Slashdot

ydrol writes "After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, I was ready to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had not seen before. However, I was disappointed to discover that a lot of the conversion tools either don't use SMP at all, or don't balance the workload evenly across processors, or require ugly hacks to use SMP (e.g. invoking distributed encoding options). I get the impression that open source projects are a bit slow on the uptake here? Which open source video conversion apps take full native advantage of SMP? (And before you ask, no, I don't want to pick up the code and add SMP support myself, thanks.)"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."

Barence writes "Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the Web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos. The company claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers' comments. 'Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware,' according to Sophos's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. 'It's head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services].'" Sophos believes that Blogger is favored because, being part of Google, it gets spidered early and often.

Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django developer's reference shelf. In particular, the book's emphasis on demonstrating best practices while building complete projects does an excellent job of accelerating an understanding of Django's most powerful features — in a realistic, pragmatic setting — and which a developer will be able to leverage in very short order." Read below for the rest of Greg's review.

KentuckyFC writes "Earlier this year, Paris-based Aldebaran-Robotics picked up $8 million in venture capital funding to help commercialize its NAO humanoid robot. The target market for this device is research labs working on the next generation of robotic hardware and software. Today, the company has posted a detailed spec of NAO on the arXiv saying that it expects the robot to cost about $15,000 each. That's cheap compared to other humanoids. Fuitsu's HOAP humanoids cost $50,000 each and various estimates price Honda's Asimo at $1 million per bot, although they are not for sale. Aldebaran-Robotics says that NAO's cost should come down to about $6,000 as production ramps up."

bigsmoke writes "So, all your servers run on RAID. You back up religiously. You're even sure that your backups are recoverable. But do you also need a UPS? According to Halfgaar (on Slashdot before to promote better Linux backup practices), yes, usually you do. He argues that despite technological advancements such as file system journaling, power failures can still cause data loss in most setups."

chareverie writes "A law just passed in New York now requires labels for violent content in video games that are already rated, as well as having parent-controlled lockout features installed in consoles by 2010. The law has caused an uproar with civil rights groups who claim that such a law is unconstitutional. A legal challenge is already in the works by the New York Civil Liberties Union who cite that similar laws that have been brought to courts in California, Illinois, Minessota, and Washington state have been deemed as unconstitutional. NYCLU legislative director Robert Perry also says that the 'new law is a "back door" way of regulating video game content.'"

snydeq writes "Jailed IT admin Terry Childs relinquished his hold over San Francisco's multimillion-dollar FiberWAN, handing his administrative passwords over to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was 'the only person he felt he could trust.' Childs is still being held on $5 million bail for his lockout of the city's FiberWAN, a case that has been called into question since an insider came forward with details about both the network and Childs himself. The case hinges on No Service Password Recovery commands Childs allegedly configured onto several Cisco devices, as well as dial-up and DSL modems the SFPD has discovered that would allow unauthorized connections to the FiberWAN. Childs intends to 'expose the utter mismanagement, negligence, and corruption at DTIS, which if left unchecked, will in fact place the City of San Francisco in danger,' according to his motion. The Department of Telecom and IS has cut 200 of its 350 IT positions since 2000 — pressure that may have contributed to Childs' actions, according to interviews with current and former DTIS staffers. Newsom secured the passwords without first telling the DTIS that he was meeting with Childs."

the4thdimension writes "MySpace has joined a coalition of other big-name e-services in support of OpenID. If you aren't familiar with the OpenID coalition, they are a group that seeks to allow users to create a single account/password set to be used on a number of services. Such services already signed up include: Google's Blogger, Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, Vox, LiveJournal, and others." Reader gbjbaanb adds a link to the BBC's coverage and points out that MySpace's 100 million users would mean nearly a doubling of the approximately 120 million OpenID accounts now in use, writing: "Initially support is to use MySpace OpenIDs as providers only — i.e. you cannot logon to MySpace with an OpenID created elsewhere, but that policy will change in the future. This should help to make OpenID the de-facto login mechanism for the Internet, now if only Microsoft would support it, there are plenty OSS OpenID libraries available."

oliderid writes "The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been unveiled. It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia and will allow Europe to participate directly in crew transportation.The reusable ship was conceived to carry four people towards the Moon, rivaling the US Ares/Orion system. This project is the Plan A for the European Space agency. The plan B is an evolution of the ATV proposed by a consortium of European companies led by Astrium."

Incon writes "Builder AU reports that Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."

David Barrett writes "If you sell three billion ads a month and can't break even, what do you do? Drop prices by 40% and switch business models, apparently. Is this an isolated incident, or does it contribute to the growing pile of evidence that ad inventory is overpriced industry-wide, with Google being the worst offender due to its policy of requiring minimum bids on keywords that would otherwise go for cheap? Check out this analysis on my blog and make up your own mind."

99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."On Thursday the Book of Psalms and the Gospel According to Mark will go live at the Codex Sinaiticus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now.

PoliTech notes in a journal entry that "Vista is the gift that just keeps on giving." "Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and [CEO] Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. 'As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,' he said... 'The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,' he said. 'Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year.' Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology... That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment.'"

eldavojohn writes "After seeing some applications from Google and participating in the Google Codejam (which seems to be built using the GWT), I kind of expected to see websites spring up left and right based off the GWT. Well, it's been a year and a half since they open sourced it and I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed by its low profile in the UI community. I've been trolling their blog and have seen a few books out on it. But the one thing I'm not seeing is its use outside of Google. I've worked through the examples and tutorials at home and though I've been impressed with the speed, I am disturbed by the actual result — a whole ton of generated Javascript. But this is the first UI technology I've found where I can write in the native language of the server (Java) to generate and unit-test the UI code. Aside from Google's use and the games of Ryan Dewsbury like KDice & GPokr, does anyone know of major sites using the GWT? If you don't and you've used it yourself, why isn't it taking off? Is it too immature? Is it a solution to a problem that already has too many solutions? Is it fundamentally lacking in some way?"