Slashdot Mirror

eldavojohn writes "A new paper entitled Epitaxial Graphene on Silicon toward Graphene-Silicon Fusion Electronics published by a group of physicists at Tohoku University in Japan has demonstrated that they can grow graphene on a silicon substrate and pair that technique with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor. For quite sometime we've been discussing the supermaterial graphene being used like silicon improving everything from memory density to transistors. Given this demonstration, are we witnessing the start of a new era in electronics or are there more hurdles to clear before the manufacturers adopt this fabrication process and embrace graphene?"

eldavojohn writes "A new paper entitled Epitaxial Graphene on Silicon toward Graphene-Silicon Fusion Electronics published by a group of physicists at Tohoku University in Japan has demonstrated that they can grow graphene on a silicon substrate and pair that technique with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor. For quite sometime we've been discussing the supermaterial graphene being used like silicon improving everything from memory density to transistors. Given this demonstration, are we witnessing the start of a new era in electronics or are there more hurdles to clear before the manufacturers adopt this fabrication process and embrace graphene?"

An anonymous reader writes "EDS's key witness during the firm's court case against BSkyB was shown to have bought his degree online – but still managed to get a worse mark than a dog. Joe Galloway said he had a degree from Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands and gave detailed evidence on how he took plane journeys between the islands and attended a college there. But while questioning Galloway in court, Mark Howard QC managed to obtain exactly the same degree as Galloway from Concordia College for his dog 'Lulu' with one key difference – the dog got a higher mark."

An anonymous reader writes "Only a few weeks after a jury acquitted Alan Ellis, the owner of the BitTorrent site 'OinK's Pink Palace,' of copyright infringement, another high profile case is about to start next week, this time for the newsgroup side of things. The MPA (Motion Picture Association) trial against Newzbin.com, a website that indexes NZB files and content on the newsgroups, will begin in London on Monday. Will lightning strike twice in favor of website indexing?" Torrentfreak points out one major difference between the cases: "Ellis’s charge was one of fraud, allegedly conducted by an individual and dealt with under criminal law, while that leveled against Newzbin is one of allowing and inducing illegal copying, i.e copyright infringement, but carried out by a bona fide company under civil law."

Wyatt Earp writes with news that a recent SEC filing from Tesla Motors revealed the company plans to stop production on its electric Roadster (and the Roadster Sport as well) in 2011. This will leave the automaker without any cars to sell until the launch of its Model S sedan (financed in part by $465 million in DoE loans) in 2012. Tesla plans to resume production of Roadster models "at least a year" after the Model S arrives. From Wired's Autopia blog: "'As a result, we anticipate that we may generate limited, if any, revenue from selling electric vehicles after 2011 until the launch of the planned model S,' the company says in the SEC filing. That may not be a problem if S production starts on plan and goes off without a hitch, but if Tesla hits any snags, things could get ugly fast — a point it concedes in the filing. 'The launch of the Model S could be delayed for a number of reasons and any such delays may be significant and would extend the period in which we would generate limited, if any, revenues from sales of our electric vehicles.'"

Dave Knott writes "After some delay Apple has updated Boot Camp to support Windows 7 on Macintosh computers. They have also provided an upgrade utility that facilitates transition to Windows 7 for Mac owners who have existing Vista installations. The new version of Boot Camp requires OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)."

An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2002, we discussed a story about the so-called 'Perpetual Motion DeLorean,' which could 'supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge.' More than seven years later, the final shoe has dropped on this saga, with a $26 million judgment against Carl Tilley and his wife, who propagated this scam that ran for several years. Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."

Sparky Anduril writes "In Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook James Kennard has written an accessible and easy-to-read book to help anyone who is writing (or plans to write) extensions for the popular open source content management system, Joomla! (specifically for version 1.5). It is available as a paperback or PDF eBook." Read on for the rest of Jonathan's review. Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook author James Kennard pages 360 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9 reviewer Jonathan West ISBN 978-1-847198-14-3 summary Recipes for developing extensions with Joomla! 1.5 This is not an introduction to writing extensions for Joomla! For example, it does not describe the architecture of extensions, nor does it suggest how you should go about designing or developing extensions. The book does not claim to do this and you will need to look elsewhere if you need introductory material on that subject.

What this book does provide however is a number of "recipes" that developers can use to solve common problems when developing extensions for Joomla! As such it is a very useful resource that can be used in two ways: the inexperienced developer will want to read through the entire book chapter by chapter, to understand the issues they will need to consider. The more experienced developer will want to use this book as a reference book, dipping in when they encounter a particular problem or face a particular task.

The first thing to say is that (perhaps unusually for a software developer) James can write! His English is clear and I cannot imagine anyone having any complaints about his grammar. This means that despite being a technical reference the book is a pleasure to read.

Each recipe is laid out in the same format (as you would expect from any good cookbook!) The title of the recipe is followed by an explanation of the problem or task. "Getting ready" lays out what you must do before getting to the body of the recipe. "How to do it..." is laid out as a set of code statements with a brief explanation. "How it works..." provides more explanation on why to do what the recipe says, often accompanied by example data. "There's more..." lays out additional things to consider, perhaps more you can do with the recipe or alternative ways of achieving the same end. Where they are alternatives, James is generally very careful to explain the pros and cons of each approach. "See also" provides a cross-reference to related recipes in the book.

The first chapter is an essential introduction to getting involved in the Joomla! open source community through JoomlaCode.org. James explains how to create a new project and manage that project. The chapter concludes by explaining the use of TortoiseSVN for managing the source code of your project. I found that the explanation of the top-level folder structure and the use of branches within SVN was particularly illuminating.

The next two chapters provide further general background: chapter two provides recipes to ensure your extensions remain secure and chapter three describes how to work with the database. While James does not explain the underlying security issues (e.g. he does not describe what SQL injection is and why it may comprise security), the recipes provided (that address keeping your SQL safe, ensuring filenames and folders are safe and that you ensure that request data does not pose a threat) are easy to follow and I was able to work out why they should be used. The chapter on Working with the Database explains how to construct and execute SQL queries and the use of the Joomla!-specific JTable object. While I am familiar with working with SQL, this chapter was an eye-opener to me as it shows very clearly how working with the database under the Joomla! framework is different from conventional approaches, and how the JTable object makes it very easy to manipulate the database.

The remaining chapters of the book each focus in on a particular area. James covers the following topics: "The Session and the User", "Multilingual Recipes", "Interaction and Styling", "Customizing the Document", "Customizing the Backend", "Keeping it Extensible and Modular", "JObjects and Arrays", "Error Handling and Reporting", "Files and Folders".

The range of topics covered is such that it will ensure you at least think about some issues that otherwise may never have crossed your mind. For example, you may not have considered it necessary to make your extension available in other languages, but in the chapter on "Multilingual Recipes" James shows that it is incredibly easy to make your extension language-aware, so even if you're not going to provide a Slovakian or Sanskrit translation you can at least ensure that your extension will support those languages (should someone out there want to do the translation work for you — which is often what happens with Joomla! extensions).

A brief summary of the content of each chapter, with a few highlights picked out, follows:

"The Session and the User": recipes cover how to use session data and how to find out information about the current user (whether guest or logged in), restricting user access based on privilege and using a user's parameters.

"Multilingual Recipes": how to ensure your extensions can support other languages, and also how to provide a translation (if you're gifted that way!)

"Interaction and Styling": applying CSS, Javascript, Ajax and MooTools to enhance your extension. This does not cover what CSS is and how to style a page, but rather how to ensure you plug CSS into your pages correctly using Joomla!

"Customizing the Document": ways of modifying the response by working with the Joomla! JDocument object. The most interesting recipes cover how to create PDF and RSS or Atom feeds from your component. This chapter is a little hard to get into as so little context is provided, but it is assumed that the reader will already have that context from a fuller knowledge of how Joomla! extensions are designed and developed.

"Customizing the Backend": provides a useful set of recipes so you can customize the backend (or administration element) of your component. James covers useful items such as disabling the menu bar (needed if the user is currently editing the configuration, so they cannot for example logout when half-way through an operation), creating a filter header (like the article filtering by section/category in the in-built content component) and how to enable tabular data to be ordered (by licking on the table header).

"Keeping it Extensible and Modular": looks at how to use Component Based Development the make it easier to develop and ensure extensions are more flexible. One very useful recipe shows you how to write a search plugin for your component; a further set of recipes describe how to manage component parameters (enabling your users to configure the behavior of your component through the backend).

"JObjects and Arrays": "Error Handling and Reporting": "Files and Folders": The final three chapters cover some fundamental concepts and provide recipes that explain how to manipulate data, manage errors and deal with files and folders.

I personally have extensive experience of building web sites using Joomla! but have no experience in developing extensions. However as a software professional I have several years experience of software development, and will find this book very useful as I start to become more involved in developing extensions for Joomla!

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sparky Anduril writes "In Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook James Kennard has written an accessible and easy-to-read book to help anyone who is writing (or plans to write) extensions for the popular open source content management system, Joomla! (specifically for version 1.5). It is available as a paperback or PDF eBook." Read on for the rest of Jonathan's review. Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook author James Kennard pages 360 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9 reviewer Jonathan West ISBN 978-1-847198-14-3 summary Recipes for developing extensions with Joomla! 1.5 This is not an introduction to writing extensions for Joomla! For example, it does not describe the architecture of extensions, nor does it suggest how you should go about designing or developing extensions. The book does not claim to do this and you will need to look elsewhere if you need introductory material on that subject.

What this book does provide however is a number of "recipes" that developers can use to solve common problems when developing extensions for Joomla! As such it is a very useful resource that can be used in two ways: the inexperienced developer will want to read through the entire book chapter by chapter, to understand the issues they will need to consider. The more experienced developer will want to use this book as a reference book, dipping in when they encounter a particular problem or face a particular task.

The first thing to say is that (perhaps unusually for a software developer) James can write! His English is clear and I cannot imagine anyone having any complaints about his grammar. This means that despite being a technical reference the book is a pleasure to read.

Each recipe is laid out in the same format (as you would expect from any good cookbook!) The title of the recipe is followed by an explanation of the problem or task. "Getting ready" lays out what you must do before getting to the body of the recipe. "How to do it..." is laid out as a set of code statements with a brief explanation. "How it works..." provides more explanation on why to do what the recipe says, often accompanied by example data. "There's more..." lays out additional things to consider, perhaps more you can do with the recipe or alternative ways of achieving the same end. Where they are alternatives, James is generally very careful to explain the pros and cons of each approach. "See also" provides a cross-reference to related recipes in the book.

The first chapter is an essential introduction to getting involved in the Joomla! open source community through JoomlaCode.org. James explains how to create a new project and manage that project. The chapter concludes by explaining the use of TortoiseSVN for managing the source code of your project. I found that the explanation of the top-level folder structure and the use of branches within SVN was particularly illuminating.

The next two chapters provide further general background: chapter two provides recipes to ensure your extensions remain secure and chapter three describes how to work with the database. While James does not explain the underlying security issues (e.g. he does not describe what SQL injection is and why it may comprise security), the recipes provided (that address keeping your SQL safe, ensuring filenames and folders are safe and that you ensure that request data does not pose a threat) are easy to follow and I was able to work out why they should be used. The chapter on Working with the Database explains how to construct and execute SQL queries and the use of the Joomla!-specific JTable object. While I am familiar with working with SQL, this chapter was an eye-opener to me as it shows very clearly how working with the database under the Joomla! framework is different from conventional approaches, and how the JTable object makes it very easy to manipulate the database.

The remaining chapters of the book each focus in on a particular area. James covers the following topics: "The Session and the User", "Multilingual Recipes", "Interaction and Styling", "Customizing the Document", "Customizing the Backend", "Keeping it Extensible and Modular", "JObjects and Arrays", "Error Handling and Reporting", "Files and Folders".

The range of topics covered is such that it will ensure you at least think about some issues that otherwise may never have crossed your mind. For example, you may not have considered it necessary to make your extension available in other languages, but in the chapter on "Multilingual Recipes" James shows that it is incredibly easy to make your extension language-aware, so even if you're not going to provide a Slovakian or Sanskrit translation you can at least ensure that your extension will support those languages (should someone out there want to do the translation work for you — which is often what happens with Joomla! extensions).

A brief summary of the content of each chapter, with a few highlights picked out, follows:

"The Session and the User": recipes cover how to use session data and how to find out information about the current user (whether guest or logged in), restricting user access based on privilege and using a user's parameters.

"Multilingual Recipes": how to ensure your extensions can support other languages, and also how to provide a translation (if you're gifted that way!)

"Interaction and Styling": applying CSS, Javascript, Ajax and MooTools to enhance your extension. This does not cover what CSS is and how to style a page, but rather how to ensure you plug CSS into your pages correctly using Joomla!

"Customizing the Document": ways of modifying the response by working with the Joomla! JDocument object. The most interesting recipes cover how to create PDF and RSS or Atom feeds from your component. This chapter is a little hard to get into as so little context is provided, but it is assumed that the reader will already have that context from a fuller knowledge of how Joomla! extensions are designed and developed.

"Customizing the Backend": provides a useful set of recipes so you can customize the backend (or administration element) of your component. James covers useful items such as disabling the menu bar (needed if the user is currently editing the configuration, so they cannot for example logout when half-way through an operation), creating a filter header (like the article filtering by section/category in the in-built content component) and how to enable tabular data to be ordered (by licking on the table header).

"Keeping it Extensible and Modular": looks at how to use Component Based Development the make it easier to develop and ensure extensions are more flexible. One very useful recipe shows you how to write a search plugin for your component; a further set of recipes describe how to manage component parameters (enabling your users to configure the behavior of your component through the backend).

"JObjects and Arrays": "Error Handling and Reporting": "Files and Folders": The final three chapters cover some fundamental concepts and provide recipes that explain how to manipulate data, manage errors and deal with files and folders.

I personally have extensive experience of building web sites using Joomla! but have no experience in developing extensions. However as a software professional I have several years experience of software development, and will find this book very useful as I start to become more involved in developing extensions for Joomla!

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

itwbennett writes "Underwhelmed by the iPad? Don't give up on tablets just yet, says blogger Peter Smith. MSI has a tablet coming in the second half of 2010 that measures up on price and size and addresses a lot of the iPad's most noted shortcomings. 'The iPad runs iPhone OS while the MSI runs Android,' writes Smith. 'That means the MSI will multitask of course, and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain). It has a camera. It's running on an Nvidia Tegra2 chip which Ars Technica suggests puts it on par with the iPad's A4 as far as computing horsepower. And of course Android doesn't live in a walled garden.'" The post notes that the MSI device does not support multitouch in its built-in apps. Still, would an Android-powered iPad-alike tempt you?

Update: 01/29 17:58 GMT by KD : Dave Altavilla suggests Hot Hardware's coverage of Asus's recently announced tablet, also based on the Tegra2 chip.

Seahawk was one of several readers to write in with news of Denmark's decision to embrace ODF. "On Friday morning Denmark decided to choose ODF over Microsoft's OOXML. For now the decision is only effective for governmental institutions, but regions and municipalities will most likely follow some time in the future. The decision has unfolded over a period of four years, and many open source advocates were fearing the worst, but it looks like the minister finally caved in and listened to what a lot of people were saying." While in transition away from Microsoft Office formats, the Danes may find use for this new OpenOffice integration guide (sent in by reader AdeleWard).

An anonymous reader writes "The long-awaited Russian stealth fighter, codenamed PAK FA or T-50, has had its first test flight today. This Google translation of a Russian article has a photo of the jet. Production is supposed to begin in 2015; the AP reports that India is helping with development. It's reportedly designed to compete with America's F-22 (first flight: 1997). Relatedly, according to Wikipedia, Japan is planning to fly its own stealth fighter, the ATD-X, which we have previously discussed, in 2011."

Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that a cracking algorithm using brute force methods can analyze the entire DES 56-bit keyspace with a throughput of over 280 billion keys per second, the highest-known benchmark speeds for 56-bit DES decryption and can accomplish a key recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even with GPU acceleration, in less than three days using a single, hardware-accelerated server with a cluster of 176 FPGAs. The massively parallel algorithm iteratively decrypts fixed-size blocks of data to find keys that decrypt into ASCII numbers. Candidate keys that are found in this way can then be more thoroughly tested to determine which candidate key is correct." Update by timothy, 2010-01-29 19:05 GMT: Reader Stefan Baumgart writes to point out prior brute-force methods using reprogrammable chips, including Copacobana (PDF), have achieved even shorter cracking times for DES-56. See also this 2005 book review of Brute Force, about the EFF's distributed DES-breaking effort that succeeded in 1997 in cracking a DES-encrypted message. "'This DES cracking algorithm demonstrates a practical, scalable approach to accelerated cryptography,' says David Hulton, an expert in code cracking and cryptography. 'Previous methods of acceleration using clustered CPUs show increasingly poor results due to non-linear power consumption and escalating system costs as more CPUs are added. Using FPGAs allows us to devote exactly the amount of silicon resources needed to meet performance and cost goals, without incurring significant parallel processing overhead.' Although 56-bit DES is now considered obsolete, having been replaced by newer and more secure Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption methods, DES continues to serve an important role in cryptographic research, and in the development and auditing of current and future block-based encryption algorithms."

couchslug writes with this excerpt from the not-yet-paywalled New York Times: "President Obama will end NASA's return mission to the moon and turn to private companies to launch astronauts into space when he unveils his budget request to Congress next week, an administration official said Thursday. The shift would 'put NASA on a more sustainable and ambitious path to the future' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the changes have angered some members of Congress, particularly from Texas, the location of the Johnson Space Center, and Florida, the location of the Kennedy Space Center. 'My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program,' Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement." If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization.

mariushm writes "The Australian Sex Party (ASP) said Wednesday that the Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. It comes just a week after it was found that material with depictions of females ejaculating during orgasm are now Refused Classification and Australian Customs directed to confiscate it. The National Classification Code dictates that anything that describes or depicts a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not) in a way that is likely to cause offense to a reasonable adult is Refused Classification." First they crack down on cartoon porn, and now this. It must be arbitrary sex law week in Australia.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "There seems to be a bit of confusion in RIAA-land these days, caused by the only 2 cases that ever went to trial, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset in Minnesota, and SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, in Boston. In both cases, the RIAA has recently asked for extensions of time. In Thomas-Rasset, they've asked for more time to make up their mind as to whether to accept the reduced verdict of $54,000 the judge has offered them, and in Tenenbaum they've twice asked for more time to prepare their papers opposing Tenenbaum's motion for remittitur. What is more, it has been reported that after the reduction of the verdict, the RIAA offered to settle with Ms. Thomas-Rasset for $25,000, but she turned them down."

Ever get the urge to look at pornographic drawings of famous cartoon children? Neither do I, but 28-year-old Kurt James Milner did, and that's what got him registered as a sex offender. Police received a tip about the pornographic material and eventually found images featuring child characters from The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls on Milner's computer. Back in 2008, a Supreme Court judge in Australia ruled that cartoons in which child characters engage in sexual acts is child pornography. Milner said he downloaded the images to show them to his friend 'because he believed they were funny.' Guess it's not so funny now.

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide published by Addison-Wesley Professional, returns in its seventh edition, now covering OpenGL up to and including version 3.1. The Red Book, so called because of its deep red cover, is the most-well known, authoritative introduction to the OpenGL graphics API. In this review I want to take you on a whirlwind tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL Programming Guide (Seventh Edition) – The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1 author Dave Shreiner, The Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group pages 883 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer Martin Ecke ISBN 0-321-55262-8 summary The Red Book remains the authoritative guide to OpenGL. The Red Book is aimed at the beginning to intermediate graphics programmer that is not yet familiar with OpenGL. It assumes a basic background in computer graphics theory and working knowledge of the C programming language. Just as the previous edition of the book, the seventh edition is incredibly comprehensive and thorough. It contains explanations of pretty much every feature OpenGL has to offer, even the more obscure and rarely used ones. This is good in the sense that it's a fairly complete book, but it can also be somewhat overwhelming for a beginner when confronted with a book that weighs in at almost 900 pages. However, the good news is that the material is presented in a logical progression and even a novice will get up to speed with the basics of OpenGL after reading only the first few chapters of the book. Some of the early chapters in the book contain a few more advanced sections mostly explaining new features that got introduced with OpenGL 3.1. These sections are conveniently marked as advanced and can probably be skipped on a first read-through of the material.

The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the basic concepts of OpenGL and describes the rendering pipeline model used in the API. GLUT, a cross-platform library that allows easily creating OpenGL applications, is also shortly discussed together with a program that shows GLUT in action. The following chapters proceed to explain the basic geometric primitives, such as lines and polygons, supported by OpenGL and how to render them in different positions and from different viewpoints using the various OpenGL matrix stacks. Also the basics of using colors, lighting, framebuffer blending, and fog are discussed.

Chapter seven contains a description of display lists, a unique and with OpenGL 3.1 deprecated feature of OpenGL that allows to store OpenGL API calls for efficient multiple uses later on in a program. Chapter eight then moves on to discuss what an image is for OpenGL, and most notably covers pixel buffer objects, a somewhat recent addition to OpenGL. The discussion of images in chapter eight brings us straight to chapter nine on texture mapping, one of the largest and arguably most important chapters in the book. Everything you need to know about textures is discussed, from specifying texture images in uncompressed and compressed form to applying textures to triangles using the various kinds of supported texture filters. Also depth textures and their application in the form of shadow maps and – new in the seventh edition – floating-point textures and texture arrays added in OpenGL 3.0 are presented.

In chapter ten the authors discuss the buffers that make up the framebuffer, such as the color buffer, depth buffer, and stencil buffer. This chapter summarizes some of the things already presented in the earlier chapters and then describes the various framebuffer operations in more detail. Chapter eleven and twelve are on the tools provided by GLU, the GL utility library, in particular tesselators, quadrics, evaluators, and NURBs. GLU is nowadays rarely ever used in production code, so these chapters mostly demonstrate just how complete the Red Book is in its coverage of OpenGL. This also applies to chapter thirteen on selection and feedback, which are rarely used features, mostly because of the lack of hardware acceleration in today's GPUs.

Finally, chapter fourteen is a collection of topics that didn't fit into the other chapters, such as error handling and the OpenGL extension mechanism. Additionally, this chapter presents various higher level techniques and tricks, for example how to implement a simple fade effect, how to render antialiased text, and some examples of using the stencil buffer. The final chapter of the book is a discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL, for short). In the seventh edition this chapter has been updated to version 1.30 and 1.40 of GLSL, as required by OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1, respectively. Even though the OpenGL API functions required to use GLSL are presented, this is only a rough overview of how programmable shaders are used in OpenGL. For a more detailed description of GLSL the reader is referred to the book "OpenGL Shading Language. Third Edition" also called the Orange Book.

The book closes with quite a few appendices on the order of operations in the OpenGL rendering pipeline, the state variables that can be queried, the interaction of OpenGL with the operating system-specific windowing systems, a brief discussion of homogeneous coordinates as used in OpenGL, and some programming tips. Also a reference of the built-in GLSL variables and functions is included.

The book contains a large number of images and diagrams, all of them in black and white except for 32 color plates in the middle of the book. The illustrations are of high quality and generally help make the explained concepts and techniques easier to understand. Most of the color plates depict spheres, teapots, and other simple geometric objects, so they aren't overly eye-catching but do serve their purpose of showing what can be achieved with OpenGL.

With OpenGL 3.1 deprecating many older API features of OpenGL in favor of more modern alternatives, the seventh edition of the Red Book seems to have a bit of a split personality at times. If you're only interested in functionality not deprecated in 3.1 you can skip entire chapters, such as the chapter on display lists or fixed-function lighting. Of course, the knowledge of matrix stacks and how to use transformations is still relevant, but the corresponding OpenGL functions have been deprecated in favor of doing all the transformation math in the vertex shader or, what most people have been doing anyway, using your own matrix structures/classes on the CPU. The situation is similar for many of the other deprecated features (such as fixed-function lighting, color index mode, immediate mode, ...) that are still described in the book. I think the time is right to combine the Red Book with the Orange Book, removing any discussion of deprecated features, to have a book that focuses solely on the modern approach to graphics programming, which is mostly based on shaders. I can only hope such an OpenGL 3.1-only focused book will see the light of day soon.

All in all, the Red Book remains the definitive guide to OpenGL. Apart from being a good introduction, it also contains many interesting tips and tricks that make the experienced OpenGL programmer come back to it often. If you've read through the Red Book and the Orange Book in their entirety you pretty much know everything there is to know about OpenGL.

The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL Programming Guide 7th Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide published by Addison-Wesley Professional, returns in its seventh edition, now covering OpenGL up to and including version 3.1. The Red Book, so called because of its deep red cover, is the most-well known, authoritative introduction to the OpenGL graphics API. In this review I want to take you on a whirlwind tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL Programming Guide (Seventh Edition) – The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1 author Dave Shreiner, The Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group pages 883 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer Martin Ecke ISBN 0-321-55262-8 summary The Red Book remains the authoritative guide to OpenGL. The Red Book is aimed at the beginning to intermediate graphics programmer that is not yet familiar with OpenGL. It assumes a basic background in computer graphics theory and working knowledge of the C programming language. Just as the previous edition of the book, the seventh edition is incredibly comprehensive and thorough. It contains explanations of pretty much every feature OpenGL has to offer, even the more obscure and rarely used ones. This is good in the sense that it's a fairly complete book, but it can also be somewhat overwhelming for a beginner when confronted with a book that weighs in at almost 900 pages. However, the good news is that the material is presented in a logical progression and even a novice will get up to speed with the basics of OpenGL after reading only the first few chapters of the book. Some of the early chapters in the book contain a few more advanced sections mostly explaining new features that got introduced with OpenGL 3.1. These sections are conveniently marked as advanced and can probably be skipped on a first read-through of the material.

The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the basic concepts of OpenGL and describes the rendering pipeline model used in the API. GLUT, a cross-platform library that allows easily creating OpenGL applications, is also shortly discussed together with a program that shows GLUT in action. The following chapters proceed to explain the basic geometric primitives, such as lines and polygons, supported by OpenGL and how to render them in different positions and from different viewpoints using the various OpenGL matrix stacks. Also the basics of using colors, lighting, framebuffer blending, and fog are discussed.

Chapter seven contains a description of display lists, a unique and with OpenGL 3.1 deprecated feature of OpenGL that allows to store OpenGL API calls for efficient multiple uses later on in a program. Chapter eight then moves on to discuss what an image is for OpenGL, and most notably covers pixel buffer objects, a somewhat recent addition to OpenGL. The discussion of images in chapter eight brings us straight to chapter nine on texture mapping, one of the largest and arguably most important chapters in the book. Everything you need to know about textures is discussed, from specifying texture images in uncompressed and compressed form to applying textures to triangles using the various kinds of supported texture filters. Also depth textures and their application in the form of shadow maps and – new in the seventh edition – floating-point textures and texture arrays added in OpenGL 3.0 are presented.

In chapter ten the authors discuss the buffers that make up the framebuffer, such as the color buffer, depth buffer, and stencil buffer. This chapter summarizes some of the things already presented in the earlier chapters and then describes the various framebuffer operations in more detail. Chapter eleven and twelve are on the tools provided by GLU, the GL utility library, in particular tesselators, quadrics, evaluators, and NURBs. GLU is nowadays rarely ever used in production code, so these chapters mostly demonstrate just how complete the Red Book is in its coverage of OpenGL. This also applies to chapter thirteen on selection and feedback, which are rarely used features, mostly because of the lack of hardware acceleration in today's GPUs.

Finally, chapter fourteen is a collection of topics that didn't fit into the other chapters, such as error handling and the OpenGL extension mechanism. Additionally, this chapter presents various higher level techniques and tricks, for example how to implement a simple fade effect, how to render antialiased text, and some examples of using the stencil buffer. The final chapter of the book is a discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL, for short). In the seventh edition this chapter has been updated to version 1.30 and 1.40 of GLSL, as required by OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1, respectively. Even though the OpenGL API functions required to use GLSL are presented, this is only a rough overview of how programmable shaders are used in OpenGL. For a more detailed description of GLSL the reader is referred to the book "OpenGL Shading Language. Third Edition" also called the Orange Book.

The book closes with quite a few appendices on the order of operations in the OpenGL rendering pipeline, the state variables that can be queried, the interaction of OpenGL with the operating system-specific windowing systems, a brief discussion of homogeneous coordinates as used in OpenGL, and some programming tips. Also a reference of the built-in GLSL variables and functions is included.

The book contains a large number of images and diagrams, all of them in black and white except for 32 color plates in the middle of the book. The illustrations are of high quality and generally help make the explained concepts and techniques easier to understand. Most of the color plates depict spheres, teapots, and other simple geometric objects, so they aren't overly eye-catching but do serve their purpose of showing what can be achieved with OpenGL.

With OpenGL 3.1 deprecating many older API features of OpenGL in favor of more modern alternatives, the seventh edition of the Red Book seems to have a bit of a split personality at times. If you're only interested in functionality not deprecated in 3.1 you can skip entire chapters, such as the chapter on display lists or fixed-function lighting. Of course, the knowledge of matrix stacks and how to use transformations is still relevant, but the corresponding OpenGL functions have been deprecated in favor of doing all the transformation math in the vertex shader or, what most people have been doing anyway, using your own matrix structures/classes on the CPU. The situation is similar for many of the other deprecated features (such as fixed-function lighting, color index mode, immediate mode, ...) that are still described in the book. I think the time is right to combine the Red Book with the Orange Book, removing any discussion of deprecated features, to have a book that focuses solely on the modern approach to graphics programming, which is mostly based on shaders. I can only hope such an OpenGL 3.1-only focused book will see the light of day soon.

All in all, the Red Book remains the definitive guide to OpenGL. Apart from being a good introduction, it also contains many interesting tips and tricks that make the experienced OpenGL programmer come back to it often. If you've read through the Red Book and the Orange Book in their entirety you pretty much know everything there is to know about OpenGL.

The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL Programming Guide 7th Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

itwbennett writes "On Friday, George Hotz, best known for cracking Apple's iPhone, said he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3 after five weeks of work with 'very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.' Days later, he has now released the exploit, saying in a blog post that he wanted to see what others could do with it. 'Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,' he wrote. 'I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night.'" Reader MBCook points out an article written by Nate Lawson "explaining how the hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."

Hugh Pickens writes "In late October, Newsday put its web site behind a pay wall, one of the first non-business newspapers to take the pay wall plunge, so Newsday has been followed with interest in media circles anxious to learn how the NY Times own plans to put up a pay wall may work out. So how successful has Newsday's paywall been? The NY Observer reports that three months into the experiment only 35 people have signed up to pay $5 a week to get unfettered access to newsday.com. Newsday's web site redesign and relaunch reportedly cost about $4 million and the 35 people who've signed up have earned Newsday about $9,000. Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic. 'That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,' said Jimenez to his assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday employees. The web project has not been a favorite among Newsday employees who have recently been asked to take a 10 percent pay cut. 'The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks,' says one staffer. 'It's an abomination,' adds another."

Following up on our discussion yesterday of annoying game distribution platforms, Ubisoft has announced the details of their Online Services Platform, which they will use to distribute and administer future PC game releases. The platform will require internet access in order to play installed games, saved games will be stored remotely, and the game you're playing will even pause and try to reconnect if your connection is lost during play. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "This seems like such a bizarre, bewildering backward step. Of course we haven't experienced it yet, but based on Ubi’s own description of the system so many concerns arise. Yes, certainly, most people have the internet all the time on their PCs. But not all people. So already a percentage of the audience is lost. Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there's the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you. Or any of the dozens of other situations when the internet is not available to a player. But further, there are people who do not wish to let a publisher know their private gaming habits. People who do not wish to report in to a company they’ve no affiliation with, nor accountability to, whenever they play a game they’ve legally bought. People who don’t want their save data stored remotely. This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games."

OBG writes "A Nebraska native charged with taking part in a massive cyber-attack against the Scientology website will be spending the next year behind bars. 20-year-old Brian Thomas Mettenbrink will plead guilty to the charge of unauthorized access of a protected computer for his involvement in the denial of service attack, which was orchestrated by the online group 'Anonymous.' Mettenbrink's is the second successful prosecution connected to the 'Anonymous' attacks. Last year, Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for attacks on Scientology sites."

OBG writes "A Nebraska native charged with taking part in a massive cyber-attack against the Scientology website will be spending the next year behind bars. 20-year-old Brian Thomas Mettenbrink will plead guilty to the charge of unauthorized access of a protected computer for his involvement in the denial of service attack, which was orchestrated by the online group 'Anonymous.' Mettenbrink's is the second successful prosecution connected to the 'Anonymous' attacks. Last year, Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for attacks on Scientology sites."

johncadengo writes "General Motors said today that it has struck a preliminary deal to sell Saab to Spyker Cars, a tiny Dutch maker of high-end sports cars, saving the Swedish automaker from what seemed like certain extinction after previous bids for it collapsed. A previous bid from Spyker was rejected by GM in late December because GM was uncomfortable with Spyker's Russian backers. The biggest investor in Spyker is the Russian bank Convers Group, which is controlled by Alexander Antonov. In March, Mr. Antonov was shot seven times and reportedly lost a finger in an attempt on his life in Moscow. No arrests have been made. His son Vladimir, 34, is a top executive at Convers and the chairman of Spyker." GM is taking a bath on the deal, financially speaking.

snydeq writes "Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5's functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision course, the latest of which involves Apple potentially courting Microsoft to tap Bing as the iPhone's default search."

snydeq writes "Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5's functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision course, the latest of which involves Apple potentially courting Microsoft to tap Bing as the iPhone's default search."

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says that Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet over six years ago, will 'no longer be a fully mobile robot,' and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform."

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says that Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet over six years ago, will 'no longer be a fully mobile robot,' and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform."

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says that Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet over six years ago, will 'no longer be a fully mobile robot,' and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform."

click2005 notes an article in The Register calling into question the one piece of hard evidence that has been put forward to pin the Google cyberattacks on China. It was claimed that a CRC algorithm found in the Aurora attack code was particular to Chinese-language developers. Now evidence emerges that this algorithm has been widely known for years and used in English-language books and websites. Wired has a post introducing the Pentagon's recently initiated effort to identify the "digital DNA" of hackers and/or their tools; this program is part of a wide-ranging effort by the US government to find useful means of deterring cyberattacks. This latter NY Times article notes that Google may have found the best deterrence so far — the threat to withdraw its services from the Chinese market.

Ten Ton Hammer has posted the transcript from an interview with Dr. Hilarie Cash, co-founder of the "reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program," a relatively new clinic that deals with adults who feel that they are addicted to video games. The interview contains some.. interesting nuggets of wisdom. If you want to avoid addiction, you'd better spend less than two hours per day on online entertainment! The good news is that she doesn't recommend beating people. "When people come, they come for 45 days. It is only for adults; patients must be 18 or older. When they first come, they come for a minimum 2 days to be interviewed and to interview us, because we don't want anyone there who doesn't want to be there. So if they decide they want to be there then they stay for 45 days or longer if they choose. During that time they don't have access to the internet. The idea is that it takes at least 30 days for the brain to make some adjustments it needs to make to get over this addiction, so the brain can begin to rewire back to normal. During that time we are helping them look at why they got addicted, what motivated their addiction and we're assessing to see what skills they are lacking so they can be successful in their adult lives. We try to make a good start at helping to build those skills."

With the recent release of Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has also decided to try out a new development model dubbed "Lorentz." A blend of both Agile and more traditional "waterfall" development models, the new methodology aims to deliver new features much more quickly while still maintaining backwards compatibility, security, and overall quality. Only time will tell if this is effective, or just another management fad. "If the new approach sounds familiar, that's because Unix and Linux development has attempted similar kinds of release variations for iterating new features while maintaining backwards compatibility. HP-UX, for example, is currently on its HP-UX 11iv3 release, which receives updates several times a year that add incremental new functionality. The Linux 2.6.x kernel gets new releases approximately every three months, which include new features as well."

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.

Major Blud writes "CNN is running an opinion piece on their front page from security technologist Bruce Schneier, in which he suggests that 'In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.' His article is short on sources, and the common belief is that a flaw in IE was the main attack method. Has this come up elsewhere? Schneier continues, 'Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.'"

We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.

We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.

Remember the Russian cop's YouTube narrative on police corruption? Reader Max_W writes with the news that Alexei Dymovsky, the cop whose videos started a movement, was arrested (Google translation; Russian original) on January 22, 2010. He is in prison in the south of Russia. Max_W adds: "It seems only a president is allowed to have a video blog in Russia."

itwbennett writes "The first widespread attack to leverage the Internet Explorer flaw that Microsoft patched in an emergency update Thursday morning has surfaced. By midday Thursday Symantec had spotted hundreds of Web sites that hosted the attack code. The attack installs a Trojan horse program that is able to bypass some security products and then give hackers access to the system, said Joshua Talbot, a security intelligence manager with Symantec. Once it has infected a PC, the Trojan sends a notification e-mail to the attackers, using a US-based, free e-mail service that Symantec declined to name." Relatedly, reader N!NJA was among several to point out that Microsoft has apparently been aware of this flaw since September.

CWmike writes "China on Friday slammed remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Internet freedom worldwide, saying her words harmed US-China relations. Clinton's speech and China's response both come after Google last week said it planned to reverse its long-standing position in China by ending censorship of its Chinese search engine. Google cited increasingly tough censorship and recent cyberattacks on the Gmail accounts of human rights activists for its decision, which it said might force it to close its offices in China altogether. On Thursday in Washington, DC, Clinton unveiled US initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption. The US will support circumvention tools for dissidents whose Internet connections are blocked, she said. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu called for the US 'to respect the facts and stop using the issue of so-called Internet freedom to unreasonably criticize China.' China's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy, the statement said, apparently referring to the issues raised by Google."

After Rambus's settlement deal with Samsung earlier this week, an anonymous reader writes with this snippet: "Memory technology company Rambus rounded out the week with another legal dispute ending in its favor as it fights to defend its patent portfolio. On Friday [the] US International Trade Commission ruled that graphics chip maker Nvidia infringed upon Rambus patents, according to statements released by the two companies on Friday. Rambus has been filing lawsuits against various technology companies for the past decade, claiming they violate patents held by the memory chip designer."

brothke writes "The fact that President Barack Obama has over 7 million Facebook fans, and First Lady Michelle Obama over 650,000 fans, are confirmation that social media has come of age. That is a far cry from former President Bush's comment in 2006 that he used the Google. While it is relatively easy for the President to get millions of followers, the challenge for businesses of all sizes is how to use social media to get fans and followers, and use them to drive business." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. The Social Media Marketing Book author Dan Zarrella pages 224 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0596806606 summary Excellent introduction to social networks and the marketing opportunities on the social web Many spam messages recently have such enticing subjects as 'Make Money on Twitter' or 'Be a Facebook Money Machine'. While those are clearly scam emails, the truth is that social media is a tidal wave. The challenge for everyone, how to get in front of that wave.

At about half the size of a regular book at 224 pages, The Social Media Marketing Book is lean to begin with. Given that about half of its pages are screen prints, one would think that such a book is a sparse approach to the topic. But the book is indeed a highly-tactical guide of significant value to any individual or organization looking to get into social media.

Many are looking to get into social media for either themselves or their business, but are clueless on how to do that. For those, the book provides an easy to understand and implement guide to using the major social networks. This includes information on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn.

The book does a good job of showing the difference between different social media sites, such as pure networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), media sharing (YouTube, Flickr), blogs, microblogging, and bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, Digg) and more.

While others would take three times the books length to make their point, Dan Zarrella is able to do that succinctly and to the point. His real-world experience in the social web is evident throughout the book. It is clear the author is one who is enmeshed in the topic in which he is writing. A lot of books show the promise of what social networks can do, but do not show how to get it done; this book does and shows what it can, and can't do.

The book(TM)s organization places an emphasis on practical use and readability. For the social media newbie, the first two chapters provide a superb synopsis of the history, protocols, and content strategies around social media. The introduction to social media provides the reader with an overview of the use, history, definition, and description of the various types of social media. Each chapter is full of actionable items that the reader can put to immediate use. The book is zero theory and complete actionability around social media.

Zarrella has also done significant research on what makes for a successful social media presence. In chapter 3 on Twitter and microblogging, he writes of the importance of an effective Twitter bio. In the chapter, he also looks at the relationship the content of a user's bio has on the number of followers a user has. He also writes about the relationship between follower number and gender and family roles. For those looking to make the most of Twitter, his paper The Science of ReTweets is a great resource.

Another benefit of The Science of ReTweets and this book is that Zarrella has not a single high-level suggestion that is impossible to put into practice. All of his advice is based on solutions that work. Zarrella's analytical marketing approach is based on science, statistics, experimentation and real data. Quite a novel concept in the world of marketing.

Throughout the book, there is good advice and it tells you what works and does not work. The book is easy to read and it makes significant use of screenshots, which are meant to give the reader a specific visual explanation of the steps they need to take.

In the section on Facebook, Zarrella makes an observation that is crucial to ones success for a business use of Facebook. He notes that for businesses, the best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you. He notes that nearly every company engaged in social media marketing should have a Facebook page, as it can often serve as a central place for the integration of others parts of a campaign.

In chapter 8, on the topic of forums, he reiterates the importance of fans, writing that a business should not underestimate the power of networks of niche forums to drive impressive numbers of visitors to your site. Once again, the best promotion comes not from the business, but from its fans.

One of the mistakes far too many companies have made, and which the book strongly advises against, is the use of forum marketing services. These organizations promise a lot but rarely deliver results. They use myriad bogus accounts to create a false buzz on behalf of the business they are trying to promote. Such an approach only serves to wreck the reputation of the business due to the zero value they post from bogus accounts.

While getting into the social web is important, chapter 10 is the books most important chapter, on the topic of strategy, tactics and practice. A mistake many make is in thinking a social web presence alone is enough, which is far from the truth. The chapter details all of the intricacies of strategy, tactics and practice to make it work. The chapter notes that strategy and tactics are inseparable, and that any successful social network presence will require both.

In an interview, Zarrella observed that the biggest challenge in social media is learning how to incorporate social media into their daily work and life. With Twitter for instance, there are many good marketers who don't Tweet that much, or do for a little while and then stop. It's a marathon, not a sprint and the savvy businesses are going to have the best results when they can learn to integrate social media with what they are already doing.

Overall, The Social Media Marketing Book is an extremely valuable resource on understanding and applying social media for both the individuals, and business. The book is a great introduction that can help you to get started. Once done, you can move onto the next level. Hopefully, Zarrella is working on that book now.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know .

You can purchase The Social Media Marketing Book from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

brothke writes "The fact that President Barack Obama has over 7 million Facebook fans, and First Lady Michelle Obama over 650,000 fans, are confirmation that social media has come of age. That is a far cry from former President Bush's comment in 2006 that he used the Google. While it is relatively easy for the President to get millions of followers, the challenge for businesses of all sizes is how to use social media to get fans and followers, and use them to drive business." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. The Social Media Marketing Book author Dan Zarrella pages 224 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0596806606 summary Excellent introduction to social networks and the marketing opportunities on the social web Many spam messages recently have such enticing subjects as 'Make Money on Twitter' or 'Be a Facebook Money Machine'. While those are clearly scam emails, the truth is that social media is a tidal wave. The challenge for everyone, how to get in front of that wave.

At about half the size of a regular book at 224 pages, The Social Media Marketing Book is lean to begin with. Given that about half of its pages are screen prints, one would think that such a book is a sparse approach to the topic. But the book is indeed a highly-tactical guide of significant value to any individual or organization looking to get into social media.

Many are looking to get into social media for either themselves or their business, but are clueless on how to do that. For those, the book provides an easy to understand and implement guide to using the major social networks. This includes information on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn.

The book does a good job of showing the difference between different social media sites, such as pure networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), media sharing (YouTube, Flickr), blogs, microblogging, and bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, Digg) and more.

While others would take three times the books length to make their point, Dan Zarrella is able to do that succinctly and to the point. His real-world experience in the social web is evident throughout the book. It is clear the author is one who is enmeshed in the topic in which he is writing. A lot of books show the promise of what social networks can do, but do not show how to get it done; this book does and shows what it can, and can't do.

The book(TM)s organization places an emphasis on practical use and readability. For the social media newbie, the first two chapters provide a superb synopsis of the history, protocols, and content strategies around social media. The introduction to social media provides the reader with an overview of the use, history, definition, and description of the various types of social media. Each chapter is full of actionable items that the reader can put to immediate use. The book is zero theory and complete actionability around social media.

Zarrella has also done significant research on what makes for a successful social media presence. In chapter 3 on Twitter and microblogging, he writes of the importance of an effective Twitter bio. In the chapter, he also looks at the relationship the content of a user's bio has on the number of followers a user has. He also writes about the relationship between follower number and gender and family roles. For those looking to make the most of Twitter, his paper The Science of ReTweets is a great resource.

Another benefit of The Science of ReTweets and this book is that Zarrella has not a single high-level suggestion that is impossible to put into practice. All of his advice is based on solutions that work. Zarrella's analytical marketing approach is based on science, statistics, experimentation and real data. Quite a novel concept in the world of marketing.

Throughout the book, there is good advice and it tells you what works and does not work. The book is easy to read and it makes significant use of screenshots, which are meant to give the reader a specific visual explanation of the steps they need to take.

In the section on Facebook, Zarrella makes an observation that is crucial to ones success for a business use of Facebook. He notes that for businesses, the best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you. He notes that nearly every company engaged in social media marketing should have a Facebook page, as it can often serve as a central place for the integration of others parts of a campaign.

In chapter 8, on the topic of forums, he reiterates the importance of fans, writing that a business should not underestimate the power of networks of niche forums to drive impressive numbers of visitors to your site. Once again, the best promotion comes not from the business, but from its fans.

One of the mistakes far too many companies have made, and which the book strongly advises against, is the use of forum marketing services. These organizations promise a lot but rarely deliver results. They use myriad bogus accounts to create a false buzz on behalf of the business they are trying to promote. Such an approach only serves to wreck the reputation of the business due to the zero value they post from bogus accounts.

While getting into the social web is important, chapter 10 is the books most important chapter, on the topic of strategy, tactics and practice. A mistake many make is in thinking a social web presence alone is enough, which is far from the truth. The chapter details all of the intricacies of strategy, tactics and practice to make it work. The chapter notes that strategy and tactics are inseparable, and that any successful social network presence will require both.

In an interview, Zarrella observed that the biggest challenge in social media is learning how to incorporate social media into their daily work and life. With Twitter for instance, there are many good marketers who don't Tweet that much, or do for a little while and then stop. It's a marathon, not a sprint and the savvy businesses are going to have the best results when they can learn to integrate social media with what they are already doing.

Overall, The Social Media Marketing Book is an extremely valuable resource on understanding and applying social media for both the individuals, and business. The book is a great introduction that can help you to get started. Once done, you can move onto the next level. Hopefully, Zarrella is working on that book now.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know .

You can purchase The Social Media Marketing Book from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage under the guise that it was critical security update will go forward, but not as a class action. A federal judge has refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant that anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 could join the case without having to hire an attorney. As Windows XP was easily the most popular operating system at the time, the ruling means Redmond has managed to avoid hundreds of millions in potential damages."

Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."

mliu writes "In what is sure to be a blow to the already beleaguered stand-alone GPS market, Nokia, the global leader in smartphone market share, has released a fully offline-enabled free GPS navigation and mapping application for its Symbian smartphones. Furthermore, the application also includes Lonely Planet and Michelin guides. Unfortunately, the N900, which is beloved by geeks for its Maemo Linux-based operating system, has not seen any of the navigation love so far. With Google's release of Google Navigation for Android smartphones, and now Nokia doing one better and releasing an offline-enabled navigation application, hopefully this is the start of a trend where this becomes an expected component of any smartphone."

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."