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andrew_j_w writes "British born creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee has finally received his Knighthood from the Queen. It's nice to a pioneer, who certainly not a household name, get such a high honour from the establishment. Hopefully more people will now recognise the great work he did!"

fruey writes "A team from York University, UK are about to test high altitude platforms, according to this article, as a way of bringing high-speed internet services to computer users in remote areas out of reach of broadband. They plan to use solar powered engines to keep the aerial platforms in position. The Capanina site have some more information about this stratospheric broadband experiment. More technical stuff can be found at the York University website This technology could deliver broadband communications at data rates up to 120Mbit/s! Screw cable and xDSL, when will stratospheric be available near me?"

Between 1804 and 1807 Jean Fourier discovered the Fourier Transform: a means of transforming any function into its frequency components. He initially used it to study the propagation of heat in solids. Since then the Fourier transform has found a myriad of applications such as the JPEG, MPEG and MP3 formats... It's even been used to multiply polynomials. The main computational cost of the Fourier transform are the N^2 multiplications it requires. In 1903 Runge noticed that the number of multiplications required could be reduced to N.log(N) by using trigonometric symmetries. In 1965 this was applied in computers by Cooley and Tukey: the fast Fourier transform became popular. Since computers represent numbers in binary, multiplications and divisions by powers of 2 are commonly implemented by shifting bits left and right. Multiplications by constants are easily optimized using the same trick. In 1999 Trac Tran of Johns Hopkins University found an approximation to the DCT which causes very little error, yet uses only 13 shifts and 31 additions for N=8. Given the recursive nature of the FFT, this transform could be used as part of an FFT with N>8. Apparently, he has applied for a patent for this approximation. Do you think this is worth a patent? Do you know of prior art?

Terragen is an extraordinary landscape generator. Currently it's only on Windows, but I've emailed the guy asking whether he would be willing to let us port it... I hope that's agreable to him. Would you like to see it on your Linux box?