Klippings

Clippings of various news and articles that tickle my interest of reading or knowing about it.

Monday, March 29, 2004

Ms. Rice's Testimony (washingtonpost.com) It is long-standing practice that key presidential advisers do not testify before congressional bodies on policy matters. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate and are therefore partly accountable to Congress; the president's staff is different.
Telegraph | News | Methane find gives new clue to life on Mars The most compelling evidence yet that alien life once lived on Mars - and might still be thriving deep below the surface - has been unearthed by Nasa and European space scientists.

Two studies have confirmed the presence of methane on the red planet. On Earth, the gas is almost always produced by microbes.

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Bush under Fire over Sharon Invitation A senior Jewish MP today launched an attack on US President George Bush’s decision to invite Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the White House.

The invitation amounted to a “presidential seal of approval” for Sharon’s Likud Government, which was responsible for “indiscriminate” killings of Palestinians, said Mr Kaufman.

He called for economic sanctions against Israel to bring Likud to the negotiating table.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

United Press International: Analysis: Mars water discoveries loom hugeThe British social historian James Burke is fond of saying any time humanity's view of reality is changed by new knowledge, reality itself is changed. That is exactly what has happened with the discovery by the Mars rover Opportunity that the red planet once harbored liquid, flowing water.

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Scientists Report Evidence of Saltwater Pools on Mars Mars was once a much warmer, wetter place, with pools of saltwater that sometimes flowed across the surface, scientists reported Tuesday.

Analyzing findings from sedimentary rocks explored by the rover Opportunity, the scientists said the rocks now appeared to have formed under a shallow bed of softly flowing water near a shoreline — not, as formerly seemed possible, through seepage from underground.
USATODAY.com - NASA's Mars gamble pays off...And now the space agency appears to have hit the jackpot by finding evidence of water on the Red Planet. Scientists announced Tuesday that one of its exploratory rovers is parked on the shoreline of what once was a salty Martian sea.

Monday, March 22, 2004

Internet Week > Security > New Bagle Worm Infects Windows Without File Attachments > March 19, 2004 A new round of Bagle worms blitzed the Internet Thursday, and takes advantage of a five-month-old vulnerability in Internet Explorer that let them infect computers without having to convince users to open a file attachment.
The big difference in this newest Bagle wave, said security experts, is that it can infect unpatched PCs without the usual file attachment.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Revenge attacks could spin out of control' Reaction from Middle East and international media to Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin

Saturday, March 20, 2004

CNN.com - Ex-Bush aide: Iraq war planning began after 9/11 - Mar 20, 2004 A second former Bush administration official is set to accuse top presidential aides, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of planning retaliatory strikes on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, despite briefings from intelligence officials explaining that Iraq likely wasn't responsible.
seattlepi.com Buzzworthy: Different takes on Yee There are a lot of ways to tell the latest story of U.S. Army Capt. James Yee, a Fort Lewis-based soldier who served as a chaplain to detainees at Guantanamo Bay before being arrested on suspicion of espionage. That accusation didn't pan out and the Army dropped all remaining charges against Yee yesterday.

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation: "A Peer-to-peer Trojan Horse
A new �Trojan horse� program called Phatbot is spreading across Windows computers connected to the Internet, employing a range of nefarious tactics including some borrowed from the world of peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Kazaa and the original Napster. According to the Washington Post, which broke the story on March 17, Phatbot can create invisible networks of up to 50 infected machines. This gives the hackers who wrote the program a highly efficient way to issue orders to the machines, in essence recruiting them into an underground hacker army. For example, the networks could be used to launch massive spam or denial-of-service attacks.

The resilient nature of peer-to-peer networks -- if one node is removed, communications will simply flow around it -- means that security officials will have a very hard time slowing Phatbot�s spread, short of tracking down every single infected machine. Just as alarming, the malicious program can evade and shut down many popular anti-virus programs. But the Post links to several sites where anti-Phatbot programs can be downloaded"

Monday, March 15, 2004

Articles: "Spam, spam, spam -- entertaining for Monty Python fans, but not for Internet users. How can E-mail administrators keep it out of the company mailboxes? Dee-Ann LeBlanc and Robert LeBlanc have some useful suggestions."
New Leader: Spain's Troops Heading Out of Iraq | Reuters.com Spain's incoming leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero indicated Monday he would pull his troops out of the "disastrous" occupation of Iraq in a major swing from his predecessor's pro-American foreign policy
EU Backs Microsoft Antitrust Action The European Union moved a step closer to wrapping up its long-running antitrust case against Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - research) Monday, winning approval from member countries on a decision that could require the software behemoth to change its Windows operating system.
IHT: Search Writing Arabic, from left or from right

Thursday, March 11, 2004

Internet Week > Storage > Hitachi Unveils 400-Gbyte Hard Drive > March 10, 2004 Hitachi Global Storage Technologies on Wednesday announced a massive
400-Gbyte 3.5-inch ATA hard drive that it's pitching primarily to
makers of digital video recorders (DVRs), but also to corporations as
a "nearline" storage platform. The Deskstar 7K400, a 7,200-rpm
(revolutions per minute) hard drive, will ship with either the
standard parallel ATA or the newer, faster Serial ATA (SATA)
interface, said Hitachi.
Internet Week > Netsky Hacker Threatens Thursday Attack > Netsky Hacker Threatens Thursday Attack > March 10, 2004: "The Netsky vs. Bagle/MyDoom battle escalated last week with a tit-for-tat exchange of crude messages buried within the worms' code. "

Saturday, March 06, 2004

Java Pro - Magical Web Interface Development: "JavaServer Faces gives you server-based power and flexibility for building Web-based interfaces that keep components in sync with your business objects"
JSF Central - Your JavaServer Faces Community - News Welcome to JSF Central, your JavaServer Faces development community! JavaSever Faces (JSF) is the new standard user interface framework for building web applications in Java. Our goal is to provide access to all of the resources you need to develop JSF-related technologies.
JavaServer Faces Spearheads Drive Toward J2EE Simplication, Says Kito Mann (SYS-CON)(Printview) As the JCP committee yesterday approved the final specification for JSR 127, the founder of a site devoted to the JSF specification has been explaining *why* the release of JavaServer Faces 1.0 is significant: it's helping simplify J2EE.

Thursday, March 04, 2004

Servlets.com | ISPs Supporting Servlets On this page we try to help you on that endeavor by keeping track of all the ISPs that are known to host servlets. For each ISP we provide location and contact information, a short summary, and user reviews.

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Database Normalization for the Real World Why is normalization important? Many databases today are still denormalized for many reasons. This article, by April Wells, addresses some of the reasons and normalizes a claim table through the different normal forms for an insurance company. The changes in the table and the addition of more tables in the process make the database more efficient, less prone to error, and more maintainable.
Offshore Outsourcing: Will Your Job Disappear in 2004? Worried about losing your high-tech or white-collar job to someone offshore? Marcia Robinson and Ravi Kalakota analyze the trends that are changing the economy in 2004.
Offshore outsourcing is everywhere—boardrooms, newspapers, magazines, cable news, even chat groups. The noise quotient around offshore outsourcing is reaching epic proportions. In this article, we outline what's taking place in offshore outsourcing and its potential impact on your job. We separate the fads from the trends to assess the underlying market dynamics and help you better navigate 2004.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

NASA Reports Evidence Mars Was Once Soaked Water is the elixir of life, and NASA scientists reported compelling evidence today that the tiny crater that the Mars rover Opportunity has been scooting around for the last month was once soaked in it...

Monday, March 01, 2004

J2SE 1.5 in a Nutshell Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.5 ("Tiger") is the next major revision to the Java platform and language; it is currently slated to contain 15 component JSRs with nearly 100 other significant updates developed through the Java Community Process (JCP).

The J2SE 1.5 release is focused along certain key themes:

Ease of Development
Scalability and Performance
Monitoring and Manageability
Desktop Client

Read more to get the details...
Core Java Technologies Technical Tips MONITORING CLASS LOADING AND GARBAGE COLLECTION
The Next Move in Programming: A Conversation with Sun's Victoria Livschitz Is there something fundamentally misguided about the way we write programs today? Why is it so difficult, if not impossible, to write bug-free programs that contain more than 20 to 30 million lines of code? Do we need a radical new paradigm shift in programming? If so, what might it look like?
The interview provoked a strong response, both inside and outside of Sun Microsystems. One response came from Sun's Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect and Java Evangelist