MrKaos writes “Western Digital seems to be preparing for the onslaught of solid-state drives set to impact its market by developing a 20,000 rpm hard drive. Similar to the VelociRaptor line of drives, the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times.” This report out of Taipei is the only word on the rumored WD 20K drive. It’s said to be a 2.5″ drive in a 3.5″ enclosure, for efficiency of cooling — the arrangement the Register enjoyed poking fun at when the 10K drive was upgraded last month.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Ever wonder about all those groups claiming Google had a ’search monopoly’ (as if there are no other search engines), or worse, coming out against Net Neutrality? CNet has a story about a shady DC lobbying group called LawMedia Group, being paid by Microsoft and Comcast, that is behind many of these attacks. That said, it’s a mystery why they weren’t able to pay more authoritative groups than the American Corn Growers Association or the League of Rural Voters to weigh in on technical matters. As a computer geek from corn country, I wouldn’t solicit their opinion on tractor repair, let alone Internet policy.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MySkippy writes “I’ve been a software engineer for just over 10 years, and I’ve seen a lot of different styles of logging in the applications I’ve worked on. Some were extremely verbose — about 1 logging line for every 2 lines of code. Others were very lacking, with maybe 1 line in 200 devoted to logging. I personally find that writing debug and informational messages about every 2 to 5 lines works well for debugging an issue, but can become cumbersome when reading through a log for analysis. I like to write warning messages when thresholds or limits are being approached — these tend to be infrequent. I log errors whenever I catch one (but I’ve never put a “fatal” message in my code, because if it’s truly a fatal error I probably didn’t catch it). Recently I came across log4j and log4net and have begun using them both. That brings me to my question: how do the coders on Slashdot handle logging in their code?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
iminplaya sends along a New Scientist article that begins: “One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger [is] called Gobero… It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush… ‘The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two meters tall,’ says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago… All traces of the Kiffian vanish abruptly around 8,000 years ago, when the Sahara became very dry for a thousand years. When the rains returned, a different population, the Tenerians, who were of a shorter and more gracile build, based themselves at this site… ‘The most amazing find so far is a grave with a female and two children hugging each other. They were carefully arranged in this position. This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,’ says Garcea.” The research article is at PLoS One.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating: automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits; automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs (with potential applications such as a privacy-enhanced Google Street View); and using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We’ve been discussing the plight of Internet radio for some time, as the Copyright Royalty Board imposed royalties that industry observers predicted would prove lethal to the nascent industry. We discussed Web radio’s day of silence in protest, which won the industry a reprieve, and the futile efforts to find relief in Congress. Now it’s looking as if the last act is indeed close. Death Metal Maniac sends along this Washington Post story with extensive quotes from Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, who said: “The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we’re doing is wasting money… We’re funded by venture capital. They’re not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken.” The article estimates that XM Satellite Radio will pay “about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener.” That’s 70% of projected revenue for Pandora; smaller players estimate the hit at 100% to 300% of revenue.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader sends in a Science News article that begins: “Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably” Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, of course, embrace unpredictability. But many physicists aren’t comfortable with that, and are working to develop deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. Conway and Kochen’s proof argues that these efforts will be fruitless — unless one is willing to give up human free will, in a very strong sense. The article quotes Conway: “We can really prove that there’s no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time. I’m still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This week we welcome Guerrilla Games‘ Killzone.com to the weekly recap. Killzone Community Editor Victor Zuylen will drop updates from the Killzone Command Center every week. Take a look at what they’ve got up there, the backstory is really intriguing.
Courtesy of David “Point Man” Brothers
Courtesy of Victor Zuylen – Editor, Killzone Community
- Killzone storyline update - The latest update to the Killzone storyline section examines the Vektan Era (2129-2155), and reveals what life on the Helghan-owned colony was like.
-
Early Days on Vekta - Snippets from a recently recovered Helghast textbook offer a unique, if not entirely unbiased, glimpse into their historical perspective on the colonization of Vekta.
-
Smoke, Mirrors and Lots of Rubble - We investigate how the Guerrilla developers pulled off the stunning building collapse in the Corinth River level. Includes a downloadable movie of the event.
ghostlibrary sends a note about Sean Tevis, an information architect in Kansas, who is running for state representative with the help of an xkcd lookalike cartoon and grassroots Net-based fundraising. Tevis had garnered more than 6,000 contributions, most of them small, from around the country, far out-fundraising his opponent. Major news outlets have picked up the story as a harbinger of 21st-century Net-based political campaigning. Reader ghostlibrary adds, “As a bonus, Tevis cites xkcd intentionally (rather than just ripping it off without crediting it) and, well, it’s actually funny.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Code Browser is a folding and outlining editor.
It is a lightweight but powerful tool for
structuring and browsing source code using
folders and links. It is especially designed to
keep a good overview of the code of a large
project.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
This release fixes several Unicode-related bugs.
GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content: text, mathematics, graphics, interactive content. TeXmacs can also be used as an interface to many external systems for computer algebra, numerical analysis, and statistics. New presentation styles can be written by the user and new features can be added to the editor using Scheme.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
The scheme mode has been improved, featuring syntax highlighting and tab indentation. An experimental plugin for drawing Feynman diagrams has been added, and the HTML to TeXmacs converter has been improved for better rendering of Wikipedia pages.
Vala is a new programming language that aims to
bring modern programming language features to
GNOME developers without imposing any additional
runtime requirements, and without using a
different ABI compared to applications and
libraries written in C.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
This release changes the default to notify on property changes in classes deriving from GObject. Bindings for LibUnique have been added, and the GLib, GTK+, and GStreamer bindings have been updated. Many bugs have been fixed in several areas.
nwcc is a C compiler for Unix systems. It targets
FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Linux/Solaris on 80×86 (with nasm
and gas), FreeBSD/Linux on AMD64 (with yasm and
gas), Solaris on SPARC (64-bit), AIX on PowerPC
(32- and 64-bit), and IRIX on MIPS (64-bit).
Cross-compilation is also supported. It doesn’t
feature any software development support beyond
plain compilation.
License: BSD License (revised)
Changes:
This release fixes many platform-independent bugs. Support for x86 and AMD-64 has also been improved.
Zoidcom is a high level, UDP based game networking
library for C/C++. Applications register their
gameobjects with Zoidcom, and Zoidcom will manage
when which object and which internal data of that
object is sent to whom. It uses bitstreams as a
native datatype and thus is very bandwidth
efficient. Support for background file transfers,
synchronization of player movement with
extrapolation and client side prediction, and many
other things are included.
License: Free for non-commercial use
Changes:
This release slightly enhances the address class API. It fixes a threading issue and some replicator problems, as well as a rare crash.
aqbanking-cli is a command line tool for
AqBanking. It has support for the HBCI protocol
and optional support for the EBICS protocol (both
are German homebanking protocols).
License: Free for non-commercial use
Changes:
This release contains the latest versions of AqBanking and Gwenhywfar, thereby fixing some HBCI problems.
yeaGTD is an acronym for “yaml encoded approach to
getting things done”. It is a script which
extracts information from simple text files, one
for each project, and then produces nicely
formatted summary reports. Flexible rules can be
used to specify repeated projects. Context,
project, and date views are supported and output
can be filtered in a variety of ways. Output can
optionally be printed or sent to standard output
in several formats. Commands are provided for
marking tasks complete, opening files for editing,
and backing up project files.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
This release is a complete redesign. The data file structure has been simplified, and the focus has been changed from displaying tasks for the current date to displaying active tasks for any selected date. The GUI version now provides complete project support internally. The number of active tasks on a given date determines the color of the date in the new calendar display, and the status of the task determines the color of the task for the day in the new Gantt chart display. Notes support log and time entries, and reports can be generated that show times aggregated in user specified ways.
The Zero Install Injector makes it possible for
