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Software

Submission + - Miro asks users to "adopt" lines of source (getmiro.com) 3

Submitted by soDean
soDean writes: The FOSS video player / downloader Miro is asking its users to support development by 'adopting' a line of source code for $4 a month. Each adopted line of code comes personalized with a little avatar character that will grow older over the year. PCF, which makes Miro, says they think the project is the first of its kind and they believe it's a chance to "to have a truly bottom up funding base."
Math

Submission + - Second Life Experiment For A Turing Test Variant (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
Al
Al writes: "Technology Review has a post about an experiment in Second Life designed as a first step towards pass the 'Hofstadter-Turing Test'. In order to pass this variant of the Turing Test, an entity must create a virtual reality, then create a computer program within that reality that itself passes the Hofstadter-Turing Test. Weird as it sounds, Florentin Neumann at the University of Paderborn in Germany has created a simple experiment Second Life experiment as a step towards passing. Neumann says: 'We have succeeded in implementing within Second Life the following virtual scenario: a keyboard, a projector, and a display screen. An avatar may use the keyboard to start and play a variant of game classic Pac-Man, i.e. control its movements via arrow keys....With some generosity, this may be considered as 2.5 levels of the Hofstadter-Turing Test'."
The Internet

Submission + - M$ Vine - A mashup of Twitter, Maps, & Newsfe

Submitted by
ccktech
ccktech writes: "M$ is beta testing a new service call Vine (http://www.vine.net/about.aspx) which allows you to "Use the dashboard to know what's happening. Information associated with the places you have chosen will appear on your map, including articles from 20,000 news and public safety sources. Information from people you care about, such as alerts and reports, will appear on the dashboard too. Send and receive alerts. Organize people into groups" In their fact sheet (http://www.vine.net/static/pdf/vine_factsheet.pdf) they mention "Microsoft Vine aims to create an inclusive network so that ultimately anyone can participate, through a social networking application such as Twitter or Facebook or using e-mail, any computer connected to the Internet, or a mobile phone, kitchen phone or a special needs device." Unfortunately at the end of the fact sheet they have "System Requirements for Microsoft Vine Beta Operating system: Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32-bit edition only), Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit editions)""
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft released IE8 as Critical Update for XP (msdn.com)

Submitted by Binestar
Binestar writes: If you've checked windows update today you'll have noticed that IE8 is now listed as a critical update. For those not interested in upgrading to IE8 at this time, the MSDN released information back in January on how to keep IE8 off your machine.
Software

Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org 170

Posted by kdawson from the now-to-tempt-all-liberty-procured dept.
ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Image

Town Fights Cricket Plague With Led Zeppelin Screenshot-sm 190

Posted by samzenpus from the certain-mariah-carey-notes-make-dolphins-abduct-and-eat-small-children dept.
The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada are getting ready to fight the annual invasion of mormon crickets with the power of Rock-N-Roll. Trial and error has shown that the crickets don't think much of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The residents circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets. "It is part of our arsenal. You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you." says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents. The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.
Privacy

Lawyers Would Rather Fly Than Download PGP 426

Posted by kdawson from the fly-once-to-exchange-keys dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The NYTimes is running a front-page story about lawyers for suspects in terrorism-related cases fearing government monitoring of privileged conversations. But instead of talking about the technological solutions, the lawyers fly halfway across the world to meet with their clients. In fact, nowhere in the article is encryption even mentioned. Is it possible that lawyers don't even know about PGP?" The New Yorker has a detailed piece centering on the Oregon terrorism case discussed by the Times.
The Courts

Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder 1395

Posted by kdawson from the so-much-for-the-geek-defense dept.
Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."
Security

Half a Million Microsoft-Powered Sites Hit With SQL Injection 222

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the little-bobby-tables-strikes-again dept.
Titus Germanicus writes to tell us that a recent attack has compromised somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 pages with a SQL injection attack. The vulnerability seems to be limited to Microsoft's IIS webserver and is easily defeated by the end user with Firefox and "NoScript." "The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft's IIS servers allow generic commands that don't require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites' creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw. In other words, there's no patch that's going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input. The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user's PC." Ignoring corporate spin-doctoring, there seems to be plenty of blame to go around.
Google

Google VisualRank for Image Search 63

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the they-don't-quite-own-the-world-yet dept.
Google researchers are claiming that a newly developed approach to visual search may do for image searching what PageRank did for text search. "The research paper, 'PageRank for Product Image Search,' is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the 'most comprehensive image search on the Web.'"
Programming

Ruby and Java Running in JavaScript 220

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fun-new-toys dept.
John Resig is reporting on his blog that a recent trip to Tokyo opened up some very interesting JavaScript projects to him that haven't met with widespread popularity outside of Japan yet. "One project, in particular, really caught my eye. It's called Orto and is an implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in JavaScript. This means that you can take an existing Java application, compile it to bytecode, run it through Orto (which produces the JavaScript, and embed it in a web page. While it doesn't provide the full capabilities of most Java code it does provide enough to make for some interesting demos." In a separate post he also detailed how the HotRuby project is allowing a Ruby VM to run in a browser using JavaScript or even indirectly using ActionScript in Flash.
Data Storage

Data Center In a Shoe Box 146

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the size-matters dept.
eldavojohn writes "How would you like to have a data center that uses just 14.5 watts and weighs 255g? It's also only as big as a shoe box! The Register looks at a few solutions to network area storage that make buying a dedicated data server on a rack look like a relic of the past. Yes, it runs Linux."
Programming

Submission + - Visual Studio and Eclipse compared and contrasted

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Without being too philosophic about IDE design, this article presents the main differences between Visual Studio and the Eclipse IDE.

Feed Engadget: Calvin College duo creates cheap, portable supercomputer (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops

Just months after scientists were able to run a quantum computer simulation on an everyday PC, we're now hearing that a Calvin College student / professor tandem have created an inexpensive, portable supercomputer for crunching massive chunks of data on the go (and on the cheap). Dubbed Microwulf, the wee beast is hailed as a "machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet," and when not being checked as baggage on a flight, can reportedly process 26.25 gigaflops of data per second. The system itself touts "four dual-core motherboards connected by an eight-port gigabit Ethernet switch," and when initially constructed, it cost just $2,470 to build. Talk about a solid price-to-performance ratio.

[Via Slashdot]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Businesses

Submission + - Bandwidth could be a new global 'currency'

Submitted by
techoon
techoon writes: "Bandwidth could become a form of "currency" with users paying for downloaded files by uploading more data themselves, researchers say. The goal is to ensure that future content, particularly video, is distributed as fairly and efficiently as possible.Computer scientists have have used the idea to develop peer-to-peer file-sharing software, which they are asking computer users to try out. They hope eventually to create a "global marketplace in bandwidth", where people can trade it as a commodity."

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