1sockchuck writes "The USPTO has issued a 'non-final determination' refusing Dell's request to trademark the term 'cloud computing' (we discussed the application earlier), finding that the term is generic and 'therefore incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for applicant's services.' According to Data Center Knowledge, 'Dell has the option of filing a response to submit arguments to dispute the USPTO examiner's findings.'" Here is the USPTO's ruling. A week and a half ago the PTO cancelled its 'notice of allowance' for the mark, a move little remarked upon at the time.

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plantsdoitsocanwe writes "An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis, paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionize the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen — touted as the clean, green fuel of the future — cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale." This was a laboratory demonstration only and the researchers say they need to bring up the efficiency.

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An anonymous reader writes "CTV reports on how Canadians are fighting back against the Canadian DMCA. Led by Michael Geist, the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group is nearing 90,000 members. There are local chapters, a YouTube contest, wikis, and people writing letters and organizing rallies against the copyright bill. Geist said, 'When you get tens of thousands of Canadians speaking out like this, there's big political risk for any political party who chooses to ignore it.'"

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Hugh Pickens writes "Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common as products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified, and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made. But the NYTimes is running an interesting essay highlighting a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands. 'A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,' says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. 'You can't simulate everything.' Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention, and making refinements with your own hands means 'you have to be extremely self-critical,' says Richard Sennett, whose book The Craftsman examines the importance of skilled manual labor. Even in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. 'You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn't exist,' says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab."

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perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."

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A commonplace of cosmologists who argue the anthropic principle is the assumption that if any or a few of the constants of nature took on an even slightly different value, life could not have evolved — perhaps even stars and galaxies would not form. Science News reports on a new calculation showing that, to the contrary, star formation could happen in up to one-quarter of universes with different values of three important constants. "In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly," said the researcher, Fred Adams. "...calculations suggest that, contrary to some previous claims, stars are not only common in our cosmos but are also ablaze in myriad other universes, where the laws of physics may be drastically different... Had Adams found that the range of parameters that allowed for stars was very small, that would have suggested that the laws of physics in our universe have been 'fine-tuned' to allow for star formation... Instead, Adams' study shows that our universe doesn't seem particularly special in that regard."

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mwilliamson writes "As I sit reading my morning paper online I still cannot view the embedded videos due to auto-detection of my Flash player not working. One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser. I remember sometime back reading that Adobe has a very small development team (possibly only one) working on the Linux port of Flash. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control. GNASH is nice, but it just isn't there 100%. I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."

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A former Daily Show researcher has weighted in on this PVRBlog post, detailing the PVR setup used by the show:

When TiVo footage is needed for TDS that day (i.e., every day), the clips are dubbed off to Beta tape and brought to an editing bay. Yup, sneakernet. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. I wouldn't be surprised if the show upgrades to a networked PVR system -- especially with an imminent move to HD -- but I don't know what their plans are.

Re: "I would think if they are archiving all their footage" -- They're not. There are already services that do this for them. The show would rather pay for those services than pay for the equipment + staff necessary to reinvent the wheel. The show does have a vast tape library, much of it stock footage provided by the AP et al. -- all the stock footage tapes get saved and logged in a database available to everyone in the office.

But since the only way to save things under the current setup is to dub it off to Beta in real time, there is no way to archive all the footage. A lot of stuff does get saved to Beta, particularly major events that are likely to remain relevant. Yet it's not the News Clip Library of Alexandria that people might think.

The Daily Show and their TiVos

I'm in the middle of a complex project or I'd take more time out to explain, but Dare Obasanjo left out the one thing in the history of SOAP vs REST that guys like him always leave out. I don't know why they do it, because it's the most important bit, it's the point between the complexity of SOAP as it evolved through the interests of the BigCos and the incompleteness of REST.

It's called XML-RPC and it's what SOAP was before the BigCo's made it complex.

Really ought to include it in your thinking, Dare and everyone else. You're missing out on something that works really well. You should at least learn the lessons and add to REST what it needs to catch up with XML-RPC. Seriously.

What's missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types. The languages we use have a lot more in common than you might think. We're all writing code, again and again, every time we support a new interface that could be written once and then baked into the kernels of our languages, and then our operating systems. Apple actually did this with Mac OS, XML-RPC support is baked in. So did Python. So if you think it's just me saying this, you should take another look.

Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E." Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.

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Anti-Globalism takes us to The Observer for an article by Vint Cerf on how far the internet has come, and how much can still be accomplished through its development. Cerf says, "We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas."

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CVG is running an interview with Kevin Cloud, executive producer at id, and Eric Biessman, who leads Raven Software's programmers and artists, about the upcoming installment to the Wolfenstein series. They provide some detail about what kind of weapons will be available, what those crazy Nazis are up to this time, and BJ Blazkowicz's new ability to "shroud" himself. "Press a single button, at any time, and you'll see the other side of reality: a green and violent dimension that's filled with strange creatures and whirling tornadoes of energy. Just being in the shroud gives you options: floating above the ground are 'collectors' - fleshy heavy metal album cover worms that are scavenging electrical energy. Pop them, with a single rifle round, and they'll blast apart, damaging enemies in the real world. They are essentially exploding, hidden, organic barrels. ...In shroud mode, too, occult symbols etched into the masonry are transformed into holes in walls that BJ can simply step, shoot, or lob a grenade through."

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ruphus13 writes "As the mobile space heats up, Sun has released the source code for Java Lightweight UI Toolkit under the GPL v2 license. ZDNet quotes Sun's senior director of embedded software saying, 'By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open-sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications -- functionality that they have been requesting for some time.' Will Adobe follow suit?" Sun is also working on some fixes to their mobile Java platform which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded €20,000 to disclose the information.

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CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."

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snydeq writes "This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch — and many of them are second-guessing their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports. The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article. 'If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter, we'd probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail system, if we used it at all,' said one Apps admin. 'And it would likely be years before we'd try a cloud-based collaborative system again from any vendor.' Coupled with recent Apple and Amazon cloud issues, these Google outages are being viewed by some as big wins for Microsoft."

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Hugh Pickens writes "The way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers — because just as bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes, says a University of London research team. The researchers' analysis describes how bees create a 'buffer zone' around their hive where they will not forage, to reduce the risk of predators and parasites locating the nest. This behavior pattern is similar to the geographic profile of criminals stalking their victims. 'Most murders happen close to the killer's home, but not in the area directly surrounding a criminal's house, where crimes are less likely to be committed because of the fear of getting caught by someone they know,' says Dr. Nigel Raine. Criminologists will fold this insight into their models using details about crime scenes, robbery locations, abandoned cars, even dead bodies, to hone the search for a suspect."

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An anonymous reader writes "I am a developer for a medium-sized private technology company getting ready for an IPO. My manager woke up one morning and decided to patent some stuff I did recently. The problem is, I'm strongly opposed to software patents, believing that they are stifling innovation and dragging the technology industry down (see all the frivolous lawsuits reported here on Slashdot!). Now, my concern is: what kind of consequences could I bring on myself for refusing to support the patent process? Has anybody been in a similar position and what was the outcome?"

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