DustyShadow writes "Harvard's Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig have an interesting op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, arguing that it would be constitutionally dubious for President Obama to adopt the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as an executive agreement. '[T]he Obama administration has suggested it will adopt the pact as a "sole executive agreement" that requires only the president's approval. ... Joining ACTA by sole executive agreement would far exceed these precedents. The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DCFC writes "News International, owners of The Times and The Sunday Times announced today that from June readers will be required to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access content. Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay, and is trying out this experiment with the most important titles in his portfolio. No one knows if this will work — there is no consensus on whether it is a good or bad thing for the industry, but be very clear that if it succeeds every one of his competitors will follow. Murdoch has the luxury of a deep and wide business, so he can push this harder than any company that has to rely upon one or two titles for revenue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "SVG has been a published standard for almost a decade. Microsoft has had nothing to do with it, even while every other major browser adopted SVG as a supported format and interface. Just in the last few weeks, though, Microsoft has thrown a surprising amount of its weight behind SVG." This means for IE 9, but it's a start.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 is now just over three weeks away. You may have your ticket to the conference, but have you purchased your official T-Shirt? We went with a slick, simple design in the hopes that this becomes your new favorite shirt, and not just for wearing to conferences! Our production house will be printing on multiple colors so you can choose the shirt that best suits your personality. We will even have shirts for the ladies, and not just for wearing as pajamas.

destinyland writes "One in 12 men suffers from colorblindness, though '[t]he good news here is that these folks are simply missing a patch of DNA ... which is just the kind of challenge this Millennium is made for. Enter science.' But NPR's Moira Gunn (from Biotech Nation) now asks a provocative question. Is it wrong to cure colorblindness? She reports on an experiment that used a virus to introduce corrective DNA into colorblind monkeys. ('It took 20 weeks, but eventually the monkeys started distinguishing between red and green.') Then she asks, could it be viewed differently? 'Are we trying to 'normalize' humans to a threshold of experience?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excelcia writes "Closing arguments in the six and a bit year old slander of title case between SCO and Novell occurred today and the case is finally in the hands of the jury. It's been an interesting case, with SCO alternately claiming that the copyrights to UNIX did get transferred to them, and that the copyrights should have been transferred to them. 'Judge Ted Stewart said, after the jury left to begin to deliberate, that in all his years on the bench, he's never seen such fine lawyering as in this case.' We're not going to find out the results until at least Tuesday, however, as one juror is taking a long weekend. Great lawyering notwithstanding, we can all hope next week that the Energizer bunny of all spurious lawsuits will finally go away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

longacre writes "A Gasoline-Powered Alarm Clock was among 15 bogus products granted the coveted Energy Star seal of approval by the US Environmental Protection Agency during a secret evaluation conducted by the Government Accountability Office. In addition, four fictional manufacturers run by fake people and marketed with crummy websites — Cool Rapport (HVAC equipment), Futurizon Solar Innovations (lighting), Spartan Digital Electronics, and Tropical Thunder Appliances — were granted Energy Star partnerships. The root of the problem: Manufacturers need only submit photos and not actual examples of their products, and they submit their own efficiency ratings, which are not independently verified by the EPA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "While Nvidia is not open-source friendly (despite public outcries over the years), they have traditionally supported the xf86-video-nv driver to provide basic mode setting support and other basic functionality. However, with the 'Fermi' and future products, even that open-source support will cease to exist. Nvidia has announced they are dropping this open-source support for future GPUs and really ending it altogether. Nvidia's recommendation is to just use the generic X.Org VESA driver to navigate their way to nvidia.com so that they can install the proprietary driver. Fortunately there is the Nouveau project that provides a 2D and 3D video driver for Nvidia's hardware, but Nvidia fails to acknowledge it nor support their efforts in any form." David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "The CTIA Wireless conference this week brought in larger crowds and more vendors than last year's event, but that probably isn't saying much, considering the recession had begun to hit hard in early 2009, Matt Hamblen reports from Vegas. The uptick pleased vendors exhibiting at the event, especially some of the smaller, lesser-known companies that sometimes offer the most interesting products, even if they never go gangbusters with the public. Matt highlights top innovative firms and products from the show, including W PhoneWatch (yes, a GSM phone watch for $199; see video), AT&T's Zero Charger (ends 'vampire draw'), Connectify (turns your laptop into a hotspot), and Line2, a Wi-Fi calling app for iPhones and iPod Touches (look out cellular voice service revenues.)" Android made quite a strong showing at the conference as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the US House of Representatives passed a bill in an attempt to ban peer-to-peer file-sharing applications on federal computers and networks. Similar bills have been proposed before, apparently in response to confidential government documents being found on LimeWire. The text of the bill, however, provides a very broad definition of 'peer-to-peer file sharing software,' and may extend to more than they intend (SMB? LDAP?)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today is the last day to get your DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 at the low price of $195! As we approach three weeks from the start of an awesome conference in an awesome city, our attendance numbers are climbing at a fast rate. Be sure to get your ticket now before the price goes up to $220 at 7pm tonight, March 26, 2010.

Brandon Savage takes another look at a popular design pattern - the registry pattern - and how he's changed his thinking on its use a bit on how (or if) it should be used in your applications.

Last July, I wrote about the registry pattern and some of its advantages. These advantages include the ability to access objects across different areas of your application, and the storage of objects for later retrieval. [...] For me, over the last few months, I've discovered two reasons why I advise against the Registry Pattern: first and foremost, it discourages unit testing, and secondly, it discourages good design.

He goes on to elaborate on why these to things could be so detrimental to your code including the problems it can cause in tests being a point of failure and that it can make you application sloppy by giving you an unpoliced "bucket" to drop things in without any context to where they fit in the site.

So what's his suggestion to replace this bit of functionality and make things both easy to test and simpler to keep structured? Dependency injection.

In a new post to his blog William shows you how to create a Popurls clone with the powerful combination of PHP and jQuery. Popurls is an aggregation site with some of the latest news and happenings from all around the web.

Since I have a crazy workload right now, I feel this is the perfect time to write a quick n' dirty tutorial on how to build your very own Popurls. Impress your friends and/or boss with a nifty, hand made news aggregator. Yes, very buzz word friendly.

He uses the SimplePie library to pull in the information from various feeds including Digg.com, Reddit.com, Wired's news feed and Engadget. He shows how to use regular expressions to extract information from the feeds (if they're uncooperative), a bit of PHP to work around potentially empty fields and the full jQuery/HTML/CSS you'll need to make it look more like this

We’ve been happy WebEnabled customers for months now, using their platform for easily cloning and deploying theme demo sites. They’re rapidly expanding the features and improving usability of this platform, and in my opinion there is no faster and easier way to get a Drupal development platform for your team up and running.

This has been great for us (dammit Jim, I’m a themer, not a sysadmin) because we’re not interested in installing and maintaining SVN, drush, a system for deployment to production, etc. I think their service really fills a need for small Drupal development teams or site owners without a lot of in-house technical resources.

read more

In a quick post to his blog Lukas Smith talks about the proposal for traits support that's been pending for PHP for a while now. Recent updates have been made to it, so it's come back up to the front of developer's minds:

Stefan has since tweaked the proposal and in the latest version it includes an alternative approach called Grafts along with the original Traits idea, which is essentially language level delegation pattern support. I am absolutely sure that we will either see Traits or Grafts in the next non patch release of PHP (aka 5.4 or 6.0).

Lukas would like to see the support go in sooner than later, so he requests some comments and thoughts on the proposed functionality and to leave them as comments on his blog entry.

To do some prototyping, I wanted to load all 32k of our Drupal nodes into MongoDB. At first, the thought of doing this seemed daunting. Then I realized that with Drush I could use a very simple script to perform an entire migration.

The result: With a 14 line PHP script, I transferred all of the nodes (CCK, taxonomy, and all) without a glitch.

Read on for the full explanation.

read more

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Craig Buckler has a suggestion on how to handle unloaded extensions in your application in case you need to define a failover.

Unless you're creating very simple applications, you will soon require one or more PHP extensions. Extensions are code libraries which extend the core functionality of the language. [...] What happens when you want to move your web application to another host or platform where a different set of extensions are configured?

Using the extension_loaded function built into PHP, you can create intelligent code that can fall back on a different technology if needed. In his example its trying to check for the GD graphics extension and echoing and error message if it's not found. The function_exists function can be used similarly.

On NETTUTS.com there's a new tutorial looking at the CodeIgniter framework and using the shopping cart class that it comes bundled with to create a simple cart system based on this library.

Today, we are going to take a look at the Shopping Cart library for CodeIgniter. This useful class allows us to add and remove items to a shopping cart, update them, and calculate prices. I will demonstrate how you can build a simple shopping cart system with the help of this library.

This is the latest in their "CodeIgniter from Scratch" series so, if you're not overly familiar with the framework, you might need to go back and start from the beginning and work your way up. The screencast steps you through the shopping cart creation and an image of the end result is also included. You can also download the source to make it easier to follow along.