mAriuZ writes "Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we've bundled Patrick Michaud's Rakudo (thats the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next months release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress. The second new feature is a toolkit for starting your own compiler. Max Mohun built a prototype several months ago, and we've added a stripped-down version for now that builds the skeleton of a compiler for you using the Parrot Compiler Tools. I mentioned the LOLCODE compiler in What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on Their Christmas Vacation; this is how Simon and Company were able to get LOLCODE up and running so quickly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kylemonger writes "A blogger at the Seattle PI has interviewed a Microsoft insider about the Xbox 360 project. The insider purports to have the background story on the 'red ring of death' (RROD) failures and why they are so common. 'RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this. And many of the failures were obviously infant mortality, where they work when they leave the factory and fail early in use. The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life. There are also other significantly high failure rates in other areas, like the DVD.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

plasmacutter writes "The EFF is raising the alarm regarding provisions injected into a bill to renew federal funding for universities. These new provision call for institutions of higher learn to filter their internet connections and twist student's arms over 'approved' digital media distribution services. 'Under said provision: Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable — (2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity. Similar provisions in last year's bill did not survive committee, it appears however that this bill is headed toward the full house for vote.' Responding to recriminations over this threat to university funding, an MPAA representative claims federal funds should be at risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks." We've previous discussed this topic, as well as similar issues.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After listening to Meet The Press today I'm almost ready to support Barak Obama for President in 2008. Here's why.

arbitraryaardvark writes "NASA's Messenger probe flew past Mercury at a distance of 125 miles. The spacecraft took hundreds of pictures during the pass, updating photos from the now 30-year-old Mariner mission. According to an article at the International Business Times, the probe will eventually settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011. 'The images obtained by the $446 million MESSENGER mission (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) this week contain some of those unexplored areas. One image released Saturday was taken after Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury last week. In the photos released this week, scientists have observed unexplored cratered areas of the planet. On Monday, Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury yet, aiming for new discoveries. Among its goals is to discover if Mercury has ice water in its polar craters and to complete the mapping of the whole planet.' Meanwhile here on Earth, a joint EU/Japan probe with an ion drive is set to head towards Mercury sometime in 2013."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brad Eleven writes "The AP reports that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has invoked executive privilege to justify withholding information in its response to a lawsuit. The state of California is challenging the agency's decision to block their attempt to curb the emissions from new cars and trucks. In response, the EPA has delivered documents requested by the Freedom of Information Act for the discovery phase of the lawsuit — but the documents are heavily redacted. That is, the agency has revealed that it did spend many hours meeting to discuss the issue, but refuses to divulge the details or the outcomes of the meetings. Among the examples cited, 16 pages of a 43-page Powerpoint presentation are completely blank except for the page titles. An EPA spokesperson used language similar to other recent claims of executive privilege, citing 'the chilling effect that would occur if agency employees believed their frank and honest opinions and analysis expressed as part of assessing California's waiver request were to be disclosed in a broad setting.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

russoc4 writes "Most people who play the United States Army's freeware FPS sit through training simulations so that they may be able to get into the action and rack up some kills. The medic skills learned in the training allow you to heal teammates in the game, but it seems that they also apply in real life situations. According to Wired and the America's Army forums, 'a North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America's Army.'" See? We learn things from videogames! Feign Death works sometimes, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kyokushi writes "Gizmondo reports that some specifications of a new ultralight Lenovo X300 have been leaked. 'It appears that Lenovo have themselves a new ultralight X300 series Thinkpad — and outside of the price and release date, we have all of the specs that you need to know. At a glance, some of the major features include: a 13.3-inch LED backlit 1440X900 screen, an ultralight 2.5 pound form factor, and Intel Merom Santa Rosa Dual Core CPU (2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ), a 64 GB SSD, up to 4GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 memory, and 4 hours of battery life.' If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The November, 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics details the birth of the cup-holder in all its miraculous, futuristic convenience:

Travel snacks can be enjoyed while the car is in motion with a dashboard tray which prevents cold drinks or water glasses from tipping over. The tray hangs from two cords which are held on the dashboard by suction cups. Bottles or glasses rest on two disks which are suspended below the tray on chains. When not in use, the tray can be folded into small space for storage in the glove compartment.

Link

In previous versions of FlickrFan you could only see today's picture downloads and code updates on the Events page.

A feature request came in saying it would be nice to be able to go back in time, and I totally agreed. That's the way it works in version 0.43, released this morning.

Details, screen shot.

An anonymous reader writes "My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on. I know this because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of 'being green', has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? You could potentially eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BotnetZombie writes "Wired tells the quite sad but very interesting stories of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Initially self-educated, both had the idea to create huge fact databases from which AI agents could feed, hoping to eventually have something that could reason at a human level or better. McKinstry leveraged the dotcom era to grow his database. Singh had the backing of MIT, where he eventually got his PhD and had been offered a position as a professor alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Sadly, personal life was more troublesome for them, and the story ends in a tragic way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's something coool -- I was able to give the NYTimesRiver an icon on the iPhone desktop.

Russell Beattie explains how it works.

Pretty simple. You just put a file named apple-touch-icon.png in the top level of the website. It must be a 57-by-57 png image.

If you added the icon before this update, you might want to do it again to get the graphic version.

Muhammar writes "As you may have heard by now, both engines of the Boeing 777 aircraft flight BA038 suddenly cut off without warning at very low altitude and low speed during autopilot-assisted landing at Heathrow. A prompt reaction of the pilots prevented the stall and saved all lives aboard. The crash landing short of the runway tore off the landing gear on impact, and the fuselage plowed a long, deep gouge in the grass. With the investigation ongoing, the available information points to an electronic control problem as the most likely cause of the sudden engine power loss."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weather Storm brings us an InformationWeek article about Wal-Mart's push for suppliers to RFID tag their product shipments. Wal-Mart seems to have lost patience in waiting for its suppliers to adopt the inventory tracking initiative. From InformationWeek: "The retailer says that beginning Jan. 30, it will charge suppliers a $2 fee for each pallet they ship to its Sam's Club distribution center in Texas that doesn't have an RFID tag. The charge is to cover Sam's Club's cost to affix tags on each pallet, says a Wal-Mart spokesman. The retailer hasn't taken such a strong-arm approach yet with the more than 15,000 suppliers that still haven't complied with its request to tag pallets and cases headed for its Wal-Mart stores. Instead, it seems focused on turning its 700-store Sam's Club warehouse-outlet division into an example of RFID supply chain technology in action, down to requiring item-level RFID in 22 distribution centers by 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Learning to Play Using Low-Complexity Rule-Based Policies: Illustrations through Ms. Pac-Man, a new paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30 details a very successful experiment in teaching an AI to play Ms Pac Man:

The researchers had agents play 50 games using different RL methods. They found that methods utilizing the cross-entropy policies performed better than methods that were hand-crafted. As they explained, the basic idea of cross-entropy is that it selects the most successful actions, and modifies the distribution of actions to become more peaked around these selected actions.

During the game, the AI agent must make decisions on which way to go, which are governed by ruled-based policies. When the agent has to make a decision, she checks her rule list, starting with the rules with highest priority. In Ms. Pac-Man, ghost avoidance has the highest priority because ghosts will eat her. The next rule say that if there is an edible ghost on the board, then the agent should chase it, because eating ghosts results in the highest points.

One rule that the researchers found to be surprisingly effective was the rule that the agent should not turn back, if all directions are equally good. This rule prevents Ms. Pac-Man from traveling over paths where the dots have already been eaten, resulting in no points.

Link (via /.)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel reports on the latest in rock-n-roll gadgetry, the attitudinal Fucking Fucker all-tube guitar amp from Metasonix, which comes with many nihilistic humor touches: "The G-1000 consists of two totally independent amplifiers, with very different preamp sections. One channel is called the HAPPY channel. The other is called the ANGRY channel." Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Practical Archivist (Sally J.) sez, "As long as we're celebrating Rosie the Riveter in all her glorious variety, I'd like to add this North Vietnamese welder to the mix. According to the caption, she is a 'worker of the Electrical Motor Workshop in Hanoi.' This photo is from a collection of North Vietnamese propaganda housed at the University of Wisconsin. I worked on it when I was in library school nearly 15 years ago. Glad to discover it's still up, although it seems funny how few of the photos I was allowed to include." Link (Thanks, Sally!)

See also: Rosie the Riveter: one of many finds in that LoC Flickr set

In a two-part column in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Robert Silverberg tells the incredible story of the Cleve Cartmill affair: in 1944, John W Campbell published a story by the writer Cleve Cartmill that laid out an eeriy accurate depiction of how the atom bomb would work, prompting a panicked -- and sometimes comical -- intelligence investigation into a putative conspiracy of science fiction writers:

Campbell provided the Military Intelligence man with Cartmill’s address–in Manhattan Beach, California. The link to the top-secret Manhattan Project based in Los Alamos was too obvious to overlook. Riley sent word to the California branch office of Intelligence that Cartmill should be placed under immediate surveillance; plainly he knew too much about our hush-hush A-bomb research. Who had tipped him off ? Both Cartmill and Campbell would need further watching.

And before long it began to seem as though a whole network of science fiction writers might be involved–a chain of conspirators. For example, the report continues, "It is established that Cartmill is very friendly with [ ], Retired U.S.N.R., who is associated with [ ] at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. This [ ] formerly was doing research work at Columbia University, and he is said to have accepted some material thought to be atomic copper from [ ] in order to measure it in the mass spectroscope at Columbia University. [ ] was advised by [ ] that the device was broken. He never received the material back from [ ]. One [ ] who has written for [ ] Magazine is said to be working with [ ] also. The possibility of the transmittal through [ ] to Cartmill has not so far been resolved. . . ."

Well, now it can be told, and you are quite familiar with the names of these sinister people. The retired naval man was Robert A. Heinlein. His Philadelphia Navy Yard associate, the former Columbia man, was Isaac Asimov. The one who sent the copper to Asimov and never got it back was Will F. Jenkins, who wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of Murray Leinster. The blanked-out magazine was Astounding, and the other writer working at the Navy Yard with Heinlein and Asimov was L. Sprague de Camp.

Link to part one, Link to part two (via Making Light)

See also: Pulp SF magazine's role in atom bomb