bobthesungeek76036 writes: Beijing's proposed regulation aims to tame rapid launches by forcing cars to boot up in a restricted performance mode after every ignition.

Under a proposed update to the National Standard, every passenger car would need a default mode in which it takes no less than five seconds to reach 100 km/h (62 mph) at startup, unless the driver manually selects a quicker setting.

The draft title "Technical Specifications for Power-Driven Vehicles Operating on Roads" appears to be part of a broader safety and road behavior initiative in China. It is intended to replace the current GB 7258-2017 standard that didn't impose such restrictions.

The trend toward self-driving and electric vehicles will add hundreds of millions of lines of code to cars. Can the auto industry cope? From a report: Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford's F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking, are becoming standard.

Vard Antinyan, a software quality expert at Volvo Cars who has written extensively about software and system complexity, explains that as of 2020, "Volvo has a superset of about 120 ECUs from which it selects to create a system architecture present within every Volvo vehicle. Altogether, they comprise a total of 100 million lines of source code." This source code, Antinyan says, "contains 10 million conditional statements as well as 3 million functions, which are invoked some 30 million places in the source code." How much and what types of software resides in each ECU varies greatly, depending on, among other things, the computing capability of the ECU, the functions the ECU controls, the internal and external information and communications required to be processed and whether they are event or time triggered, along with mandated safety and other regulatory requirements. Over the past decade, more ECU software has been dedicated to ensuring operational quality, reliability, safety and security.

"The amount of software written to detect misbehavior to ensure quality and safety is increasing," says Nico Hartmann, Vice President of ZF's Software Solutions & Global Software Center at ZF Friedrichshafen AG, one of the world's largest suppliers of automotive components. Where perhaps a third of an ECU's software was dedicated to ensuring quality operations ten years ago, it is now often more than half or more, especially in safety critical systems, Hartmann states. Which ECUs and associated software end up going into a Volvo like its luxury SUV XC90 model, which has approximately 110 ECUs, depends on several factors. Volvo, like all auto manufacturers, has variants of each model offered for sale aimed at different market segments.

Charter has been using the argument that their First Amendment rights are being violated as it fights off state lawsuits for its poor service. "It recently tried to use the First Amendment card again in a legal battle with Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), which recently accused Charter of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by refusing to carry TV channels run by the African-American-owned ESN," reports Techdirt. "While Charter tried to have the suit dismissed by claiming that the First Amendment prohibits such claims because an ISP enjoys 'editorial discretion,' the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit didn't agree." From the report: The court noted that while ISPs and cable companies do enjoy some First Amendment protection, it doesn't apply here, just like it didn't apply in the net neutrality fight: "As part of its defense, Charter had told the court that by choosing which channels to carry, the company was engaging in a form of editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment. Therefore, it said, the court would have to use a stricter standard to evaluate Entertainment Studios' claim of a legal violation -- a standard that might result in the claim being rejected. The Ninth Circuit said otherwise, saying that just because Charter engages in corporate speech when it selects which channels to carry does not 'automatically' require the court to use the tougher standard."

As a result, the court is letting the case move forward. For its part, ESN's discrimination complaint alleges that its complaint is based on more than just having its channel withheld from the company's cable lineup: "The opinion on Charter's motion to dismiss also marks a victory for the 25-year-old programming firm founded by comedian Byron Allen, which bought the Weather Channel in March and accused Charter executives in court of hurling racist insults at Allen and other black Americans in numerous encounters. In one alleged instance, Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge called Allen, who is black, 'boy' at an industry conference and advised him to change his behavior, according to court documents. In another alleged example, the court said, Charter's senior executive in charge of programming, Allan Singer, approached a group of black protesters outside Charter's offices to tell them to 'get off of welfare.'"

Emmett Plant (former Slashdot editor as well as video interviewee) writes: Legend of the Red Dragon was written by Seth Robinson in 1989, and it remains one of the most popular games of the DOS BBS era. Chris England has been doing his part to keep the game alive for the past twelve years, adapting an installation that runs on Linux. I was only able to play for two days before I was overcome with curiosity -- I wrote to Chris, politely inquiring as to how it all came together. Read on below for a look into Chris's motivations, the state of the project, and just how deeply nested it can all get, when bringing games from early BBS days into the modern era.

Bennett Haselton writes "The U.S. government recently announced that academic papers on federally-funded research should become freely available online within one year of publication in a journal. But the real question is why academics don't simply publish most papers freely anyway. If the problem is that traditional journals have a monopoly on the kind of prestige that can only be conferred by having your paper appear in their hallowed pages, that monopoly can easily be broken, because there's no reason why open-access journals can't confer the same imprimatur of quality." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts on the great free-access debate.

Muad writes "Michael Kerrisk has been the maintainer of the Linux Man Pages collection (man 7) for more than five years now, and it is safe to say that he has contributed to the Linux documentation available in the online manual more than any other author before. For this reason he has been the recipient a few years back of a Linux Foundation fellowship meant to allow him to devote his full time to the furthering this endeavor. His book is entirely focused on the system interface and environment Linux (and, to some extent, any *NIX system) provides to a programmer. My most obvious choice for a comparison of the same caliber is Michael K. Johnson and Eric W. Troan's venerable Linux Application Development, the second edition of which was released in 2004 and is somewhat in need of a refresh, lamentably because it is an awesome book that belongs on any programmer's shelf. While Johnson and Troan have introduced a whole lot of programmers to the pleasure of coding to Linux's APIs, their approach is that of a nicely flowing tutorial, not necessarily complete, but unusually captivating and very suitable to academic use. Michael's book is a different kind of beast: while the older tome selects exquisite material, it is nowhere as complete as his — everything relating to the subject that I could reasonably think of is in the book, in a very thorough and maniacally complete yet enjoyably readable way — I did find one humorous exception, more on that later. Keep reading for the rest of Federico's review.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes " Amid the latest 'sexting' controversy, here is a proposal for a scientifically objective method to determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography. This is a harder problem than it seems, but not for the reasons you'd think. And it raises questions about how the same scientific principles could be applied to other matters of law." Hit the link below to read the sextiest story on Slashdot today.

The success of the Halo franchise is unquestionable. Bungie's trilogy of first-person shooters established a standard against which most similar games have been judged for the past eight years. Thus, when Ensemble Studios picked up the task of bringing the Halo universe to real-time strategy, they faced two separate mountains to climb: maintaining the high quality demanded by fans of the series and developing for a genre that traditionally translates poorly to console play. Fortunately, they had a head start on the latter, bringing in a wealth of experience from the Age of Empires series. Creating an intuitive and dependable control scheme was a top priority, and their success in doing so makes Halo Wars a worthy addition to the series. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

On August 18 and 19, you submitted questions for NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin about his (non-profit) site's ability to live up to its claim, "Your guide to good journalism." We sent selected questions to Fabrice on August 19. Here are his answers.

Tom Keating writes to tell us that the Bluetooth SIG has announced the adoption of WiMedia's version of ultra-wideband technology for integration into current Bluetooth technology. This move hopes to push the popularity of Bluetooth by providing a new high speed option that can transmit high quality sound and video. WiMedia also has a copy of the announcement [PDF] on their site with a few additional details.

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

Jim Holmes writes "Marc Holmes's Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruseControl.NET is an outstanding book for development teams wanting to build a reliable, automated delivery system. The book clearly lays out the case for having a standard delivery process, then dives into specific details of implementing such a process via NAnt and CruiseControl.NET. The book also covers several other tools, both open source/freeware and commercial, including NDoc, FxCop, NUnit, Red Gate's SQL Bundle, and Eric Smith's CodeSmith code generation tool. This book, like Steve Loughran's Java Development with Ant has crucial concepts and patterns which are useful to folks even outside its target .NET audience. This is because the author is so emphatic about the criticality of process and standards, something applicable to anyone developing and delivering software." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review.

adamba writes: "Why are manhole covers round?" "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" "How would you design a remote control for venetian blinds?" "What company is famous for interview questions like those?" You might not know the answer to the first three questions, but you probably know the last one. The notion of asking "Microsoft interview questions," quick logic puzzles and brainteasers, has become accepted wisdom for many technology companies. In comparison, the questions asked during traditional interviews, such as "Describe your typical day" and "What is your greatest weakness?" seem too simplistic, too easy to handle with a prepared answer, too prone to allowing weak candidates to slip through: they simply don't reveal enough about the person. While the Microsoft questions appear to be a better way to evaluate people, the issue has never really been seriously examined. Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?" Read on for an interesting look at the details and justifications for this kind of interview.

Sara Killingsworth wrote in with a press release from Be saying that they have selected Cygnus's GNUPro to be the compiler on their OS. I've attached the full press release below if you're curious. It mentions that Cygnus's compiler solution perfored 20% faster.