An anonymous reader writes "This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator. The person who discovered this security hole claims that XP, 2000, 2003 and NT are not vulnerable to it; only Windows Vista is."

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Sculptor Ageli Batle makes elaborate, highly detailed sculptures of everyday objects in graphite that can then be used as gorgeous pencils -- you can write with anything from an antler to an olive branch to a callalily or a wing. They write with surprising smoothness and accuracy and are a joy to hold and behold. Link

Titus Germanicus writes "If you're thinking about open sourcing a project in the near future, Mozilla might be the perfect blueprint to follow. At last week's Mesh 2008 conference in Canada, Mike Shaver, chief technology evangelist and founding member at Mozilla, and John Resig, a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla — two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser — listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project. Shaver said in this interview that because the Web is intended for everybody, the level same openness should be shared with Firefox's open source contributors."

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Iddo Genuth writes "Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the "Phoenix Mars Lander" touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving at its destination, the Phoenix will begin its exploration of our intriguing neighbor planet, in a mission to help astronomers resolve at least some of the many questions regarding Mars. The key question remains: can the Red Planet support some form of life?" Hella grats to our nerd brethren- you looked great on the Science channel. Yes I'm watching this live. Can't wait to see what happens next.

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marcan writes "The Homebrew Channel is a tool that can be installed on any Wii (no hardware mods required) that lets you run unsigned homebrew software from an SD card, or upload executables via WiFi or a USBGecko. We've tried to make it friendly for users with a simple GUI, and powerful for developers with direct upload features and reloading which we hope will make testing less painful. The channel can be installed using a DVD if you have a modchip, or using an exploit in Zelda: Twilight Princess which only requires an SD card (or any future hack or booting method). Once installed, it simply shows up as a Channel on the Wii Menu, just like any official channel. Hopefully, this and other recent developments (such as the upcoming devkitPPC r15 toolchain, much improved and with many bugs fixed) will help make the Wii an appealing platform for DIY software. And yes, it also runs Linux."

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AFP has a good summary of the pre-touchdown jitters the Phoenix Mars Lander crew is living through. The spacecraft has been under way for 10 months. If the landing goes according to plan — and only about half of the three dozen such attempts have — mission controllers at the University of Arizona will receive radio signals from the Martian surface at 23:53 GMT. Here's the Mars mission home. You can (in theory) track the lander here, but at the moment the JPL Solar System Simulator is "experiencing technical difficulties."

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Among the minor tweaks we introduced with the new Basecamp project switcher are some larger link targets at the top of the screen. Since then I’ve been paying extra attention to link target size. Here are a couple examples of generous link targets for inspiration.

Threadless has featured large link targets on its main navigation for a long time. Here’s what the nav looks like:

As a user, when you glance at this nav, you might imagine the specific pixel areas that you need to target like this:

But when you move your mouse toward the nav, you’ll be pleased to discover the actual link targets are much larger:

The end result is a feeling of comfort. It’s just really easy to click the links. It feels like the links are working with you instead of against you.

Flor does the same thing with their links. Here’s the navigation:

Here are the targets you might aim for:

And here are the actual targets:

You might have noticed both of these sites use images for their navigation links. The same effect is easy to achieve with HTML links. Just use padding where you might have had whitespace.

Normally you might have white space between your links like this:

<div class="nav">
  <a href="">First link</a> <a href="">Second link</a>
</div>

Instead, use clickable padding on the anchors to create space between them:

<style>
  div.nav a { padding: 5px; }
</style>

<div class="nav">
  <a href="">First link</a><a href="">Second link</a>
</div>

Note how the anchors touch each other with no white space in the second example.

We do this in quite a few places in our apps and think it’s one of those small things that makes a big difference.

FiReaNGeL alerts us to a huge development in virology and microscopy: by using a specialized microscope that only illuminates a cell's surface, scientists at Rockefeller University have watched, in real time, hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together in a living cell to form a single particle of HIV-1. A video is available on Rockefeller's front page. "By zeroing in at the cell's surface, the team became the first to document the time it takes for each HIV particle, or virion, to assemble: five to six minutes. 'At first, we had no idea whether it would take milliseconds or hours,' says Jouvenet. 'We just didn't know.' 'This is the first time anyone has seen a virus particle being born,' says Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. 'Not just HIV,' he clarifies, 'any virus.'"

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circletimessquare writes "The New York Times has a gushing portrait of Shigeru Miyamoto. His creative successes have spanned almost 30 years, from Donkey Kong, to Mario (as well known as Mickey Mouse around the world, the story notes), to Zelda, to the Wii, and now to Wii Fit — which according to some initial rumors is selling out across the globe in its debut. The article has some gems of insight into the man's thinking, including that his iconic characters are an afterthought. Gameplay comes first, and the characters are designed around that. Additionally, his fame and finances and ego are refreshingly modest for someone of his high regard and creative stature: 'despite being royalty at Nintendo and a cult figure, he almost comes across as just another salaryman (though a particularly creative and happy one) with a wife and two school-age children at home near Kyoto. He is not tabloid fodder, and he seems to maintain a relatively nondescript lifestyle.'"

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Ant writes in with news that an amusement park in the UK is trying out a ban on smartphones and PDAs, with the intent to enable families actually to have fun together. The press release says that from May 25 to June 1, adults found using a PDA will be asked to drop it off at a "PDA Drop Off Zone" — no word on what happens if they refuse. But both the Sun and BoingBoing, which picked up their brief story, strike a more ominous note with the claim that "special wardens" will confiscate the devices. If the experiment is deemed a success the park may make the ban permanent.

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An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the dot-ca domain, plans to change its WHOIS policy to better protect domain name registrants. Quoting the Canadian Press: '[Law Professor Michael] Geist said the changes have raised the ire of law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, who have used the Whois search to track down sexual predators and copyright violators.' Despite this, the organization seems committed to following through with the reforms." Geist also gave a talk recently about digital advocacy; the effectiveness of using modern technology to raise concerns and share ideas about issues such as privacy and copyright law.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

palegray.net writes "A consortium of large telecommunications companies are competing to deliver high speed wireless Internet access over frequencies allocated for educational use. The schools who control the frequencies, long frustrated by difficulties in obtaining cost-effective net access, find the tables turned in their favor. From the LATimes: '... technological advances have made the airwaves easier to use — and much more lucrative to hold. For Cal State Los Angeles, Long Beach, Dominguez Hills, Fullerton and Pomona, as well as schools and religious institutions around the country, holding a license to the spectrum as the wireless industry expands has been like finding a winning lottery ticket in a dresser drawer. The agreements funnel thousands and even millions of dollars annually to schools at a time of budget cutbacks and economic slowdown.'

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zentechno writes "While cleaning out some very old boxes in a long-untouched closet, I discovered my first supply of PC games, some of which came out when 386s were new. While there's almost zero use for these, I still think the cover art is quite cool. I found the original Zork, its sequels, Enchanter, and Sorcerer from InfoCom, Star Trek: 'The Kobayashi Alternative' from Simon & Schuster, Pool of Radiance and Eye of the Beholder from SSI, Loom by Lucas Games, Nuclear War from New World, Annals of Rome and FireZone from PSS, Sidewinder from EA, and Defender of the Crown from Mindscape, to name many. I loved these games, and wonder if there's any sort of serious collector's market out there as exists for vinyl album art — or is it just a personal thing?" I know I'll always hang on to my copies of Star Control II and Think Quick! from when I was a wee PC gamer. What's still rattling around in your closet?

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The MPAA won judgments totaling $4M against two sites which merely link to infringing content. They're not arguing that it's an infringement of their distribution right, like the RIAA has with their 'making available' argument. Instead, they got the sites for 'contributory copyright infringement', just like RIAA v. LimeWire. To translate all that legalese into English, search engines which primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the US. That applies even if the sites in question do not host any infringing materials, participate in, or encourage the infringement done by their users. And, even honoring DMCA notices in order to take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions hasn't prevented the **AA from suing."

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OK, maybe I can't say for certain why the NFL opted out of their current CBA. But what I can speak to is the problem with salary caps as they are structured in the NHL, NFL and NBA, so that sports fans can understand why the NFL is doing what it is doing and why it could and probably will happen in any league governed by a salary cap.

The basic structure of a salary cap is that the revenues of the league are aggregated into a total pool, call it football, basketball or hockey related income.

Every league is different in the specifics of which revenue is included. Generally its 100pct of national revenue, such as national TV and marketing deals and the net margin dollars of nationally sold merchandise at the top level. In addition to the national revenue, the collective bargaining agreements for each league specify which local revenues from each team are added to the pool as well.

The salary cap for the league is then calculated by multiplying a percentage of revenue specified by the collective bargaining agreement and then dividing that result by the number of teams. So if a hypothetical league has 2 billion in cap related revenue and the multiplier is 50pct , then you take (2 billion x 50pct ) and then divide by 20 teams to get a cap of 50mm dollars per team.

Its a simple concept. The idea behind having a cap is that when total revenues for the league go up, then the amount of money available to players should go up as well. Makes perfect sense for a hypothetical league where BOTH local and national revenues per team are consistently equal.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, while national revenues per teams are split equally, the amount of revenues generated locally per team varies enormously market by market. This is a huge problem for salary cap based leagues.

Why does this create a problem ? Because in the biggest of big markets, significant increases in revenues can increase the value of the salary cap by more dollars than some other teams can increase their local revenues.

So in our hypothetical league, lets say there is a team in Metropolis, a big city, that just signed a TV deal for its preseason games, increased their ticket prices, and added a huge video board , that when all is said and done, for the next season, will add a total of $ 40mm in revenue.

Another big market just opened their new stadium, which now seats 100k people and has 200 suites that they are charging an arm and a leg for because their teams is on a roll, having made the playoffs the last couple years, with what appears to be a bright future. In this first year of the stadium, they expect to add 100mm in local revenues more than they had last year.

In BFE, one of the smaller markets in the league, they just had a terrible season. Although they have a stadium they moved into just 8 years ago, they have no pricing elasticity for tickets or advertising, and in fact their attendance is declining. As a result, despite the additional TV revenue they will get from the new TV deal the league has signed, they will see a decline in total revenues of 5mm dollars this year and if they don't have a good season, revenues could decline further in future years.

For the sake of this example, we will assume the other 17 teams had a net revenue impact of zero

Overall the business for this hypothetical league is good. Their national TV deal just renewed, and merchandise and advertising sales are great. At the national level, total league revenues will increase 5mm per team, or 100mm dollars.


So in this hypothetical example, to figure out the how the cap would change, we would take the 40mm increase that Metropolis had , add it to the 100mm dollar change for the 2ND big market team, add to it the 100mm dollar increase from the new national TV deal and then subtract the 5mm decline that BFE had, for a net increase of 235mm for the league. Then to get the salary cap increase, we multiply that number by 50pct ($117.50) and divide by 20 teams. So the salary cap would increase by $ 5. 875k from 50mm to 55.875mm per team.

As you can quickly figure out, for the teams with new, big market size TV and stadium deals, the increase in the cap is no big deal. For those teams from BFE, who don't have pricing elasticity or markets that can support stadiums that seat 100k, things are not so good. Every year seems to bring an increase in the salary cap , which their local fans and their own desire to win pressures them to spend up to, yet their total revenues never seem to keep up with.

Add to this pressure, the design of how contracts are structured so that teams which perform the worst and have the least pricing elasticity, get the highest draft picks and must write out checks for huge signing bonuses for their rookies, who they have no idea whether or not they will preform. Its not that they don't want the high draft picks, but there is no question that their financial risk equation escalates dramatically.

These same teams, also feel the greatest pressure to sign new free agents. Again, which carry significant financial risk with big upfront payments, and on field performance risk. There is no template for winning and the stress levels go way up when its eating up every dollar you have to try to win.

At this point, most fans argue that this shouldn't matter because teams in the NFL, oops, I mean our hypothetical league are making huge sums of money, so what does it matter ? Honestly, I don't know if 100pct of the teams are making money or not. What I do know is that with new stadiums being built in Dallas and New York that the local revenue numbers are so huge that the NFL had to ask that some of the NY stadium money be excluded from the cap calculations. There is no way for small market teams to be able to keep up with the big markets. Their sheer market size allows them to increase revenues, which in turn increases the cap by a magnitude that the small markets won't ever be able to keep up with.

This becomes more evident when you see a small market team like Buffalo smartly sell some of their home games to a much larger city of Toronto.

Which is exactly why, IMHO, the NFL opted out of their agreement. The small market teams see the writing on the Income Statement and Balance Sheet walls. They see the look in their bankers bloodshot eyes. Things will get worse before they get better, so better plan on changing things now.

Have the days of salary caps come and gone ?

The salary cap was a very smart move during an era when the scale and growth of national TV and other national league revenue sources more than compensated for the variances in local revenues of small and large markets. In those days, whatever money came to teams, regardless of source seemed to go right back out of their pockets. The cap helped protect us sports owners from ourselves, equally..

Is a salary cap still a smart move ? Or is it better to be cap less, like baseball, but with a very strong tax and revenue sharing program ?

The bottom line problem for current cap systems is that one teams financial success can have a significantly negative impact on the financial performance of another. Rather than enjoying the success of the new stadiums in the big markets, or the big local TV or advertising deals they sign, small markets are shell shocked by the annual increases in the cap they create. Increases that they can't possibly keep pace with.

When this happens, teams have to "give up" on their players and seasons more often in order to try to rebuild, which in turn hurts not only the fans and the league, but also the players as higher priced players lose slots to lower priced and younger players.

That's not a good situation for anyone. Its a huge problem that needs to be solved.

A cap can work if its based on national rather than local revenues. Even if its a higher percentage of those revenues than is currently paid. If only national revenues are applied to cap calculations then the change in the cap available to teams every year impacts all teams equally. if a team can manage their local business successfully, they will make money. If the teams succeed, the league succeeds and the national money will grow and the money paid to players will grow at the same pace.


Can a league survive without a cap ? Yes, but I think it must be a league where it takes more than 1 or 2 players to lead a team to a championship. Otherwise, the richest teams can just buy those 2 players, with a 3rd as insurance, which means the competitive balance of the league is purely dependent on finances. That is not a good position to be in. Baseball and football are 2 leagues that I can think can survive (as baseball has) quite nicely without a cap. The NBA and NHL would struggle competitively without them.

Hopefully this helps explain, at least from my perspective, why the NFL would opt out of its CBA when its doing so well

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pacopico writes "The Register has a report on an intriguing Las Vegas-based company which is building one of the world's largest data centers called the SuperNAP. The company — Switch Communications — claims it will be the most densely packed and power efficient data center ever built. The report notes, 'Legend has it that the company managed to acquire what was once meant to be Enron's broadband trading hub for a song. This gave Switch access to more than twenty of the primary carrier backbones in a single location. Switch tied this vast network to existing data center hosting facilities and attracted military clients, among others, to its Las Vegas shop.'"

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Joi Ito, a shrewd Japanese/American venture capitalist, has written a great little blog-post about why he's not so hot to invest in the "mobile Internet." Basically, when a heavily regulated, big stupid phone company controls your "internet," then your ability to innovate and do cool stuff and make money is entirely predicated on the regulator's or the stupid phone company's willingness to allow that to happen. So if you're making money by disrupting something that matters to the phone company or one of its entrenched partners, forget about it.

The reason that we have vibrant startup driven innovation is because the Internet is open by nature. Anyone can participate without asking permission and anyone can compete with anyone else at every layer of the stack. This DNA of open and free competition (except for the occasional semi-monopoly) is what allows startups like Google to come in and displace incumbents. If it weren't for the Internet, I'm positive that the telcos would have determined that it was the most efficient that THEY design and operate the "online directories"...

In 2006 in Japan, mobile advertising was only $330M vs Content (Ringtones, Song-tones, Games) at $2.2B and Commerce at $4.7B. (http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper/eng/WP2007/2007-index.html) Although all of us are experimenting with advertising and advertising is increasing on mobile, the overwhelming percentage of money spent on mobile devices goes to paying for and the collection of payments for a small number of not so innovative products from a small number of providers.

Link