Slashdot

Corporations have only two responsibilities: Maximize profits, and follow the law.

It is our responsibility to make the law just.

This is how a democracy harnesses the power of greed to provide justice and prosperity to all.

Steve Kerrison writes "With the power of CPUs ever-increasing and the number of cores in a system increasing too, having a supercomputer sit under your desk is no longer a pipe dream. But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise. A UK system integrator has developed a concept PC that blows that all away. The eXtreme Concept PC (XCP) has quite a romantic design story, with inspiration coming from concept cars and the sarcophagus-like Cray T90. The end result is a system that resembles a Cylon — computing power never looked so ominous. Although just a concept, the company behind the design reckons there could be a (small) market for the systems, with varying levels of compute power accompanied by appropriate (say, LN2) cooling."

Stony Stevenson alerts us to a little mixup in which a Google Street View crew requested and was granted access to a US military base. Images from inside the base (which was not identified in press reports) showed up online, and the Pentagon requested that they be pulled. Google complied within 24 hours. The military has now issued a blanket order to deny such photography requests in the future; for its part Google says the filming crew should never have asked.

porkpickle writes A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported."

njdube sent in this Space.com story about the money behind SETI that opens, "It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off. So is searching for intelligent creatures on unseen worlds worth the candle? After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"

Tivo tries out PayPerPost- essentially pseudo viral marketing where you pay people for creating advertising for you and getting it out on the net. Unsurprisingly, when this all came out, people complained and they killed the program and tried to pull the videos when they realized that they were looking like tools.

Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."

SteakNShake writes "Once again professional astronomers are struggling to understand observations of the sun. ScienceDaily reports that a team from Saint Andrew's University announced that the sun's magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the corona via a mechanism dubbed the 'solar skeleton.' Computer models continue to be built to mimic the observed behavior of the sun in terms of magnetic fields but apparently the ball is still being dropped; no mention in the announcement is made of the electric fields that must be the cause of the observed magnetic fields. Also conspicuously absent from the press releases is the conclusion that the sun's corona is so-dominated by electric and magnetic fields because it is a plasma. In light of past and present research revealing the electrical nature of the universe, this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing."

David Shiga writes "Astronomers have identified many objects out there that they think are black holes. But could they be portals to other universes called wormholes, instead? According to a new study by a pair of physicists, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They have discovered that wormholes with the right shape would look identical to black holes from the outside. But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets. Exotic effects from quantum physics might produce wormholes naturally from collapsing stars, one of the physicist says, and they might even be produced in future particle accelerator experiments."

fusconed writes "Bloomberg reports that the Russian government is proposing to build an underground tunnel between Russia and Alaska for transporting goods, electricity and natural resources. The tunnel would be twice as long as that between the UK and France. The $10 — $12b cost is not something to be overlooked, but Russia claims the benefits would pay it off in 20 years. It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"

Fennec writes "Jeremiah Paleck wasn't too excited about the Vista launch, so he decided to have some fun, creating a sheet of Windows error stickers for A4 sticker paper (informing us gravely, "Error: The operation completed successfully"). BoingBoing and Engadget report, with an image of the sticker neatly placed in a Windows Vista advertisement at a bus stop in Prague. It seems that perhaps Vista's advertising campaign has been infected with a little "viral marketing"..."

myawn writes "Threading has been an integral part of Java since the 1.0 release. Up until Java 5.0, you could know everything you needed to know about threads if you understood the 'synchronized' keyword and the Object wait(), notify(), and notifyAll() methods. Yet mastering this seemingly small amount of material is much tougher than it looks at first glance — resulting in a lot of thread-safe code that isn't, or that doesn't scale well. It was eye-opening, and scary, to learn from this book just how much code that looks correct at first glance is in fact broken (not thread-safe). And since many threading errors don't show up except under heavy load, and are very susceptible to timing, even seemingly rigorous testing might not uncover the issue. So there's just no escaping the need to have a thorough understanding of threading idioms, and to be able to recognize safe from unsafe code.

The authors assert that the increase in multi-core processors changes the game, such that soon even on entry level systems, your code will need to be multi-threaded to have any chance of being able to use all of the processing power you're paying for. So techniques that used to be something needed only by high-end server-side programmers will increasingly become part of every Java programmer's basic skillset.

Java 5.0 saw a major reworking of the threading facilities available to the Java programmer. If you need to write or support threaded code on Java, I'd consider this book a must-have. The authors are the primary members of the Expert Group responsible for the Java 5.0 java.util.concurrent packages. The level of detail here is excellent — not just an overview of new Java APIs, but a tutorial on threading concepts that is very clear, richly detailed, and fully supported by examples. The book doesn't suffer from having multiple authors — there is a consistent voice throughout, so either the authors worked very closely together or great editorial work was done to ensure a consistent tone.

Here's just a small sample some of the things you'll learn

• what's the difference between monitors, locks, latches, semaphores
• why double-check locking is broken
• why not to start a thread from a constructor
• why GUI event dispatch loops are single-threaded
• use (and mis-use) of volatile
• various ways in which multithreaded code can deadlock; techniques for avoiding or backing out of a deadlock
• how multi-threaded code interacts with exception handling, finalizers, and interruptions
• understanding the Java Memory Model and object visibility (when changes made to an object by one thread will be seen by other threads)

The practical stuff in Part III (testing multi-threaded code, and performance) is especially welcome. There are several graphs that show performance of various implementation alternatives, which make a very convincing case that the 5.0 concurrency packages provide great out-of-the-box performance.

The writing is a joy to read; in addition to being clear and concise, it includes some humorous observations such as 'writing tests is an adventure in iterative specification discovery' and 'a thread-safe class is one that is no more broken in a concurrent environment than in a single-threaded environment'.

The book provides exhaustive coverage of new concurrency stuff in 5.0, such as

• Concurrent Collections
• Executor Framework, thread pools, Callable, FutureTask, Blocking Queues
• ReentrantLock, ReadWriteLock, Condition
• Atomic variables ("better volatiles")

as well as previews on Java 6 changes, and at least one reference to a feature intended for Java 7.

Contents:

• • 1. Introduction
• I. Fundamentals
• • 2. Thread Safety (atomicity, race conditions, locking, reentrancy, liveness)
  • 3. Sharing objects
  • 4. Composing objects
  • 5. Building blocks (synchronized collections, iterators, concurrent collections, queues, synchronizers, semaphores, barriers)
• II. Structuring Concurrent Applications
• • 6. Task Execution (the Executor framework, thread pools, queues)
  • 7. Cancellation and Shutdown
  • 8. Applying Thread Pools
  • 9. GUI applications
• III. Liveness, Performance, and Testing
• • 10. Avoiding Liveness Hazards
  • 11. Performance and Scalability
  • 12. Testing Concurrent Programs
• IV. Advanced Topics
• • 13. Explicit Locks
  • 14. Building Custom Synchronizers
  • 15. Atomic Variables and Nonblocking Synchronization
  • 16. The Java Memory Model
• A. Annotations for Concurrency

Over 40 pages of index makes it very useable as a reference.
The book's website is here
Order it from Amazon.com "

DanLake writes "On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.

Carson said MIT's teachers collect what they have created for their courses and make it available over the Web. Many online learners purchase text books for the courses they are monitoring and a recent MIT-Amazon link showed that about 2,000 text books were ordered by independent learners, demonstrating just how serious the learners are.

"Video and audio files are very popular," said Carson. "There are 21 courses with full video available." Typically, independent learners view videos with streaming media players and replay them on PCs, MP3s, or iPods."

Fennec writes "Amazon.com has launched a beta of a new service called Askville, yet another online answers service, flavored with "Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins." These coins will supposedly become useful some day on another Amazon service that's not actually open yet, Questville. If this virtual currency becomes useful, could Askville fill a place between strictly volunteer systems and pay-for-answer services like the now-defunct Google Answers? Or is it destined to fail in the already-saturated online Q&A market?"