly in a model in Processing. While this modeling is by no means completely accurate or state of the art, it is a good introduction and would likely suffice for simple games and web design.

The third chapter brings angles into the mix by concentrating on oscillations. While it does a great job of talking about the important aspects of trigonometry, the text does really follow through with recalling these concepts. For instance, the mnemonic device SOHCAHTOA from geometry class is briefly explained and subsequently dropped. We use it in later chapters but it is used implicitly and may be difficult for people who are not intimately familiar with it to see the trigonometric reductions employed for simplified coding of the visualizations. Shiffman does an excellent job at starting with something that looks like a complex system, breaking it down to its component vectors and showing incremental changes to the code that iteratively improve on the visualization at hand. In doing so he gives an example of how a modeling programmer should think and work through known physical behavior to derive something that works visually in Processing.

Next up is particle systems. The reader is introduced to simpler ways of maintaining a set of particles as we start to focus on multiple particles with complex interactions. Shiffman opts to keep it simple and shies away from coding aspects like ArrayList versus LinkedList versus HashMap. Instead minimal space is spent on side ventures and the particle systems are surprisingly easy to get off the ground. The user is introduced to polymorphism, inheritance and more advanced class constructs so that the user can reduce the amount of code required to activate, handle and delete heterogenous groups of particles. For a beginning developer this chapter is great at walking them through these more advanced concepts and helping them see a direct benefit to the code.

So far, Introduction through Chapter Four of the book, everything has been great. Shiffman points out that there are a plethora of physics libraries out there in any imaginable language of any imaginable quality. And, consequently, it's unlikely you're going to forge forward with the aforementioned concepts and find yourself making the next engine for latest blockbuster space shooter game. As a result, Chapter Five is an overview of how to interact with physics libraries and use your Processing sketch as a facade that just queries said library for position. Box2D is the first library he tackles and with good cause — it's the same engine used by Angry Birds. And that's great because it is certainly empowering to know that if you can skin a simple game that adds a few game rules to physics, you can make a billion dollars. I learned a lot from this. I have never interacted with a physics library like this before and it was easy to produce fluid and impressive results. But it felt like glue code and it also felt like this text could be deprecated with a large update to Box2D (or it's Java and Processing equivalents). This really is a necessary and helpful chapter for this book but I felt sad that we had so quickly given up on rolling our own physics library. After Box2D, Shiffman presents VerletPhysics and provides a helpful resource for when you should use one over the other. Also, the terms for interacting with the libraries are slightly different but represent the same concept (side note: I wasn't a big fan of the convoluted names these two libraries used to designate objects and object types).

Chapter Six shows the reader how to emulate an autonomous agent by introducing "desired" vectors to each object. In this case it is a race car trying to reach a target. As the object moves, the desired vector is a updated. Examples of code are provided that show the object overshooting its target and Shiffman progresses on his path of slightly improving it by algorithmically adjusting the desired vector by introducing a slowing magnitude upon approach of the target. The actions of the object become more complicated as a flow field is suggested instead for behavior. The author explores path following and how to introduce a bit of wandering around straight line like an ant following a pheromone trail or a person walking along a wall. Simple examples of group behavior like even spacing in a crowded group or flocking in a sparse population within a large space. Lastly this chapter covers a very important aspect of code: performance. By now the reader has seen many examples where code can run slowly and this chapter's continual pairwise updating of all objects on the screen brings up Big O Notation. I wish Shiffman would spend more time on this or at least provide a separate box with more technical information on it like he did with other concepts.

The seventh chapter takes an interesting turn into cellular automata. While an interesting chapter and an interesting concept, it feels a bit disjoint from the rest of the text. While there is a way to tie it back into the long running ecosystem project. The most important aspect of cellular automata is that they are fun visualizations where as other concepts in programming that revolve around mutating state might not be as readily visible (like finite state machines or Markov models). This is the first chapter that feels a little rushed and more like a brief foray into a potentially deep field. The Game of Life is covered but only in its simplest aspects and I feel like this chapter could be better.

Chapter Eight dives into fractals. Again, like the last chapter, it is a bit short but I enjoyed this chapter. They are a great visual way to introduce newcomers to recursion and get them excited about it. On top of that, Shiffman shows how fractals appear in nature. Koch curves and Sierpinski triangles as fractal visualizations. Shiffman has a great informational box discussing the "monster" curve and tantalizes the reader with the paradox that an infinite recursion of the Koch curve results in an infinitely long line in a finite area of paper. This sort of stuff is what makes reading a book like this enjoyable and drives people to delve deeper into this concepts. I only wish the book had more of this. Also crucial to recursion in this chapter is a processing feature new to me: pushMatrix() and popMatrix(). As these are built out into trees, the author moves on to L-systems as devised by Aristid Lindenmayer. It's amazing how this simple grammar could result in a simulation of an algal growth.

The ninth chapter helps the user through a high level overview of genetic algorithms. I think one thing this book lacks is caution or warning about jumping into concepts or using concepts just because they sound cool. While genetic algorithms sound cool and futuristic, I have rarely found them to be at all useful on a professional level. Shiffman does a great job of explaining precisely how selection is determined by defining the constraints of the environment as well as the evaluation function. Unfortunately I find that these things are often hard to define and it's warnings like these that the text lacks. Nevertheless, there are a few good examples picked out for coding — unsurprisingly they use the laws of physics we just discussed and a number of computable variables for valuation. The best example is the rocket ship which is introduced after the standard monkeys trying to type the works of Shakespeare at a typewriter. Shiffman does a great job of explaining genetic algorithms and it's certainly a neat topic that's fun to think about but I'm not sure it's a good practical fundamental aspect of coding. It definitely works for the simulation side of coding so it should stay in the book but again it feels rushed with a lot of the simulation application left to the reader in the ecosystem project. I think that a much longer chapter that models predation — like wolves and rabbits — might work a lot better. You could even tie in a little bit of math and show situations where not enough mutations cause the hunter or prey to settle in on local maximums.

The tenth and final chapter briefly covers neural networks. Again, this chapter felt rushed and was missing a lot of the great explanations that were present in the first half of the book. The scant thirty five pages covers peceptrons, neural networks, training vehicles with them and even backpropagation of multilayered neural networks to hand more complex classification demands. In an effort to give this chapter some fun visualizations, the last thing Shiffman covers is the animation of the operation of a neural network. I'm intimately familiar with all these topics but the pace at which this chapter moves might be too much for a starting developer. I feel like there's a huge opportunity in this chapter to more thoroughly explain neural networks and to get readers more excited about classification systems in code.

All in all, the book was thoroughly enjoyable and I really enjoy that it is a creative commons work with both a github for the source code and the raw book. Although the latter chapters could use a lot of additional work this book is a great beginning tool for people who wish to start modeling nature in visualizations quickly and easily.

You can purchase a physical copy of The Nature of Code from amazon.com or you can name your price on a PDF directly. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."

Nerval's Lobster writes "A presidential campaign is many things to many people: a reason to hope in the future, a wellspring of jokes and debate fodder, an annoyance to tune out, a chance to participate in the civic process. But for a couple dozen software engineers and developers involved over the past two years in President Obama's re-election effort, a campaign was something entirely different: a billion-dollar tech startup with an eighteen-month lifespan and a mandate to ship code under extreme pressure. Speaking to a New York City audience, some of Obama for America's leading tech people—those involved in the all-important Dashboard and Narwhal projects, as well as fundraising and DevOps—characterized the experience as 'insane,' filled with unending problems and the knowledge that, at the end of the whole process, nearly everything they worked on would likely end up tossed away. This is the story of what happened, and how technologies on a massive scale can make or break campaigns."

vikingpower writes "As a previous Slashdot story already reported, Ruby on Rails was recently reported to suffer from a major SQL injection flaw. This has prompted the Dutch government to take the one and only national site for citizens' digital identification offline (link in Dutch, Google translation to English). Here is the English-language placeholder page for the now-offline site. This means that 16 million Dutch citizens cannot authenticate themselves anymore with government instances, and that those same government instances can not communicate anything to those same citizens anymore." Fixes were released, so it looks like it's on their sysadmin team now.

An anonymous reader writes with news that Microsoft is killing Messenger in favor of Skype. From the article: "Microsoft on Tuesday mass emailed its 100 million+ Messenger users to let them know that the service is officially being retired on March 15, 2013. On that date, all users will be migrated to Skype, which Microsoft acquired back in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. This means Messenger will be shut down in just 66 days. It will only keep working afterwards in mainland China, mainly because Skype is operated there by a local provider called TOM." Relatedly, an anonymous reader asks: "I am looking to build a Skype replacement for me and some friends and was wondering which languages you would use server side to handle all of the encrypted data streaming? I am thinking to use SIP on a centralized server (as NAT can be a pain to get through). The clients will use end-to-end encryption. Thoughts?" There are some alternatives already, for variable definitions of working.

An anonymous reader writes "As the next generation of consoles looms, we've seen a growing trend towards low price, compact alternatives such as the Ouya and GameStick, many of which run on the Android mobile platform. But this article on the trend raises a very good point: through the use of cloud computing and game streaming technology, it's entirely possible these machines will be able to keep pace with the powerhouse technology inside the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox 720, and perhaps even overtake them. After all, if these little boxes can simply stream from powerful servers, how can the stalwarts of gaming keep up?"

Nerval's Lobster writes "On the heels of rolling out high-speed broadband to Kansas City, Google is bringing more connectivity to another American municipality: New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, which will receive Wi-Fi in outdoor areas courtesy of the search-engine giant. The free Internet zone will encompass an area between 8th Avenue and the West Side Highway on the East-West access, and 19th Street and Gansevoort Street on the North-South. It will cost $115,000 to build and $45,000 a year to maintain, according to Bloomberg, with costs split between Google and a nonprofit neighborhood development group. Internet access will come free of advertising, aside from a provider message from Google, and not require any sort of password. Under mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City has encouraged the development of a sizable tech sector; in addition to dozens of startups, Google and other behemoths have opened headquarters in Manhattan. In theory, this 'Silicon Alley' will contribute mightily to the city's tax base and diversify the local economy."

Antipater writes "Disney parks and resorts have long had a system that combined your room key, credit card, and park ticket into a single card. Now, they're taking it a step further by turning the card into an RFID wristband (called a 'MagicBand'), tracking you, and personalizing your park experience, targeted-ad style. 'Imagine booking guaranteed ride times for your favorite shows and attractions even before setting foot in the park,' wrote Tom Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, in a blog posting on Monday. 'With MyMagic+, guests will be able to do that and more, enabling them to spend more time together and creating an experience that's better for everyone.' Disney does go on to talk about all the things you can opt out of if you have privacy concerns, and the whole system seems to be voluntary or even premium." With a theme park, at least, you can also choose to avoid the place entirely; that makes it, however creepy, a bit different from compulsory education settings, or mandatory car tracking.

Antipater writes "Disney parks and resorts have long had a system that combined your room key, credit card, and park ticket into a single card. Now, they're taking it a step further by turning the card into an RFID wristband (called a 'MagicBand'), tracking you, and personalizing your park experience, targeted-ad style. 'Imagine booking guaranteed ride times for your favorite shows and attractions even before setting foot in the park,' wrote Tom Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, in a blog posting on Monday. 'With MyMagic+, guests will be able to do that and more, enabling them to spend more time together and creating an experience that's better for everyone.' Disney does go on to talk about all the things you can opt out of if you have privacy concerns, and the whole system seems to be voluntary or even premium." With a theme park, at least, you can also choose to avoid the place entirely; that makes it, however creepy, a bit different from compulsory education settings, or mandatory car tracking.

arclightfire writes "Endgame:Syria billed itself as the first game to cover on ongoing war in a mashup of interactivity and journalism. However it seems like Apple is not happy with this idea, as PocketTactics reports; 'Apple's app guidelines have once again tripped up the release of a strategy game rooted in a real-world conflict. Auroch Digital's Endgame Syria has been rejected by Apple's approvals team for violating guidelines section 15.3, "solely target[ing] a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity." If section 15.3 sounds familiar, it's because it was the clause invoked when Cupertino said no to Pacific Fleet back in September – the game ran afoul of the guidelines for including Japanese flags in a WWII naval sim.'"