Slashdot Mirror

Tyketto writes "The United States Air Force has taken the first public step in the search for a replacement of the Boeing VC-25, also known as Air Force One, saying it is no longer cost effective to operate and modernize the two 19-year-old VC-25s, which are converted Boeing 747-200s. Airbus has already submitted data for the A380, and while Boeing has had the Air Force One contract for nearly 50 years, delays with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Boeing 747-8, as well as the KC-X Tanker competition, may see the USAF looking to Europe for its next presidential aircraft."

Got To Get Me A Git writes "Distributed version control systems (DVCS) seem to be the next big thing for open source software development. Many projects have already adopted a DVCS and many others are in the process of migrating. There are a lot of major advantages to using a DVCS, but the task of migrating from one system to another appears to be a formidable challenge. The Perl Foundation's recent switch to Git took over a year to execute. The GNOME project is planning its own migration strategy right now after discovering that a significant majority of the project's developers favor Git. Perhaps some of the projects that are working on transitions from other mainstream version control systems can pool their resources and collaborate to make some standardized tools and migration best practices documentation. Does such a thing already exist? Are any folks out there in the Slashsphere working on migrating their own project or company to a DVCS? I'd appreciate some feedback from other readers about what works and what doesn't."

deltaromeo points out a BBC report calling the UK's law requiring ISPs to retain users' emails for at least a year an "attack on rights." The article also points out financial and technical flaws with the plan (which we first discussed in October). TechCrunch goes a step further, detailing how it conflicts with other governmental goals. Quoting: "...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other. Are we also expected to think that the consumers using online services are not going to be put off from engaging in the boom of 'sharing' that Web 2.0 created? How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity? That may not happen, but the mere suggestion that your email is no longer private would serve to kill the UK population's relish for new media stone dead, and with it large swathes of the developing online economy."

darthcamaro writes "Remember the big DNS flaw that Dan Kaminsky 'discovered' last year? Well, it looks like another flaw in DNS has just been patched. This time it's an item that affects DNSSEC, which was supposed to be the savior for the Kaminsky flaw. The good news, though, is that this time, the issue is relatively minor and DNS has already been patched. 'The flaw is specific to certain usages of DNSSEC,' Joao Damas, senior programming manager of the ISC told InternetNews. 'It is strongly advised that all BIND DNSSEC deployments update in case they are using the particular pattern affected (DSA keys in some cases) and to prevent coming across the problem in the future unexpectedly.'"

Michael J. Ross writes "After installing and learning the basics of the content management system Drupal, many Web developers do not know how to best proceed from there. They may realize that much of the programming potential of Drupal — and thus the earning potential of Drupal developers — is derived from the use of community-contributed modules that greatly extend Drupal's power. But there are thousands of such modules, with no objective direction as to which ones are best suited for particular tasks, and what bugs and other flaws could trip up the developer. These programmers need a thorough guide as to which modules are the most promising for the development of the most common types of Web sites. A new book, Using Drupal, aims to fill this need." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Using Drupal author Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins pages 490 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596515805 summary Key contributed Drupal modules put to use creating sample sites. Published by O'Reilly Media on 16 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0596515805, the book is authored by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins — all of whom are affiliated with Lullabot and are actively involved in the Drupal community and knowledgeable about Drupal's core and plug-in modules. Despite the old adage about having too many cooks in the kitchen, a technical book of this nature should benefit from having half a dozen authors, since each one will have his or her fortes, and the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, as a result of this complementary expertise.

This title appears to be O'Reilly's first — and, as of this writing, only — Drupal book. This is in no way astonishing, given that O'Reilly has never been known for pushing books too quickly through development and production, simply to gain "first mover advantage." Rather, they generally work to create higher-quality efforts that will better stand the test of time — unlike the "shovel" books that some other publishers tend to push out the door, with less coherence and more errata. As a consequence, in the technical libraries of veteran programmers, one tends to see a disproportionately high number of book covers sporting pictures of animals.

On the publisher's Web page for Using Drupal, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, colophon, errata (of which there are currently several), a link for purchasing the book in electronic form (in formats such as PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket), and a link for viewing the book immediately online, in the Safari Books Online system. There is a simple forum for the book, which currently contains seven posts, three of which already have replies from one of the book's authors and from an O'Reilly community manager. There is a browse system that allows the visitor to read portions of each section of each chapter, and thus preview the book before purchasing it. It even includes the illustrations within each previewed section, but for some reason does not include the figure numbers within the captions.

The authors have created their own site dedicated to the book, where visitors will find brief author biographies largely similar to those found at the very end of the book, with links to the authors' profile pages on Drupal.org. Lastly, there is a download page for the source code, which comprises a copy of Drupal 6, all of the contributed modules and themes needed to complete the hands-on exercises, and the supplementary resource files for those exercises, such as logos and product images. There is a change log for the download file, and yet no mention on the page — or even in the book itself, as far as I can tell — as to which version in the 6.x release series was used for the book and in the download package.

Oddly, neither the publisher's site nor the authors' site appears to mention the free downloadable chapter (Chapter 9, "Event Management"), although it is offered in an article posted in the blog section of Do It with Drupal.

After a foreword by Dries Buytaert — Drupal's founder and project lead — the book continues for 490 pages in total, organized into eleven chapters and three appendices. Nine of the chapters each begin with a description of a case study that will be used for illustrative purposes, followed by some implementation notes, which includes discussion of the candidate modules that could be used for this particular case study, and the trade-offs among them. The contributed modules that are chosen for the implementation and their capabilities are summarized, and then further explained with hands-on exercises — in which the particular modules are utilized and configured. Each of these nine chapters takes the reader through the development of a complete Web site, and is wrapped up with discussion of additional modules applicable to the kind of Web site being created. In Chapters 2 through 10, the case studies are: a simple Drupal site that supports client editing, a job posting board, a product reviews site, a wiki, a site for managing publishing workflow, a photo gallery, multilingual sites, an entertainment events management site, and an online store. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Drupal — covering modules, users, nodes, organizational schemes, and content types — preceded by a brief history of content management systems. Chapter 11 explores site theming, with details on the files and other elements that make up a theme, and how to customize them. The book's three appendices cover installing and upgrading Drupal, choosing the right modules for a job, and a list of the modules and themes used in the book.

The book's material is current with Drupal version 6, but should be of some value to any developer opting, for whatever reason, to stick with version 5. Speaking of versions, the authors should have mentioned which version of Drupal they chose, including the minor release number. The Drupal code in the aforesaid download package indicates that the chosen version is 6.4.

This book is unique, in that most if not all other Drupal books on the market are either introductory in nature — which at best devote only a single chapter to discussing third-party modules contributed by developers — or more advanced, specializing in a particular subject area, such as Drupal site security or e-commerce. Using Drupal, just as the title indicates, examines the detailed usage of best-of-breed modules to accomplish specific goals that one often encounters as a Web developer.

One of the most valuable aspects of software development books written by veteran programmers, is their discussions of various solutions to a particular problem — regardless of its size or complexity — and the reasons why they chose one approach instead of any of the others. Using Drupal is no exception. The authors examine the advantages and disadvantages of various third-party modules, even those that were not chosen for implementing the sample Web sites.

In any computer programming book, screenshots and other figures can be most helpful to the reader, because they reinforce the narrative descriptions of the cumulative results of all the steps up to that point. The screenshots are even valuable to someone following along on his own computer, because they provide immediate confirmation that he has not missed a critical step in the process. Using Drupal offers a generous amount of such screenshots, as well as information tables that help in visually breaking up the text. The only weakness with some of the screenshots is the lack of contrast between the text and the background, resulting in a dark gray shown on a light gray background — not always clearly readable.

The book is substantial in length and content, and naturally it cannot adequately cover dozens of sorts of Web sites. But clearly the book would have been more complete if it contained a chapter explaining how to allow content to be viewable by a limited set of authenticated users. An ideal case study for this would be the implementation of an e-zine site, for which prospective subscribers could view the homepage and other marketing material, but only subscribers could read the actual e-zine's contents. Even better would be to make this sample site fee-based, and show how to accept payments through PayPal (or some other payment systems for which there are Drupal modules) and possibly validate new subscribers automatically and instantly, using PayPal's IPN feature.

The flaws of this book are few and minor. There are unreported errata, most of them grammatical — e.g., "as [the] ability" (page 10) and "modules [that] were" (page 89) — which are to be expected in the first edition of any technical book. Speaking of errata, on the publisher's Web site, the errata should be sorted — or sortable — by page number, so it is much faster for people to see if a discovered erratum has already been reported. In addition, the URLs within the book that do not contain any filename (e.g., "http://www.example.com"; page 8) are in most if not all cases missing the trailing "/" (the root directory). Yet my primary complaint pertains to its production, and not its writing: For countless lines within the text, the spaces separating the words are too narrow, making it difficult to distinguish the words from one another when reading rapidly. As a consequence, each one of these lines almost appears to be a single word. (Skilled programmers know the great value of using whitespace in their code for enhancing readability; the same is certainly true for the printed word.) This readability problem is exacerbated by two factors: The ink color does not appear to be pure black, but instead a dark gray, which possibly has the advantage of producing less glare, but provides less contrast. Secondly, the serif font selected (whose name does not seem to be identified in the book — a common practice ages ago) has quite thin curves, which arguably does make the font face more stylish, but diminishes readability.

In terms of the target audience, the authors do not assume that the reader knows PHP (although some is shown in the chapter on theming), but they do assume that the reader is comfortable installing a PHP-based content management system and all of its required technologies, and familiar enough with Drupal to be able to navigate through the administrative area, download and add modules, and perform other basic admin tasks. Programmers just getting started with Drupal will benefit the most from this book, while experienced Drupal programmers will most likely learn some hitherto unknown best practices, and perhaps even some valuable modules or techniques that the individual has never seen before.

Using Drupal is a detailed and information-packed guide to the most promising contributed modules, and how they can be best employed for creating common types of Web sites. Drupal developers should find this a valuable part of their technical library, especially when they begin creating one of those types of Web sites for the first time.

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

You can purchase Using Drupal 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 "After installing and learning the basics of the content management system Drupal, many Web developers do not know how to best proceed from there. They may realize that much of the programming potential of Drupal — and thus the earning potential of Drupal developers — is derived from the use of community-contributed modules that greatly extend Drupal's power. But there are thousands of such modules, with no objective direction as to which ones are best suited for particular tasks, and what bugs and other flaws could trip up the developer. These programmers need a thorough guide as to which modules are the most promising for the development of the most common types of Web sites. A new book, Using Drupal, aims to fill this need." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Using Drupal author Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins pages 490 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596515805 summary Key contributed Drupal modules put to use creating sample sites. Published by O'Reilly Media on 16 December 2008, under the ISBN 978-0596515805, the book is authored by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins — all of whom are affiliated with Lullabot and are actively involved in the Drupal community and knowledgeable about Drupal's core and plug-in modules. Despite the old adage about having too many cooks in the kitchen, a technical book of this nature should benefit from having half a dozen authors, since each one will have his or her fortes, and the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, as a result of this complementary expertise.

This title appears to be O'Reilly's first — and, as of this writing, only — Drupal book. This is in no way astonishing, given that O'Reilly has never been known for pushing books too quickly through development and production, simply to gain "first mover advantage." Rather, they generally work to create higher-quality efforts that will better stand the test of time — unlike the "shovel" books that some other publishers tend to push out the door, with less coherence and more errata. As a consequence, in the technical libraries of veteran programmers, one tends to see a disproportionately high number of book covers sporting pictures of animals.

On the publisher's Web page for Using Drupal, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, colophon, errata (of which there are currently several), a link for purchasing the book in electronic form (in formats such as PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket), and a link for viewing the book immediately online, in the Safari Books Online system. There is a simple forum for the book, which currently contains seven posts, three of which already have replies from one of the book's authors and from an O'Reilly community manager. There is a browse system that allows the visitor to read portions of each section of each chapter, and thus preview the book before purchasing it. It even includes the illustrations within each previewed section, but for some reason does not include the figure numbers within the captions.

The authors have created their own site dedicated to the book, where visitors will find brief author biographies largely similar to those found at the very end of the book, with links to the authors' profile pages on Drupal.org. Lastly, there is a download page for the source code, which comprises a copy of Drupal 6, all of the contributed modules and themes needed to complete the hands-on exercises, and the supplementary resource files for those exercises, such as logos and product images. There is a change log for the download file, and yet no mention on the page — or even in the book itself, as far as I can tell — as to which version in the 6.x release series was used for the book and in the download package.

Oddly, neither the publisher's site nor the authors' site appears to mention the free downloadable chapter (Chapter 9, "Event Management"), although it is offered in an article posted in the blog section of Do It with Drupal.

After a foreword by Dries Buytaert — Drupal's founder and project lead — the book continues for 490 pages in total, organized into eleven chapters and three appendices. Nine of the chapters each begin with a description of a case study that will be used for illustrative purposes, followed by some implementation notes, which includes discussion of the candidate modules that could be used for this particular case study, and the trade-offs among them. The contributed modules that are chosen for the implementation and their capabilities are summarized, and then further explained with hands-on exercises — in which the particular modules are utilized and configured. Each of these nine chapters takes the reader through the development of a complete Web site, and is wrapped up with discussion of additional modules applicable to the kind of Web site being created. In Chapters 2 through 10, the case studies are: a simple Drupal site that supports client editing, a job posting board, a product reviews site, a wiki, a site for managing publishing workflow, a photo gallery, multilingual sites, an entertainment events management site, and an online store. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Drupal — covering modules, users, nodes, organizational schemes, and content types — preceded by a brief history of content management systems. Chapter 11 explores site theming, with details on the files and other elements that make up a theme, and how to customize them. The book's three appendices cover installing and upgrading Drupal, choosing the right modules for a job, and a list of the modules and themes used in the book.

The book's material is current with Drupal version 6, but should be of some value to any developer opting, for whatever reason, to stick with version 5. Speaking of versions, the authors should have mentioned which version of Drupal they chose, including the minor release number. The Drupal code in the aforesaid download package indicates that the chosen version is 6.4.

This book is unique, in that most if not all other Drupal books on the market are either introductory in nature — which at best devote only a single chapter to discussing third-party modules contributed by developers — or more advanced, specializing in a particular subject area, such as Drupal site security or e-commerce. Using Drupal, just as the title indicates, examines the detailed usage of best-of-breed modules to accomplish specific goals that one often encounters as a Web developer.

One of the most valuable aspects of software development books written by veteran programmers, is their discussions of various solutions to a particular problem — regardless of its size or complexity — and the reasons why they chose one approach instead of any of the others. Using Drupal is no exception. The authors examine the advantages and disadvantages of various third-party modules, even those that were not chosen for implementing the sample Web sites.

In any computer programming book, screenshots and other figures can be most helpful to the reader, because they reinforce the narrative descriptions of the cumulative results of all the steps up to that point. The screenshots are even valuable to someone following along on his own computer, because they provide immediate confirmation that he has not missed a critical step in the process. Using Drupal offers a generous amount of such screenshots, as well as information tables that help in visually breaking up the text. The only weakness with some of the screenshots is the lack of contrast between the text and the background, resulting in a dark gray shown on a light gray background — not always clearly readable.

The book is substantial in length and content, and naturally it cannot adequately cover dozens of sorts of Web sites. But clearly the book would have been more complete if it contained a chapter explaining how to allow content to be viewable by a limited set of authenticated users. An ideal case study for this would be the implementation of an e-zine site, for which prospective subscribers could view the homepage and other marketing material, but only subscribers could read the actual e-zine's contents. Even better would be to make this sample site fee-based, and show how to accept payments through PayPal (or some other payment systems for which there are Drupal modules) and possibly validate new subscribers automatically and instantly, using PayPal's IPN feature.

The flaws of this book are few and minor. There are unreported errata, most of them grammatical — e.g., "as [the] ability" (page 10) and "modules [that] were" (page 89) — which are to be expected in the first edition of any technical book. Speaking of errata, on the publisher's Web site, the errata should be sorted — or sortable — by page number, so it is much faster for people to see if a discovered erratum has already been reported. In addition, the URLs within the book that do not contain any filename (e.g., "http://www.example.com"; page 8) are in most if not all cases missing the trailing "/" (the root directory). Yet my primary complaint pertains to its production, and not its writing: For countless lines within the text, the spaces separating the words are too narrow, making it difficult to distinguish the words from one another when reading rapidly. As a consequence, each one of these lines almost appears to be a single word. (Skilled programmers know the great value of using whitespace in their code for enhancing readability; the same is certainly true for the printed word.) This readability problem is exacerbated by two factors: The ink color does not appear to be pure black, but instead a dark gray, which possibly has the advantage of producing less glare, but provides less contrast. Secondly, the serif font selected (whose name does not seem to be identified in the book — a common practice ages ago) has quite thin curves, which arguably does make the font face more stylish, but diminishes readability.

In terms of the target audience, the authors do not assume that the reader knows PHP (although some is shown in the chapter on theming), but they do assume that the reader is comfortable installing a PHP-based content management system and all of its required technologies, and familiar enough with Drupal to be able to navigate through the administrative area, download and add modules, and perform other basic admin tasks. Programmers just getting started with Drupal will benefit the most from this book, while experienced Drupal programmers will most likely learn some hitherto unknown best practices, and perhaps even some valuable modules or techniques that the individual has never seen before.

Using Drupal is a detailed and information-packed guide to the most promising contributed modules, and how they can be best employed for creating common types of Web sites. Drupal developers should find this a valuable part of their technical library, especially when they begin creating one of those types of Web sites for the first time.

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

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

overheardinpdx writes "I'm sad to report that longtime HPC technology pundit Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa) died this past Tuesday. Many of you may know of him through his blog, his submissions to Slashdot, and his many years of software visualization work at SGI and Cray Research. I worked with Roland 20 years ago at Cray, where we both wrote tech stories for the company newsletter. With his focus on how new technologies modify our way of life, Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web. Rest in peace, Roland. You will be missed." The notice of Roland's passing was posted on the Cray Research alumni group on Linked-In by Matthias Fouquet-Lapar. There will be a ceremony on Monday Jan. 12, at 10:30 am Paris time, at Père Lachaise.

Misch writes "Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) will be taking the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Rep. Boucher has been an advocate for consumers rights, is a co-founder of the Congressional Internet Caucus, and has participated in a Slashdot Interview. He was instrumental in defeating key escrow, back in the day."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Atlantic Recording v. Brennan, the landmark Connecticut case in which the first decision rejecting the RIAA's 'making available' theory was handed down, the RIAA has finally thrown in the towel and dismissed its own case. Mr. Brennan never appeared in the case at all. In February, 2008, the RIAA's motion for a default judgment was rejected for a number of reasons, including the Court's ruling (PDF) that there is no claim for 'making available for distribution' under the US Copyright Act. The RIAA moved for reconsideration; that motion was denied. Then, in December, the RIAA's second motion for default judgment was rejected. Finally the RIAA filed a 'notice of dismissal' ending the case."

nandemoari writes "A six-year-old who recently stole his parents' car and drove it into a utility pole has passed the buck onto a familiar scapegoat: the video game, Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games' controversial Grand Theft Auto video game has been criticized by parent groups and crusaders (or in the eyes of gamers, nincompoops) like former lawyer Jack Thompson for years (Thompson once tried to link the Virginia Tech slayings to late-night Counterstrike sessions. He's since been disbarred). However, not as of yet has anyone under the age of, oh, ten, blamed the game for a car theft."

techmuse writes "Lexus has announced plans to send targeted messages to buyers of its cars based on the buyer's zip code and vehicle type. Unlike regular spam, these messages will be delivered directly to the buyer's vehicle, and will play to the vehicle's occupants as audio. Lexus has promised to make the messages relevant to the car buyers." Imagine the fun that some targeted malware could do — not that such a thing could happen to a Lexus.

Vigile writes "A new stereoscopic 3D gaming technology has hit the street today from NVIDIA, though demoed earlier in the year, that promises to bring high quality 3D gaming to the PC. The GeForce 3D Vision technology utilizes active shutter glasses and a 120 Hz display (either 120 Hz LCD or 3D-Ready DLP TVs) to bring an immersive 3D effect to PC games. Using the depth buffer information stored in DirectX, the NVIDIA software is able to construct a stereo 3D image out of existing game content while the 120 Hz requirement gives each eye 60 frames of motion per second negating the physical detriments that were known to occur with previous 3D offerings. The review at PC Perspective details how the technology works, the performance hit your games take while using it and the advantages and disadvantages to the user's gaming experience with 3D Vision."

fuzzel writes "Today Google announced Google over IPv6 where ISPs can sign up their DNS nameservers so that their users will get access to an almost fully IPv6-enabled Google, including http://www.google.com, images and maps, etc., just like in IPv4. Without this only http://ipv6.google.com is available, but then you go to IPv4 for most services. So, start kicking your ISPs to support IPv6 too, and let them sign up. Check this list of ISPs that already do native IPv6 to your doorstep. The question that now remains is: when will Slashdot follow?"

snydeq writes "According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, more than 35 million data records were breached in the US in 2008. Tracking media reports and disclosures companies are required to make by law, the ITRC noted a 47 percent increase in breaches last year at a range of well-known US companies and government entities. The majority of the lost data was neither encrypted nor protected by a password. A third of the breaches occurred at business entities. One in six breaches were attributed to insider theft, a figure that more than doubled between 2007 and 2008, ITRC said."

Ars Technica reports that the FTC is getting ready to take a hard look at gaming DRM, setting up a town hall meeting to be held on March 25th. They're currently recruiting panelists, and they say the meeting will, in part, "address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations." The controversy over DRM came to a head in 2008 with the release of Spore and the multiple subsequent class-action lawsuits focusing on the SecuROM software that came with the game. Ars Technica says the town hall meeting will also look at "legal issues surrounding DRM" and "the potential need for government involvement to protect consumers."

Ars Technica reports that the FTC is getting ready to take a hard look at gaming DRM, setting up a town hall meeting to be held on March 25th. They're currently recruiting panelists, and they say the meeting will, in part, "address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations." The controversy over DRM came to a head in 2008 with the release of Spore and the multiple subsequent class-action lawsuits focusing on the SecuROM software that came with the game. Ars Technica says the town hall meeting will also look at "legal issues surrounding DRM" and "the potential need for government involvement to protect consumers."

Ars Technica reports that the FTC is getting ready to take a hard look at gaming DRM, setting up a town hall meeting to be held on March 25th. They're currently recruiting panelists, and they say the meeting will, in part, "address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations." The controversy over DRM came to a head in 2008 with the release of Spore and the multiple subsequent class-action lawsuits focusing on the SecuROM software that came with the game. Ars Technica says the town hall meeting will also look at "legal issues surrounding DRM" and "the potential need for government involvement to protect consumers."

nandemoari writes "Not long after we first heard murmurs Microsoft may be ready to lay off as much as 17 per cent of its workforce, the popular Consumer Electronics Show, held every year in Las Vegas, is rumored to be shrinking alongside the global economy. The Consumer Electronics Association, host of the CES, estimates that the numbers of both exhibitors and visitors will be down in 2009. The CEA expects about 130,000 people will attend this year, down 11,000 from last year. And about 2,700 exhibitors are expected to attend, down from 3,000 in 2008."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Oprah Winfrey, or to be more precise, Oprah's Book Club, is being sued by the inventor/patent attorney Scott C. Harris for infringing upon his patent for 'Enhancing Touch and Feel on the Internet.' So Oprah's Book Club is now one of many people and entities being sued over this patent because they allow people to view part, but not all, of a book online before purchasing it. Mr. Harris also sued Google Books for infringing upon this patent. He actually was fired from his position as partner at Fish & Richardson for that, because Google is a client of that law firm and they had conflict of interest rules to uphold." It would be entertaining to see Oprah give very wide and mainstream publicity to the abuses enabled by our current patent system.

Update: 01/07 22:03 GMT by KD : The blog author Joe Mullin wrote to point out that the lawsuit was not filed by the inventor, Scott C. Harris, but rather by the shell company Illinois Computer Research, which seems to exist for the purpose of filing lawsuits based on this particular patent.

The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declan McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."

Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.

BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."

Lorin Ricker writes "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory. Then I found Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade. His new "tips" book entitled, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, is wonderful. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction." Read below for the rest of Lorin's review. Ubuntu Kung Fu author Keir Thomas pages 367 publisher Pragmatic Bookshelf rating 9 reviewer Lorin Ricker ISBN 1-934356-22-0 summary A very useful "tips and tricks" how-to book about Ubuntu Linux As a relatively young Linux distro, Ubuntu already sports a wealth of introductory and how-to books vying for the enthusiast's money — and I've already purchased a significant sampling of these which informs my opinion about the book here under review. And even for Ubuntu, the "tips & tricks" section of my own Linux bookshelf contains volumes which run from the encyclopedic to the practical — I'd even collected O'Reilly's Ubuntu Hacks (Oxer, Rankin & Childers) well before encountering Ubuntu Kung Fu.

How well does Keir Thomas's new book fare in this crowded field? Does he provide actual unique value to the Ubuntu community, useful knowledge which is otherwise unavailable or hard to find? In a nutshell (oops, sorry... that's a book series for another time!): Yes, he does. In fact, he hits the target pretty squarely.

Ubuntu Kung Fu is organized as only three chapters (with no preface material at all): "1 Introduction," including obligatory "How to Read This Book," "Acknowledgments" and "Sharing" sections; "2 An Ubuntu Administration Crash Course"; and, the largest chapter by far, "3 The Tips" themselves.

Though it concentrates on rather basic material, the second chapter on Ubuntu administration is actually one of the best subject primers I've encountered so far, and is written directly and to-the-point. There's the right focus and enough detail to help those users making the initial transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu, including coaching on users and passwords, file system structure (see sidebar "Drive Letters and Ubuntu"), and guidance regarding "Command Line or GUI?".

For example, after weeks of my own stumbling about in the vast sea of information and opinion known as the Ubuntu Forums, searching in vain for a concise explanation on the distinction between a "virtual console" and a regular old "X-windows terminal" — as an old VMS hacker, I'd had experience with such things — I found exactly the explanation I needed, including Ctrl/Alt/F-key controls, in this chapter. The author manages to underline the relevance of this even to the novice Ubuntu user as it applies to "What do I do if things go wrong?", without getting mired in unneeded exotica.

This chapter continues with the necessary skills in software installation and management, including Synaptic and APT, packages and repositories, doing a good job of giving the novice his or her bearings to get started. It concludes with a decent orientation on config files and the gconf-editor, making and keeping backups, and what to do if it does all go wrong.

"The Tips," the third chapter, constitutes 315 separate items, covering over 300 pages, the big majority of the book. Each tip is clearly titled as to its purpose, and has a small check-box in the margin beside the title so that the reader has a place to mark the tip as to personal relevance and priority.

I suppose that the best way to give you a sense of the value of these tips is to provide a summary of my own "usage statistics", derived from my own check-box marks. When I first surveyed the book to get my own bearings, I used a yellow highlighter pen to color in the check-box for tips that caught my eye and that I especially wanted to get back to... Later, as I read through the entire "Tips" chapter, I made a check in the box for each tip I intended to return to for installation or implementation on my own Ubuntu box, and where appropriate, when I actually did install or implement the tip, I made an installation note as to time and details. A good many of the tips are for information or how-to skill only, with nothing to install or implement other than enhancing the reader's own understanding.

Of the 315 tips, I counted 108 (34%) that I marked with yellow highlight; 16 (5%) that I checked for implementation, but have not yet done so for one reason or another; and 19 (6%) that I've implemented on my system. Considering that any "tips & tricks" book ends up becoming a grab-bag of items with a hit-or-miss appeal to any particular person, this is a very good personal return-on-investment. Yet this breakdown is rather arbitrary, as many of the tips are techniques to know and use, rather than configurations to manage or applications to install. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Mr. Thomas's grab-bag is typical in its variety and scope — there's likely something for everyone, both Ubuntu novice and expert, in this book. And, true to style for such volumes, the author notes this about his "big book of tips": "...that you can jump in anywhere." This goes to the heart of my only notable criticism of the book, one of organization. Unlike many "tips" books, where there's usually some attempt to organize the presentation of topical items into a somewhat obvious order, the editorial decision for UKF was to explicitly order the tips randomly — this was no accident, as the author makes explicit in a couple of his remarks.

Indeed, reading through the "Tips" chapter in page-order is no different than embarking on a thorough reading in random order — there simply is no rhyme-or-reason to the presentation of items. This is particularly frustrating because there are numerous instances of tips which are closely related by subject or purpose, and for which the reader would be well served by having them grouped on successive pages for ease of reference and purpose.

That this was an editorial decision is made clear by the fact that the Table of Contents is itself 10 pages long, listing every single tip in the book, and is then followed by a secondary, equally lengthy "Contents by Topic" which attempts to group the tips by general category, "Application Enhancements", "Command Line Tricks", "General Productivity Tips", etc. Furthermore, the editorial effort was made to cross-reference related tips in the text, under Tip 39, we find "...see Tip 173, on page 204, and Tip 228, on page 260," and so on. For all this cross-referencing and contents by topic effort, wouldn't it have been more effective to simply organize the tips in a semblance of relationship, commonality and order? After all, having done a "Contents by Topic", why not just go ahead and organize the book accordingly?

For some readers, the random shuffling of tips may not matter much, as so much of the information will be newly encountered and of subjectively individual value. And value there is aplenty in this book! I'll close by noting four items which were of particular interest and value to me, things for which I'd been previously searching for without luck, or which I didn't even know existed in the open source world of resources:

First, on the ubiquitous implementation of yet another Trashcan for file deletion in a File Manager (the Gnome Nautilus app, which is prevalently used on Ubuntu): GUI designers just can't get over the fact that "mere mortals" might actually delete files and not really mean it... hence, the Trashcan mechanism to protect them from their own silly actions.

This is actually a two-edged sword, and I'd been caught in the quandary of having intended to really delete some application files, which happen to have been root-owned, only to have them get snagged in my file system's Trashcan. The real quandary commenced when, using sudo, I tried to figure out how to delete them from the command line — but where in the heck is "the Trashcan"? I could see the files in Nautilus (where I couldn't conveniently use sudo-power to delete them), but following my own hunches as to where-in-the-file-system the Trashcan was actually stored turned up empty-handed.

UKF to the rescue — see Tips 39, 228 and 309 for everything you'd need to know about handling the Trashcan from the command line.

Secondly, I'd become quite fond of enhanced cut-&-paste (multiple) clipboard capabilities under Windows. Again, UKF to the rescue: Tip 306 let me know of an open source (KDE) clipboard enhancement known as Klipper (it's in the Ubuntu Repositories), which scratches this itch most satisfactorily.

Third, although Ubuntu provides basic, rudimentary tools (Gnome and KDE) for capturing screen shots, until I got to Tip 313, I didn't know that the GIMP could be used to augment and sophisticate screen shot capturing! And, of course, you can refine, edit and save your shots in any GIMP-available format directly. A great enhancement, if only to my working GIMP knowledge!

Lastly, like most folks, I've got a dark side, secrets which must be kept — things like account numbers, passwords, and other personal arcana which cannot, or should not, be kept in unencrypted form. Again, under Windows, I'd found an encryption technology known as TrueCrypt which I'd employed (and paid for) on that platform for a couple of years prior — and with my transition to Linux, I had mistakenly assumed that I had to abandon TrueCrypt as a Windows-only app.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered Tip 145, which informed me that TrueCrypt includes an open source licensed release for Linux, including exactly where to go to install it and how best to use it! Bravo, and thank you, Mr. Thomas, for helping me resurrect an old and trusted friend!

In summary, it should be apparent that, in spite of my grumblings about the random tip presentation, I think that Keir Thomas's Ubuntu Kung Fu is a wonderful book — address the organization issues in a second edition, and I think it'd become an exemplar of its type. I recommend it highly to anyone who has become, or is becoming, an Ubuntu Linux user and enthusiast. It usefully helps bridge the gap between the Microsoft Windows experience and the not-so-different world of the Linux desktop. It provides ample practical help and knowledge to advance your productive use of Ubuntu Linux. This book takes a pride-of-place position right beside my copy of Ubuntu Hacks, where I can refer to it whenever I've a hankering to implement "that new thing" I remember having read about.

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

Lorin Ricker writes "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory. Then I found Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade. His new "tips" book entitled, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, is wonderful. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction." Read below for the rest of Lorin's review. Ubuntu Kung Fu author Keir Thomas pages 367 publisher Pragmatic Bookshelf rating 9 reviewer Lorin Ricker ISBN 1-934356-22-0 summary A very useful "tips and tricks" how-to book about Ubuntu Linux As a relatively young Linux distro, Ubuntu already sports a wealth of introductory and how-to books vying for the enthusiast's money — and I've already purchased a significant sampling of these which informs my opinion about the book here under review. And even for Ubuntu, the "tips & tricks" section of my own Linux bookshelf contains volumes which run from the encyclopedic to the practical — I'd even collected O'Reilly's Ubuntu Hacks (Oxer, Rankin & Childers) well before encountering Ubuntu Kung Fu.

How well does Keir Thomas's new book fare in this crowded field? Does he provide actual unique value to the Ubuntu community, useful knowledge which is otherwise unavailable or hard to find? In a nutshell (oops, sorry... that's a book series for another time!): Yes, he does. In fact, he hits the target pretty squarely.

Ubuntu Kung Fu is organized as only three chapters (with no preface material at all): "1 Introduction," including obligatory "How to Read This Book," "Acknowledgments" and "Sharing" sections; "2 An Ubuntu Administration Crash Course"; and, the largest chapter by far, "3 The Tips" themselves.

Though it concentrates on rather basic material, the second chapter on Ubuntu administration is actually one of the best subject primers I've encountered so far, and is written directly and to-the-point. There's the right focus and enough detail to help those users making the initial transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu, including coaching on users and passwords, file system structure (see sidebar "Drive Letters and Ubuntu"), and guidance regarding "Command Line or GUI?".

For example, after weeks of my own stumbling about in the vast sea of information and opinion known as the Ubuntu Forums, searching in vain for a concise explanation on the distinction between a "virtual console" and a regular old "X-windows terminal" — as an old VMS hacker, I'd had experience with such things — I found exactly the explanation I needed, including Ctrl/Alt/F-key controls, in this chapter. The author manages to underline the relevance of this even to the novice Ubuntu user as it applies to "What do I do if things go wrong?", without getting mired in unneeded exotica.

This chapter continues with the necessary skills in software installation and management, including Synaptic and APT, packages and repositories, doing a good job of giving the novice his or her bearings to get started. It concludes with a decent orientation on config files and the gconf-editor, making and keeping backups, and what to do if it does all go wrong.

"The Tips," the third chapter, constitutes 315 separate items, covering over 300 pages, the big majority of the book. Each tip is clearly titled as to its purpose, and has a small check-box in the margin beside the title so that the reader has a place to mark the tip as to personal relevance and priority.

I suppose that the best way to give you a sense of the value of these tips is to provide a summary of my own "usage statistics", derived from my own check-box marks. When I first surveyed the book to get my own bearings, I used a yellow highlighter pen to color in the check-box for tips that caught my eye and that I especially wanted to get back to... Later, as I read through the entire "Tips" chapter, I made a check in the box for each tip I intended to return to for installation or implementation on my own Ubuntu box, and where appropriate, when I actually did install or implement the tip, I made an installation note as to time and details. A good many of the tips are for information or how-to skill only, with nothing to install or implement other than enhancing the reader's own understanding.

Of the 315 tips, I counted 108 (34%) that I marked with yellow highlight; 16 (5%) that I checked for implementation, but have not yet done so for one reason or another; and 19 (6%) that I've implemented on my system. Considering that any "tips & tricks" book ends up becoming a grab-bag of items with a hit-or-miss appeal to any particular person, this is a very good personal return-on-investment. Yet this breakdown is rather arbitrary, as many of the tips are techniques to know and use, rather than configurations to manage or applications to install. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Mr. Thomas's grab-bag is typical in its variety and scope — there's likely something for everyone, both Ubuntu novice and expert, in this book. And, true to style for such volumes, the author notes this about his "big book of tips": "...that you can jump in anywhere." This goes to the heart of my only notable criticism of the book, one of organization. Unlike many "tips" books, where there's usually some attempt to organize the presentation of topical items into a somewhat obvious order, the editorial decision for UKF was to explicitly order the tips randomly — this was no accident, as the author makes explicit in a couple of his remarks.

Indeed, reading through the "Tips" chapter in page-order is no different than embarking on a thorough reading in random order — there simply is no rhyme-or-reason to the presentation of items. This is particularly frustrating because there are numerous instances of tips which are closely related by subject or purpose, and for which the reader would be well served by having them grouped on successive pages for ease of reference and purpose.

That this was an editorial decision is made clear by the fact that the Table of Contents is itself 10 pages long, listing every single tip in the book, and is then followed by a secondary, equally lengthy "Contents by Topic" which attempts to group the tips by general category, "Application Enhancements", "Command Line Tricks", "General Productivity Tips", etc. Furthermore, the editorial effort was made to cross-reference related tips in the text, under Tip 39, we find "...see Tip 173, on page 204, and Tip 228, on page 260," and so on. For all this cross-referencing and contents by topic effort, wouldn't it have been more effective to simply organize the tips in a semblance of relationship, commonality and order? After all, having done a "Contents by Topic", why not just go ahead and organize the book accordingly?

For some readers, the random shuffling of tips may not matter much, as so much of the information will be newly encountered and of subjectively individual value. And value there is aplenty in this book! I'll close by noting four items which were of particular interest and value to me, things for which I'd been previously searching for without luck, or which I didn't even know existed in the open source world of resources:

First, on the ubiquitous implementation of yet another Trashcan for file deletion in a File Manager (the Gnome Nautilus app, which is prevalently used on Ubuntu): GUI designers just can't get over the fact that "mere mortals" might actually delete files and not really mean it... hence, the Trashcan mechanism to protect them from their own silly actions.

This is actually a two-edged sword, and I'd been caught in the quandary of having intended to really delete some application files, which happen to have been root-owned, only to have them get snagged in my file system's Trashcan. The real quandary commenced when, using sudo, I tried to figure out how to delete them from the command line — but where in the heck is "the Trashcan"? I could see the files in Nautilus (where I couldn't conveniently use sudo-power to delete them), but following my own hunches as to where-in-the-file-system the Trashcan was actually stored turned up empty-handed.

UKF to the rescue — see Tips 39, 228 and 309 for everything you'd need to know about handling the Trashcan from the command line.

Secondly, I'd become quite fond of enhanced cut-&-paste (multiple) clipboard capabilities under Windows. Again, UKF to the rescue: Tip 306 let me know of an open source (KDE) clipboard enhancement known as Klipper (it's in the Ubuntu Repositories), which scratches this itch most satisfactorily.

Third, although Ubuntu provides basic, rudimentary tools (Gnome and KDE) for capturing screen shots, until I got to Tip 313, I didn't know that the GIMP could be used to augment and sophisticate screen shot capturing! And, of course, you can refine, edit and save your shots in any GIMP-available format directly. A great enhancement, if only to my working GIMP knowledge!

Lastly, like most folks, I've got a dark side, secrets which must be kept — things like account numbers, passwords, and other personal arcana which cannot, or should not, be kept in unencrypted form. Again, under Windows, I'd found an encryption technology known as TrueCrypt which I'd employed (and paid for) on that platform for a couple of years prior — and with my transition to Linux, I had mistakenly assumed that I had to abandon TrueCrypt as a Windows-only app.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered Tip 145, which informed me that TrueCrypt includes an open source licensed release for Linux, including exactly where to go to install it and how best to use it! Bravo, and thank you, Mr. Thomas, for helping me resurrect an old and trusted friend!

In summary, it should be apparent that, in spite of my grumblings about the random tip presentation, I think that Keir Thomas's Ubuntu Kung Fu is a wonderful book — address the organization issues in a second edition, and I think it'd become an exemplar of its type. I recommend it highly to anyone who has become, or is becoming, an Ubuntu Linux user and enthusiast. It usefully helps bridge the gap between the Microsoft Windows experience and the not-so-different world of the Linux desktop. It provides ample practical help and knowledge to advance your productive use of Ubuntu Linux. This book takes a pride-of-place position right beside my copy of Ubuntu Hacks, where I can refer to it whenever I've a hankering to implement "that new thing" I remember having read about.

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

A few weeks back we discussed the perspective that the economic meltdown could be viewed as a global computer crash. In the NYTimes magazine, Joe Nocera writes in much more depth about one aspect of the over-reliance on computer models in the ongoing unpleasantness: the use of a single number to assess risk. Reader theodp writes: "Relying on Value at Risk (VaR) and other mathematical models to manage risk was a no-brainer for the Wall Street crowd, at least until it became obvious that the risks taken by the largest banks and investment firms were so excessive and foolhardy that they threatened to bring down the financial system itself. Nocera explores the age-old debate between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. Reliance on models created a 'false sense of security among senior managers and watchdogs,' argues Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who likens VaR to 'an air bag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.'"

newtley writes "Two days ago we discussed the earlier p2pnet report that the RIAA had fired MediaSentry (now called SafeNet). Now the Wall Street Journal is confirming this report. MediaSentry has been 'invading the privacy of people,' the WSJ quotes Ray Beckerman; 'They've been doing very sloppy work.' Beckerman cites MediaSentry's practice of 'looking for available songs in people's filesharing folders, uploading them, and using those uploads in court as evidence of copyright violations.' MediaSentry 'couldn't prove defendants had shared their files with anyone other than MediaSentry investigators.' The WSJ notes, 'In place of MediaSentry, the RIAA says it will use Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software ApS. The music industry had worked with DtecNet previously both in the US and overseas, and liked its technology...' "

An anonymous reader writes "The Zune 30 failure became national news when it happened just three days ago. The source code for the bad driver leaked soon after, and now, someone has come up with a very detailed explanation for where the code was bad as well as a number of solutions to deal with it. From a coding/QA standpoint, one has to wonder how this bug was missed if the quality assurance team wasn't slacking off. Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver."

Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg: "President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."

Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg: "President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."

UnknowingFool writes "As a followup to the Zune New Year's Eve meltdown, Microsoft has issued a workaround for what some users have correctly guessed was a bug caused by a leap year. To recover from the problem, let the Zune drain the batteries and restart it after noon on January 1, 2009. Many sites are reporting that Microsoft has 'fixed' the issue, but technically all Microsoft has done is to ask users to wait out the conditions that triggered the bug. Unless a software patch comes out, Zunes will suffer the same problem again in four years." Reader ndtechnologies adds, "According to posts in the Toshiba forum at anythingbutipod.com, the same bug that shut down millions of Zune 30's also affects the Toshiba Gigabeat S. The Zune 30 is based off of the Gigabeat S series and was co-developed by Microsoft with Toshiba."

fortapocalypse writes "Yohanes Nugroho just released WiiApple, an Apple IIe Emulator for Wii. While the sound doesn't work, some games are playable (he shows a screenshot of Epyx Winter Games as well the execution of a program he wrote in BASIC). He's also released the source code. Using WiiApple requires the Homebrew Channel, which we have discussed in the past."

nandemoari quotes a story at Infopackets: "2009 has gotten off to a great start for a team of iPhone enthusiasts with little regard for Apple's licensing requirements. They've finally figured out a way to get the phone to work with any cell phone carrier (and not just AT&T). The iPhone Dev Team is best known for their work on 'jailbreaking;' the technique of altering an iPhone so that you can run any applications on it, not just those approved by Apple. Given the company's questionable vetting policy for entry to the official App store, it's not surprising many users approve of jailbreaking."

nandemoari quotes a story at Infopackets: "2009 has gotten off to a great start for a team of iPhone enthusiasts with little regard for Apple's licensing requirements. They've finally figured out a way to get the phone to work with any cell phone carrier (and not just AT&T). The iPhone Dev Team is best known for their work on 'jailbreaking;' the technique of altering an iPhone so that you can run any applications on it, not just those approved by Apple. Given the company's questionable vetting policy for entry to the official App store, it's not surprising many users approve of jailbreaking."

Tiger4 writes "CNN reports on a simple test to determine the presence of genes linked to Prostate Cancer. These five genes, if present, can increase the risk of prostate cancer up to nine times. 'More than 25,000 American men will die from prostate cancer this year. But prostate cancer can be treated successfully if the disease is caught early. A blood test that can detect whether a man is at high risk for developing prostate cancer is on the horizon. The study was published in the February 28, 2008, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.' It turns out the company actually wants to test saliva, making the test significantly easier and more convenient. Compare this to the tests available for BRCA, the so called Breast Cancer genes. Finding you have the gene can be devastating, but knowing well in advance of developing cancer allows many more options to be considered."

StrongestLink writes "In an intriguing twist on the recent Comodo CA vulnerability discussed here last week, security researcher Mike Zusman today revealed that three days prior to StartCom's disclosure of a flaw in a Comodo reseller's registration process, he discovered and disclosed an authentication bypass flaw to StartCom in their own registration process that allowed an attacker to submit an authorized request for any domain. During a month which was marked by the continuing paradigm shift to SSL-verified holiday shopping, the Chain of Trust continues to run off the gears, and Bruce Schneier is even commenting publicly that SSL's site validation mission isn't even relevant. What lies ahead for the billion-dollar CA industry?"

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a tantalizing 'unconfirmed' report, it appears that the RIAA has jettisoned MediaSentry (now known as SafeNet) as its 'investigator.' MediaSentry has come under heat in a number of different states for the fact that it was 'investigating' without an investigator's license and invading people's privacy. Earlier this year it was found to have made diametrically conflicting written statements to two different tribunals within 30 days of each other, in one denying that it was an 'expert witness,' in another claiming that it was an 'expert witness.' If the report is accurate, the termination comes at an interesting time, since MediaSentry's investigator is the plaintiffs' only fact witness to prove copyright infringement in Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is now headed for a retrial on March 9th. If he does take the stand, the reasons for his company's termination will be fair game for cross examination. One also has to wonder if it's in any way connected to the puzzling enigma of the New York Attorney General's alleged involvement in the RIAA's recent Wall Street Journal announcement that it would be reducing its p2p file sharing cases to a trickle."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a tantalizing 'unconfirmed' report, it appears that the RIAA has jettisoned MediaSentry (now known as SafeNet) as its 'investigator.' MediaSentry has come under heat in a number of different states for the fact that it was 'investigating' without an investigator's license and invading people's privacy. Earlier this year it was found to have made diametrically conflicting written statements to two different tribunals within 30 days of each other, in one denying that it was an 'expert witness,' in another claiming that it was an 'expert witness.' If the report is accurate, the termination comes at an interesting time, since MediaSentry's investigator is the plaintiffs' only fact witness to prove copyright infringement in Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is now headed for a retrial on March 9th. If he does take the stand, the reasons for his company's termination will be fair game for cross examination. One also has to wonder if it's in any way connected to the puzzling enigma of the New York Attorney General's alleged involvement in the RIAA's recent Wall Street Journal announcement that it would be reducing its p2p file sharing cases to a trickle."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a tantalizing 'unconfirmed' report, it appears that the RIAA has jettisoned MediaSentry (now known as SafeNet) as its 'investigator.' MediaSentry has come under heat in a number of different states for the fact that it was 'investigating' without an investigator's license and invading people's privacy. Earlier this year it was found to have made diametrically conflicting written statements to two different tribunals within 30 days of each other, in one denying that it was an 'expert witness,' in another claiming that it was an 'expert witness.' If the report is accurate, the termination comes at an interesting time, since MediaSentry's investigator is the plaintiffs' only fact witness to prove copyright infringement in Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is now headed for a retrial on March 9th. If he does take the stand, the reasons for his company's termination will be fair game for cross examination. One also has to wonder if it's in any way connected to the puzzling enigma of the New York Attorney General's alleged involvement in the RIAA's recent Wall Street Journal announcement that it would be reducing its p2p file sharing cases to a trickle."

fortapocalypse sends word that a new paper was published today in the journal Science on the hypothesis that a comet impact wiped out the Clovis people 12,900 years ago. (We discussed this hypothesis last year when it was put forth.) The new evidence is a layer of nanodiamonds at locations all across North America, at a depth corresponding to 12,900 years ago, none earlier or later. The researchers hypothesize that the comet that initiated the Younger Dryas, reversing the warming from the previous ice age, fragmented and exploded in a continent-wide conflagration that produced a layer of diamond from carbon on the surface. While disputing the current hypothesis, NASA's David Morrison allows, "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained."

jwilcox154 writes "Yesterday a dispute over fee hikes had threatened a damaging blackout at a minute past midnight Thursday that would have prevented TWC subscribers from watching their favorite shows such as 'SpongeBob SquarePants' and 'The Colbert Report.' The two sides reached an agreement on Thursday, the first of January 2009. The companies stated the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Details must still be finalized over the next few days."

Ian Lamont writes "The Industry Standard has put together a collection of video highlights from Steve Jobs' Macworld keynotes since his return to Apple in the late 1990s. It's interesting to watch. Jobs was basically able to turn tech product demonstrations into convincing consumer spectacles that made even the simplest product feature — such as the handle on the clamshell iBook — seem innovative and utterly desirable. And while his appearance changed greatly over the years (compare his 1998 iMac demonstration with his "iPod Mini" keynote in 2004, when he was reportedly trying to treat cancer with a special diet), his enthusiasm never waned. Of course, he may make appearances at Apple's WWDC or other events, but a Macworld expo with Phil Schiller headlining just won't be the same."

aputerguy writes "My Fedora 8 Linux server crashed sometime between 18:59:40 EST (GMT -5:00) and 19:00:00 EST (GMT -5:00) on Dec 31, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been running this same hardware non-stop for more than six years and other than the occasional reboot for kernel (or distro) upgrades, it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in 2237 days of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than background processes were running at the time of the crash. Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here? Has anyone (other than Zune 30GB owners) noticed similar year-end issues with their computers or electronic devices?"

northern squirrel writes "As reported by Security Focus, Google had publicly released their 50-page Browser Security Handbook (under a CC BY license, too). To quote, the document is 'meant to provide developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers,' and features a comparison of security features in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and — you guessed it — Chrome. Is it a belated Christmas gift to web developers, or just a reaction to recent bad publicity?"

RobGoldsmith writes "Governor Bill Richardson today announced that Virgin Galactic has signed a 20-year lease agreement with the State of New Mexico. Virgin Galactic's world headquarters will be established in New Mexico and its operations will be located at New Mexico's Spaceport America, the nation's first purpose-built commercial spaceport. The signing of the lease agreement coincides with the beginning of the test flying program for Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo launch vehicle which got underway this month in Mojave, CA. The WhiteKnightTwo will serve as the mother ship for SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle that will carry commercial astronauts into sub-orbital space from Spaceport America."

ThinSkin writes "Now that the folks at ExtremeTech have finished writing about the best keyboards for every occasion, they conclude their roundup of input devices with the best computer mice in every category, which includes ergonomic mice, gaming mice, notebook mice, and so on. While this year's crop of gaming mice didn't impress much, there were advancements in non-gaming mice and tracking, as demonstrated by Microsoft's Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack technology — which is considered more precise than optical and laser. Even ergonomic mice saw little growth in the year — prompting the reviewer to rely on the older Zero Tension Mouse as a favorite."

Zonk writes with news of a collaboration between Massively and GamerDNA to analyze the state of MMO player bases for 2008. Sifting through the data brought out several interesting trends. For example, Age of Conan took a substantial hit when Warhammer arrived on the scene, but none of the other major MMOs were significantly affected. Also, it seems Lord of the Rings: Online got a big shot in the arm from its Mines of Moria expansion — even moreso than World of Warcraft from Wrath of the Lich King, relatively speaking. The article also asserts the following about the recently-canceled Tabula Rasa: "... until the cancellation announcement in November, numbers were trending in the right direction, however slightly. Players were growing more interested in the sci fi MMO shooter, and logins were on the rise. If its development had not been so long, so expensive, and so vastly overhyped and mismarketed, this title could have been left alone to find its legs and found some small measure of success in a long tail environment akin to the Sony Station Pass."

huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said. The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."

huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said. The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."

Sub Zero 992 writes "Heise Security (article in German) is reporting that at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (25C3) researchers in Europe's dedected.org group have published an article (PDF) showing, using a PC-Card costing only EUR 23, how to eavesdrop on DECT transmissions. There are hundreds of millions of terminals, ranging from telephones, to electronic payment terminals, to door openers, using the DECT standard." So far, the Heise article's German only, but I suspect will show up soon in English translation. Update: 12/30 21:27 GMT by T : Reader Juha-Matti Laurio writes with the story in English. Thanks!

This morning on the NPR shuffle podcast, they included a segment about Penny Arcade. Seems only fair since NPR did Achewood a few months ago. If they just get XKCD on there, then the universe can rest.