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Google

Submission + - Google Maps now does interactive re-routing (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Remember how cool it was the first time you used MapQuest or Google Maps or Google Earth? Once you try the new interactive dragging of routes on Google Maps, you'll find yourself wasting too much time again just playing with it and being amazed at how fast and scalable it is.
The Internet

Submission + - Puzzling Wikipedia edits on wrestler's murder (wikinews.org)

Submitted by glesga_kiss
glesga_kiss writes: An interesting article on wikinews points to edits of WWE Wrestler Chris Benoit's page on wikipedia suggesting foreknowledge of the murder. Edits from an IP in Connecticut, later followed by one from a wifi provider in Australia state that he cancelled an engagement due to the death of his wife. These were posted 13 hours prior to the polices discovery of the bodies after concerned family members asked the police to check up on him after erratic behaviour. A member of the Wikimedia Foundation has suggested that the IP address quite likely belongs to the WWE Headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.
Education

Journal Journal: Our Solar system was adopted? 4

Journal by mandark1967
Our Solar System is traveling at a 60 to 90 degree angle compared to the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy and scientists have now discovered why. It seems our solar system originated not in the Milky Way Galaxy, but in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is in the process of being eaten by the Milky Way.
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia gets state funding in Germany (heise.de)

Submitted by
tmk
tmk writes: "How can the Wikipedia be improved? The German government started today a project to train experts to contribute to Wikipedia. The goal is to write or improve several hundret articles about renewable ressources in the Internet encyclopaedia. The project ist funded by the German Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection. The German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Wikipedian to coordinate the efforts."
Security

Submission + - Passwords in small companies

Submitted by daeg
daeg writes: As any person in a small company can tell you, we have too many passwords and too many people know them because the defined job roles are very lax. The programmers know our shipping password because they've had to ship things before and the administrative assistants know our printer passwords, for instance. Are there any easy ways to manage these types of passwords securely? If an employee leaves, we have to change all of the passwords (particularly for the places that do not allow multiple delegate user accounts) and simultaneously tell everyone the new password, which is tedious and error prone, at best. What are some methods that have worked in your small companies?
Music

Submission + - Oregon mother sues the RIAA

Submitted by
newtley
newtley writes: "Tanya Andersen, the disabled Oregon mother who for three years has been living a nightmare, is suing RIAA and its so-called settlement center for malicious prosecution, says Recording Industry vs The People. "They made life horrible and did a lot of damage," she told p2pnet. "People need to fight back. It's really wrong they can abuse their power like this. It was three years — two years for the lawsuit and a year when they were harassing me. It's really important for me to tell people what they've done and I'm really thankful that I'm able to do that.""
Democrats

Submission + - Diane Feinstein vs. The First Amendment

Submitted by CodeBuster
CodeBuster writes: United Press International reports that, "U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., said Sunday she is "looking at" the possibility of reviving the fairness doctrine for U.S. broadcasters. Feinstein, speaking on "Fox News Sunday" with Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said talk radio in particular has presented a one-sided view of immigration reform legislation being considered by the Senate. U.S. talk radio is dominated by conservative voices."
Education

Submission + - UK Government rules Inteligent Design not Science (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by blane.bramble
blane.bramble writes: The Register is reporting that there is no place in the science curriculum for Inteligent Design and that it can not be taught as science. The UK Government has stated that "The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science."
Novell

Submission + - Mono coders hack Linux Siverlight in 21 days

Submitted by Etrigoth
Etrigoth writes: After the recent announcement of Silverlight by Microsoft at their Mix event in Vegas, Miguel de Icaza
galvanised his team of developers in the Mono group at Novell to create a Linux implementation, a so-called 'Moonlight'.

Remarkably, they achieved this in 21 Days.

Although they were first introduced to Silverlight at the Las Vegas Mix, de Icaza was invited by a representative of Microsoft France for a
10 minute demonstration at the Paris Re-Mix 07 keynote conference, should they have anything to show.
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch.

Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon.

It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work
Media

Submission + - NBC Exec Says Movie Piracy Hurts Corn Farmers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An executive at NBC is apparently claiming that movie piracy is hurting corn farmers. His quote: "In the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment." Apparently you don't need to understand basic logic to get a high-level job at NBC.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Harry Potter ending (not) leaked online (blorge.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "A hard look at those news stories about a "hacker" who stole the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — and posted the details online. This article identifies the original post, then wonders why newspapers swallowed its claims (without any evidence) that an email to the book's publisher installed a Trojan Horse just a month before the final book's release."
Editorial

Submission + - "Vote for me, dimwit" (economist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The "wisdom of crowds" does not apply to the voting public according to a commentary piece running in the Economist. Prediction markets work when the ignorant vote randomly, allowing the informed to determine the outcome. However, new research contends that voters consistently display four distinct biases that skew the outcome. The result is that politicians, even those who know better, pander to voter irrationality when running for office. How biased are you?
Data Storage

Submission + - Just how delicate are modern hard drives?

Submitted by
RedBear
RedBear writes: "Recently I've been researching the idea of setting up a computer system like the Mac mini on small to medium-size boats, for use as on-board entertainment centers and/or computer navigation systems. One of my main concerns has been figuring out whether the hard drive will need to be replaced with solid-state media in order to be completely reliable. Having been conditioned by various information sources over the years to treat a spinning hard drive like a baby made of eggshells, I was surprised to find many "car PC" enthusaists commenting in forums that they've had absolutely no problems using desktop hard drives in moving vehicles for years. I've also been surprised to find very little information about or mounting systems for "ruggedizing" hard drives for mobile use, besides some references to sticking a bit of rubber between the drive and the mounting frame, which really seems inadequate. So I'm left wondering, just how delicate is the modern hard drive, really? Are they hardier than I've always been led to believe? Is a modern hard drive ever actually likely to die from just being bumped around a bit, or do they usually die nowadays for other, more mysterious reasons?

Here's the scenario: A small boat (15-35ft) traveling on choppy or rough seas at various speeds can encounter several different kinds of motion, and that motion can shift very suddenly from going in one direction to going in a perpendicular or opposite direction. With the wrong hull design, cruising speeds or wave crest spacings, resonant vibrations can develop that can practically shake your teeth out of your head at times. Go over a big wave the wrong way and you can find yourself doing a belly-flop or nose-dive a dozen or more feet down into the trough behind it, with a nice resounding thump. Again entirely dependent on hull design and angle of incidence, but the harder you hit the water, the harder it hits back. Then there is the lovely continuous rocking (technically, pitching) and rolling that never really stops when you're in unprotected waters, and can vary from -85 to 85 degrees from one moment to the next. I can't imagine any of this motion being good for any kind of hard drive.

Now, a computer like a laptop or the Mac mini has a notebook-size 2.5" hard drive, which by all accounts will be more resistant to G-force shocks than a typical desktop-size 3.5" hard drive. I've read that this is mostly because of their use of "ramp load/unload" technology, where the drive head never touches the platters. Recently some desktop hard drives have started to use this ramp loading technology, so does that mean those desktop drives will be just as shock-resistant as notebook drives, or is the size difference also important? And just how motion resistant are the notebook drives, in a practical outside-the-testing-lab sense?

Some laptops and even drives these days also have motion sensors that will trigger the drive to park the heads during excessive movement, like when a laptop gets pulled off a table onto the floor. I have to guess on this but I'm suspecting these motion sensing systems would get triggered far too often, possibly interrupting the computer during important read or write activities, at best causing a performance hit and at worst crashing the system if it happens too often. So this doesn't seem like the ultimate solution for a drive that may be affected by nearly continuous strong G-forces.

Is anyone here experienced with building systems like this? I'm not talking about a typical car-PC traveling around on mostly paved city streets, I'm talking about a system that will stay functional and reliable while strapped in the back of a racing pickup while it goes through a thousand-mile off-road race through the Mojave desert. Does any company make mounting systems specifically for this kind of use, or is it totally nonsensical to expect any hard drive to survive under such conditions? My Google-fu may not be the best in the world, but I can usually ferret out what I'm looking for, and I've found basically zilch on ruggedized hard drives or mounting systems for either hard drives or computers in high G-force environments.

Keep in mind, one of my main goals is to keep costs as low as possible, so it would be interesting but pointless to discuss commercial solutions that cost a small fortune. The available specialized marine computer systems I saw seem to be designed for large commercial vessels and are horrendously expensive. We aren't talking about military clients here, just regular people who happen to live and/or work on boats. I just want to be able to take a regular computer and make a few ehancements that would allow it to be used on a boat reliably for years under any possible circumstances. Thus one of the main problems with solid-state media, it would cost 3-5 times as much to get 1/10th to 1/5th of the storage capacity, and that's comparing it to notebook hard drives. 160GB notebook HDD = $110, 16GB UDMA CompactFlash card = $300. With desktop hard drives the cost vs. capacity gap widens even further.

This is even more of a problem because one of the main advantages to using a system like the Mac mini would be its ability to run Windows in a virtual machine for access to a lot of Windows-only navigation, mapping/charting and GPS software as well as Windows-only drivers for GPS hardware, while still having access to the great stability and usability experience of Mac OS X, including the multimedia aspects like gigs of music and MP4/DivX rips of movies. The most recent versions of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion both have snapshotting and reversion capabilities which would make it incredibly simple for non-technical users to recover from Windows software glitches while out at sea, and keep their software navigation systems working under almost any circumstances. But installing multiple operating systems (and keeping backups) and having access to all those multimedia files means you need plenty of disk space. For most people, obtaining an adequate amount of solid-state storage to really replace a 100+ gigabyte hard drive would be very cost-prohibitive.

If you were tasked with "ruggedizing" a computer system for use under similar circumstances, how would you go about it? How would you make a mounting system to protect a computer from G-forces that may sometimes be the equivalent of, let's say, being dropped on a carpeted floor from about desk height, over and over again? I don't think a couple of rubber feet will be quite enough, and I'm very interested in hearing ideas on simple padding and suspension systems that could isolate a computer from this level of G-shock. A bungie-cord type suspension system would probably just exacerbate the bouncing motion. It would need to be something different, something that would really dampen sudden motion rather than reacting to it. My only idea so far is complicated, probably expensive, and has something to do with counterweights, pulleys, copper tubing and neodymium magnets. Alternatives are welcome, as are any comments pointing out that I'm being ridiculous for thinking computers are so delicate. Am I? Please back up any such statements with references, of course."

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