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Books

Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks 323

Posted by timothy from the sobering-thought-about-checks-in-general dept.
Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)
Cellphones

Passport Required To Buy Mobile Phones In the UK 388

Posted by Soulskill from the and-dna-samples-for-special-ringtones dept.
David Gerard points out a Times Online story that says: "Everyone [in the UK] who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society. A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say." We've recently discussed other methods the UK government is using to keep track of people within its borders, such as ID cards for foreigners and comprehensive email surveillance.
The Media

Debating "Deletionism" At Wikipedia 484

Posted by timothy from the edit-this-story-one-comment-at-a-time dept.
Ian Lamont writes "In a strange turn of events, the Wikipedia entry for Deletionpedia — an online archive of deleted Wikipedia articles — is now being considered for deletion. The entry for Deletionpedia was created shortly after the publication of an Industry Standard article and a discussion on Slashdot this week. Almost immediately, it was nominated for deletion, which has sparked a running debate about the importance of the Wikipedia entry, Deletionpedia, and the sources that reference it. For the time being, you can read the current version of the Deletionpedia entry, while the Wikipedia editors carry on the debate."
Windows

One Third of New PCs Downgraded To XP? 617

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-only-they-could-just-be-not-bought dept.
CWmike writes "More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, said performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network. 'The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,' Craig Barth, the company's CTO, said. 'People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights.' Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. 'Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn.'"
Book Reviews

Linux System Programming 98

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Jon Mitchell writes "As a Perl programmer recently thrown in to the world of C development on Linux, I have been looking for something that would take my K&R level of experience and bring it up to date with modern methods, hopefully letting me write more efficient and reliable programs. Linux System Programming is a volume that targets this need. Robert Love, former "Chief Architect, Linux Desktop" at Novell, kernel hacker of many years, and Gnome developer of well known features such as Beagle and NetworkManager, attempts in this book to document the Linux system call and C API to common systems programming tasks. Given that he developed the pre-emptive kernel and inotify he has the knowledge." Read below for the rest of Jon's review.
Books

Ten Strangely Cruel Science Experiments 357

Posted by Zonk from the cruel-but-hilarious dept.
aalobode writes "The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book by Alex Boase, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments. There they list the top science experiments — including the one from which the book gets its name — that were conducted by otherwise sane humans who tragically or otherwise ignored the effect of their research on the subjects themselves. Nowadays, most institutions have a review board for research on human subjects which would flag most proposals that could lead to harm for the subjects, but not so in the past. 'Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries. They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.'"
Math

Patterns in Lottery Numbers 563

Posted by Zonk from the you're-still-advised-against-playing dept.
markmcb writes "Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, i.e., random numbers are selected and people guess what they will be for a cash prize. But how random are the numbers? Matt Vea has conducted a pattern analysis of the MegaMillions lottery, which recently offered a sum of $370M (USD) to the winner. Matt shows that the lottery isn't as random as it may seem and that there are 'better' choices than others to be made when selecting numbers. From the article, 'A single dollar in MegaMillions purchases a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of landing the jackpot ... a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers.'" Includes some excellent charts of his analysis.
Math

Best Way To Teach Oneself Math? 609

Posted by kdawson from the making-up-for-lost-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In high school I failed two out of three years of math classes and eventually dropped out of school completely. I earned my general equivalency diploma as soon as was legally possible and from there went on to college and beyond. That was many years ago and my most basic algebra, trigonometry, and geometry skills are slipping away at an alarming rate. I'm looking for a self-guided course covering the equivalent of 4 years of high school mathematics including calculus. My math skills are holding me back. How can I turn this around?"
Programming

Making Your Code OSS-Appealing? 180

Posted by kdawson from the run-it-up-the-flagpole dept.
goldcd writes "A while back I wrote some pretty reasonable forum code, a PHPBB alternative. A few years down the line it's pretty stable, I've stopped tinkering with it, and it's standing up by itself. I have neither the time, inclination, nor inspiration to do anything more with it, but would very much like to give the code to the world to use and expand upon. Now I could just upload it as it is onto SourceForge, but currently it's very specific in its usage and I'd be ashamed of what 'proper' coders would think of my amateur offering — I'm afraid it would be laughed at and ignored. On the other hand, I don't want to waste hours of my own time perfecting it for people just to 'rip off' as is, and never contribute anything. My question is, what do you have to do to make your code 'OSS appealing?'"
Security

EA Denies DRM Problems With Sims 2 188

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the typical-mmo-company-response dept.
Fizzlefist writes "For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software in the latest expansion pack, Bon Voyage. It seems paid customers have been having problems since day one of release, but EA is only now, 5 weeks later, issuing an official statement on the matter. A lot of what's in the statement is outright fiction with proven reports of issues with disabling of disc burning software, optical disc drives, printers, cameras, system slowdown and even system crashes. Fan responses have been cold to say the least. Interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after its release."
Microsoft

MS Awarded "Best Campaigner Against OOXML" 190

Posted by kdawson from the pull-gun-aim-at-foot-pull-trigger dept.
HansF writes "Microsoft itself is the surprise winner of the FFII's Kayak Prize 2007, offered by the FFII in its call for rejection of Microsoft's OOXML standards proposal. The software monopolist is honored as 'Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization.' FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, 'We could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we're sincerely grateful to them.'" If Microsoft doesn't send a representative to claim their 2500-Euro prize at the FFII General Assembly in November, FFII will give the money to Peruvian earthquake relief.
Power

Electric Motorcycle Inventor Crashes at Wired Conference 337

Posted by CowboyNeal from the egg-on-face dept.
not5150 writes "The inventor of the electric 'KillaCycle" motorcycle was taken to the hospital for x-rays after demonstrating the vehicle to reporters. Bill Dube, a government scientist during the day and bike builder at night, attempted a burnout in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center during the Wired NextFest fair. Fueled by the "most powerful" lithium-ion batteries in the world, the bike accelerated uncontrollably into another car. There's a video interview (thankfully before the crash) and footage of Dube crashing."
Programming

Building a Fast Wikipedia Offline Reader 208

Posted by kdawson from the you-could-look-it-up dept.
ttsiod writes "An internet connection is not always at hand. I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips. After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching. (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching. (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them). (4) LaTeX based rendering for mathematical equations. (5) Hard disk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian. (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the 'dump' into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes days."

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