An anonymous reader writes "The Zune 30 failure became national news when it happened just three days ago. The source code for the bad driver leaked soon after, and now, someone has came up with a very detailed explanation for where the code was bad as well as a number of solutions to deal with it. From a coding/QA standpoint, one has to wonder how this bug was missed if the quality assurance team wasn't slacking off. Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesus, *everyone* is twittering/emailing/suggesting this 2800+ word monster op-ed in today's New York Times by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. Here's a snip:

Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

The End of the Financial World As We Know It (NYT). When you're done with that, don't miss the companion piece in the same NYT edition, How to Repair a Broken Financial World, which is another must-read, clocking in at 2,000 words. And when you're done with all that, go watch "Keeping up with the Kardashians" or "Dog The Bounty Hunter" and eat some Hot Pockets, because AFAIAC, you'll have paid your thinkin' dues for the week.

About the writers: "Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Liar’s Poker, is writing a book about the collapse of Wall Street. David Einhorn is the president of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund, and the author of Fooling Some of the People All of the Time."

Make: television debuted 1/3/2009 7am PST online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv). The series encourages everyone to invent, revent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv - the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes - We're pretty sure this might be the first TV show to launch in all these places, hopefully others will too!

For the new folks just joining us here, MAKE is a magazine, it's also a yearly event called "Maker Faire", a very popular website, a book series, a Maker Shed - but most of all it's a community of Makers who share their projects and skill. Make is what -you- make it. It's a growing DIY movement of people who look at things a little different and who just might spark the next generation of scientists, engineers and makers. Over the weekend our friends (and new friends) had some great things to say about the show, here's all the ones we could find, thanks for the support!

CNET News - 'Make' magazine debuts television series, Following on the success of their hit do-it-yourself magazine, the people behind Make will now bring their efforts to public television.

Laughing Squid - Make: Television Launches, Weekly Episodes Profiling Makers. MAKE magazine, Twin Cities Public Television and American Public Television have just launched the wonderful new weekly series Make: Television.

Boing Boing - MAKE: television site has videos of first episode. MAKE: television site has videos of first episode...

Hack a Day - Make: television premiering today. Make’s television series will be premiering on public television across the US over the next couple days.

io9 - Make a Cat Feeder Out of Your Old VCR. Our pals over at the superlative MAKE: magazine have finally launched their public television show, which celebrates the spirit of mad science by profiling weird inventions you can create in your own home.

BuzzFeed - A new web and TV serious from MAKE Magazine celebrating some of the coolest “Makers” (inventors, artists, geeks and everyday people) and their inventions — which mix old and new technology to upgrade, renew, and recycle

Lifehacker - Make Magazine Debuts Their Own TV Show. If you're a fan of Make magazine and their DIY-ethos, you won't want to miss the premiere of Make Television. Available both online in HD and on a large number of public stations across America.

Wired / Geekdad - MAKE: television Empowers DIYers. If you had any doubt how huge the maker movement is, check this out -- MAKE: television, the video extension of one of our favorite magazines, premiered last night on Public Television and on the Internet.

NOTCOT - Congrats to our friends at Make on launching Make TV!!! It will even be premiering nationwide on Public Television stations this month!

Hacked Gadgets - This is a great day for the hackers and maker around the world. Make Television is On the Air! This is a big step in legitimizing the DIY area that we are all so interested in.

Biking Bis - "MAKE: television" features bicycle creations by SF's Cyclecide. The debut of a DIY show on public television connects viewers with artists who transform old bicycles into unusual pedal-powered creations.

Engadget - MAKE on the big screen. Make: television sneak peak at Engadget's reader meet up in New York city.

Gizmodo - Make: Television, The Ultimate DIY Tech Show, Debuts This Weekend. Ever wanted to have public TV teach you how to make a fully functional pneumatic t-shirt cannon/Burrito Blaster in the privacy of your own living room? Friends, Make: television debuting this weekend is for you.

Twitter - Tons of folks twittering away about Make: television!

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John Mecklin sends in word of initiatives through which the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known as "computational journalism." "James Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, is in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable. The goal: Computer algorithms that can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public-interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. Or, in short, data mining in the public interest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers wrote in to mention that the copyright on the image of the character Popeye expired in the EU as the year began, 70 years since the death of its creator Elzie Segar. The US will have to wait until 2024, 95 years after Segar's death. Only Popeye's image is free of trademark in the EU; the name "Popeye" is still under copyright by King Features Syndicate. Popeye made his first appearance in a comic strip in 1929 and became hugely popular in the 1930s. The Times claims that Popeye now moves $2.8B of merchandise per year. Le Monde's coverage (in Google translation) mentions the real-life people in Segar's early experience who inspired some of the Popeye cast of characters. Popeye himself was based on the prize fighter Frank "Rocky" Fiegel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Gillmor has been on a campaign to get Feedburner to wake up and make his Feedburner feed more responsive. I support him in this. Now that Feedburner is pwned by Google, there's something kind of sneaky about a big company that prides itself on keeping its servers up and responsive all the time to be asleep on this.

To be fair to Google, it's not 100 percent clear if Steve's website is pinging them on the feed update. This is something we could look into because the protocol for pinging is something we're all pretty familiar with, since its been around for a long time and it's pretty simple. There's an XML-RPC interface, even a REST interface. Google operates a compatible ping server. You don't even have to know the protocol, since Matt Mullenweg kindly put up a server that pings them all. Just tell him what changed and let him make the call for you.

However, it is the very end of the Christmas holiday, so that may be the reason. A wire-trip, and no one is watching the store. That's the danger of centralizing a decentralizing technology like RSS. Like the Internet itself it can route around outages, but only if you let it be distributed. This points out the need for an open source easy to install version of Feedburner. Now with cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft's upcoming Azure, and Google's own AppEngine, it would be a simple matter to put something together in any number of different languages that would provide all the benefits of Feedburner (stats mainly) without the problems of excessive centralization.

Steve called a few minutes ago, and I volunteered to write about this. I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air, whether it's a small independent project or something run by Microsoft.

Update: Feedsqueezer.

Photographer Duane Kerzic was standing on the public platform in New York's Penn Station, taking pictures of trains in hopes of winning the annual photo contest that Amtrak had been running since 2003. Amtrak police arrested him for refusing to delete the photos when asked, though they later charged him with trespassing. "Obviously, there is a lack of communication between Amtrak's marketing department, which promotes the annual contest, called Picture Our Trains, and its police department, which has a history of harassing photographers for photographing these same trains. Not much different than the JetBlue incident from earlier this year where JetBlue flight attendants had a woman arrested for refusing to delete a video she filmed in flight while the JetBlue marketing department hosted a contest encouraging passengers to take photos in flight." Kerzic's blog has an account of the arrest on Dec. 21 and the aftermath.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've tried to use it conversationally, but it quickly falls apart.

Consider an example.

Suppose I say the sky is blue.

Someone says: "What do you mean by that?"

Now I have three choices: 1. Ignore it. 2. Ask what they're referring to. 3. Assume they mean my statement that the sky is blue, and explain what it means for the sky to be blue.

Suppose I choose #2. Because I might have said 5 things in the last hour, and how do I know which one my correspondent is referring to. So I respond: "Which item are you referring to?" But before my friend can respond someone else asks "What are you talking about?" Now to that one I have three possible choices, the same ones as before.

Back up a step. I could have chosen #3. How do you explain what it means for the sky to be blue in 140 characters? And if you try, someone else will ask you to explain your explanation. But how will you know which twit they're referring to!

Right around this time someone chimes in with a political objection to something I've said. By trying to cram real conversation into 140 character snippets, you're bound to offend someone, because in order to be politically correct you have to allow for the possibility that you're talking about a man or a woman, someone who is young or old or inbetween, or if you assume they're American you'll get a lecture on how all Americans think everyone is an American or somesuch.

Honestly don't see how anyone gets past the first step in a conversation, but as I've gotten more people following me, the opportunities get narrower. When I try to satisfy everyone, what happens then is someone tells me I'm posting too much and I should STFU or they're going to unsubscribe. Ohhh.

So when someone asks me a question that I want to answer, I DM them. But usually I choose option #1. For me it's not and can't be conversational.

Jay Rosen asked: "Write a 140 character post that explains what you find Twitter useful for."

DW: "Twitter is my shared notepad. If I want to remember something and I don't mind if everyone else knows it, I just post it here."

Only 126 characters.

The New York Times is running a story about Google engineer T. V. Raman, who lost his vision at age 14 but didn't let that stand in the way of his interest in technology. In addition to modifying a version of Google's search engine to give preference to pages that were more compliant with accessibility guidelines, Raman is now working on making cell phones easier to use without needing to look at them. "Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion." Raman and a co-worker, Charles Chen, are also attempting to extend various phones' ability to read back scanned text to include signs that are anywhere in the phone's field of view.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I went to see the Israeli animated documentary feature "Waltz With Bashir" (Vals Im Bashir) last night. The autobiographical film was written and directed by Ari Folman, with illustration and art direction by David Polonsky.

It is a powerful piece of filmmaking, and I hope everyone reading this blog post will go out and support it, if it's still playing in a theater where you live. Given the escalation of conflict in Gaza this weekend, the film's message seems all the more timely and poignant.

I couldn't help but think as I was watching last night (in a mostly empty art-house theater on the other side of town) that this captures what the young Israeli soldiers must be experiencing right now, and what the Palestinians in Gaza must be experiencing, as well.

Waltz is about memory. It's a story about conflict trauma and PTSD. It's a story about how the responsibility for atrocities tends to be passed from one set of hands to another, never resting, and how the impact of violence is also passed down, never resting. It's a story about what combatants on both sides have in common: we are human beings.

Here are some stills from the movie. Here are higher-quality trailers on Apple. Here are some of the critics' reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. When the DVD comes out, I am buying it, and buying copies for friends.

Oh, and Susannah Breslin points us to these guys, Asaf and Tomer, who were credited as artists on the film. Here is my favorite still (contains nudity).

PS: Wiley Wiggins told me on Twitter last night that Folman's next project is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book The Futurological Congress . That oughta be amazing. Incidentally, Waltz reminded me a lot of the film through which I first became aware of Wiley Wiggins' work, too.

Below: Speaking of the power of memory -- for me, hearing this great OMD song again, in this context, was potent. I loved that band, and was happy to see them included the film's '80s-heavy soundtrack.

On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation has announced they are switching their version control systems to git. According to the announcement, Perl 5 migration to git would allow the language development team to take advantage of git's extensive offline and distributed version support. Git is open source and readily available to all Perl developers. Among other advantages, the announcement notes that git simplifies commits, producing fewer administrative overheads for integrating contributions. Git's change analysis tools are also singled out for praise. The transformation from Perforce to git apparently took over a year. Sam Vilain of Catalyst IT 'spent more than a year building custom tools to transform 21 years of Perl history into the first ever unified repository of every single change to Perl.' The git repository incorporates historic snapshot releases and patch sets, which is frankly both cool and historically pleasing. Some of the patch sets were apparently recovered from old hard drives, notching up the geek satisfaction factor even more. Developers can download a copy of the current Perl 5 repository directly from the perl.org site, where the source is hosted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TRNick writes "What's the state of free software, 25 years after GNU's birth? TechRadar has an interview with Richard Stallman to find out. Stallman thinks free software is making good progress: 'Nowadays hardware developers are also increasingly likely to publish the interface specs so that we can develop free software that works with the hardware. Perhaps we are turning the corner, but we still have a big fight on our hands before all computer users have freedom.' But how many of us actually run an operating system that Richard Stallman would consider free? Many of the more popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, bundle proprietary code with their free software packages. Perhaps free software has reached a large enough install base that companies are happy to use it for their own gain, but aren't quite so willing to make their own commitments to free software development. How important this is to the success of free software depends on how strong your stance is on freedom is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg: "President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snikulin writes "My 6-year-old embedded software happily runs on kernel v2.4 on an XScale CPU. The software gets a bunch (tens of megabytes) of data from an FPGA over a PCI-X bus and pushes it out over GigE to data-processing equipment. The tool chain is based on the somewhat outdated gcc v2.95. Now, for certain technical reasons we want to jump from the ARM-based custom board to an Atom-based COM Express module. This implies that I'll need to re-create a Linux RAM disk from scratch along with the tool chain. The functionality of the software will be essentially the same. My question: is it worth it to jump to kernel 2.6, or better to stick with the old and proven 2.4? What will I gain and what will I lose if I stay at 2.4 (besides the modern gcc compiler and the other related dev tools)?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem — as long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NYTimes reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Z80xxc! writes "FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) has officially announced the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition. This competition, started by inventor Dean Kamen, encourages high-school students to design and build robots to compete with and against other FRC teams. The competition overview video is available from NASA. This year's competition is called 'Lunacy.' The game consists of a series of 135-second face-offs during which the student-designed robots must pick up 9-inch game balls and deposit them in trailers hitched to the opposing teams' robots. The game field is coated with regolith, a slick polymer material, and special wheels are used to create a low-traction interaction with the crater's surface. Together, these combine to simulate the one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon. For any readers who are interested in participating, FRC teams can always use more adult mentors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meshach writes "Ars Technica has an interesting run-down on the major open source victories of 2008. Some, like Firefox 3, we can probably mostly agree on. Others — KDE 4 comes to mind — will be more controversial. And Mono 2? What else should be on the list?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tested the latest Win7 build against XP and Vista and came to a surprising conclusion: Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs in the vast majority of the 23 tasks tested. Even installation. 'Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I've decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests...'" This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, the Israeli government sent ground troops into the Gaza strip region, as part of an 8-day offensive on Hamas. Two recent Boing Boing posts related to this topic drew intense discussions with an extremely high number of comments, so I thought I'd open up a new thread today -- clearly you, our community, have a lot to say about this, and about alternative resources for news, information, and insight on the conflict.

Among the resources I've pointed to before: Global Voices' special coverage on the Gaza conflict. Rocketboom did special coverage from the region earlier in 2008, worth re-watching for FAQ about those homemade rockets from Hamas. Last week, representatives of the Israeli government held press conferences of a sort on Twitter, and today Twitter is abuzz with tweets pointing to Al Jazeera's new "Gaza coverage" twitterbot. CNN is reporting that some of the weapons being used by Israel to attack mixed civilian and military targets come from the United States. There are an awful lot of protests, pro- and against, going on around the world.

A request in advance to those joining the discussion thread here on Boing Boing: keep it civil, respectful, on-topic, and please avoid personal attacks and moralizing. The road to Godwin's law is a short one. Let's not go there. Predictably, there is much fawning about in mainstream outlets over amateur op-eds on YouTube. If you *really* want endless rivers of unmoderated attack-comments, please just go there, instead. (Thanks, Derek Bledsoe)

Image: Israeli flag holder on right, courtesy formsixteen. Palestinian flag holder on left, courtesy jilliancyork.