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Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Xscale confirmed in iPhone, by Intel!

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I hope you can read italian, or at least machine-translate it. You were right, there's an ARM in the iPhone and it's a Marvell Xscale.

http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/SoleOnLine4/Finanza %20e%20Mercati/2007/01/grusconi_180107_bucci_intel .shtml?uuid=b94d3c02-a6c8-11db-a363-00000e25108c&D ocRulesView=Libero

Dario Bucci, CEO of intel italy, interviewed by the financial newspaper "ilSole 24 Ore" confirmed that their former technology operates at the heart of the iPhone.

this is the passage:
I micropchip del nuovo Apple iPhone sono Intel?
No, non sono nostre ma di Marvell, la società cui abbiamo ceduto le attività che comprendevano l'architettura XScale. Apple è comunque uno dei principali clienti Intel per quanto riguardo le flash memory e nel nuovo terminale ci sono le nostre Nand.

more or less:
The chips in the new Apple iPhone are made by Intel?
No, they're Marvell's. We sold our Xscale architecture to this company. However Apple is one of our best customers for flash memories and our NANDs are featured in the new handheld.
Music

Submission + - Create yourown online music channel

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "There is a lot of great music in the world. Much more than you hear on popular radio and television. Because of formats, timeslots, playlists and other old media concepts you are not getting what you should. There are bands out there that are going to change the future of music. And bands that already did. Very few of them are getting airplay these days. One thing that they are doing is touring the world and playing live. Fabchannel.com brings you a wide variety of live music in sound and vision. From upcoming acts to big stars playing rock, hiphop, folk, avant-garde and everything in between. With a team of dedicated, music loving directors, editors, programmers and promoters Fabchannel has built one of the biggest online concert archives in the world. 700 full-length concerts, festivals, performances, debates and lectures can be freely experienced in the Fabchannel video on demand archive. Live from the famous Paradiso and Melkweg Amsterdam. Originated from Paradiso and with the continuous help of the Paradiso and Melkweg staff, Fabchannel provides you with the music and the tools to watch it. We record, you choose. All high quality and virtualy endless playlists."
Space

Submission + - Electric Solar Sail to Propel Spacecraft Cheaper

Submitted by
mairas
mairas writes: "The electric solar wind sail, or a large set of long, thin conducting wires set up radially like the spokes of the wheel, may yet provide a relatively simple way to set up extremely large solar wind sails: a solar-powered electron gun is used to create a high positive voltage in the wires. Positively charged solar wind particles see the electric fields of the charged wires as opaque obstructions, thus accelerating the spacecraft. The article states that small payloads could be sent to Pluto in less than five years using electric solar wind sails."
Math

Submission + - Your web browser, now a graphing calculator

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Taking advantage of the vector graphics features offered by the latest browsers, a recently created website called FooPlot turns your web browser into a function plotter (in 2-D and 3-D), offering a few basic graphing calculator features with a promise for further developments and integration with popular online spreadsheet applications. Gaining popularity in an educational context both in high schools and universities, this is another great example of the potential of the Internet to become the application platform of the future.

As an added extra, FooPlot also permits functions to be tacked onto the URL: http://fooplot.com/x^2+2x+1.
Education

Submission + - Advice to Upcoming College Students

Submitted by
sandrorafael
sandrorafael writes: "I was invited as one of the resource speakers for convocation on career guidance program in order for senior graduating students to be guided and assisted in choosing the courses or profession they prefer upon entering a chosen college or university after high school graduation. I'm asking fellow slashdotter to help me in giving advice to the graduating students. Thank you."
Perl

Submission + - Minimal Perl for Unix and Linux People

Submitted by
Ravi
Ravi writes: "Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) — the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages. But it has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master.

The book titled "Minimal Perl — for Unix and Linux people", authored by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications addresses these obstacles presented by Perl's complexity. This book which is divided into two parts comprising of a total of 12 chapters takes a unique methodology to explain the Perl syntax and its use. The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed like features and relys on concepts such as inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to directly apply their existing knowledge to the task of learning Perl.

What I found while reading this book is that the "Minimal Perl" is a specially crafted subset of Perl language designed to be easily grasped by people who have a Unix background and who wish to use Perl to write their scripts. Its main aim is to filter out the complex way of writing programs using Perl and stick to simple ways and where ever possible accomplish complex tasks using just one or two lines of Perl code. So in the first part of the book comprising of 6 chapters, the author explains how Perl can be used to do the same tasks as accomplished by common Unix tools such as grep, awk, sed and find. He goes one step further by explaining how one can accomplish much more and in a much simpler way by using the Perl techniques than can be achieved by using these tools.

Through out the book, the author consciously makes sure that the learning curve in acquiring Perl skills remain gentle. As Perl is a language whose syntax has a multitude of options, this book is peppered with numerous tables which provide excellent information at a glance. For example, in the third chapter titled "Perl as a (Better) grep command", the author lists and compares the fundamental capabilities of Perl and the different grep commands such as grep, egrep and fgrep which clearly shows the advantages that Perl has over grep. In another table, you get a birds eye view of the essential syntax of Perl's regular expressions and their meaning. This chapter alone has around 12 tables. This is a really nice feature of this book because it doubles this book as a ready reference for Perl where you can flip to the respective page and get the information you need.

The main strength and drawback of a language such as Perl is its dependence on regular expressions for accomplishing complex tasks. Once you master the regular expressions, the sky is the limit for ordering and segregating data using this language. And in Perl, there are more than one ways of doing the same thing. What is unique about this book is that the author specializes in explaining the easiest way of doing a particular task as is hinted by the title of the book.

In many places, the author demonstrates accomplishing complex tasks using just a few lines of Perl code. And many of the examples covered in this book are practical examples which give an idea of how the commands relate to the final outcome. For instance, while elaborating on the one line grep like commands in Perl, the author illustrates a web oriented application of pattern matching where he shows how to extract and list, the outline of slashdot.org site's front page. And the surprising thing is this is accomplished using just a single line of Perl code. This book has lots of such one liner examples which teaches how to use Perl intelligently using minimal effort.

If part I of this book focuses on ways in which simple Perl programs can provide superior alternatives to standard Unix commands, the second part comprising of another six chapters throws light on the other aspects of Perl concentrating on the syntax of the language and various built-in functions and modules available which does away with a lot of re-invention of the wheel — so to speak, and helps churn out code which is portable across OSes.

Chapter 7 titled "Built-in functions" introduces an eclectic mix of functions available in Perl. So you have functions which are used to extract a list of fields from a string, functions to access the current date and time, generating random numbers, sorting lists, transforming lists, managing files with functions and so on. These functions are broadly classified into those which generate and process scalars and those that process lists.

In chapter 8 of this book, the author involves the reader on the numerous scripting techniques that can be used to write better Perl programs.

It was quite surprising that the author has chosen to discuss the variables — more specifically the list variables comprising of arrays and hashes as well as the looping constructs only in the 9th and 10th chapters respectively when they should be some where up front. But on hind sight, I feel it is a good decision as once, you execute the one liner Perl programs in the initial chapters, by the time you reach the 9th chapter, you will be fairly confident in using Perl.

The last two chapters deal with creating sub-routines and modules. Over the years various Perl programmers have created modules which are used for diverse purposes. And with an aim to share these modules, they are collected and stored at one central place known as CPAN, which is an acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The final chapter, apart from teaching how to create modules in Perl and manage them, also introduces the CPAN and ways in which one can find the right module by searching on CPAN.

The special variables cheat-sheet and the guidelines for parenthesizing code provided in the two appendices are really useful as a quick reference while writing Perl programs.

This is not a comprehensive book on Perl, rather the author specializes on a slice of Perl which when mastered can do over 95% of the jobs which require Perl. So for instance, you won't find object oriented concepts of Perl being mentioned in this book. But in many ways, the author has moved beyond explaining a subset of Perl by providing a section titled "Directions for further study" at the end of each chapter, where the author lists further material which can be used to learn more about the topic that is covered.

I really enjoyed going through this book on Perl, especially because it stresses on the practical side of using Perl and takes a minimal approach which does away with some of the seemingly complex nature of this language.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog titled "All about Linux" where he shares his thoughts and experiences in using Linux, Open Source and Free software."
Software

Submission + - Interview: Kenneth Hensley of PuppyLinux

Submitted by
sharkscott
sharkscott writes: "PuppyLinux is one of the most popular "flavors" of Linux, I have used it on several old P-II and P-III machines that I donated and it got them to work when the original OS (95 and 98) would not even so much as boot up. It was just after PuppyLinux's offer to be the OS for the One Laptop Per Child and the new "Unofficial PuppyLinux Guide" came out that I first contacted Kenneth of PuppyLinux. I wanted to know more about Puppy, the OLPC and what goes into making a guide for a Linux distro, Kenneth was kind enough to share his experinces with me. Read more at LXer.com"
The Media

Submission + - Dinosaurs, humans coexist in U.S. creation museum

Submitted by jlowery
jlowery writes: Yeah, yeah: flamebait. But it's not the museum I find darkly amusing, it's the following paragraph in this Reuters story.

Mocking publicity is free publicity," Looy said. Besides, U.S. media have been more respectful, mindful perhaps of a 2006 Gallup Poll showing almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve, but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
I long for the days when journalists aspired to the old-fashioned ideal of being guardians of the truth. Instead, media chooses to be 'respectful' of quaint pre-19th century theologic explanations of the natural world just because half of Americans would rather be spoonfed fairy stories instead of cracking open a science book. If they did, they would soon understand how the miraculous world they live in today is due entirely to men and women applying the scientific method to understand the world around them.

While the truth may be murky at times, that does not mean that every half-baked extreme point of view has to be given equal deliberation or respect.
Displays

Submission + - Yet Another HD Format

Submitted by ebresie
ebresie writes: Just as you were hoping the HD format war was going to come to an end...here comes another format. HD VMD is a new format, by New Medium Enterprise, leveraging off of old red laser technology of the old DVD format. This makes for cheaper HD DVD.
The Internet

Submission + - Promoting Your Website?

Submitted by Aabra
Aabra writes: I'm an admin in a relatively small (300 or so) community. Google, despite our best efforts has decided to put our website on pages 2-4, far below sites that are completely irrelevant when searching for our keywords. We're trying to increase our playerbase (It's a free source port for a once extremely popular game.) and are having difficulty getting any traffic to the site. What are some good ways to promote your website and increase traffic?

Feed Bloggers Take on Talk Radio Hosts (nytimes.com)

From feed by nytfeed
A San Francisco radio station pre-empted programming in response to a campaign by bloggers who recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers.
Privacy

New Plan In UK For "Big Brother" Database 178

Posted by kdawson from the for-our-own-good dept.
POPE Mad Mitch writes "The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair is going to unveil plans on Monday to build a single database to pull together and share every piece of personal data from all government departments. The claimed justification is to improve public services. The opposition party and the Information Commission have both condemned the plan as another step towards a 'Big Brother' society. Sharing information in this way is currently prohibited by the 'over-zealous' data protection legislation. An attempt to build a similar database was a key part of the, now severely delayed, ID card scheme."
Software

Submission + - A development contract for code to be GPL'ed?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I am working as an independent developer for a client I have a long relationship with, and of whom I used to be an employee. I've made informal contracts in the past for development work, but this job is much more significant. Also, the client has gone to court over software development in the past; he was in the right to do so, but I need to cover myself. The product will be released under the (L)GPL and copyrighted by me, and the client will also be agreeing to open the license and give me the copyright on some code I previously developed.

I plan to consult a lawyer, but I just want a little more direction before I start investing hours. Are there any resources I should know about, beyond what the FSF has to offer?

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