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Media

Submission + - Where are people going... CNN.com? No....Mininova. (fastsilicon.com)

Submitted by
mrneutron2003
mrneutron2003 writes: "As proof positive of the relative disconnect mainstream media experiences on the internet, multibillion dollar news organization CNN is now outranked in sheer web traffic by......a torrent search engine. It appears that sometime in mid September mininova.org surpassed CNN , and as you can see from the accompanying Alexa graph continues to skyrocket well ahead of the worlds #1 news organization. Seems people are more interested in the next episode of Heroes, than they are the 2008 Presidential Election. I can't half blame them. http://www.fastsilicon.com/off-the-wall/where-are-people-going-.-cnn.com-no-mininova.org.html?Itemid=60"
Handhelds

Submission + - 30,000 Palm Apps Land on Nokia's Web Tablets

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Some 30,000 applications originally written for the Palm Pilot PDA will soon run on Nokia's Linux-based web tablets. The applications will run on top of a virtual machine (VM) currently being beta tested by Access for Nokia's 770, N800, and N810 Internet tablets. The Garnet VM beta is available now for free download from Access, with registration. It has reportedly achieved 80 percent compatibility, with wider compatibility expected pending user feedback. Applications run within a QVGA-sized window (configurable as landscape or portrait) centered in the tablets' 800x480 displays.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - SCO found guilty of lying about Unix code in Linux (linux-watch.com)

Submitted by
mlauzon
mlauzon writes: "In the United States, SCO's Linux/Unix litigation has been stalled out while the company's bankruptcy trial is being dealt with. In Germany, however, several court cases have found SCO Group GmbH, SCO's Germany branch, guilty of lying about Linux containing stolen Unix code.

In the first case, reported on by Heise Online, the pro-Linux German companies, Tarent GmbH and Univention found that SCO was once more making claims that Linux contained Unix IP (intellectual property). Specifically, SCO GmbH made the familiar claims that "As we have progressed in our discovery related to this action, SCO has found compelling evidence that the Linux operating system contains unauthorized SCO UNIX intellectual property (IP)." This was followed by the usual threat "If a customer refuses to compensate SCO for its UNIX intellectual property found in Linux by purchasing a license, then SCO may consider litigation."

The German Linux companies had already successfully protested against these statements in 2003. Then they were granted an injunction against SCO from making its claims that Linux contains illegally obtained SCO IP, a.k.a. Unix source code. If SCO violated this injunction, SCO would have to pay a fine of 250,000 Euros.

Since Tarent and Univention brought the matter to the attention of the courts, SCO has taken down the offending page with its claims.

Of course, in the U.S. court system, it has already been ruled that SCO has no Unix IP. Novell, not SCO, owns Unix.

Tarent's managing director told Heise Online that he found "It disconcerting, though not surprising, to see SCO trying to do towards the end what it is really being paid for by its supporters: spreading falsities as disparaging as possible about Linux." Unlike 2003, where Linux companies had to nip things in the bud, exercising vigilance is due now where things are coming to an end: "Even though SCO has reached the end of the line in our opinion, one should not let them get away with this."

In a similar case, Andreas Kuckartz, a German Linux advocate, had been publicly stating since 2003 that "SCO IP Licenses for Linux" amounted to little more than "protection money pricelists" and that SCO is "spreading rumors about copyright violations in Linux." Further, Kuckartz claimed that "The SCO Group Inc. is probably is involved in crimes such as stock manipulation and filing a fraudulent complaint against IBM."

SCO took him to court over these claims and SCO has lost (German PDF document). The Higher Regional Court in Munich ruled, Kuckartz said in e-mails to Linux-Watch, "that my statements are allowed because none of the factual statements I made to support those accusations are false. I can now even go to a business partner of The SCO Group GmbH and tell him or her that SCO is probably involved in the named crimes."

Kuckartz claim that he believes is the most important one is that in the four years the case has dragged out, SCO never objected "to my statement that SCO has not presented any proof of copyright violations in the lawsuit SCO vs. IBM."

In the United States, however, SCO, even now, continues to drag out its unsubstantiated claims that IBM has stolen SCO's Unix IP. In the SCO bankruptcy hearing, SCO attorney Arthur Spector once more claims, "Our litigation is a tremendous asset" and "Our litigation with IBM could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars.""
Security

Submission + - Enigma machine still up for grabs (rhul.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Ever wanted to own your own piece of crypto history?

A genuine WWII Enigma machine, potentially worth thousands of US dollars, is up for grabs in a code-breaking competition associated with the book "Can you crack the Enigma code?" by author Richard Belfield (ISBN-10: 0752875264, ISBN-13: 9780752875262).

As part of the book, Richard worked with a team of experts from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London to create a challenging collection of puzzles. These "Enigma puzzles" are designed to test even the most experienced puzzle addicts. The puzzles have been designed in such a way that ingenuity and lateral thinking will be as important as having access to a computer in solving them. The prize: a genuine Enigma machine, potentially worth thousands of pounds.

The competition has been running for over a year, and so far, it seems that the puzzles have defied even the most determined attempts to break them. There's been plenty of discussion on the on-line forum at http://enigma.isg.rhul.ac.uk/ but so far it seems that only the first three of the six puzzles have been cracked.

Time to sharpen your pencils and get to work..."
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Voting For America's Troops (electiontechnology.com)

Submitted by
Online Voting
Online Voting writes: "A pilot program from the Operation BRAVO Foundation is bringing Internet voting to a select group of Florida voters stationed abroad. The program intends to set up touch screen kiosks at three Air Force bases in the UK, Germany, and Japan. The project is expected to cost $700,000 and have up to 900 possible voters. Sponsors of the program have said it is a necessary step to ensure overseas voters have a chance to have their votes successfully counted and cite a recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission study which found half of all military and abroad attempting to vote did not have their ballot counted.

Another group attempting solve problems faced by overseas and military voters, the Overseas Vote Foundation, has launched its new Web 2.0 system to assist with voter registration. And not to be left out of the loop the U.S. government is planning to launch a complete online voter registration system in December."
Education

Submission + - Mayor of Birmingham, Al. Asks For OLPC Exception (al.com)

Submitted by
BhamGray
BhamGray writes: "Larry Langford, the new Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, has asked the One Laptop Per Child organization to consider providing students in his City with laptops for the 2008 school year. The City of Birmingham would purchase the laptops through OLPC at a price of around $200 each. This would be a departure from the OLPC's "developing nations" target, but the organization's representatives are quoted in the article as having been persuaded by Mayor Langford to consider it."
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox Memory Hogging Is Due to Fragmentation (pavlov.net)

Submitted by A beautiful mind
A beautiful mind writes: It has been long claimed by users that Firefox leaks memory, and on the other hand the developers claimed the number of leaks are minimal. It turns out both groups were right. Stuart Parmenter, one of the authors of the RAMBack extension started investigating and found out that the issue is memory fragmentation. He discovered that while loading about:blank uses 12,589,696 bytes of memory in the test he performed (image), after exercising Firefox with different websites and then clearing the caches with the help of the RAMBack extension the picture is wholly different: "Our heap is now 29,999,872 bytes! 16,118,072 of that is used (up 4,634,208 bytes from before... which caches am I forgetting to clear?). The rest, a whopping 13,881,800 bytes, is in free blocks!"
Announcements

Submission + - New 4-quark particle discovered in Japan (www.kek.jp)

Submitted by
mu22le
mu22le writes: "An international team of researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the "Belle collaboration"*1, recently announced the discovery of an exotic new sub-atomic particle with non-zero electric charge. This particle, which the researchers have named the Z(4430)*2, does not fit into the usual scheme of "mesons", combinations of a quark*3and an antiquark that are held together by the force of the strong interaction.

The Z(4430) particle was found in the decay products of B-mesons (mesons containing a "bottom" quark) that are produced in large numbers at the KEKB "B-factory", an electron-positron collider at the KEK laboratory. While investigating various decays of the B meson in a data sample containing about 660 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, the Belle team observed 120 B mesons that decay into a Z(4430) and a K-meson. The Z(4430) then instantly decays into a "Psi-prime" (Psi-prime) particle and a pi-meson (see Figure-1). The Belle team found that this particle has the same electric charge as the electron and a mass about 4.7 times that of the proton.

In the past few years, a number of peculiar new particles, including the so-called X(3872), Y(4260), X(3940), Y(3940), have been found by the Belle and also by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). These new particles lie in the mass region from 4 to 4.5 times the proton mass, and decay into "J/psi" or "Psi-prime" particles and pi-mesons. Here J/psi and Psi-prime particles are examples of so-called "charmonium" mesons, bound states of a charm quark and its anti-particle (an anti-charm quark). Since the masses and the decay properties of these new particles do not match theoretical expectations for quark-antiquark combinations, theorists around the world have proposed other potential explanations, which include the possibility that some are made up of four quarks (for example, a combination of a charm quark, an anti-charm quark, an up quark and an anti-up quark). However, since all of these new particles are electrically neutral, it was not experimentally possible to rule out alternative explanations of the new states as excited charmonium mesons.

On the other hand, the newly discovered Z(4430) state has non-zero electric charge, a characteristic that clearly distinguishes this particle from normal quark-antiquark mesons; it, therefore, must have a charm quark, an anti-charm quark and at least two more quarks (for example, an up quark and an anti-down quark). Thus, the Z(4430) does not fit into the framework of known mesons. As a result it has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the world's physics community (Figures 2 and 3).

Single quarks cannot be isolated. Instead, quarks are confined in composite particles such as mesons. This is a characteristic feature of the strong force, described by a mathematical theory called "Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD)". The discoveries of sub-atomic particles at the KEK B-factory provide an experimental foundation for better understanding of the phenomena of quark confinement as well as the formation of matter in QCD.

The discovery of the Z(4430) is described in a paper submitted on October 22 to Physical Review Letters, a leading physics research journal."
Social Networks

Submission + - Wikipedia's Fundamental Problems

Submitted by Moryath
Moryath writes: We all know Wikipedia isn't perfect — but can it be saved? Is it usable, or at the same time those who love it crow, why is it that more people are now leaving than entering? Why is it that the vast majority go by, perhaps contribute once, and quickly become like even Wikipedia's co-founder, utterly disillusioned? Why do former administrators come out and tell the problems themselves even when the "community" threatens them?

Or is it something more basic — is it that wikipedia's administrators are too powerful, and too willing to place an indefinite ban on anyone they choose, with no recourse? Is it impossible for new users to even come in and work, with edit-count-itis and entrenched cliques running the place into the ground?
Space

Submission + - Near Earth "Asteroid" Turns Out to be Spac 1

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: Last week, the IAU's Minor Planet Center asked professional astronomers around the world to help track a previously unknown asteroid, labeled 2007 VN84, that will pass the earth at the alarmingly close distance of 5600 km on November 13. However, Denis Denisenko of the Moscow Space Research Institute then noticed something peculiar: the object's trajectory exactly matched that of the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, which will perform a gravitational slingshot around the earth on that date on its way to study and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The MPC's editorial notice on the error also comments critically on the current means available to identifying distant spacecraft such as Rosetta.
Software

Submission + - Linux software wiki - Come add software! (ribosi.com)

Submitted by
this213
this213 writes: "Linux software wiki open to the public, No account required to add and edit software.

There's very little software in it now. By my own efforts, this will continually grow. With some community involvement, this will change drastically. The only stipulation for software to be included is that it runs on Linux. This can be desktop applications, command line tools, cross-platform applications and even web scripts.

The main feature of this wiki is the ability for users to search a Windows application and see alternatives for Linux. So, someone searching a Windows alternative of "MS Word" might get a response of Abiword, OpenOffice.org and Kwrite."
Windows

Submission + - Claim - new machines will be linux proof. (whatreallyhappened.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: the new VISTA machines coming in next year are rumored to be set up to prevent people from installing alternate operating systems such as XP or, for that matter, LINUX.

(So — anyone have a theory how the DRM be set up to do this?)
Software

Submission + - What the Feick: The new Yahoo! Mail (appscout.com)

Submitted by
Brian H.
Brian H. writes: "We just gave the new incarnation of Yahoo! Mail an Editors' Choice, over at PC Mag. However, not all of the updates to the service have been completely positive. A reader, whose last name is Feick, wrote in to complain about the new spell-check which insists on changing his name to a similarly spelled, but largely work-inappropriate, four letter word."

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