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Space

Submission + - Salmonella Made More Lethal By Space Travel

Submitted by kidcharles
kidcharles writes: The AP reports that researchers at Arizona State University have performed a controlled experiment that showed mice were significantly more likely to die from salmonella that had been in orbit. The researchers are not entirely sure what caused the salmonella to become more lethal. "That's the 64 million dollar question," said professor Cheryl Nickerson. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes." The researchers suspect that reduced fluid shear due to microgravity may have altered the bacteria.
Space

Submission + - GPS III to No Longer Have Selective Availability (defenselink.mil) 2

Submitted by Cobalt Jacket
Cobalt Jacket writes: The U.S. Department of Defense has announced that Selective Availability (SA) would "no longer be present in the next generation of GPS satellites." (referring to GPS III) Existing satellites have had the feature disabled by President Clinton since 2000, but SA can be activated at any time. SA was one of the principle stated reasons for the European Union and European Space Agency's backing of the Galileo program. This will not affect the GPS IIF spacecraft which will be launched over the next few years, though it is unlikely that SA will ever be utilized on those satellites.
The Courts

Submission + - SCO blames Linux for bankruptcy filing 4

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.

In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux."

McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."
Security

Submission + - Bastille Linux domain hijacked; Name change

Submitted by sglafata
sglafata writes: The Bastille-Linux.org domain name was hijacked by a cyber-squatter this past 9/11 by the name of Mykhaylo Perebiynis. He now wants $10,000 to give it back. Although, the true trademark owners are very confident that they will get it back by following the proper methods, it will take some time. In the meantime, Jay Beale, the maintainer of Bastille, has decided to change the name to Bastille Unix (since their servers are hosted on MacOSX and HP-UX) and register the domain. Once they get their domain name back, they will redirect future requests for Bastille-Linux.org to Bastille-Unix.org.
Programming

Submission + - Programming Erlang Book

Submitted by
gnalre
gnalre writes: "Every day it seems there is a new publication of a book on perl/python/ruby. Some languages however do not seem to get that sort of attention. One of those under-represented languages is Erlang, however for the first time in 10 years a new Erlang book has been published!

As someone who had a brief flirtation with Erlang long ago, I was interested to see how the language had evolved in the intervening decade. I was also curious to re-evaluate Erlang to see what solutions it offered to the present day issues of writing reliable distributed applications.

Programming Erlang — Software For A Concurrent World (ISBN 10193435600X) is part of the pragmatic programmer series. As with all the books in this series, it is available in paperback or for a reduced cost you can directly download it in PDF format (which is always useful if you spend a lot of time on the move and you do not like carrying around a dead tree with you). The books format and layout as with all the books of this series are clear and logical.

The book is written by Joe Armstrong, who co-authored the first Erlang book a decade ago. He was also one of the originators of the Erlang language and has been directly connected to its development ever since. We can therefore be assured about the author's knowledge and insight into the language, if not his impartiality.

The book itself can be roughly split into three main sections.
  1. Getting started and Sequential programming
  2. Concurrent Programming
  3. Erlang libraries and advanced Erlang techniques.


In Chapter 1 the author sets out his stall of why Erlang is worthy of your attention. It's clear from this chapter that the author feels Erlang's strength lies in applications requiring an element concurrency and fault tolerance. Another emphasis is made of running Erlang on modern multi-core processors, something that was only a glint in a hardware designer's eye 10 years ago, but is rapidly becoming an issue in all areas of programming. From this chapter you also get a feel on how the author approaches his programming in that he states that he wants the reader to have fun with the language, which is a refreshing change to some language text books whose main purpose appears to be as a cure for insomnia.

Chapter 2 goes through installing Erlang and the Erlang shell (a command line environment similar to ones with languages such as perl). The chapter also starts us into the strange world of functional programming, where variables can only be given a value once (e.g you cannot do i=i+1), recursion replace loops and pattern matching replaces assignments. Fortunately the Erlang language is remarkably concise. For example there are only 4 data types. However to those coming from a purely procedural programming background the learning curve could be a steep one. Saying that the Author does a good job of leading you through the languages intricacies with examples being compared to code from languages such as Java to help keep your feet on solid programming ground.

The next 3 chapters move on to writing simple Erlang programs. As a quick aside, for anyone new to Erlang it is well worth examining the quicksort implementation described in chapter 3. Its conciseness and simplicity was one of the reasons the language won me over when I first met the language.

These chapters also cover error detection and handling. It's worth noting that Erlang has a philosophy of ensuring programs fail hard, so that bugs can be weeded out at an early stage. This idea very much defines how Erlang error handling is defined.

One criticism of the first section is Chapter 6 which describes compiling and running an Erlang program. I would have preferred that this information be covered earlier in the book or be placed in an appendix because it is probably an area you will want to reference repeatedly.

Chapter 7 is where things really get interesting and the true power of Erlang starts to come to the fore. This is where Erlang's concurrency credentials are explained. This chapter begins by providing some useful metaphors of the Erlang concurrent model, but chapter 8 is where the fun begins by describing the Erlang concurrency primitives that allow the creation of processes and the process communication methods. The author here highlights one of the language features, the Erlang light weight process. These are true processes (not threads) but take up very little in the way of resources. Indeed it is not unusual to have 1000's of such processes running in an application.

The next few chapters expand on the available concurrency primitives and how to move from concurrency on your local processor to concurrency utilising the resources of multiple machines either on a local network or across the web. It finishes the section off by showing the example of a simple IRC application.

Chapter 12 starts the next section by looking at how to interact with the world outside the Erlang environment. First it examines how to interface an Erlang program to applications written in other languages such as C. It then goes onto to look at file and socket handling in Erlang. Chapter 15 looks at two important Erlang storage primitives ETS and DETS before we get to the OTP Erlang libraries in Chapter 16.

The OTP libraries are the standard Erlang libraries and tools. In fact the OTP libraries are worthy of a book in itself. The author highlights the section on the generic Server module as the most important section in the whole book and one to be reread until its importance has sunk in. This is because here are encapsulated many of the lessons learned in writing industrial fault-tolerant applications, such the updating of a running applications code without causing that application to miss a beat. The section is finished off by describing the Erlang distributed database (humorously named Mnesia) and then finishing it off with the example of a simple server application.

The book finishes off by looking at Erlang on multicore systems including its support for SMP. As the author states this is the leading edge of present day Erlang and is still under development.

Conclusion

Firstly I would like to thank the pragmatic programmers for publishing this book. Erlang's profile has been in need of highlighting for many years and hopefully this book will help. The book definitely provides a great starting point for anyone who wants to get to grips with the language and takes them to the point where they can start writing useful applications. This book is a worthy successor to the last book published and does a good job of both updating the material and explaining some of the later developments such as SMP. Anyone who has a need for writing fault tolerant applications should at least look at this book. If nothing else you will never be afraid of dealing with recursion ever again.

In many ways the book cuts off just when things are getting interesting. There are hints in the book about real world Erlang's applications and it would have been good if some of these experiences could have been expanded. Hopefully however this book is the start of increased exposure for Erlang. If so then someone may get around to writing another Erlang book describing some of the advanced issues about generating robust applications. I just hope it won't take another 10 years this time.

Tony Pedley is a senior engineer specialising in real-time embedded systems. In his spare time he likes to tease windows programmers and confuse managers by telling them it would be a lot easier if we wrote it in Erlang."
Censorship

Submission + - Brit social services try to censor Youtube

Submitted by Kedyn's Crow
Kedyn's Crow writes: Britain's social services, citeng the Data Protection Act, are trying to remove a audio recording from youtube. The recording posted by expectant parents Vanessa and Martin Brookes , shows social services attepting to force the adoption of her unborn child in spite of their own belief that there was "no immediate risk to your child from yourselves"
Software

Submission + - Citrix acquires XenSource virtualization software (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Citrix Systems agreed to acquire XenSource today in a deal valued at $500 million. The recently rumored deal will let Citrix enter the server and desktop virtualization markets, long dominated by VMware, who went public yesterday and whose shares are trading at $51 at the close of trading. Investment banking firm Jefferies & Company issued a report Tuesday on Citrix titled "Citrix-Xen Makes Perfect Strategic Sense." The company says Citrix's close relationship with Microsoft — the two have worked together for years on thin-client technology — is key in that Citrix could help Microsoft make up ground on VMware, whose successful IPO on Tuesday confirmed its leadership role in the emerging virtualization market. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/081507-citri x-xensource-desktop-server-virtualization.html"
Security

Submission + - Security to sit on the chip (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by
Tech.Luver
Tech.Luver writes: "theinquirer reports, " SECURITY OUTFIT Symantec, and the maker of chips, Intel, are apparently sitting in smoke filled rooms trying to hammer security products into processors. Symantec Vice President Rowan Trollope told Reuters yesterday that the project, dubbed Project Hood, is part of an effort by both companies to expand their use of virtualisation technology. ""
The Internet

Submission + - Don't Kill The Trolls, But Feed Them (seorefugee.com) 2

Submitted by
Henk van Ess
Henk van Ess writes: "Voelspriet.nl has initiated an idea to rid communities (be it forums, blogs, whatever) of trolls. Not get rid of them by banning them or nuking their posts, no, by accepting their trolly messages and keeping them at ease. The smart thing is that this anti-troll plug-in only shows the trolly stuff to the troll itself. That way, the other community members need not suffer. The idea was presented today on Dutch radio in Radio Online. A free beta plug-in for Wordpress will be available soon."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone/iTunes 7.3.2 Requires MS Outlook for PC (apple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward 2.0
Anonymous Coward 2.0 writes: I got an iPhone and was reasonably happy. There has only been one major issue... on the PC platform, the only program to sync calendars to is a full version of Outlook (Express won't do). That was annoying and represented a $65 hidden cost (under my company's MS Employee purchase plan). I get paid fairly well so I just shelled it out. But now with the new iTunes Apple has made it mandatory that MS Outlook be the default mail client!
Security

Submission + - Corporate IT security (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
Thomas Allen
Thomas Allen writes: "We all know that employees often represent our biggest security risk. But the Wall Street Journal seems to be giving them more fodder for breaching corporate security. Bob Evans of InformationWeek takes the Journal to task for what he calls irresponsible advice on how to "circumvent corporate IT policies to breach network security, visit blocked sites without getting caught, access confidential work documents remotely, and otherwise trash every cybersecurity policy a company has." As an IT professional, I found the Journal's coverage very troubling, so I'm glad they're being called on it."
Communications

Submission + - Batteries the Focus of AT&T Investigation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T is focusing on the batteries supplied by Avestor as the cause of its 2006 equipment explosion in a suburban Houston neighborhood. The carrier says it has 17,000 of those same batteries still in its network. Here are some photos of the equipment that was shredded in the blast.
Announcements

Submission + - Circuit City subpoenas CAG and DVDTalk (kotaku.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "This is more of just a request to look into the story. Basically, a poster on DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer has posted the weekly ads for Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target ahead of time for the last few years. A few weeks ago he confirmed that there was an intended price break on the PS3 and stole Sony's thunder from E3. A Circuit City ad was used for confirmation. Circuit City has threatened and CheapAssGamer.com to give them personal information about the poster. CheapAssGamer has hired a lawyer and is going to fight. The story is similar to the Black Friday ads being posted early and FatWallet fighting back."
Censorship

Submission + - AT&T proves Net Neutrality fears well founded

Submitted by
LinearBob
LinearBob writes: "The Chicago Tribune has an article describing in detail how AT&T censored a live concert by Pearl Jam. Here is a link to the Chicago Tribune article.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-th u_jam_0809aug09,1,6237615.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

The following was quoted from the Tribune article:

"A live Internet broadcast of Pearl Jam's performance at Chicago's Lollapalooza music festival Sunday went off without a hitch — until singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.

Lyrics critical of the president didn't make it past editors of the show's Webcast, the band complained Wednesday on its Web site.

The performance, sponsored by AT&T Inc. and carried on AT&T's "Blue Room" site, omitted the lyrics "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home" as part of a version of the song "Daughter," according to the Pearl Jam Web site.

An AT&T spokeswoman confirmed the omission Wednesday, saying that it had been a mistake made by someone working for the agency hired by AT&T to handle its Blue Room content.

"We don't have a policy in place to censor," said AT&T's Tiffany Nels. "We have a policy on excessive profanity. This was an honest mistake. There was no censorship intended."

Nels said that there is a delay of a few seconds between the performance and its streaming to the Web so that an editor can cut out profane language because the Web site is available to all ages and AT&T doesn't want foul language going out.

End quote

Perhaps there was no censorship intended, but censorship IS what AT&T did here. I find AT&T's explanation for the missing lyrics to be disingenuous at best. To me, this is a clear case of censorship, and is precisely why we need "Net Neutrality" now."

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