Slashdot Mirror

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will remember that on Sept. 1, a federal judge overturned a $1.3 billion judgment and approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award of $272 million. Now, according to court documents filed this week, former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow will plead guilty to criminal charges of copyright infringement for downloading software from Oracle's servers. Sentencing will take place at a hearing on Sept. 14."

An anonymous reader writes "Germany has decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and embark on an energy turnaround that focuses on large increases in sustainable energy production. What will it take in terms of investments, and will it mean cost hikes for German consumers? Will it really mean more jobs in the 'green energy' sector? Quoting: 'Total investment over the next decade for such an energy turnaround is estimated to be roughly €200 billion (or almost $290 billion). ... At the moment, more than 20 new coal-fired power plants are being planned or already under construction; together, they would achieve a total output of 10 gigawatts and could, in terms of power supply, replace nuclear power plants that are still operational. But coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy turnaround that the government has put forward.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Department of Justice filed an antitrust complaint to stop the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile USA. Now, AT&T has responded, arguing that the merger would benefit consumers by increasing competition and freeing up spectrum. 'That means increased output, higher quality service, fewer dropped calls,and lower prices to consumers than without the merger,' they say. Meanwhile, House Republicans have sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an explanation of 'what went into the decision to challenge the merger and whether the agencies considered the impact on jobs and economic growth.' A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21."

Trailrunner7 writes "Apple has finally released a fix for the certificate trust issue caused by the attack on DigiNotar, more than a week after the fraudulent certificates were identified and other browser vendors moved to revoke trust in them. While Microsoft, Mozilla and Google had been communicating with users about the issue and pushing out new versions and updates to eliminate the compromised certificate authorities from their browsers, Apple had been mum about the attack and hadn't given any indication of when it might issue an update for Safari. On Friday the company published a security advisory for Mac OS X users, saying that it was removing DigiNotar's certificates from its trust list."

New submitter Serpents writes "The new management of MediaNews Group (owner of the Denver Post) decided to terminate their contract with Righthaven. So far, the infamous copyright troll has lost all the infringement lawsuits they've filed (although it seems they've managed to settle out of court in a dozen cases or so). Is it possible this will finally spell Righthaven's doom?" The new CEO of MediaNews said that while the copyright issues are real, the involvement of Righthaven was "a dumb idea from the start."

An anonymous reader writes "A bill introduced Thursday by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) would regulate the handling of consumers' private data and punish companies who screw it up (e.g. Sony). 'These rules would require companies to follow specific storage guidelines and ensure that personal information is stored and protected correctly. Companies that do not adhere to these security guidelines could be subject to stiff fines.' Blumenthal told the NY Times, 'The goal of the proposed law is essentially to hold accountable the companies and entities that store personal information and personal data and to deter data breaches. While looking at past data breaches, I've been struck with how many are preventable.'"

Estonian researchers claim that magnets can either force you to lie or make it impossible. Subjects in the study had magnets placed at either the left or the right side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the results suggest that the individual was either unable to tell the truth or unable to lie depending on which side was stimulated. From the article: "Last year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also used powerful magnets to disrupt the area said to be the brain's 'moral compass,' situated behind the right ear, making people temporarily less moral."

CWmike writes "A security researcher is criticizing Apple for lagging with its response to the DigiNotar certificate fiasco. He is urging the company to quickly update Mac OS X to protect users. 'We're looking at some very serious issues [about trust on the Web] and it doesn't help matters when Apple is dragging its feet,' said Paul Henry, a security and forensics analyst with Lumension. Unlike Microsoft, which updated Windows on Tuesday to block all SSL certificates issued by DigiNotar, Apple has not updated Mac OS X to do the same. Meanwhile, even Mac OS X users who want to go DIY are stymied, reports Bob McMillan, because the OS can't properly revoke dodgy digital certificates."

donberryman writes "IEEE Times reports that Heathkit, the fabled electronics kits company, is going back into that business after a two-decade hiatus. The Heathkit website says that they will be releasing Garage Parking Assistant kit (GPA-100) in late September followed by a Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor kit. Amateur radio kits may be coming by the end of the year." I hope for real this time — I never saw for sale the HERO kit they promised a few years ago.

gbrumfiel writes "It's now been six months since an earthquake and tsunami sparked a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. New data from the Japanese government is now allowing a closer comparison of the fallout from the disaster with the Chernobyl. In terms of Cs-137, the contaminant of greatest concern, Fukushima appears to be about a fifth as bad as Chernobyl. Nature News has a Google Earth mash-up that lets you see the two accidents together. Nature also reports that chaos and bureaucracy are slowing efforts to research the crisis." (Note: There's plenty left for Linux users in the accompanying text, but the Google Earth plug-in is for Windows and Mac OS X only.)

Reeses writes "Fare thee well, Yahoo: In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale. From the article: 'It was once the world's leading search engine, its founders held talks about a merger with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation – and it even managed to fend off a $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.'"

Reeses writes "Fare thee well, Yahoo: In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale. From the article: 'It was once the world's leading search engine, its founders held talks about a merger with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation – and it even managed to fend off a $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.'"

harryjohnston writes "Following the introduction of New Zealand's new copyright legislation, which we discussed last week, major ISP Orcon reports that international peer-to-peer traffic has dropped 10%. This might mean that the law is actually working to some extent, though experts say the effect will probably only be temporary."

frisket writes "The JIRA issue-tracking system has been around for seven years and has proved popular in commercial as well as open-source environments owing to its licensing arrangements (free of charge to certain classes of organizations, and source code available to developers). The release of v.4 in 2009 (now at 4.4) brought some major changes to the UI and searching, a new plugin architecture, and the ability to share project dashboards outside the system. Patrick Li's JIRA 4 Essentials is a comprehensive guide to the interface and facilities that both presents the material straightforwardly and avoids the trap of just being a guide to the menus. Although it is aimed mainly at the administrator, it will also be useful for the desktop user wanting a standalone system." Read on for the rest of Peter's review. JIRA 4 Essentials: Track bugs, issues, and manage your software development projects with JIRA author Patrick Li pages 333 publisher PACKT rating 7 reviewer Peter Flynn ISBN 978-1-849681-72-8 summary A step-by-step tutorial and is packed with practical examples that will make learning JIRA easy. JIRA is an tracking system for issues arising in software project management and development (the vendor, Australian software company Atlassian, seems to avoid the use of the phrase "bug-tracker".) It's written in Java and runs on all three main platforms, and can be downloaded for server or desktop, or run hosted, and there is a 30-day trial period.

Pricing is scaled by number of users in bands, and is for a perpetual license with a year's support. Although it is commercial software, Atlassian provides it free of charge to open source projects — one reason for its popularity in the movement — and a limited set of non-profit organization types. Academic and developer licenses are also available at a reduced rate.

JIRA 4 Essentials: Track bugs, issues, and manage your software development projects with JIRA is aimed at the administrator who needs a comprehensive description, explanation, and reference to JIRA that goes beyond the online documentation. Patrick Li has also provided a book that the end user can use and learn from (I administer systems, but not JIRA; but I use it for several applications).

So why this book? JIRA's online documentation is very good, and fine for reference and searching, but the book explains the features in much more detail, with more background on factors like why you might want to use one particular feature rather than another. Patrick Li has done what few authors of the "About..." style of book do: produce a readable yet detailed explanation of how to use an application, without simply reproducing each menu in turn.

The book is divided into ten chapters, approaching the topic from the project management and issue management point of view. This approach means that newcomers learns why they might want to do something rather than just how.

Chapter 1 covers getting started: a description of the JIRA architecture (I did say this was for admins and developers), followed by installation options and the installation process itself (Java, MySQL, and JIRA). The examples and screenshots here are for Microsoft Windows users of the standalone version (which comes bundled with Tomcat): experienced admins on Unix-based systems are assumed to know how to install Tomcat and deploy an application. Very sensibly it includes a section on installing HTTPS, something neglected by many web-based systems.

Chapters 2 and 3 are on project management and issue management as dealt with in JIRA. They take an outward-in approach, describing the overall management facilities (project administration and configuration) before going on to the finer detail of components, issues, priorities, and resolutions. This can be a little frustrating for the admin taking over a running system, and needing to perform individual tasks; or for the user wanting to add an issue rather than configure an entire project, but the four-level table of contents provides enough overview to let you find the right section. The running example used for illustration is a project support desk, and the many screenshots are detailed and accurate. Chapter 3 ("Issue Management") in particular is very detailed: this is one area where most users will spend most of their time, so it merits this approach.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with field and screen management respectively. The fields available in any interface are always an annoyance to the end user: the one you need is never there, and there are dozens that you can't imaging ever wanting. Getting the fields and their configuration right is critical to the success of any installation, and Li rightly spends a lot of the chapter on customizing the field set. A similar approach pays off in Chapter 5 on screen management, although it would have been useful to cover some of the concepts of usability such as field order logic, data entry types, and flow logic between screens, which tend to be neglected by busy admins, only to raise issues later with the interface to the issue management software itself.

Chapter 6 is on workflows and business processes: how to adapt the concepts of Chapters 4 and 5 to the business logic of your organization. This is possibly one of the most important configurations, as it forms the interface with the rest of the company, but it is the only chapter I would take issue with, as the writing seems to be less coherent and convincing than elsewhere, as if it was done in haste. It's perfectly accurate, so far as I can tell, and the screenshots are carefully detailed; it's just slightly less easy to read, particularly the central part on transitions and conditions. But this is a small defect overall.

Chapter 7 is on setting up email notification and SMTP. As with most collaborative systems, email can be used both as an input and an output, and there is a set of templates that can be edited to reflect the way your company wants users to be notified. (I live in hope that some company will say "Thanks for submitting ticket XYZ. I'm sorry we screwed up on that one: we're fixing it and we'll let you know." which would be much more honest than the usual marketing claptrap.) Mail submission is an often-neglected way of communicating, and it's good to see it get decent attention.

I mentioned earlier that it was good to see HTTPS being covered: the same is true of Chapter 8 ("Securing your JIRA") which covers the benefits and shortfalls of signup, captchas, the permission hierarchy, and the roles of JIRA sysadmin and JIRA admin.

The final two chapters cover searching and general administration. Searching is one of the biggest bugbears in bug^H^H^Hissue submission: people have so many different ways of expressing what they feel to be the matter that no amount of urging will make them write the same topic when they submit the same bug. Dev teams have to deal with repeated duplicate submissions which would be avoided if search engines would only let people find earlier reports of the same thing, but this magic continues to elude us. JIRA introduced JQL in an attempt to help: this is based on a field=value query syntax which is fine for token list fields, but not much use for freetext searches, where a thesaurus would be more useful. However, Li explains the problem and the solutions available, and also covers setting up stored filters, and creating dashboards and reports. The last chapter (10) deals with customizing the general look and feel, colors, logos, date and time configs, and the use of plugins (the Google Docs Connector is illustrated).

Each chapter has a summary, but they are rather short. It would be more useful to see a whole page summarizing the material covered, rather than just a few lines: this would then provide a valuable resource when using the book for training. Perhaps a re-issue of the book for v.5 could address this.

There are some minor cultural/linguistic problems with the use of "a software" and "softwares" as nouns, and the occasional appearance of "manual" for "manually", which indicates that some tighter copy-editing might be appropriate for a future edition. There is a good two-level index, but it is unclear from simple capitalization what the semantics of entries are (a reserved word or phrase? a key value? a prompt or GUI widget?). A minor annoyance is the otherwise very good Table of Contents, which appears to have been done by a PowerPoint user, with the font-size continually shrinking and the margin indenting as the depth increases (for the page numbers as well as the entries!): better control of the design is needed.

Overall, I found the book both readable and useful. It is well illustrated with very clear screenshots, using tooltip-yellow callouts to explain fields and prompts. The writing style is light and illustrative, explaining why an action is needed before how to do it.

On the subject of training, the book would probably be useful to trainers for the same of its detailed procedures (go here, click this, type that, click there). Li does state that JIRA can be used for managing issues outside the software issue-tracking field, which implies that it could be used by non-IT people at some stage, and training would certainly be needed. The HelpDesk application example, which recurs throughout, will probably be a useful point of reference for the majority of readers. If the future plans for JIRA are to extend its reach outside the IT issue-tracking field, it might be useful to develop a non-IT application example for another edition.

You can purchase JIRA 4 Essentials from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

frisket writes "The JIRA issue-tracking system has been around for seven years and has proved popular in commercial as well as open-source environments owing to its licensing arrangements (free of charge to certain classes of organizations, and source code available to developers). The release of v.4 in 2009 (now at 4.4) brought some major changes to the UI and searching, a new plugin architecture, and the ability to share project dashboards outside the system. Patrick Li's JIRA 4 Essentials is a comprehensive guide to the interface and facilities that both presents the material straightforwardly and avoids the trap of just being a guide to the menus. Although it is aimed mainly at the administrator, it will also be useful for the desktop user wanting a standalone system." Read on for the rest of Peter's review. JIRA 4 Essentials: Track bugs, issues, and manage your software development projects with JIRA author Patrick Li pages 333 publisher PACKT rating 7 reviewer Peter Flynn ISBN 978-1-849681-72-8 summary A step-by-step tutorial and is packed with practical examples that will make learning JIRA easy. JIRA is an tracking system for issues arising in software project management and development (the vendor, Australian software company Atlassian, seems to avoid the use of the phrase "bug-tracker".) It's written in Java and runs on all three main platforms, and can be downloaded for server or desktop, or run hosted, and there is a 30-day trial period.

Pricing is scaled by number of users in bands, and is for a perpetual license with a year's support. Although it is commercial software, Atlassian provides it free of charge to open source projects — one reason for its popularity in the movement — and a limited set of non-profit organization types. Academic and developer licenses are also available at a reduced rate.

JIRA 4 Essentials: Track bugs, issues, and manage your software development projects with JIRA is aimed at the administrator who needs a comprehensive description, explanation, and reference to JIRA that goes beyond the online documentation. Patrick Li has also provided a book that the end user can use and learn from (I administer systems, but not JIRA; but I use it for several applications).

So why this book? JIRA's online documentation is very good, and fine for reference and searching, but the book explains the features in much more detail, with more background on factors like why you might want to use one particular feature rather than another. Patrick Li has done what few authors of the "About..." style of book do: produce a readable yet detailed explanation of how to use an application, without simply reproducing each menu in turn.

The book is divided into ten chapters, approaching the topic from the project management and issue management point of view. This approach means that newcomers learns why they might want to do something rather than just how.

Chapter 1 covers getting started: a description of the JIRA architecture (I did say this was for admins and developers), followed by installation options and the installation process itself (Java, MySQL, and JIRA). The examples and screenshots here are for Microsoft Windows users of the standalone version (which comes bundled with Tomcat): experienced admins on Unix-based systems are assumed to know how to install Tomcat and deploy an application. Very sensibly it includes a section on installing HTTPS, something neglected by many web-based systems.

Chapters 2 and 3 are on project management and issue management as dealt with in JIRA. They take an outward-in approach, describing the overall management facilities (project administration and configuration) before going on to the finer detail of components, issues, priorities, and resolutions. This can be a little frustrating for the admin taking over a running system, and needing to perform individual tasks; or for the user wanting to add an issue rather than configure an entire project, but the four-level table of contents provides enough overview to let you find the right section. The running example used for illustration is a project support desk, and the many screenshots are detailed and accurate. Chapter 3 ("Issue Management") in particular is very detailed: this is one area where most users will spend most of their time, so it merits this approach.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with field and screen management respectively. The fields available in any interface are always an annoyance to the end user: the one you need is never there, and there are dozens that you can't imaging ever wanting. Getting the fields and their configuration right is critical to the success of any installation, and Li rightly spends a lot of the chapter on customizing the field set. A similar approach pays off in Chapter 5 on screen management, although it would have been useful to cover some of the concepts of usability such as field order logic, data entry types, and flow logic between screens, which tend to be neglected by busy admins, only to raise issues later with the interface to the issue management software itself.

Chapter 6 is on workflows and business processes: how to adapt the concepts of Chapters 4 and 5 to the business logic of your organization. This is possibly one of the most important configurations, as it forms the interface with the rest of the company, but it is the only chapter I would take issue with, as the writing seems to be less coherent and convincing than elsewhere, as if it was done in haste. It's perfectly accurate, so far as I can tell, and the screenshots are carefully detailed; it's just slightly less easy to read, particularly the central part on transitions and conditions. But this is a small defect overall.

Chapter 7 is on setting up email notification and SMTP. As with most collaborative systems, email can be used both as an input and an output, and there is a set of templates that can be edited to reflect the way your company wants users to be notified. (I live in hope that some company will say "Thanks for submitting ticket XYZ. I'm sorry we screwed up on that one: we're fixing it and we'll let you know." which would be much more honest than the usual marketing claptrap.) Mail submission is an often-neglected way of communicating, and it's good to see it get decent attention.

I mentioned earlier that it was good to see HTTPS being covered: the same is true of Chapter 8 ("Securing your JIRA") which covers the benefits and shortfalls of signup, captchas, the permission hierarchy, and the roles of JIRA sysadmin and JIRA admin.

The final two chapters cover searching and general administration. Searching is one of the biggest bugbears in bug^H^H^Hissue submission: people have so many different ways of expressing what they feel to be the matter that no amount of urging will make them write the same topic when they submit the same bug. Dev teams have to deal with repeated duplicate submissions which would be avoided if search engines would only let people find earlier reports of the same thing, but this magic continues to elude us. JIRA introduced JQL in an attempt to help: this is based on a field=value query syntax which is fine for token list fields, but not much use for freetext searches, where a thesaurus would be more useful. However, Li explains the problem and the solutions available, and also covers setting up stored filters, and creating dashboards and reports. The last chapter (10) deals with customizing the general look and feel, colors, logos, date and time configs, and the use of plugins (the Google Docs Connector is illustrated).

Each chapter has a summary, but they are rather short. It would be more useful to see a whole page summarizing the material covered, rather than just a few lines: this would then provide a valuable resource when using the book for training. Perhaps a re-issue of the book for v.5 could address this.

There are some minor cultural/linguistic problems with the use of "a software" and "softwares" as nouns, and the occasional appearance of "manual" for "manually", which indicates that some tighter copy-editing might be appropriate for a future edition. There is a good two-level index, but it is unclear from simple capitalization what the semantics of entries are (a reserved word or phrase? a key value? a prompt or GUI widget?). A minor annoyance is the otherwise very good Table of Contents, which appears to have been done by a PowerPoint user, with the font-size continually shrinking and the margin indenting as the depth increases (for the page numbers as well as the entries!): better control of the design is needed.

Overall, I found the book both readable and useful. It is well illustrated with very clear screenshots, using tooltip-yellow callouts to explain fields and prompts. The writing style is light and illustrative, explaining why an action is needed before how to do it.

On the subject of training, the book would probably be useful to trainers for the same of its detailed procedures (go here, click this, type that, click there). Li does state that JIRA can be used for managing issues outside the software issue-tracking field, which implies that it could be used by non-IT people at some stage, and training would certainly be needed. The HelpDesk application example, which recurs throughout, will probably be a useful point of reference for the majority of readers. If the future plans for JIRA are to extend its reach outside the IT issue-tracking field, it might be useful to develop a non-IT application example for another edition.

You can purchase JIRA 4 Essentials from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

When Eben Upton isn't working as an ASIC architect for Broadcom, he is the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a UK registered charity which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level. Raspberry Pi plans to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. Their first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a baseline Model A device, and $35 for a Model B device with integrated 2-port USB Hub, 10/100 Ethernet controller and 128MB of additional RAM. Eben has agreed to answer your questions about what it takes to make an ultra-low-cost computer, running an educational charity, or anything else. The usual Slashdot interview guidelines apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.

When Eben Upton isn't working as an ASIC architect for Broadcom, he is the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a UK registered charity which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level. Raspberry Pi plans to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. Their first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a baseline Model A device, and $35 for a Model B device with integrated 2-port USB Hub, 10/100 Ethernet controller and 128MB of additional RAM. Eben has agreed to answer your questions about what it takes to make an ultra-low-cost computer, running an educational charity, or anything else. The usual Slashdot interview guidelines apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, realxmp writes "The BBC is reporting that GlobalSign has stopped issuing certificates because of yet another suspected CA security breach. This was in response to a post on the ComodoHacker paste bin, claiming that this and several other CA's have also been compromised." No word yet on whether they were actually compromised.

Debuting on Slashdot, seezer writes with a piece by Rick Falkvinge about a recently release diplomatic cable. From the article: "Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the U.S. government and industry interests." This is from a Pirate Party founder and so might be slightly exaggerated, but there is certainly evidence in the cable that the U.S. exerted quite a bit of influence of Swedish copyright law. The U.S. government appears particularly vexed that the Swedish public doesn't seem to think anything is wrong with copying protected works, and (not unexpectedly) was quite concerned that Pirate Party members might actually be elected.

With his first accepted submission, quantr tips news that Groupon's IPO plans, which triggered skepticism about its high valuation and furthered claims of a new dot-com bubble, have been put on hold amid regulatory concerns and worries about "market volatility." According to the WSJ, "When the company filed to go public in early June, it attracted criticism for its high marketing costs and unprofitable business. The company was also asked by the Securities and Exchange Commission to remove an unusual accounting metric, dubbed Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income, which painted a more robust picture of its performance. Last week, the SEC also contacted a Groupon attorney over a different matter, said a person familiar with the situation: a leaked internal memo from Groupon Chief Executive Andrew Mason to his staff, in which he touted the company and blasted its critics. Making public statements about the financial status of a company during an IPO process is prohibited by SEC rules."

jmobley6030 writes with a bit in Gamer Gaia about Sony pulling out the big guns for their security infrastructure. Quoting: "Months after the great PlayStation network attack things are starting to get back to normal around the gaming world. While it doesn't seem like another hack attempt will take place anytime soon Sony is fearful that it could happen again. Sony announced today via their corporate news feed that they have hired Philip R. Reitinger, a former Homeland security official, as Chief Information Security Officer at Sony."

zacharye writes with a news post in BGR. From the article: "Sprint ... announced that it has filed a lawsuit with a federal court in the U.S. District of Columbia in an effort to block AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. The suit is related to the Department of Justice's lawsuit, which was filed on August 31st. 'Sprint opposes AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile,' Sprint's vice president of litigation Suzan Haller said. 'With today's legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.'"

First time accepted submitter (and Slashdot coder) cogent writes "Wicked Lasers, famous for last year's 1000mW handheld blue laser, and infamous for its handling of six-month-long backorders, is now selling a green version. There are three power levels, each priced at $1/mW (300mW, 500mW, 1000mW). Since the eye is far more sensitive to green than to blue, this is pretty much the state of the art in putting-dots-on-stuff technology. Wicked Lasers sent out an email promising to handle backorders much better this time." Adds reader whitedsepdivine: "There is currently no disclaimer that this is not a lightsaber on their site, so we can only assume that this version is."

First time accepted submitter (and Slashdot coder) cogent writes "Wicked Lasers, famous for last year's 1000mW handheld blue laser, and infamous for its handling of six-month-long backorders, is now selling a green version. There are three power levels, each priced at $1/mW (300mW, 500mW, 1000mW). Since the eye is far more sensitive to green than to blue, this is pretty much the state of the art in putting-dots-on-stuff technology. Wicked Lasers sent out an email promising to handle backorders much better this time." Adds reader whitedsepdivine: "There is currently no disclaimer that this is not a lightsaber on their site, so we can only assume that this version is."

Kevin Kelly ("Senior Maverick for Wired Magazine," among many other things) is back with answers to a selection of the questions posed to him by Slashdot readers. Read on below for his take on travel, the Long Now Foundation (including the 10,000-year clock — clocks! — that is among the foundation's projects), the future of fusion, and what to do about inevitable widespread suckage. Why "exotropy"?
by ynotds

I still cite Out of Control as the most readable introduction to the oft confused subject of complexity, and am right now wading through What Technology Wants but finding it far more forced (sleep inducing). While I clearly don't disagree with the idea of seeing technology as a partner with humanity [meme.com.au], your newer book reads like you have invested too long in a world constructed from your imaginings and cut back your level of interest in looking at what is actually going on, an interest which seemed to pervade your earlier projects.

Yes, I am well past your rationalization for abandoning "exotropy", so what I really want to know is whether we are all going to be condemned to defend our business models to the death?

Kevin Kelly: I don't really understand the question, but let me suggest that money is generally becoming less important, even as more of life becomes monetized. Money (and business) will become ubiquitous, but as money and business becomes super abundant, they will also become less valuable, less prized, less meaningful. Even super wealth is less important. The richest billionaires in the world control hundreds of millions times as much money as an average worker in the US, but the clothes billionaires wear, the cars they drive, the food they eat is not a hundred million times better. In fact often the rich don't even dress as well as the poor.

In a very real way, beyond a certain level of wealth, the extra billions is meaningless; more a matter of status than anything else. A hundred years from now the richest person may be a zillionaire, but their life will not differ much from a billionaire. Most of the people in the world are not far above the poverty line, and very far from millionaires. But as business and money and cash flows becomes the norm as billions of people rise up out of poverty, it also diminishes as the vehicle for power and status.

Value of travel?
by EricBoyd

I know that you did a lot of travel when you were younger (e.g. backpacking in Asia for years). How important was that for your status as a "Renaissance man"? Would you still recommended extensive travel to young people, or has globalization changed the opportunities?

KK: Globalization amplifies the value (and ease) of travel, while travel amplifies globalization. I've found there is no better education dollar for dollar than traveling. No matter what kind of learning you want to do, whether schoolbook, or business research, or artistic, or goalless exploration, then travel is your best bet. I think a lot of the woes of America could be cured by establishing a two-year national service requirement for all youth, without exceptions, which could be fulfilled by service abroad -- Peace Corp like -- in hundreds of different programs in alien places.

The benefit of travel like this is confronting "Otherness." The Other forces you to examine your assumptions, to question your beliefs, to stretch your perspective, to widen your horizons, and to entertain alternatives -- all skills worth a million dollars in today's world. You won't get very much of this at college. But go to India, or the Congo, or Albania, and its Otherness will teach you.

Tool philosophy for software tools?
by TheLoneGundam

What is your philosophy on software tools? Do you prefer to use a lot of small pieces, loosely assembled, using scripts to join things together and get things done, or do you like to find a software suite (such as Office) and work within that?

KK: Despite co-founding the Hacker's Conference, I am not a hacker. I am not at ease with code, so I tend to use off-the-shelf software programs. My shopping philosophy is to aim for the highest-common denominator. In other words to find the highest quality tool that has been adopted by the largest number of people. I avoid the highest possible quality if only a few folks are using it because support will be minimal and expensive. I also avoid a very popular tool if higher quality is being used widely by others. This is why I am a fan of Costco, which also aims at highest-common denominator goods. They sell not the best, but stuff at above-average quality and very populist prices. Occasionally I will be an early adopter, but most times I let others pay the price for beta versions. I prefer my tools to be well-proven. My site Cool Tools was set up to offer recommendations of well-proven tools. Only a very few of the ones we feature are brand new tools.

The 10,00 year clock
by strangeattraction

Will there be an actual clock completed (other than prototypes) before the 10,000 years are up?

KK: Indeed. Within your lifetime there will be at least one 10,000-year clock built in west Texas. At this very moment a mechanical-digital clock is being constructed inside a mountain on the property owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. When done it will be about 200 feet tall. And you can sign up now if you would like to visit it when its finished.

Long-term thinking
by hereisnowhy

One purpose of the Long Now Clock is to encourage long-term thinking. Aside from the Clock, though, what do you think people can do in their everyday lives to adopt or promote long-term thinking?

KK: The 10,000-year Clock we are building in the hills of west Texas is meant to remind us to think long-term, but learning how to do that as in individual is difficult. Part of the difficulty is that as individuals we constrained to short lives, and are inherently not long-term. So part of the skill in thinking long-term is to place our values and energies in ways that transcend the individual -- either in generational projects, or in social enterprises.

As a start I recommend engaging in a project that will not be complete in your lifetime. Another way is to require that your current projects exhibit some payoff that is not immediate; perhaps some small portion of it pays off in the future. A third way is to create things that get better, or run up in time, rather than one that decays and runs down in time. For instance a seedling grows into a tree, which has seedlings of its own. A program like Heifer Project which gives breeding pairs of animals to poor farmers, who in turn must give one breeding pair away themselves, is an exotropic scheme, growing up over time.

10,000 year clock
by Anonymous

Australia is a geologically stable (and ancient) place... does the foundation have any plans on building a similar clock downunder, and if so, when? How can one help out in the construction (if at all)?

KK: The hope of the Long Now Foundation is that many clocks ticking for ten-thousand years will be built all around the world -- Australia, too. They don't all have to be monumental, like the one in Texas. They could be household sized. And it very well may be the the monumental clocks are the ones that are pillaged and disabled over the centuries, while smaller less prominent ones keep ticking. Perhaps after 10,000 years the only clock still ticking is one at the end of a dusty road in the outback that almost everyone had forgotten about.

Serious Question
by bughunter

Why don't we have fusion power yet? What are the specific technical, political, economic and social obstacles to replacing dirty fossil fuel and potentially catastrophic nuclear fission power plants with nuclear fusion plants? I know this is kind of a "where's my flying car" question, but I feel that if our society really wanted affordable, practical fusion power to replace fossil fuel driven plants, we could achieve it, but we have barely even started down that road. Why not? What would it take to make it a priority?

KK: Building a synthetic sun has been much more difficult that it first seemed. Research on fusion has been going on steadily for almost 50 years, and each year the researcher have felt they were "only 1 year away" from getting it. That constant gap makes it hard to believe in now. But in fact, science has generated net positive fusion -- the energy out surpassing the energy needed to create the fusion -- but it is no where near an economic positive, nor anywhere near industrial rates. In other words only toy amounts have been generated. Scaling down the sun by a zillion times is proving hard. And there are some scientists who believe that it cannot be brought to an economic feasible method -- at least at current energy prices -- which is part of the reason why we have not made it priority #1. I think when there are a few more demos of it working for sustainable periods in the prototypes, it will become more believable (or obvious). Or if energy prices really hit the roof.

Philosophical implications of cheap fusion energy?
by Anonymous

Putting aside any political or social unwillingness from the powers that be, in a far future, in a world with large scale fusion energy production, man kind will at long last have an almost free lunch. For, what, if I may ask, will the cost of anything be when everything can be made from recycled chemical elements and lots of almost free energy from large scale fusion of abundant hydrogen? Gadgets can be made, food can be made (who needs cows when you can engineer your own steak from scratch? Nature makes protein by chemical processes anyhow...) Are you worried about environmental pollution? Well, we pollute *now* because it costs us money to not pollute. We don't make stuff environmentally friendly *now* because it costs more than the dirty stuff. But with free energy we have the means to do stuff right. After all, under the assumption of free energy, the cost of doing it right is not higher than the cost of doing it dirty. Overpopulation will of course restrict the amount of space available for habitation, so wars will be fought over land, but in the far end who needs a pile of expensive dirt on the earth when there is so much free space in space?

What are the social implications of such a thought experiment? What happens in a society when goods cost nothing? Is there any need for money anymore? And even if you needed money for some reason how would you acquire it? Remember that your salary is your compensation for your labor, and labor has long since been replaced by machines running on cheep energy.

They tell me that fusion is only 50 years away...
So in a post fusion world, where is man-kind headed in your opinion? Will my grandchildren see a reconstruction of society?

KK: If energy followed the same curve as computation and was half as cheap each year, what kind of world would we make? It could be a pretty scary world. George Dyson, science historian, son of Freeman Dyson, who worked on nuclear weapons, believes that "free" fusion power would be the worst thing that could happen to our civilization. Sort of like giving an unrestricted million dollars to a 12-year old. What could go wrong? Unlike George I don't worry, although I do believe it would be completely disruptive.

First, I don't believe fusion would ever be "free." It would certainly be cheap, but the cheaper it got the more difficult and costly getting rid of the heat in society would be. And I'm not just thinking of the global warming effects (which would be significant) but more on where you put all the energy you are unleashing each minute. It has to exit the biosphere somewhere. If we had to make giant planetary radiators, there would be a cost to those, which would be added to the cost of generating the power. What that means is that while the calories (BTUs, ergs) would become ever cheaper, the other aspects of energy -- storage, removal, management, etc. would become more complex and costly.

Energy is more than just ergs, just as computation is more than just transistors. Transistors are essentially free per transistor, but your laptop still costs $700. An erg may become essentially free per erg, but your energy use may still cost $700.

Nonetheless, having extremely cheap energy would radically alter our landscape. I think we'd build a lot of moving bots and make a lot more gadgets. Maybe our shelters would be more kinetic, flexible. We'd certaintly travel even more. I have no fear of overpopulation; rather ever more depopulation as robots did more of the hard "manual" work. It would be a different world.

15 years after the invention of the PC
by Anonymous

... it started sucking, with Microsoft and Intel dominating everything. Anyone who came out with a cool idea was given an offer they couldn't refuse. And if they did refuse it, they were toast.

Are we on a similar suckage curve with the Internet? Although it was arguably invented in the '70s or even before, it only came to the attention of most people in the mid '90s.

KK: Sucking is inevitable. Suck would take over the entire universe if we did not keep inventing new things that did not suck. For a while. Even better is that the frontier of the new keeps expanding so we have more new ways to create anti-sucky coolness -- even while the things we invented yesterday are starting to suck. As long was we can keep the game going, the forces of cool will outweigh the forces of suck.

First time accepted submitter Lyrdor writes "The Terms of Service for the Stanford Artificial Intelligence class points to how the free class this fall will be used for 'developing and evaluating the Online Course prior any commercial release of the Course' by a startup called KnowLabs. Although all of the press accounts so far have pointed to how the course would be a new example of Open Educational Resources from Stanford, the terms of service point to something else going on. On the LinkedIn page of David Stavens, Co-Founder and CEO at Know Labs, the startup is described on his profile as an 'angel funded startup to re-envision and revolutionize education using the social web and mobile apps. We launched www.ai-class.com and attracted over 130,000 students in 190+ countries.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has announced that he will be distributing the Linux kernel via Github until kernel.org servers are fully operational following the recent server compromise. From the announcement: 'But hey, the whole point (well, *one* of the points) of distributed development is that no single place is really any different from any other, so since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?'"

GMGruman writes "The feds may be blocking AT&T's buyout of T-Mobile, but T-Mobile is in poor shape to continue as is. Parent company Deutsche Telekom's decision not to invest in U.S. spectrum a decade ago constrained T-Mobile's ability to grow, especially through 4G networks now finally emerging. But from a customer point of view, it was the iPhone that has threatened the company the most. Or, more precisely, its lack of the iPhone."

Trailrunner7 writes "The attack that compromised some high-value servers belonging to kernel.org — but not the Linux kernel source code — may have been the work of hackers who simply got lucky and didn't realize the value of the servers that they had gotten their hands on. The attackers made a couple of mistakes that enabled the administrators at kernel.org to discover the breach and stop it before any major damage occurred. First, they used a known Linux rootkit called Phalanx that the admins were able to detect. And second, the attackers set up SSH backdoors on the compromised servers, which the admins also discovered. Had the hackers been specifically targeting the kernel.org servers, the attack probably would've looked quite different." A few blog posts in the wake of the attack have agreed with the initial announcement; while it was embarrassing, the integrity of the kernel source is not in question.

www.sorehands.com writes "Back in 2006, e360Insight and David Linhardt obtained an $11.7M judgment against Spamhaus, an international anti-spam organization. The judgment was subsequently appealed and reduced to $27,002. That judgment was appealed yet again, and the appeals court has now vacated the earlier number and entered a judgment against Spamhaus in the amount of $3. (Yes, three dollars.) As you may recall, e360's oral arguments for the latest appeal were not well received by the court." The ruling itself is a fairly entertaining diatribe about how e360 shot itself in the foot repeatedly and with enthusiasm throughout the case, and contains gems like this: "By failing to comply with its basic discovery obligations, a party can snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory."

www.sorehands.com writes "Back in 2006, e360Insight and David Linhardt obtained an $11.7M judgment against Spamhaus, an international anti-spam organization. The judgment was subsequently appealed and reduced to $27,002. That judgment was appealed yet again, and the appeals court has now vacated the earlier number and entered a judgment against Spamhaus in the amount of $3. (Yes, three dollars.) As you may recall, e360's oral arguments for the latest appeal were not well received by the court." The ruling itself is a fairly entertaining diatribe about how e360 shot itself in the foot repeatedly and with enthusiasm throughout the case, and contains gems like this: "By failing to comply with its basic discovery obligations, a party can snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory."

intellitech sends this excerpt from a Reuters report: "The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a tipping point for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday (PDF). ... The amount of orbital debris tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network jumped from 9,949 cataloged objects in December 2006 to 16,094 in July 2011, with nearly 20 percent of the objects stemming from the destruction of the Chinese FENGYUN 1-C satellite, the National Research Council said. ... the panel made two dozen recommendations for NASA to mitigate and improve the orbital debris environment, including collaborating with the State Department to develop the legal and regulatory framework for removing junk from space. The study, 'Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs,' was sponsored by NASA."

Layzej writes "Remote Sensing Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Wagner resigned earlier today (PDF) over a global warming study published in his journal that was said to cast doubt on global warming models but was later found to be flawed. Wagner stated that the paper most likely contained fundamental methodological errors and false claims. He further expressed dismay over how 'the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements.' The author of the paper, Dr. Roy Spencer, has responded to the resignation."

Layzej writes "Remote Sensing Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Wagner resigned earlier today (PDF) over a global warming study published in his journal that was said to cast doubt on global warming models but was later found to be flawed. Wagner stated that the paper most likely contained fundamental methodological errors and false claims. He further expressed dismay over how 'the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements.' The author of the paper, Dr. Roy Spencer, has responded to the resignation."

zacharye writes "This whole lost iPhone 5 prototype story just got whole lot more interesting. According to SF Weekly, six investigators claiming to be members of the San Francisco police department descended upon one Bernal Heights, San Francisco man's home in search of a lost iPhone 5 prototype that CNET originally reported had been left in a bar. The scary part? The SFPD does not seem to be aware of such an investigation. Instead, it appears as though they may have actually been members of Apple's security team allegedly impersonating police officers." So far this claim seems to be developing solely through media communications; in order for the SFPD to start an investigation, the man whose house was searched would need to speak with the police directly. Update: 09/03 12:14 GMT by S : A later report indicates police were present, but they stood outside while Apple employees searched the house. No police report was filed because Apple wanted it kept a secret.

McGruber writes "Vivek Wadhwa has written an article in the Washington Post titled, 'Mr. President, there is no engineer shortage,' which addresses the perceived national shortage of engineers. Wadhwa slams China for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to auto mechanics and technicians, yet fails to slam the U.S. for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates. He also says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.'"

We recently discussed news that WikiLeaks had complained of a password leak which threatened the encryption of unredacted documents contained in the Cablegate archive. Now, reader solanum writes with this update: "According to the Guardian, 'WikiLeaks has published its full archive of 251,000 secret US diplomatic cables, without redactions, potentially exposing thousands of individuals named in the documents to detention, harm or putting their lives in danger. The move has been strongly condemned by the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – who have worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.' In the same article The Guardian gives further explanation of the controversy reported earlier, suggesting that Assange went against standard protocol in providing the master password to the newspaper."

MrSeb writes "If the New York Times Research & Development Lab has its wicked way, you will soon be able to stop taking your mobile computer of choice into the bathroom — and use a 'magic mirror' instead. On average we spend an hour in the bathroom every day, and the magic mirror — which is built from a 'data-bearing' mirror, Microsoft Kinect, and a healthy dollop of ingenuity — is designed to capitalize on that time by letting you surf the web and increase the New York Times' advertising revenue."

An anonymous reader sends word that hacking group Anonymous has breached servers and accounts belonging to "dozens" of Texas police departments, leaking emails, documents and personal information. They say the attacks are in retaliation for "the arrests of dozens of alleged Anonymous suspects," and were done in solidarity with "the 'Anonymous 16' PayPal LOIC defendants, accused LulzSec member Jake Davis 'Topiary,' protesters arrested during #OpBart actions, Bradley Manning, Stephen Watt, and other hackers and leakers worldwide." Predictably, some of the leaked emails paint an unflattering picture of internal operations at the police departments.

An anonymous reader sends word that hacking group Anonymous has breached servers and accounts belonging to "dozens" of Texas police departments, leaking emails, documents and personal information. They say the attacks are in retaliation for "the arrests of dozens of alleged Anonymous suspects," and were done in solidarity with "the 'Anonymous 16' PayPal LOIC defendants, accused LulzSec member Jake Davis 'Topiary,' protesters arrested during #OpBart actions, Bradley Manning, Stephen Watt, and other hackers and leakers worldwide." Predictably, some of the leaked emails paint an unflattering picture of internal operations at the police departments.

CWmike writes "The Apache open-source project has patched its Web server software to quash a bug that a denial-of-service (DoS) tool has been exploiting. Apache 2.2.20, released Tuesday, plugs the hole used by an 'Apache Killer' attack tool. On Aug. 24, project developers had promised a fix within 48 hours, then revised the timetable two days later to 24 hours. The security advisory did not explain the delay."

sighted writes "NASA reports that the seemingly-unstoppable robotic geologist Opportunity is finding things at Endeavour crater that it has never seen before, adding new life to a mission that has already been epic. Observations 'suggest that rock exposures on Endeavour's rim date from early in Martian history and include clay minerals that form in less-acidic wet conditions, possibly more favorable for life.' In a teleconference today, one mission scientist compared this new phase of exploration to a 'whole new mission.'"

itwbennett writes "Federal judge Phyllis Hamilton has overturned the $1.3 billion judgment Oracle won against SAP and has approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award, which would negate the need for a new trial." Oracle is in the habit of asking for awards in the billions; with that model, they really can make it up on volume.

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center received more FOIA documents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security regarding mobile x-ray scanners (a.k.a. Z Backscatter Vans). We've discussed these devices before. Perhaps the most interesting part is slide #11 ('Disclaimer About Scanning People') on page 6 of this PDF explaining that the radiation output of these devices is too high to comply with ANSI N43.17. In other words, they output too much radiation even by TSA's questionable standards for airport body scanners. Regardless, the slide ends with the author stating that the ANSI standard 'is not applicable to covert operations.' What might that assertion have meant to the presentation's intended audience?"

CWmike writes "Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, said this week that Windows 8 will let users treat the traditional desktop as 'just another app' that loads only on command. When it unveiled Windows 8's UI in June, Microsoft said it would feature a 'touch-first' interface to compete in the fast-growing tablet market. Underneath that, however, would be a traditional Windows-style desktop. 'Having both of [the] user interfaces [work] together harmoniously is an important part of Windows 8,' Sinofsky said in a blog post on Wednesday. The Metro-style UI — the one inspired by Windows Phone 7's tile-based design — will be the first to show up when a user boots a device. At that point, users reach a crossroads. 'If you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop — we won't even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there,' Sinofsky said. 'If you don't want to do ... 'PC' things, then you don't have to and you're not paying for them in memory, battery life or hardware requirements.' If using a conventional PC with keyboard and mouse, Windows 8 users will run an 'app' to load the desktop, he said. 'Essentially, you can think of the Windows desktop as just another app.'"

riverat1 writes "The Next Web has a story on Muammar Gaddafi's monitoring of the internet and other telecommunications. As you might expect, the monitoring was intense. The story names companies that supplied the monitoring software, most notably Amesys, a unit of the French company Bull SA. There is a more detailed story behind the paywall at the Wall Street Journal." Boeing's Narus division may also have been involved (collecting very important Analytics and nothing suspicious of course). Update: 09/01 16:08 GMT by UL :Axure pointed out that VASTech (South Africa), ZTE (China), and the aforementioned Narus (US) also provided assistance, making the title of the article a bit inaccurate. It seems the Libyan Internet monitoring was an international affair (my apologies to Europe).

CWmike writes "Hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project — a considerably higher number than DigiNotar has acknowledged earlier this week when it said 'several dozen' certificates had been acquired by attackers. Among the certificates acquired by the attackers in a mid-July hack of DigiNotar, Van de Looy's source said, were ones valid for mozilla.com, yahoo.com and torproject.org, a system that lets people connect to the Web anonymously. Mozilla confirmed that a certificate for its add-on site had been obtained by the DigiNotar attackers. 'DigiNotar informed us that they issued fraudulent certs for addons.mozilla.org in July, and revoked them within a few days of issue,' Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, said Wednesday. Looy's number is similar to the tally of certificates that Google has blacklisted in Chrome."

Michael J. Ross writes "For decades, programmers have written computer code in one language, and then programmatically translated that code into another, lower-level form (typically machine code that can be run directly by a microprocessor, or some sort of bytecode that can be interpreted by a virtual machine). For instance, source code written in C or C++ is compiled and assembled into machine code. In web programming, there are emerging languages and other tools for translating code into JavaScript. For instance, Google Web Toolkit allows the programmer to create web apps in Java. The latest addition to this category is CoffeeScript, a language that can be compiled into JavaScript, and is intended to reduce source code size and clutter by incorporating some of the best operators from other Web scripting languages, particularly Ruby. It is also the topic of a new tutorial, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development." Read on to learn what Michael thinks of this book. CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development author Trevor Burnham pages 138 pages publisher Pragmatic Bookshelf rating 5/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1934356784 summary A fast-paced tutorial of CoffeeScript. This book is authored by Trevor Burnham, who is credited as one of the early contributors to the project by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator and project lead of CoffeeScript) in his foreword to the book. Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf on 3 August 2011, under the ISBN 978-1934356784, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development fills only 138 pages, which is certainly a change of pace from the majority of programming tomes now being released. This book's material is grouped into six chapters, plus four appendices — aside from a preface, which introduces CoffeeScript as well as a word game, which is used as the example project throughout the book. Oddly enough, the preface mentions jQuery, but not as one of the well-known attempts to streamline JavaScript code.

The first chapter, "Getting Started," begins by briefly explaining how to install Node and npm (Node Package Manager). These instructions assume that you are following along in a Linux environment or some emulation thereof. They also seem to assume that nothing goes wrong in any of the steps, because no troubleshooting guidance or references are provided. Given the number of moving parts required to get CoffeeScript running, as well as the technical pitfalls that could ensnare a Windows or Mac user, the author should have provided more clear and detailed installation instructions. Also, readers unfamiliar with Linux/Unix may be puzzled by some of the instructions. For instance, page 3 appears to state that the way to check that those two aforesaid packages are on your path, is to simply type in "PATH" (whereas what is needed is "echo $PATH"). From that point forward, the narrative gradually becomes more opaque, with cursory coverage of text editor plug-ins, the "coffee" command line compiler, REPL, "the soak" (an existential chain operator), and the limitations of trying to debug CoffeeScript code. It is quite possible that by the end of this chapter, many readers will decide to not bother trying to learn CoffeeScript, and instead to stick with plain JavaScript, possibly supplemented with jQuery (which is not to say that jQuery code is any easier to read).

In the next three chapters, the author presents the basics of CoffeeScript, including how to: define and use functions and their arguments; test conditionals; throw and catch exceptions; understand variable scoping and context; create arrays using splats; accept input from the console; create objects, arrays, and soaks (in more detail than before); iterate over collections; match patterns; define namespaces using modules; and create prototypes and classes. He makes extensive use of examples, which thankfully are concise (unlike some programming books whose example code span far too many lines, and sometimes even multiple pages — forcing the reader to dig through the code, trying to find the important lines). Also, the brevity of CoffeeScript syntax is undoubtedly a factor. However, his concise style extends to the narrative as well, and will likely cause newbies to have to read the material several times — and even then wonder whether they fully grasp the concepts. It seems that the author understands CoffeeScript extremely well, but is not always able to communicate that knowledge to the reader in a patient and comprehensible manner.

Chapter 5 is a primer on jQuery, and is apparently included in the book so that the example application (the word game) can be made to work in a web browser — since none of the code or narrative (aside from the example app) appears to be related to CoffeeScript. It would have been more efficient to simply point the reader to an online jQuery tutorial, and then present only the CoffeeScript-specific differences — or just briefly explain how to load CoffeeScript files in an HTML file, which could have been done in a sidebar. The last chapter demonstrates how to run CoffeeScript on a web server, utilizing Node.js, and also explores how the lack of threads in JavaScript can impact Node programming. The example project is made multiplayer using Node, Connect, and WebSocket.

The appendices provide answers to the end-of-chapter exercises, alternative methods of running CoffeeScript code, a JavaScript cheat sheet, and a list of a half dozen bibliographic references. This book concludes with a suspiciously-short index, at less than three pages long, which appears to provide only the first or earliest occurrences of the major terms. Consequently, anyone who tries to use this book as a reference work for looking up key terms quickly — or for finding their later occurrences — will likely need to obtain an electronic version of the book, since all e-readers have search functionality. Furthermore, the index is missing some key terms used in the text, such as "function callbacks" and "arbitrary expressions" — heck, it's even missing "expressions," a fundamental concept in any programming language.

Prospective readers who wish to learn more about the book, can visit Pragmatic Bookshelf's page, which offers brief descriptions of the book and its author — as does O'Reilly Media's page. But, as of this writing, only the former makes available an e-book version, pre-publication reader comments, a discussion forum, the example source code used in the book, and a link to a page for reporting errata, which already has more than half a dozen items listed. More are present in the text: "add [a] multiplayer capability" (page xx); a lone ")" missing its matching "(" (in Exercise 6, page 34); "in a lot in functions" (page 107; should read "in a lot of functions"); "a[n] overhead" (page 110); "everyone and their dog is" (page 116).

The author's writing style is sometimes quirky, which in most cases adds a bit of levity, but occasionally leads to the misuse of terms, e.g., array ranges usage described as "fantastical" (page 43). "BDFL" (page xiii) will prove puzzling at first to most readers. On page xvi, the reader is told that JavaScript "contains multitudes." — multitudes of what? And nothing can excuse the groan-inducing "automagically" (page 100).

In terms of the ordering of the topics, one of the most exasperating aspects of this book is the way that many language concepts — such as chained comparisons, and variables being true or false (or "truthy" or "falsy") — are not presented up front, on their own, but mixed in with discussions of other topics, including development of the game application, and even in the answers to the chapter questions (Appendix 1). This makes the book generally unsuitable as a reference, especially when combined with a disappointing index.

One might assume that the modest size of this book is a result of the small size of the language itself. But another factor is surely the pithy presentation style for even some of the most important concepts in the language. Perhaps worst of all — especially from the perspective of someone relatively new to programming — some basic concepts are not addressed, or the example code does not address common use cases. For instance, in CoffeeScript, how does one create a block consisting of multiple lines of code? On page 17, indentation is briefly mentioned, but the sample code shows single-line blocks only. Other important ideas are "saved as an exercise" (which may induce flashbacks to exasperating technical college textbooks). Some readers may conclude that the author didn't want to make the effort of fully describing the language, in a more canonical fashion, which would have resulted in a much longer, but more valuable book.

It is unclear as to how much of the likely mystification and frustration of the average reader will be due to the writing choices made by the author, and how much can be blamed on the sometimes cryptic syntax of CoffeeScript, evident in the discussion of topics such as function binding (Chapter 2) and keywords (e.g., from page 106, "what.x and @x are, of course, equivalent if and only if what is this." Of course!). Readers are told in the introduction that they do not need to be experts in JavaScript to understand the book's material, and can be amateurs (page xviii). But there are several places in the book where intermediate-level knowledge, at a minimum, would be needed. That sort of difficult material may be another point in the CoffeeScript journey where some readers will decide to eschew learning the language.

The production quality of the book is fine, except that the chosen font's ratio of height to width is more than what is usually found in books nowadays; when combined with inadequate spacing among the words within many of the sentences, it makes it difficult for the reader to rapidly scan the material. The e-book version reflects the same minor problem. Yet it makes excellent use of color for syntactically highlighting the code — a feature not seen in the print version.

So if you would like to do some JavaScript programming, but without writing any JavaScript, then one possible place to start your journey is CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development. As of this writing, it is the only CoffeeScript book on the market. Yet should the language continue growing in popularity, then more substantial and recommendable books will probably become available.

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

You can purchase CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development 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 J. Ross writes "For decades, programmers have written computer code in one language, and then programmatically translated that code into another, lower-level form (typically machine code that can be run directly by a microprocessor, or some sort of bytecode that can be interpreted by a virtual machine). For instance, source code written in C or C++ is compiled and assembled into machine code. In web programming, there are emerging languages and other tools for translating code into JavaScript. For instance, Google Web Toolkit allows the programmer to create web apps in Java. The latest addition to this category is CoffeeScript, a language that can be compiled into JavaScript, and is intended to reduce source code size and clutter by incorporating some of the best operators from other Web scripting languages, particularly Ruby. It is also the topic of a new tutorial, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development." Read on to learn what Michael thinks of this book. CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development author Trevor Burnham pages 138 pages publisher Pragmatic Bookshelf rating 5/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1934356784 summary A fast-paced tutorial of CoffeeScript. This book is authored by Trevor Burnham, who is credited as one of the early contributors to the project by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator and project lead of CoffeeScript) in his foreword to the book. Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf on 3 August 2011, under the ISBN 978-1934356784, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development fills only 138 pages, which is certainly a change of pace from the majority of programming tomes now being released. This book's material is grouped into six chapters, plus four appendices — aside from a preface, which introduces CoffeeScript as well as a word game, which is used as the example project throughout the book. Oddly enough, the preface mentions jQuery, but not as one of the well-known attempts to streamline JavaScript code.

The first chapter, "Getting Started," begins by briefly explaining how to install Node and npm (Node Package Manager). These instructions assume that you are following along in a Linux environment or some emulation thereof. They also seem to assume that nothing goes wrong in any of the steps, because no troubleshooting guidance or references are provided. Given the number of moving parts required to get CoffeeScript running, as well as the technical pitfalls that could ensnare a Windows or Mac user, the author should have provided more clear and detailed installation instructions. Also, readers unfamiliar with Linux/Unix may be puzzled by some of the instructions. For instance, page 3 appears to state that the way to check that those two aforesaid packages are on your path, is to simply type in "PATH" (whereas what is needed is "echo $PATH"). From that point forward, the narrative gradually becomes more opaque, with cursory coverage of text editor plug-ins, the "coffee" command line compiler, REPL, "the soak" (an existential chain operator), and the limitations of trying to debug CoffeeScript code. It is quite possible that by the end of this chapter, many readers will decide to not bother trying to learn CoffeeScript, and instead to stick with plain JavaScript, possibly supplemented with jQuery (which is not to say that jQuery code is any easier to read).

In the next three chapters, the author presents the basics of CoffeeScript, including how to: define and use functions and their arguments; test conditionals; throw and catch exceptions; understand variable scoping and context; create arrays using splats; accept input from the console; create objects, arrays, and soaks (in more detail than before); iterate over collections; match patterns; define namespaces using modules; and create prototypes and classes. He makes extensive use of examples, which thankfully are concise (unlike some programming books whose example code span far too many lines, and sometimes even multiple pages — forcing the reader to dig through the code, trying to find the important lines). Also, the brevity of CoffeeScript syntax is undoubtedly a factor. However, his concise style extends to the narrative as well, and will likely cause newbies to have to read the material several times — and even then wonder whether they fully grasp the concepts. It seems that the author understands CoffeeScript extremely well, but is not always able to communicate that knowledge to the reader in a patient and comprehensible manner.

Chapter 5 is a primer on jQuery, and is apparently included in the book so that the example application (the word game) can be made to work in a web browser — since none of the code or narrative (aside from the example app) appears to be related to CoffeeScript. It would have been more efficient to simply point the reader to an online jQuery tutorial, and then present only the CoffeeScript-specific differences — or just briefly explain how to load CoffeeScript files in an HTML file, which could have been done in a sidebar. The last chapter demonstrates how to run CoffeeScript on a web server, utilizing Node.js, and also explores how the lack of threads in JavaScript can impact Node programming. The example project is made multiplayer using Node, Connect, and WebSocket.

The appendices provide answers to the end-of-chapter exercises, alternative methods of running CoffeeScript code, a JavaScript cheat sheet, and a list of a half dozen bibliographic references. This book concludes with a suspiciously-short index, at less than three pages long, which appears to provide only the first or earliest occurrences of the major terms. Consequently, anyone who tries to use this book as a reference work for looking up key terms quickly — or for finding their later occurrences — will likely need to obtain an electronic version of the book, since all e-readers have search functionality. Furthermore, the index is missing some key terms used in the text, such as "function callbacks" and "arbitrary expressions" — heck, it's even missing "expressions," a fundamental concept in any programming language.

Prospective readers who wish to learn more about the book, can visit Pragmatic Bookshelf's page, which offers brief descriptions of the book and its author — as does O'Reilly Media's page. But, as of this writing, only the former makes available an e-book version, pre-publication reader comments, a discussion forum, the example source code used in the book, and a link to a page for reporting errata, which already has more than half a dozen items listed. More are present in the text: "add [a] multiplayer capability" (page xx); a lone ")" missing its matching "(" (in Exercise 6, page 34); "in a lot in functions" (page 107; should read "in a lot of functions"); "a[n] overhead" (page 110); "everyone and their dog is" (page 116).

The author's writing style is sometimes quirky, which in most cases adds a bit of levity, but occasionally leads to the misuse of terms, e.g., array ranges usage described as "fantastical" (page 43). "BDFL" (page xiii) will prove puzzling at first to most readers. On page xvi, the reader is told that JavaScript "contains multitudes." — multitudes of what? And nothing can excuse the groan-inducing "automagically" (page 100).

In terms of the ordering of the topics, one of the most exasperating aspects of this book is the way that many language concepts — such as chained comparisons, and variables being true or false (or "truthy" or "falsy") — are not presented up front, on their own, but mixed in with discussions of other topics, including development of the game application, and even in the answers to the chapter questions (Appendix 1). This makes the book generally unsuitable as a reference, especially when combined with a disappointing index.

One might assume that the modest size of this book is a result of the small size of the language itself. But another factor is surely the pithy presentation style for even some of the most important concepts in the language. Perhaps worst of all — especially from the perspective of someone relatively new to programming — some basic concepts are not addressed, or the example code does not address common use cases. For instance, in CoffeeScript, how does one create a block consisting of multiple lines of code? On page 17, indentation is briefly mentioned, but the sample code shows single-line blocks only. Other important ideas are "saved as an exercise" (which may induce flashbacks to exasperating technical college textbooks). Some readers may conclude that the author didn't want to make the effort of fully describing the language, in a more canonical fashion, which would have resulted in a much longer, but more valuable book.

It is unclear as to how much of the likely mystification and frustration of the average reader will be due to the writing choices made by the author, and how much can be blamed on the sometimes cryptic syntax of CoffeeScript, evident in the discussion of topics such as function binding (Chapter 2) and keywords (e.g., from page 106, "what.x and @x are, of course, equivalent if and only if what is this." Of course!). Readers are told in the introduction that they do not need to be experts in JavaScript to understand the book's material, and can be amateurs (page xviii). But there are several places in the book where intermediate-level knowledge, at a minimum, would be needed. That sort of difficult material may be another point in the CoffeeScript journey where some readers will decide to eschew learning the language.

The production quality of the book is fine, except that the chosen font's ratio of height to width is more than what is usually found in books nowadays; when combined with inadequate spacing among the words within many of the sentences, it makes it difficult for the reader to rapidly scan the material. The e-book version reflects the same minor problem. Yet it makes excellent use of color for syntactically highlighting the code — a feature not seen in the print version.

So if you would like to do some JavaScript programming, but without writing any JavaScript, then one possible place to start your journey is CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development. As of this writing, it is the only CoffeeScript book on the market. Yet should the language continue growing in popularity, then more substantial and recommendable books will probably become available.

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

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

First time accepted submitter neBelcnU writes "It's still early, but there are findings for the recent losses of a Proton and Soyuz rockets. There was a procedural error in the Proton's flight planning, and the 3rd stage gas-generator is the center of attention in the Soyuz. From the article: 'The Soyuz investigation has not formally issued its findings or recommended corrective actions. A launch schedule for the next manned flight to the International Space Station will not be decided until the commission completes its work.'"