Contents

1. Why Power Failures Can Always Lead To Data Loss
2. Video Game Labeling Law Passed In New York
3. MySpace Joins OpenID Coalition
4. Slimmed Down MySQL Offshoot Drizzle is Built For the Web
5. Speculation On a Second Internet Economy Collapse
6. World’s Oldest Bible Going Online
7. Next Generation SSDs Delayed Due To Vista
8. Is Anyone Using the Google Web Toolkit?
9. Nintendo Loses Controller Patent Lawsuit
10. New Rifle Tech Offers Variable Muzzle Speed
11. UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle
12. Buy From Amazon With Your TiVo
13. COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat
14. The First Paper-Based Transistors
15. Troll Patents Lists In Databases, Sues Everyone

Duh! - by mlwmohawk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I remember a discussion on the PostgreSQL hacker’s list about recoverability and transaction logs.

You can’t make a system that will not lose data, you can only make a system that knows the last save point of 100% integrity.

There are too many variables and too much randomness on a cold hard power failure. You absolutely need a UPS that gives you time to shut down cleanly.

UPS - more than just a backup. - by Zebadias (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
UPS smooths out all those nasty spikes as well as stopping your servers from going down to a 1 second power cut.

UPS is more than just saving your data.

Illiteracy - by carou (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

From TFA:

Fly, little data! Be free!

Well no shit, Sherlock - by Skyshadow (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Power losses can cause data loss? Gee, you mean that my system that relies on electricity for everything it does can be adversely effected by power outages even if I take precautions? That’s some good admin work there, Lou — if only there was some sort of law that covered the tendency of things that can go wrong to go wrong…

Next week: Fires can make things warm, floods can make things wet.

Re:Well no shit, Sherlock - by Skyshadow (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I don’t know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts.

As a former sysadmin, I would think that any machine reliant on ‘happy thoughts’ would be the most crash-prone system in the history of computing.

Because Violent Video Games are Hiding so Well - by hardburn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So you take a game like “Grand Theft Auto”, which is named after a felony, and comes with subtitles like “Vice City”, and which has a back cover talking about guns and gangsters, and if that’s not enough for you, comes with an M rating with a clear label of “Blood and Gore Violence”. Apparently after seeing all that, some people’s first thought is that it’s a game about rainbow-colored horses galloping across fields where the trees blossom lollipops.

Parents should have more than enough information already about what games are violent or not. If they’re still buying them, then that’s their fault, not the gaming industry.

Why the Censorship tag? - by LWATCDR (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“A law just passed in New York now requires labels for violent content in video games” 
This doesn’t censor anybody or anything. 
“as well as having parent-controlled lockout features installed in consoles by 2010” 
So a VChip for consoles. No more censorship than the TV VChip and will be uses about as much.

I can see complaining about the cost of this law, the effectiveness of it, or even if it is redundant but censorship? Just what liberties are being taken away by labeling? 
And please no “slippery slope arguments”. I want to know how providing the consumer more information is a bad thing? Now the vchip in the console I can see problems with cost but outside of that what is the problem. It will not effect any adult unless they are dumb and turn it on and forget the password.

I can see how it may be unconstitutional but only because it could be seen as the state interfering with interstate commerce. But that has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

Re:Just what we need, more laws - by 0100010001010011 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

People want the future in Wall-E. We want the government (or some company) to do everything for us.

Parenting? Nah let the schools do it. If they screw it up, we’ll bitch about it. 
Health Care, Insurance, Food, Fuel, Houses. I want the government to do it. 
Opinions, TV, Media. Just let the government tell me what I think, as long as I can see Jamye Lynn Spears’ retarded baby.

Re:Unconstitutional? At what level? - by Woundweavr (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Unfamiliar with the 14th Amendment or just last 100 years of Constitutional precedent? Its pretty black letter law, and certainly applies to New York.

Re:Unconstitutional? At what level? - by jonnythan (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Go read your Fourteenth Amendment.

The Bill of Rights applies to state governments as well. New York State is not allowed to abridge the freedom of speech of New York citizens.

Re:One Password to Rob Them All - by Jellybob (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Good security doesn’t even let the other party know your cleartext password, or access your account with them without it. But I don’t see how OpenID will do anything like that.

Maybe you should try reading the spec then, since that’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

The only place that gets your plain text password is your OpenID provider, and whenever you try to login to another site using OpenID, you get redirect to your provider’s site, where:

1) If you don’t already have a session open, you login, and then go to 2.

2) You get asked if you really want to login on the client site, and if so, what information do you want to let them have (usually anything from “nothing at all” to “everything”, or a combination of them).

This way the only site you need to implicitly trust is the OpenID provider - which if you choose can be on your own server, running your own code, with whatever means of authentication you like.

If you’re feeling really paranoid you could even have it send you a text message, or electrocute your balls, every time someone logs in with your credentials, so that even if someone does get them you’ll know as soon as they try to use it, and can disable or change them.

Re:One Password to Rob Them All - by Doc Ruby (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

What we need is the opposite of this scheme.

We need to store our passwords on our own local trusted machine. Like on our personal mobile phone with tested HW encryption, which requires multifactor ID: thumbprint, voice recog, keyed PIN, retina scan. In fact, that device shouldn’t store some simple password data, but rather a onetime password generator that generates unique secure password sequences for each challenging site. Maybe the phone should send the password via IR/Bluetooth or a phonecall, but secure itself against attacks over that connection, or just report the momentary password on the screen for its human to read and enter into the challenge.

It’s insane that I give my bank PIN to some arbitrary sketchy ATM in some latenight deli when I’m already drunk, need another 6-pack, and won’t even remember where (or who) I was when I find out months later that my PIN was used by someone (of the dozen sketchy ATMs I used that year) to rob my account. I want onetime passwords right now, that my phone can remember, attached to the specific counterparties, money quantities and transaction description. So later I’ve got my own complete, authoritave record.

Not go the other way and give my PIN to every fly by night website, just because they “trust each other” with nothing of their own at stake.

Re:OpenID? - by phoenix.bam! (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I don’t think you understand how openid works. The only way to compromise all sites is for your openid provider to be compromised. You only provide 3rd party sites with a URL which points to your openid provider. You are forwarded to your openid provider (SSL cert verifies to you that the provider is legit.) You enter your credentials to the openid provider who then sends over a back channel that you are verified back to the 3rd party site. At no time does the 3rd party site have any of your authentication credentials and therefore can not access anything on other sites which you use that openid account for.

Damned MS… - by db32 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I really wanted my Hotmail account to be compromised when my Google/Myspace/Facebook/Amazon/Ebay/Paypal accounts are all compromised by the single sign on. Now they will have to get my OpenID AND my Passport logons. 
 
Seriously…with the internet being such a dangerous place for the average user. How in the freaking hell is a single sign on going to make it better? I mean really now this seems monumentally stupid. And worse the summary tries to blast MS for not supporting it. For all the many things to bitch about MS…“They won’t sign on and support one of the dumbest security ideas on the internet” seems pretty counter to the normal complaints that they do stupid things when it comes to security. 
 
With any luck some banks and credit cards will adopt this. So now you can have everything stolen from you with a single username/password combination that was probably lifted from you through a fake website or one of the dozens of account stealing malware bits that you installed to get “OMG Ponies Wallpaper & Pointers!”. For bonus points, being able to pull a drive by install of malware to steal this account from a MySpace banner and then using that to steal all of their money, email addresses, and social webpages would be great. Bonus points if you manage to auction off all of their personal possesions through their ebay account and then keep the money through their paypal account.

Problem - by Rinisari (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

A problem inherent in a decentralized single signon system is that there are more and more providers popping up, and not all of them are trustworthy or taking the necessary security precautions to lockdown their sites. Caveat emptor, I guess, though. I run my own, and so I’m responsible for my own security.

Just goes to show, MySQL people are dolts - by mlwmohawk (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Sorry, it is incomprehensible that this sort of project would be started.

The problem with MySQL, to BEGIN WITH, is that it doesn’t support enough SQL or the SQL it does support well enough, to construct efficient queries. What ends up happening is that you move your “data logic” to your application and out of your database. This means the database handles simpler queries, but returns more data. While these simple queries appear faster, they hit more data on the disk and actually cause the system to become I/O bound.

“Real” databases handle the “data logic” close to the data and can estimate the most efficient access to the data needed, thus REDUCING the I/O bottleneck, making more complex queries more efficient than simple queries. CPU time is virtually free with respect to data access.

Every time I see some Java, PHP, or .NET guy go off about MySQL being faster, I just shake my head. Data access is a real science grounded in math and the physical realities of actual computers and storage devices. A “good” database has YEARS of research and unless you are a god (and you are not) it will be very hard for you to beat it.

I’ve been in the business for about 28 years and I don’t understand why software developers have this blind spot about databases. Maybe it is a “not written by me” attitude, but I just don’t get it. A “good” database has so many facilities to make your data access efficient and fast as hell. Yet, most developers that I have to direct, simply refuse to learn about databases, specifically SQL. They go out of their way to write elaborate functionality in their language of choice that could have been constructed in a moderately interesting SQL query, that could be wrapped in a function and been more efficient.

The “drizzle” product is just another avoidance of an important semester of computer science that people don’t want to understand and will ultimately create even more poorly designed web sites.

All for it - by spinkham (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

From my point of view, this is MySQL finally embracing their target market. 
These features are great and important, but if you’re doing small scale web programming through a framework that uses an ORM, or just very simple SQL, why not slim the program down? 
If you want real database features, you probably shouldn’t be using MySQL in the first place in my opinion.

For Crying Out Loud - by hardburn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Proof that when MySQL originally added those materials, they still didn’t know why they were important. Some of these aren’t even going to slow you down much. Prepared statements can speed you up in some cases.

In this state, it occupies a spot that SQLite does just fine.

So it’s like SQLite… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

…reinvented, but with security flaws. Awesome!

Oh man. - by Hero Zzyzzx (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

One man’s “superfluous” is another man’s key feature. No views? No prepared statements? Holy carp. Isn’t MySQL crippled enough as it is?

At first glance it’s hard for me to see where Drizzle would fit where SQLite doesn’t.

a bit simplistic - by jollyreaper (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

He’s forgetting that there was also the speculative insanity that goes along with any bubble in any industry. There were many companies that made enough revenue to be possible if only the executive spending could have been reined in. I’m forgetting the name of it but there was a new media company that was doing something like $180 million in business but was spending $200 million. They produced content, text! It’s not like that requires a huge capital investment. People are the biggest expense, get a cheap building somewhere, have your people work there, maybe rent a small bit of office space in a posh tower for impressing investors. But no, they put the whole organization in the posh tower, aeron chairs in every office, and shot their whole wad on overhead.

The internet has nothing to do with that kind of stupidity, it’s endemic to human affairs. And the matter of crazy-stupid shit getting funded just because someone has a business plan? Again, common in any bubble, be it tech or tulips.

Psychology catches up everything - by Kupfernigk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The value of any new advertising medium declines over time as people find ways to avoid seeing it, or mentally filter it out. The problem is that there are 2 types of advertising:

• Directories
• Trying to make me buy stuff

People over time get sick of the “Trying to make me buy stuff”.

Example: When I was a kid magazines like Amateur Photographer contained piles of ads which were basically directory listings. Item, price, condition. They were in fact useful data for buyers. What’s the nearest supplier who has a second hand Leica M3 in excellent condition? Nowadays, the ads in photo magazines are demand-creators; reams of eye candy. More advertising, in color, is needed to pay for the content. What does it tell me? Five guys have half a page of trying to sell me the same digital camera I don’t want. Do they have what I do want? Hard to say.

Google’s problem is it wants to be a directory, but its advertisers want to distort its market by directing irrelevant traffic in the hope of selling something. Like bad coinage, bad ads drive out good ads. (Just like eBay with the crooks driving out legitimate sellers.) Ultimately the public gets turned off. (Do I ever click on a right hand link on a google page? No. Do I ever click on the top 3 links? Hardly ever. That’s experience, not prejudice.)

So, my 2c worth is that this may be nothing to do with the recession and everything to do with the great public having had time to realise what a scam much internet advertising is. Someone will have to come up with a better paradigm. If people will still pay money for print magazines, how much will they pay for a verified Google for instance (I would personally pay a $10/month for a shit-free search engine where abusers were removed from search results, no messing.)

Other Industries Prosper on the Internet - by ehaggis (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
“The first internet bubble popped largely because all business models failed except for ad selling.” (from the article).  
 
I disagree. Pornography and Gambling as well as on-line RX have proven to be profitable over time. Perhaps the monetary profit margin is inversely related to the moral and cultural benefit to society.

Re:Naive Question - by Tridus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

How many times have you seen an ad for coke on TV, then immediately run out to the store to buy it? Can’t say I ever have, but they keep on doing it.

Advertising exists for more then making instant purchase decisions.

Economics 101. - by 140Mandak262Jamuna (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
From the article:Don’t believe me? Search for “Flash” and you’ll see it has zero ads. In a totally free market, that means you have no competition, and thus should be able to bid as low as you want to get your ad to appear. But when you try to create an AdWord for the “Flash” keyword, you’ll see it sets the minimum price at $0.10. So even if the market (me) only wants to pay $0.01, it’s priced 10x higher than the market (I) will bear. Which is why there are no ads on the “Flash” keyword.

Free market wants to pay zero dollars for an ad? You mean people want to pay more than zero dollars for milk, cereals and bread? Come on! No body wants to pay more than zero dollars for anything. But the other side of the equation is, no body would sell things below the cost of production, at least not for sustained long durations. Google has a minimum bid because that is the cost of production for that ad.

The author displays profound ignorance about economics.

No resurrection? Do your homework. - by fearsomepirate (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
Sinaiticus has complete resurrection accounts in Matthew, Luke, and John and the entirety of Paul’s resurrection theology (e.g. Romans). It doesn’t have the post-resurrection appearences in Mark (the Gospel ends right when the disciples find the empty tomb), although it does have the pre-resurrection foretellings. It’s also one of the four key texts behind the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, which is the basis behind nearly every modern Bible translation and what ministry candidates study in most North American seminaries. The problem with many of you atheists is that you assume Christians don’t do any of their own textual criticism or historical research, therefore you don’t do it, either.

Wrong Interpretation by Poster - by alexj33 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

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.”

This is a misleading statement by the poster and the article itself. The post-resurrection text in Mark (which is the only text the article seems to mention is in contention) has always been recognized by the modern Christian church as not appearing in the earliest manuscripts. Don’t take my word for it; pick up the latest NIV Bible and look at Mark 16:9-20. It most likely mentions this very fact. 
 
The article only mentions the text in Mark missing. From the article:

The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus’ disciples discover his empty tomb, for example. Mark’s last line has them leaving in fear.  
 
“It cuts out the post-resurrection stories,” said Juan Garces, curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project. “That’s a very odd way of ending a Gospel.”

Unfortunately, you still need to deal with the resurrection stories in the other three gospels (Matthew, Luke and John) as well as the Old Testament references such as Psalms 16:10.

Summary is wildly inaccurate - by john-da-luthrun (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

First, as others have pointed out, the Codex is from the 4th century CE (i.e. “AD”) rather than BCE (or “BC”).

Second, saying “it makes no mention of the resurrection” is inaccurate. It doesn’t contain the final 8 verses from Mark’s Gospel, which have been considered to be a late addition for years and are usually square-bracketed in modern Bible editions.

However, if you actually *read* Mark’s Gospel, it has plenty of references to the resurrection of Jesus earlier in the text. Plus the Codex Sinaiticus also includes the other three Gospels, all of which include post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.

But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine…

Yes, and to take it further - by g4b (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Mark’s Gospel was considered by some theologians to been written in a style of “play”. Mark writes like you could play it on a stage. People come in, talk, go out. 
 
Mark’s ending, with the cross, was in many ways like the ending of a drama. It opened doors not just for talk about the play, but also for thinking about the matter. 
 
I cant recite what I have read further, but the theologian was going into detail, why the ending did suggest something else to happen, which would have been obvious for people of that time, so mark didn’t need the resurrection to be mentioned. it was obvious for them that there was more to it, like it is obvious for us now, that “I am your father” is a reference to Star Wars, but later, when time passed, the resurrection was added to the book. 
 
Most christians know, that Mark did not mention the resurrection chronologically in the original. But, there were 3 other gospels, and plenty of people writing about the resurrection, and even Mark pointed the resurrection out in a lot of passages. So, no, there is no debate at all on our side. 
 
Still, thanx for the news. Accurate timing (BCE?) and some insights which books are in this old bible would have been better, though.

Re:Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot - by SirLoadALot (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Actually, we do our best to smugly mock all religions without prejudice whenever we get the chance. That’s because most fundamentalists of any stripe think all unbelievers will burn equally well in hell, so we return the favour as best we can.

SANDISK has been caught in a lie here. - by Coolhand2120 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
So is SANDISK telling the lie now when they say it runs poorly or are they telling the lie then when they say it will run optimally and even provide benchmarks. No matter how you look at it, SANDISK is lying.  
 
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785

“The results indicate that the new Windows Vista operating system will run optimally when installed on the SanDisk SSD”

Ya, it is Vista’s fault… - by TheNetAvenger (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Ok, even on SlashDot, this deserves to be bashed for what it is, instead of the we hate MS lovefest that it will probably get.

Why is this the only manufacturer that seems to be having production issues, performance issues and general reliability problems on all OSes? SanDisk is the joke of Flash in all forms, especially SSD.

Motives against Vista…

Hmm, maybe when Vista was released and 80% of the SanDisk Flash Memory failed to perform well enough to be used for Readyboost, they were a bit Pissed Off? How about the devices Vista won’t even see properly because they don’t meet basic USB or SD specifications, that also POed SanDisk a bit.

SanDisk also has a horrible reputation with USB Card readers, as the devices won’t even work at the basic BIOS levels, and people buying them that ‘only’ used them in Devices were POed and returning them because they started expecting them to work in their computers now too. (Issues like can’t see device, SD card, or see it as 1GB when it is a 2GB card are some of the basic problems with SanDisk SD and Flash USB devices.)

99% of all other SD/Flash brands work fine with Vista, see a pattern yet?

Ok, now on to the Vista Issue - This is where it gets borderline insane…

Vista is the only OS that has internal optimizations to work with SSD read/write array patterns. Even with as ‘crappy’ as the SanDisk people would like everyone to believe Vista handles SSD, Vista actually squeezes about 10-15% more performance out of a hybrid or SSD than XP or other OSes in general. (Sure there are some arguments about how MFRs implemented the SSD array controllers, and SanDisk again seems to be the odd dog out in this discussion.)

So are SanDisk’s problems because of Vista or because of SanDisk’s ‘own’ issues?

I guess everyone here should decide for themselves. A few searches on both Vista and SSD or Flash devices in general and a search or two on SanDisk should put this article in perspective.

This would be a lot less laughable if they used any excuse except Vista, the main OS to have SSD kernel level support and the only OS(Windows) to outperform XP and previous versions of NT on SSD drives.

(Be sure to check out the SanDisk demonstrations that specifically use Vista to ‘show off’ the performance of their drives, that even makes it more goofy.)

Re:Ya, it is Vista’s fault… - by jmpeax (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
DailyTech disagrees with you:

Re:what about linux? - by antifoidulus (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Not exactly what you were looking for, but at least on the macbook air the SSD doesnt seem to improve performance, but there are other reasons to get SSDs besides peformance. For starters, you can create a laptop with almost no moving parts, which can be very nice for certain environments. Plus, the SSD is less likely to have a catastrophic crash than traditional hds(provided you aren’t doing an inordinate amount of writes, all the more reason to have as much ram as possible!)

Famous quote - by Trogre (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

When I read this, a certain quote comes to mind:

“The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.” -Unknown

So perhaps on some plane of reality we might be grateful to the good people at Microsoft for forcing SSD makers to make improvements they might not otherwise have made?

It’s still labor intensive - by MrBlic (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I’ve recently spent a year with the GWT, and just a couple of months with Flex.

I would use Flex to flashify whatever dynamic parts of a standard html page I needed to for my next project. Everything that I’m trying to do in GWT could be done much faster in Flex… and when you are done in Flex, you are really done.

In the GWT, you have to be aware of what html each of the Java GWT widgets equates to… and then in the CSS, you have to work thinking about the resulting html. (FireBug makes it pretty easy.)

Cons for GWT 1.4:

  - Long start-up times: web sites can take 8 seconds to show you their first page as the GWT javascript initializes.

  - One imperfect CSS declaration, and you’re having to debug IE6 / IE7 / Firefox / Safrai issues… Only very plain sites are insulated well from browser incompatibilities.

  - Your site is all-or-nothing GWT. It’s possible to use one GWT app to automate one part of a static page easily… but usually your whole site is 100% GWT, with no other static pages outside of the GWT’s control.

  - The AJAX mechanism on RFC-compliant browsers only lets you make two async requests at once… a third request is queued until one of the first two async requests returns… making it only asynchronous to an extent.

  - I ended up having lots of html in my .java files, and using the HTMLPanel to turn that html into a GWT Widget. There are some parts of a web site that really do make more sense as HTML, and there’s no easy way in GWT to keep the html separate (no templates!?!)

  - The integration of GWT development can be done simply, but it can also grow to mirror the complexity of EJB style Java junk way too easily.

  - IE needs special treatment (worth repeating.)

That said, it’s probably the best way to create a web app for an iPhone right now, since there’s no flash on the iPhone. (Please Adobe, I’d love it if you created an Air run-time for the iPhone!)

Pros of the GWT:

  - it makes it easy to handle the back button and bookmarks.

  - it can scale up to fairly large sites, and the smallest building blocks can be kept clean and small.

  - the end user experience is a good one after that start-up delay.

  - The GWT team has done lots of fantastic work, and in an open exchange… one of my coworkers has committed some changes to one of the supporting libraries.

Flex, on the other hand is designed to appeal to people who are weary from fighting CSS / browser incompatibility issues. In Flex, you still use CSS, but it works the way you would expect all the time. In Flex, you can also skin any compononent to look however you want, and then have a very clean top-level which wires up the various components with their skins. It’s really beautiful… and best of all, when you’re done, You’re done! You don’t even have to test on IE6! The learning curve is about the same, or a little harder, but it’s all forward motion.

My next site is going to be 80% Django templates, with a good dose of mochikit (or dojo) for some dynamic parts, and a few Flex / flash applets sprinkled in where they make sense.

GWT is a good concept - by tangent3 (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Theoretically…

Number of Java developers > Number of Flash developers > Number of Silverlight developers 
Number of Javascript capable browsers > Number of Flash enabled browsers > Number of Silverlight enabled browsers.

Which is a good idea, since Google has created a framework in a language that most developers are familiar with, for a platform that just about all web browsers support out of the box.

However…

Number of PHP hosting sites > Number of ASP hosting sites > Number of Ruby hosting sites > Number of Tomcat hosting sites

Which is probably one of the reasons why it’s not doing so well. 
GWT-RPC is excellent. It allows me to use the same data objects on client and server, and debug both from the same IDE. But it requires a Tomcat server.

Now if GWT is able to compile the server portion to easily deployable PHP code, this could lead to somewhere interesting.

I used it - by Fuzuli (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Because I needed a website with a high level of interaction. The client asked for enabling disabling of various things on a widget, some bells and whistles,but nothing fancy. In the beginning I wrote the code for this using javascript, hand coded the whole thing. But change requests, and much more important than that, browser compatibility problems cost me a lot of time. GWT fixed this aspect. Mostly compatible with all major browsers, and being much more experienced in Java than in js, I became more productive. 
However, I should have limited my implementation to a single widget, and that was my mistake when using GWT. Use a plain jsp page, attach the widget to a div, and be done with it. Instead I’ve built the whole thing on GWT, and later fell in a position where I can not easily add very simple stuff. The usual GWT app is one single js chunk, which navigates to different pages by hiding and showing things on a page. This requires a little getting used to, and I’ve implemented more flexible things like pulling html via remote calls etc. But in general, mixing GWT with a more server side oriented technology (asp.net, jsp, jsf etc…) looks like a better approach now. But when you have to build a slightly complex interface where there are trees, enabled disable compoenents, users adding, removing things to a list etc, GWT serves well. I guess the secret is in the balance, just use it at the necessary level, no more. I could have used Flash, but that’d be a total pain for multiple reasons. (a lot of reasons actually)

So, where’s the question? - by DerekLyons (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You start with the assumption it should be widespread, and are disappointed because it is not. Which leads to the question, what leads you to that assumption?

We are - by Arnold_DeVos (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

We have used it for a fairly big internal application for one of our clients. Given we wanted ajax rather than a typical rich client, the main advantage of GWT was that we could program in the same language end-to-end.

We managed to avoid a lot of boilerplate code by using the same data class definitions (POJO’s) in the server and client. So an object might be created by hibernate from a database record, copied to the client, displayed and edited, copied back to the server, manipulated there and finally updated in the database via hibernate.

The main omission in GWT is a good framework for binding data to UI elements. Because there is no introspection available in the GWT client environment, it is hard to do this in a generic way. We solved the basic problem by generating class and property descriptors during the usual hibernate code generation step. We then created a UI-POJO binding framework that picks up and uses these descriptors. Again avoiding a lot of boilerplate.

Our code for all this is here: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-hibernate/

I’d say GWT worked out pretty well.

Nintendo basically admitted infringement! - by harlows_monkeys (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Nintendo used an interesting strategy. They basically conceded that the Gamecube controllers and Wii Classic controller infringed, and concentrated on making sure that only those would be found to infringe. The Wii remote was also accused, and their goal was to keep that from being found to infringe.

Judge Clark commented on this when denying Nintendo’s motion for remittitur:

It appears to the court that Nintendo made some skillfully calculated decisions regarding trial tactics to protect the Wii Nunchuk with Remote. Sales revenue to date from the Wii Nunchuk totals more than the revenue from the other three products combined. In terms of an on-going royalty or compulsory license, that is where substantial future damages would have been. Having virtually admitted that three ‘old school’ products infringe, and having made no serious attempt to rebut Anascape’s damage calculations, Nintendo is not in a good position to argue that the jury’s verdict is the result of passion or prejudice, or even that it is disproportionate to the injury sustained.

Re:The real creator is Ralph H. Baer. 1967. - by harlows_monkeys (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Nice rant. Now go read the patents in question, and feel real stupid.

Re:Prior Art - by triffid_98 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Consoles in the 1970’s had paddles. That’s not really the same thing.  
The earliest mainstream console with an analog stick I’m aware of was on the (82?) GCE Vectrex, though from your link the infamously terrible 5200 stick predates it by a few months.  
 
Anyway, this patent is about analog sticks with built in rumble packs. Previous controllers (N64,DC) used plug in modules instead. Building one into the controller itself, wow, go go patent trolls.

Analog sticks?? The first generation of consoles (as in 1970) used them almost exclusively, see: This link.

Patent Office penalties - by Stephen Ma (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This looks like another trivial patent. Whatever happened to the old “non-obvious” test for patentability?

Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management.

At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there.

Re:Patent Office penalties - by Harmonious Botch (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I like this line of thought, but you are way too generous. Why penalize with money? Give each patent examiner a strike when their decisions are over turned. After three strikes, kill them. ( Most would retire after two )

Hmmm…this plan could bring accountability to other governmental agencies too. Imagine every congressperson getting a strike when a law that he/she passed was found to be unconstitutional.

Life or Death Violation of K.I.S.S. - by djmoore (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It’s a terrible idea.

1. See the incident a few weeks ago where a soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags—but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks.

2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as “leave without pay and a reprimand in your file”, against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead.

3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole ‘nother level of complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on “kill” not “stun”, but there’s also a question of whether or not it will fire at all—just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop.

4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn’t do as he is told, he will die. I don’t want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it’s only set to stun.

5. Americans have, and should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can’t trust your military or police, the answer isn’t to give them weak weapons—the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces.

[1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for “out of uniform, unbadged civilians”, but nothing comes to mind.

Interesting, but perhaps not what it seems. - by Trespass (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

This technology really doesn’t see best suited for hand weapons. A single external pack of liquid or gaseous propellant really doesn’t seem like a good idea for an infantry weapon. At best it adds a further degree of complication to cleaning and maintaining the weapon, and at worst makes it more dangerous to use than current designs.

Police use? The money would be better spent on more training, I’d suspect.

Now a tank or naval gun might be a very interesting environment for a system like this. Because the propellant would be pumped separately from the projectile, shells would be smaller/lighter than conventional shells of a similar caliber. The autoloader could be smaller and lighter, thereby making the turret smaller. Likewise, it would be easier to compartmentalize the propellant separately from the fighting compartment. The tanks could conform to available space, taking up less interior room. Guns could fire in either a flat or arcing trajectory as well, making them more flexible.

The problem of having the propellant under pressure could be a serious fire hazard, of course…

Rule #1 of Marksmanship - by Butisol (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Do not aim your rifle at anything you do not intend to kill. All it would take is a misfire or accidentally putting it on the wrong setting and you’ve got brains splattered everywhere. I don’t think these fascists thought this the whole way through. Then again, maybe they did :(

Impossible to identify non-lethal attacks - by Alex Belits (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

With such a weapon the supposed target would never be able to distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, and any mistake can turn out deadly — you will either have a cop unknowingly shooting lethal bullets, or fleeing person returning fire with a regular gun, believing that cops are trying to kill him. Or both at the same time. The right thing to do is to go into the opposite direction — making lethal and non-lethal weapons so different that it will be impossible to take one for another even from a distance. Like the difference that exists now between a gun and a club, or between uniforms and equipment of soldiers (who always shoot to kill) and riot police (that is expected to never use anything deadly).

Lund says the technology can be scaled to any size - by greenguy (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

I can’t wait to see the Howitzer that leaves a bruise.

Re:There’s always the opium option… - by Saffaya (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Except it was originally the UK :)

Parent and grand-parent are referring to :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

“speaking for the Chinese government” - by Ritz_Just_Ritz (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

You don’t get to be in a position where you’re the CEO/President of a company who’s standard is “blessed” by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough…corruption/nepotism…cough).

More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.

State level NIH - by gzipped_tar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.

Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of “GBxxxxx” standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email’s encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.

Usually the “invented-here” standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.

Re:here’s a fourth one - by Bob The Cowboy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Extra feature? - by Lazyrust (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
So I take it the UOF standard will allow you to write anything as long as its not political, anti-social or anything about human rights? I wonder if it has its own version of Clippy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy? “I see you are writing an article on human rights. Would you like to see a list of government agencies that are watching you?”

Take it a little further… - by AceMulligan (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

A friend of mine worked at a marketing agency where she worked with a prototype system similar to this, howeverit was even more interactive. At any given time during a show, you could:

1) Hit the pause button

2) Point the remote at the TV which controles a mouse like cursor (think Wii Remote)

3) Point to car\shirt\bag\etc that happened to be on the screen at the time

4) Click it and be directed to a ‘buy it now’ interface

The idea is that companies would pay the show for product placement adding to the revenue of the show and … dare I say… eliminate the need for commercials.

The only problem I foresee with this approach is increasingly blatant product placement within shows which WILL get to the point of being distracting, much like commercials are today.

Comcast Entry - by lymond01 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

If you press something like 888, you get localish car sales. I think there’s one for real estate too. Granted, you can’t press BUY NOW, because you’d really need to hide the remote from your children…

Re:Comcast Entry - by svnt (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Last time I was bored at my friend’s house, I calculated that in less than 15 minutes I could charge off around USD $2000 in porn using just the remote.

Cars aren’t so scary compared with trying to resell pay-per-view porn.

Re:What’s with this news? - by kabz (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Never underestimate the addictiveness of immediate gratification.

It happened a couple of times that I’ve been browsing the ‘App Store’ and just thought “I need that!” and bought it.

Combining TV watching, aspiration to own ‘stuff on TV’, with credit card information (on Amazon), and the ability to buy on a whim, we should see this take off.

Re:What’s with this news? - by HTH NE1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Yeah, like if you like how the killer used the reciprocating saw to dismember the body on CSI:, buy it now with a ThumbsUp on your TiVo remote.

I’m not shitting you: one of the CSI shows had product placement of a reciprocating saw as a dismemberment tool, first shown prominently in the episode (matching blade marks to bone), then the exact same model was advertised during a commercial break.

I won’t like it if it means pop-ups during the show. And I own 8 TiVos (7 subscribed).

“Childhood” is a recent concept - by Rastl (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Is it just me that remembers that the idea of “childhood” is at most a century old? Prior to that they were adults-in-training.

So this entire “Think of the children” crap is more about protecting an idea that these small humans should be shielded from the realities of life instead of educated so they actually do become adults.

I think the new definition of childhood actually extends into the mid-20s because of more societal pressure. They’re in college, they really aren’t responsible yet, etc.

Screw that. It’s the parents job to get those little monsters properly trained to be responsible adults. Heck, overseas ‘kids’ are in professional training schools by they time they’re sixteen. Here they’re still considered helpless babes who can’t do anything without mommy and daddy there to make sure they don’t get ‘damaged’.

Don’t even get me started on that whole self-esteem vs actual value stuff that the schools are promoting.

I realize I’m starting to sound like an old fogey but I guess that’s what I am. I’m tired of seeing these poor young adults with absolutely no idea of what is expected of them or how to achieve it. And all because of some misguided idea that they should be protected while they’re young instead of taught.

I despair.

ID - by Darkness404 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.  
 
It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don’t know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.

Re:The problem isn’t really in parent’s hands - by taustin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Licenses and education required for breeding.

Sure. As long as I, and only I, get to decide who gets the license and who doesn’t. Remember, the country is currently run by jeezmoid fantatics who believe - literally - in forced breeding.

Real penalties for not getting help when you can’t parent your offspring properly.

Sure. With a very precise definition of what constitutes “getting help,” which will involve getting it from some government office (who else could we trust?). Said office will be open 24 hours a day in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, and one hour a month in poor, mostly non-white neighborhoods. Of course.

End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can’t be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness.

Unless, of course, you are a man, in which case you obviously should have no responsibility whatsoever for where you dip your wick. (Yes, that is exactly what you just said - live with the results, but only if you are a woman.)

Oh, and, BTW, get ready for the tax increases, since all those women will be on welfare. Except, of course, you’d rather let them literally starve. I mean, really, it’s not like women are people or anything, right?

Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone?

Hold the parents responsible in exactly what way? Put them in prison? More tax increases. Plus, more tax increases to take care of their other kids.

Undoubtably this means more “community resources” and “social workers” to help failing parents.

Which is to say, more taxes. Lots more taxes. And, if so many parents aren’t capable of raising their kids properly, where are you going to find social workers who can? If we can train social workers to raise other people’s kids, why can’t we use the same money to train parents to raise their own, and then no pay them middle class wages for the rest of their working lives?

But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end.

You appaerently want to put more people in prison. Then, you turn around and decry how many people are in prison.

Hey! - by realmolo (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod!

Love, 
Chris Matthews

Harm to children - by Black Art (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?

I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.

Oh wait… These are Metaphorical Children. They don’t obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.

ohnoitsroland - by Danny Rathjens (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Surely the real news is that Roland actually added correct content to an article rather than simply copied some pieces and made an inflammatory, catchy /. submission to get more hits on his “make money fast by blogging” blog? 
I think it will take more than one or two decent submission to redeem himself of all the crap submissions that caused all the agitation for the ability to filter posts by submitter and the creation of firefox add-ons specifically for filtering him.

A heat sink is going to be crucial - by ArhcAngel (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

to make sure the circuit never reaches 451F

obvious uses.. - by apodyopsis (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
“no, I am a genuine 5$ bill!” 
 
“I will not display the next page of the book until you watch this advert in full” 
 
paper airplane, and UAV in one 
 
smart toilet paper (ugh!) 
 
Q’s wet dream 
 
interactive wall paper 
 
disposable smart ID badges 
 
party hats with a difference.. 
 
“I am your tenth cigarette this hour!” 
 
any more? can anybody think of sinister possible uses?

This is great and everything… - by BitterOldGUy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
but this will put even more demand on forests and the farming of trees - they grow too slow to keep up with the potential demand of these products (Just think of how many electronic devices are made and you know that disposable ones are going to sell like hotcakes!).

What they really need to do is use something very common; like, I don’t know, sand. That’s assuming they can come up with the technology. I know, I know. I’m dreaming.

Re:This is great and everything… - by negRo_slim (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Yeah using a renewable and easily managed resource is obviously a terrible idea… Wait, no it’s a fantastic idea, I grew up surrounded by a managed forest and while it may stunt growth in the short term the fact is it left us with countryside to be proud of and long term economic activities, especially when you read of developments such as this.

Fraud… - by IHC Navistar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The so-called “inventors” of this should be locked up for fraud, since they presented themselves as inventors of something that has existed for years, en masse. This is like trying to patent speadsheets 10 years after they began to be used widespread and claim, on a *legal* document, that you created them, and using you claim of having invented it years after they came into existence as a your basis for filing suit.

This action clearly constitutes:

1) Malicious prosecution, 
2) Reckless Litigation, 
3) Perjury, 
4) Fraud, 
and 
5) Conspiracy to commit fraud.

The shitwit patent clerks that approved this should be fired without pay, forced to pay attorney’s fees for every defendent listed, and prohibited from ever holding a government job again.

They should at least be liable for attorney’s fees, since this was an exceptionally gross, very likely deliberate, misuse of authority and judgement.

THE IDIOTS RESPONSIBLE:

Primary Examiner: Greta Robinson 
Secondary Examiner: Cheryl Lewis …sigh… women.

I wonder how many pairs of shoes they got in return for approval…

Shoot them. - by Just Some Guy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

There has evolved in our society a class of villains who would destroy the republic for love of profit. They are amoral and sociopathic, delighting in the money they steal from its citizens, allowed to thrive by our fatally broken legal system, and in the end relying on the armed strength of the government to confiscate their misgotten gains.

I no longer see a reason why these subpeople should be allowed to walk freely among the citizens of our country. They are guilty of treason by criminal negligence, and have forfeited their right to be considered equals under the law by their utter contempt of the same.

Re:they don’t understand - by locokamil (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Fix’d your quoting

And Slashdot can fix it: - by snl2587 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Ok, guys: the critical date is December 28, 2001.

First person to post prior art gets a big pat on the back!

November 1999 - by edalytical (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=502658&highlight=wishlist

Signal to Noise ratio over time