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ABC News

Cell phones bane to today's society Kankakee Daily Journal - 1 hour ago Cell phone kills 25 people. That may sound like a headline from a checkout counter tabloid. Actually, it's a true story, but it will never be reported that way. Crash shines rare light on 'railfans' Chicago Tribune Witnesses say light was green just before Metrolink train crashed Los Angeles Times United Press International - The Associated Press - LAist - San Francisco Chronicle all 887 news articles

CBC.ca

NASA At 50: Houston, They Have A Problem Tampa Tribune - 1 hour ago WASHINGTON - With half a century of amazing accomplishments behind it, NASA is entering a second space age beset by uncertainty and searching for renewal. International Space Updates, October 2008 DailyTech NASA at 50: The Shuttle, Space Station and Beyond Space.com Journal Inquirer - ABC News - Times Online - Spaceflight Now all 366 news articles

secmartin writes “Shortly after the release of Iron Man on Blu-ray on October 1, people started complaining of defective discs; the problem turned out to be that all the Blu-ray players downloading additional content brought down Paramount’s BD-Live servers, causing delays while loading the disc. Which really makes you wonder what will happen when they decide to shut down this service in a couple of years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anti-Globalism notes a large study out of the UK indicating that computer-aided detection can be as effective at spotting breast cancer as two experts reading the x-rays. Mammograms in Britain are routinely checked by two radiologists or technicians, which is thought to be better than a single review (in the US only a single radiologist reads each mammogram). In a randomized study of 31,000 women, researchers found that a single expert aided by a computer does as well as two pairs of eyes. CAD spotted nearly the same number of cancers, 198 out of 227, compared to 199 for the two readers. “In places like the United States, ‘Where single reading is standard practice, computer-aided detection has the potential to improve cancer-detection rates to the level achieved by double reading,’ the researchers said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

phpW2ML is a Web 2 Markup Language (W2ML)
processor. W2ML is an XML-based open format. With
a W2ML processor installed on the Web server, it
is possible to process W2ML markup in XHTML files.
Web pages written in XHTML+W2ML and served with
phpW2ML can be edited online with standard Web
browsers.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
The W2ML processor now supports the v W2ML
element. It also supports the style HTML attribute
in WYSIWYG edition (CSS declarations are
whitelisted on save). A minor information leak was
fixed: it was possible to test the existence of
files above the document root. On the W2ML
application side, new demonstrations include an
information page demonstrating the v element, hit
counters with bitmapped fonts, and an “It works”
Apache-like home page.

Andy’s PHP Knowledgebase is a database-driven knowledge base management system. It features bookmark friendly URLs, easy search with browsing with article tags, article submission, and a professional and attractive interface. It is intended to be used to store, manage, and update article content for a knowledge base, but is very customizable and enables any number of creative uses.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release introduces a new article viewer
script, v.php. It also includes improved admin
authentication. HTML header and menu files have
been moved to a “HTML” directory for easy editing.
This release also includes improved pending,
approval, and Q&A functions. Article tags, related
articles, comments, and article rating have been
reimplemented.

Guitone is a Qt-based, cross-platform graphical
user interface for the distributed version control
system monotone (http://monotone.ca). It
aims towards full implementation of the monotone
command line interface and is specially targeted
at beginners.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
This release contains many minor bugfixes and two
new features. You can now select the correct
encoding for a diffed file and there is a new
“Node information” dubbed information window for
workspace items which contains useful information
about them.

GMAMEUI is a front-end for MAME on Linux. It helps
the user play and configure arcade games more
easily. GMAMEUI is an enhancement of GXMame,
fixing a number of long-standing bugs, including
adding support for SDLMame in preference over the
now-obsolete X-MAME. New UI features were also
added.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
A crash which occurred when rebuilding the
gamelist was fixed. The displayed image is resized
as the available space increases or decreases. The
audit window does not revert to a smaller size if
the expander is clicked. Compilation errors were
fixed.

CNET News

Was the Yahoo-Google Deal a Ploy To Weaken Yahoo? Slashdot - 10 hours ago JagsLive writes with a link to a BetaNews story about a US Senator who is questioning whether the deal between Yahoo and Google was brokered with less than honorable intentions on Google's part. Google and Yahoo Ad Deal Delayed Washington Post Google, Yahoo delay search ad partnership Reuters New York Times - PC World - United Press International - Bloomberg all 563 news articles

Electronic House

Vudu offers new format to stream 1080p HD movies to its BX100 player ZDNet - 23 hours ago As I mentioned in my post yesterday about Netflix, one of the obstacles video-streaming services are going to have to overcome is the quality of the files they’re sending to big HDTVs. Vudu goes 1080p–and adds $200 credit for new buyers CNET News VUDU Launches HDX IGN The Times - HD-Report - xchange Magazine - Broadcasting & Cable all 24 news articles

Calgary Herald

CERN Launches Huge LHC Computing Grid Slashdot - 8 hours ago RaaVi writes "Yesterday CERN launched the largest computing grid in the world, which is destined to analyze the data coming from world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. CERN Plugs In World’s Largest Computing Grid eFluxMedia CERN Unveils Global Grid For Particle Physics Research InformationWeek Reuters - NetworkWorld.com - ReadWriteWeb - Inquirer all 77 news articles

Ian Lamont writes “For the first time, a list of popular notebook reviews shows three ‘netbooks’ in the top 10. The netbooks use Intel’s Atom processor. Notebookreview.com’s editor says there has never been more than one netbook in its monthly ratings. The reason for the netbooks’ sudden popularity no doubt relates to the price and basic functionality, but there’s a catch. Despite calling Atom a ‘high-performance’ chip, Intel cautions people not to confuse netbooks with notebooks, as netbooks will be unable to take on video editing or other processor-intensive tasks. This leads to the question of how netbooks will be able to handle demanding Web apps — or whether Web apps will have to be slimmed down to accommodate millions of netbook owners.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ’s reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) “Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this… list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize… Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma… [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft’s competing parody ’standard,’ OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of ’synchronized maintenance,’ without which they claim SC 34 can’t fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything.” A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DailyTech

This week in Apple: Apple stock, royalties, Verizon rumors Ars Technica - 2 hours ago By Jacqui Cheng | Published: October 04, 2008 - 03:45PM CT This has been a volatile week, and not just because of the stock market rollercoaster. Google: Android Market Will Be More Open Than iPhone Apps Store InformationWeek Apple misses September deadline for iPhone notifications Macworld Apple Insider - PC World - the iPhone Blog - BusinessWeek all 357 news articles

ruphus13 writes “There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one’s tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The ‘alpha-alpha’ version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn’t it be easily circumvented? The article asks, ‘Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let’s think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn’t it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution’s repositories, mirror that singular distribution’s disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution’s users in the great wide open?’ What should truly paranoid user do?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JMeld is a visual diff and merge tool. It is built
to be fast with large files. This tool is very
much inspired by the “meld” program.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
The Directory diff is in a usable state now.

Liaison is a collaboration system for developers and complete development teams. It attempts to integrate a bugtracker (Bugzilla), a Wiki (MoinMoin), Subversion, and other tools. It was inspired by trac.

JELAN provides facilities for constructing and
invoking LL(1) language lexical analyzers and
parsers. These are embedded in the sense that a
language can be specified and then used for
textual analysis within the same Java program.
This avoids the need for a separate generation
phase to write and compile a lexical analyzer and
parser from the language specification.

Preedit writes “The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft. An internal state document (dated September 15) uncovered by Infoweek reveals that Maine will not be upgrading its more than 11,000 personal computing devices from XP to Vista — ever. Instead, it’s going to wait until Windows 7 ships in 2010 and hope for the best. The news is in line with a survey that shows only 4% of businesses in the UK have upgraded to Vista, the story notes. So much for that $300 million Seinfeld campaign.” A commenter on the article makes the point that Maine’s signing an enterprise software license with Microsoft means that Redmond doesn’t really lose out on this deal; it simply allows the state to upgrade its equipment and software on its own time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Javascript VirtualKeyboard allows you to use any
existing keyboard layouts without having them
installed on your local PC. This tool is useful
for embedding into a WYSIWYG HTML editor, a Web
mail system, chat, forum, or any other application
requiring user input. About 70 languages/130
keyboard layouts are supported. It has an easy and
powerful design, allowing it to implement complex
layouts like Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and so on.
It has full support for keyboard and mouse input.
It features a completely CSS-driven UI that is
easy skinnable.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
Text input in the WYSIWYG editors was fixed. An
image-free skin was added. Some minor problems in
skins were fixed.

Javascript VirtualKeyboard allows you to use any
existing keyboard layouts without having them
installed on your local PC. This tool is useful
for embedding into a WYSIWYG HTML editor, a Web
mail system, chat, forum, or any other application
requiring user input. About 70 languages/130
keyboard layouts are supported. It has an easy and
powerful design, allowing it to implement complex
layouts like Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and so on.
It has full support for keyboard and mouse input.
It features a completely CSS-driven UI that is
easy skinnable.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
Text input in the WYSIWYG editors was fixed. An
image-free skin was added. Some minor problems in
skins were fixed.

unicap is a library to access different kinds of
capture devices. Device drivers are loaded with a
plugin system so that new drivers can be easily
added. Currently, it has support for
video-4-linux, video-4-linux-2, IIDC cameras, and
video-to-firewire converters, and provides GTK widgets for live video display and access to device properties.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version offers optional support for libv4l.
The video downscaling of Ogg/Theora videos was
fixed.

domus.Link is a Web-based frontend for Heyu. Its
design focuses on separating configuration from
actual controls, thus giving the user a simple and
user-friendly GUI. The primary concern is that
anyone with little or no knowledge of home
automation systems can easily manage and
administer the system.

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License: Free for non-commercial use

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Changes:
A few UI enhancements were made. The language
files were updated. Translations for German,
Portuguese, and Spanish were added. A few minor
bugs were fixed.

AgileWiki is an SDK for assembling software systems which are fluid, easily configured and can be reorganized on-the-fly to meet ever changing
requirements. It includes a COW-based database,
the Rolonics programming paradigm, and semantic
inferencing.

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License: Common Public License

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Changes:
Ark control is no longer enabled when a remote ark
is not connected. Parents and children are now
listed on the left side of the Browse display (and
are clickable).

orDrumbox is a fully-featured drum machine and
audio sequencer that is pattern oriented, has an
automatic composer, automatic sound assignations,
custom drum kits, loop support, and the ability to
import and export songs.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
The GUI was updated. Some bugs were fixed.

The STUBS Toolchain and Utility Build Suite is a
set of scripts designed to build one or more
software packages by means of a pre-written set of
configuration files. Each configuration file
encapsulates the necessary build and install
commands for a given package, and URLs are
included so source and patches can be downloaded
as necessary. STUBS is designed to both bootstrap
and work within the Franki/Earlgrey Linux
environment (an extensible busybox and
uClibc-based Linux boot floppy produced by one of
several example STUBS configurations).

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This prerelease introduces a separate set of
extensions called “Rou Gui”, containing networking
applications. The sanitized scripts of the
previous release have been extended with new
versions of autoconf and dhcpcd.

H2 is an SQL database engine written in Java that
implements the JDBC API. Embedded, server, and
clustering modes are available. A browser based
console application is included. The database has
strong security features. Disk based and in-memory databases and tables are supported.

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License: Mozilla Public License (MPL)

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Changes:
Some features are now enabled by default that were
previously optional. The database driver can now
automatically reconnect if the connection is lost.
The H2 Console tool now works with the JDBC-ODBC
bridge and supports command line options. Database
names can now be one character long. Large objects
now work for in-memory databases in server mode in
Linux.

eval2 is a real-time evaluator for PHP. It is
designed to be a debugging tool. Code is executed
server-side as the user types and results are
returned via AJAX. It comes with a limited
textarea WYSIWYG code editor with tab, shift-tab
indentation, and a GUI MySQL browser. It requires
Firefox.

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License: BSD License (revised)

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Changes:
Code checks were added to see that specific $_GET
values are set.

Jabir is an application that implements a Point Of
Sale for bars, restaurants, pizzerias, and similar
establishments. It includes both a Swing-based
interface and a Web-based interface.

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License: Other/Proprietary License

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Changes:
A Portuguese translation was added.

LibU is a multiplatform C library that comes under
a BSD-style license. It includes many
interdependent modules for accomplishing several
tasks: memory allocation, networking and URI
parsing, string manipulation, debugging, and
logging in a very compact way, plus many other
miscellaneous tasks. It has a small footprint
(about 70KB for the default configuration), it is
modular, and it has a multiplatform nature, making
it an ideal candidate for embedded systems. KLone
is an example of such usage.

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License: BSD License (revised)

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Changes:
New APIs were added: u_config_sort_children,
u_config_del_child, u_config_print_to_fp,
u_config_load_from_buf, u_config_save_to_buf,
u_config_load_from_drv, u_list_insert,
u_list_del_n, u_log_set_lock (MT support),
u_log_set_unlock (MT support), and *_err_rcif.
Support for loading a configuration from opaque
data sources was added. Support for the “include”
directive was added in the configuration. A new
module for dynamic array handling was added. A
memory leak in the list module was fixed.
u_path_snprintf was fixed.