feed on feeds - 2012/02/21 - items 0 to 15

En syrisk aktivist och medborgarjournalist som via nätet direktsänt videomaterial har dödats.

En dansk soldat dömdes i dag till tio månaders fängelse sedan han överdoserat smärtstillande i hopp om att skickas hem från Afghanistan.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Tyma, creator of Mailinator, writes about a greedy algorithm to analyze the huge amount of email Mailinator receives and finds ways to reduce its memory footprint by 90%. Quoting: 'I grabbed a few hundred megs of the Mailinator stream and ran it through several compressors. Mostly just stuff I had on hand 7z, bzip, gzip, etc. Venerable zip reduced the file by 63%. Not bad. Then I tried the LZMA/2 algorithm (7z) which got it down by 85%! Well. OK! Article is over! Everyone out! 85% is good enough. Actually — there were two problems with that result. One was that, LZMA, like many compression algorithms build their dictionary based on a fixed dataset. As it compresses it builds a dictionary of common sequences and improves and uses that dictionary to compress everything thereafter. That works great on static files — but Mailinator is not a static file. Its a big, honking, several gigabyte cache of ever changing email. If I compressed a million emails, and then some user wanted to read email #502,922 — I'd have to "seek" through the preceding half-million or so to build the dictionary in order to decompress it. That's probably not feasible.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jan Blomgren beskriver valstrategin som ”närmast sovjetisk”.

En pilot på ett inrikes SAS-plan besköts vid 18-tiden av grön laser och träffades i ögonen vid inflygning till Arlanda.

Mitt framför ögonen på sina släktingar höggs en kvinna ihjäl på ett bröllop i Hamburg.

phy_si_kal writes "The new, open source, Opa web programming language just hit version 0.9.0 'S4,' six months after its last major release. Apart from a new syntax more similar to JavaScript, the new release focuses on mongoDB integration. Opa now features something similar to object-relational mapping (ORM) except that mongoDB is a non-relational, document-oriented database and Opa a functional, non-object-oriented language. The new functionality makes the NoSQL database even easier to use, as all language-database calls are automated. The mapping of functional datastructures to documents could even be much better than current ORM approaches and solve the object-relational impedance mismatch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Incident called "deeply unfortunate" and military leaders order probe after reports of Muslim holy book burning.

Det är politikerna som är problemet

Den 27-åriga patienten dök aldrig upp efter en permission i fredags.

Zothecula writes "If you thought WikiLeaks was a disruptive idea, the transparency grenade is going to blow you away. This tiny bit of hardware hidden under the shell shaped like a classic Soviet F1 hand grenade allows you to leak information from anywhere just by pulling a pin. The device is essentially a small computer with a powerful wireless antenna and a microphone. Following 'detonation,' the grenade intercepts local network traffic and captures audio data, then makes the information immediately available online."