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Top news on 16 August 2009 |
The Best and Worst Tech-Book Publishers?
An anonymous reader writes "I am an author working on a technical book about an open-source software package. I am looking for a publisher, and I would like to hear experiences from any Slashdot authors. Who are the best publishers to work with and why are they great? Who are the worst publishers in the tech book business, and what nightmare/horror stories can you tell us about them? Any publishing company in particular you recommend avoiding? Any gems of advice (rights reversion, etc.) you can provide for first-time tech book authors?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Wave Preview Opens Up On Sept 30th
snitch writes with this snippet from InfoQ about the current state of Google Wave: "With the Google Wave Preview scheduled for public availability on September 30th, Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga has posted on the Wave Google Group about what the team has been working on along with some future directions. Up until now, with the limited availability of testing accounts there have been complaints on the Google Group from users that wanted to get their hands on this new technology but didn't have access to the sandbox. As Douwe explains, the team has been busy all this time with stability issues and more."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Easy Work-Around" For Microsoft Word's Legal Woes
CWmike writes "Microsoft can likely use an 'easy technical work-around' to sidestep a recent injunction by a Texas federal judge that bars the company from selling Word, a patent attorney said today. 'The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold,' said Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman LLP who has practiced patent and trademark law for 17 years. 'Headlines that say Microsoft can't sell Word are not really true,' said Negrin, pointing out that the injunction granted by US District Court Judge Leonard Davis on Tuesday only prohibits Microsoft from selling Word as it exists now after Oct. 10. 'All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish the two versions.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Arizona Judge Tells Sheriff "Reveal Password Or Face Contempt"
An anonymous reader writes "Four days ago, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona conducted a raid against the county government building hosting computers for a law enforcement database. After threatening to arrest county employees who would stop them, the officers proceeded to secure the room and promptly changed passwords on many of the servers. In a hearing on Friday, a Superior Court judge threatened to hold members of the Sheriff's Office in contempt if they did not reveal the passwords by next Wednesday. Following this, the Sheriff's Office claimed to be conducting an investigation against other Superior Court judges. Courts have asked for passwords before, but never under conditions like this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gene Therapy Causes Blind Woman To Grow New Fovea
Al writes "A woman with a rare, inherited form of blindness is now able to read, thanks to a gene therapy that caused a new fovea — the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors — to grow in her eye. The patient suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, meaning an abnormal protein makes her photoreceptors have a severely impaired sensitivity to light. She received the experimental treatment twelve months ago when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye — about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter. Along with two other patients receiving the same treatment, her eyesight improved after just a few weeks. Now the physicians report that this patient seems to have developed a new fovea, exactly where she received the injection. Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth, the results suggest that the brain is able to adapt to new visual stimuli remarkably quickly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends?
Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Measuring Real Time Public Opinion With Twitter
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through Twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DoJ Defends $1.92 Million RIAA Verdict
Death Metal points out a CNet report saying that the Justice Department has come out in favor of the $1.92 million verdict awarded to the RIAA in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. Their support came in the form of a legal brief filed on Friday, which notes, "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It also says, "The Copyright Act's statutory damages provision serves both to compensate and deter. Congress established a scheme to allow copyright holders to elect to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement instead of actual damages and profits because of the difficulty of calculating and proving actual damages."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
14-Year-Old Wins International Programming Contest
marcog123 writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics was held earlier this week in Bulgaria. The IOI is a programming competition for high school learners up to 20 years of age that has a focus on problem solving and algorithms. It was won by 14-year-old Henadzi Karatkevich of Belarus (PDF, list of gold medalists), beating the world's top high school programmers, including 18- and 19-year-olds, to become the youngest winner in the IOI's 21-year history. Competition is really tough, with some countries taking months off school to concentrate only on IOI training. Henadzi first entered the IOI in 2006 when he was only 11 years old and won silver (missing gold by only six points). He won gold in 2007 and 2008. He has the opportunity to enter for the next three years; that is, unless he follows the path of Terence Tao, who won IMO gold at 12 and then went to university the following year. If he continues his current streak, he will easily surpass the current record of six IOI medals by South Africa's Bruce Merry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile
fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sony To Convert Online Bookstore To Open Format
Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports that Sony is to convert its online bookstore to the EPUB format. While this format still allows DRM, it's supported on a much wider variety of readers. Is this a challenge to the Kindle? It's nice to see Sony opening up to the idea of open standards. Even if you still have reservations about buying a Sony device, you might be able to patronize their bookstore sometime soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved
xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Burning Man Responds To EFF's Criticism of Policy
Briden writes "Earlier this week, we discussed the EFF's criticism of the Burning Man Photo Policy. Burning Man has now responded at length on their own blog. Here's an excerpt: 'In fact, there are but two essential reasons we maintain these increased controls on behalf of our community: to protect our participants so that images that violate their privacy are not displayed, and to prevent companies from using Burning Man to sell products. We don't remove images from pages just because they criticize us (I've never been involved in taking down an image from an editorial blog criticizing Burning Man, and it's certainly not because there haven't been any!). We're also not at all interested [in] preventing participants from sharing their personal imagery or impressions of the event on third party sharing sites in a noncommercial manner, so long as they observe the concerns about privacy and commercialism. We're delighted to see people sharing videos, stories, and pictures on our official Facebook page, and we know that it, along with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. are representative of the way many of us share personal imagery in the digital age.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mac, Linux Support For Quake Live, Preview of Rage
AlexMax2742 writes "Great news for those anxious gamers who have been waiting for a Linux and Mac version of Quake Live. Support for both is being implemented with next Tuesday's update, according to project lead Marty Stratton, who gave the release date during a press conference held at QuakeCon 2009. A video of the press conference is up at QuakeUnity." John Carmack revealed that they're working on a "premium" subscription service for Quake Live, which will allow players to configure and run their own private servers. Also at QuakeCon, a new trailer was released for id's upcoming shooter, Rage. Kotaku posted an extensive preview of Rage, saying, "I've seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendor." A detailed presentation on id Tech 5, the new game engine behind Rage, was given at SIGGRAPH 2009 last week.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dell Considering ARM-Based Smartbooks
wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld: "In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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