[Slashdot] Stories for 2009-07-06

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Slashdot Daily Newsletter

In this issue:
* Space Station Marathon Starting This Weekend
* Free Wi-Fi For the Residents of Venice, Italy
* Pirate Party Coming To Canada
* The Technology of <em>Neuromancer</em> After 25 Years
* Testing 3G Networks Across the US
* Revisiting the Five-Minute Rule
* We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
* Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back
* RAID Trust Issues &mdash; Windows Or a Cheap Controller?
* A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention
* Gaikai Drawing Interest With Low-Key Demo, Believable Claims
* Why Amazon's Kindle Should Use Open Standards

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| Space Station Marathon Starting This Weekend |
| from the this-calls-for-a-twitter-mashup dept. |
| posted by timothy on Saturday July 04, @23:02 (Space) |
| http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/04/2230220 |
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[0]RobGoldsmith writes with this snippet from Space Fellowship: "If
you've never seen a spaceship with your own eyes, now's your chance. The
International Space Station (ISS) is about to make a [1]remarkable series
of flybys over the United States. Beginning this 4th of July weekend, the
station will appear once, twice, and sometimes three times a day for many
days in a row. No matter where you live, you should have at least a few
opportunities to see the biggest spaceship ever built."

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/04/2230220

Links:
0. http://spacefellowship.com/
1. http://spacefellowship.com/2009/07/04/space-station-marathon/

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| Free Wi-Fi For the Residents of Venice, Italy |
| from the venice-washington-must-continue-to-wait dept. |
| posted by timothy on Sunday July 05, @02:00 (Networking) |
| http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/04/2236213 |
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pmontra writes "The City of Venice, Italy, started to offer [0]free Wi-Fi
to residents (Google translation from [1]the Italian source) on July 3
2009. Tourists and other visitors will pay [2]5 Euros a day for the
service starting from September. The hot spots are connected to a ten
thousand kilometer (6,250 mile) fiber optic LAN the City started
deploying in the '90s. The first day of free Internet access has been
celebrated with a digital treasure hunt in the channels of the lagoon
city."

Discuss this story at:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/04/2236213

Links:
0. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fcorrieredelveneto.corriere.it%2Fveneziamestre%2Fnotizie%2Fcronaca%2F2009%2F11-giugno-2009%2Finternet-wi-fi-gratis-venezia-residenti-1601454344716.shtml
1. http://corrieredelveneto.corriere.it/veneziamestre/notizie/cronaca/2009/11-giugno-2009/internet-wi-fi-gratis-venezia-residenti-1601454344716.shtml
2. http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5622LO20090703

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| Pirate Party Coming To Canada |
| from the but-the-vikings-hit-canada-hundreds-of-years-ago dept. |
| posted by timothy on Sunday July 05, @05:08 (Media) |
| http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/0714203 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "After scoring a surprise electoral win in
Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, [0]The Pirate Party
is [1]coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People
should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any
material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes
government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as
part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/0714203

Links:
0. http://www.piratepartyofcanada.com/
1. http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jWUvBM5C13QP1GPNoo8DchgsAufw

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| The Technology of <em>Neuromancer</em> After 25 Years |
| from the where-were-you-when-it-came-out dept. |
| posted by timothy on Sunday July 05, @08:15 (Sci-Fi) |
| http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/0826246|
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. [0]Dr_Ken
writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the
current state of some of [1]the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer
is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core
idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all
the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book
eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to
popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi
community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it
came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984,
winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula
Award.'"

Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/0826246

Links:
0. mailto:kkkraska@hotmail.com
1. http://www.macworld.com/article/141500/2009/07/neuromancer_25.html

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| Testing 3G Networks Across the US |
| from the can-you-hear-me-now dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @09:41 (Wireless Networkin|
| http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/128213 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

PCWorld recently [0]tested the 3G networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint
in 13 different cities across the US. They've now posted the results,
which show that Sprint and Verizon are neck-and-neck for reliability,
while AT&T has consistently higher upload rates. From the article:
"Across more than 20 testing locations in each of the 13 cities we
tested, Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps. Verizon
demonstrated good reliability, too; the network was available at a
reasonable and uninterrupted speed in 89.8 percent of our tests. Sprint's
3G network delivered a solid connection in 90.5 percent of our 13-city
tests. Sprint's average download speed of 808 kbps across 13 cities
wasn't flashy (at that speed, a 1MB file downloads in 10 seconds), but
dependability is an important asset. The Sprint network performed
especially well, both in speed and in reliability, in our test cities in
the western part of the United States. The AT&T network's 13-city average
download speed in our tests was 812 kbps. Its average upload speed was
660 kbps. Reliability was an issue in our experience of the AT&T system:
Our testers were able to make a connection at a reasonable, uninterrupted
speed in only 68 percent of their tests." What have you noticed about the
various carriers in your city?

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/128213

Links:
0. http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,167391/printable.html

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| Revisiting the Five-Minute Rule |
| from the more-things-change dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @11:00 (Data Storage) |
| http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/1416210 |
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In 1987, a study published by Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu evaluated
the trade-offs between holding data in memory and storing it on a disk.
Known widely as the "five-minute rule," their research was updated and
expanded 10 years later. Now, as jamie points out, Communications of the
ACM is running an article by Goetz Graefe with another decennial update,
[0]evaluating the rule using hardware and software typical of 2007, with
an eye toward how flash memory will affect the situation. An excerpt from
Graefe's conclusion: "The 20-year-old five-minute rule for RAM and disks
still holds, but for ever-larger disk pages. Moreover, it should be
augmented by two new five-minute rules: one for small pages moving
between RAM and flash memory and one for large pages moving between flash
memory and traditional disks. For small pages moving between RAM and
disk, Gray and Putzolu were amazingly accurate in predicting a five-hour
break-even point two decades into the future. Research into flash memory
and its place in system architectures is urgent and important. Within a
few years, flash memory will be used to fill the gap between traditional
RAM and traditional disk drives in many operating systems, file systems,
and database systems."

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/1416210

Links:
0. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32091-the-five-minute-rule-20-years-later/fulltext

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks? |
| from the or-food dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @12:26 (Education) |
| http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/1546214 |
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[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid
and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to
[1]gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting ��� or
sometimes selling ��� them to other students at the start of a new one.
Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order
came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They
would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it
shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People
thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third
academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing
rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who
was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008
was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January
alone."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/1546214

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back |
| from the i-don't-eat-greens,-food-eats-greens dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @13:49 (Earth) |
| http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/1556256 |
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SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but
once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing
the predator to [0]lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to
make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to
find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker:
when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with
the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a
voracious mouth."

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/1556256

Links:
0. http://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2009/07/04/from-predator-to-plant-in-one-gulp/

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| RAID Trust Issues &mdash; Windows Or a Cheap Controller? |
| from the why-buy-the-mirrored-cow dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @15:12 (Data Storage) |
| http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/1729257 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

NicApicella writes "My new system has two sparklin' SATA drives which I
would like to mirror. After having been burned by a not-so-cheap,
dedicated RAID controller, I have been pointed to software RAID
solutions. I now stand in front of two choices for setting up my RAID: a
Windows 7 RC software RAID or a hardware RAID done by the cheap
integrated RAID controller of my motherboard. Based on past experiences,
I have decided that only my data is worth saving ��� that's why the RAID
should mirror two disks (FAT32) that are not the boot disk (i.e. do not
contain an OS or any fancy stuff). Of course, such a setup should secure
my data; should a drive crash, I want the system up and running in no
time. Even more importantly, I want any drive and its data to be as safe
and portable as possible (that's the reason for choosing FAT32), even if
the OS or the controller screw up big time. So, which should I choose?
Who should I trust more, Microsoft's Windows 7 or possibly the cheapest
RAID controller on the market? Are there other cheap solutions?"

Discuss this story at:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/1729257

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| A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention |
| from the click-here-to-report-as-spam dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @16:28 (Google) |
| http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/2025206 |
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CNet has a story about the security measures Google employs to protect
their email systems and [0]fight the never-ending war on spam. Their
Postini team, [1]acquired two years ago, has a variety of monitoring
tools and automated response systems to find and block undesirable
messages. Quoting: "The system scores each message on numerous
combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing
the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message
types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and
customer spam reports. ... To block fresh spam attacks not covered by
existing heuristic technologies and viruses not covered by existing
signature databases Postini relies on proprietary Zero-Hour technology to
identify new outbreaks that show up in the traffic patterns and
quarantine them for later rescanning. Customers can also create and build
out their own white lists of message senders they trust and blacklist
others they don't trust. It takes an average of 150 milliseconds for a
message to be scanned by the antivirus engines that Postini licenses from
McAfee and Authentium.

Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/2025206

Links:
0. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10276548-83.html
1. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/09/1347243&tid=217

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| Gaikai Drawing Interest With Low-Key Demo, Believable Claims |
| from the cloud-gaming-with-a-silver-lining dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @17:55 (Networking) |
| http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/1948233 |
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Earlier this week, we discussed news that games industry veteran Dave
Perry had posted a demo of his upcoming [0]cloud gaming service Gaikai.
Now that people have had time to speak with Perry and evaluate the demo,
reaction has been surprisingly positive. Quoting Eurogamer: "What struck
me about the presentation was that [1]there was absolutely nothing
unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p
gameplay at 60 frames per second ��� games were running in differently
sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video
itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS. There was no talk of
world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best
minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264
codec that we use ... And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that
we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s
and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play
games in an ultra-accessible manner." By contrast, OnLive was received
with [2]much more criticism, in part due to their dramatic promises.
While playing online games with Gaikai will naturally add some amount of
latency, the article points out that single player games need not lag
more than you'd [3]expect from a console controller. Meanwhile, unlike
OnLive, Gaikai is not trying to compete directly with the major console
manufacturers, instead trying to work with them in order to [4]deliver
their first-party games to new audiences.

Discuss this story at:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/1948233

Links:
0. http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/07/01/1522210/Dave-Perry-Shows-Off-Cloud-Gaming-Service-Gaikai
1. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gaikai-cloud-computing-gameplay-that-works-blog-entry
2. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article
3. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_responsiveness_in_video_.php
4. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212860.html

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| Why Amazon's Kindle Should Use Open Standards |
| from the yay-open-book-puns dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 05, @19:22 (Books) |
| http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/05/2110233 |
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Tim O'Reilly wrote in Forbes a while back that he thinks [0]the Kindle
only has another two or three years of life left, unless Amazon wises up
and embraces open standards. He came to this conclusion, in part, because
of his experience deciding how to publish documents on the web back in
the mid-1990s. "You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the
Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty
publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the
Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was
simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in
return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with
proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our
content to users of the Microsoft platform. The only problem was we'd
already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server
software and published documents using an open standards format. That
meant anyone could read them using a free browser. While MSN had better
tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to
us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more
quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would
eventually win the day."

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/05/2110233

Links:
0. http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html

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