Slashdot Mirror

hessian writes with this excerpt: "The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov. The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings."

New submitter jmeboi writes "Engadget reports that Sprint has announced a rollover from WiMAX to LTE for its 4G needs. The company is 'converting its 1900MHz holdings and LightSquared's 1600MHz spectrum ("pending FCC approval") to LTE,' and also re-purposing the section of 800MHz spectrum that was set aside for the defunct iDEN push-to-talk network. 'The company plans for a rapid deployment of this new 4G, with the first LTE markets and handsets to hit in mid-2012 with the full rollout mostly completed by 2013. Current subscribers signed up for WiMAX plans won't have to worry, as their devices will continue to be supported throughout 2012.'"

An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski revealed plans yesterday to overhaul the U.S. phone subsidy program and shift its focus to providing broadband access. He said, 'Broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society. If we want the United States to be the world's leading market, we need to embrace the essential goal of universal broadband, and reform outdated programs.' According to BusinessWeek, the program currently 'supports phone service to schools, libraries, the poor and high-cost areas.' Last year it spent $4.3 billion to provide support to over 1,700 carriers in high-cost areas. Genachowski hopes the change will put the U.S. 'on the path to universal broadband service by the end of the decade.'"

Spy Hunter writes "Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum, Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said, 'We're planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half. We're running hundreds of wafers through the fab, and we're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time.' They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying, 'In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we'll replace SRAM.' With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?"

First time accepted submitter jalfreize writes "Indian Mathematician Rohit Gupta (known by the moniker @fadesingh on twitter) has announced an online workshop which he intends to 'conclude by attacking an important problem in front of (the participants), in public view.' The problem is the Riemann Hypothesis, first proposed in 1859. Rohit outlines his approach based on quasicrystals first outlined by Freeman Dyson. His audacious plan, coupled with this recent news about quasicrystals, has kicked up a storm of interest in the Indian twitterverse."

iONiUM writes with a CNET article outlining the next step in Microsoft's plans for cable television, which he says "seems like yet another step forward in killing traditional cable companies." From the article: "[Microsoft] announced this morning that nearly 40 television content providers — including Comcast, Verizon, and HBO in the United States — will roll out programming over Xbox Live. The company also has deals lined up with providers in the U.K., Spain, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Italy."

angry tapir writes "Responding to the rapid adoption of their software, the folks behind the OpenStack cloud software are planning to form a stand-alone nonprofit foundation to steward future development of the open-source software suite. They will formally announce the foundation at the OpenStack conference, being held this week in Boston. Hosting provider Rackspace, which currently owns the OpenStack trademark and copyrights, plans to transfer ownership of these resources to the not-for-profit foundation once it is operational."

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has launched a project to recruit 10,000 volunteers across Europe to measure the performance of their broadband connection over two years. The trial, believed to be the world's biggest follows similar projects in the US and the UK, run by the EC's partner SamKnows. The data collected will be used to plan the next generation of services. Those interested in signing up to take part can do so here."

First time accepted submitter Mindflux0 writes "The European Union is going forward with the proposed Solar Orbiter, a space probe designed to study the sun. The probe will orbit closer to the sun than any other man-made object at a sizzling 42 million km. It's planned to launch in 2017 for close to a billion euros."

John Cowan recently gave a talk on the progress of R7RS (slides), the next revision of the Scheme language standard, at LispNYC. After the R6RS debacle, the community stepped back and is now basing the next standard on R5RS; the work has been split into two languages — R7RS-Small and R7RS-Large. The first working group is preparing to issue a final draft of the R7RS-Small language (PDF; clocking in at 73 pages vs. R5RS's 50) within the next few weeks. Read on for a summary of the planned changes to R7RS (more or less in the order of presentation). The talk details a number of improvements over R5RS and R6RS, and is divided into two portions. The majority of the talk discuses the status of the small language, with the last portion giving a quick update on the future intent of the large language group.

First on the list of major new features is a mandatory library system designed to be easily implemented atop existing module systems. R6RS's library system proved to tackle too much at once and be incompatible with everything already in a use (a persistent concern in the design of the R7RS-Small language). The R7RS system, on the other hand, is static, simple, and just powerful enough to promote implementation of portable libraries.

Exceptions are stripped down from R6RS (which proved too incompatible with existing implementations for practical use). guard (similar to try...catch in other languages) and with-exception-handler are supported: the latter runs the handler in the context from which the error was triggered (permitting recovery from the error like invoke-restart ) Unlike r6rs, exceptions lack a strictly defined hierarchy and can be any object (you could e.g. throw 4 if you really felt like it).

Dynamically scoped variables, in the form of parameters, are now part of the standard. Unlike Common Lisp special variables, parameters are first-class objects bound to expressions rather than symbols that are declared dynamically scoped. For reasons of simplicity it was decided to make parameters immutable (i.e. any "mutation" has to be done by rebinding). This has the (intentional) side-effect of making parameters play more nicely with threads (when mutation is permitted, setting a parameter that has not been rebound in the current thread requires synchronizing all threads and can have unexpected results).

As expected, R7RS includes bytevectors to complement strings. The small language standard only permits accessing bytevectors as ordered sets of unsigned 8-bit values (the large language standard will offer more flexible access). Binary I/O is implemented via a set of parallel procedures (open-binary-input-file vs. open-input-file, etc.) in contrast to the incredibly complicated dual binary/text ports provided by R6RS. Additionally, string and bytevector ports similar to SRFI-6 are provided instead of the incompatible string ports provided by R6RS.

Taylor Campbell noted that integer division in most languages is insufficiently expressive, and so R7RS will provide Euclidean division and centered division in addition to the usual suspects. Mathematicians rejoice!

As with R6RS, Unicode support is mandated. Unlike R6RS, the only characters that must be supported are those present in ASCII. For supported characters, Unicode case mapping and normalization are mandatory. One interesting diversion from Unicode and R6RS is that string order comparison is implementation-dependent: this gives implementers latitude with the internal encoding of strings.

Any user of Scheme knows that the language strives for consistent and obvious names for bindings. R7RS furthers this goal by resolving the long-standing inconsistency with core data structure creation, copying, mutation, mapping, etc. Lists, strings, and vectors now have a consistent set of each: make-TYPE, TYPE-copy, TYPE-set!, etc. Conversion procedures between all three types are also provided.

Finally, number of minor improvements were made. Most notable: record types are compatible with SRFI-6 (widely in use today); case sensitivity is the default (with optional insensitivity via include-ci); s-expression and nested block comments were added; IEEE infinities and NaNs have read syntax; strings may contain C-style escape sequences; Common Lisp circular list notation is supported; and common extensions to syntax-rules were standardized.

The final 20 minutes of the talk were about the status of R7RS-Large.

The R7RS Large language is currently on hold, mostly because all the small language members are on the large language committee as well, so there is a lack of time to work on both simultaneously. Work is planned to resume upon release of the final draft of the small language. Some work, however, has been completed.

The main focus of R7RS-Large is providing Scheme "with batteries included." John Cowan started the process by looking beyond the Lisp and Scheme communities (Python is mentioned) to figure out which libraries modern programmers expect their language to include.

This resulted in a list of around 250 packages that was narrowed down to around 80 packages through an initial voting process. It was decided then than some desirable packages (e.g. a foreign function interface) had to be omitted due to complexity. It is expected that implementers will continue experimenting and gradually come to a consensus on the larger packages using the existing SRFI process, and perhaps another revision of the standard down the road.

Of the packages planned for inclusion, the most prominent are: networking, threads, regular expressions, delimited continuations, URI handling, date and time parsing/arithmetic/formatting, hash tables, ambient environment access, file system directory access, gettext (i18n support), and pattern matching.

Most will be optional; packages will only be made mandatory if a number of the other packages require them. A compliant R7RS-Large implementation will only have to either provide a package fully or not at all (half implementations are forbidden).

Interestingly, R7RS large with all packages will be even larger than Common Lisp.

To avoid getting bogged down in stylistic discussions, a decision was made to focus on functionality above other concerns. The resulting packages may not be aesthetically pleasing to everyone, but will provide useful functionality. Users who disagree with naming, scope of functionality, argument ordering, etc. will be free to use the library system to import only the bindings they want, rename functions, wrap things into the style they want, etc. Basically, a compromise between the MIT approach and "Worse is Better" is being sought.

Here a call for volunteers is made: Since the focus will be on functionality over pure aesthetics, developers outside of the Lisp and Scheme communities are actively encouraged to participate in the R7RS-Large language process. No fixed time commitment would be required; the goal is to get a lot of people involved with a few core members maintaining momentum and guiding the process. The R7RS-Large language is most definitely a language designed by and for developers. So, make your voice heard!

Overall R7RS is shaping up to be the standard R6RS should have been (which, of course, could not have happened without the lessons of R6RS). The split between an elegant core language with each design issue meticulously fretted over and voted upon and a looser library standard should, hopefully, result in a core language that will stand the test of time with a standard library that can be used to get actual work done.

First time accepted submitter Oyjord writes "I am going to China in March, and I was curious what kind of cell phone hardware and plans American travelers use while there. I honestly don't like cell phones (and I currently use the Drug Dealer Throwaway Special Du Jour) but I thought I'd look into one with a good data plan, so I could perhaps take pics and upload them on the spot, and perhaps use the phone's internal GPS as opposed to taking my Garmin along, etc." (Note: it would be great if you include in your answers some idea about their currency — if you're in China right now, say, or if you were there more than a year ago.)

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Paris took a big step towards clean transportation as it launched the world's first electric car share program. Created by Vincent Bollore, the Autolib electric car-share is modeled off the city's popular bike share system, and it will be the largest program of its kind in the world. By December the program will include 250 electric vehicles, and it's planned to expand in 2012 if the first leg of the project is successful."

Zothecula writes "Those not content with getting a 2D top-down or 360-degree street level view of a planned route using Google Maps can now enjoy a virtual flight over the route thanks to Google adding a new Helicopter View. The new feature, which currently only works in a full browser and requires the Google Earth plugin, lets users see 3D view, and should come in particularly handy for walkers or bike riders looking for a more intuitive view of potentially tiring hills."

akahige sends this excerpt from an article at TechDirt: "The Patent Examiner blog has the incredible story of Innovatio IP, a patent troll that recently acquired a portfolio of patents that its lawyers (what, you think there are any employees?) appear to believe cover pretty much any Wi-Fi implementation. They've been suing coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants and hotels first — including Caribou Coffee, Cosi, Panera Bread Co, certain Marriotts, Best Westerns, Comfort Inns and more. ... The lawyer representing the company, Matthew McAndrews, seems to imply that the company believes the patents cover everyone who has a home Wi-Fi setup, but they don't plan to go after such folks right now, for 'strategic' reasons."

hazytodd was one of several readers to tip news of Sprint Nextel's plan to grab a piece of the iPhone action in order to halt the company's downward slide. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Sprint has committed to buying 30.5 million iPhones over the next five years (summary of paywalled WSJ story), which at retail rates works out to roughly $20 billion. "To sell that many iPhones, Sprint would have to double its rolls of contract customers, convert all of them to the Apple device or a combination of the two." A separate rumor at Boy Genius Report suggests the iPhone 5 may be a Sprint exclusive until sometime next year, with Verizon and AT&T getting the upgraded iPhone 4S until then. Apple is holding an event to unveil the new phone tomorrow.

hackingbear writes with an article from Reuters about Foxconn's plans to move iPad production to Brazil. From the article: "A much-hyped $12 billion plan for Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn to produce iPads in Brazil, announced in April by President Dilma Rousseff during an official visit to China, is 'in doubt' due to stagnant negotiations over tax breaks and Brazil's own deep structural problems such as a lack of skilled labor and bad infrastructure, government sources tell Reuters. '(Foxconn) is making crazy demands' for tax breaks and other special treatment, the official added. Local media have reported that Foxconn is also seeking priority treatment at Brazilian customs, which is notoriously slow even by the standards of emerging markets."

angry tapir writes with an excerpt from a Techworld article: "Nokia is planning to lay off an additional 3,500 employees, as the company continues to restructure after announcing its decision to focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The affected employees work in manufacturing, location and commerce, and supporting functions."

FleaPlus writes "During a talk at the National Press Club, SpaceX's Elon Musk revealed the company's plans for making their Falcon 9 rocket fully reusable. A rendering depicts the first stage, upper stage, and Dragon capsule all separately returning to the Earth's surface and making a controlled, rocket-powered landing. During the next few years SpaceX will be testing VTVL (Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing) maneuvers and re-usability with their Falcon 9-based 'Grasshopper' testbed, with up to 70 test launches per year. Musk stated that if reuse is successful, it would result in a 100x reduction in their already-low launch costs, a key step toward Musk's long-term aim of lowering the price of a ticket to Mars to $500K."

First time accepted submitter (and first-time parent — congratulations!) SoylentRed writes "I recently have had my first kid, a wonderful healthy daughter who is now just over 6 months old. As one can expect, we have an abundance of photos and videos, and have started to scratch our heads about the best way to store these files and back them up long-term. My parents have asked us (funny thing is it was my mom — the least tech-savvy person among our family) what our plan is to make sure these files are saved and available for her when she is older — which made me realize that we don't really have a good plan! We are currently using TimeMachine on my wife's MacBook Pro; for now we are doing OK with that as a back-up. But my parents have offered to help pay for something that might be a better solution. We could burn DVDs — but that is tedious and gets to be a pain as we would need to back those up (or recopy) them every year or so to be sure we aren't suffering from degrading DVDs. Is our best option right now to pick up two hard drives, back up all our pictures and videos to the first, and then use a 3rd party app to mirror that drive to the second just in case one of them craps out? Is there an online solution that would be better? We are still a few years away from being able to afford the DVDs/CDs that are the 100+ year discs. Is there a better solution I haven't thought of?"

wisebabo writes with news from CNN that "China's first space laboratory module launched Thursday, according to state-run media, an important milestone in China's plan to build a space station." The module, known as Tiangong-1, features sleeping areas and exercise equipment. Writes wisebabo: "In another universe (Arthur C. Clarke's 2011), it would be on its way to Europa by now. Anyone know what orbital plane/altitude it's at? Can it be reached by NASA/Soyuz? Are the docking ports compatible? How about the air pressure/breathing mix?"