Slashdot Mirror

srinravi writes to mention an Ars Technica article about another ambitious 'inexpensive computer' project. A Chinese manufacturer, YellowSheepRiver, is aiming to make available a $150 Linux PC built with inexpensive hardware components. From the article: "Urging potential customers to 'Say no to Wintel,' YellowSheepRiver is devoted to using its own Linux distribution and hardware designed and manufactured by Chinese companies. YellowSheepRiver hopes to close the "digital divide" by making computer technology available to the Chinese public at an affordable price. The Municator, which comes with 256MB of RAM, uses a unique 64-bit CPU with an instruction set based on a subset of the MIPS architecture. Designed by a Chinese company called BLX, the the cheap chip is clocked at 400 or 600MHZ and supposedly provides performance comparable to that of an Intel P3."

An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is reporting that Ben Liblit has been awarded the 2005 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his study on understanding and fixing software 'bugs' in the real world. From the article: 'Liblit's dissertation proposes a method for leveraging the key strength of user communities - their overwhelming numbers. His approach uses sparse random sampling rather than complete data collection for gathering information from the experiences of large numbers of software end users. It also simultaneously ensures that the observed data is an unbiased, representative subset of the complete program behavior across all runs.' Slashdot broke the story on this research back in 2003. Apparently the project is still going strong."

thefirelane wrote to mention a New Scientist study that indicates your subconscious mind is a better decision maker than you are. From the article: "The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say. Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with."

Carl Bialik writes "'You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Pizer is one of about about 1,000 members of the "cryonics" movement who plan to put their bodies on ice soon after death so that in the future, medical advances can save them. A small, wealthy subset of these cryonauts is exploring ways to leave their money to themselves. 'With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated,' the Journal reports. 'Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world.'"

Robert writes "As part of the announcement of the next generation look and feel for Windows Vista, Microsoft said that it will make a subset of the new presentation layer available for other platforms. 'Windows Presentation Foundation', the look and feel which provides the rich front end for Vista, will also eventually be available in compact form for other platforms such as the Apple Macintosh, older versions of Windows, and smart devices such as phones or PDAs."

Mad-Mage1 writes "The recent arrests in Florida and the UK of men who were accessing unsecured wireless hotspots has created a flood of articles that contain panic inducing rhetoric. "A small subset of computer-savvy hackers has the know-how and gadgets for more nefarious activities," claims the Sacramento Bee (via Techdirt). "They're (Pringles cans fashioned into antennas) unsophisticated but reliable, and it's illegal to possess them," quips Sacramento County Sheriff's Lt. Bob Lozito of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force." I hope they tell Fry's about all the illegal antennas they're stocking, too.

Gamasutra has up a feature on The Rise of the Auteur & the Return of Indie Development. The article's argument is that the explosion of gaming into mainstream consciousness is opening up niche market opportunities. From the article: "As the overall market of game players increases, the subset of people interested in indie development will naturally increase. Have an interest in indie artists in any medium usually takes more effort (finding new artists via word of mouth or niche communities) and so most people are not interested in putting forth that effort. The formulaic nature of most game development will slowly help spur some of these new players to look for new sources of game experiences."

AmiChris asks: "At work I need something that can dump sequential entries for several hundred thousand instruments in realtime. It also needs to be able to retrieve data for a single instrument relatively quickly. A standard relational database won't cut it. It has to keep up with 2000+ updates per second, mostly on a subset of a few hundred instruments active at a given time. I've got some ideas of how I would build such a beast, based on flat files and a system of caching entries in memory. I would like to know if: someone has already built something like this; and if not, would someone want to use it if I build it? I'm not sure what other applications there might be. I could see recording massive amounts of network traffic or scientific data with such a library. I'm guessing someone out there has done something like this before. I'm currently working with C++ on Windows. "

jschauma writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are available in the NetBSD 2.0.2 Release Announcement."

prostoalex writes "Metafor from MIT is a code visualization utility, capable of converting high-level descriptions into class and function (or method, depending on which camp you're in) definitions. According to the screenshot, it looks like Metafor tries to figure out the components of the software application, defines classes, deduce actions, and generates some function (method) signatures. A PDF document by researchers is available from MIT: "We explore the idea of using descriptions in a natural language as a representation for programs. While we cannot yet convert arbi-trary English to fully specified code, we can use a reasonably expressive subset of English as a visualization tool. Simple descriptions of program objects and their behavior generate scaffolding (underspecified) code fragments, that can be used as feedback for the designer. Roughly speaking, noun phrases can be interpreted as program objects; verbs can be functions, adjectives can be properties. A surprising amount of what we call programmatic semantics can be inferred from linguistic structure. We present a program editor, Metafor, that dynamically converts a user's stories into program code, and in a user study, participants found it useful as a brainstorming tool." There's also an article about it on ACM."

Newly released TextWrangler 2.0 is now free (as in beer). TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor. TextWrangler has switched identities since 1.0, from being a text editor with an indeterminant purpose to a subset of BBEdit, a BBEdit Lite on steroids. It handles syntax coloring, scripting tools (perl, python, shell), and some Xcode integration. It does not include some of BBEdit's more advanced features like source control, CodeWarrior integration, glossaries, and creating text factories (though it can run existing saved factories). BBEdit remains $200, and TextWrangler still qualifies for BBEdit's $130 cross-upgrade price. Previous purchasers of TextWrangler qualify for a store credit (they will be notified via e-mail).

An anonymous reader writes "Windows for devices has an article about the .Net CPU. The chip is programmed with a subset of the CLR and runs the same software as the SPOT smart watches. Among other things, "[t]he computer module is implemented in the format of a 32-pin "DIP" (dual inline package) chip, allowing the module to conveniently plug into a standard 32-pin DIP socket. In addition, the ".netcpu CPU Module" integrates 4MB of nonvolatile Flash memory (interfaced via an SPI interface on the SoC). It also provides 24 general purpose digital I/O lines, which are multiplexed with other functions including 8 VTU ports, a USB port, two serial ports, and SPI and I2C interfaces." More information about the product can be found at the .netcpu company website."

The Watcher asks: "I was at my parents house over the weekend trying to remove various adware/spyware/annoying software, things like Kazaa, Bonzi Buddy, etc.. During this I thought it would be helpful to know things like exactly what files/folders were created/modified and what registry entries were created/modified by an installer program so that I would not have to rely on the supplied uninstaller that only removes a selected subset of what was installed. So what are some preferred utilities out there that work well for this purpose?"

inode_buddha writes "This article describes SCO's recent letters to its UNIX licensees, asking them to certify that they '...are not using Unix code in Linux.' It also notes another set of letters '...outlining additional evidence of copyright infringement to a subset of 1,500 global Linux users that SCO first contacted in May about copyright infringement.' There's also a decent breakdown of the company's balance sheet and some quotes from company officials. I hope to see one of those 'other' letters; could anyone post it? SCO better have asbestos underwear." Ask and receive: idiotnot adds "Here's the article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here is a PDF Copy of the letter." "Yours truly"?

StefanJ writes "Researchers at the University of Washington -- supported by the NASA's Astrobiology Institute, its Planetary Atmospheres program, and Intel -- have come up with a new simulation of planetary formation that suggests that not only are terrestrial planets (small, rocky worlds, as opposed to gas giants) are common, but that water worlds (the subset of terrestrials that have sufficient water to support Life As We Know It) may be plentiful as well. A key factor as to how 'wet' a planetary system's terrestrial worlds get: The eccentricity of the orbits of the system's jovian worlds. It will be a while before we have telescopes good enough to actually see terrestrial planets and spec out their atmospheric composition, allowing us to reality-check these simulations. But it's still cool to play with sims like this. I can't wait for the home version! (Emergency backup link to Science Daily article based on the press release.)"

penciling_in writes "A new study has been released on CircleID where Benjamin Edelman of Berkman Center for Internet & Society explains: "In the past, most measurements of registrar market share have tracked overall registrar shares -- number of domains registered by a registrar divided by number of domains registered by all registrars. In this article, I propose some alternatives -- particular subsets of domains in which to measure registrar market shares, providing a basis for comparison with overall market shares. Results vary dramatically across these subsets, with implications on the future customer retention rates of the corresponding registrars." Related articles include: Registrar Market Share: An Alternative Perspective and Report on Survey of Domain Registration Services"

eldrich asks: "We have two labs: a main lab (lab 1) has 1.2Tb of on-line data storage -- two machines with 600Gb RAID-5s hung off of them. These happily service about 30 Linux machines via NFS over fast ethernet. There are 5-6 WinXP machines that connect via SMB and Samba. The lab is on a private network with a single firewall between it and the world, and we use LDAP for practically everything (hostname, usernames, password, autofs, etc). The students' lab (lab 2) is 40 miles away, with 8 workstations and 2 WinXP machines. This lab also has a small RAID-5 Linux server with 180GB space which serves via NFS and Samba. Sometimes we have people from lab 2 at lab 1 and while they are at the main lab, they need their files. What I want to do is make lab 2's 180GB RAID a subset cache of the 1.2Tb one in lab 1. This puts everyone's main storage at lab 1 (which is backed up weekly) but a local copy can be cached on the lab 2 raid system. This gives the students a local copy for fast access, but all the safety of the backups made from our system. Does anyone know of a filesystem or programs that can help with this?"

"Some people spend 95% of their time in lab 2, so that is their 'home' server, but when they come to lab 1 for a week's stay or so, they scp/rsync their files to the lab 1 server, and at the end of the week push the changes back to lab 2. When people login to a workstation, they usually remain logged in for days at a time and xlock the screen. [If we can get this caching system working], it would mean that people moving between the labs would not need to copy files around since there would always be a 'local' copy.

The network between the labs is not fast enough for direct automounting of lab 1's server on the lab 2 workstations, especially since some files can be over 300Mb in size. We have a VPN (via freeswan) between the different labs, so all data transmitted is encrypted. Also, because lab 2 has 1/6 the capacity of lab 1's RAID it needs to be cached copies of in-use or probable in-use data only.

Crontab entries set for night copies are not useful because people often appear from both places on any given day.

The 3 servers currently run 2.4.18 with XFS so any solution should be compatible with XFS but at a real push we could consider changing the filesystem to another one."

coolmacdude writes "Well it seems that the early estimates were a bit overzealous. According to preliminary test results (in postscript format) on the full range of CPUs at Virginia Tech, the Rmax score on Linpack comes in at around 7.4 TFlops. This puts it at number four on the Top 500 List. It also represents an efficiency of about 44 percent, down from the previous result of 80 achieved on a subset of the computers. Perhaps in light of this, apparantly VT is now planning to devote an additional two months to improve the stability and efficiency of the system before any research can begin. While these numbers will no doubt come as a disappointment for Mac zealots who wanted to blow away all the Intel machines, it should still be noted that this is the best price/performance ratio ever achieved on a supercomputer. In addition, the project was successful at meeting VT's goal of developing an inexpensive top 5 machine. The results have also been posted at Ars Technica's openforum."

Thanks to RPGnet for posting an article interviewing a cross-section of the women at the GenCon gaming convention, and discussing how they fit into a "cohesive, well-established, largely male-oriented culture." The author of the piece interviews individuals that she classifies as the 'young gamer', the 'entrepreneur', the 'organizer', and the 'booth babe', among others, and tries to illuminate "how women fit themselves into the loose conglomeration that is gamer culture, and how they formed their own unique subset of gaming."

An anonymous reader writes "The Khronos Group announced today that it has ratified the OpenGL ES 1.0 royalty-free open standard for advanced 2D and 3D graphics in embedded systems including mobile and handheld devices, and that the API specification is now available for free download. OpenGL ES defines subset profiles of OpenGL; OpenGL and OpenGL ES are royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. OpenGL ES 1.0 is said to run in software implementations as small as 50Kbytes, and can enable hardware graphics pipeline acceleration on both fixed point and floating point systems."