Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter WIn5t0n writes "Just a day after the alleged leak of 12million Apple UDID's, both Apple and FBI have denied the story that Anonymous, a global hacking community, gained access to the files by hacking into an FBI laptop through a Java vulnerability. Earlier this morning the FBI claimed that, even though the agent cited in Anonymous's story is an actual FBI operative, neither he nor anyone else in the agency has or has had access to Apple device information. This afternoon Apple followed up on the FBI's statement, with an unidentified Apple representative claiming that, 'The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization.' It should also be noted that while the hackers claim to have accessed 12 million UDID's, only 1 million were publicly released. The Apple representative who made the previous statements also said that, 'Apple has replaced the types of identifiers the hackers appear to have gotten and will be discontinuing their use.' Even though neither Anonymous nor the FBI/APPLE will admit where the data actually came from, it does appear that at least some of the leaked UDID's are legit and can be tied back to current, privately owned devices. So far no information besides the devices UDID, DevToken ID, and device name has been released, however the original hackers claimed that some devices were tied to details as exact as phone numbers and billing addresses."

First time accepted submitter WIn5t0n writes "Just a day after the alleged leak of 12million Apple UDID's, both Apple and FBI have denied the story that Anonymous, a global hacking community, gained access to the files by hacking into an FBI laptop through a Java vulnerability. Earlier this morning the FBI claimed that, even though the agent cited in Anonymous's story is an actual FBI operative, neither he nor anyone else in the agency has or has had access to Apple device information. This afternoon Apple followed up on the FBI's statement, with an unidentified Apple representative claiming that, 'The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization.' It should also be noted that while the hackers claim to have accessed 12 million UDID's, only 1 million were publicly released. The Apple representative who made the previous statements also said that, 'Apple has replaced the types of identifiers the hackers appear to have gotten and will be discontinuing their use.' Even though neither Anonymous nor the FBI/APPLE will admit where the data actually came from, it does appear that at least some of the leaked UDID's are legit and can be tied back to current, privately owned devices. So far no information besides the devices UDID, DevToken ID, and device name has been released, however the original hackers claimed that some devices were tied to details as exact as phone numbers and billing addresses."

New submitter payola writes "On September 15, Amazon will begin adding in sales tax for purchases made in California. This is sparking a buying frenzy among California residents who are rushing to buy consumer electronics and other expensive items on the site before the deadline. Of course, consumers are supposed to pay sales taxes on their online purchases anyway, but few actually do. 'Amazon is not the only Internet merchant affected by the new law. But as the nation's largest online retailer, it has been the main target. More than 200 other out-of-state companies with major business in California may also be on the hook to collect sales taxes on items shipped to the state. The tax revenue from these online sales is being lauded as a win for the debt-ridden state, which estimates it will see an additional $317 million annually as a result; more than $83 million of that is expected to come from Amazon alone.'"

An anonymous reader writes "ReadWriteWeb makes the case that Apple should stop censoring submissions to the App Store. The company made headlines last week for banning an app showing the locations of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The article says Apple should restrict its bans to apps that have terrible functionality or a poor UI, and 'get out of the business of censorship.' Quoting: 'Last year in Syria, antigovernment activists began using an iPhone app to disseminate news, maps, photos and videos about the conflict in a country that doesn't exactly rank highly for its press freedom. Mobile tech in the hands of Syrian dissidents proved enough of a nuisance that the government banned the iPhone in late 2011, presumably to quash content that the regime found, um, objectionable. This example raises a few questions. First, why are pins on a map more objectionable than photos and video clips from a war zone? Why does content that effectively agitates for one government to be overthrown make the cut, while content that may make another government look bad (depending on one's own perspective) doesn't? Is Apple taking sides in international conflicts? Perhaps more disturbing is the notion that, were Apple to apply these standards consistently, apps like the one used by Syrian dissidents — and perhaps some news apps — would be barred from the App Store as well.'"

ananyo writes "In what is likely to be a historic moment in science, ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, has published 30 papers in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology today, assigning some sort of function to roughly 80% of the genome, including more than 70,000 'promoter' regions — the sites, just upstream of genes, where proteins bind to control gene expression — and nearly 400,000 'enhancer' regions that regulate expression of distant genes. The project was designed to pick up where the Human Genome Project left off. Although that massive effort revealed the blueprint of human biology, it quickly became clear that the instruction manual for reading the blueprint was sketchy at best. Researchers could identify in its 3 billion letters many of the regions that code for proteins, but those make up little more than 1% of the genome, contained in around 20,000 genes. ENCODE, which started in 2003, aims to catalog the 'functional' DNA sequences between genes, learn when and in which cells they are active and trace their effects on how the genome is packaged, regulated and read. Nature has set up an ENCODE site with an explorer, that groups the papers by topic, and collects all the papers, which are available free."

RogueyWon writes "In an interview with gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Ubisoft has announced that it will no longer use always-online DRM for its PC games. The much-maligned DRM required players to be online and connected to its servers at all times, even when playing single-player content. This represents a reversal of Ubisoft's long-standing insistence that such DRM was essential if the company were to be profitable in the PC gaming market." The full interview has a number of interesting statements. Ubisoft representatives said the decision was made in June of last year. This was right around the time the internet was in an uproar over the DRM in Driver: San Francisco, which Ubisoft quickly scaled back. Ubisoft stopped short of telling RPS they regretted the always-online DRM, or that it only bothers legitimate customers. (However, in a different interview at Gamasutra, Ubisoft's Chris Early said, "The truth of it, they're more inconvenient to our paying customers, so in listening to our players, we removed them.") They maintain that piracy is a financial problem, and acknowledged that the lack of evidence from them and other publishers has only hurt their argument.

RogueyWon writes "In an interview with gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Ubisoft has announced that it will no longer use always-online DRM for its PC games. The much-maligned DRM required players to be online and connected to its servers at all times, even when playing single-player content. This represents a reversal of Ubisoft's long-standing insistence that such DRM was essential if the company were to be profitable in the PC gaming market." The full interview has a number of interesting statements. Ubisoft representatives said the decision was made in June of last year. This was right around the time the internet was in an uproar over the DRM in Driver: San Francisco, which Ubisoft quickly scaled back. Ubisoft stopped short of telling RPS they regretted the always-online DRM, or that it only bothers legitimate customers. (However, in a different interview at Gamasutra, Ubisoft's Chris Early said, "The truth of it, they're more inconvenient to our paying customers, so in listening to our players, we removed them.") They maintain that piracy is a financial problem, and acknowledged that the lack of evidence from them and other publishers has only hurt their argument.

RogueyWon writes "In an interview with gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Ubisoft has announced that it will no longer use always-online DRM for its PC games. The much-maligned DRM required players to be online and connected to its servers at all times, even when playing single-player content. This represents a reversal of Ubisoft's long-standing insistence that such DRM was essential if the company were to be profitable in the PC gaming market." The full interview has a number of interesting statements. Ubisoft representatives said the decision was made in June of last year. This was right around the time the internet was in an uproar over the DRM in Driver: San Francisco, which Ubisoft quickly scaled back. Ubisoft stopped short of telling RPS they regretted the always-online DRM, or that it only bothers legitimate customers. (However, in a different interview at Gamasutra, Ubisoft's Chris Early said, "The truth of it, they're more inconvenient to our paying customers, so in listening to our players, we removed them.") They maintain that piracy is a financial problem, and acknowledged that the lack of evidence from them and other publishers has only hurt their argument.

eldavojohn writes "You may recall the news that Google would not be paying Oracle for Oracle's intellectual property claims against the search giant. Instead, Google requested $4.03 million for lawyer fees in the case. The judge denied some $2.9 million of those fees and instead settled on $1.13 million as an appropriate number for legal costs. Although this is relative peanuts to the two giants, Groklaw breaks the ruling down into more minute detail for anyone curious on what risks and repercussions are involved with patent trolling."

The Wiki Weapon Project and its idea of making guns with 3D printers has already been mentioned on Slashdot. It has also been written up on Forbes.com and a lot of other geek and non-geek sites. Note that when some Wiki Weapon proponents talk about making "guns" with 3D printers, they may be talking only about lower receivers or other static parts, not barrels, firing pins or other parts that must be machined to close tolerances and are subjected to a lot of stress when the gun fires. But low-cost 3D printing and low-cost CNC machining technologies are both advancing at a rapid rate, so thinking about the intersection of firearm manufacturing and open source is both worthwhile and timely. There's been a strong debate about this topic on Eric S. Raymond's Armed and Dangerous blog that's worth reading. Also recommended: The Home Gunsmith.com and CNC Gunsmithing. Astute Slashdot readers will, no doubt, recommend many more. Meanwhile, this video is about licensing, distribution, and legal matters, not the actual manufacture of firearms. There's a transcript (we're finally doing transcripts of selected videos) below the video for those who prefer to read instead of watch.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Nokia CEO Stephen Elop first took to the stage at Center548 on New York City's West Side, where Microsoft had first unveiled Windows Phone 7 in late 2010, to claim that Nokia was becoming a 'more nimble competitor' thanks to several strategic decisions under his tenure, including the choice of Windows Phone as the company's primary smartphone platform. ... In terms of [the 920's hardware]: the battery is 2000 mAh; the processor is a dual-core Snapdragon S4, which was apparently selected for its energy efficiency; and the aforementioned wireless charging, based on the 'Qi' wireless charging standard. ... Despite the enthusiasm displayed onstage for Windows Phone 8, the new smartphone platform poses something of a conundrum for Nokia. The company invested heavily in Windows Phone 7, all but abandoning its homegrown operating systems — including Symbian, once a dominant player in the mobile arena — in favor of Microsoft’s platform. But those Windows Phone 7 smartphones won't upgrade to Windows Phone 8 software, and nor will they run Windows Phone 8 apps."

judgecorp writes "The FBI has denied the UDID codes released yesterday came from an agent's laptop, as claimed by the AntiSec hacker group. The FBI says it does not hold such data, and the attack never happened. However, the agent named by AntiSec is real, and some of the published UDID codes have been found to be genuine. So where did they come from?"

Hugh Pickens writes "In the past, carriers like Sprint have placed restrictions on their Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) to prevent them from competing directly against the carriers. The MVNOs were forced to sell budget service and budget technology. But Businessweek reports that the Galaxy S III has began shipping to customers of MVNO Ting, officially making Ting the first carrier to offer an LTE service without owning an LTE network. 'All the market trends we're talking about today are allowing us to be competitive at the high end,' says Elliot Noss, CEO of Ting, adding that Sprint has stripped off the last remaining obstacles to MVNOs competing with it on equal terms. Virtual carriers are experimenting with new pricing models, such as Ting's metered voice and data plans, that run counter to the way big operators have always sold their services. So far, only a minority of customers finds these new types of models appealing, but it's a growing minority, says Noss. MVNOs all but died out in the last decade, victim to their own over-segmentation of the market and the only survivors were the ones who kept their focus on the budget prepaid segment like TracFone. But nine months ago, AT&T and T-Mobile started selling data and voice airtime by the bucket, which gives MVNOs much more flexibility in pricing. Even more significantly, carriers started working directly with MVNOs to craft unique plans in exchange for a percentage of the plans' revenues. In the meantime, prepaid operators such as Leap Wireless are already selling the iPhone, and it's only a matter of time before the economics are right for Sprint to lift its iPhone restriction as well. 'I'll put it this way: I would be disappointed if we didn't have the iPhone by next summer,' says Noss. 'That kind of holdback of iconic devices is beginning to make less and less [business] sense.'"

1sockchuck writes "Intel has just concluded a year-long test in which it immersed servers in an oil bath, and has affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The chipmaker is now working on reference designs, heat sinks and boards that are optimized for immersion cooling. 'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,' said Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel. 'I think it will catch on. It's going to be a slow progression, but it will start in high-performance computing.' Intel's test used technology from Green Revolution Cooling, which says its design eliminates the need for raised flooring, CRAC units or chillers. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquiCool)."

1sockchuck writes "Intel has just concluded a year-long test in which it immersed servers in an oil bath, and has affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The chipmaker is now working on reference designs, heat sinks and boards that are optimized for immersion cooling. 'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,' said Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel. 'I think it will catch on. It's going to be a slow progression, but it will start in high-performance computing.' Intel's test used technology from Green Revolution Cooling, which says its design eliminates the need for raised flooring, CRAC units or chillers. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquiCool)."

1sockchuck writes "Intel has just concluded a year-long test in which it immersed servers in an oil bath, and has affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The chipmaker is now working on reference designs, heat sinks and boards that are optimized for immersion cooling. 'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,' said Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel. 'I think it will catch on. It's going to be a slow progression, but it will start in high-performance computing.' Intel's test used technology from Green Revolution Cooling, which says its design eliminates the need for raised flooring, CRAC units or chillers. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquiCool)."

1sockchuck writes "Intel has just concluded a year-long test in which it immersed servers in an oil bath, and has affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The chipmaker is now working on reference designs, heat sinks and boards that are optimized for immersion cooling. 'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,' said Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel. 'I think it will catch on. It's going to be a slow progression, but it will start in high-performance computing.' Intel's test used technology from Green Revolution Cooling, which says its design eliminates the need for raised flooring, CRAC units or chillers. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquiCool)."

sam_handelman writes "The Gates Foundation responded to the critiques of its policies (previously discussed here) by inviting its critics at Education Week Teacher to a dialog on its own site. Edweek blogger Anthony Cody answered the challenge. The two sides negotiated a five-part series of post and counterpost, which can be viewed on both sites. Previous exchanges include Cody's question, Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?, and an answer from the Gates Foundation's Global Press Secretary, Chris Williams, Poverty Does Matter — But It Is Not Destiny. The final round of the dialog has begun, and is available for comment on the Gates Foundation's own blog. Slashdot readers may not know about Gates' sponsorship of specific edutech industry partners, such as Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation, and Pearson Education. Cody poses tough questions, including, 'Can the Gates Foundation reconsider and reexamine its own underlying assumptions, and change its agenda in response to the consequences we are seeing?' According to the agreement, the Gates Foundation will answer in the coming week, concluding the series."

An anonymous reader writes "N+1 has an interview with Jacob Appelbaum (who is part of the Tor project) titled 'Leave Your Cellphone at Home.'" Jacob has a lot to say about privacy, data security, and surveillance. He ought to know. Among other things, he's had his email seized, been relieved of his phone, been the subject of a National Security Letter (video) and generally had his travel disrupted.

An anonymous reader writes "N+1 has an interview with Jacob Appelbaum (who is part of the Tor project) titled 'Leave Your Cellphone at Home.'" Jacob has a lot to say about privacy, data security, and surveillance. He ought to know. Among other things, he's had his email seized, been relieved of his phone, been the subject of a National Security Letter (video) and generally had his travel disrupted.

Orome1 writes "A file containing a million and one record sets containing Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) and some other general information about the devices has been made available online by Anonymous hackers following an alleged breach of an FBI computer. 'During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java,' the hackers claim." Update: 09/04 13:44 GMT by T : A piece at SlashCloud points out that if the leak is genuine, this raises some sticky questions about privacy and security; in particular: "[H]ow did the agency obtain said information, and to what purpose? Why did all that personal data reside on the laptop of one special agent?"

Orome1 writes "Joanna Rutkowska, CEO of Invisible Things Lab, today released version 1.0 of Qubes, a stable and reasonably secure desktop OS. It is the most secure option among the existing desktop operating systems — even more secure than Apple's iOS, which puts each application into its own sandbox and does not count on the user to make security decisions. Qubes will offer users the option of using disposable virtual machines for executing tasks they believe could harm their computer. These VMs will be lightweight, easily and extremely speedily created and booted, and would be just as easy to discard." First covered back in 2010. See some screenshots of the X11 part in action (and they say displaying clients from multiple "hosts" isn't useful...)

eldavojohn writes "For quite some time humans have struggled to answer the question why there is anything rather than nothing. Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? tackles such questions in the form of a journey. After laying a brief groundwork, Holt travels from leading prominent philosopher to curmudgeonly physicist to reserved theologian, visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers. Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story author Jim Holt pages 320 publisher Liveright rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0871404091 summary An existential detective story. The book's first page is titled "A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives" (made for those of you who don't have time to read) and presents a very simple proof about the self-forbiddingness of nothing. The book starts off with a brief prerogative to drive the reader's thirst for why this question is important. Typical of the rest of the book Holt drops a lot of names so I'm not going to mention the names that are brought up in passing. The author tries to cover all his bases by bring up anyone from Roger Penrose to René Descartes to Woody Allen. The veritable name dropping proves Holt has done his homework but at times can be a little overbearing and, in my opinion, reaches borderline ADD-philosophy at a few points in the book. Be warned, you will find Tennessee Williams, John Archibald Wheeler, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza and Georg Cantor all mentioned on the same page! The opening few pages select an interesting cast from history as the question arises: Why Does the World Exist?

Holt proceeds from baiting the reader to what he calls a "Philosophical Tour D'Horizon" and, as its name suggests, this chapter blazes through many names — big and small — throughout history that might have contributed to answering this question. I can say this effort is quite readable whereas a more serious effort to be completely comprehensive would be much more lengthy and tedious. I should disclose at this point that Holt played his cards well by mentioning and paying favor to perhaps my most favorite of polymaths: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and he continues to do so throughout this book).

Following that, the next obvious step is to tackle a definition of "nothing" — our 'null hypothesis' of existence. We exist as something so we know that and so Holt begins by sampling what we have at our disposal to define nothing. Holt briefly recalls the advent of zero in mathematics and moves on to the more refined points of what nothing can be defined as in English, French and a number of other ways. This chapter struck me as needlessly tiresome as the author tackles the inane intricacies of natural languages applied to concepts like nothing. Heidegger's "nothing that noths" question struck me as merely a failure of natural language — not a deep and profound question. Holt correctly switches to logical methods like predicate calculus to better tackle this concept of nothing but this chapter left a bad taste in my mouth as the author never attacks the root problem. You can talk about how the word "nothing" operates in English or how "le néant" operates in French but these human invented definitions and grammars are buggy systems for the task at hand. Why do scientists prefer math to describe systems? Why do computers use true and false versus "maybe" and "probably not"? Logic, predicate calculus and math (although far from perfect themselves) are our tools to arm ourselves to better describe our surroundings and I feel like Holt wasted words on the shortcomings of "Does it make sense to say X about nothing?" Regardless this chapter does present mental exercises to the reader about what nothing truly is and examines the paradox of the null hypothesis in existence. Also, in so many ways nothing is nice and simple so why doesn't the law of parsimony dictate that there should have been nothing instead of what is?

The first person Holt visits in this book is Russian Physicist Andrei Linde (the same Linde that was awarded one of Milner's nin awards) and very little time is spent on Linde since the theory visited here is that we exist because our everything was created in a lab by a "physicist" hacker. The second person Holt interviews is a little more interesting and given many more pages. He also happened to be my favorite character in the quest and one with which I found myself most in agreement: Adolf Grünbaum. Holt calls this man "The Great Rejectionist" and I found that to be an adequate and fair title because their discussions make it clear that it is hard to start with base assumptions when debating this borderline hostile mind. Grünbaum, an atheist, had attacked Freudian psychoanalysis and served as an intelligence officer after escaping Nazi Germany. The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing and instead required Holt to make statements that could then be either met with concurrence (ha!) or picked apart by someone armed with years of studying. There's a part in this chapter where Holt alludes to Grünbaum disagreeing to the statement that the Null World is the simplest possible outcome (I'm assuming in order to invoke the Law of Parsimony) and even allowing that to go forward Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"

The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.

Before jumping to the next stop, Holt arms us with the concepts of finite versus infinite and with good reason. Richard Swinburne is a philosopher of religion at Oxford and I found him to be the most disagreeable person encountered along the way in this book. Holt brings up many good points against the possibility of there being a God. The possibility of God explains away all of our aforementioned problems but I felt like he gave Swinburne a free pass on a lot of these points. I was disappointed that the author embodied an intellectual steel trap for everyone else while Swinburne, when cornered, wasn't pressed further. This chapter sets out to answer a lot of questions but I felt like Swinburne was reaching when he tried to explain that God is actually a very simple concept — maybe even simpler than you or I. And I just don't buy that. I also didn't think that Holt fully utilized the newly established definitions of infinity and nothing to pry apart Swinburne's position. As an example, Swinburne speaks of the "infinitely powerful" and "infinitely good" God but draws that as an analogy to parents watching children. He says that God keeps his distance and that's why we're not permeated with infinite goodness ourselves. I feel like Holt should be tearing this apart because this is illogical to me if I consider these two cases: Case 1) the universe is finite and there is Nothing outside of the universe so God does not exist outside the universe so he exists inside the universe. But if God is infinitely good, there would be no room in a finite space for evil — it would be completely packed with good. Case 2) God exists outside the universe (I believe this was Swinburne's suggestion) with the ability to influence inside the universe. However, we now find ourselves back to the issue that Swinburne and Holt addressed in this chapter and that is answering the questions, "What amount of power and good does God allow into the universe? And why that amount?" These two cases have plagued my mind since I was a child, E=mc^2 dictates that it takes a finite (though large to us) amount of power to create sustenance from nothing. The Christian God has an infinite amount of power and is infinitely good yet allows people to die when a finite amount of power would prolong their lives. From good people to bad people to people who have never had the chance to hear God's word, they die daily when a finite amount of power would save them. But I digress — suffice it to say this was a very disappointing chapter and this is why this book loses a point in my mind. I guess it was necessary to visit this possibility but it wasn't fair to let cordiality intervene with a philosophical swordfight.

On the heels of the visit to Swinburne, Holt discusses some of the finer points of proving God's existence through pure logic. I enjoyed his references to Bertrand Russell and Russell's fall to Anselm's ontological argument. Holt also relays Richard Dawkin's knee jerk dismissal of it and Gödel's more complete analysis of the logic. The next stop on the way is physicist David Deutsch of Oxford. The visit with Deutsch is relatively brief but he seems to maintain safe positions without venturing anywhere problematic. His interest is studying the mutliverse theory but he balks at any attempts to even suggest there might be a principle that explains the foundation of our existence. So there's not much to discuss but the opening of this principle of multiple universes is important to the rest of the possibilities presented throughout the book. Holt also looks at the possibility that our universe exists because of a "quantum fluctuation" as first proposed by Ed Tryon and later given more concrete possibilities by Alex Vilenkin. This leads nicely into Holt's next person to visit: Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg sheds a lot of light on the physical aspects with the question of existence. Weinberg provides a little discussion on string theory and how the scientific aspects might work. I was surprised to learn that Weinberg is disappointed at the slow rate of string theory development and he calls it "the best effort we've made to step beyond what we already know." There is, of course, a careful context to that statement with Weinberg explaining that it hasn't worked out how we initially thought it would. I found one of Weinberg's statements to be surprising when he calls Quantum mechanics an "empty stage" and he further says he thinks that "Karl Popper was wrong to say that a scientific theory must be open to falsification. You can't falsify quantum mechanics, since it doesn't make predictions." We don't have a final theory yet but Weinberg does a great job of explaining what finding one would mean and what it will never be able to answer. Holt follows this up with a lot of information and caveats about the multiverse/megaverse as he transitions to another popular scientist and writer.

I've read a number of Roger Penrose's books and was pleased to read his interaction with Holt. I was a little disappointed with Holt's treatment of Platonism in regards to mathematics — mostly because he treats it as borderline mysticism and I personally enjoy reading that kind of mathematical philosophy. While I feel like it has roots in mysticism, I have enjoyed Penrose's works that reference "Platonic contact." Penrose imagines that there are three worlds: the physical world, the world consisting of consciousness and the aforementioned Platonic world. A very brief explanation is that there is a mysterious connection between this physical world via our minds to the conscious world and in our minds there is now a small part of our conscious (the part dealing with mathematics) that connects us to the Platonic world. So I suppose that triples the question of this book and Holt isn't afraid to call these worlds "miraculously self-creating and self-sustaining." Penrose, calls the Platonic world "eternally existing", "profound" and "timeless" but what of the possibility of the Null World? What about outside our universe? How does it stand up to the Nothing? These questions are never really pressed for some reason. Holt briefly references an extreme Platonist by the name of Max Tegmark and I felt like Penrose didn't leave much progress in our quest to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Instead, he offers that this Platonic world is prime and the other two exist in its shadows but I was never satisfied or understood why those shadows exist.

Holt transitions to the next pieces with a reference to John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit." As a developer, this is an incredibly tantalizing possibility but I found it to be a bit misplaced in this book. I found the explanation of this to be less than satisfactory (similarly as in my review of Gleick's "The Information") and I wish someone would include more substance to this view of everything arising from information. Holt muddies up the water even a little further by examining the idea that our brains have this "mind-stuff" or property to them that is perhaps built on top of a quantum phenomena. While there are interesting thought experiments about this "mind-stuff" and consciousness, it seems a little out of scope from the grand purpose of this book. Nonetheless it's fun to think about.

One of the final realms to explore is John A. Leslie's own position of an almost "ethical requiredness" or a need for goodness. I found Leslie to be a sound and logical philosopher but I did not enjoy that the bulk of his explanations seemed to hinge on analogies. Perhaps this is far more prevalent in modern philosophy but something inside me objects to using paintings to explain how universes are enumerated. The example I'm talking about is the question of why, if goodness is a prerogative, would there be infinitely many universes conceptually available but only ours in existence (which is of some arbitrary goodness). And Leslie explains this by saying that the diversity of goodness in the universes is analogous to why the Louvre has paintings of various quality instead of having its walls packed with perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa. I understand his premises and his analogy but I don't see the value of arbitrary selection of a universe — this "axiarchic theory." Both Leslie and Holt reference Dawkin's response of calling goodness a piffling concept and noting that cosmologically it's as arbitrary as "Channel Number Fiveness." And this is the premise of Leslie's assertions: that "Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense." Holt notes that Leslie is a sort of modern-day Spinoza.

The last philosopher on Holt's journey is Derek Parfit who, among other things, discusses the idea of a "selector" with Holt. Parfit breaks down our existence into how and why which is an interesting way to look at it when you consider the selector to be a mechanism that selects (or doesn't select) our universe out of all the possibilities. If the selector is something, then you have to explain the selector of the selector or the meta-selector. For example: The null hypothesis (the world of Nothing) has the selector of simplicity and no meta-selector. Also, by some sound logic and reasoning the two come to the conclusion that a selector can't select itself thus looping backwards and explaining its selection. Armed with this, the author tries his hand at proving which of these explanations and meta-explanations are valid and comes to a conclusion. Similar to my earlier complaints, the biggest problem I have with this is that his method is to rule out the combinations of meta-selectors and selectors until he is down to one or two. How does he know that the explanations for his options in this book amount to the entirety of the possibilities of selectors and meta-selectors? To rule out all possibilities but one in order to understand this seems futile since we may not be able to imagine all selectors and meta-selectors possible.

The very last person interviewed for the book is John Updike. Although he had some interesting things to say, this felt more like an intellectual artist's view of why there is something rather than nothing. Updike says he is part of the group that find this existence to be "a kind of miracle" and he calls this a "last resort, really of naturalistic theology." There's a bit of cute wordplay in this last chapter but it felt appropriate to read it near the end of this journey. Updike gets to weave characters into plots and embed the aforementioned logic and views into those stories. And given that background and his interest in this topic, he playfully left me with an "it's not so bad that we don't know" sort of lightheartedness.

The penultimate chapter of this book deals with the question of whether we seriously exist at all. I think it would have been better for Holt to approach this from a nurture versus nature standpoint that's already been heavily discussed before. He does pose some interesting thought exercises like a procedure that replaces diseased brain matter with healthy brain matter that has no recollection or memories but it only does it 1% of my brain matter at a time. At what point would I cease to be me? So there's some interesting ideas in here but the chapter is largely disagreeable with me. I know that every person I meet knows at least one thing I don't and I like to use such a basic pairwise comparison to justify unique existence. I don't find much value in considerations of the self on a transcendental level and that's probably why this chapter didn't have a lot of value to me.

Throughout the book, Holt has been relaying to us his day to day experiences including the death of his dog. He also noted that Updike died fairly suddenly months after he spoke with him. In the final chapter "Return to Nothingness," Holt does a little work of tying what this all means into the context of death. During the writing of this book, his mother passed away and the final pages are devoted to that account and his emotions. If Updike was a jocular relief about existence, this final chapter is a sobering reminder that ultimately we are all mortal. While well written and heavily symbolic, it is a depressing note on which to end this journey.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's composition is a good mix of art and science making it a light read compared to others about the same topic. If you're looking for thought experiments or wish to further ply yourself with a good survey of the current armaments in this debate, you can buy Why Does the World Exist? from Amazon. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

eldavojohn writes "For quite some time humans have struggled to answer the question why there is anything rather than nothing. Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? tackles such questions in the form of a journey. After laying a brief groundwork, Holt travels from leading prominent philosopher to curmudgeonly physicist to reserved theologian, visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers. Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story author Jim Holt pages 320 publisher Liveright rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0871404091 summary An existential detective story. The book's first page is titled "A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives" (made for those of you who don't have time to read) and presents a very simple proof about the self-forbiddingness of nothing. The book starts off with a brief prerogative to drive the reader's thirst for why this question is important. Typical of the rest of the book Holt drops a lot of names so I'm not going to mention the names that are brought up in passing. The author tries to cover all his bases by bring up anyone from Roger Penrose to René Descartes to Woody Allen. The veritable name dropping proves Holt has done his homework but at times can be a little overbearing and, in my opinion, reaches borderline ADD-philosophy at a few points in the book. Be warned, you will find Tennessee Williams, John Archibald Wheeler, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza and Georg Cantor all mentioned on the same page! The opening few pages select an interesting cast from history as the question arises: Why Does the World Exist?

Holt proceeds from baiting the reader to what he calls a "Philosophical Tour D'Horizon" and, as its name suggests, this chapter blazes through many names — big and small — throughout history that might have contributed to answering this question. I can say this effort is quite readable whereas a more serious effort to be completely comprehensive would be much more lengthy and tedious. I should disclose at this point that Holt played his cards well by mentioning and paying favor to perhaps my most favorite of polymaths: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and he continues to do so throughout this book).

Following that, the next obvious step is to tackle a definition of "nothing" — our 'null hypothesis' of existence. We exist as something so we know that and so Holt begins by sampling what we have at our disposal to define nothing. Holt briefly recalls the advent of zero in mathematics and moves on to the more refined points of what nothing can be defined as in English, French and a number of other ways. This chapter struck me as needlessly tiresome as the author tackles the inane intricacies of natural languages applied to concepts like nothing. Heidegger's "nothing that noths" question struck me as merely a failure of natural language — not a deep and profound question. Holt correctly switches to logical methods like predicate calculus to better tackle this concept of nothing but this chapter left a bad taste in my mouth as the author never attacks the root problem. You can talk about how the word "nothing" operates in English or how "le néant" operates in French but these human invented definitions and grammars are buggy systems for the task at hand. Why do scientists prefer math to describe systems? Why do computers use true and false versus "maybe" and "probably not"? Logic, predicate calculus and math (although far from perfect themselves) are our tools to arm ourselves to better describe our surroundings and I feel like Holt wasted words on the shortcomings of "Does it make sense to say X about nothing?" Regardless this chapter does present mental exercises to the reader about what nothing truly is and examines the paradox of the null hypothesis in existence. Also, in so many ways nothing is nice and simple so why doesn't the law of parsimony dictate that there should have been nothing instead of what is?

The first person Holt visits in this book is Russian Physicist Andrei Linde (the same Linde that was awarded one of Milner's nin awards) and very little time is spent on Linde since the theory visited here is that we exist because our everything was created in a lab by a "physicist" hacker. The second person Holt interviews is a little more interesting and given many more pages. He also happened to be my favorite character in the quest and one with which I found myself most in agreement: Adolf Grünbaum. Holt calls this man "The Great Rejectionist" and I found that to be an adequate and fair title because their discussions make it clear that it is hard to start with base assumptions when debating this borderline hostile mind. Grünbaum, an atheist, had attacked Freudian psychoanalysis and served as an intelligence officer after escaping Nazi Germany. The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing and instead required Holt to make statements that could then be either met with concurrence (ha!) or picked apart by someone armed with years of studying. There's a part in this chapter where Holt alludes to Grünbaum disagreeing to the statement that the Null World is the simplest possible outcome (I'm assuming in order to invoke the Law of Parsimony) and even allowing that to go forward Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"

The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.

Before jumping to the next stop, Holt arms us with the concepts of finite versus infinite and with good reason. Richard Swinburne is a philosopher of religion at Oxford and I found him to be the most disagreeable person encountered along the way in this book. Holt brings up many good points against the possibility of there being a God. The possibility of God explains away all of our aforementioned problems but I felt like he gave Swinburne a free pass on a lot of these points. I was disappointed that the author embodied an intellectual steel trap for everyone else while Swinburne, when cornered, wasn't pressed further. This chapter sets out to answer a lot of questions but I felt like Swinburne was reaching when he tried to explain that God is actually a very simple concept — maybe even simpler than you or I. And I just don't buy that. I also didn't think that Holt fully utilized the newly established definitions of infinity and nothing to pry apart Swinburne's position. As an example, Swinburne speaks of the "infinitely powerful" and "infinitely good" God but draws that as an analogy to parents watching children. He says that God keeps his distance and that's why we're not permeated with infinite goodness ourselves. I feel like Holt should be tearing this apart because this is illogical to me if I consider these two cases: Case 1) the universe is finite and there is Nothing outside of the universe so God does not exist outside the universe so he exists inside the universe. But if God is infinitely good, there would be no room in a finite space for evil — it would be completely packed with good. Case 2) God exists outside the universe (I believe this was Swinburne's suggestion) with the ability to influence inside the universe. However, we now find ourselves back to the issue that Swinburne and Holt addressed in this chapter and that is answering the questions, "What amount of power and good does God allow into the universe? And why that amount?" These two cases have plagued my mind since I was a child, E=mc^2 dictates that it takes a finite (though large to us) amount of power to create sustenance from nothing. The Christian God has an infinite amount of power and is infinitely good yet allows people to die when a finite amount of power would prolong their lives. From good people to bad people to people who have never had the chance to hear God's word, they die daily when a finite amount of power would save them. But I digress — suffice it to say this was a very disappointing chapter and this is why this book loses a point in my mind. I guess it was necessary to visit this possibility but it wasn't fair to let cordiality intervene with a philosophical swordfight.

On the heels of the visit to Swinburne, Holt discusses some of the finer points of proving God's existence through pure logic. I enjoyed his references to Bertrand Russell and Russell's fall to Anselm's ontological argument. Holt also relays Richard Dawkin's knee jerk dismissal of it and Gödel's more complete analysis of the logic. The next stop on the way is physicist David Deutsch of Oxford. The visit with Deutsch is relatively brief but he seems to maintain safe positions without venturing anywhere problematic. His interest is studying the mutliverse theory but he balks at any attempts to even suggest there might be a principle that explains the foundation of our existence. So there's not much to discuss but the opening of this principle of multiple universes is important to the rest of the possibilities presented throughout the book. Holt also looks at the possibility that our universe exists because of a "quantum fluctuation" as first proposed by Ed Tryon and later given more concrete possibilities by Alex Vilenkin. This leads nicely into Holt's next person to visit: Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg sheds a lot of light on the physical aspects with the question of existence. Weinberg provides a little discussion on string theory and how the scientific aspects might work. I was surprised to learn that Weinberg is disappointed at the slow rate of string theory development and he calls it "the best effort we've made to step beyond what we already know." There is, of course, a careful context to that statement with Weinberg explaining that it hasn't worked out how we initially thought it would. I found one of Weinberg's statements to be surprising when he calls Quantum mechanics an "empty stage" and he further says he thinks that "Karl Popper was wrong to say that a scientific theory must be open to falsification. You can't falsify quantum mechanics, since it doesn't make predictions." We don't have a final theory yet but Weinberg does a great job of explaining what finding one would mean and what it will never be able to answer. Holt follows this up with a lot of information and caveats about the multiverse/megaverse as he transitions to another popular scientist and writer.

I've read a number of Roger Penrose's books and was pleased to read his interaction with Holt. I was a little disappointed with Holt's treatment of Platonism in regards to mathematics — mostly because he treats it as borderline mysticism and I personally enjoy reading that kind of mathematical philosophy. While I feel like it has roots in mysticism, I have enjoyed Penrose's works that reference "Platonic contact." Penrose imagines that there are three worlds: the physical world, the world consisting of consciousness and the aforementioned Platonic world. A very brief explanation is that there is a mysterious connection between this physical world via our minds to the conscious world and in our minds there is now a small part of our conscious (the part dealing with mathematics) that connects us to the Platonic world. So I suppose that triples the question of this book and Holt isn't afraid to call these worlds "miraculously self-creating and self-sustaining." Penrose, calls the Platonic world "eternally existing", "profound" and "timeless" but what of the possibility of the Null World? What about outside our universe? How does it stand up to the Nothing? These questions are never really pressed for some reason. Holt briefly references an extreme Platonist by the name of Max Tegmark and I felt like Penrose didn't leave much progress in our quest to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Instead, he offers that this Platonic world is prime and the other two exist in its shadows but I was never satisfied or understood why those shadows exist.

Holt transitions to the next pieces with a reference to John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit." As a developer, this is an incredibly tantalizing possibility but I found it to be a bit misplaced in this book. I found the explanation of this to be less than satisfactory (similarly as in my review of Gleick's "The Information") and I wish someone would include more substance to this view of everything arising from information. Holt muddies up the water even a little further by examining the idea that our brains have this "mind-stuff" or property to them that is perhaps built on top of a quantum phenomena. While there are interesting thought experiments about this "mind-stuff" and consciousness, it seems a little out of scope from the grand purpose of this book. Nonetheless it's fun to think about.

One of the final realms to explore is John A. Leslie's own position of an almost "ethical requiredness" or a need for goodness. I found Leslie to be a sound and logical philosopher but I did not enjoy that the bulk of his explanations seemed to hinge on analogies. Perhaps this is far more prevalent in modern philosophy but something inside me objects to using paintings to explain how universes are enumerated. The example I'm talking about is the question of why, if goodness is a prerogative, would there be infinitely many universes conceptually available but only ours in existence (which is of some arbitrary goodness). And Leslie explains this by saying that the diversity of goodness in the universes is analogous to why the Louvre has paintings of various quality instead of having its walls packed with perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa. I understand his premises and his analogy but I don't see the value of arbitrary selection of a universe — this "axiarchic theory." Both Leslie and Holt reference Dawkin's response of calling goodness a piffling concept and noting that cosmologically it's as arbitrary as "Channel Number Fiveness." And this is the premise of Leslie's assertions: that "Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense." Holt notes that Leslie is a sort of modern-day Spinoza.

The last philosopher on Holt's journey is Derek Parfit who, among other things, discusses the idea of a "selector" with Holt. Parfit breaks down our existence into how and why which is an interesting way to look at it when you consider the selector to be a mechanism that selects (or doesn't select) our universe out of all the possibilities. If the selector is something, then you have to explain the selector of the selector or the meta-selector. For example: The null hypothesis (the world of Nothing) has the selector of simplicity and no meta-selector. Also, by some sound logic and reasoning the two come to the conclusion that a selector can't select itself thus looping backwards and explaining its selection. Armed with this, the author tries his hand at proving which of these explanations and meta-explanations are valid and comes to a conclusion. Similar to my earlier complaints, the biggest problem I have with this is that his method is to rule out the combinations of meta-selectors and selectors until he is down to one or two. How does he know that the explanations for his options in this book amount to the entirety of the possibilities of selectors and meta-selectors? To rule out all possibilities but one in order to understand this seems futile since we may not be able to imagine all selectors and meta-selectors possible.

The very last person interviewed for the book is John Updike. Although he had some interesting things to say, this felt more like an intellectual artist's view of why there is something rather than nothing. Updike says he is part of the group that find this existence to be "a kind of miracle" and he calls this a "last resort, really of naturalistic theology." There's a bit of cute wordplay in this last chapter but it felt appropriate to read it near the end of this journey. Updike gets to weave characters into plots and embed the aforementioned logic and views into those stories. And given that background and his interest in this topic, he playfully left me with an "it's not so bad that we don't know" sort of lightheartedness.

The penultimate chapter of this book deals with the question of whether we seriously exist at all. I think it would have been better for Holt to approach this from a nurture versus nature standpoint that's already been heavily discussed before. He does pose some interesting thought exercises like a procedure that replaces diseased brain matter with healthy brain matter that has no recollection or memories but it only does it 1% of my brain matter at a time. At what point would I cease to be me? So there's some interesting ideas in here but the chapter is largely disagreeable with me. I know that every person I meet knows at least one thing I don't and I like to use such a basic pairwise comparison to justify unique existence. I don't find much value in considerations of the self on a transcendental level and that's probably why this chapter didn't have a lot of value to me.

Throughout the book, Holt has been relaying to us his day to day experiences including the death of his dog. He also noted that Updike died fairly suddenly months after he spoke with him. In the final chapter "Return to Nothingness," Holt does a little work of tying what this all means into the context of death. During the writing of this book, his mother passed away and the final pages are devoted to that account and his emotions. If Updike was a jocular relief about existence, this final chapter is a sobering reminder that ultimately we are all mortal. While well written and heavily symbolic, it is a depressing note on which to end this journey.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's composition is a good mix of art and science making it a light read compared to others about the same topic. If you're looking for thought experiments or wish to further ply yourself with a good survey of the current armaments in this debate, you can buy Why Does the World Exist? from Amazon. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

eldavojohn writes "For quite some time humans have struggled to answer the question why there is anything rather than nothing. Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? tackles such questions in the form of a journey. After laying a brief groundwork, Holt travels from leading prominent philosopher to curmudgeonly physicist to reserved theologian, visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers. Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story author Jim Holt pages 320 publisher Liveright rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0871404091 summary An existential detective story. The book's first page is titled "A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives" (made for those of you who don't have time to read) and presents a very simple proof about the self-forbiddingness of nothing. The book starts off with a brief prerogative to drive the reader's thirst for why this question is important. Typical of the rest of the book Holt drops a lot of names so I'm not going to mention the names that are brought up in passing. The author tries to cover all his bases by bring up anyone from Roger Penrose to René Descartes to Woody Allen. The veritable name dropping proves Holt has done his homework but at times can be a little overbearing and, in my opinion, reaches borderline ADD-philosophy at a few points in the book. Be warned, you will find Tennessee Williams, John Archibald Wheeler, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza and Georg Cantor all mentioned on the same page! The opening few pages select an interesting cast from history as the question arises: Why Does the World Exist?

Holt proceeds from baiting the reader to what he calls a "Philosophical Tour D'Horizon" and, as its name suggests, this chapter blazes through many names — big and small — throughout history that might have contributed to answering this question. I can say this effort is quite readable whereas a more serious effort to be completely comprehensive would be much more lengthy and tedious. I should disclose at this point that Holt played his cards well by mentioning and paying favor to perhaps my most favorite of polymaths: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and he continues to do so throughout this book).

Following that, the next obvious step is to tackle a definition of "nothing" — our 'null hypothesis' of existence. We exist as something so we know that and so Holt begins by sampling what we have at our disposal to define nothing. Holt briefly recalls the advent of zero in mathematics and moves on to the more refined points of what nothing can be defined as in English, French and a number of other ways. This chapter struck me as needlessly tiresome as the author tackles the inane intricacies of natural languages applied to concepts like nothing. Heidegger's "nothing that noths" question struck me as merely a failure of natural language — not a deep and profound question. Holt correctly switches to logical methods like predicate calculus to better tackle this concept of nothing but this chapter left a bad taste in my mouth as the author never attacks the root problem. You can talk about how the word "nothing" operates in English or how "le néant" operates in French but these human invented definitions and grammars are buggy systems for the task at hand. Why do scientists prefer math to describe systems? Why do computers use true and false versus "maybe" and "probably not"? Logic, predicate calculus and math (although far from perfect themselves) are our tools to arm ourselves to better describe our surroundings and I feel like Holt wasted words on the shortcomings of "Does it make sense to say X about nothing?" Regardless this chapter does present mental exercises to the reader about what nothing truly is and examines the paradox of the null hypothesis in existence. Also, in so many ways nothing is nice and simple so why doesn't the law of parsimony dictate that there should have been nothing instead of what is?

The first person Holt visits in this book is Russian Physicist Andrei Linde (the same Linde that was awarded one of Milner's nin awards) and very little time is spent on Linde since the theory visited here is that we exist because our everything was created in a lab by a "physicist" hacker. The second person Holt interviews is a little more interesting and given many more pages. He also happened to be my favorite character in the quest and one with which I found myself most in agreement: Adolf Grünbaum. Holt calls this man "The Great Rejectionist" and I found that to be an adequate and fair title because their discussions make it clear that it is hard to start with base assumptions when debating this borderline hostile mind. Grünbaum, an atheist, had attacked Freudian psychoanalysis and served as an intelligence officer after escaping Nazi Germany. The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing and instead required Holt to make statements that could then be either met with concurrence (ha!) or picked apart by someone armed with years of studying. There's a part in this chapter where Holt alludes to Grünbaum disagreeing to the statement that the Null World is the simplest possible outcome (I'm assuming in order to invoke the Law of Parsimony) and even allowing that to go forward Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"

The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.

Before jumping to the next stop, Holt arms us with the concepts of finite versus infinite and with good reason. Richard Swinburne is a philosopher of religion at Oxford and I found him to be the most disagreeable person encountered along the way in this book. Holt brings up many good points against the possibility of there being a God. The possibility of God explains away all of our aforementioned problems but I felt like he gave Swinburne a free pass on a lot of these points. I was disappointed that the author embodied an intellectual steel trap for everyone else while Swinburne, when cornered, wasn't pressed further. This chapter sets out to answer a lot of questions but I felt like Swinburne was reaching when he tried to explain that God is actually a very simple concept — maybe even simpler than you or I. And I just don't buy that. I also didn't think that Holt fully utilized the newly established definitions of infinity and nothing to pry apart Swinburne's position. As an example, Swinburne speaks of the "infinitely powerful" and "infinitely good" God but draws that as an analogy to parents watching children. He says that God keeps his distance and that's why we're not permeated with infinite goodness ourselves. I feel like Holt should be tearing this apart because this is illogical to me if I consider these two cases: Case 1) the universe is finite and there is Nothing outside of the universe so God does not exist outside the universe so he exists inside the universe. But if God is infinitely good, there would be no room in a finite space for evil — it would be completely packed with good. Case 2) God exists outside the universe (I believe this was Swinburne's suggestion) with the ability to influence inside the universe. However, we now find ourselves back to the issue that Swinburne and Holt addressed in this chapter and that is answering the questions, "What amount of power and good does God allow into the universe? And why that amount?" These two cases have plagued my mind since I was a child, E=mc^2 dictates that it takes a finite (though large to us) amount of power to create sustenance from nothing. The Christian God has an infinite amount of power and is infinitely good yet allows people to die when a finite amount of power would prolong their lives. From good people to bad people to people who have never had the chance to hear God's word, they die daily when a finite amount of power would save them. But I digress — suffice it to say this was a very disappointing chapter and this is why this book loses a point in my mind. I guess it was necessary to visit this possibility but it wasn't fair to let cordiality intervene with a philosophical swordfight.

On the heels of the visit to Swinburne, Holt discusses some of the finer points of proving God's existence through pure logic. I enjoyed his references to Bertrand Russell and Russell's fall to Anselm's ontological argument. Holt also relays Richard Dawkin's knee jerk dismissal of it and Gödel's more complete analysis of the logic. The next stop on the way is physicist David Deutsch of Oxford. The visit with Deutsch is relatively brief but he seems to maintain safe positions without venturing anywhere problematic. His interest is studying the mutliverse theory but he balks at any attempts to even suggest there might be a principle that explains the foundation of our existence. So there's not much to discuss but the opening of this principle of multiple universes is important to the rest of the possibilities presented throughout the book. Holt also looks at the possibility that our universe exists because of a "quantum fluctuation" as first proposed by Ed Tryon and later given more concrete possibilities by Alex Vilenkin. This leads nicely into Holt's next person to visit: Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg sheds a lot of light on the physical aspects with the question of existence. Weinberg provides a little discussion on string theory and how the scientific aspects might work. I was surprised to learn that Weinberg is disappointed at the slow rate of string theory development and he calls it "the best effort we've made to step beyond what we already know." There is, of course, a careful context to that statement with Weinberg explaining that it hasn't worked out how we initially thought it would. I found one of Weinberg's statements to be surprising when he calls Quantum mechanics an "empty stage" and he further says he thinks that "Karl Popper was wrong to say that a scientific theory must be open to falsification. You can't falsify quantum mechanics, since it doesn't make predictions." We don't have a final theory yet but Weinberg does a great job of explaining what finding one would mean and what it will never be able to answer. Holt follows this up with a lot of information and caveats about the multiverse/megaverse as he transitions to another popular scientist and writer.

I've read a number of Roger Penrose's books and was pleased to read his interaction with Holt. I was a little disappointed with Holt's treatment of Platonism in regards to mathematics — mostly because he treats it as borderline mysticism and I personally enjoy reading that kind of mathematical philosophy. While I feel like it has roots in mysticism, I have enjoyed Penrose's works that reference "Platonic contact." Penrose imagines that there are three worlds: the physical world, the world consisting of consciousness and the aforementioned Platonic world. A very brief explanation is that there is a mysterious connection between this physical world via our minds to the conscious world and in our minds there is now a small part of our conscious (the part dealing with mathematics) that connects us to the Platonic world. So I suppose that triples the question of this book and Holt isn't afraid to call these worlds "miraculously self-creating and self-sustaining." Penrose, calls the Platonic world "eternally existing", "profound" and "timeless" but what of the possibility of the Null World? What about outside our universe? How does it stand up to the Nothing? These questions are never really pressed for some reason. Holt briefly references an extreme Platonist by the name of Max Tegmark and I felt like Penrose didn't leave much progress in our quest to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Instead, he offers that this Platonic world is prime and the other two exist in its shadows but I was never satisfied or understood why those shadows exist.

Holt transitions to the next pieces with a reference to John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit." As a developer, this is an incredibly tantalizing possibility but I found it to be a bit misplaced in this book. I found the explanation of this to be less than satisfactory (similarly as in my review of Gleick's "The Information") and I wish someone would include more substance to this view of everything arising from information. Holt muddies up the water even a little further by examining the idea that our brains have this "mind-stuff" or property to them that is perhaps built on top of a quantum phenomena. While there are interesting thought experiments about this "mind-stuff" and consciousness, it seems a little out of scope from the grand purpose of this book. Nonetheless it's fun to think about.

One of the final realms to explore is John A. Leslie's own position of an almost "ethical requiredness" or a need for goodness. I found Leslie to be a sound and logical philosopher but I did not enjoy that the bulk of his explanations seemed to hinge on analogies. Perhaps this is far more prevalent in modern philosophy but something inside me objects to using paintings to explain how universes are enumerated. The example I'm talking about is the question of why, if goodness is a prerogative, would there be infinitely many universes conceptually available but only ours in existence (which is of some arbitrary goodness). And Leslie explains this by saying that the diversity of goodness in the universes is analogous to why the Louvre has paintings of various quality instead of having its walls packed with perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa. I understand his premises and his analogy but I don't see the value of arbitrary selection of a universe — this "axiarchic theory." Both Leslie and Holt reference Dawkin's response of calling goodness a piffling concept and noting that cosmologically it's as arbitrary as "Channel Number Fiveness." And this is the premise of Leslie's assertions: that "Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense." Holt notes that Leslie is a sort of modern-day Spinoza.

The last philosopher on Holt's journey is Derek Parfit who, among other things, discusses the idea of a "selector" with Holt. Parfit breaks down our existence into how and why which is an interesting way to look at it when you consider the selector to be a mechanism that selects (or doesn't select) our universe out of all the possibilities. If the selector is something, then you have to explain the selector of the selector or the meta-selector. For example: The null hypothesis (the world of Nothing) has the selector of simplicity and no meta-selector. Also, by some sound logic and reasoning the two come to the conclusion that a selector can't select itself thus looping backwards and explaining its selection. Armed with this, the author tries his hand at proving which of these explanations and meta-explanations are valid and comes to a conclusion. Similar to my earlier complaints, the biggest problem I have with this is that his method is to rule out the combinations of meta-selectors and selectors until he is down to one or two. How does he know that the explanations for his options in this book amount to the entirety of the possibilities of selectors and meta-selectors? To rule out all possibilities but one in order to understand this seems futile since we may not be able to imagine all selectors and meta-selectors possible.

The very last person interviewed for the book is John Updike. Although he had some interesting things to say, this felt more like an intellectual artist's view of why there is something rather than nothing. Updike says he is part of the group that find this existence to be "a kind of miracle" and he calls this a "last resort, really of naturalistic theology." There's a bit of cute wordplay in this last chapter but it felt appropriate to read it near the end of this journey. Updike gets to weave characters into plots and embed the aforementioned logic and views into those stories. And given that background and his interest in this topic, he playfully left me with an "it's not so bad that we don't know" sort of lightheartedness.

The penultimate chapter of this book deals with the question of whether we seriously exist at all. I think it would have been better for Holt to approach this from a nurture versus nature standpoint that's already been heavily discussed before. He does pose some interesting thought exercises like a procedure that replaces diseased brain matter with healthy brain matter that has no recollection or memories but it only does it 1% of my brain matter at a time. At what point would I cease to be me? So there's some interesting ideas in here but the chapter is largely disagreeable with me. I know that every person I meet knows at least one thing I don't and I like to use such a basic pairwise comparison to justify unique existence. I don't find much value in considerations of the self on a transcendental level and that's probably why this chapter didn't have a lot of value to me.

Throughout the book, Holt has been relaying to us his day to day experiences including the death of his dog. He also noted that Updike died fairly suddenly months after he spoke with him. In the final chapter "Return to Nothingness," Holt does a little work of tying what this all means into the context of death. During the writing of this book, his mother passed away and the final pages are devoted to that account and his emotions. If Updike was a jocular relief about existence, this final chapter is a sobering reminder that ultimately we are all mortal. While well written and heavily symbolic, it is a depressing note on which to end this journey.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's composition is a good mix of art and science making it a light read compared to others about the same topic. If you're looking for thought experiments or wish to further ply yourself with a good survey of the current armaments in this debate, you can buy Why Does the World Exist? from Amazon. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

cylonlover writes "Three-dimensional printers are popping up everywhere these days. Some are small enough to fit in a briefcase and others are large enough to print houses, but scientists at the Vienna University of Technology are going for the microscopic. Earlier this year, the university built a 3D printer that uses lasers to operate on a tiny scale. Now they're refining the technique to enable precise placement of a selected molecule in a three-dimensional material. This process, called '3D-photografting,' can potentially be used to create a 'lab on a chip' or artificially grow living tissue."

cylonlover writes "Three-dimensional printers are popping up everywhere these days. Some are small enough to fit in a briefcase and others are large enough to print houses, but scientists at the Vienna University of Technology are going for the microscopic. Earlier this year, the university built a 3D printer that uses lasers to operate on a tiny scale. Now they're refining the technique to enable precise placement of a selected molecule in a three-dimensional material. This process, called '3D-photografting,' can potentially be used to create a 'lab on a chip' or artificially grow living tissue."

judgecorp writes "Latest market share figures show the difference between perception and reality. Windows 7 just nudged past Windows XP with both around the the 43 percent mark. OS X and Windows Vista divide the rest of the spoils, with all versions of OS X only just adding up to a little more than the failed Windows version, according to data from Netmarketshare."

After its big win against Samsung, Apple named 8 Samsung products it wanted an injunction to ban from sale in the U.S. Apple wasn't content with that, though; USA Today reports on the state of the expanded list: "The new list of 21 products includes Samsung's flagship smartphone Galaxy S III as well as the Galaxy Note, another popular Android phone. If the court finds those devices are infringing Apple's patents and irreparably harming the U.S. company, it could temporarily halt sales in the U.S. market even before the trial begins."

First the spec, and now the hardware: MrSeb writes "After five years of trying to convince us that 3D TVs are the future, it seems TV makers are finally ready to move on — to 4K UHDTV. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Sony, Toshiba, and LG are all showing off 84-inch 4K (3840×2160) TVs. These aren't just vaporware, either: LG's TV is on sale now in Korea (and later this month in the US), Sony's is due later this year, and Toshiba will follow in the new year. Be warned, though: all three will cost more than $20,000 when they go on sale in the US — oh, and there's still no 4K Blu-ray spec, and no such thing as 4K broadcast TV. In other display-related news, Panasonic is showing off a humongous 145-inch 8K (7680x4320) plasma TV, and some cute 20-inch 4K displays — but unfortunately neither are likely to find their way to your living room or office in the near future."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Department of Defense currently relies on dogs as the animal of choice for explosives detection but training dogs is expensive and takes a long time. Now the U.S. Army is sponsoring a project to develop and test a rugged, automated and low-cost system for training rats to detect improvised explosive devices and mines. 'The automated system we're developing is designed to inexpensively train rats to detect buried explosives to solve an immediate Army need for safer and lower-cost mine removal,' says senior research engineer William Gressick. Trained rats would also create new opportunities to detect anything from mines to humans buried in earthquake rubble because rats can search smaller spaces than a dog can, and are easier to transport. Rats have already been trained by the National Police in Colombia to detect seven different kinds of explosives including ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, gunpowder and TNT but the Rugged Automated Training System (Rats) research sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, plans to produce systems for worldwide use since mines are widespread throughout much of Africa, Asia, and Central America and demining operations are expected to continue for decades to restore mined land to civilian use. 'Beyond this application, the system will facilitate the use of rats in other search tasks such as homeland security and search-and-rescue operations" adds Gressick. "In the long-term, the system is likely to benefit both official and humanitarian organizations.'" A rodent-vs-mine matchup has apparently been in the works for some time.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Ever wanted to mine your own Facebook data? Wolfram Alpha is offering you the chance. Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a 'computational knowledge engine.' In contrast to other search engines such as Google and Bing, which return pages of blue hyperlinks in response to queries, Wolfram Alpha offers up objective data: type in the name of a person, for example, and you might receive their dates of birth and death, a timeline, and a graph of Wikipedia page hits. Now Wolfram Alpha's offering a new feature that can spit back years of your personal Facebook data sliced, diced, visualized and analyzed."

PCM2 writes "The Register reports that Security Explorations' Adam Gowdiak says there is still an exploitable vulnerability in the Java SE 7 Update 7 that Oracle shipped as an emergency patch yesterday. 'As in the case of the earlier vulnerabilities, Gowdiak says, this flaw allows an attacker to bypass the Java security sandbox completely, making it possible to install malware or execute malicious code on affected systems.'"

puddingebola writes "HP done gone and released the open source version of webOS. From the article: 'Gone are the days of HP's TouchPad and Palm ambitions, but HP is moving ahead with its plans to make webOS, its beleaguered mobile operating system, live on as open-source supported platform. Today it's launching the beta release... The release will have 54 components available as open source, the blog says, some 450,000 lines of code under the Apache 2.0 license.'" There are two flavors: an OpenEmbedded based version for targeting mobile device (kudos there!), and a desktop build which runs Luna as an application on the desktop (how long until someone writes a rootless version?). More info at the Open webOS project overview page, with source code over at GitHub

MassDosage writes "After nearly 15 years or of writing code professionally it was refreshing to take a figurative step back and read a book aimed at people getting started with computer programming. As the title suggests, Think Like A Programmer tries to get to the core of the special way that good programmers think and how, when faced with large and complex problems, they successfully churn out software to solve these challenges in elegant and creative ways. The author has taught computer science for about as long as I've been programming and this shows in his writing. He has clearly seen a lot of different people progress from newbie programmers to craftsmen (and craftswomen) and has managed to distill a lot of what makes this possible in what is a clear, well-written and insightful book." Read below for the rest of Mass Dosage's review. Think Like A Programmer author V. Anton Spraul pages 256 publisher No Starch Press rating 8/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-59327-424-5 summary An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving Think Like A Programmer is probably best read by those with at least a year's experience with programming, such as first or second year computer science students or those picking up programming on their own. The code examples in the book are all written in C++ so a basic knowledge of C++ syntax is required but this should be easy to pick up by anyone with familiarity with related or similar languages. Experienced programmers looking to brush up on their fundamentals will most likely find something useful here too. They probably do a lot of what is suggested here already without being aware of it but it can be encouraging to see this formalized in a book. I found it gratifying to see that some of the techniques I use daily were covered here — it's good to know that I'm not the only one who scrawls down funny diagrams and sketches out a rough plan before actually typing any code.

Different types of problem solving are discussed in separate chapters which cover the use of data structures, pointers, recursion and code libraries before wrapping up with a final chapter that brings all the previous approaches together. The book is intended to be read in its entirety with later chapters making frequent references to topics covered earlier. Think Like A Programmer is not a cheat sheet or cook book with quick fixes but a more substantive book that rewards those who read it as thoroughly as it has been written. Each chapter contains a few examples which are used to explain the topic under discussion and these have been well chosen to illustrate the key concepts. A series of exercises are also included which build on and extend each chapter. The author stresses that if the reader really wants to learn something and improve their problem solving skills then these exercises should be considered even more important than the text. The best way to learn how to program is by doing and the exercises force one to put what one has just learned into practise. The first few exercises at the end of a chapter are relatively simple and are basically variations on the examples that help the reader build confidence before moving into more challenging and tricky exercises that push one to apply one's recently acquired knowledge to new limits.

Throughout the book everything is explained in a good level of detail and enough background information is provided so that the reader should never feel out of their depth. The pros and cons of the various presented solutions are clearly weighed up with logical backing. The author is obviously very knowledgeable and experienced with teaching hard concepts to new learners and this shows in his no-nonsense, down-to-earth but enjoyable writing style. The code samples are clear and well thought out as are the diagrams that accompany the various examples. The chapter on classes was the only one where I felt like focus was being lost due to too many C++ implementation details but perhaps that's just the nature of the language. I would have liked the example here to show more clearly how classes can turn a morass of functional code into something more logically grouped and easier to understand. To be fair, the exercises at the end of this chapter do ask one to do this by asking one to convert a collection of string utility functions into a more logically organized string class. This again shows the importance of actually doing the exercises and not just simply reading them.

The core idea of how programmers take a complex problem and then break this down into smaller, more manageable and solvable parts is well described. The importance of having a plan before jumping in and writing code without thinking is stressed and there are great suggestions for how to take stock of your own personal strengths and weaknesses and come up with a personal plan that works for you. The example is given of someone who likes jumping right into coding — for someone like this it probably makes sense for them to do early prototyping as a way to start solving a particular problem, as long as the longer term plan involves taking a step away from this and incorporating the lessons learned into a more thoroughly thought out solution later. In this, as in the rest of the book, the author shows his years of experience teaching a wide range of people with different skill sets and approaches to problem solving. There is no single way to think like a programmer, but rather a number of tried and tested strategies that can be employed in various ways. Think Like A Programmer captures this core idea in an satisfying, down to earth manner and I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting to improve their problem solving capabilities. I wish I had had this book when I started studying computer science — the fundamentals contained here would have been a valued addition to the text books teaching syntax and specific technologies.

You can purchase Think Like A Programmer 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 "After nearly 15 years or of writing code professionally it was refreshing to take a figurative step back and read a book aimed at people getting started with computer programming. As the title suggests, Think Like A Programmer tries to get to the core of the special way that good programmers think and how, when faced with large and complex problems, they successfully churn out software to solve these challenges in elegant and creative ways. The author has taught computer science for about as long as I've been programming and this shows in his writing. He has clearly seen a lot of different people progress from newbie programmers to craftsmen (and craftswomen) and has managed to distill a lot of what makes this possible in what is a clear, well-written and insightful book." Read below for the rest of Mass Dosage's review. Think Like A Programmer author V. Anton Spraul pages 256 publisher No Starch Press rating 8/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-59327-424-5 summary An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving Think Like A Programmer is probably best read by those with at least a year's experience with programming, such as first or second year computer science students or those picking up programming on their own. The code examples in the book are all written in C++ so a basic knowledge of C++ syntax is required but this should be easy to pick up by anyone with familiarity with related or similar languages. Experienced programmers looking to brush up on their fundamentals will most likely find something useful here too. They probably do a lot of what is suggested here already without being aware of it but it can be encouraging to see this formalized in a book. I found it gratifying to see that some of the techniques I use daily were covered here — it's good to know that I'm not the only one who scrawls down funny diagrams and sketches out a rough plan before actually typing any code.

Different types of problem solving are discussed in separate chapters which cover the use of data structures, pointers, recursion and code libraries before wrapping up with a final chapter that brings all the previous approaches together. The book is intended to be read in its entirety with later chapters making frequent references to topics covered earlier. Think Like A Programmer is not a cheat sheet or cook book with quick fixes but a more substantive book that rewards those who read it as thoroughly as it has been written. Each chapter contains a few examples which are used to explain the topic under discussion and these have been well chosen to illustrate the key concepts. A series of exercises are also included which build on and extend each chapter. The author stresses that if the reader really wants to learn something and improve their problem solving skills then these exercises should be considered even more important than the text. The best way to learn how to program is by doing and the exercises force one to put what one has just learned into practise. The first few exercises at the end of a chapter are relatively simple and are basically variations on the examples that help the reader build confidence before moving into more challenging and tricky exercises that push one to apply one's recently acquired knowledge to new limits.

Throughout the book everything is explained in a good level of detail and enough background information is provided so that the reader should never feel out of their depth. The pros and cons of the various presented solutions are clearly weighed up with logical backing. The author is obviously very knowledgeable and experienced with teaching hard concepts to new learners and this shows in his no-nonsense, down-to-earth but enjoyable writing style. The code samples are clear and well thought out as are the diagrams that accompany the various examples. The chapter on classes was the only one where I felt like focus was being lost due to too many C++ implementation details but perhaps that's just the nature of the language. I would have liked the example here to show more clearly how classes can turn a morass of functional code into something more logically grouped and easier to understand. To be fair, the exercises at the end of this chapter do ask one to do this by asking one to convert a collection of string utility functions into a more logically organized string class. This again shows the importance of actually doing the exercises and not just simply reading them.

The core idea of how programmers take a complex problem and then break this down into smaller, more manageable and solvable parts is well described. The importance of having a plan before jumping in and writing code without thinking is stressed and there are great suggestions for how to take stock of your own personal strengths and weaknesses and come up with a personal plan that works for you. The example is given of someone who likes jumping right into coding — for someone like this it probably makes sense for them to do early prototyping as a way to start solving a particular problem, as long as the longer term plan involves taking a step away from this and incorporating the lessons learned into a more thoroughly thought out solution later. In this, as in the rest of the book, the author shows his years of experience teaching a wide range of people with different skill sets and approaches to problem solving. There is no single way to think like a programmer, but rather a number of tried and tested strategies that can be employed in various ways. Think Like A Programmer captures this core idea in an satisfying, down to earth manner and I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting to improve their problem solving capabilities. I wish I had had this book when I started studying computer science — the fundamentals contained here would have been a valued addition to the text books teaching syntax and specific technologies.

You can purchase Think Like A Programmer from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

New submitter submeta writes "Katsunobu Imai at Hiroshima University has figured out a way to construct a universal Turing machine using cellular automata in a Penrose tile universe. 'Tiles in the first state act as wires that transmit signals between the logic gates, with the signal itself consisting of either a 'front' or 'back' state. Four other states manage the redirecting of the signal within the logic gates, while the final state is simply an unused background to keep the various states separate.' He was not aware of the recent development of the Penrose glider, so he developed this alternative approach."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Did images of Nokia's upcoming Windows Phone 8 smartphones leak a few days early? That's the question after a Twitter feed, @evleaks, posted a set of images early on Aug. 31. The first, it claimed, was of the '4.3-inch Nokia Lumia 820,' while the second purported to show the '4.5-inch Nokia Lumia 920 with PureView.' Corporate-sanctioned leaks are a fairly regular thing in the tech world, but they tend to follow well-defined patterns: a public-relations executive — wait, sorry, 'unnamed source' — will email a journalist with an image of an upcoming device, for example, or a disgruntled former engineer will data-dump information onto their blog. Glossy publicity images originating from a new, relatively unknown Twitter feed is less common, although the Twitter feed in question has leaked other images in the past."

First time accepted submitter JavaBear writes "Oracle have just released the u7 release of their Java 7. From the article: 'In response to the findings of a recent vulnerability in Java 7 that was being exploited by malware developers, Oracle has released an official patch that takes care of the problem. In the past week, a new vulnerability was unveiled in Oracle's Java 7 runtime, which has been used by hackers in targeted attacks on Windows-based systems. Similar to the recent Flashback malware in OS X, this vulnerability allows criminals to create a drive-by hack where the only action needed to compromise a system is to visit a rogue Web page that hosts a malicious Java applet."

chicksdaddy writes "Securityledger reports that, days after Saudi Aramco said it had cleansed its network of a malware infection, Qatari firm RasGas, the world's second largest producer of liquefied natural gas, has been knocked offline in a similar attack. RasGas's corporate web site was offline late Thursday and a RasGas spokesman, speaking to the website arabianoilandgas.com acknowledged that 'an unknown virus has affected' the company's office systems since Monday, August 27. The company has notified its suppliers by fax that the company is 'experiencing technical issues with its office computer systems,' ArabianOilandGas.com reported. However, a company spokesperson said that the company's LNG production and distribution operations were unaffected."

Nerval's Lobster writes "EMC president and incoming VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger most likely shot down any hope that the company's storage arrays would be built around the ARM architecture. Gelsinger, who also helped orchestrate the VMworld show in San Francisco this week, presented an Aug. 29 keynote at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, Calif. Afterward, an audience member told Gelsinger that as many as 25 percent of all servers could be shipped around the low-power ARM architecture, then asked if Gelsinger agreed with that estimate. EMC previously shifted its product lines to Intel processors. Gelsinger told the audience member that the situation is unlikely to change, even if ARM could deliver workloads at a fraction of the power of an X86 chip."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from geek.com: "Amazon has released a rather bizarre bit of news today. The Kindle Fire has completely sold out. You can no longer buy one, and the wording of the press release suggests there won't be any more manufactured. In nine months on sale Amazon claims to have secured 22 percent of tablet sales in the U.S.. With that in mind, Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a '2' at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that." Also covered on Slashcloud.

SmartAboutThings writes "In a recent survey performed by Wakefield Research, it has been discovered that the majority of the surveyed Americans are quite confused about the notion of Cloud, when it relates to Cloud Storage/Computing. The most interesting fact is that 51% of the surveyed persons thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing!"

Nerval's Lobster writes "AMD named John Gustafson as senior fellow and chief product architect of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, the former ATI graphics business unit. Gustafson, known for developing a key axiom governing parallel processing, will apply that knowledge to AMD's more traditional graphics units and GPGPUs, co-processors that have begun appearing in high-performance computing (HPC) systems to add more computational oomph via parallel processing. At the Hot Chips conference, AMD's chief technical officer, Mark Papermaster, also provided a more comprehensive look at AMD's future in the data center, claiming that APUs were the keystone of the 'surround computing era,' where a wealth of data — through sensors, gestures, voice, augmented reality, metadata, and HD video and graphics — will need to be contextualized, analyzed, and either encrypted or assigned privacy policies. That, of course, means the cloud must shoulder the computational burden."

Michael Ross writes "Of all the open source content management systems used for building websites, Drupal has a reputation for being one of the most flexible and powerful available, but not the easiest for web designers to use. Drupal version 7 has made some strides in alleviating those flaws, but there is still much progress to be made. During the past few years, a number of books have been published that explain how Drupal designers can do custom theming, but they tend to focus on the technical details of the theme layer, and not the practice of web design when using Drupal as a foundation. That rich yet neglected subject area is the focus of a new book, Drupal for Designers: The Context You Need Without the Jargon You Don't." Keep reading to see what Michael has to say about the book. Drupal for Designers author Dani Nordin pages 328 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1449325046 summary How to design and manage Drupal projects. The book's author, Dani Nordin, is a Massachusetts-based web designer and the founder of The Zen Kitchen, a UX design business. The book was published by O'Reilly Media, on 1 August 2012, under the ISBN 978-1449325046. The publisher's page offers a description of the book, the table of contents, an author bio, and some free sample content (the first chapter). This publication is a compilation of three previously-released short guides — Planning and Managing Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers — with additional material. All of these books were written by Dani Nordin, and comprise the "Drupal for Designers" series by O'Reilly Media. (My thanks to the publisher for a review copy of this particular title.)

The book's material spans 328 pages, and is organized into seven parts, which do not include the introduction or the first chapter. The seven parts — each comprising at least two chapters — are largely presented in the same order that a typical reader would want to learn and implement the recommendations: Discovery and User Experience; Sketching, Visual Design, and Layout; Setting Up a Local Development Environment; Prototyping in Drupal; Making It Easier to Start Projects; Working with Clients; and Sample Documents.

Unlike most introductory Drupal books, this one wisely begins with a helpful dictionary of Drupal terminology. The first chapter also discusses the phases that compose a typical Drupal project lifecycle. Sandwiched in between is some guidance on where to place custom code in a Drupal directory system. The author advises that "Any module, theme, or other customization that you create for your site should always reside in sites/all" (page 2, and also reflected on pages 1 and 5). That may be true of contrib modules and themes, but certainly not custom ones, which are better located in sites/default or sites/[domain name]. She states that a child theme should be "stored separately in sites/all/<client_name>" (page 4). Actually, they should be placed in "sites/default/themes" or the themes subdirectory of a domain name directory. Finally, she recommends that for a multisite installation, one should keep "everything in sites/all" (page 5). Lumping everything into the "all" subdirectory would defeat the fundamental mechanism of multisite, which allows one to host multiple sites on a single Drupal installation, with their custom files and settings separated by domain name.

The first part of the book is loaded with valuable counsel on how to conduct the discovery phase of a website project, including coverage of project goals, user experience (UX), mockup tools, user personas, wireframes, prototypes, and the key components of a short-form project brief. It is evident from the narrative that the author is drawing upon a great deal of real-world experience, as well as lessons learned from other veteran web designers. The only blemish is where the author refers to "the project brief in Section 8" (page 45, repeated on page 254), and yet there appears to be no such section in the book. Perhaps she means Appendix A, which has an example project brief.

Once a design team has completed and received sign-off on a project brief — as well as any wireframes and other helpful preliminaries — a logical next step is to build the initial visual design. In the second part of the book, the author demonstrates how she uses sketches, style tiles, layout elements, greyboxing, grid systems, and Fireworks templates for crafting a visual design for a website. Throughout these chapters, she uses a redesign of her own personal website to illustrate the material. Both this part and the previous part of the book contain little information that is specific only to Drupal; thus, it could be useful to designers building websites using other CMSs.

Some readers of the book may already have up-to-date Drupal environments installed and configured on their development web servers. For those who do not, Part III will likely be appreciated, especially if the reader is using a Mac machine, because that is the environment to which the text and screenshots are geared. The author contends that "Windows seems to add an annoying layer of complexity to most of the command-line stuff" (page 102). Yet from my own experience, installing and using Git and Drush on a Windows PC is largely the same as in a Linux environment. Most developers complain that the main hurdle is Git's unintuitive workflow, which is independent of the operating system. The author touches upon some other tools, such as LESS and phpMyAdmin. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on Drush and Git, respectively. The last chapter in this section steps the reader through installing MAMP and Drupal. The discussion is generally comprehensible, except for the first paragraph on page 132, which is arguably the most confusing in the entire book. For instance, echoing a misstep seen earlier, it advises that all changes to your Drupal site should be stored in the sites/localhost directory, which contradicts the advice on the previous page, that all customizations to the site should be located in the sites/all directory.

The fourth part of the book covers prototyping in Drupal: gleaning from the client the information needed to define the content types for the website; choosing the appropriate modules for implementing the desired functionality; using views for displaying data; improving the HTML generated by views; creating custom Drupal themes; and using LESS to better manage the CSS within a theme. The advice is on target, except for the recommendation to use the Submit Again module, which does not have a Drupal 7 release, and has been replaced by the Add another module. Readers who are having difficulty locating the User Reference module mentioned by the author (page 187), can find it as a submodule in the References project. Lastly, the author instructs the reader to enable any base theme used (page 217), but actually it does not need to be enabled; installation alone is sufficient.

Part V, the briefest of them all, explains how to utilize the Features module, as well as Drush Make and installation profiles. Part VI comprises three chapters which offer guidance on how to propose an estimate for new projects, how to push back on unreasonable client requests, and how to learn from and document a finished project. This material is so closely related to that presented in the first part of the book — project discovery, planning, project briefs, etc. — that these final three chapters should have been incorporated into that earlier part. In fact, the first paragraph of this part states that it describes a phase of the discovery process that should be conducted prior to the phase described in Part I. Nonetheless, the author provides smart tips on some of the more difficult aspects of project management. The last part of the book comprises three appendices with sample documents — specifically, a project brief, a work agreement, and a project proposal.

On the publisher's page for the book, no errata have been reported, at this time. That is likely because the book appears to contain remarkably few errata: "What if there was" (pages 81 and 245; "was" should be "were"); "get familiar [with] the command line" (page 108); "a couple of" (page 172; should be "a few," as it is referencing three bullet points); ".less" (page 208, twice; should be "LESS"); "carpal tunnel[s]" (page 231); "original code [for] a feature" (page 242); and ".tpl" (page 266; should be ".tpl.php"). This is certainly a low number of errata for a technical book of this size. Kudos to the author and the O'Reilly editing team.

Overall, the book's style is clear and conversational, with only a few rough patches. Incidentally, the terms "directory" and "folder" are synonymous, but newbie readers who do not understand this could be confused when the two terms are used interchangeably, especially within the same sentence (e.g., page 109). Interspersed at various points in the text are interviews with people involved in web design, entitled "From the Trenches," which add perspective from designers other than the author. The reader will also find some natural humor and humility, which is always welcome in a technical work.

The author and publisher have made good use of the many screenshots, showing sample designs, Drupal user interface pages, etc. Unfortunately, for the Drupal pages, the admin theme used is the default, Seven, which results in black text on a gray background — a poor choice for such wide screenshots being compressed into small images on the page. Consequently, much of the text is barely legible, especially for anyone with imperfect eyesight.

From a technical point of view, the information provided is accurate and worthwhile. The only serious problem is the misleading advice, noted above, concerning the placement of custom modules and themes within the directory structure of a Drupal project — which was undoubtedly unintentional. The reader will encounter some HTML markup, a lot more CSS, and a minimal amount of PHP code. All of it is neatly formatted, and the only apparent problem is where a snippet of example code includes invalid nested "<?php" tags (page 188).

Despite these minor blemishes, this is one of the better-written Drupal books on the market. Web designers who will be working on Drupal projects, should be well rewarded in choosing this book as a solid starting point for their studies.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Drupal for Designers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael Ross writes "Of all the open source content management systems used for building websites, Drupal has a reputation for being one of the most flexible and powerful available, but not the easiest for web designers to use. Drupal version 7 has made some strides in alleviating those flaws, but there is still much progress to be made. During the past few years, a number of books have been published that explain how Drupal designers can do custom theming, but they tend to focus on the technical details of the theme layer, and not the practice of web design when using Drupal as a foundation. That rich yet neglected subject area is the focus of a new book, Drupal for Designers: The Context You Need Without the Jargon You Don't." Keep reading to see what Michael has to say about the book. Drupal for Designers author Dani Nordin pages 328 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1449325046 summary How to design and manage Drupal projects. The book's author, Dani Nordin, is a Massachusetts-based web designer and the founder of The Zen Kitchen, a UX design business. The book was published by O'Reilly Media, on 1 August 2012, under the ISBN 978-1449325046. The publisher's page offers a description of the book, the table of contents, an author bio, and some free sample content (the first chapter). This publication is a compilation of three previously-released short guides — Planning and Managing Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers — with additional material. All of these books were written by Dani Nordin, and comprise the "Drupal for Designers" series by O'Reilly Media. (My thanks to the publisher for a review copy of this particular title.)

The book's material spans 328 pages, and is organized into seven parts, which do not include the introduction or the first chapter. The seven parts — each comprising at least two chapters — are largely presented in the same order that a typical reader would want to learn and implement the recommendations: Discovery and User Experience; Sketching, Visual Design, and Layout; Setting Up a Local Development Environment; Prototyping in Drupal; Making It Easier to Start Projects; Working with Clients; and Sample Documents.

Unlike most introductory Drupal books, this one wisely begins with a helpful dictionary of Drupal terminology. The first chapter also discusses the phases that compose a typical Drupal project lifecycle. Sandwiched in between is some guidance on where to place custom code in a Drupal directory system. The author advises that "Any module, theme, or other customization that you create for your site should always reside in sites/all" (page 2, and also reflected on pages 1 and 5). That may be true of contrib modules and themes, but certainly not custom ones, which are better located in sites/default or sites/[domain name]. She states that a child theme should be "stored separately in sites/all/<client_name>" (page 4). Actually, they should be placed in "sites/default/themes" or the themes subdirectory of a domain name directory. Finally, she recommends that for a multisite installation, one should keep "everything in sites/all" (page 5). Lumping everything into the "all" subdirectory would defeat the fundamental mechanism of multisite, which allows one to host multiple sites on a single Drupal installation, with their custom files and settings separated by domain name.

The first part of the book is loaded with valuable counsel on how to conduct the discovery phase of a website project, including coverage of project goals, user experience (UX), mockup tools, user personas, wireframes, prototypes, and the key components of a short-form project brief. It is evident from the narrative that the author is drawing upon a great deal of real-world experience, as well as lessons learned from other veteran web designers. The only blemish is where the author refers to "the project brief in Section 8" (page 45, repeated on page 254), and yet there appears to be no such section in the book. Perhaps she means Appendix A, which has an example project brief.

Once a design team has completed and received sign-off on a project brief — as well as any wireframes and other helpful preliminaries — a logical next step is to build the initial visual design. In the second part of the book, the author demonstrates how she uses sketches, style tiles, layout elements, greyboxing, grid systems, and Fireworks templates for crafting a visual design for a website. Throughout these chapters, she uses a redesign of her own personal website to illustrate the material. Both this part and the previous part of the book contain little information that is specific only to Drupal; thus, it could be useful to designers building websites using other CMSs.

Some readers of the book may already have up-to-date Drupal environments installed and configured on their development web servers. For those who do not, Part III will likely be appreciated, especially if the reader is using a Mac machine, because that is the environment to which the text and screenshots are geared. The author contends that "Windows seems to add an annoying layer of complexity to most of the command-line stuff" (page 102). Yet from my own experience, installing and using Git and Drush on a Windows PC is largely the same as in a Linux environment. Most developers complain that the main hurdle is Git's unintuitive workflow, which is independent of the operating system. The author touches upon some other tools, such as LESS and phpMyAdmin. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on Drush and Git, respectively. The last chapter in this section steps the reader through installing MAMP and Drupal. The discussion is generally comprehensible, except for the first paragraph on page 132, which is arguably the most confusing in the entire book. For instance, echoing a misstep seen earlier, it advises that all changes to your Drupal site should be stored in the sites/localhost directory, which contradicts the advice on the previous page, that all customizations to the site should be located in the sites/all directory.

The fourth part of the book covers prototyping in Drupal: gleaning from the client the information needed to define the content types for the website; choosing the appropriate modules for implementing the desired functionality; using views for displaying data; improving the HTML generated by views; creating custom Drupal themes; and using LESS to better manage the CSS within a theme. The advice is on target, except for the recommendation to use the Submit Again module, which does not have a Drupal 7 release, and has been replaced by the Add another module. Readers who are having difficulty locating the User Reference module mentioned by the author (page 187), can find it as a submodule in the References project. Lastly, the author instructs the reader to enable any base theme used (page 217), but actually it does not need to be enabled; installation alone is sufficient.

Part V, the briefest of them all, explains how to utilize the Features module, as well as Drush Make and installation profiles. Part VI comprises three chapters which offer guidance on how to propose an estimate for new projects, how to push back on unreasonable client requests, and how to learn from and document a finished project. This material is so closely related to that presented in the first part of the book — project discovery, planning, project briefs, etc. — that these final three chapters should have been incorporated into that earlier part. In fact, the first paragraph of this part states that it describes a phase of the discovery process that should be conducted prior to the phase described in Part I. Nonetheless, the author provides smart tips on some of the more difficult aspects of project management. The last part of the book comprises three appendices with sample documents — specifically, a project brief, a work agreement, and a project proposal.

On the publisher's page for the book, no errata have been reported, at this time. That is likely because the book appears to contain remarkably few errata: "What if there was" (pages 81 and 245; "was" should be "were"); "get familiar [with] the command line" (page 108); "a couple of" (page 172; should be "a few," as it is referencing three bullet points); ".less" (page 208, twice; should be "LESS"); "carpal tunnel[s]" (page 231); "original code [for] a feature" (page 242); and ".tpl" (page 266; should be ".tpl.php"). This is certainly a low number of errata for a technical book of this size. Kudos to the author and the O'Reilly editing team.

Overall, the book's style is clear and conversational, with only a few rough patches. Incidentally, the terms "directory" and "folder" are synonymous, but newbie readers who do not understand this could be confused when the two terms are used interchangeably, especially within the same sentence (e.g., page 109). Interspersed at various points in the text are interviews with people involved in web design, entitled "From the Trenches," which add perspective from designers other than the author. The reader will also find some natural humor and humility, which is always welcome in a technical work.

The author and publisher have made good use of the many screenshots, showing sample designs, Drupal user interface pages, etc. Unfortunately, for the Drupal pages, the admin theme used is the default, Seven, which results in black text on a gray background — a poor choice for such wide screenshots being compressed into small images on the page. Consequently, much of the text is barely legible, especially for anyone with imperfect eyesight.

From a technical point of view, the information provided is accurate and worthwhile. The only serious problem is the misleading advice, noted above, concerning the placement of custom modules and themes within the directory structure of a Drupal project — which was undoubtedly unintentional. The reader will encounter some HTML markup, a lot more CSS, and a minimal amount of PHP code. All of it is neatly formatted, and the only apparent problem is where a snippet of example code includes invalid nested "<?php" tags (page 188).

Despite these minor blemishes, this is one of the better-written Drupal books on the market. Web designers who will be working on Drupal projects, should be well rewarded in choosing this book as a solid starting point for their studies.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Drupal for Designers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

One of the interesting tidbits that came out of last week's billion-dollar verdict in Apple v. Samsung was that the jury's foreman, a patent holder himself, was instrumental in leading the other members through the various complicated infringement claims. Now, Groklaw analyzes an interview the man gave with Bloomberg News (video), in which his statements reveal a basic misunderstanding of what qualifies as prior art. Quoting Groklaw: "In discussing the first patent on the list, he says they got into a discussion about the prior art that was presented at trial. Here's why they discounted it: 'The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there.' That isn't disqualifying for prior art. It doesn't have to run on the same processor. It doesn't have to run at all. It can be words on a piece of paper. (If you don't believe little old me, here's a lawyer noticing the video too now.) ... The foreman, in answering criticisms, says that the jury paid close attention to the jury instructions. But looking at this one, did they? I'm sure they meant to, and I'm also sure they did their best according to what they understood. But this was an error, and it's one I don't think the judge can ignore, if anyone brings it to her attention."

derekmead writes "Hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force's most recent failed test of an unmanned hypersonic vehicle, Russia now says it wants to jump into the hypersonic game with a long-range bomber. Will Russia's newest Bear fly at 4,500 miles an hour? The Russian military sure hopes so. 'I think we need to go down the route of hypersonic technology and we are moving in that direction and are not falling behind the Americans,' Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Russian television. 'The question is will we copy the Americans' 40-year experience and create a [Northrop] B-2 analog or will we go down a new, ultramodern technology route, looking to the horizon, and create a machine able to penetrate air defenses and carry out a strike on any aggressor.' The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds."

Hugh Pickens writes "Paul Ohm writes in Harvard Business Review that businesses today are building perfect digital dossiers of their customers, massive data stores containing thousands of facts about every member of our society. He says these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. 'This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm,' writes Ohm. 'And these companies are combining their data stores, which will give rise to a single, massive database. I call this the Database of Ruin. Once we have created this database, it is unlikely we will ever be able to tear it apart.' Consider the most famous recent example of big data's utility in invading personal privacy: Target's analytics team can determine which shoppers are pregnant, and even predict their delivery dates, by detecting subtle shifts in purchasing habits. 'In the absence of intervention, soon companies will know things about us that we do not even know about ourselves. This is the exciting possibility of Big Data, but for privacy, it is a recipe for disaster.' According to Ohm, if we stick to our current path, the Database of Ruin will become an inevitable fixture of our future landscape, one that will be littered with lives ruined by the exploitation of data assembled for profit. The only way we avoid this is if companies learn to say, 'no' to some of the privacy-invading innovations they're pursuing. 'The lesson is plain: compete vigorously and beat your competitors in every legitimate way, except when it comes to privacy invasion. Too many companies have learned this lesson the hard way, launching invasive new services that have triggered class action lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and media firestorms.'"

MojoKid writes "Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off the company's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of AMD's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part for AMD. Bulldozer, which launched just over a year ago, was a disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, offered a number of key changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built Bulldozer in the first place. Enhancements to Fetch and Decode architecture have been made, as well as increased scheduler efficiency and cache load latency, which combined could bring a claimed 15 percent performance-per-watt performance gain. AMD expects to ship Steamroller sometime in 2013 but wouldn't offer timing detail beyond that."