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Microsoft

Submission + - Former Microsoft exec: Microsoft has 'become the thing they despised' (bgr.com) 2

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company’s mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won’t launch Windows RT, its response to Apple’s three-year-old iPad, until later this year...

Submission + - Journey to the Mantle of the Earth? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: New Scientist has an interesting story about a Japanese effort to reach the Earth's mantle. While some mantle material has been recovered from volcanoes, no pure mantle material has been obtained. (We have moon rocks, but nothing from a few km beneath our feet!) Accompanying the article is a gallery of previous attempts at drilling farther and farther into the Earth's crust.
Android

Submission + - Android botnet army spouting spam from Yahoo Mail app (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Analysis of spam samples suggests that a malicious application could be using Android devices to spread spam messages, in what Microsoft researcher Terry Zink has called "the next evolution in the cat-and-mouse game that is email security."

Zink believes the botnet was created by a malicious app most likely found in an insecure market. After analyzing the IP addresses that were stamped in the headers of the messages, a routine practice of Yahoo Mail, Zink found that the IPs connected to servers in Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

Because downloading a malicious app from the Android Market is highly unlikely, Zink says, the fact that the messages stem largely from developing countries where Android's app community has yet to establish an ecosystem indicates that the devices were infected by an illegitimate app downloaded elsewhere
Programming

Submission + - StackOverflow Man Remakes Net One Answer at a Time (wired.com)

Submitted by
MikeatWired
MikeatWired writes: "Jeff Atwood wants to make software developers better. No, scratch that. He wants to make the entire internet better. Atwood is the co-founder of StackExchange, a network of question-and-answer websites. StackExchange’s original site, StackOverflow, caters exclusively to developers. 'We have a reputation about being jerks about quality, but we want each page we put up to make the internet better, not worse,' Atwood tells Wired. 'Not even the same. Better.' But according to Atwood, StackOverflow’s goal isn’t just to have quality answers or help developers solve technical problems. 'A programmer’s job is to communicate with users to find out what people want,' he explains. 'We’re tricking developers into being better communicators.' By making developers better at the non-technical aspects of programming, Atwood hopes StackOverflow can make the internet better for everyone. At the very least, software developers — and so many others — are listening."
IT

Submission + - Surviving Your Company's Steve Jobs Wannabe (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Bob Lewis offers advice for IT departments dealing with one of the worst business diseases: a top-down contagion of Steve Jobs wannabes. These 'Great Dictators' have 'all of Steve Jobs' worst characteristics (except, perhaps, his poor hygiene) without any of his saving graces: the supreme certainty that they're right, without actually being right often enough to justify their high opinions of themselves. Because business culture flows downhill, arrogant autocracy is the company's standard leadership model,' and with everyone thinking they're an 'internal customer,' IT will be on the receiving end of orders from every petty dictator in the company.' The key, of course, is to avoid falling prey to the cowering toadyism that these petty dictators come to expect as the preferred way for folks in IT to 'manage up.'"
Programming

Submission + - When Functional Programming Makes Sense (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Unless you've been living under a rock, you know functional programming languages rank among the hottest languages used by so-called alpha geeks, writes Andrew Oliver. While this brave new world is upon us, and before we take things too far, it might be a good time to pause and reflect on the appropriateness of functional programming for everyday application development. 'Functional programming addresses the concurrency problem of state but often at a cost of human readability. Functional programmming may be entirely appropriate for many circumstances. Ironically, it might even help bring computer and human languages closer together indirectly through defining domain-specific languages. But its difficult syntax makes it an extremely poor fit for general-purpose application programming. Don't jump on this bandwagon just yet — especially for risk-averse projects.'"

Submission + - Air France Crash Final Report Published (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The France's aviation authority, BEA, has released a final crash report on the Air France over the Atlantic in June 2009. The document blames the Airbus A330's ergonomics as well as inappropriate action by the pilots. Going through the events, the disaster began with the malfunctioning of speed sensors known as Pitots during a period of turbulence. The captain was taking a rest break and the co-pilots were in control at the time. The captain returned to the flight deck but was unable to reverse the catastrophic course of events. One of the mistakes of the crew was to point the nose of the aircraft upwards after it stalled, instead of down. 'The crew was in a state of almost total loss of control of the situation,' BEA chief investigator Alain Bouillard summed. The report makes 25 new safety recommendations on top of the 25 called for in a preliminary report last year.
Google

Submission + - Apple announces patent on Head Mounted Display - Like google glass (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by
cygnwolf
cygnwolf writes: "Another salvo is fired in the Apple vs Google war. Apple revealed yesterday that they filed for and have been granted a patent on a Head Mounted Display that bears a curious resemblance to Google Glass

From the article:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday granted Apple's application for a patent describing head-mounted display technology that is tangentially related to see-through, or augmented reality, units like Google's Project Glass."
Google

Submission + - Nexus Q - Not Exactly Made in USA (ifixit.com)

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes: Among the much ballyhooed tech at Google I/O last week was the Google Nexus Q. Google made an effort to proudly point out the device was "Made in the USA" and even had it stamped on the back of it. A tear-down at ifixit.com however, reveals the guts of the thing are mostly manufactured overseas at the expected locations (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, et al). Wired also posted a tear-down in which they reveal a die-casting shop in Wisconsin is the source of the zinc housing, but certainly not the entire device as some news sources reported. It's great that Google decided to utilize the struggling US manufacturing sector for this, but claiming the device is USA made, and being blatantly vaugue about it's origins is quite misleading.

Comment Re:Why should Google care... (Score 4, Informative) 141

by mat.power (#40552319) Attached to: YouTube-MP3 Ripper Creator Takes On Google
There are videos with copyrighted material on YouTube which is allowed to be on YouTube (many artists/labels put music up themselves). That doesn't mean anyone is free to turn it into an mp3. Though, I'm not sure why Google would go after a site like this, rather than the music industry... perhaps someone else can explain that :)

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