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Yesterday, Sony gave a presentation explaining a bit about the new PS4 hardware, the development environment (Windows 7 based IDE), and the changes to the Dual Shock controller. From the article: "The system is also set up to run graphics and computational code synchronously, without suspending one to run the other. Norden says that Sony has worked to carefully balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough room for computational tasks. The GPU will also be able to run arbitrary code, allowing developers to run hundreds or thousands of parallelized tasks with full access to the system's 8GB of unified memory. ... The DualShock 4 controller that's standard on the PS4 eliminates one feature that was seldom used on the PS3 —the analog face buttons..." The trackpad will support two touch points, the rumble motors can be controlled more finely, and the analog sticks were tweaked for "reduced dead zone and better feeling tension that grips your thumbs."

An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that text messages are private communication (Official Ruling) and therefore police are required to get a warrant to gain access to the text messages of private citizens. The CBC reports: '[Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman] Abella said the only practical difference between text messaging and traditional voice communications is the transmission process. "This distinction should not take text messages outside the protection to which private communications are entitled," she wrote.'" Quite different from the attitude in the U.S.

First time accepted submitter bobthesungeek76036 writes "On March 26th, Larry Ellison and always with fashionable haircut John Fowler announced the new line of SPARC servers from Oracle. Touted as the fastest microprocessor in the world, they put up some impressive SPEC numbers against much more expensive (and older) IBM hardware. Is the industry still interested in SPARC or is it too late for Larry to regain the server market that Sun Microsystems had many moons ago?" El Reg has a pretty good overview of the new hardware; the T5 certainly looks interesting for highly threaded work loads (there's some massive SMT going on with 16 threads per core), but with Intel dominating for single-threaded performance and ARM-based servers becoming available squeezing them for massive multi-threading, is there really any hope in Oracle's efforts to stay in the hardware game?

sl4shd0rk writes "Hispalinux, which represents Spanish Open Source developers and users, has filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission. 14 pages of grief cited Windows 8 as an 'obstruction mechanism' calling UEFI Secure Boot a 'de facto technological jail for computer booting systems... making Microsoft's Windows platform less neutral than ever.' On March 6 of 2012 the Commission fined Microsoft 561 million Euros for failing to offer users a choice of web browser, and there was also a 2004 ruling which found the company had abused its market position by tying Windows Media Player to Windows itself. Relations appear to remain more tense towards Windows in Europe, so there may be some hope of making UEFI more Linux-friendly. UEFI has been implicated in the death of Samsung laptops running Linux."

A year ago James Cameron made history by traveling solo almost seven miles deep in an area of the Pacific Ocean known the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep. He made the trip in a submersible he helped design, the Deepsea Challenger submersible system and science platform. To celebrate the anniversary, Cameron is forming a partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and donating the Deep Sea Challenger. From the press release: "Cameron will transfer the Deepsea Challenger to Woods Hole, where WHOI scientists and engineers will work with Cameron and his team to incorporate the sub’s numerous engineering advancements into future research platforms and deep-sea expeditions. This partnership harnesses the power of public and private investment in supporting deep-ocean science. “The seven years we spent designing and building the Deepsea Challenger were dedicated to expanding the options available to deep-ocean researchers. Our sub is a scientific proof-of-concept, and our partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a way to provide the technology we developed to the oceanographic community,” says Cameron. James even sent us a few early drawings of the Deepsea Challenger that he made during a conversation with oceanographer Don Walsh in November 2003. The sketches are proof that many great ideas start out on napkins or lined paper.

DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible system and science platform, Jim Cameron, Nov. 2003.

"The one that's interesting, although it's very faint, is the one that shows how I would sit in the sphere, with the HD camera at the viewport. Surprisingly, that concept never changed."

For many decades, gramophone records (the black vinyl discs in Grandma's attic) were made by cutting grooves directly into an acetate disc, then making a mold from that "master" and "pressing records." Nowadays, of course, we use digital recording software on our computers or even on our mobile phones. Vinyl? Strictly for fogies and maybe a few audiophiles who think analog recordings have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack. Naturally, SXSW is a haven for these folks, and among them Tim Lord found Wesley Wolfe and two German compatriots from vinylrecording.com, busily demonstrating their vinyl recording system, which is sort of the gramophone record equivalent of print on demand. Lots of background music in the video makes the voices a bit hard to hear; some might prefer the transcription -- although those who do will lose out on watching the vinyl recording machine in action. Either way. Or both. Up to you.

An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."

First time accepted submitter Olivier Bonaventure writes "The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol. Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address, the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use cases, including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G, or servers that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP connection [note: link has source code and technical details] by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces."

There have been video editing apps available for Linux for years, from ones meant to be friendly enough to compete on the UI front with iMovie (like the moribund Kino, last released in 2009, and the actively developed PiTiVi and Kdenlive) to editors that can apparently do nearly anything, provided the user is a thick-skinned genius — I'm thinking of Broadcast 2000/Cinelerra. Then there's VJ-tool-cum-non-linear editor LiVES, which balances a dense interface with real-time effects for using video as a performance tool, and can run on various flavors of UNIX, including Mac OS X. Dallas-based developer Jonathan Thomas has been working for the last few years on a Free (GPL3 or later), open-source editor called OpenShot, which aims for a happy medium of both usability and power. OpenShot is Linux-only, though, and Thomas is now trying to kickstart (as in, using a Kickstarter project) a cross-platform release for OS X and Windows, too. I've been tempted by dozens of KickStarter projects before, but this is the first one that I've actually pledged to support, and for what may sound like a backwards reason: I like the interface, and am impressed by the feature set, but OpenShot crashes on me a lot. (To be fair, this is mostly to blame on my hardware, none of which is really high-end enough by video-editing standards, or even middle-of-the-road. One day!) So while I like the idea of having a cross-platform, open-source video editor, I have no plans to migrate to Windows; I'm mostly interested in the promised features and stability improvements.

Bennett Haselton writes "Recently I wrote an article about what I considered to be the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web (and how-to instructions in general), using as a jumping-off point a passage from Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here. My point was that most "newbie" instructions never seemed to get judged by the basic criteria by which all instructions should be judged: If you give these instructions to a group of beginners, and have them attempt to follow the instructions without any additional help from the author, what kind of results do they get? The original title of my article was "Better Cooking Through Algorithms," but due to some confusion in the submission process the title got changed to "Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here" even though, as multiple commenters pointed out, it didn't make much sense as a "book review" since it only mentioned a short passage from the actual book. This article, on the other hand, really is intended as a review of The 4-Hour Chef, even though the article only covers a similarly tiny fraction of the book's 671-page length. That's because even before buying the book, I was determined to review it according to a simple process: Try three recipes from the book. Follow the directions step by step. (If any direction is ambiguous, then follow what could be a plausible interpretation of the directions.) My estimation of the quality of the book, as an instructional cooking guide for beginners, is then determined by the quality of the food produced by my attempt to follow the directions. (I've done this so many times for so many "beginner cookbooks," that I've probably lost my true "beginner" cook status in the process — which means that the results obtained by a real beginner using The 4-Hour Chef, would probably be a little worse than what I achieved.)" Read on for the rest of Bennett's Thoughts

I bought the book with tempered high hopes. Watching Tim Ferriss in his TV interviews and reading the enthusiasm that leaps off of every page (each recipe even comes with a "song pairing," music to jam out to while making the dish), it's hard not to take a quick liking to him. He comes across as a man who who really does want to share his passion and not just sell books. He's goofily handsome in that way that women and some men often confuse with "confidence", although he does seem to possess a lot of actual confidence. But enthusiasm is the enemy of objectivity, and I was determined to review the book according to the criterion of how well the directions actually work, not based on how much fun it would be to hang out with Tim. Even though it would probably be fun.

In his interview on Jimmy Fallon, for example, they looked like they were having a great time, but Jimmy told Tim that he read the book and tried following the directions for making bacon-infused bourbon, then proceeded to show some "action shots" of the result that he achieved: a jar of what looked like solid bacon fat, which Jimmy said he did not drink. OK, I thought, that means that whatever comes next, in that case the directions failed. Tim proceeded to explain that you have to be careful not to overblend it, and to leave it in the freezer long enough to be able to scrape more of the fat off, so that if you get a result that looks like Fallon's jar of goo, then that's probably what you did wrong. Great advice, but, not in the book. "Bacon-infused bourbon" sounds like precisely the kind of recipe that will sell a lot of books (not surprisingly, it's listed on the back cover of the book jacket), but which is hard to write good directions for.

In the same interview, Ferriss showed how he cooked sea bass sous vide in a hotel kitchen sink and then finished it by searing it with the hotel's travel iron, which he cheerfully admitted the hotel was not too happy about. I'm all for re-purposing common household items to find a new way to achieve something, but only if it's an improvement over the more mundane way of doing things; otherwise, it's just doing things inefficiently for the sake of being weird as an end in itself. (When I posted a photo of my bookshelf with a hollow-core wooden plank C-clamped to it at one end, with the other end used as an anchor for my XOOM tablet so I could watch movies while lying flat in bed, it was because that was the easiest way I could find to do that.) To be fair, Tim's suggestion of searing fish with a travel iron was probably intended to get the reader into the adventurous spirit, not as literal advice -- but then, my mission remains to evaluate the actual cooking advice, according to the results it produces.

The short answer: Of the three recipes I tried, one came out barely edible, and the other two were palatable mostly to the degree that the raw ingredients themselves were tasty, so I might as well have just snacked on the ingredients separately instead of combining them. All recipes definitely showed signs that they could have been greatly improved by being worked over by the process I described in my last article — i.e., show the recipes to a group of genuine newbies, listen to their feedback about all the points where they get stuck, then keep revising according to that feedback until you reach the point where the latest round of newbie testers is able to get through the directions with no problem. (You may notice that this sounds like a very obvious idea, but most how-to directions show very little sign of having been put through this kind of scrutiny.)

The first recipe in the book was for "Osso Buko", Ferriss's "knock-off" version of ossobuco, using lamb shanks instead of veal shanks. With $60 for a new porcelain Dutch oven, $20 for the lamb shanks, and other miscellaneous expenses, it cost me about $100 just to try the recipe to see if it worked (although Fred Meyer let me return the Dutch oven after I realized I was never going to try this again, and yes, I know you can find cheaper ones). A few times in the recipe, the directions used an unfamiliar term that I would have expected to be defined in a text for true beginners (for example, I didn't know what a "dry wine" was, and even the Wikipedia article wasn't much help, but the grocery store stockboy helped me out). The bigger problem was that at multiple points in the recipe, the instructions were too ambiguous to know if I was following them correctly, or I was unable to follow them exactly and didn't know how big of an adjustment I needed to make (e.g. what to do if the smallest shanks I could find were bigger than the recommended size). I still have no idea if the mediocre results were caused by one big screwup at one particular step, or the accumulation of many small deviations from what a real chef would have done.

Specifically: (1) The recipe calls for a Dutch oven. Ferriss has a brand he recommends, but can I use one from the local Fred Meyer? How big? The recipe doesn't say. I picked a five-quart since it was big enough to hold the lamb shanks. (2) The recipe calls for "lamb shanks." Fore shanks or hind shanks? Does it matter? My grocery store only has "lamb foreshanks" anyway. (3) The recipe says each shank should be 12 oz, but the smallest ones I could find were all 16 oz. What adjustments do I make? I have no idea. (4) The recipe called for "1/3 of a bottle" of wine, but later said to pour in enough "to cover 1/2-3/4 of the meat," and I couldn't do that without pouring in the whole bottle. I assumed the "cover 1/2 of the meat" direction took precedence over the "use 1/3 of the bottle" direction, but at that point I was sure that I'd deviated so far from the intent of the directions that the dish wasn't going to work. I put the whole thing into the oven at 350 degrees for two hours, which is about the only part of the recipe that I was sure that I followed correctly.

The results came out barely edible (I said "barely" — I still ate them, but I would never serve them or bring them to a party). Mostly it was a lot of work to cut through the tendons and small bones to get to the meat; if the Dutch oven was supposed to soften the meat so that everything fell off the bone, it didn't work.

The second recipe I tried was for crab cakes with harissa sauce. Right away I ran into a problem, since even in my fairly cosmopolitan city with multiple ethnic and specialty grocery stores, none of the ones I visited had ever heard of "harissa sauce." Now for directions that have been thoroughly beta-tested, this is where they would typically say, "Harissa sauce can be difficult to find, so here's where to look; otherwise, you can use this as a substitute." I found some forums saying you could use hot sauce, so I went with that. The crab cakes came out fine, but probably mostly due to the expensive crab ingredient, and I didn't like them enough to make them again.

The third recipe that I tried was for coconut cauliflower curry mash. The directions called for "crushed cashews," and said "If they're uncrushed, you can then crush them in your hands directly into the bowl. This is how Chuck Norris does it." By this time I was getting a little tired of the book being cute at the expense of being helpful — roasted cashews are physically impossible for most people to crush in their hands — but I flattened some under a rolling pin and followed the rest of the recipe. The result tasted OK, but probably only about as good as if I'd just mixed up the nuts and cauliflower and other ingredients and cooked them in a pot.

And that was the end of the ride for me. Three recipes and three results that I never thought about making again (one that was barely edible, and two that tasted only slightly better than the component ingredients mixed together, neither one all that good). Based on those sample results, my estimation is that for a true beginner going through the recipes in the book, the "success rate" would not be high enough to justify the time and money that they'd spend.

Full disclosure compels me to report that I did successfully prepare and "serve" one recipe in the book: bacon roses, which turned out about as well in my own kitchen as the ones he showed off on Jimmy Fallon. Most artificial roses have removable heads, and if you bake a couple of rolled-up slices of raw bacon, they come out resembling roses that can be threaded on the artificial-rose stems. But even then, the instructions in the book were overkill, requiring the reader to take a cupcake baking pan and drill holes in the bottom of each cupcake holder, so that you can cook the bacon in the cupcake holders while draining the fat out (but which also ruins the cupcake pan for the purpose of making actual cupcakes). For one thing, you can use silicone cupcake molds and just poke a hole in the bottom rather than drilling through aluminum; these can also be stacked when you're done, so that they take up much less storage space than a 12-muffin baking pan. But in any case I found that you could get perfectly good results just by rolling up the pieces of bacon and baking them sideways on a broiler rack; they hold their shape just as well as if you had baked them in the cupcake holders, since the rolled-up bacon hardly expands anyway. (This is the kind of thing that you also find if you have people beta-testing your recipes.)

To be fair, I'm only narrowly reviewing the book as an instructional guide to cooking. The book claims that the principles taught in its pages can be used to transform your life in a wide range of ways, including becoming world-class in "any skill" in about six months, which Ferriss says he has used to learn kickboxing, Spanish, shooting basketball 3-pointers, and Japanese horseback archery. Next on his list: writing cooking directions!

But now I'm being a smartass, and the truth is that there is potential for the recipes in these book to be transformed into something that could produce fantastic results in the hands of a beginner. Normally when I try out a "beginner's cookbook" — usually by using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature to sample a few recipes from the cookbook and print them out for free — if the first three recipes produce inedible results, I throw them out and never give the cookbook a second thought. But I'm more optimistic about re-working Ferriss's recipes in accordance with the beta-testing process above, for two reasons. First, he really does seem to have a passion for helping people and not just selling books (that's important, because it's hardly going to drive book sales to take recipes from the book and beta-test them and improve them as a free web-based project). Second, he has legions of fans who would probably volunteer as beta testers. I myself would be happy to volunteer, since the commitment of a beta tester is minimal, by design, because you're supposed to simulate the experience of a real user without overthinking it: go through the instructions one time, and record the quality of the result you get at the end. (Optionally, make a note of any ambiguous directions you encountered along the way, which might affect the quality of the end result.)

As they're written now, I don't think the recipes in the book would pass the definitional test of good directions: Give them to beginners, have them try to follow the steps, and record the results. I had essentially the same thought about the business-launching advice in Tim Ferriss's first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I only bought as a companion to the new book. Now I think The 4-Hour Workweek does contain a lot of useful self-help advice — for example, to get over your fear of the worst-case outcome by visualizing it entirely and realizing that it's not that bad. (Although I cracked up at the part about "outsourcing your work," thinking of a certain Verizon employee who took the advice too literally.) But for a book whose key premise is that you can liberate yourself from a 40-hour workweek, the advice about how to start a successful business to do this, occupies a surprisingly small portion of the book (pp. 150-200, if you leave out the subsequent chapter about how to automate your business once it's successful). Well, I've been a part of various entrepreneur communities since before I graduated college, and over the years I've seen many people follow some variation of the steps in those chapters, and the reality is that even if the founder does everything right, most new businesses still fizzle out just like my mediocre "osso buko."

The key difference, I think, is that any formula on how to start your own wildly successful business and shrink your workweek down to 4 hours, cannot work without a lot of luck — if it could, angel investors would just start hiring "entrepreneurs" to follow the formula exactly, if every one of those entrepreneurs (or even 25% of them) hit it out of the park with their new business venture, the investors would make out like gangbusters. Most methodical research suggests that actually only about 5% of VC-backed businesses hit their projected break-even on cash flow -- suggesting that even the best VCs can't find any combination of personal attributes, or action steps, that leads to entrepreneurial success without a big dose of luck. (Ferriss himself says that The 4-Hour Workweek was turned down by 28 out of 29 publishers, which sounds like a testament to the importance of persistence; but most authors whose work is turned down by the first 28 publishers, will usually get turned down by the 29th one too, and there was obviously a certain amount of luck in the fact that that didn't happen to him.)

On the other hand, following a recipe and producing a delicious dish, ought to be possible without luck. What you need, though, are precise directions that have been picked apart by beginner beta testers to remove any ambiguities, until you reach the point where the latest wave of beta testers was able to get through the directions with no confusion, and produce great results in nearly every case. The recipes in The 4-Hour Chef aren't at that point, but Tim Ferriss has the fan-based manpower at his disposal to test and transform those recipes into truly idiot-proof directions for delicious food, if he wants to.

Bennett Haselton writes "Recently I wrote an article about what I considered to be the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web (and how-to instructions in general), using as a jumping-off point a passage from Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here. My point was that most "newbie" instructions never seemed to get judged by the basic criteria by which all instructions should be judged: If you give these instructions to a group of beginners, and have them attempt to follow the instructions without any additional help from the author, what kind of results do they get? The original title of my article was "Better Cooking Through Algorithms," but due to some confusion in the submission process the title got changed to "Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here" even though, as multiple commenters pointed out, it didn't make much sense as a "book review" since it only mentioned a short passage from the actual book. This article, on the other hand, really is intended as a review of The 4-Hour Chef, even though the article only covers a similarly tiny fraction of the book's 671-page length. That's because even before buying the book, I was determined to review it according to a simple process: Try three recipes from the book. Follow the directions step by step. (If any direction is ambiguous, then follow what could be a plausible interpretation of the directions.) My estimation of the quality of the book, as an instructional cooking guide for beginners, is then determined by the quality of the food produced by my attempt to follow the directions. (I've done this so many times for so many "beginner cookbooks," that I've probably lost my true "beginner" cook status in the process — which means that the results obtained by a real beginner using The 4-Hour Chef, would probably be a little worse than what I achieved.)" Read on for the rest of Bennett's Thoughts

I bought the book with tempered high hopes. Watching Tim Ferriss in his TV interviews and reading the enthusiasm that leaps off of every page (each recipe even comes with a "song pairing," music to jam out to while making the dish), it's hard not to take a quick liking to him. He comes across as a man who who really does want to share his passion and not just sell books. He's goofily handsome in that way that women and some men often confuse with "confidence", although he does seem to possess a lot of actual confidence. But enthusiasm is the enemy of objectivity, and I was determined to review the book according to the criterion of how well the directions actually work, not based on how much fun it would be to hang out with Tim. Even though it would probably be fun.

In his interview on Jimmy Fallon, for example, they looked like they were having a great time, but Jimmy told Tim that he read the book and tried following the directions for making bacon-infused bourbon, then proceeded to show some "action shots" of the result that he achieved: a jar of what looked like solid bacon fat, which Jimmy said he did not drink. OK, I thought, that means that whatever comes next, in that case the directions failed. Tim proceeded to explain that you have to be careful not to overblend it, and to leave it in the freezer long enough to be able to scrape more of the fat off, so that if you get a result that looks like Fallon's jar of goo, then that's probably what you did wrong. Great advice, but, not in the book. "Bacon-infused bourbon" sounds like precisely the kind of recipe that will sell a lot of books (not surprisingly, it's listed on the back cover of the book jacket), but which is hard to write good directions for.

In the same interview, Ferriss showed how he cooked sea bass sous vide in a hotel kitchen sink and then finished it by searing it with the hotel's travel iron, which he cheerfully admitted the hotel was not too happy about. I'm all for re-purposing common household items to find a new way to achieve something, but only if it's an improvement over the more mundane way of doing things; otherwise, it's just doing things inefficiently for the sake of being weird as an end in itself. (When I posted a photo of my bookshelf with a hollow-core wooden plank C-clamped to it at one end, with the other end used as an anchor for my XOOM tablet so I could watch movies while lying flat in bed, it was because that was the easiest way I could find to do that.) To be fair, Tim's suggestion of searing fish with a travel iron was probably intended to get the reader into the adventurous spirit, not as literal advice -- but then, my mission remains to evaluate the actual cooking advice, according to the results it produces.

The short answer: Of the three recipes I tried, one came out barely edible, and the other two were palatable mostly to the degree that the raw ingredients themselves were tasty, so I might as well have just snacked on the ingredients separately instead of combining them. All recipes definitely showed signs that they could have been greatly improved by being worked over by the process I described in my last article — i.e., show the recipes to a group of genuine newbies, listen to their feedback about all the points where they get stuck, then keep revising according to that feedback until you reach the point where the latest round of newbie testers is able to get through the directions with no problem. (You may notice that this sounds like a very obvious idea, but most how-to directions show very little sign of having been put through this kind of scrutiny.)

The first recipe in the book was for "Osso Buko", Ferriss's "knock-off" version of ossobuco, using lamb shanks instead of veal shanks. With $60 for a new porcelain Dutch oven, $20 for the lamb shanks, and other miscellaneous expenses, it cost me about $100 just to try the recipe to see if it worked (although Fred Meyer let me return the Dutch oven after I realized I was never going to try this again, and yes, I know you can find cheaper ones). A few times in the recipe, the directions used an unfamiliar term that I would have expected to be defined in a text for true beginners (for example, I didn't know what a "dry wine" was, and even the Wikipedia article wasn't much help, but the grocery store stockboy helped me out). The bigger problem was that at multiple points in the recipe, the instructions were too ambiguous to know if I was following them correctly, or I was unable to follow them exactly and didn't know how big of an adjustment I needed to make (e.g. what to do if the smallest shanks I could find were bigger than the recommended size). I still have no idea if the mediocre results were caused by one big screwup at one particular step, or the accumulation of many small deviations from what a real chef would have done.

Specifically: (1) The recipe calls for a Dutch oven. Ferriss has a brand he recommends, but can I use one from the local Fred Meyer? How big? The recipe doesn't say. I picked a five-quart since it was big enough to hold the lamb shanks. (2) The recipe calls for "lamb shanks." Fore shanks or hind shanks? Does it matter? My grocery store only has "lamb foreshanks" anyway. (3) The recipe says each shank should be 12 oz, but the smallest ones I could find were all 16 oz. What adjustments do I make? I have no idea. (4) The recipe called for "1/3 of a bottle" of wine, but later said to pour in enough "to cover 1/2-3/4 of the meat," and I couldn't do that without pouring in the whole bottle. I assumed the "cover 1/2 of the meat" direction took precedence over the "use 1/3 of the bottle" direction, but at that point I was sure that I'd deviated so far from the intent of the directions that the dish wasn't going to work. I put the whole thing into the oven at 350 degrees for two hours, which is about the only part of the recipe that I was sure that I followed correctly.

The results came out barely edible (I said "barely" — I still ate them, but I would never serve them or bring them to a party). Mostly it was a lot of work to cut through the tendons and small bones to get to the meat; if the Dutch oven was supposed to soften the meat so that everything fell off the bone, it didn't work.

The second recipe I tried was for crab cakes with harissa sauce. Right away I ran into a problem, since even in my fairly cosmopolitan city with multiple ethnic and specialty grocery stores, none of the ones I visited had ever heard of "harissa sauce." Now for directions that have been thoroughly beta-tested, this is where they would typically say, "Harissa sauce can be difficult to find, so here's where to look; otherwise, you can use this as a substitute." I found some forums saying you could use hot sauce, so I went with that. The crab cakes came out fine, but probably mostly due to the expensive crab ingredient, and I didn't like them enough to make them again.

The third recipe that I tried was for coconut cauliflower curry mash. The directions called for "crushed cashews," and said "If they're uncrushed, you can then crush them in your hands directly into the bowl. This is how Chuck Norris does it." By this time I was getting a little tired of the book being cute at the expense of being helpful — roasted cashews are physically impossible for most people to crush in their hands — but I flattened some under a rolling pin and followed the rest of the recipe. The result tasted OK, but probably only about as good as if I'd just mixed up the nuts and cauliflower and other ingredients and cooked them in a pot.

And that was the end of the ride for me. Three recipes and three results that I never thought about making again (one that was barely edible, and two that tasted only slightly better than the component ingredients mixed together, neither one all that good). Based on those sample results, my estimation is that for a true beginner going through the recipes in the book, the "success rate" would not be high enough to justify the time and money that they'd spend.

Full disclosure compels me to report that I did successfully prepare and "serve" one recipe in the book: bacon roses, which turned out about as well in my own kitchen as the ones he showed off on Jimmy Fallon. Most artificial roses have removable heads, and if you bake a couple of rolled-up slices of raw bacon, they come out resembling roses that can be threaded on the artificial-rose stems. But even then, the instructions in the book were overkill, requiring the reader to take a cupcake baking pan and drill holes in the bottom of each cupcake holder, so that you can cook the bacon in the cupcake holders while draining the fat out (but which also ruins the cupcake pan for the purpose of making actual cupcakes). For one thing, you can use silicone cupcake molds and just poke a hole in the bottom rather than drilling through aluminum; these can also be stacked when you're done, so that they take up much less storage space than a 12-muffin baking pan. But in any case I found that you could get perfectly good results just by rolling up the pieces of bacon and baking them sideways on a broiler rack; they hold their shape just as well as if you had baked them in the cupcake holders, since the rolled-up bacon hardly expands anyway. (This is the kind of thing that you also find if you have people beta-testing your recipes.)

To be fair, I'm only narrowly reviewing the book as an instructional guide to cooking. The book claims that the principles taught in its pages can be used to transform your life in a wide range of ways, including becoming world-class in "any skill" in about six months, which Ferriss says he has used to learn kickboxing, Spanish, shooting basketball 3-pointers, and Japanese horseback archery. Next on his list: writing cooking directions!

But now I'm being a smartass, and the truth is that there is potential for the recipes in these book to be transformed into something that could produce fantastic results in the hands of a beginner. Normally when I try out a "beginner's cookbook" — usually by using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature to sample a few recipes from the cookbook and print them out for free — if the first three recipes produce inedible results, I throw them out and never give the cookbook a second thought. But I'm more optimistic about re-working Ferriss's recipes in accordance with the beta-testing process above, for two reasons. First, he really does seem to have a passion for helping people and not just selling books (that's important, because it's hardly going to drive book sales to take recipes from the book and beta-test them and improve them as a free web-based project). Second, he has legions of fans who would probably volunteer as beta testers. I myself would be happy to volunteer, since the commitment of a beta tester is minimal, by design, because you're supposed to simulate the experience of a real user without overthinking it: go through the instructions one time, and record the quality of the result you get at the end. (Optionally, make a note of any ambiguous directions you encountered along the way, which might affect the quality of the end result.)

As they're written now, I don't think the recipes in the book would pass the definitional test of good directions: Give them to beginners, have them try to follow the steps, and record the results. I had essentially the same thought about the business-launching advice in Tim Ferriss's first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I only bought as a companion to the new book. Now I think The 4-Hour Workweek does contain a lot of useful self-help advice — for example, to get over your fear of the worst-case outcome by visualizing it entirely and realizing that it's not that bad. (Although I cracked up at the part about "outsourcing your work," thinking of a certain Verizon employee who took the advice too literally.) But for a book whose key premise is that you can liberate yourself from a 40-hour workweek, the advice about how to start a successful business to do this, occupies a surprisingly small portion of the book (pp. 150-200, if you leave out the subsequent chapter about how to automate your business once it's successful). Well, I've been a part of various entrepreneur communities since before I graduated college, and over the years I've seen many people follow some variation of the steps in those chapters, and the reality is that even if the founder does everything right, most new businesses still fizzle out just like my mediocre "osso buko."

The key difference, I think, is that any formula on how to start your own wildly successful business and shrink your workweek down to 4 hours, cannot work without a lot of luck — if it could, angel investors would just start hiring "entrepreneurs" to follow the formula exactly, if every one of those entrepreneurs (or even 25% of them) hit it out of the park with their new business venture, the investors would make out like gangbusters. Most methodical research suggests that actually only about 5% of VC-backed businesses hit their projected break-even on cash flow -- suggesting that even the best VCs can't find any combination of personal attributes, or action steps, that leads to entrepreneurial success without a big dose of luck. (Ferriss himself says that The 4-Hour Workweek was turned down by 28 out of 29 publishers, which sounds like a testament to the importance of persistence; but most authors whose work is turned down by the first 28 publishers, will usually get turned down by the 29th one too, and there was obviously a certain amount of luck in the fact that that didn't happen to him.)

On the other hand, following a recipe and producing a delicious dish, ought to be possible without luck. What you need, though, are precise directions that have been picked apart by beginner beta testers to remove any ambiguities, until you reach the point where the latest wave of beta testers was able to get through the directions with no confusion, and produce great results in nearly every case. The recipes in The 4-Hour Chef aren't at that point, but Tim Ferriss has the fan-based manpower at his disposal to test and transform those recipes into truly idiot-proof directions for delicious food, if he wants to.

psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"

ICANN.org says, "The DotOrg Foundation [update: Note that the organization is now known as the Public Interest Registry], along with its operating partners, is committed to stable, efficient and affordable management of the .org registry." Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet's basic "plumbing," and few spend much time thinking about .org and the group that is responsible for maintaining it. That group did, however, have a booth at SXSW. That's where Timothy Lord interviewed .org spokesperson Thuy LeDinh, who was happy to explain what the .org people do and why they do it.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations, none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first. He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency. Now David Taylor reports on BBC that the latest set of declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls show that by the time of the Presidential election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks — or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had 'blood on his hands'. It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war that he knew would derail his campaign. Nixon therefore set up a clandestine back-channel to the South Vietnamese involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was dispatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. Meanwhile the FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and transcripts of Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. Johnson was told by Defense Secretary Clark Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace. The president gave Humphrey enough information to sink his opponent but by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency so Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway. In the end Nixon won by less than 1% of the popular vote, escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, and finally settled for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968."

Hugh Pickens writes writes "After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations, none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first. He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency. Now David Taylor reports on BBC that the latest set of declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls show that by the time of the Presidential election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks — or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had 'blood on his hands'. It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war that he knew would derail his campaign. Nixon therefore set up a clandestine back-channel to the South Vietnamese involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was dispatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. Meanwhile the FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and transcripts of Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. Johnson was told by Defense Secretary Clark Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace. The president gave Humphrey enough information to sink his opponent but by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency so Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway. In the end Nixon won by less than 1% of the popular vote, escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, and finally settled for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968."

c0lo writes "U.S. federal authorities are examining Microsoft's involvement with companies and individuals that allegedly paid bribes to overseas government officials in exchange for business. The United States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into the bribery allegations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania. The China allegations were first shared with United States officials last year by an unnamed whistle-blower who had worked with Microsoft in the country, according to the person briefed on the inquiry. The whistle-blower said that a Microsoft official in China directed the whistle-blower to pay bribes to government officials to win business deals. U.S. government investigators are also reviewing whether Microsoft had a role in allegations that resellers offered bribes to secure software deals with Romania's Ministry of Communications. In Italy, Microsoft's dealings with consultants that specialize in customer-loyalty programs are under scrutiny, with allegations that Microsoft's Italian unit used such consultants as vehicles for lavishing gifts and trips on Italian procurement officials in exchange for government business. In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, John Frank, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said the company could not comment about continuing investigations. Mr. Frank said it was not uncommon for such government reviews to find that the claims were without merit. Somehow, given the way OOXML became a standard, it wouldn't surprise me if it were an actual fire that caused this smoke."

ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."

ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."

ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."

theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."

Hugh Pickens writes "Mike Hoffman reports that Syria's Assad regime has accused the rebels of launching a chemical weapons attack in Aleppo that killed 25 people — an accusation the rebel fighters have strongly rebuked. A Reuters photographer said victims he had visited in Aleppo hospitals were suffering breathing problems and that people had said they could smell chlorine after the attack. The Russian foreign ministry says it has enough information to confirm the rebels launched a chemical attack while U.S. government leaders say they have not found any evidence of a chemical attack. White House spokesman Jay Carney says the accusations made by Assad could be an attempt to cover up his own potential attacks. 'We've seen reports from the Assad regime alleging that the opposition has been responsible for use. Let me just say that we have no reason to believe these allegations represent anything more than the regime's continued attempts to discredit the legitimate opposition and distract from its own atrocities committed against the Syrian people,' said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. 'We don't have any evidence to substantiate the regime's charge that the opposition even has CW (chemical weapons) capability.' President Obama has said the 'red line' to which the U.S. would send forces to Syria would be the use of chemical weapons. However, it was assumed the Assad regime would be the ones using their chemical weapons stockpile, not the rebels."

concealment sends this quote from an article about evading internet censorship with the sneakernet: "Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez on Saturday told newspaper publishers from around the Western Hemisphere that 'nothing is changing' in Cuba’s ossified political system and that 'the situation of press freedom in my country is calamitous.' But Sanchez said underground blogs, digital portals and illicit e-magazines proliferate, passed around on removable computer drives known as memory sticks. The small computer memories, also known as flash drives or thumb drives, are dropped into friendly hands on buses and along street corners, offering a surprising number of Cubans access to information. 'Information circulates hand to hand through this wonderful gadget known as the memory stick,' Sanchez said, 'and it is difficult for the government to intercept them. I can't imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn't.'"

judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recipients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreessen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort: 'Fortunately we are still alive,' joked Pouzin. 'It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.' Awarded in the U.K., the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judges considered entries from 65 countries."

The guy who came up with the LazyHusband app, Ethan Duggan, isn't married. That's good, because he's only 12 years old. One of his local (Las Vegas) TV stations says this about him: "...the 12-year-old from Henderson, Nev., said he was tired of always replying to his mother's questions of how she looked in an outfit, he came up with common phrases that, with a touch of the screen, can tell his mother, 'You look amazing today.'" The app costs 99 cents for iOS, Android or Kindle. Ethan admits that Dad helped, but says the app is his own work and was his idea. He's now working on Lazy Kid and Lazy Wife. The TV story says, "Phrases for Lazy Kid include, yes, I did my homework and I love you. Ethan said he is having a hard time coming up with common phrases that a wife might say to her husband." Pro basketball retiree turned business guy Shaquille O'Neal is reportedly interested in LazyHusband, which means you may hear plenty more about LazyHusband and the prodigy who created it.

langelgjm writes "In a closely-watched case, the U.S. Supreme Court today vindicated the first-sale doctrine, declaring that it "applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad." The case involved a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher's permission. The 6-3 decision has important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion (PDF) that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad."

skade88 writes "Wired has a good article that covers the origins of the white dwarf super nova Johannes Kepler observed in 1604. From the article: 'Up until now, it was unclear what lead to the star's explosion. New Chandra data suggests that, at least in the case of Kepler's remnant, the white dwarf grabbed material from its companion star. The disk-shaped structure seen near the center suggests that the supernova explosion hit a ring of gas and dust that would have formed, like water circling a drain, as the white dwarf sucked material away from its neighbor. In addition, magnesium is not an element formed in great abundances during Type 1a supernovas, suggesting it came from the companion star. Whether or not Kepler's supernova is a typical case remains to be seen. '"

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing." The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing." The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).

An anonymous reader writes "An article at TechCrunch bemoans the naysayers of ubiquitous video camera headsets, which seems like a near-term certainty whether it comes in the form of Google Glass or a similar product. The author points out, rightly, that surveillance cameras are already everywhere, and increasingly sophisticated government drones and satellites mean you're probably on camera more than you think already. 'But there's something about being caught on video, not by some impersonal machine but by another human being, that sticks in people's craws and makes them go irrationally berserk.' However, he also seems happy to trade privacy for security, which may not be palatable to others. He references a time he was mugged in Mexico as well as a desire to keep an eye on abuses of authority from police and others. 'If pervasive, ubiquitous networked cameras ultimately make public privacy impossible, which seems likely, then at least we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless.'"

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Fast Software Encryption conference in Singapore earlier this week, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Dan Bernstein presented a method for breaking TLS and SSL web encryption when it's combined with the popular stream cipher RC4 invented by Ron Rivest in 1987. Bernstein demonstrated that when the same message is encrypted enough times--about a billion--comparing the ciphertext can allow the message to be deciphered. While that sounds impractical, Bernstein argued it can be achieved with a compromised website, a malicious ad or a hijacked router." RC4 may be long in the tooth, but it remains very widely used.

We'd like to wish you a happy Pi Day. It may be just as arbitrary as some other holidays (though perhaps easier to schedule than some), but any excuse for some delicious food is one I'll take. Reader alphadogg writes with a few suggestions of ways to take part in this convenient celebration of both rationality and irrationality. (And lead your comment with the number of digits you can recite offhand ...)

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The news that that Google is killing off Google Reader in their annual spring cleaning means hordes of abandoned RSS users will need a new home to get their news fix before July 1, 2013. Sure, Google Reader may not have been the most beautifully designed product to come out of Mountain View, Calif., but it sure was convenient. And now that it's going away, it's evident just how valuable it has been. 'It's a tough question that's not unlike asking what's the best planet to live on not named Earth or the best thing to breathe not named air,' writes Casey Chan. 'Google Reader was that obvious a choice.' So what's the best RSS reader not named Google Reader? Is it Reeder? Or NetNewsWire? Maybe Feedly? Or should we all just ditch RSS and get with Twitter?" Personally, I've taken a liking to Akregator on my desktop and Sparse RSS on my phone (syncing done woefully manually by exporting the list of feeds from my desktop reader and importing into the phone reader now and then). Update: 03/14 14:43 GMT by T : Depending on your aesthetics and platform of choice, you might like one of these four options, too.

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

theodp writes "When Aaron Swartz tapped into MIT's network and scooped up data from one non-profit company, the U.S. Attorney threatened him with 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. So what kind of jail time did 38 Attorneys General threaten Google with for using its Street View cars to scoop up passwords, e-mail and other personal information by tapping into the networks of their states' unsuspecting citizens? None. In agreeing to settle the case, the NY Times reports, Google is required to police its own employees on privacy issues, lecture the public on how to fend off privacy violations like the one Google perpetrated, and forfeit about 20% of one day's net income. Given the chance, one imagines that Aaron Swartz would have happily jumped at a comparable deal." The fine being $7 million. At least EPIC isn't as cynical and thinks the outcome was positive.

The quote in the title is from www.muckrock.com/about/. And that is exactly what MuckRock is all about: Making FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for you (and investigative reporters) so you don't have to deal with the often-daunting paperwork and runarounds you may run into when you try to pry information out of a recalcitrant government agency. In theory, most government information is public. In practice, many local, state and federal government bodies would just as soon never tell you anything. This is why Tim Lord talked with MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy, and why we're running this interview in the middle of Sunshine Week, which exists "...to educate the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary secrecy."

The quote in the title is from www.muckrock.com/about/. And that is exactly what MuckRock is all about: Making FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for you (and investigative reporters) so you don't have to deal with the often-daunting paperwork and runarounds you may run into when you try to pry information out of a recalcitrant government agency. In theory, most government information is public. In practice, many local, state and federal government bodies would just as soon never tell you anything. This is why Tim Lord talked with MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy, and why we're running this interview in the middle of Sunshine Week, which exists "...to educate the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary secrecy."

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The Columbus Dispatch reports that southwestern Ohio Judge Robert Ruehlman has ordered a halt to a speeding-ticket blitz in a village that installed traffic cameras saying it's 'a scam' against motorists and blasting the cameras and the thousands of $105 citations that resulted. 'Elmwood Place is engaged in nothing more than a high-tech game of 3-Card Monty,' Ruehlman wrote. 'It is a scam that motorists can't win.' The village began using the cameras in September, resulting in 6,600 speeding citations in the first month, triple the population of the village of 2,188. Optotraffic installed the Elmwood Place cameras and administered their use, in return for 40 percent of ticket revenue — which quickly topped $1 million. But business owners and motorists struck back, charging in a lawsuit that the cameras hurt the village's image and said they were put into use without following Ohio law for public notice on new ordinances. 'This is the first time that a judge has said, "Enough is enough,"' said plaintiffs' attorney, Mike Allen, who called the ruling a victory for the common people. 'I think this nationally is a turning point.'"

jjoelc writes "Being one of those 'suffering' through the time change last night, the optimist in me reminded me that it could be much worse. That's when I started wondering how many different time/date standards there really are. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but is sorely lacking in the various formats used by e.g. Unix, Windows, TRS-80, etc. And that is without even getting into the various calendars that have been in and out of use throughout the ages. So how about it? How many different time/date 'standards' can we come up with? I'm betting there are more than a few horror stories of having to translate between them..."

theodp writes "Taking a page from HP's playbook, Harvard University administrators secretly searched the emails of 16 deans last fall, looking for a leak to reporters about a case of cheating. The deans were not warned about the email access and only one was told of the search afterward. Dean and CS prof Michael Smith said in an email Sunday that Harvard will not comment on personnel matters or provide additional information about the board cases that were concluded during the fall term. Smith's office and the Harvard general counsel's office authorized the search, according to a Boston Globe report. Smith's Harvard bio notes that his entrepreneurial experience included co-founding and selling Liquid Machines, where Smith coincidentally invented a software technique designed to keep unauthorized people from reading electronic documents."

gentryx writes "Newly found evidence supports earlier claims that Gustave Whitehead (a German immigrant, born Gustav Weißkopf, with Whitehead being the literal translation of Weißkopf) performed the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight as early as 1901-08-14 — more than two years before the Wrights took off. A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight. A detailed analysis of said photo can be found here. Apparently the results are convincing enough that even Jane's chimes in. His plane is also better looking than the Wright Flyer I." (And when it comes to displacing the Wright brothers, don't forget Alberto Santos Dumont.)

gentryx writes "Newly found evidence supports earlier claims that Gustave Whitehead (a German immigrant, born Gustav Weißkopf, with Whitehead being the literal translation of Weißkopf) performed the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight as early as 1901-08-14 — more than two years before the Wrights took off. A reconstructed image shows him mid-flight. A detailed analysis of said photo can be found here. Apparently the results are convincing enough that even Jane's chimes in. His plane is also better looking than the Wright Flyer I." (And when it comes to displacing the Wright brothers, don't forget Alberto Santos Dumont.)

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Discover Magazine reports that Hugo Chavez will apparently get an embalming job designed to keep him looking alive for decades similar to that of Russia's Vladimir Lenin, whose body still lies in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, nearly 90 years after his death. So how do you preserve a human body for decades without it turning into a pile of melted tissue? First, get to work quickly. Upon death, the human body starts decomposing immediately. The way to stop it is with formaldehyde, a preservative used for the past century, which inhibits the enzyme decomposition as well as killing bacteria. 'You pump the chemical in, and as the formaldehyde hits the cells of the body, it firms up the protein of the cell, or fixates it,' says Vernie Fountain, head of the Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills in Springfield, Mo. 'That's what makes them stiff.' With a body that will have to be on display for years, it's likely to require a top-shelf, super-strong solution. 'If I were doing Hugo Chavez, I would strengthen the solution and use more preservative product,' says Fountain. Next, get a good moisturizer. Formaldehyde preserves, but it also dries out the body. Vaseline or other moisturizers can preserve the look of skin, according to Melissa Johnson Williams, executive director of the American Society of Embalmers. Finally keep cool. Heat decomposes a body so for long term preservation, the body has to be kept at the temperature of a standard kitchen refrigerator, somewhere in the mid-40s. Lastly, if Venezuelans really want to keep Hugo Chavez around forever, like many other world figures, there's only one solution that works, according to Fountain. 'The best form of preservation is mummification.'"

sciencehabit writes "It's the sort of abstract puzzle that keeps a scientist awake at night: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern? In the 300 years since this 'three-body problem' was first recognized, just three families of solutions have been found. Now, two physicists have discovered 13 new families. It's quite a feat in mathematical physics, and it could conceivably help astrophysicists understand new planetary systems." The paper is available at arxiv.

theodp writes "When it comes to tales of fake girlfriends, Manti Te'o can't hold a candle to theoretical particle physicist Paul Frampton. In November 2011, writes the NY Times' Maxine Swann in 'The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble,' Frampton met who he says he thought was Czech bikini model Denise Milani on Mate1.com. A Yahoo Messenger romance bloomed, at least in the 68-year-old Frampton's mind (Frampton's ex-wife was a self-described 'physics groupie'). But before starting their perfect life together, fake Denise asked Frampton for one little favor — would he be so kind as to bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz, Bolivia? Yep, bad idea. The UNC Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy soon found himself in a Buenos Aries prison, charged with transporting two kilos of cocaine into Argentina. Currently serving a four years and eight months sentence under house arrest, Frampton reportedly continues to supervise his two current PhD students by phone, and still finds time to post to the Physics archive."

Ian Lamont writes "The Economist writes that self-publishing threatens the existence of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) regimen, which is used to track and distribute printed books. Self-publishing of e-books has experienced triple-digit growth in recent years, and the most popular self-publishing platforms such as Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing don't require ISBNs (Amazon assigns its own reference number to these titles). But Bowker, the sole distributor of ISBNs in the United States, sees an opportunity in self-publishing. The packages for independent authors are very expensive — Bowker charges $125 for a single ISBN, and $250 for ten. It also upsells other expensive services to new and naive authors, including $25 barcodes and a social widget that costs $120 for the first year. Laura Dawson, the product manager for identifiers at Bowker, insists that ISBNs are relevant and won't be replaced anytime soon: 'Given how hard it is to migrate database platforms and change standards, I wouldn't expect to replace the ISBN, simply because it is also an EAN, which is an ISO standard that forms the backbone of global trade of both physical and digital items. There are a lot of middlemen, even in self-publishing. They require standards in order to communicate with one another.'" It seems like a lot of programs/services just use ASINs (despite being controlled by a single private entity), probably indicating some deficiency with the current centralized registration regime. Back in 2005, Jimmy Wales suggested we needed something (culturally) similar to wikipedia for product identifiers. The O'Reilly interview indicates that the folks issuing ISBNs think DOIs are DOA too.

MellowTigger writes "I work at a non-profit organization. I am looking for a site where we can register an account under our group's name, then spawn multiple projects to solicit programmer help for our organization. The current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim. We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL. At the moment, my available options emphasize individual projects of public interest, so we would have to spawn multiple independent projects, seeming to spam the host with 'pointless' minor tasks. We already have technical people seeking to donate time. We just need a way to coordinate skill matching, document sharing, and code submission out on the web. What do you suggest?"

derekmead writes "Dolly's mere existence was profound. It was also unusually short, at just six years. But scientists in Japan announced yesterday they have succeeded in cloning mice using the same technique that created Dolly with more or less perfect results: The mice are healthy, they live just as long as regular mice, and they've been flawlessly cloned and recloned from the same source to the 25th generation. Researchers claim it's the first example of seamless, repeat cloning using the Dolly method—known as "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT)—in which the nucleus from an adult source animal is transferred to an egg with its nucleus removed. Until recently, the process was fraught with failures and mutations. But the team led by Teruhiko Wakayama, whose results were published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, was able to create 581 clones from the same original mouse. Scientists, including Dolly's creator, have long felt the process was still too unstable—and too wasteful of precious eggs, given the failure rate—to be used on humans any time soon. But perhaps it's not so far off, after all."

Millions of pixels have been used to talk about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban telecommuting and her reasons for doing it. Today's interviewee, Mårten Mickos, built MySQL AB into a billion-dollar company with 70% of its workers, all over the world, telecommuting instead of working in offices. Now he's CEO of another young open source company, Eucalyptus, and is following a similar hiring pattern. Mårten says (toward the end of the video/transcript) that he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.