Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Biotech

Submission + - When is a Honeyeater not a Honeyeater? (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: "Every once in awhile, I will read a scientific paper that astonishes and delights me so much that I can hardly wait to tell you all about it. Such is the situation with a newly published paper about the Hawai'ian Honeyeaters. In short, due to the remarkable power of convergent evolution, Hawai'ian Honeyeaters have thoroughly deceived taxonomists and ornithologists as to their true origin and identity for more than 200 years."
Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo! becomes Platinum Sponsor of Apache Software (shareholder.com)

Submitted by jschauma
jschauma writes: Yahoo! published a press release, announcing that "it has become a platinum sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)." In their company blog, Yahoo! points out their particular interest in Lucene as well as Hadoop and that they have hired Doug Cutting, creator of both projects and VP at Apache. (Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia; Yahoo! also provides hosting capacity to Wikimedia.)
Space

Computer Model Points To the Missing Matter 97

Posted by kdawson from the on-a-whim dept.
eldavojohn writes "There exists a little-known problem of missing regular matter that has perhaps been overshadowed by the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Computer models show that there should be about 40% more regular matter than we see... so where is it? From the article: 'The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments — which connect galaxy clusters — hidden from direct observation in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, or WHIM, said CU-Boulder Professor Jack Burns... The team performed one of the largest cosmological supercomputer simulations ever, cramming 2.5 percent of the visible universe inside a computer to model a region more than 1.5 billion light-years across.' This hypothesis will be investigated and hopefully proved/disproved when telescopes are completed in Chile and the Antarctic. The paper will be up for review in this week's edition of the the Astrophysical Journal."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Iran builds supercomputer from banned AMD parts 2

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by AMD to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation. Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - What's new in Blade Runner: The Final Cut? (sffmedia.com)

Submitted by
tripper700
tripper700 writes: "25 years since its original release, a definitive version of Ridley Scott's science fiction masterwork Blade Runner, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, has arrived. So what exactly has changed? And is it worth all the fuss? SFFMedia describes each change in detail. Is it just a patch up job attempting to cash in on a cult film? Or like an oil painter retouching a masterpiece, or a novelist polishing prose, is Ridley Scott simply trying to perfect his original vision?"
GNOME

Submission + - GNOME supporting Microsoft OOXML as ISO standard? (archive.org)

Submitted by
christian.einfeldt
christian.einfeldt writes: "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against the purported Microsoft OOXML standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver calls on the GNOME Foundation to explain its apparent attempts to 'resolve' the criticisms, which is a pre-condition to acceptance of Microsoft OOXML as a second office productivity standard by the world ISO committee. Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, the OpenDocument Format (ODF), which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."
It's funny. Laugh.

Facebook Goes To 64 Bit User IDs 144

Posted by Zonk from the internet-users-on-mars-or-europa-can-expect-to-sign-up-soon dept.
NewsCloud writes "Facebook has announced to developers that they are moving to a 64 bit user ID in November. At 32 bits, the current ID allows nearly 4.3 billion user accounts. Yet, despite having only 47 million users today, Facebook's move to 64 bits will allow it to have more than 18 quintillion (18,446,744,074,000,000,000) user accounts. Of course, there are currently only about 6.5 billion people in the world. Is Facebook setting their sights beyond Earth or just trying to avoid what happened when Slashdot ran out of space for comment IDs last year. Perhaps they are planning to implement personas."
Communications

The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct 939

Posted by kdawson from the culture-drain dept.
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
Television

Submission + - NBC to offer Free Video Download Service

Submitted by Damocles the Elder
Damocles the Elder writes: Apparently NBC realized that people on the internet do watch TV, because after breaking up with Apple over iTunes pricing schemes, they're setting up their own free service. FTA:

NBC first contracted with Amazon to offer its programs for sale to downloading devices like MP3 players. Now it is establishing its own downloading service, which NBC executives say they expect to become a viable competitor to iTunes. "With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment," said Vivi Zigler, the executive vice president of NBC Digital Entertainment. "Not only does this feature give them more control, but it also gives them a higher quality video experience."
Wii

Submission + - Wii uses elliptic curve cryptography

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for?
Space

Submission + - Borexino, the Sun neutrino hunter

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "An international team of more than 100 researchers has used the huge Borexino detector to detect low-energy solar neutrinos for the first time. These results confirm recent 'theories about the nature of neutrinos and the inner workings of the sun and other stars.' In particular, it's now almost certain that neutrinos oscillate between three types, namely electron, muon and tau neutrinos. The Borexino detector used for these discoveries is located near L'Aquila, Italy. It is a 18-meter-diameter dome shielded by 2,400 tonnes of purified water and lying more than a kilometer underground to block interferences with cosmic rays. Read more for additional references and a diagram showing the various components of the Borexino detector, one of the deepest laboratories in the world."
Java

Submission + - GWT in Action

Submitted by
Michael J. Ross
Michael J. Ross writes: "Server-side computer languages, such as Java, possess numerous advantages over their client-side counterparts — including more robust integrated development environments (IDEs). In contrast, Web-focused languages, such as JavaScript, benefit from the global accessibility of the Internet. Bridging this gap, and leveraging the strengths of both sides, has long been an objective of the software development community — though not all attempts have been successful, e.g., Java applets. The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is the latest attempt, and shows considerable promise, as illustrated in a new book intended to help programmers learn this new technology: GWT in Action.

Written by Robert Hanson and Adam Tacy, this book was published by Manning Publications on 5 June 2007, under the ISBNs 1933988231 and 978-1933988238. For any prospective reader who would like to learn more about the book, they can first try the book's Web page, where they will find online versions of the "about this book" section, table of contents, preface, and index. The publisher offers two freely downloadable chapters, "Creating the Default Application" and "Communicating with GWT-RPC," in PDF format. In addition, there is a link to purchase the book's electronic version, and a link to the author's forum, where readers can post questions about the book or GWT, and likely receive a response — perhaps even by one of the authors.

The book's 17 chapters are organized into four parts, and cover a generous number of topics: introduction to GWT; creating the default GWT application; building your own application based upon the default one; creating widgets and panels, including composite panels; processing user events; creating JSNI components; modularizing your code; communicating using GWT-RPC; client-side RPC; classic Ajax and HTML forms; using JSON for interoperability; automatically generating code; GWT's native properties; testing and deploying GWT applications; more on the inner workings of GWT itself. The book has no appendices, but a substantial index, which is essential for such a technically detailed subject area.

GWT in Action is clearly intended to be a practical and fairly comprehensive coverage of Google's new toolkit. Almost all of the GWT concepts are explained within the context of developing a substantial sample application, the Dashboard, created by the authors. The reader is encouraged to follow along as the authors build the application, thereby learning from doing — almost always an effective approach. At 600 pages, with almost none of the formatting padding found in far too many technical books nowadays, the authors have not skimped on providing the reader with a lot of information. Furthermore, their treatment of application deployment is far better than any other I have encountered.

Unfortunately, the book has many weaknesses. On an overall basis, the order of presentation is at times disjointed — seemingly dictated more by the Dashboard and less by the most logical order for someone new to GWT. Compounding the problem, the authors frequently refer to advanced topics, covered in greater detail later, and also repeat earlier information, occasionally several times. Despite promises to provide a gentle exposition, it can be difficult at times for the reader to determine if any critical steps were skipped, as a consequence of key instructions for building the sample application being spread out, and interspersed with too many references to general comments covered earlier. In turn, readers will likely find it frustrating to try to get the sample application working at each step of the development process — and not just at the end, with the complete code.

One source of these difficulties, is that in the first few chapters, the authors try to introduce too many topics all at once, and as a result do not thoroughly discuss each one in its own section. Instead, they break up the information over multiple sections, scattered throughout the book. An example of this is internationalization. Section 2.2.4 is titled "Implementing Internationalization," and yet provides almost no details, and is essentially unusable by itself. At the very least, it should mention that later sections 3.2.1 and 15.3 provide a lot more information. Furthermore, internationalization was introduced far too early in the book, and greatly complicates the process. Instead, the authors should have created a simple application using only English for the user interface, and introduce internationalization later, after fully explaining the basics of turning Java code into JavaScript functionality.

Part I of the book is the weakest of all of them, which may, sadly, turn off readers who would otherwise get to the better material later. The authors are clearly enthusiastic about the topics at hand, and the number of moving parts associated with Java/JavaScript/GWT development is certainly not trivial. Nonetheless, those initial chapters would greatly benefit from a rewrite; this would make the material more comprehensible and easier to follow, step-by-step.

We can mention some specific flaws: A book like this that is introducing a new technology, must take care to not leave the unwarned reader wondering if they have been left behind in the steps. People reading some of the earlier material may conclude that those steps have already been assumed by the authors, and will not be covered. The authors do not mention how to obtain and install GWT until page 30; that should be right up front. The authors do not appear to mention which version of GWT they used for the book. (I chose 1.3, not 1.4RC, available as of this writing). Any reader trying to follow along and implement their example application (the Dashboard) will probably find several hurdles. First of all, make sure that you have version 1.4 of GWT installed, and not 1.3.3, which does not include some of the panels and widgets used in their sample code.

In Chapter 1, they modify a "Hello world" application to create another application that shows a tic-tac-toe board that has clickable squares, but does not play the game. Chapter 2 describes this as "a fully functioning Tic-Tac-Toe application," which is like claiming a program works because it compiles. Also in Chapter 2, their discussion of development alternatives is slowed down by repetition of the same information. The sample code in the book has minor inconsistencies. For example, naming a password String "oldPass" in one method, then "old" in another, related method. There are other instances, but these give one an idea of some of the inconsistencies.

The coverage of topics is generally quite thorough, though at times verbose and redundant — particularly in Chapter 2, though it is certainly not limited to that chapter. The second and third paragraphs in Chapter 3, for instance, continue the repetitious style which is found in many places throughout the book, and likely has made it longer than necessary. In Chapter 4, the first two pages explain what widgets are, several times, and conclude with a picture of a button — as if any reader who has made it that far into the book doesn't know what a button is. The book could certainly use some trimming.

The downloadable source code is not complete. For starters, it is missing the code from Chapters 1 and 2, though admittedly none of that is too long. The code provided for Chapter 4 is just a portion of what is displayed in the book. Moreover, the directory paths in the sample code archive files, are not consistently named, and some may even be incorrect. For example, the code for Chapter 5 has a folder named "Dashboard — Chapter 4." That sort of thing does not instill confidence in the typical reader. The authors should revisit the sample code — making it complete and consistently named.

The publisher's page for the book does not appear to have a link for errata; perhaps none have been reported yet. Here are some: On page 75, in Table 3.1, in the left-hand column, "gwt-onLoadErrorFn" should instead read ""gwt:onLoadErrorFn." On page 77, in the second paragraph, the file name extension should be all lowercase, not all uppercase. On page 78, in Listing 3.6, the String parameter in the first label.setText() call should be delimited with straight quotes, not curly quotes. (Microsoft Word strikes again?!) On page 81, in the third paragraph, "comply to" should read "comply with." On pages 87 and 88, the -whitelist and -blacklist option values each contain an extraneous space before the "^." There are undoubtedly more such errata throughout the book, and can be corrected in the next edition; but these are enough to at least get an errata file started. Fortunately, none of them would lead an alert reader astray.

Even though the book could use significant reorganization and streamlining in the next edition, GWT in Action is packed with practical information on a wide range of GWT topics.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction..." -- Art Spiegelman

Close