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Software

Submission + - Freenet 0.7.5 Announced

Submitted by evanbd
evanbd writes: After a year of development, the Freenet Project has announced version 0.7.5 of the Freenet anti-censorship software. Compared to 0.7, the new version offers significantly improved network performance, faster startup and reduced memory usage when uploading or downloading large files, enhancements to the user interface, and a new Windows installer. A new search function is also available, though it's still fairly limited. Downloads are available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. If you encounter any difficulties or bugs, help is available on IRC in #freenet at irc.freenode.net.

Comment Idiots - exactly the wrong way to launch a website (Score 5, Insightful) 218

by Sanity (#27974131) Attached to: Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera
You can be pretty sure that this wasn't the idea of the engineers who built the website. The worst possible launch from an engineering standpoint is a high-profile one where your traffic spikes immediately on going live. The likely outcome is that your site goes down and all your PR effort results in nothing other than ridicule.

When I've been involved in launching websites I've always had to talk down the PR people from some kind of high-profile launch, to something as gradual as possible.
The Internet

Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera 218

Posted by Soulskill from the nuts-and-bolts dept.
future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

Comment Re:Exactly... (Score 1) 532

by Sanity (#26941505) Attached to: Ballmer Pleads For Openness To Compete With Apple

This is not funny, this is insightful. If Mac were more popular, you would start seeing more crapware and horrible UIs for it as well.

So what? If you don't like the crapware, don't use it!

It is actually scary that people are seriously defending Apple here. If Microsoft was requiring that they get to approve every app that runs on Windows, and blatantly disapproving any app that they thought was "competitive", there would be uproar here on Slashdot.
Space

Spaceplane Concept Receives Euro Funding 193

Posted by samzenpus from the space-plane-race dept.
draevil writes "BBC News reports that the novel "Skylon" spaceplane design of British firm Reaction Engines has received funding to proceed with its proof-of-concept design for an air-breathing rocket engine. If successful, the Sabre rocket engine will be able to take the Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo from a runway, to orbit and then back to that runway without the need for disposable components or a piggy-back ride on a larger aircraft. Should the design prove viable, it could see first use within ten years."
Science

Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance 255

Posted by samzenpus from the I-seen-things dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."
The Internet

Submission + - Swarm: A true distributed programming language (locut.us)

Submitted by
Sanity
Sanity writes: "Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, has proposed a new programming language called Swarm, the purpose of which is to be truly and transparently distributed. The idea is that you write your code as normal, but when it runs it can jump between multiple computers in a cluster — effectively distributing both the data and computation in a scalable manner. The same code can run on a single computer, or run in a distributed way across hundreds of computers in a cluster. The Swarm prototype is open source, and implemented in Scala."
Java

Does an Open Java Really Matter? 766

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-finally-an-easy-question dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the relevance of the recent opening of Java given the wealth of options open source developers enjoy today. Sure, as the first full-blooded Java implementation available under a 100 percent Free Software license, RedHat's IcedTea pushes aside open source objections to developing in Java. Yet, McAllister asks, if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose? 'The problem, as I see it, is twofold,' he writes. 'First, as the Java platform has matured, it has become incredibly complex. Today it's possible to do anything with Java, but no one developer can do everything — there simply aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all. Second, and most important, even as Java has stretched outward to embrace more concepts and technologies — adding APIs and language features as it goes — newer, more lightweight tools have appeared that do most of what Java aims to do. And they often do it better.'" Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.
Software

Submission + - After 3 Years, Freenet 0.7 Released!

Submitted by evanbd
evanbd writes: After over 3 years of work, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7. "Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content." ... "The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends.

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