vinividivici - Slashdot User

Wikipedia's Search Engine Plan 102

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 11, 2007 @10:21AM from the just-because-you-can dept.

jasonoik writes "Wikia, the commercial company founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, reveals plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market. The service does not yet an official release date. The article also leaves open the possibility that the search results may contain ads, and concludes by listing figures of the web advertisement market." Update: 03/11 17:24 GMT by KD : Wikia and Wikipedia are separate companies.

Prescription Meds For Vista Sleep Disorder 144

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 11, 2007 @08:33AM from the you-will-sleep-now-and-when-you-wake dept.

Arnold O'Connor writes "NeoSmart Technologies has compiled a list of hotfixes and patches provided by Microsoft for Windows Vista that address a large number of issues related to waking/resuming a Vista PC (both x86 and x64) from sleep or hibernation. Sleep-related disorders have plagued Vista since its release, though they were not present in earlier betas. Most of these fixes are due to be included in Windows Vista SP1 — codenamed Fiji."

Submission + - Firefox closing in on Explorer in SMB market

Submitted by thefickler on Sunday March 11, 2007 @08:17AM

thefickler writes: Mozilla's Firefox browser is closing in on Internet Explorer's market leading position in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market, according to a survey by Toronto-based online time tracking and billing provider, FreshBooks, of 140,000 of its SMB customers. Firefox's browser market share was up by 1.35 percent in February 2007 to 38.95 percent while Internet Explorer's share dropped by 0.73 percent to 56.95 percent

The Best Mac OS X Software Tools 213

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 11, 2007 @06:04AM from the steroids dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

Submission + - Now, create your OWN instant messenger service.

Submitted by Jack on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:54AM

Jack writes: 'msgr' is a webservice that helps you create your own instant messenger service for your group of friends, community or website, without any programming knowledge. This is ideal for community websites where a quick and easy way to chat is needed among its members. You can customize the messenger with your chosen messenger name, tagline, logo, and links, along with a 'Whats New' page that can be loaded when users login to your messenger. Besides instant messaging, msgr also supports file transfers between members. The messenger service does not require separate hosting.

Subliminal Messages Might Actually Work 172

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 10, 2007 @10:17PM from the buy-popcorn-now dept.

GrumpySimon writes "New research indicates that subliminal messages may actually work. In a paper titled Attentional Load Modulates Responses of Human Primary Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli, Bahrani et al. demonstrate that even though stimuli may not be available to consciousness, they are processed by the visual cortex. While I'm sure that marketing agencies all over the world are rubbing their hands in glee at this news, the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will. So with any luck the use of subliminal messages in advertising will remain an urban legend."

Submission + - YORP effect observed and measured

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10, 2007 @08:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (Yorp) effect describes the torque, or rotational force, created when light particles hit the surface of an object, causing it to heat up. The theory was proposed in order to explain various Solar System phenomena which show peculiar regular behaviour. From the article: Now, separate studies published in the journals Nature and Science have observed and measured the tiny stellar shoves on two spinning asteroids. They reveal that both are gradually starting to spin faster and faster, which could eventually create new Solar System landmarks. "If we can spin up an asteroid so fast, there's a really good chance that these objects will fly apart," said Dr Stephen Lowry, a planetary astronomer at Queen's University Belfast and lead author of one of two Science papers. In this case, the fragments could form a binary asteroid where two objects orbit each other, he said. "This is a phenomenon that gradually affects the evolution of the Solar System," said Dr Mikko Kaasalainen of the University of Helsinki, who is an author of the Nature paper.

Political Leaning and Free Software 629

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 10, 2007 @08:32PM from the free-as-in-markets dept.

00_NOP writes "HateMyTory is the world's first political rating site and occasionally gets blasted or promoted by British bloggers on either side of the political spectrum. But here's something even more intriguing: when the right come visiting they hate the site but they are disproportionately likely to be users of free software, whether that is just Firefox on top of their Windows box, or all the way with some Linux distro. But when the left rally to the cause they are more likely than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple. If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree? As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling."

Why Consumer Macs Are Enterprise-Worthy 449

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 10, 2007 @04:36PM from the toys-no-longer dept.

cyberkahn tips us to an article in Computerworld that makes the case for Apple's consumer machines moving into corporations. (The article dismisses Linux desktops in the enterprise in a single bullet item.) With the press that Vista has been getting, is Apple moving into a perfect storm? Quoting: "There is no comparison between Apple's 'consumer' machines and the consumer lines of its competitors. All of Apple's machines are ready to move into the enterprise, depending on the job at hand. The company's simple and elegant product line, which is also highly customizable, will be Apple's entree to the business market — if IT decision-makers can get over their prejudice against equipment that's traditionally been aimed at consumers."

Submission + - Inside the Machine

Submitted by

Paul S. R. Chisholm

on Saturday March 10, 2007 @03:14PM

Paul S. R. Chisholm writes: "Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture, written by Ars Technica's Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, talks about how CPUs work, and how they've evolved and advanced in the past fifteen years. The result is detailed, very up-to-date (including descriptions of Intel's Core 2), generally clear, and covers a lot of fascinating material.

[EDITORS, PLEASE NOTE — Please do not publish my e-mail address!]

How on earth have CPUs advanced as fast as they have? How have we gone from 60 MHz Pentiums in 1993 to 3.73 GHz Xeons (with two cores) and 2.66 GHz Core 2 Extremes (with four!) today? Sure, Moore's Law and competition pushed the chip makers, but how did they implement all that extra performance? In Inside the Machine, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes provides a thorough, exhaustive, nearly exhausting look at what's at the heart of your computer. If Stoke's name sounds familiar, he's a founder and long-time contributor to Ars Technica. Anyone who liked his work there, his comprehensive articles and brightly colored diagrams, will probably enjoy this book a lot.

The first two chapters cover the basics of CPU operation and machine language. These are pretty good, though you'll probably need some assembler language experience to really understand everything in these chapters. Even without such experience, you'll pick up enough to get through the rest of the book.

The next two chapters get more advanced, covering pipelined and superscalar execution. CPUs don't execute one instruction at a time. Instead, they break instructions into smaller operations, and work on those smaller operations in parallel. These two chapters begin to tell how CPUs do that. (The book also discusses caching, another huge performance booster. For some reason, Stokes doesn't get to that until chapter 11.)

The rest of the book discusses specific CPUs. From Intel, we see the original Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core, and Core 2. (Intel didn't release as much information about the Pentium II and III.) From the Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance, we learn about the 601 (the heart of Apple's first "Power Mac"), 603, 604, 750 (G3), 7400 (G4), and 970 (G5). In the middle of all that, there's also an excellent description of 64-bit computing, its advantages, and even its disadvantages.

Every buzzword you've ever heard about CPUs is covered: front end vs. back end, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, pipeline stalls, SIMD, direct-mapped vs. N-way set associative mapping. That sounds intimidating, but Stokes introduces the concepts one at a time, clearly and in detail. The next time an overclocking fanatic tries to tell you why his AMD CPU is so much better than your Intel CPU (or vice versa), you'll not only be able to follow the whole discussion, you'll be able to argue back.

Stokes turns all this into a (highly technical) history of CPU development. One chip's virtue is its successor's vice; one generation's shortcoming is another's opportunity.

This book reinforced something I already knew but don't often enough live by: Portability depends on architecture (for example, x86 vs. PowerPC), but high performance depends on microarchitecture (for example, Pentium M vs. Athlon 64 X2). Today's Core 2 chips have many high performance features missing from the 1993 original Pentiums. A good compiler like gcc can take advantage of those additional features. This is bad news if you're using a binary Linux distribution, compiled to a lowest common denominator. It's good news if you're building and installing Linux from source, with something like Linux From Scratch or Gentoo/Portage. It's also good news for just-in-time compilers (think Java, .NET, and Mono); they're compiling on the "target" machine, so they can generate code tailored for the machine's exact microarchitecture.

The full color diagrams were a big help in understanding Stokes's points. On the other hand, I'm not sure why the book was printed in hardcover. To make it look more like a textbook? Is that a good thing?

The text is packed with jargon, buzzwords, and TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations). Most of that is unavoidable, but a glossary would have been nice. Each chapter builds on the previous ones, so most readers will want to read all the chapters in order, paying close attention the whole time. Even so, this book had a lot more forward references ("I'll define that shortly" or "We'll get to that later") than most technical books.

Don't expect much non-technical discussion. Exceptions: There is a (very good) description of the Pentium 4's obsession with higher and higher clock speeds, including marketing pressures, and the resulting performance increases and drawbacks. The occasional "Historical Context" sections are also quite nice. But you'll see nothing on Apple's decision to move from PowerPC to Core, or the competitive battle between AMD and Intel. For that matter, you'll see almost nothing at all about AMD or its products.

Personally, I think Stokes missed an important opportunity to talk in depth about multiprocessing. He spends only four pages on the subject, and that only as part the description of the Core Duo. (You'd think there was never a multi-core G5.) There's only a couple of paragraphs on the difference between multiple CPUs and multiple CPU cores. ("Dual dual-cores" and the AMD 4x4, anyone?) He declines to discuss how caches interact with multiple CPUs or multiple cores. That's unfortunate, because anyone doing multi-threaded software development really needs to understand cache issues, at just about exactly the level this book covers. But you'll find nothing here about cache coherency, or about what out-of-order execution results might be visible only to multi-threaded software. Well, he spent three years of his life writing this; if I want a say in what gets said, I should write my own darned book.

Jon Stokes had an incredibly ambitious goal: to write an accessible book that covers much of the same ground as Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture and Computer Organization and Design. I don't think he achieved that, but he came pretty close.

You can visit the book's home page or the author's blog.

Paul S. R. Chisholm has been developing software for 25 years. He's worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Ascend Communications / Lucent Technologies, Cisco Systems, and some small startups you've never heard of. His latest article, "'Pure Virtual Function Called': An Explanation," appeared in The C++ Source. He lives and works in New Jersey."

Journal Journal: Mac and PC: Mac gets upgraded to Leopard 4

Journal by _xeno_ on Saturday March 10, 2007 @02:56PM

Mac: I'm a Mac.

PC: And I'm a PC.

Pull out to reveal tubes hooked up to Mac's head.

PC: You OK, Mac? What's with the tubing?

Mac: Oh, it's nothing, just getting read to upgrade to Leopard. Backing up the files in case something goes wrong, standard stuff, really. Unlike your upgrade to Vista, I don't have to worry about going under the knife like you did.

PC: [skeptically] Really?

Submission + - Wikipedia reveals plans for a web search engine

Submitted by jasonoik on Saturday March 10, 2007 @02:44PM

jasonoik writes: Wikia, the company behind wikipedia reveals plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market. The service does not yet an official release date. The article also leaves open the possibility that the search results may contain advertisments, and concludes by listing figures of the web advertisment market.

Open Source Federal Income Tax Software 227

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 10, 2007 @02:12PM from the taxman-meets-penguin dept.

niiler writes "There is finally a usable US federal income tax program for Linux users who don't wish to file online. TaxGeek is a Mozilla-based US income tax program that includes Form 1040, Schedules A, B, C, C-EZ, D, E, K-1 (1065), SE (Short and Long), W2, Forms 8880, 8853, 8863, 8812, 5695, 4952,3903, 2106, 2106ez, 2441 with access to most other files as PDFs. It is intended to be extensible so that developers can easily add other forms that are needed without affecting the existing file formats and stored data. TaxGeek will also create PDFs of all the supported forms so that you can print them and send them in to the IRS. (PDF creation support requires the installation of Perl PDF::Reuse.) At this point, e-filing is not supported."

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