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Programming

ExtJS 2.1 AJAX Library Switches To GPL 57

Posted by timothy from the how-to-stir-a-small-pot dept.
Vandre writes "The popular AJAX library ExtJS released a new version today. There has been a huge controversy among the Ext community. Previously Ext had been accused of not being open source and trying to restrict its users' rights." It seems be boil down to whether the developers like or dislike the GPL, under which the library's new version is available -- the comments illustrate a long-standing divide when it comes to licensing. The foundation which oversees development explains why they've chosen dual-licensing at all.
Cellphones

Submission + - Cubans Line up for First Mobile Phones

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Lines stretched for blocks outside phone stores as ordinary Cubans were allowed to sign up for cellular phone service for the first time. The contracts cost about $US120 to activate — half a year's wages on the average state salary, still, lines formed before the centers opened, and waits grew to more than an hour. "It's great. It's really great. And everyone wants to be first to sign up," said Usan Astorga, a 19-year-old medical student who stood for about 20 minutes before her line moved at all. Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable in most developed countries, but Cuba's government limited access to cell phones in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba. Only foreigners and Cubans holding key government posts were allowed to have cell phones since they first appeared on the island in 1991 but President Raul Castro has pledged to do away these small but infuriating restrictions on daily life, and his popularity has surged as a result. The new phone contracts allow Cubans to make and receive overseas calls, a key feature because the overwhelming majority of Cubans have relatives and friends in the United States."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - GPS Used to find Graves in Eco-Burial Sites

Submitted by
Narrative Fallacy
Narrative Fallacy writes: "Relatives and friends will use a satellite navigation device to find graves of loved ones in Australia's eco-burial site on bushland attached to Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery. Reflecting a worldwide trend towards environmentally friendly burials, the deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary. "It's an ideal way of utilising land and helping wildlife and vegetation," said Kris Whitney, Lismore Council co-ordinator of cemeteries. "A family can walk around the bushland and pick a site. The body can be oriented in any direction. We promise there will be no internments within five metres. We'll record accurate GPS co-ordinates." Families visiting graves would be lent a satellite navigation device. This will be Australia's fourth "natural burial site" with existing sites in Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia."
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: Study: ISPs meddled with customers' Web traffic

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington. In a paper, set to be delivered Wednesday, the researchers document some troubling practices. In July and August they tested data sent to about 50,000 computers and discovered that a small number of Internet service providers (ISPs) were injecting ads into Web pages on their networks.
Link to Original Source
Media

Skewz.com Founder Vipul Vyas Answers Your Questions About Media Bias 75

Posted by Roblimo from the everyone-is-biased-except-me dept.
You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them.
Math

Submission + - SPAM: Building 5-ton calculator from 19th century plans

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see for themselves how they did computing the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank and some muscle. The Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., will unveil a new construction, the first in the United States, of the 19th century British mathematician Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier mechanical digital calculator.
Link to Original Source
Software

Submission + - SPAM: Open Source programmers earn more and combat trade

Submitted by
WirePosted
WirePosted writes: "The findings from the fourth-quarter 2007 Open Source Industry and Community survey is out. The authors say the results show open source is effective in combating trade deficit and that IT professionals involved in open source earn more than their more proprietary colleagues. Let's check it out."
Link to Original Source
United States

Submission + - Lieberman Campaign Web Site Not Hacked After All

Submitted by
Narrative Fallacy
Narrative Fallacy writes: "On the eve of the Connecticut primary election on August 2006 Senator Joseph Lieberman's web site crashed the day before the upset victory of the challenger, Ned Lamont. The Lieberman campaign asserted it had been hacked in "a coordinated attack by our political opponents" and Lieberman requested an investigation. Now an FBI e-mail message from October 2006 has been disclosed, saying that its investigation showed that it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont's insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude. "The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured," the FBI wrote. "There was no evidence of (an) attack." Lieberman campaign workers probably caused the site to crash themselves because the site was configured to allow only 100 e-mail messages an hour and when that limit was exceeded many times on the day before the primary, the site crashed, according to the report. Lieberman's primary opponent Ned Lamont called on the senator to apologize for his campaign's accusations. "We consider the matter closed," said Dan Gerstein, a spokesman for Mr. Lieberman."
Networking

Internet Black Holes 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)
Power

Submission + - Superinsulatored Batteries Hold Charge Forever

Submitted by
Pioneer Woman
Pioneer Woman writes: "Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have created a new fundamental state of matter called superinsulators that open the way for a new generation of microelectronics and points to new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics. Researchers fashioned a thin film of titanium nitride which they then chilled to near absolute zero. When they tried to pass a current through the material, its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100,000 once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. Superinsulators could eventually find their way into a number of products, including circuits, sensors and battery shields. When a battery is left exposed to air, the charge will eventually drain from it because the air is not a perfect insulator but if you have a superinsulator, then the battery will hold a charge forever says Argonne senior scientist Valerii Vinokur. Scientists could eventually form superinsulators that would encapsulate superconducting wires, creating an optimally efficient electrical pathway with almost no energy lost as heat."
Math

Submission + - Cognitive Dissonance and the Monty Hall Paradox

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there's a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology including one discussed recently on slashdot on an experiment that demonstrated that monkeys employ the psychological mechanism of cognitive dissonance just like humans. The paradox arises from the counterintuitive Monty Hall Paradox that proves that if you're ever on "Let's Make a Deal" your best strategy after being shown the door with the goat, is to switch doors to double your probability of winning the prize. Economist M. Keith Chen has challenged research into cognitive dissonance on the same principle and says that hundreds of choice-rationalization experiments performed since 1956 are flawed. That view isn't shared by Laurie R. Santos, one of the Yale psychologists who did the monkey experiment. "Keith nicely points out an important problem with the baseline that we've used in our first study of cognitive dissonance, but it doesn't apply to several new methods we've used that reveal the same level of dissonance in both monkeys and children," Dr. Santos says. "I doubt that his critique will be all that influential for the field of cognitive dissonance more broadly.""
Biotech

Submission + - Darwinian Evolution on a Chip

Submitted by
Pioneer Woman
Pioneer Woman writes: "Laboratory evolution is greatly accelerated compared with natural evolution, but it usually requires substantial manipulation by the experimenter. Researchers Brian M. Paegel and Gerald F. Joyce have developed a system that relies on computer control and microfluidic chip technology to automate the directed evolution of functional molecules in much the same way that one would execute a computer program using a population of billions of RNA enzymes with RNA-joining activity, which were challenged to react in the presence of progressively lower concentrations of substrate. The steps were repeated automatically for 500 iterations of 10-fold exponential growth followed by 10-fold dilution. The researchers observed evolution in real time as the population adapted to the imposed selection constraints and achieved progressively faster growth rates over time. The original research paper is available on PLOS Biology, the open-access, peer-reviewed journal."

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