Monday, June 05, 2006
Medical Privacy Laws Highly Ineffectual
source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/0935254
Chinese Mathematicians Prove Poincare Conjecture
source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/0440258
Another Robotic Vehicle to Help Soldiers
source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/0124210
The 100 Best Tech Products of 2006
source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/0123245
U. Washington Crypto Course Now Online for Free
source:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/04/1311243
HP cuts back on telecommuting
SOME KEY WORKERS WILL HAVE TO COME TO OFFICE OR FIND NEW JOBS
Hewlett-Packard, the Silicon Valley company known for pioneering flexible work arrangements four decades ago, is canceling telecommuting for a key division of the company.
While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter.
The decision shocked HP employees and surprised human resource management experts, who believe telecommuting is still a growing trend.
``It's usually cheaper to have people operating in their own space than in your own. There's obviously something not going right or not to their liking for them to want to regroup or to change,'' said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president for global human resources for the American Management Association.
The architect of the HP division's change, Randy Mott, is regarded by Wall Street as a mastermind of operational efficiency based on his days as chief information officer at Wal-Mart Stores and Dell. Since joining HP as CIO in July, Mott's philosophy on building a strong IT workforce starkly contrasts with that of competitors, who encourage telecommuting to retain skilled workers who desire better work/life balance.
Mott said by bringing IT employees together to work as teams in offices, the less-experienced employees who aren't performing well -- which there are ``a lot of'' -- can learn how to work more effectively.
In an office, ``you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,'' he said.
An HP spokesman would not comment on whether HP is planning to scale back telecommuting in other divisions. Workers said there are more than 1,000 IT employees, but HP declined to discuss the number.
IT workers generally support their companies by keeping computers and databases running and building Web sites and applications. Some can do their jobs without talking to co-workers more than once a day. And the more interactive IT jobs at HP typically involve early morning and late-night conference calls with colleagues around the world.
By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. With many thousands of HP IT employees scattered across 100 sites around the world -- from Palo Alto to Dornach, Germany -- the new rules require many to move. Those who don't will be out of work without severance pay, according to several employees affected by the changes.
Mott's changes underscore HP's determination to free itself from what new executives view as cumbersome costs and an outdated corporate culture.
Flexible work arrangements began at HP in 1967 as a core part of the company's widely respected management philosophy. In the book ``The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company,'' HP co-founder David Packard wrote: ``To my mind, flextime is the essence of respect for and trust in people. It says that we both appreciate that our people have busy personal lives and that we trust them to devise, with their supervisor and work group, a schedule that is personally convenient yet fair to others.''
Sun Microsystems, an HP competitor, now allows about 17,000 employees to work from home, including 83 percent of its IT staff. And an April survey by the Society for Human Resource Management shows the number of employers now offering telecommuting as an option to combat surging gas prices climbed 50 percent compared with eight months earlier.
Working from home also has been catching on over the past five years as technologies -- such as high-speed and wireless Internet access -- have made it easier for colleagues located anywhere to collaborate.
But one of HP's former IT managers, who left the company in October, said a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements and could be heard washing dishes or admitted to driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates. The former manager, who declined to be identified because he still has ties with HP, said telecommuting morphed from a strategic tool used to keep exceptional talent into a right that employees claimed.
Mott confirmed he's sending IT workers into offices, but he would not discuss the details. He added that employees who are working side by side in the same office ``are the most effective in terms of accomplishing the task and the goals at hand.''
Some experts agree even high-tech communication tools, from instant-messaging emoticons to video-conference calls, can't match in-person interaction.
``There's a certain synergy when people are together in a room,'' said Avramidis, the management association executive.
A small fraction of HP's top-performing IT employees still will be able to telecommute. The others need to start packing. HP has offered to pay some relocation expenses for IT employees who live more than 50 miles from a designated office, according to an IT employee who qualifies for a relocation package.
That employee, who has worked at HP for about 20 years, said that's not enough to move her family from the East Coast to the office designated for her in California. And she cringes at uprooting her children and forcing her husband to find a new job -- especially as more layoffs loom at HP.
``Why is HP telling us we can't do this when everybody else is saying, `Please do'? That's kind of bizarre,'' said the employee, who didn't want to be identified for fear of retribution. ``I like my flexibility. The only reason I've stayed with HP this long is because I've been telecommuting.''
source:http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/14732974.htm
Video games in Congress' crosshairs
The purported problem of violent and sexually explicit video games has resurfaced on politicians' agenda as the November election draws near.
A U.S. House of Representatives committee on consumer protection says it will hold a hearing on the topic later this month, with a focus on "informing parents and protecting children" from the alleged dangers of those types of games.
A committee schedule originally listed the event for next Wednesday. But that date has been postponed because of scheduling conflicts, Jack Seum, chief of staff for Rep. Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who chairs the panel, said on Friday.
A witness list for the hearing, which the committee hopes to reschedule for June 14, had not been finalized by Friday, Seum said.
Representatives from the Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies for the video game industry, and the Entertainment Safety Ratings Board, which oversees the labeling of games, said the organizations expect to testify.
An ESA representative declined to comment on the group's planned testimony, except to say it views it "as an opportunity to talk about the tools available to parents," such as parental control technology.
For his part, Seum said that Stearns is not currently planning any additional legislation. "There's nothing we're planning to do immediately as a result of this hearing," he said.
There's hardly any shortage of video game proposals, with many already pending in Congress. Just last month, a little-noticed bill called the Video Games Ratings Enforcement Act was referred to Stearns' panel for consideration.
Introduced by Rep. Jim Matheson, a Utah Democrat, the proposal would make it illegal for anyone to sell, rent, or attempt to sell or rent video games rated "adults-only" to minors under age 18, or "mature" video games to anyone under age 17. The Federal Trade Commission would be permitted to levy fines of up to $5,000 per violation.
That approach is nearly identical to a bill unveiled last December by U.S. Senate Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman. They propose imposing fines or community service hours on any business that sells or rents video games with a "mature," "adults-only" or "ratings pending" tag to anyone under age 17. That measure has not yet gone up for debate.
Both longtime foes of the video game industry, Clinton and Lieberman have publicly lashed out against "graphic, violent and pornographic content" in video games. They were among those who pledged new action after a flap last summer over a sexually explicit scene embedded in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."
Earlier this year, the two politicians and a handful of other supporters secured a Senate committee's approval of a bill that would bankroll a sweeping study of the "impact of electronic media use." That measure, called the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, or CAMRA, does not propose any restrictions, but it is viewed as a way to justify new regulations down the road. An identical bill is pending in the House but has not yet proceeded to a vote.
If the experience of states that have attempted to enforce their own laws restricting violent and sexually explicit video games is any indicator, the federal proposals aren't likely to go far without legal challenges.
In April, a federal judge tossed out a Michigan law that criminalized the sale of violent video games to children under 17, deeming it a violation of the First Amendment's guarantees of free expression. During the past few years, federal courts have declared similar laws in California, Illinois and Washington--along with the cities of St. Louis and Indianapolis--to be unconstitutional.
That hasn't stopped other states from continuing to pass new laws. Just last week, the Oklahoma Legislature gave final approval to a bill that would make it a crime to sell violent video games to anyone younger than 18. It heads next to the governor's desk.
source:http://news.com.com/Video+games+in+Congress+crosshairs/2100-1028_3-6079654.html?tag=nefd.top
Vast DNA Bank Pits Policing Vs. Privacy
Data Stored on 3 Million Americans
Brimming with the genetic patterns of more than 3 million Americans, the nation's databank of DNA "fingerprints" is growing by more than 80,000 people every month, giving police an unprecedented crime-fighting tool but prompting warnings that the expansion threatens constitutional privacy protections.
With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even people who have been arrested but not convicted.
Now some in law enforcement are calling for a national registry of every American's DNA profile, against which police could instantly compare crime-scene specimens. Advocates say the system would dissuade many would-be criminals and help capture the rest.
"This is the single best way to catch bad guys and keep them off the street," said Chris Asplen, a lawyer with the Washington firm Smith Alling Lane and former executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. "When it's applied to everybody, it is fair, and frankly you wouldn't even know it was going on."
But opponents say that the growing use of DNA scans is making suspects out of many law-abiding Americans and turning the "innocent until proven guilty" maxim on its head.
"These databases are starting to look more like a surveillance tool than a tool for criminal investigation," said Tania Simoncelli of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.
The debate is part of a larger, post-Sept. 11 tug of war between public safety and personal privacy that has intensified amid recent revelations that the government has been collecting information on personal phone calls. In particular, it is about the limits of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from being swept into criminal investigations unless there is good reason to suspect they have broken the law.
Once someone's DNA code is in the federal database, critics say, that person is effectively treated as a suspect every time a match with a crime-scene specimen is sought -- even though there is no reason to believe that the person committed the crime.
At issue is not only how many people's DNA is on file but also how the material is being used. In recent years, for example, crime fighters have initiated "DNA dragnets" in which hundreds or even thousands of people were asked to submit blood or tissue samples to help prove their innocence.
Also stirring unease is the growing use of "familial searches," in which police find crime-scene DNA that is similar to the DNA of a known criminal and then pursue that criminal's family members, reasoning that only a relative could have such a similar pattern. Critics say that makes suspects out of people just for being related to a convict.
Such concerns are amplified by fears that, in time, authorities will try to obtain information from stored DNA beyond the unique personal identifiers.
"Genetic material is a very powerful identifier, but it also happens to carry a heck of a lot of information about you," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington concerned about DNA database trends.
Law enforcement officials say they have no interest in reading people's genetic secrets. The U.S. profiling system focuses on just 13 small regions of the DNA molecule -- regions that do not code for any known biological or behavioral traits but vary enough to give everyone who is not an identical twin a unique 52-digit number.
"It's like a Social Security number, but not assigned by the government," said Michael Smith, a University of Wisconsin law professor who favors a national database of every American's genetic ID with certain restrictions.
Still, the blood, semen or cheek-swab specimen that yields that DNA, and which authorities almost always save, contains additional genetic information that is sensitive, including disease susceptibilities that could affect employment and health insurance prospects and, in some cases, surprises about who a child's father is.
"We don't know all the potential uses of DNA, but once the state has your sample and there are not limits on how it can be used, then the potential civil liberty violations are as vast as the uses themselves," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.
She and others want samples destroyed once the identifying profile has been extracted, but the FBI favors preserving them.
Sometimes authorities need access to those samples to make sure an old analysis was done correctly, said Thomas Callaghan, who oversees the FBI database. The agency also wants to be able to use new DNA identification methods on older samples as the science improves.
Without that option, Callaghan said, "you'd be freezing the database to today's technology."
Crime-Fighting Uses
Over the past dozen years, the FBI-managed national database has made more than 30,000 "cold hits," or exact matches to a known person's DNA, showing its crime-fighting potential.
In a recent case, a Canadian woman flew home the day after she was sexually assaulted in Mexico. Canadian authorities performed a semen DNA profile and, after finding no domestic matches, consulted the FBI database. The pattern matched that of a California man on probation, who was promptly found in the Mexican town where the woman had been staying and was charged by local authorities.
Congress authorized the FBI database precisely for cases like that, on the rationale that sexual predators and other violent felons tend to be repeat offenders and are likely to leave DNA behind. In recent years, however, Congress and state legislators have vastly extended the system's reach.
At least 38 states now have laws to collect DNA from people found guilty of misdemeanors, in some cases for such crimes as shoplifting and fortunetelling. At least 28 now collect from juvenile offenders, too, according to information presented last month at a Boston symposium on DNA and civil liberties, organized by the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.
The federal government and five states, including Virginia, go further, allowing DNA scans of people arrested. At least four other states plan to do so this year, and California will start in 2009.
Opponents of the growing inclusion of people arrested note that a large proportion of charges (fully half for felony assaults) are eventually dismissed. Blood specimens are not destroyed automatically when charges are dropped, they note, and the procedures for getting them expunged are not simple.
Even more controversial are DNA dragnets, which snare many people for whom there is no evidence of guilt. Given questions about whether such sweeps can be truly voluntary -- "You know that whoever doesn't participate is going to become a 'person of interest,' " said Rose of the ACLU -- some think they violate the Fourth Amendment.
Civil liberties issues aside, the sweeps rarely pay off, according to a September 2004 study by Samuel Walker, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska. Of the 18 U.S. DNA dragnets he documented since 1990, including one in which police tested 2,300 people, only one identified the offender. And that one was limited to 25 men known to have had access to the victim, who was attacked while incapacitated in a nursing home.
Dragnets, Walker concluded, "are highly unproductive" and "possibly unconstitutional."
Familial searches of the blood relatives of known offenders raise similar issues. The method can work: In a recent British case, police retrieved DNA from a brick that was thrown from an overpass and smashed through a windshield, killing the driver. A near-match of that DNA with someone in Britain's criminal database led police to investigate that offender's relatives, one of whom confessed when confronted with the evidence.
Not investigating such leads "would be like getting a partial license plate number on a getaway car and saying, 'Well, you didn't get the whole plate so we're not going to investigate the crime,' " said Frederick Bieber, a Harvard geneticist who studies familial profiling.
But such profiling stands to exacerbate already serious racial inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system, said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University.
"Incarceration rates are eight times higher for blacks than they are for whites," he said, so any technique that focuses on relatives of people in the FBI database will just expand that trend.
A Universal Database?
That's a concern that many in law enforcement raise, too -- as an argument in favor of creating a universal DNA database of all Americans. The system would make everyone a suspect of sorts in every crime, they acknowledge. But every criminal, regardless of race, would be equally likely to get caught.
Opponents cite a litany of potential problems, including the billions it would cost to profile so many people and the lack of lab capacity to handle the specimens.
Backlogs are already severe, they note. The National Institute of Justice estimated in 2003 that more than 350,000 DNA samples from rape and homicide cases were waiting to be processed nationwide. As of the end of last year, more than 250,000 samples were backlogged in California alone.
And delays can matter. In 2004, police in Indiana arrested a man after his DNA matched samples from dozens of rapes -- the last 13 of which were committed during the two years it took for the sample to get through the backlog.
A big increase in tests would also generate more mistakes, said William C. Thompson, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, whose studies have found DNA lab accuracy to be "very uneven."
In one of many errors documented by Thompson, a years-old crime-scene specimen was found to match the DNA from a juvenile offender, leading police to suspect the teenager until they realized he was a baby at the time of the crime. The teenager's blood, it turned out, had been processed in the lab the same day as an older specimen was being analyzed, and one contaminated the other.
"A universal database will bring us more wrongful arrests and possibly more wrongful convictions," said Simoncelli of the ACLU.
But Asplen of Smith Alling Lane said Congress has been helping states streamline and improve their DNA processing. And he does not think a national database would violate the Constitution.
"We already take blood from every newborn to perform government-mandated tests . . . so the right to take a sample has already been decided," Asplen said. "And we have a precedent for the government to maintain an identifying number of a person."
While the debate goes on, some in Congress are working to expand the database a bit more. In March, the House passed the Children's Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act.
Under the broad-ranging bill, DNA profiles provided voluntarily, for example, in a dragnet, would for the first time become a permanent part of the national database. People arrested would lose the right to expunge their samples if they were exonerated or charges were dropped. And the government could take DNA from citizens not arrested but simply detained.
The bill must be reconciled with a Senate, which contains none of those provisions.
source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201648.html?sub=AR
Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
source:http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/03/1416201
The Perils of PC Posture
Are your shoulders hunched? Your wrists arched back?
How about your neck: Is it craned forward? Is your back aligned with your chair back? Are your feet flat on the floor?
Well, here's some news that might get you to sit straight up in your chair: Along with the majority of the computer-facing population, you could be well on your way to developing a series of unsavory repetitive stress ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome, postural syndrome, tendonitis and eye strain.
"The most egregious ergonomic crimes I see include sitting without any back support for more than one hour at time; extended reaching in any direction, causing problems for the shoulders, neck and upper back area; awkward neck positioning and rotating the neck repeatedly; and people … pitch[ing] forward off their chairs," Deborah Read, MOTR/L ergonomics consultant and president of ErgoFit Consulting in Seattle, told eWEEK.
"The No. 1 symptom people need to pay attention to is chronic aching. It's the most serious but also the most ignored. People brush it off and end up getting themselves to a point of no return. If you have had aching any place—lower back, upper back, between the shoulder blades, wrists or hands—for three days, you need to have it looked at," said Read.
Other common symptoms are aching or soreness in the tendon areas, as well as nerve symptoms such as numbness and tingling.
"The early signs of repetitive strains and injury are tightness and soreness in the upper back and shoulders. People tend not to do anything about it until they have symptoms down into their wrists and elbows," said Deidre Rogers, president of Ergovera Ergonomic Consulting in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Here are some things the experts recommend workers do to help avoid repetitive stress injuries.
Sit better
Desk work has long been associated with an easier lifestyle than manual labor, so much so that many do not realize that an act as idle as sitting can cause injuries.
"Put it this way—sitting upright has the highest compressive force on the lumbar disc [of] any … position," said Read.
Furthermore, most people don't sit properly in their chairs, slouching and sliding down, and then rolling their shoulders forward.
"They're stretching their muscles the in the wrong ways and end up limiting their range of motion. Slouching collapses the diaphragm, limiting the amount of oxygen you are allowing into your body to circulate," said Wendy Young, certified ergonomist with Ergo Pro in Houston, which provides ergonomic consulting, training and products.
Next Page: Don't rely on external support.
Young does not recommend that people rely on external lumbar support except in cases where obesity or physical problems leave the individual no other options.
"A lot of newer chairs were designed to support the lumbar region in the lower back. But, the body is strong enough to support itself," said Young.
Young instead suggests that people sit all the way back in their chair so that their sacrum touches the chair's back.
"When you do this, your pelvis and back are aligned properly and it allows you to move easily in the chair," said Young.
Rogers approaches seating positions differently, dismissing the popular notion that elbows and knees should rest at 90-degree angles.
"Think it terms of open angles. Instead of sitting with your legs at a 90-degree angle, try a 110-degree angle. Keep your elbow at 110-degree angle to your hand," said Rogers.
While everyone sits at a computer differently, men and women tend to fall into gender-specific posture traps.
"Men tend to be low writers. They like their chairs lower, and to sit back in them, and they need to learn to sit higher. Men strain their arms and wrists when they sit too low. Women are 'perchers'—they sit away from the backrests and at the edge of their seats. Women tend to slouch because they're so far away from their back support," said Rogers.
Use Equipment Correctly
When most people think of ergonomics, they think of wrist rests. Yet, even these long pieces of padding that are nearly standard in office settings are widely misused.
"Wrist rest is a very unfortunate term because the general public thinks that it means they're supposed to rest their wrist on it. There's no protective fat under your wrist, and resting on this unprotected area could cause contact stress. I would be happier if they were called palm rests," said Read.
None of the specialists suggested that people throw their wrist rests out the window, however.
"Wrist rests were designed for resting between spells of typing, not during typing… The killer combination is lazy typing and cold hands, suggestive of a smaller carpal tunnel. These two factors together almost guarantee that you will get a wrist or arm injury," said Rogers.
Each of the specialists referenced pianists when discussing the proper way to hold your hands and wrists when you type. Pianists use their fingers to hit keys, but keep their wrists raised and arms engaged, and hit the keys with their fingertips alone.
"The worst setup is the keyboard on the keyboard tray [and] the mouse up on the desk surface. It leads to reaching injuries," said Rogers.
Adjust Your Monitor
Most people have their monitor height set too high, or worse, lack the ability to lower it. Read suggested that people sit squarely in front of their computer screens with their feet flat to make adjustments.
"Your horizontal line of site should hit the first one to two inches of the screen itself. When you need to look lower, you should use your eyeballs and not your neck."
Those that wear bifocals should keep their monitors even lower, so that they are always looking at them through the bottom of their eyeglasses, "without dropping their heads," said Read.
Next Page: Use special equipment.
Use Specialty Equipment Where Available
"Injuries tend to start with your upper back and neck," explained Young, "and one of the worst things you can do is cradle the phone to your neck with your shoulder."
Young said that there was little excuse for workers not to use a headset these days, considering that one can be purchased inexpensively at Radio Shack or office supply stores.
Rogers recommends that people who do even a little data entry or read from documents while on the computer buy an inexpensive document holder.
"Remember that your eyes lead your posture, and if the objects you are looking at are out of the way, your posture will strain. Put the document holder on the side of your eye dominance."
While trading in one keyboard for another that fits the user better is not always an option, Rogers suggests that people who can, should.
"A lot of narrow-shouldered women get in trouble with the standard keyboard. A keyboard should be the same width as your shoulders," said Rogers.
Move Around
"People go to the chiropractor and get massages and then go back to the same chair," said Young. "Unsurprisingly, their injuries return."
All of the experts emphasized the importance of moving around throughout the day, whether through simple stretches, programs that prompt people to take a break, or by refilling your water glass or standing to complete tasks when you can.
"One of the misnomers about repetitive strain injury is that the repetitive motion is at fault. The real evil is the static posture," said Rogers.
Rogers pointed out that although people have done repetitive work for hundreds of years without getting injured, the difference today is that we rarely move around when we work.
Read reminds people that not all "desk tasks" need to be done while sitting.
"Get your butt out of the chair as much as possible. You can talk on phone while standing; you can stand to read a document," said Read.
Young offered more specific tactics to ensure that people are getting enough blood flowing.
"People do not take enough breaks," said Young, who encourages her clients to drink a lot of water so, at the very least, they'll need to rise once an hour to make the trek to the restroom.
"Every 10 minutes or so, rest your hands for 10 to 12 seconds and give your wrists time to recover. People tend to stop breathing, or breathe shallowly from the chest when they are stressed. Put your pen down and let go of your mouth and practice deep diaphragm breathing," said Young.
Rogers shoots down the notion that all those breaks will affect work output.
"If you do shoulder rolls or simple stretches every 20-30 minutes and walk around for five minutes every hour, you keep your perspective fresh and your mind active. In the end, you'll be more productive."
In the worst-case scenario, you could lose the ability to tell hot from cold, find yourself dropping things or develop a syndrome known as "foot drop," in which pressure on the sciatic nerve can cause a foot to drag while you walk.
eWEEK picked the brains of a slew of ergonomics and other posture professionals, who all voiced the sobering truth that human beings were not designed to fold themselves into computer workstations each day. But, they weren't all gloom and doom—they also suggested simple adjustments workers can make to save themselves from a lifetime of aching backs and sore necks.
Repetitive stress injuries don't develop in one week, or even two, but if you consider that people hold that slouched posture and poor alignment for more than eight hours a day, five times a week, over many years, it's not difficult to understand how people can get hurt.
Nokia turns cellphones into webservers
Nokia says it's "Raccoon" project started out with the Unix version of Apache, and exploited Symbian's POSIX layer in making the port. In addition to the basic Apache httpd daemon, Nokia ported mod_python, in order to enable dynamic pages generated from both Python scripts and PSP (python server pages). Other built-in modules include mod_alias, mod_auth, mod_autoindex, mod_dav, mod_dav_fs, mod_dir, mod_log_config, mod_mime, mod_rewrite, and mod_setenvif.
Nokia says it installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought "the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard." However, the project's goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.
Ultimately, Nokia says it was able to develop a gateway application, released under the open source Apache2 license, said to be capable of providing a webserver on a mobile phone with a URL accessible from any Internet browser. "In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet," Nokia says.
Raccoon project architecture
(Click to enlarge)
Users with Internet-connected PCs can install the gateway application themselves. A single gateway can support somewhere between 100 and 1,000 concurrent users, and many more actual accounts -- making it suitable for university trials, Nokia says.
Alternatively, Nokia offers a Gateway service, which it says it is committed to providing "for the foreseeable future."
The implications of mobile phone-based websites
Nokia notes that websites hosted on mobile phones enable phone owners to inter-actively participate in content generation. For example, Nokia has written an application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which is then relayed to the requester as a JPEG.
Another touted advantage is that the amount of personal information stored on mobile phones makes it easy to "semi-automatically generate a personal home page."
So far, Nokia's "concept demonstration applications" include:
- Interactive, contextual, and location-dependent content
- Use the phone as a webcam
- Find other mobile web sites in the proximity
- Find out the location of a mobile website (cellid)
- Use the phone as a webcam
- Enabling new communication means without operator involvement
- Send instant message
- Leave instant message in the inbox
- Leave a note on a mobile weblog
- Send instant message
- Access core data
- Access favorites, contacts, calendar, logs, and messages
- Download images
- Mount a read-write view of the root webserver directory and edit pages directly using WebDAV
- Access favorites, contacts, calendar, logs, and messages
An Internet comprised largely of mobile phone-based servers could challenge search engines to keep pace, however, because of the "dynamism" of an Internet where site content can change from minute to minute.
Availability
The Raccoon Project's Symbian port of apache and gateway software can be freely downloaded under an Apache2 license from the project's Sourceforge website. The apache port was developed using a Nokia 6630, but should work on any "S60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2" phone. The gateway application comes with Linux install scripts, but may also work on Windows. It requires a static IP, but may also work with dynamic DNS services.
Users wishing to use Nokia's gateway services, instead of running their own gateway, may request an account via email; additional details can be found here.
source:http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS5822160852.html
The Pirate Bay Is Back Online
source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/03/1220249
Orbiting gas stations key to interplanetary exploration
An orbiting "gas station" is an important requirement for the long-term future of human interplanetary exploration, a study by NASA engineers suggests.
For missions to Mars, spacecraft would make pit stops at fuelling stations orbiting the Earth or Moon to fill their tanks with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen generated in space.
Researchers believe it may one day be possible to mine oxygen from lunar soil. And if there is frozen water in some of the Moon's craters, that could be split into hydrogen and oxygen. This would mean the fuel loads needed for long missions would not have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravity, making the missions more efficient and sustainable, say Joe Howell, project manager for NASA's in-space cryogenic propellant depot at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, US, and his colleagues.
But Howell notes there are still many technical challenges to overcome before a fuel depot could operate in zero gravity. For example, he says, "you can't just stick a pump in a tank and pump it from the bottom."
In zero gravity, cryogenic fuels still have surface tension and therefore stick to the walls of their tanks. Acquisition devices would have to find a way to pick up the liquid, but not the gases in the centre of the tank.
Fuel gauge
Another major problem engineers have yet to overcome is measuring the amount of fuel inside a tank in space. "If you've got the propellant floating around in there, you can't just put a dip stick in there and measure it like you do your oil gauge," Howell told New Scientist.
An orbiting fuel station would also have to operate autonomously, because a human attendant would not be on call to help pump the gas. The failure of NASA's recent DART mission gave a clear demonstration of the challenges of autonomous operations by spacecraft.
Yet another problem is that hydrogen and oxygen must be kept very cold, -253°C and -183°C respectively, to remain in their liquid state. While space is cold, the Sun is a powerful source of radiant heat, so any space-based gas station would have to be insulated and have solar-powered coolers to maintain the ultra-low temperatures.
Prize fund
NASA appears to backing away from developing in-space fuelling stations itself, but has set up a $5-million prize fund for any company that can create one.
The budget for Howell's project was cut back in 2005 when the agency decided it was not required to fulfill the short-term goal of returning humans to the Moon. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told the American Astronautical Society in November 2005 that, while such a station would be a "highly valuable enhancement", it was not affordable under current budget constraints and "the mission [to the Moon] was not hostage to its availability".
Instead NASA is trying to spur industry to develop such a fuel depot with the Fuel Depot Demonstration Challenge, one of NASA's Centennial Challenges.
The $5 million will go to the first team to build, launch and test a model of a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen storage or production depot in Earth orbit. According to the draft rules, the tanks must be launched into low-Earth orbit and hold at least 20 kilograms of liquid hydrogen and 120 kilograms of liquid oxygen for 120 days. The deadline is 2012.
Despite the cuts, Howell is hopeful for the future of fuel depots. "We feel like this is something that's going to be very important in the future when we talk about long-term missions and keeping cryogenic propellants in space for a long period of time," he told New Scientist.
source:http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn9259-orbiting-gas-stations-key-to-interplanetary-exploration.html
Tools To Automate Checking of Software Design
source:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/02/207246
MySQL: Workers in 25 countries with no HQ
(FORTUNE Magazine) - It seemed like a typical company holiday party. The brandy and eggnog flowed freely, although it didn't seem to loosen up any of the attendees.
All standard fare for an office party - except that there was no office. Thomas Basil, director of support at MySQL (pronounced "my S-Q-L"), a $40 million software maker, staged the event online, playing Santa while dispensing virtual drinks and gifts to staffers scattered in such outposts as Russia, England, and Germany.
To accommodate the different geographies, Basil started the festivities on a December day at 10 A.M. in Baltimore, where he lives. (His clocks are actually set seven hours ahead to Helsinki time, the time zone of many of his team members.)
"When a company is as spread out as this one," Basil explains, "you have to think of virtual ways to imitate the dynamics of what goes on in a more familiar employment situation."
That neatly sums up the broader challenge that many companies are confronting: how to nurture a bond among workers who rarely, if ever, meet.
Few businesses are as spread out as MySQL, which employs 320 workers in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home. (MySQL's database software is open source. That is, it offers access to its software's source code free and hopes in return to get its customers' help in identifying and fixing bugs and creating new features.)
As the face-to-face world diminishes, managing technology-tethered teams effectively - as MySQL and the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia do - might determine which competitor prevails.
How on earth do these virtual organizations get anything done? Management gurus have been preaching since the early days of Peter Drucker that workers must be organized into corporations with strict boundaries (between, for example, employees and customers) and a centralized physical plant (the headquarters). Based on those criteria, a remotely controlled entity such as MySQL begins to look no more managerially sophisticated than, say, your average garden club.
But peer inside such an oddly configured company, and you'll find someone at the top who has thought very deliberately about how to execute effectively in the virtual world, managing communications resources and human ones in such a way as to keep participants feeling valued and connected. As pioneering as those folks may be, they are hardly soft-headed idealists.
"I have a very low opinion of human nature, which is that people are both greedy and lazy," declares Michael "Monty" Widenius, co-founder and chief technical officer of MySQL, which is based in Cupertino, Calif. "Of course you have noble people, but they are a small fraction."
Twenty-five years ago, author Tracy Kidder mined improbable turf for a page-turner: a bunch of geeks at Data General Corp., a leading maker of minicomputers. His account of deadline-driven dynamics inside an engineering cabal trying to build a new product in time to prop sagging sales ended up winning him a Pulitzer Prize.
Open "The Soul of a New Machine" today, though, and you'll see that it's not just the story of a desperate company about to be fatally blindsided by the arrival of the PC. The book also preserves an antiquated notion of teamwork, where technology came between people and everyone worked everything out over pizza and beer.
But these days effective team-building, in the MySQL mode, may come from knowing when not to send an emotional e-mail or why the phone is necessary for certain interactions. The 51-year-old Basil, whose basement office is next to the family's overworked washing machine (he is a father of six), has developed strict guidelines that govern his online conduct.
In the morning, when he first signs on to the company's Internet Relay Chat (IRC) - a postmodern version of the CB radio that acts as a company-wide chatroom and offsets the isolating aspects of e-mail - Basil makes sure to greet every support-team member by name.
"It sends a message that each individual is important to me," says Basil, who deliberately tries to "build the humanity" into virtual work, which consists of "lots of solitude and technology."
That job description calls for CEOs who are willing to choose new hires in a different way. Hiring for attitude? Stop, and focus on abilities. Looking for team players? Think again - these employees will have only themselves to mutter at most days.
MySQL hires strictly for skills, assessing raw talent by watching prospective workers grapple with technical problems. CEO MÃ¥rten Mickos, who works in the 30-person home base, has hired many an engineer sight unseen. By some accounts that's just as well.
"We have people with lots of tattoos," notes Widenius. "Some of them I would not like to be with in the office every day."
From a safe distance Mickos will ask such questions as "How do you plan your day?"
If a reply comes back that says "I always sleep until 11 A.M., and then I start working," Mickos doesn't want to hear any more. He's sold. "The brightest engineers like the calmness and coolness of the night," he says.
He is also wary of hiring "young men without a wife or a girlfriend or a dog or parents. They are at risk because they can get so immersed in their job that it drives them crazy. We don't want the type who read e-mails on their way to brush their teeth. They need a life."
Naturally his final question is "By the way, where do you live?" "I'm not the sort of CEO who needs to see everybody sweat and work hard," says Mickos. "These are passionate people who aren't going to stop because somebody isn't looking."
Software developer Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin, who lives in the southeastern Ukraine city of Lugansk, was hired in 2001 without ever having spoken to a soul at MySQL. "My ability with spoken English was not so good," says Byelkin, 33. While his English has improved, the spotty phone service where he lives still serves as a handy barrier. (We were disconnected twice.)
People at MySQL match the technology to the task. Besides IRC, the company relies on Skype to allow people to make free voice calls over the Internet - and just as important, to keep themselves from perishing in what can quickly intensify into category 5 e-mail storms.
MySQLers are also known to fire up a chat session on the side while on a conference call with a customer - the digital equivalent of kicking each other under the conference table.
Basil's rule: "Voice is more personal than text and more helpful in building real understanding."
This flexible approach helps keep people engaged during company-wide meetings, where it's impractical to let everyone chime in. When Mickos gets the whole staff together - not to be confused with gathering them in one place - he relies on a system he has dubbed "Radio Sakila."
Named after the company's dolphin mascot, it combines a typical conference call with instant messaging so that employees can get their questions addressed. Those who want to send messages anonymously can do so by routing them through the HR director.
At one of these quarterly confabs, Basil messaged his boss that what he was saying was unrealistic. Soon after "I got back a three-paragraph personal reply," recalls Basil. "That builds loyalty."
MySQL managers also learn to evaluate people and give feedback differently. Productivity is measured strictly by output; mushy factors like charisma don't pertain in cyberspace. It may be easier for laggards to hide in a virtual company, but they can't do so for long.
Despite the informality of the structure - it is often impractical to follow a strict chain of command, and much more efficient to grab a colleague by the virtual collar and ask for help - all employees become watchful citizen sheriffs. They can see how often a colleague pops up on, say, tech-support mailing lists or conference calls or IRC chats.
The company has developed software called Worklog, which requires employees to check off tasks as they finish them. It may be possible to fake certain electronic cues, but workers also fill out weekly reports, which serve as the official record of what they have accomplished.
"We are strictly a management-by-objective company," says Erik Granström, a marketing manager. "If you don't produce what you say, you will only get so many chances." (Granström, a 50-year-old former veterinarian, has his own management problems. During our phone conversation his 13 sheep escaped and were last seen charging toward his garden.)
It's not as if MySQL workers get some perverse kick out of catching colleagues goofing off, though. They know how common it is for e-mail or voice messages to be misconstrued, so they watch what they say. Fire off a dumb question to one of MySQL's mailing lists, and you are likely get back the terse rebuke "RTFM" - read the freakin' manual.
The watchdog system also allows MySQL to spot talent among the company's army of volunteers - a minor league for software programmers.
Shawn Green, 39, joined MySQL in May and works out of a converted dining room in Blountville, Tenn. A former MySQL customer, he was discovered by one of the Russian developers who was monitoring an IRC channel where Green was active.
MySQL has brought aboard more than 50 employees from its user group, reckons Kaj Arnö, vice president of community relations. The possibility that they might get hired fires up outside contributors. In some circles, it's considered prestigious to have had the company accept a fix you've made.
And MySQL will make sure everyone knows it, touting such achievements in documentation, inserting names into press releases, and bestowing awards at the company's annual users' conference.
All of which is nice. But it's straight out of Tom Sawyer: Civilians are being enticed to work free. MySQL owes them nothing for their efforts.
"Nobody is kidding themselves about what is going on here," says Arnö. "The users provide the company with bug reports and with word of mouth."
How long can that last? Eventually, it would seem, these hard-working geeks are bound to feel exploited - or migrate to another product's fan club. Even Widenius acknowledges the possibility.
"These users have their own needs to satisfy," he says. "Their main motivation is that they are lazy, and once they fix a problem, they want the fix to be in the next version of the software so they don't have to make the same changes again."
If he's right, then users will help MySQL only so much. And employees, for their part, may turn lonely and restless in their makeshift home offices. Being on any team is draining, but the virtual kind never fully disbands at the end of the day - because there is no end. As Jimmy Buffett might put it, It's 9 A.M. somewhere.
How to motivate - and control - an army of 30,000 volunteer workers.
Daniel Mayer doesn't complain that he's underpaid. That's because he is happy being unpaid.
"I enjoy contributing to a product that I think of as having great value," he says. "I like the idea that I am part of something bigger than myself."
The 30-year-old, who lives in Atlanta, is referring to Wikipedia, the vast, reasonably reliable online encyclopedia that has one million entries in its English-language edition alone. Operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, it has a payroll of four. But there are 30,000 active volunteers.
The trick is making them work together for the common good. Since its launch in 2001, founder Jimmy Wales has made it easy for contributors to monitor one another's movements. Wikipedians are alerted when any changes appear on pages they've worked on. Every edit can be traced to its maker, and most versions of each entry, along with online conversations about it, can be retrieved.
"Being very transparent encourages good behavior," says Wales, who's based in St. Petersburg.
Vandals strike anyway. But Wales, 39, has never had to switch the entire site to read-only status to save it. Virtual vigilantes are always on patrol. Volunteers who misbehave risk eternal banishment.
Mayer recalls one person who was kicked out for insisting that Wikipedia compare fluoride to rat poison - and not just because of its taste.
Official Wikipedia policy requires that entries stay neutral and that members treat one another civilly. Any serious dispute can move through three stages of appeal - the last one involving an elected 12-volunteer arbitration committee. After that - and only after that - your unpaid job may be history.
source:http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/31/magazines/fortune/mysql_greatteams_fortune/index.htm
