Thursday, November 10, 2005
IBM Releases Cell SDK
source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/05/11/10/1318202.shtml?tid=156&tid=137
Riot Crackdown Nets Bloggers
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69536,00.html
02:50 PM Nov. 09, 2005 PT
French prosecutors shut down several blogs this week and arrested bloggers suspected of inciting violence, as officials moved to squelch riots that have rocked France for more than 10 days.
A prosecuting attorney from Le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told Wired News that three bloggers and forum visitors allegedly posted messages that violated French criminal statutes governing violent speech. Two of the bloggers, who were arrested earlier this week, could be arraigned under violent speech statutes, the prosecutor said. The blogs in question, he said, were hosted on a French site called Skyblog, which is owned by Skyrock.
One of the blogs, called Hardcore, allegedly published violent, racially tainted hate speech that, according to the prosecutor, incited violence with a post called "Destroy France."
"We arrested the site's creator and the author of a posted message, which called for rioters to 'take out all of France' last Friday between 9 and 10 o'clock," the prosecutor said, adding that the alleged perpetrators were a minor and an adult in the Paris region who are under house arrest and facing criminal charges.
Authorities in Aix-en-Provence, the prosecutor said, are questioning another minor who was arrested for having allegedly called for "anyone who is man enough to go and burn down the local police department," on his site, Nike La France, which means "take out France."
Skyblog has shut down many other sites, a Skyrock spokesman said, but he would not elaborate on their content.
"All I can say is that we don't comment on exactly why we shut down certain sites, which we systematically do as a matter of policy when they violate certain guidelines," David Roizen said. "Other than that, I can't say anything more and I don't have the time to go into it, either."
Skyrock deletes roughly 6,500 articles and shuts down 10 blogs every day that violate its policy prohibiting racist, obscene or violent content, the company said in a statement.
"In some of the serious cases, we alert the authorities," the statement said.
But Ahmed Meguinia, a political activist who saw some of the Paris region's hardest-hit areas during the past week, said many bloggers feared prosecution for publishing even nonviolent content. While not condoning blogs that incited violence, he said that there was a lack of media coverage explaining why ethnically segregated inhabitants of some of France's poorest cities have been driven to riot. Instead, the world repeatedly sees CNN images of burning cars and shops, he said.
"Many think that you can get arrested by only saying that you agree with the riots," Meguinia said. "Meanwhile, journalists are only writing about what the public officials tell them, and won't go into certain neighborhoods because they think they are as dangerous as Baghdad."
Since the civil unrest began Oct. 29, nearly 1,500 individuals have been arrested or questioned by prosecutors, according to the French Ministry of Justice .
source:http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69536,00.html
IBM And Sony Form Linux Alliance
source:http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/11/10/1321238.shtml?tid=136&tid=233&tid=106
RISK The Game On Google Maps
source:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/10/0035205&tid=217&tid=10
Virtual property market booming
 Property is hot in virtual world |
The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year.
The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia.
He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island.
Project Entropia offers gamers the chance to buy and sell virtual items using real cash, a trend which is gaining popularity as the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds continue to blur.
Property boom
There are fortunes to be made in the burgeoning world of MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing gaming).
"The money made to date is only a taste of what can be achieved with my virtual island purchase," said Deathifier. 
"We've really only just begun with the estate sales and land management, there is still more room for growth and revenue with the untapped resources surrounding the land."
Last month, another of Entropia's virtual properties - a virtual space station - sold at auction for £57,000.
Bridging gap
While the real housing market may be somewhat static, the one in the virtual world is booming, said the space station auction winner, gamer Jon Jacobs, AKA Neverdie.
He said the virtual real estate market was "on fire" as gamers increasingly realised that virtual worlds could start to compete with real worlds at an economic level.
Neverdie plans to use his space station to establish an in-game "night club" through which the entertainment industry can sell music and videos to gamers.
The Entropia economy works by allowing gamers to exchange real currency for PED (Project Entropia Dollars) and back again into real money.
Ten PEDs are the equivalent to one US dollar and gamers can earn cash by accumulating PEDs via the acquisition of goods, buildings and land.
Project Entropia was launched in 2003 and now has 300,000 registered accounts.
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4421496.stm
Gravity-Powered Asteroid Tractor Proposed to Thwart Impact
 | Gravity-Powered Asteroid Tractor Proposed to Thwart Impact By Bjorn Carey SPACE.com Staff Writer posted: November 9, 2005 1:00 pm ET |
An asteroid the size of two football fields could wipe out a large city or set off a series of tsunamis across the world. The threat of such an Earth-smashing asteroid has lead scientists to dream up several methods of defending the planet against such a catastrophe.
Solutions have ranged from pushing the asteroid with a spacecraft to mounting a thruster on its surface. But pushing it would require too much fuel and could break up the asteroid. Also, asteroids rotate, which could complicate the firing of a surface thruster.
Now, two NASA astronauts have presented a plan for an “asteroid tractor”—an unmanned, 20-ton spacecraft that uses the invisible bond of gravity to gently pull an asteroid into a new, non-threatening orbit.
“You can think of it like a big elastic band between the two pulling them together,” said Edward Lu, who presents the concept for the spacecraft with fellow astronaut Stanley Love in the Nov. 10 issue of the journal Nature.
The tractor would hover above the surface of the asteroid, without touching it, and use gravity as a towline. If the spacecraft maintains a consistent distance between it and the asteroid, and always tows in the same direction, this method won’t disturb the asteroid’s rotation or composition.
Despite the urge to give the asteroid a hardy tug, the key to moving an asteroid with gravity is to be gentle. An asteroid is likely to be loosely packed material, so tugging on it too hard could break it into unmanageable pieces. Or, the force from the spacecraft’s thrusters could break up the asteroid or stir up unwanted dust if fired too vigorously.
To make sure the thrusters couldn’t break up the asteroid—or hinder the net towing force by pushing the asteroid away—Lu and Love angled the thrusters slightly away from the body of the spacecraft.
“The jets fire off to the side, not quite as efficient as firing straight down. It’s like rowing forward by pushing off to the sides—it keeps you moving forward, but very slowly,” Lu told SPACE.com. “It takes less than a pound of force—about what you need to hold up a cup of coffee.”
In 2029, the 1,000-foot (320 meters) asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will whiz by Earth at a distance of about 18,600 miles (30,000 kilometers). That’s about as close as many geosynchronous satellites. It will swing by the Earth again in either 2035 or 2036, and scientists predict it has a small chance of hitting the planet on this pass.
“The kind of spacecraft we’ve talked about could move an asteroid 650 feet (200 meters) across provided we have decades of advanced warning,” Lu said. “That’s not out of line with what you’d expect – we can predict the orbit of an asteroid decades in advance.”
- NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told To ‘Stand Down’
- Japan’s Hayabusa Asteroid Probe Hits Snag In Practice Landing Run
- Largest Asteroid Might Contain More Fresh Water than Earth
- Asteroid Apophis: Dealing with Earth's Future Troublemaker
source:http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/051109_asteroid_tractor.html
Write Portable Code
| Write Portable Code | |
| author | Brian Hook |
| pages | 248 (14 page index) |
| publisher | No Starch Press |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Simon P. Chappell |
| ISBN | 1593270569 |
| summary | I recommend this book to anyone working with portable code. |
This is a book for computer programmers who write software designed to run on multiple platforms. It's also for programmers who suspect that their software may need to run on different platforms. This brings the book onto the radar for free and open source software authors, as they seek to create software that does not trap their end users into using specific operating systems. The Structure
There is a good progression shown in the eighteen chapters of the book. The first couple of chapters introduce the reader to portability concepts and then to some of the specific portability features of ANSI C and C++ that are used throughout the rest of the book.
The middle chapters of the book, cover individual portability topics. Some of these topics are the obvious ones, like Floating Point numbers, Networking, Operating System, File System and Dynamic Libraries. Other topics are less intuitively associated with portability, but when you read the chapter, it's inclusion is both obvious and necessary. These subjects include Source Code Management, Compilers, Scalability and Data. There is more to portability than many of us might suspect.
The last two chapters look at some alternative ways of getting portability. Scripting languages are discussed and the pros and cons of each ones portability is weighed. Lastly the use of cross-platform libraries and toolkits is addressed. Quite apropos given that the book's author is also the author of a cross platform library.
As an example of the thoughtful approach taken in this book, lets' take a look at the chapter on scripting languages. It's about the shortest chapter in the book, but representative of the approach that Mr. Hook brings to his work. This chapter takes a very honest look at the portability and cross-platform aspects of using scripting languages. There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of scripting languages. The advantages include everything that is a disadvantage of low-level languages like C/C++. Scripting languages do not require you to worry about about memory allocation, bindings, System API calls or any of the other bugbears of a low-level language programmer's life. The disadvantages of scripting languages naturally include performance, given their interpreted natures, a general lack of tools, such as development environments or IDEs and their tendency to sit high above the operating system with a corresponding detachment from low-level facilities and services of that same operating system. Mr. Hook's choice of scripting languages to consider was interesting. I expected Ruby and Python; both popular and capable in their own right. The inclusion of JavaScript/ECMAScript was also not too unexpected, now that standalone versions are bubbling up and becoming available. The real surprise, albeit a pleasant one, was the inclusion of Lua; a scripting language designed for platform portability and which seems to have managed to fully mature without making a blip on most geeks radar screens.
I like that Mr. Hook has experience writing portable software. This matched with his authorship of the Portable Open Source Harness (POSH) portability library and his contributions to the Simple Audio Library (SAL) gives a great deal of credence to his writing.
This is a solid "doing" book. Mr. Hook is under no illusion that he's writing an introduction to programming. This book has a consistent purpose to take experienced programmers and fully equip them to deal with portability and it does not deviate from this in the slightest.
The layout of the book is first rate, with clear typography, comfortable spacing, clear diagrams and tables and nicely highlighted callouts. I did not notice any obvious typos or glitches in the book. While the look of a book is not the author's fault if it is below par, a well presented book can enhance the reading and learning experience.
The examples are as realistic as possible. While some of the examples to teach principles might be simpler, they are typically backed up with examples from either the POSH or SAL projects, showing real world portability coding. The level of C/C++ required to understand the examples is higher than many books that I've read. That's not to say that the code seems obfuscated, but it's code that is taking into account aspects of the real world and is, by necessity, not simple. A further positive quality of the code examples is that they're very well explained; well enough that an inexperienced programmer with determination could follow them and come to an understanding.
Appendix B contains a summary of all of the portability rules presented through the book. There are twenty rules and each is reprised with a small explanation/reminder of it's application. An example: Rule 4 - "Never read or write structures monolithically from or to memory. Always read and write structures one element at a time, so that endian, alignment, and size differences are factored out."
If you're looking for more of a fluffy "about" book, then this is not it. This is not a complaint, rather I offer it as something to consider, before you buy what you might otherwise think is a beginner's book.
I must reiterate the non-trivial C/C++ example code the book contains. This book is for serious programmers and is not afraid to role up it's sleeves and cut real code.
This is a very well written and very readable book. There are many aspects to the subject matter of portability and Mr. Hook addresses more of them than many of us had previously suspected existed and addresses them with firm authority. I recommend this book to anyone working with portable code."
source:http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/09/1555231&tid=156&tid=6
Blog-Spotting With IBM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Corporate leaders who ignore what bloggers are saying about them and their businesses could have serious consequences.
IBM (Quote, Chart) today introduced new software that monitors and analyzes blogs, wikis
The Public Image Monitoring Solution is a response to two developments, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technology strategy and innovation, said at a news conference at the company's research offices here.
First is a shift of the source of Web content. In the early days of the Web, most online information was created by businesses, governments and universities because they could pay for servers, storage and content- creation applications.
"The last few years we've seen a dramatic change in that," Wladawsky-Berger said, noting how easy and inexpensive it is to publish online content. "Now, over 50 percent of information on the Web are coming from individuals."
At the same time, search has grown up.
"If it wasn't for search you could have all the information out there on everything and you couldn't find a damn thing," Wladawsky-Berger said.
Not only is there more information out there, but it is being used by consumers and businesses to make buying decisions.
"People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses," Marc Andrews, head of IBM's strategy and business development of information integration, said.
IBM's Public Image Monitoring Solution is based on WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition. It uses the company's text analytics and semantic search technology from its research and consulting divisions.
The Armonk, N.Y., IT giant also went outside for some components. It uses Nstein Technologies' multilingual text analytics and news feeds and published articles from Factiva.
The offering assesses the tone of blogs and posts: positive, negative or neutral. It also identifies hot topics of discussion. For example, using the software to look at a particular make and model car would return content about fuel economy, roominess and safety.
Public Image Monitoring Solution is currently available from IBM and Nstein. IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind version 8.3 is expected to be available later this year.
In addition to this offering, IBM is working on other hot social networking technologies, such as using blogs and wikis to help managers share information and pull in links to Web sources to solve business problems, the company said.
To be sure, IBM will be using Public Image Monitoring Solution to see how early adopters react.
source:http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/print.php/3562116
