http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl News for nerds, stuff that matters en-us Copyright 1997-2009, Geeknet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2009-12-27T08:43:11+00:00 Geeknet, Inc. help@slashdot.org Technology hourly 1 1970-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicslashdot.gif http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl //slashdot.org/submission/1140730/Coby-CXCB91-9-Band-AMFM-ShortWave-Radio?from=rss Buy this radio to help you get to sleep, listening to the AM band. For a few bucks, I did end up using it regularly, and this little Coby did inspire me enough that I am now looking around to buy a high end SW radio kkmart2008 2009-12-27T07:15:41+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140728/MMO-Lasagna-New-Aion-ServicesFor-you-to-pay-fo?from=rss http://mmolasagna.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-aion-servicesfor-you-to-pay-for.html edwardsfamily 2009-12-27T07:06:32+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140724/Security-in-the-Ether?from=rss Technology Review's David Talbot says IT's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud — and prove we can trust it. 'The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications,' says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. 'Many of these applications are going on at a blistering pace, and cloud computing is going to be a great facilitative technology for a lot of these people.' But there's one little catch. 'None of this can happen unless cloud services are kept secure,' notes Talbot. 'And they are not.' Fully ensuring the security of cloud computing, says Talbot, will inevitably fall to emerging encryption technologies. theodp 2009-12-27T06:59:20+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140722/Panasonic-Plans-Lithium-Ion-Storage-Cell-for-Home?from=rss Panasonic Corp. in collaboration with Sanyo Electric Co., plans to develop a lithium-ion storage cell for home use until 2011. “We’ll be the first to bring to the market a storage battery for home use, which can store sufficient electricity for about one week of use,” said Fumio Otsubo, president of Panasonic, in a recent interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun. bluemanlines 2009-12-27T06:52:56+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140718/Worldrsquos-First-Production-Hybrid-Motorcycle-D?from=rss The Indian company Eko Vehicles has announced the development of the world's first production hybrid motorcycle called ET-120. In short time this motorcycle will run on the Indian streets, offering about 280 miles per gallon with a top speed of 40 miles per hour. bluemanlines 2009-12-27T06:41:56+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140714/Diet?from=rss Cara bagaimana untuk menjalankan perniagaan diet secara online di Malaysia dengan mengunakan teknologi pemkomputeran Anonymous Coward 2009-12-27T06:34:38+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140712/Hosting-control-panel-that-supports-NAT?from=rss I run a web hosting company in Australia and want to know if anyone is aware of a Linux hosting control panel that supports NAT ? I mean truly "supports" operation behind a NAT firewall? The only one that I can find that will work behind NAT is Plesk, and only if you manage / host the DNS on an external server with a public IP address. The reason I ask is because I want to build up a new network of VMWare clusters and want to run everything behind NAT so that I can have load balancers and absolute redundancy! rabbieaz 2009-12-27T06:28:08+00:00 //slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=8111306&from=rss Scientists have used the dye fluorescein to create a new imaging technique to view graphene. sdfeed 2009-12-27T06:13:33+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140706/TSA-Keep-Your-Hands-Where-We-Can-See-Them?from=rss Courtesy of Yahoo News: Some airlines were telling passengers on Saturday that new government security regulations prohibit them from leaving their seats beginning an hour before landing The regulations are a response to a suspected terrorism incident on Christmas Day. Air Canada said in a statement that new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in U.S. airspace...Flight attendants on some domestic flights are informing passengers of similar rules. Passengers on a flight from New York to Tampa Saturday morning were also told they must remain in their seats and couldn't have items in their laps, including laptops and pillows.I seriously thought this was an Onion article at first. Anonymous Coward 2009-12-27T05:25:32+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140688/Getting-Connected-A-History-of-Modems?from=rss This two pages TechRadar article tells about a history of modems — "Their arrival heralded a new age of communications and they played a major role in the explosion of the internet. We're talking, of course, about modems. Here we look back on the development of this remarkable device..."Seen on Digg. antdude 2009-12-27T03:47:28+00:00 //slashdot.org/journal/243040/Amazon-sells-more-ebooks-on-x-mas-than-real-books?from=rss Amazon reports for the first time ever they sold more ebooks on one day than real books. Here is the article. My wife is an ebook (only) author and reported her largest single day sales on Christmas day, and December has been her best month ever as well. All those Kindles bought for this season are being seen in ebook sales. ctmurray 2009-12-27T03:22:33+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140672/trains-v-planes?from=rss This is not a scoop but is high speed train a useful part of infrastructure, with announcement of world fastest bullet train in China. Anonymous Coward 2009-12-27T01:07:18+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140670/Terrorist-flies-around-no-fly-list?from=rss Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab flew to Detroit with a bomb on board. Incompetence guided the design of his trigger, and our government agencies that didn't register him on the no-fly list. So what did Big Brother do? Well they did put him into a database of suspected terrorists.This whole mess, and the thousands preceding it, begs one big question. How far does big brother have to go to actually make us safe? And at what point can we say it isn't working? narcberry 2009-12-27T00:59:43+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140666/Australia-Confirms-Censorship-Plans-Tells-Fibs?from=rss The Australian Government today confirmed that it would proceed with broadscale internet censorship in Australia following a trial into ISP based internet filtering.Delivered pre-Christmas so as to minimize debate on the plan, Reichsminister for censorship Stephen Conroy spun the decision by selectively quoting parts of the trial report. Conroy claimed among other things that banned material “can be done with 100 per cent accuracy and negligible impact on internet speed” and that the filter would apply to all RC (Refused Classification) content.It’s an interesting line, because the reports findings don’t actually say that the filtering of RC content is either 100% accurate nor would it necessarily have a “negligible” affect on internet speeds (we’ll get to “negligible” in a moment.) Anonymous Coward 2009-12-27T00:31:58+00:00 //slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=8105182&from=rss An inside look at Darpa, the secretive defense agency that’s changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us. nytfeed 2009-12-26T23:12:18+00:00 //slashdot.org/journal/243038/New-DHS-Initiative?from=rss In the wake of the recent attempted pants bombing, the Department of Homeland Security has initiated new security measures for airline travel. Thomas Rousers, deputy assistant to the permanent assistant undersecretary for airline security (outgoing), discussed the rationale for the program: "We here at DHS are very concerned by the latest apparel-related attempted terrorist attack. The shoe bomber was the first str johndiii 2009-12-26T23:07:53+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140650/history--management--bash-something-new-?from=rss Dear friends,Saving history in Linux terminals (bash, sh...) gives great advantages if used efficiently. Short history files are not of much help to someone who is used to use long commands over a period. (sometimes i submit i write an entire shell script in a single command e.g. [for x in `find $USER/project/ -name *.f90`;do grep -i 'end subroutine' $x;done] ). One wishes to rather recall them from history than to write again, so to have it in the history one increases the size of the history file, say 10000 lines.However one now has to face the other problem of extracting the require command from a much bigger "garbage". So one tries to remove redundancies from the HISTFILE by using various techniques (using HISTIGNORE, HISTCONTROL). Most of the techniques i know are useful to avoid replication, and not saving some simple commands like ls, exit etc.But my focus is is on the situation, where we write a lot commands, and make many typing errors. (e.g typed s instead of ls, eco instead of echo...so on). these miss-typed commands are also saved in history and are useless. Is there any way to avoid this? More precisely, something that can decide to save a command based on its exit status, or if $0 (in language of bash) is an existing command.I did basing homework of searching the manpages of bash, history and also google a bit, but didn't find anything useful.I am waiting for the comments. :-) rajarshi 2009-12-26T22:49:28+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140648/WSJ-Time-for-a-Climate-Change-Plan-B?from=rss Whether you believe in Climate Change or Climategate the problem is that no one in the first or third world is really willing to actually pay enough to change things fast enough to make much difference. The bigger question is whether it is better to spend money to mitigate one problem (CO2) or solve other problems.This from an article by Nigel Lawson in the WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107604574607793378860698.html) : "The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century."And: "The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future."And if we do need a conspiracy theory it is helpful to remember that 27 out of 50 of the worlds largest oil companies are state owned or controlled (http://www.energyintel.com/DocumentDetail.asp?document_id=245527). sl149q 2009-12-26T22:47:13+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140646/Largest-Santa-Sculpture-in-the-World?from=rss Santa Claus is that old to enter night in the house and bring gifts to good children, but what you do when measures 160 m wide and 24 meters high .. Well the Chinese have decided to build the largest Santa Claus in ice, in the world. Recently in Harbin, China som..Read More Anonymous Coward 2009-12-26T22:30:46+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140644/Predictions-for-the-Internet-in-2010?from=rss Over the past several weeks I have formulated some predictions for 2010. Overall, I am excited for the new year. If you would like to argue for or against any of these predictions, definitely leave a comment. BPaton 2009-12-26T22:29:49+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140614/Groklaw-Putting-Comes-v-Microsoft-Docs-Online?from=rss PJ of Groklaw is working on putting the documents from Comes v. Microsoft online, to make them searchable and accessible to everyone. If you don't remember their history, the plaintiffs got these documents from Microsoft during discovery after fighting the lawyers tooth and nail. After realizing how embarrassing the documents were to Microsoft, they put them online and later got a very large settlement from Microsoft by agreeing to take their website down. The web being what it is, these documents had already been mirrored and were later (legally) made available on the Pirate Bay. Now Groklaw has put them online and is looking for people to help transcribe them, so that documents like the infamous Evangelism is War presentation will not be forgotten. Anonymous Coward 2009-12-26T20:44:46+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140612/Book-Review-The-Art-of-Unit-Testing?from=rss The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET Author: Roy Osherove Publisher: Manning Pages: 296 ISBN: 1933988274 Summary: Soup to nuts unit testing with examples in .NET "We let the tests we wrote do more harm than good." That snippet from the preface of Roy Osherove’s "The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET" (AOUT hereafter) is the wrap up of a frank description of a failed project Osherove was part of. The goal of AOUT is teaching you great approaches to unit testing so you won’t run into similar failures on your own projects. AOUT is a well-written, concise book walking readers through many different aspects of unit testing. Osherove’s book has something for all readers, regardless of their experience with unit testing. While the book's primary focus is .NET, the concepts apply to many different platforms, and Osherove also covers a few Java tools as well. Osherove has a long history of advocating testing in the .NET space. He’s blogged about it extensively, speaks at many international conferences, and leads a large number of Agile and testing classes. He’s also the chief architect at TypeMock, an isolation framework that’s a tool you may make use of in your testing efforts – and he’s very up front about his involvement with that tool when discussing isolation techniques in the book. He does a very good job of not pushing his specific tool and also covers several others, leaving me feeling there wasn’t any bias toward his product whatsoever. AOUT does a number of different things really, really well. First off, it focuses solely on unit testing. Early on Osherove lays out the differences between unit and integration tests, but he quickly moves past that and stays with unit tests the rest of the book. Secondly, Osherove avoids pushing any particular methodology (Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, etc.) and just stays on critical concepts around unit testing. I particularly appreciated that latter point. While I’m a proponent of *DD, it was nice to read through the book without having to filter out any particular dogma biases. I think that mindset makes this book much more approachable and useful to a broader audience – dive in to unit testing and learn the fundamentals before moving on to the next step. I also enjoyed that Osherove carries one example project through the entire book. He takes readers through a journey as he builds a log analyzer and uses that application to drive discussion of specific testing techniques. There are other examples used in the book, but they’re all specific to certain situations; the brunt of his discussion remains on the one project which helps keep readers focused in the concepts Osherove’s laying out. The book’s first two chapters are the obligatory introduction to unit testing frameworks and concepts. Osherove quickly moves through discussions of "good" unit tests, offers up a few paragraphs on TDD, and lays out a few bits around unit test frameworks in general. After that he’s straight in to his "Core Techniques" section where he discusses stubs, mocks, and isolation frameworks. The third part, "The Test Code" covers hierarchies and pillars of good testing. The book finishes with "Design and Process" which hits on getting testing solidly integrated into your organization, plus has a great section on trying to deal with testing legacy systems. There are a couple handy appendices covering design issues and tooling. Osherove uses his "Core Techniques" section to clearly lay out the differences between stubs and mocks, plus he covers using isolation frameworks such as Rhino.Mocks or TypeMock to assist with implementing these concepts. I enjoyed reading this section because too many folks confuse the concepts of stubbing and mocking. They’re not interchangeable, and Osherove does a great job emphasizing where you should use stubs and mocks to deal with dependencies and interactions, respectively. The walkthrough of splitting out a dependency and using a stub is a perfect example of why this book’s so valuable: Osherove clearly steps through pulling the dependency out to an interface, then shows you different methods of using a stub for testing via injection by constructors, properties, or method parameters. He’s also very clear about the drawbacks of each approach, something I find critical in any design-related discussion – let me know what things might cause me grief later on! While the discussion on mocking, stubbing, and isolation was informative and well-written, I got the most out of chapters 6 ("Test hierarchies and organization") and 7 ("The pillars of good tests"). The hierarchy discussion in particular caused me to re-think how I’ve been organizing an evolving suite of Selenium-based UI tests. I was already making use of DRY and refactoring out common functionality into factory and helper methods; however, Osherove’s discussion led to me re-evaluating the overall structure, resulting in some careful use of base class and inheritance. His concrete examples of building out a usable test API for your environment also changed how I was handling namespaces and general naming. If you’re in an organization that’s new to testing, or if you’re trying to deal with getting testing around legacy software, then the last two chapters of the book are must-read sections. Changing cultures inside organizations is never easy, and Osherove shows a number of different tools you can use when trying to drive the adoption of testing in your organizations. My own experience has shown you’ll need to use combinations of many of these including finding champions, getting management buy off, and most importantly learning how to deal with the folks who become roadblocks. The Art of Unit Testing does a lot of things really well. I didn’t feel the book did anything poorly, and I happily include it in my list of top software engineering/craftsmanship books I’ve read. All software developers, regardless of their experience with unit testing, stand to learn something from it. FrazzledDad 2009-12-26T20:42:52+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140600/How-to-teach-a-12-year-old-to-program?from=rss I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++? thelordx 2009-12-26T19:55:38+00:00 //slashdot.org/submission/1140586/Apparently-Magnetic-North-is-MovingEast?from=rss National Geographic has published a story outlining research that Earth's magnetic pole is rapidly moving in an easterly direction at a speedy 40 miles per year. Yet unknown forces in the core of the Earth are creating a "magnetic plume," affecting the magnetic pole. The roaming pole's destination: Russia! Sara Palin was right! Oddly enough, my own compass tells me it just keeps moving north... Dyne09 2009-12-26T18:36:42+00:00 //slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=8100554&from=rss If the Apple tablet emerges as expected, this could be another market that Cupertino takes from right under the PC companies' noses. cnetfeed 2009-12-26T18:32:12+00:00