Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Media

Submission + - Pluggd: A Google for Podcasts

Submitted by
SuperWebTech
SuperWebTech writes: "Wired Magazine reports that a Web startup called Pluggd is seeking to do to audio files what Google did to webpages. Though among several groups attempting to index information from podcasts and other audio material, Pluggd offers several novel innovations. These include concept mapping, used to associate keywords frequently found in the same context; a visual heatmap-style display of audio files to show where your searched words appear; plans to allow users to splice related content into a single audio broadcast; and more."
United States

Submission + - Disaster Planning for The Suburban Home

Submitted by herbal_rub
herbal_rub writes: With all the talk of terrorists on the loose, global warming chaos, terrorism threats, and rumors of the world's demise, Justin Oldham has written a timely piece on Defending you Suburban Castle in the event of catastrophe. Everything from stocking the right food to avoiding the attention of marauders is covered. All the stuff never covered when you ravage your town with disasters in SimCity. What are /.er's doing to prepare for the apocalypse beyond a UPS and backups?
Privacy

Submission + - Amazingly simple! Craigsnumber is going to rock ..

Submitted by
Jai
Jai writes: "Hats off Alec! I couldn't have said it better — (http://saunderslog.com/2006/12/20/craigsnumber/) It is good to see folks working hard to make things simple :) Jai"
Music

Submission + - Alabama Man Beats RIAA Motion Without Lawyer

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Representing himself, without an attorney, an Alabama man has defeated a summary judgment motion by the RIAA. In Motown v. Liggins the judge ruled that "there is a genuine issue of material fact that precludes granting summary judgment: whether Defendant copied or distributed any of Plaintiffs' recordings. In his responses to the requests for admissions, Plaintiff did not admit that he copied or distributed any of Plaintiffs' recordings. Plaintiffs have not demonstrated the absence of a genuine issue of material fact, and their motion is therefore due to be denied". The case is published in Westlaw at 2006 WL 3257792."
Media

Submission + - Digital Media Winners and Losers of 2006

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MP3 Newswire released its annual winners and losers in digital media for 2006. Winners include Azureus, the Pirate Bay, and YouTube. The losers list includes Streamcast, Captain Copyright (and his sidekick Lieutenant Lame), and the Online Guitar Archive. At the bottom of the post are links to past year's winners and losers lists.
The Internet

Submission + - Police consider Youtube effective against crime

Submitted by
Khalid
Khalid writes: "The Canadian Press is reporting that after a 72-second surveillance tape was posted on Youtube, a suspect in a stabbing murder case has surrendered.

Consequently, police in Hamilton, Ontario say they now consider YouTube to be an effective crime-fighting tool.

From the article:
Police say the clip didn't lead to any witnesses coming forward, but the extra attention paid to the case because of the use of YouTube likely encouraged the suspect to turn himself in.
Hamilton police believe it's the first time law enforcement has used YouTube as a direct investigative tool.
Staff Sgt. Jorge Lasso, who made the decision to post the clip online, says the video had registered some 34,000 hits as of Thursday.
"
Robotics

Submission + - WowWee's CTO Interviewed on RoboCommunity

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From building a cardboard robot that spoke with a broken Walkman in grade school to leading the technology division of one of the world's fastest-paced up-and-coming robotics companies, Davin Sufer — CTO of WowWee Robotics — has certainly had a wild ride. Jump on the roller coaster with him by checking out his recent interview with Khalid Hosein, Editor of WowWee's official community called RoboCommunity.
The Internet

Submission + - VoIP-media services for small biz: what's going on

Submitted by
Salvatore
Salvatore writes: "Dear all, I would like to assess and analyze the best ideas and online services for VoIP and multimedia / WebTV application providing for the small and medium business market. Do you know about very attractive VoIP/communication services for Mom and Pop shops around there? For instance: www.movytel.it has developed a pure VoIP Web-based click-to-talk servics to let people be assisted when they navigate a site. Everybody talks about www.skype.com tring to develop their own WebTV. I wonder which other crazy, sexy, interesting business ideas are out there provided by other VoIP-Media service provider that we will hear from during 2007. Any suggestion? Ideas? Web sites to watch?"
Networking

Submission + - How Web Crawlers Work

Submitted by
Eran Aharonovich
Eran Aharonovich writes: "A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the internet seeking for web pages to process.

Many applications mostly search engines, crawl websites everyday in order to find up-to-date data.
Most of the web crawlers save a copy of the visited page so they could easily index it later and the rest crawl the pages for page search purposes only such as searching for emails ( for SPAM ).

How does it work?

A crawler needs a starting point which would be a web address, a URL.

In order to browse the internet we use the HTTP network protocol which allows us to talk to web servers and download or upload data from and to it.

The crawler browses this URL and then seeks for hyperlinks (A tag in the HTML language).

Then the crawler browses those links and moves on the same way.

Up to here it was the basic idea. Now, how we move on it completely depends on the purpose of the software itself.

If we only want to grab emails then we would search the text on each web page (including hyperlinks) and look for email addresses. This is the easiest type of software to develop.

Search engines are much more difficult to develop.

When building a search engine we need to take care of a few other things.

1. Size — Some web sites are very large and contain many directories and files. It may consume a lot of time harvesting all of the data.

2. Change Frequency — A web site may change very often even a few times a day. Pages can be deleted and added each day. We need to decide when to revisit each site and each page per site.

3. How do we process the HTML output? If we build a search engine we would want to understand the text rather than just treat it as plain text. We must tell the difference between a caption and a simple sentence. We must look for bold or italic text, font colors, font size, paragraphs and tables. This means we must know HTML very good and we need to parse it first. What we need for this task is a tool called "HTML TO XML Converters". One can be found on my website. You can find it in the resource box or just go look for it in the Noviway website: Noviway

That's it for now. I hope you learned something."
Music

Submission + - Creative Commons: Not Just For Software

Submitted by
VE3OGG
VE3OGG writes: "With so many people on Slashdot championing the benefits of GNU GPL, Public Domain, and Creative Commons, including myself, I decided to put together a brief list of media content that made use of those and similar licenses. What I thought would be a brief list, ended up only scratching the surface, and incorporating both amateur and professional quality material. On top of that, there seems to abe a niche for everything from electronic to classical music, and from cartoons to feature-length movies. Of course there are the common ones, people like Cory Doctrow and Elephants Dream, and the Internet Archive's listing of The Grateful Dead, but then there were things such as the CBC programme ""Odd Job Jack", a SciFi CG short film "Blue" and Ourmedia, a website totally dedicated to Creative Commons and like licenses. So I would like to ask Slashdot (and its readers) if they know of any other GNU/GPL, CC, Public Domain, Beer Licenses or similar content that I might have missed."

Slashdot Top Deals

Your computer account is overdrawn. Please see Big Brother.

Close