Slashdot Mirror

Anonymous Lazy Boy writes "Yesterday saw the official release of Valgrind 1.0.0. Valgrind is a C/C++ programmer's dream come true: effortless memory allocation checking, uninitialized memory access, leaks etc. Purify for Linux has arrived, only better: contrary to its commercial (non-Linux) sibling, checking is performed directly on the executable, no re-linking necessary. The technology behind Valgrind is highly fascinating and explained down to the very gory details in the documentation."

profBill asks: "I work in the area of complex adaptive systems, that is understanding the emergence of complexity from the interactions of many elements (immune systems, economies, ecosystems, etc.). In particular we are using evolutionary computation to create elements/creatures that can co-exist in an ecosystem with certain interactions and relationships. All that is very interesting, but in the end, assuming we create such creatures, I have to show them to the ecologists and biologists so they can understand what is going on. The only way I can imagine doing it easily, other than with graphs and charts, is to create a 2D animation of the creatures and their interactions that these folks can watch. My problem is that there are so many choices for a toolkit to build such a 2D animation. My goal is not a movie of ILM quality, but something 'good enough'."

"'Good enough' for me means:

• Quick and dirty, that I can tune as needed.
• Zoom capability on a grid
• Pop up menus on any one grid element to get information.
• Scrolling, resizing, the typical.
• Be able to hook to a C/C++ program to get a creature's behavior

What would you use to build such an animation?"

danox writes "Macromedia has finally incorporated some accessibility features into flash, with their latest version flash MX (note that you pretty much need a flash viewer to see this site). Accessibility nazi Joe Clark on A List Apart has written a pretty good critique of the new features and doesn't give macromedia too much praise. Apart from the fact that macromedia has to do this in order to keep the US government as a customer, its a step forward for flash. Just think, it's now possible to write a plugin that will render flash animations as text."

Jadsky writes "Salon is is running a story about how modifications to games are now the lifeblood of the industry. It cites "Day of Defeat", an add-on to Half-Life, and proceeds to give an analysis of the history and current work on game mods. It also mentions Castle Smurfenstein and the Doom Construction Kit, which many of us played with before there was z-space."

dsoltesz writes "Legislation that's been in the works to put a program in place to allow government techies to trade places with private sector counterparts for six to twelve month stints, just passed in the House. The government seems to be on the winning end of the Digital Tech Corps Act, until perhaps, the government IT workers realize the grass really is greener on the corporate side of the fence... If the bill makes it, it will be interesting to see if the concept actually gets implemented."

CodeShark writes: "According to this story at CNN, Transmeta is set to release their new TM6000 microprocessor this afternoon. The chip apparently incorporates some of the functions usually provided by high-performance (and high price!) chip sets. Transmeta is reporting a further reduction in power requirements by 44% and sees the laptop and sub-laptop markert as the primary markets for their new CPU. Intel and AMD claim to be catching up with the Transmeta chips in terms of power requirements, I'd be curious to find out what the real world comparisons might make of those claims ..." If anyone out there is at Microprocessor Forum, please say in comments any further details that are made clear there.

s3hel writes "As if things weren't already hard enough, online retailers are experiencing yet another e-rip-off: electronic price tag alteration. This is kind of neat, set your own price for that new laptop! " Basically it points out a very simple vulnerability in web applications. It's nothing surprising at all, people do this sort of stuff to Slashdot all the time -- fortunately we're not selling anything ;)

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm presently doing a research project on the actual cost of computer viruses to companies within the U.S. Computer Economics, a research firm out of Carlsbad, California, has released statistics suggesting that virus attacks have cost U.S. businesses $17.1 Billion in 2000. That figure has gone on to be quoted in a number of other publications such as an article in Information Week magazine, but beyond a simple explanation, statistics aren't presented to back up this claim. How much have virus attacks cost you or your company?" To be honest with you, I too would like to see the mathematics behind this claim.

chuqui asks: "I'm looking for some help from the /. group mind. I have a consulting opportunity that involves a large, complex system. Designing and building this beast is going to require a wad O'documentation, and I'm looking for ideas and tools to help deal with this, especially with flow diagrams and flow charts (I could adapt a traditional flowcharting tool, but these are more process diagrams than code flowcharts), and some way of documenting a good sized SQL system, with the schema, the tables and the connections..." If there is a single tool that can do all this, I would be pleasantly surprised, but I'm sure that there is a decent suite of tools that can be collected from the Open Source Software Catalog that would be perfect for this type of work. Right?

"I've found some tools I could use, but they all live on That Other System. The place I'm doing this for is open to considering Open Source tools for the project, so I have a chance to throw a couple of more chinks into the IS ivory tower armor if I can find find the right tools.

So I'd love some feedback from the group mind: what tools do you use to help keep a handle on large project designs, especially those involving database systems. I need process flow documentation and a way to manage the database definitions, but I'd love to hear about all of your favorite tools. I'd love to be able to bring forward a complete project management solution that's open source, just to prove it can be done to the people who believe life begins and ends with three letters and white coats...."

sireenmalik asks: "Of late I have become interested in this field of research namely Event Correlation on a Distributed Network System. The more I read about it, the more ignorant I feel. There is so much to it: distributed network systems, databasing, artifical intelligence (neural networks, baysian belief networks, rule based,etc.), software engineering, computer science, telecommmunication....etc. If I were to really attack it from a programming point of view, can somebody tell me what tools and languages should I use? I suppose it will be a realtime environment. Academicians support ADA but I can't figure how the artificial intelligence part will be done. If I use PROLOG/LISP I get into HEAP management business which really is a dragon for realtime systems. C/C++ .. Java....? To add the list I also know about the diverse implementations using JIRO (from SUN), ECDL (from HP), RAPIDE (from Stanford.edu), JAVA Management API, ELAVA, GEM Language, MODEL Language, IF/PROLOG......and the list goes on and on and on! It's interesting as well as confusing (I can't help but agree here). Let's talk about it. Maybe something useful happens here?"

urbanjunkie asks: "I want to ensure my web site/database farm/whatever is as available as possible, so I checked out many HA (High Availability) packages for Linux. It seems that they -all- seem to want me to use shared storage. I don't want to use shared storage since it moves the point of failure to the disk array. I know that the disk array can be RAIDed etc, but what about a fire, power loss and any of the other things that can go wrong? I'd prefer to have something that replicated changes made to one disk to another disk located in a separate PC that may well be in a location 100 metres away. Is there anything open sourced that can do this?"

oMaT writes: "An article @ CNN states that Sony is having problems purchasing as many of some components as they need. They state that the projected 1m units to be shipped on Oct 26 will actually be more like 500,000. They also hope to have the demand met after the holiday season... Jan-Feb. Bummer." I've heard that if you want to pre-order one, you better pay in advance, as it isn't looking good. Personally, I'm just gonna play the new Zelda, and wait and see what happens with the PS2.

For those of you who think Ask Slashdot is lacking in the technical questions department, I hope this query from (yet another) Anonymous Coward will spark your interest: "I have written a forking server in Perl that is exibiting a phase change in its response characteristics around 10 simultaneous connections. As the number of simultaneous connections passes through 10 connections the connection time increases by two orders of magnitude and becomes very random. At the same point the transmission times drop slightly and continue to have small standard deviations. Although I posted this question to a variety of Perl and Unix usenet usegroups over a week ago, I never received a response. Since the most important part of the post is the performance plot, I placed it and relevant code snipits at: http://www.geocities.com/nawkboy The memory, io, and cpu usage never exceeded more than 80% at any time during the tests and were seldom above 50%. The test results were very similar between remote and local clients. The server is running on a Sun Enterprise 420R running Solaris 2.6. I do not understand the behavior and would appreciate any guidance in understanding it."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Over the years I have heard the idea of luring in Crackers into a honeypot, so you can watch them and see what they are doing. It has always seemed to me to be a better idea to keep the Crackers completely away with a low profile and a firewall. What do you think?" This is an interesting approach to security and one I have also thought about from time to time...assuming you can build a convincing enough trap so you can learn how they work. "Forewarned is forearmed", especially when it comes to Cracking. How likely would such traps fool really good crackers? Update: 04/07 03:09 by CT : originally this story misused 'hacker' quite offensively. I corrected it.

sashae writes: "We've heard a lot over the last couple of months about the gigantic dollar-figure sales the net has been generating, that the US Gov't has missed out on taxing. American Outlook magazine has an article about the true impact of Internet sales on taxes that the states would normally collect. "

morzel asks a doosy: "XML is one of these words everybody's talking about yet no-one really knows how to use it in specific applications or server technologies. At the Apache XML Project, some work is being done on integrating XML/XSL in the server itself, but personally I like IBM's idea of a transcoder in between a range of (XML) servers and a range of clients. But... how can it be done?" (More)

"Suppose you have to develop an on-line application, and you'd want to go with XML on the server side, and everyday browsers on the client side. Portable platforms like Palm and WAP-enabled phones will probably be a client platform that is being used frequently.
What tools -open source or commercial- are available to accomplish this?

The elements of the system are:

• XML Enabled Database system: Data is retrieved by the transcoder using HTTP or your favorite protocol
• Transcoding gateway: should translate the XML data using XSL (or another way) to a form readable by the client. The exact translation or the XSL to use can be set by the server (included in the XML source), or be detected by the gateway.
• Browsers of all colours and kinds.

A typical usage of this system would be the publishing of an on-line application without having to bother with client troubles except for writing the XSLs. I do web development, and the amount of work that goes into making sure every platform works as it's supposed to be is way too much in comparison to the functionality of the system. Specially when exotic clients like PDAs and WAP mobile phones are requested client platforms (e.g.: a sales follow-up app), the burden of getting everything working and having a UI that does the job is a real nightmare...

XML is the wave of the future, that's for sure... But what tools are available to actually incorporate XML in a system that can do all things we poor webdesigners dream of?

All suggestions welcome! "

Anonymous Coward wrote with a link to this News-Observer story. AC says the "...NC State department of revenue has added an additional line to the NC Individual Income tax form requiring consumers to calculate how much they spent for goods online and pay taxes on it." Meanwhile, Parothed sent a link to an article that implies that the (heavily libertarian) Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies might just find the North Carolina Internet tax plan acceptable.

mark juncosa asks: "It is a mystery to me how Nintendo's Duck Hunt gun works. I have thought about it for a long time and have not been able to come up with any kind of good solution." Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind knowing this one myself. On a guess, I'd say that the system is entirely active and all the work being done by the gun and the TV remaining the display device that it always has been. Am I close? Or completely off base?

The Joker wrote in with a strange question. He has a cable modem with a 750 meg/month limit, along with an ISDN line. He asks "Is it possible to do ip accounting in such a way that he will start using my isdn connection as soon as the monthly traffic reaches 650 mb, but will keep the other line open."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Electric vehicles, still a small percentage of the total automotive market in the U.S., are beginning to gain ground, according to analysis by IHS Markit. There were 208,000 new registrations for electric vehicles in the U.S. last year, more than double the number filed in 2017, IHS said Monday. That growth in EVs was heavily concentrated in California as well as nine other states that have adopted the Zero Emission Vehicle program. California was the first to launch the ZEV program a state regulation that requires automakers to sell electric cars and trucks there. Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont are also ZEV states.

California accounted for nearly 46 percent, or 95,000, of new EV registrations in 2018, IHS said. California has 59 percent of market share of registered electric vehicles in the U.S. More than 350,000 new EVs will be sold in the US in 2020. Those figures will give EVs a still tiny 2 percent share of the total U.S. fleet. By 2025, that figure is expected to rise to more than1.1 million vehicles sold or a 7 percent share, according to recent IHS Markit. The Tesla's Model 3 is the top selling all-electric in the U.S. so far this year, followed by the Chevy Bolt, Tesla Model X, Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf, according to estimates by Inside EVs.