Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

Mobile: IPhone 3G Jailbreak Released, Paves Way For Open Source Apps

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @06:48PM
from the coming-up-apples dept.

PainMeds writes "iPhone Atlas is reporting that the first jailbreak for the iPhone 3G has been released, and includes the popular Cydia community installer for distributing free games and applications. Since Apple's SDK was released, web sites have criticized Apple for the restrictions placed on both what developers could write and what APIs they were allowed to use. Others have noted the SDK's incompatibility with the GPL. The Cydia installer has provided a distribution channel for both open source software and software that would otherwise be impossible to build using the restricted SDK. A few applications are already out, including MobileTerminal and NES.app, a Nintendo game console emulator. In just over a week, open development is finally here for the iPhone 3G!"

[+] apple, cellphones, software (tagging beta)

Ask Slashdot: Guide For Small Team Programming?

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @05:50PM
from the live-from-portland-coffee-house dept.

dm writes "I run a small design shop and have been doing more and more web development, including fairly involved back-end programming of what's now essentially become our own CMS. Up to now I've been doing all the programming myself. Now we are working with a second programmer for the first time. I already use version control (SVN) and an issue-tracking system, and I guess we are both decent at what we do — although self-taught, but we both lack experience programming in a team context. Is there a useful guide for this? Most of the tutorials I have seen for Subversion are surprisingly organized from a single coder's perspective. Where else should I look?"

[+] programming (tagging beta)

Your Rights Online: Encrypting Google Calendar With Firefox Extensions

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @04:42PM
from the show-as-unavailable dept.

mrcgran writes "IBM's Nathan Harrington has an interesting essay on using open-source tools to ensure privacy on Google Calendar: 'Today's Web applications provide many benefits for online storage, access, and collaboration. Although some applications offer encryption of user data, most do not. This article provides tools and code needed to add basic encryption support for user data in one of the most popular online calendar applications. Building on the incredible flexibility of Firefox extensions and the Gnu Privacy Guard, this article shows you how to store only encrypted event descriptions in Google's Calendar application, while displaying a plain text version to anyone with the appropriate decryption keys.'"

[+] google, privacy (tagging beta)

Technology: Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside?

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @03:36PM
from the why-people-hate-to-call-it-piracy dept.

traycerb writes "The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining: 'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too.' The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'"

[+] business, internet, media (tagging beta)

Hardware: Making Strides Toward Low-Cost LED Lighting

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @02:30PM
from the brightly-walk-among-the-clouds dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "You all know that incandescent bulbs are pretty inefficient, converting only 10% of electricity into light — and 90% into heat. Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, could soon replace incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs in our homes. They are more efficient and environmentally friendly. But LED lights are currently too expensive because they are using a sapphire-based technology. Now, Purdue University researchers have found a way to build low-cost and bright LEDs for home lighting. According to the researchers, the LED lights now on the market cost about $100 while LED lights based on their new technology could be commercially available within a couple of years for a cost of about $5. It would also help to cut our electricity bill by about 10%."

[+] power, technology, ohnoitsroland (tagging beta)

Developers: Cold Boot Attack Utilities Released At HOPE Conference

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @01:26PM
from the shining-a-spotlight dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Jacob Appelbaum, one of the security researchers who worked on the cold boot attacks to recover encryption keys from memory even after reboot, has announced the release of the complete source code for the utilities at The Last HOPE in New York City. The hope (obligatory pun) is that the release of these tools will help to improve awareness of this attack vector and enable the development of countermeasures and mitigation techniques in both software and hardware. The full research paper (PDF) is also available."

[+] security, software, coldboot, hope (tagging beta)

Linux: Linux Needs More Haters

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @12:24PM
from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

Corrupt brings us a ZDNet column by Jeremy Allison, who says Linux could benefit from more "tough love" in order to improve its functionality and popularity. Excerpting: "As Elie Wiesel said, 'the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.' LinuxHater really doesn't hate Linux, despite the name. No one takes that much time to point out flaws in a product that they completely loathe and despise. The complaints are really cries of frustration with a system that just doesn't quite do what is desired (albeit well disguised). A friend pointed out to me that the best way to parse LinuxHaters blog is to treat it as a series of bug reports. A perl script could probably parse out the useful information from them and log them as technical bug reports to the projects LinuxHater is writing about. Deep down, I believe LinuxHater really loves Linux, and wants it to succeed."

[+] editorial, linux, linuxbusiness, linuxsucks, toughlove (tagging beta)

Science: Injections To Replace Heart Surgery?

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @11:24AM
from the shot-through-the-heart dept.

chareverie writes "Researchers at Harvard University have been working towards a goal of replacing some types of heart surgery with injections of cells that would grow into blood vessels for damaged hearts. The cells that would be used are progenitor cells obtained from the blood or bone marrow, as opposed to stem cells that are obtained from human embryos. The research team was successful with their tests on growing heart blood vessels in mice. Joyce Bishoff, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the report, says, 'Our next goal down the line is to use them in humans.' She also notes that more studies need to be done on animals to see how these cells would react and behave with other types of tissues. A similar human experiment was done two years ago in Germany, during which a few people from a group of 75 heart attack victims were given injections of progenitor cells from their own bone marrow or blood. The report concluded that there were improved heart functions." Reader w1z4rd points out related coverage with some more information at BBC News.

[+] science, health, heart, medicine (tagging beta)

Science: "Tabletop" Fusion Researcher Committed Scientific Misconduct

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @10:23AM
from the rebranding-doesn't-always-work dept.

Geoffrey.landis writes "A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation — a finding that would be groundbreaking, if true, but one that apparently could not be replicated by other researchers. The allegations against Taleyarkhan were made in March of 2006. A local Indiana paper gives the full list of allegations against Taleyarkhan, and the resolution of each by the panel. The full report (PDF) is also available. Of the nine specific allegations, only two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,' but notes that this comes 'just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent.'" We've discussed this gentleman's work and the scrutiny it has received several times, and members of the scientific community seem to have given him the benefit of the doubt in many cases.

[+] fusion, power, science, technology (tagging beta)

Ask Slashdot: Best and Worst Coding Standards?

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @09:21AM
from the buffer-overrun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you've been hired by a serious software development house, chances are one of your early familiarization tasks was to read company guidelines on coding standards and practices. You've probably been given some basic guidelines, such as gotos being off limits except in specific circumstances, or that code should be indented with tabs rather than spaces, or vice versa. Perhaps you've had some more exotic or less intuitive practices as well; maybe continue or multiple return statements were off-limits. What standards have you found worked well in practice, increasing code readability and maintainability? Which only looked good on paper?"

[+] programming, perl, java, standards (tagging beta)

Hardware: Texas To Build $4.93B Wind-Power Project

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 20, @08:19AM
from the not-just-hot-air dept.

Hugh Pickens points out a story in the NYTimes about Texas' $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project. One of the major goals of the project is to improve electrical throughput to the population centers. Current transmission lines are unable to handle all of the power generated by Texas' wind fields. State citizens will be paying slightly more to help cover the cost, though the project is expected to eventually lower the cost to consumers. Quoting: "The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running. 'The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The lack of transmission has been a fundamental issue in Texas, and it's becoming more and more of an issue elsewhere,' said Vanessa Kellogg, the Southwest regional development director for Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm in West Texas and has more wind generation under development. 'This is a great step in the right direction.'"

[+] texas, news, power, technology (tagging beta)

Games: Did E3 Just Gasp Its Last Breath?

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @07:15AM
from the my-last-breath-will-be-a-sigh dept.

Ian Lamont writes "This year's E3 is over, and there's already talk that this could be the last one. Even before the conference started, a slew of studios announced they wouldn't be taking part, citing high costs and other 'business reasons.' At the conference itself, 'there were no huge game announcements, and Microsoft didn't even bother having Bungie show up to talk about the next Halo release, claiming that the company wanted to "shorten the presentation."' Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said he 'hated' E3's new format, adding 'either we need to go back to the old E3, or we'll have to have our own private events.' Crave also noted there are no solid plans for next year's show. On the other hand, people have predicted E3's demise in previous years, and they turned out to be wrong."

[+] e3 (tagging beta)

Mobile: UK PM's Aide Loses BlackBerry In Chinese Honeytrap

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @04:22AM
from the my-envy-exceeds-his-chagrin dept.

longacre writes "The Times of London is today reporting a January incident in which a top aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown discovered his BlackBerry missing from his hotel room after spending the night with an attractive woman who approached him in a Shanghai disco. Seems this was a run-of-the-mill BlackBerry without any encryption, only a simple password lock. The greatest fear is that, even if the device did not contain any sensitive messages at the time, there was likely enough information on board for a hostile intelligence service to snake its way deep into Downing Street's email servers. The aide was 'informally reprimanded.'"

[+] security, communications, espionage, spynovel (tagging beta)

Science: Web-Crawling Program Spots Disease Outbreaks

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 20, @01:40AM
from the ebola-ebola-ebola-ebola-ebola-dropsy dept.

no1home writes "There is a story at Discovery Channel's site about a new utility for mapping disease. The premise is to have bots crawl the web looking for stories about disease outbreaks and log them onto a map. '"We were originally thinking about how we could expand disease surveillance and pick up outbreaks earlier than traditional methods," said John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, who created HealthMap in September of 2006 with Clark Friefeld, a software developer at Harvard Medical School.' But then it was noticed by Google.org and has since grown into its own website, HealthMap Global disease alert map, and claims to be able to identify 95% of all disease outbreaks, some of them before WHO or CDC."

[+] internet, medicine (tagging beta)

Your Rights Online: FBI Fights Testing For False DNA Matches

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @11:06PM
from the grassy-knollers-know-it's-easy-to-blame dept.

Statesman writes "The Los Angeles Times reports that an Arizona crime lab technician found two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles, so similar that they would ordinarily be accepted in court as a match, but one felon was black and the other white. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. Dozens of similar matches have been found, and these findings raise questions about the accuracy of the FBI's DNA statistics. Scientists and legal experts want to test the accuracy of official statistics using the nearly 6 million profiles in CODIS, the national system that includes most state and local databases. The FBI has tried to block distribution of the Arizona results and is blocking people from performing similar searches using CODIS. A legal fight is brewing over whether the nation's genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny. At stake is the credibility of the odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene."

[+] court, privacy, science, technology, usa (tagging beta)

News: To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @09:10PM
from the why-the-monkeys-poke-and-prod dept.

theodp writes "The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan confesses to being stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs. For example, Heffernan notes she could quote kavya on Yahoo Answers word for word ('How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?'), but worries that doing so makes kavya look like an idiot rather that the sweetly earnest 7-year-old that he or she might be. Is it better to paraphrase or revise the question into 'How is a baby formed?' For now, Heffernan is going to let things stand (stet) and treat message boards like novels, preserving idiosyncrasies of language as far as possible and taking them as intentional — a 'wuz' on the Internet remains 'wuz' in the paper."

[+] internet, media (tagging beta)

Ask Slashdot: Real-World 3G Monthly Cost With Taxes and Fees?

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @07:56PM
from the best-salesman-bluntly-tells-the-truth dept.

Kristl writes "I have called AT&T and walked into several AT&T stores to ask 'How much will an AT&T phone plan cost per month with taxes and fees and everything?'. No one can answer this question. They are evasive and become testy when I push them on it. Their answer is they can't tell me what the government is going to charge me as the fees can vary month to month, but I've been an AT&T customer for several years, and my taxes and fees have not varied more than a dollar in all of that time. So I question them: 'Can you just tell me what the taxes and fees will be for a 3G plan in California that has the basic calling plan, basic data plan, and the basic text plan?' I even do the math for them, that's $75. Okay AT&T, what are the taxes and fees on $75? Oh, they can't tell me that, as the taxes and fees can vary from month to month." There's more to this justified rant (below); real-world numbers in comments could help answer the questions that cell carriers seem content to sidestep as completely as possible.

[+] cellphones, communications, money, apple (tagging beta)

Technology: GM Researching Windshields For Old Drivers

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @06:42PM
from the how-about-a-high-beam-blocker-for-everyone dept.

beuges writes "General Motors researchers are working on a high-tech windshield that users lasers and infra-red sensors to identify and enhance important objects for older drivers with vision problems. 'For example, during a foggy drive, a laser projects a blue line onto the windshield that follows the edge of the road. Or if infrared sensors detect a person or animal in the driver's path during a night drive, its outline is projected on the windshield to highlight its location.' And it's not only older drivers who will benefit: 'Some features would be helpful to drivers of all ages. If a driver is speeding, a pink box frames an approaching speed limit sign to draw the driver's attention.' The 65 and older population in the US will nearly double in about 20 years, meaning more people will be struggling to see the road like they used to."

[+] technology, transportation, hud (tagging beta)

Hardware: The Father of Multi-Core Chips Talks Shop

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @05:40PM
from the green-onion-layered-beneath-yogurt dept.

pacopico writes "Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun designed the first mainstream multi-core chip, crafting what would become Sun Microsystems's Niagra product. Now, he's heading up Stanford's Pervasive Parallelism Lab where researchers are looking at 100s of core systems that might power robots, 3-D virtual worlds and insanely big server applications. The Register just interviewed Olukotun about this work and the future of multi-core chips. Weird and interesting stuff."

[+] hardware, programming, supercomputing (tagging beta)

Games: Wii Is the New US Console Leader

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, @04:33PM
from the depends-who's-counting-and-how dept.

stoolpigeon writes with this snippet from an AFP story carried by Google: "Nintendo said Thursday that its globally popular Wii has become the top-selling video game console in the United States, a crown coveted by rivals Microsoft and Sony. Market-tracking firm NPD Group reports that 666,000 Wii consoles were sold in the United States in June, raising the total sales count in the country to nearly 10.9 million units." I'd rather play board games than video games, but the Wii Fit makes one of these tempting anyhow.

[+] nintendo, games (tagging beta)

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Older Stuff

Mobile: IPhone 3G Jailbreak Released, Paves Way For Open Source Apps

Ask Slashdot: Guide For Small Team Programming?

Your Rights Online: Encrypting Google Calendar With Firefox Extensions

Technology: Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside?

Hardware: Making Strides Toward Low-Cost LED Lighting