MrKaos writes "Western Digital seems to be preparing for the onslaught of solid-state drives set to impact its market by developing a 20,000 rpm hard drive. Similar to the VelociRaptor line of drives, the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times." This report out of Taipei is the only word on the rumored WD 20K drive. It's said to be a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" enclosure, for efficiency of cooling — the arrangement the Register enjoyed poking fun at when the 10K drive was upgraded last month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Ever wonder about all those groups claiming Google had a 'search monopoly' (as if there are no other search engines), or worse, coming out against Net Neutrality? CNet has a story about a shady DC lobbying group called LawMedia Group, being paid by Microsoft and Comcast, that is behind many of these attacks. That said, it's a mystery why they weren't able to pay more authoritative groups than the American Corn Growers Association or the League of Rural Voters to weigh in on technical matters. As a computer geek from corn country, I wouldn't solicit their opinion on tractor repair, let alone Internet policy."

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MySkippy writes "I've been a software engineer for just over 10 years, and I've seen a lot of different styles of logging in the applications I've worked on. Some were extremely verbose — about 1 logging line for every 2 lines of code. Others were very lacking, with maybe 1 line in 200 devoted to logging. I personally find that writing debug and informational messages about every 2 to 5 lines works well for debugging an issue, but can become cumbersome when reading through a log for analysis. I like to write warning messages when thresholds or limits are being approached — these tend to be infrequent. I log errors whenever I catch one (but I've never put a "fatal" message in my code, because if it's truly a fatal error I probably didn't catch it). Recently I came across log4j and log4net and have begun using them both. That brings me to my question: how do the coders on Slashdot handle logging in their code?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iminplaya sends along a New Scientist article that begins: "One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger [is] called Gobero... It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush... 'The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two meters tall,' says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago... All traces of the Kiffian vanish abruptly around 8,000 years ago, when the Sahara became very dry for a thousand years. When the rains returned, a different population, the Tenerians, who were of a shorter and more gracile build, based themselves at this site... 'The most amazing find so far is a grave with a female and two children hugging each other. They were carefully arranged in this position. This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,' says Garcea." The research article is at PLoS One.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating: automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits; automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs (with potential applications such as a privacy-enhanced Google Street View); and using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been discussing the plight of Internet radio for some time, as the Copyright Royalty Board imposed royalties that industry observers predicted would prove lethal to the nascent industry. We discussed Web radio's day of silence in protest, which won the industry a reprieve, and the futile efforts to find relief in Congress. Now it's looking as if the last act is indeed close. Death Metal Maniac sends along this Washington Post story with extensive quotes from Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, who said: "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money... We're funded by venture capital. They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken." The article estimates that XM Satellite Radio will pay "about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener." That's 70% of projected revenue for Pandora; smaller players estimate the hit at 100% to 300% of revenue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader sends in a Science News article that begins: "Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably" Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, of course, embrace unpredictability. But many physicists aren't comfortable with that, and are working to develop deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. Conway and Kochen's proof argues that these efforts will be fruitless — unless one is willing to give up human free will, in a very strong sense. The article quotes Conway: "We can really prove that there's no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time. I'm still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ghostlibrary sends a note about Sean Tevis, an information architect in Kansas, who is running for state representative with the help of an xkcd lookalike cartoon and grassroots Net-based fundraising. Tevis had garnered more than 6,000 contributions, most of them small, from around the country, far out-fundraising his opponent. Major news outlets have picked up the story as a harbinger of 21st-century Net-based political campaigning. Reader ghostlibrary adds, "As a bonus, Tevis cites xkcd intentionally (rather than just ripping it off without crediting it) and, well, it's actually funny."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love it when things change!

And so far it looks like the Twitter folk did a good job with the features to support threading.

This is a very lightweight feature on the server side, lots more work in the client, and very similar to the effort required to support payloads. Just three new fields in the struct that represents a status. A pointer to the payload, its MIME type and size so clients know what to display to represent the payload.

I love that identi.ca is matching Twitter feature-for-feature in the API, where it counts; continuing what Steve Gillmor calls their bearhug. Good term.

I also love that Twitter's API seems more responsive since the last time I worked on code that ran against it. Seems all the outages had a payoff, faster service for API calls.

I'm in a good mood, that's for sure, and then I heard that Obamaman raised $51 million in July. I love how they waited to announce theirs until after McSame announced he raised a mere $27 million. Heh. I love it when Dems play nasty. It's about fcuking time.

BTW, back to tech politics, Steve Gillmor is absolutely correct to insist that identi.ca stick to the 140 character limit. If they didn't, users would have to remember to only type 140-character posts if they wanted them to be able to go over a bridge to Twitter. Imagine if all the rail in the US were the same gauge, how much easier things would have been (they're not even a consistent gauge in the NYC subway system). Engineers have a hard time accepting historic limits like this, but it's often a good idea (not always of course).

On a related topic DeWitt Clinton talks about the way FriendFeed handles general RSS sources.

TopSpin writes "Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, has announced that ECMA Technical Committee 39 has abandoned the proposed ECMAScript 4.0 language specification in favor of a more limited specification dubbed 'Harmony,' or ECMAScript 3.1. A split has existed among the members of this committee, including Adobe and Microsoft, regarding the future of what most of us know as JavaScript. Adobe had been promulgating their ActionScript 3 language as the next ECMAScript 4.0 proposal. As some point out, the split that has prevented this may be the result of Microsoft's interests. What does the future hold for Mozilla's Tamarin Project, based on Adobe's open source ActionScript virtual machine?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years people have been saying that they will watch things in HD, that they would never ordinarily watch. In the 12 years I have been involved in Internet Video in one form or another, I have yet to have anyone ever tell me they will watch something just because its on the internet.

Thats not to say people wont surf the net and sample something they otherwise would not watch. Thats what the internet video aggregation sites are all about. Sampling things you never would other wise watch.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear, while more people are "snacking on Internet video", the real "meal" continues to be TV.

It appears like the Olympics are proving this out and presenting an interesting conclusion, people are starting to define the content they want to watch on each platform. The Platform is the Message to content creators.

Without question, people want to watch big events on their big HDTVs. There is a reason why 30pct of homes and quickly growing now have HDTVs.....they like to watch them. With a 73" HDTV from Mitsubishi down to about $2200 bucks, its easy to see why and the pricing of all HDTVs continuing to fall, its a trend thats not going to end anytime soon. Watching an event like the Olympics, just about any sporting event and even big shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars benefit. ESPN has issued research saying their ratings across the board are up 47 to 50pct every month in HDTV households.

I think the real question of the Olympics isnt "whats the impact of the Internet", its "whats the impact on viewing of HDTV ?". If and when NBC releases numbers regarding ratings in HDTV households, I wouldnt be shocked if the numbers are 75pct higher. People with big, beautiful TVs that they spent a lot of money on, want a reason to watch them. This could go down as the year the Olympics reinvigorated TV.

if programmers understand that people will watch different programs on different platforms, we can stop playing the game of trying to replace TV.

Programmers will create content differently for every platform, from cellphone, even to movies. In the movie world , its pretty simple to see that big movies, with big special effects look great and sound great in theaters. Same with 3D. Thats an experience even a 73" HDTV cant recreate fully

Events look great on HDTVs, whether they are sports, shows or movies.

Quick hits and short clips are great for the internet. Sure some people will watch shows that perform better on other platforms on the net. We all use what we have available when its our only choice. Which is why so much video consumption online is in the office. Its our only choice.

replays and breaking news and anything that helps us kill time are what we will use our MIDS, PDAs, and phones for.

The platform is the message from viewers to content providers.

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mikeselectricstuff writes "HP's 20b business consultant calculator isn't the sort of thing that would normally interest the average Slashdotter, but HP has released a Devkit for it, including schematics and source for a sample application, and they appear to be actively encouraging people to re-purpose it. Maybe the engineers thought a business calculator was just too boring for their hardware? The calculator is based on an Atmel ARM chip, and it has a bootloader and JTAG interface to allow user applications to be written and downloaded, turning a boring calculator into anything you can do within the constraints of the hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps playing for them while the tune goes mum for the rest of their bets.

Those are potentially good-enough odds for a VC to make a decent return for their investors. Lots of VC’s can’t even pass that bar, though, and end up net-negative for their backers. But let’s just take the guys who do make it. What’s their seal of approval worth?

According to Adam from Heroku, it’s much more valuable to get the peg from these gamblers than actually having sales in the shop:

When you’re doing your own thing, you have very little feedback on whether your path makes sense. You’ve got users/customers, sure. But for any random thing you might build, you’ll always be able to find some weirdos that want it, and maybe are even willing to pay for it. Whether those people represent the vanguard of a sustainable customer base, or whether they are a niche too tiny to build a real business on, is impossible to tell early on.

But convincing investors of the viability of your idea – enough to place a monetary wager on it – provides early confirmation that you’re on a viable path. It may even provide some course-corrective feedback. This is why VC-backed companies tend to get more respect than non, all other things being equal. A firm whose sole purpose is predicting technology trends believes that there is a reasonable chance that this company’s product will be the next big thing.

It’s funny, I have the exact opposite take from the same indicators.

Real customers who use their own money to pay for your products seem like a much better, much more real confirmation that you’re doing something right than getting pegged by a VC using other people’s money to fish for 1-in-10 chances of a monster trout.

To me, convincing a VC to give you money only confirms that they think your outfit is capable of having a long shot of making a big sale down the line. And that they can dilute you successfully enough that they’ll get the lion’s share of the spoils. As a confirmation of a real business? Meh.

Separate users from customers to determine success
I think the confusion comes from how callously users and customers are conflated. I absolutely agree that if you’re just giving away your shit for free, then interest is only an indirect indicator for possible success at best. Who knows if these freeloaders can actually be made to turn a profit? Better take the money upfront and run for the exit before you have to find out!

But if you stop thinking so much about users (or eyeballs if we’re talking early 2000s) and start focusing on customers, the game opens up. Real customers not only confirm directly that you have a compelling product (rather than the by-proxy way of a VC), they also help fund your operation from the get-go.

You don’t need outside bets to launch a web business
Most web startups don’t have high costs outside of labor that can’t be linked at least linearly (and preferably better than that!) to the growth in customers. If you need lots of servers, it’s presumably because lots of people like your product and if you’re treating your users as customers, that means you’ll be having plenty of dough to bake a profitable cake.

All that being said, it’s certainly possible that being on the receiving end of a VC bet can lead you to the jackpot. The wheels in Vegas wouldn’t keep turning if some people didn’t see a big bucks ringing of cha-ching sometimes. So if the idea of trusting VCs over customers appeals to you, just roll your dice and hope you don’t roll seven!

Not long ago, we discussed Cassini's mission to "skeet-shoot" Saturn's moon Enceladus in order to take high-resolution pictures as close to the surface as possible. Well, NASA scientists found what they were looking for. A newly released mosaic shows 300-meter-deep fractures in Enceladus' surface which are the source of enormous icy plumes that periodically erupt into space, reaching hundreds of kilometers from the moon's surface. Another picture shows one of the fractures in closer detail.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal Maniac brings us a story from the New York Times about a team of scientists who were able to relate genetic differences to geographical origins. Countries such as Germany, Austria, and France occupy the central area of the genetic map, with Italy, Finland, and the UK being relative outliers. Quoting: "All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. ... Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago." Update: 08/16 15:11 GMT: Reader iminplaya points out the source article, which contains the technical details behind the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Judge Faith Hochberg has denied a preliminary injunction sought by the Programmers Guild to put a hold on a controversial 'emergency' rule change by the Department of Homeland Security to permit foreign students to work continuously in the US for two-and-a-half years after graduation without an H-1B visa. Hochberg indicated she failed to see how an increased labor supply could result in wage depression for engineers and computer workers. That seems disingenuous, since in Andaya v. Citizens Mortgage Corporation, Judge Hochberg recently saw first-hand how a US employer got away with paying an H-1B computer engineer as little as $15,000 to do a job with a 'prevailing wage rate' of $41,000. In that case, Hochberg ruled against Filipino H-1B visa holder Almira Andaya, arguing that 'nonpayment of wages as listed on the H-1B visa petition ... does not raise a substantial question of federal law.'"

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "John McCain has finally released a technology platform. Most of it is the same old stuff; lower corporate taxes, protect children from porn, and avoid Internet regulation unless 'necessary.' Alas, in his view, helping the RIAA's War on Sharing is necessary to stop the 'global epidemic' of piracy, while Net Neutrality is something he 'does not believe in.' Ars Tec