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Google

Android 1.5 SDK Is Released 135

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-your-hack-on dept.
RadiusK writes "Starting today, developers can get an early look at the SDK for the next version of the Android platform. Version 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition. At the developer site, you can download the early-look Android 1.5 SDK, read important information about upgrading your Eclipse plugin and existing projects, and learn about what's new and improved in Android 1.5."
Education

College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior 1079

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-is-your-mom dept.
FutureDomain writes "The Boston College Campus Police have seized the electronics of a computer science student for allegedly sending an email outing another student. The probable cause? The search warrant application states that he is 'a computer science major' and he uses 'two different operating systems for hiding his illegal activity. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.' The EFF is currently representing him."
Handhelds

iPhone Jailbreaking Still Going Strong 166

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-touch-the-apples dept.
snydeq writes "Despite the productivity promises of Apple's forthcoming 3.0 firmware update, jailbreaking should continue to push the iPhone's productivity envelope, as users increasingly demand the Holy Grail of smartphone power use: applications that run in the background, InfoWorld reports. Copy and paste, video recording and streaming, Internet tethering, and content search are just a few of the features over which iPhone users have sought to jailbreak their devices — a practice Apple itself has done little to crack down on. Jailbreak apps circumvent hardware and software restrictions that Apple says ensure a consistent, responsive user interface and optimal battery endurance. In particular, jailbroken phones can run apps in the background, a capability Apple reserves for its own apps but prohibits in third-party programs. Jay Freeman, creator of the Cydia iPhone installer and Cydia Store, however, believes a free-market approach is the best way to satisfy power users' demands for features without compromising the performance of their iPhones. And given Apple's App Store overcrowding, it seems likely that jailbroken phones and app venues like Cydia Store will continue to be popular with iPhone customers and developers, even after the 3.0 firmware ships."
Programming

Can rev="canonical" Replace URL-Shortening Services? 354

Posted by Soulskill from the snds-lk-a-pln dept.
Chris Shiflett writes "There's a new proposal ('URL shortening that doesn't hurt the Internet') floating around for using rev="canonical" to help put a stop to the URL-shortening madness. In order to avoid the great linkrot apocalypse, we can opt to specify short URLs for our own pages, so that compliant services (adoption is still low, because the idea is pretty fresh) will use our short URLs instead of TinyURL.com (or some other third-party alternative) replacements."
Robotics

"Tweenbots" Test NYC Pedestrian-Robot Relations 197

Posted by kdawson from the heart-of-gold-beneath-that-hard-bitten-exterior dept.
MBCook recommends Kacie Kinzer's tweenbots page, which documents some of her experiments with small, anthropomorphized robots that need help. Kinzer is writing a thesis (at the Center for the Recently Possible) centered around investigating whether people in New York City will help a cute little robot to get where it's going. "Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."
Handhelds

T-Mobile To Launch Android Tablet 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the that's-one-big-ass-iphone dept.
nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is planning to use Google's open source operating system 'Android' on devices that blur the line between cellphone and home PC. In addition, Samsung says they will also produce Android phones, but need to work out the kinks first. Both announcements come shortly after HP revealed that it is investigating the idea of using Android to power some of its low-cost netbook computers in place of Windows."

Comment Re:Horrible article (Score 1) 292

by Jonboy X (#27352679) Attached to: What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean For Java, MySQL, Developers

Not to be contentious, but I'm curious...

1) Glassfish is now more popular than JBoss.

Cite? It's tough to get a good feel for these things. The hype around Glassfish has been huge, but I haven't seen developers flocking to actually use it. It's kinda moot anyway because most of the places I've worked at use Spring/Hibernate instead of EJB, and can get by with just a Servlet container.

2) IDEs can bring money to a company indirectly. IBM does more than just consult. They also offer a suite of Java technologies. Eclipse is just Websphere developer studio free edition. Eventually, IBM hopes that you;'ll move up the chain and buy their tools.

I think you've got it backwards there. WebSphere Dev Studio is just a repackaged version of Eclipse with add-ons to integrate with WebSphere AS and related stuff that you can buy from IBM. Granted, IBM started Eclipse, but Eclipse.org was spun off and has been largely separate for years. If nothing else, the fact that Eclipse has been somewhat splintered lately should be proof of a lack of central guidance.

3. I agree with what you said about MySQL, but IBM could still stand to make some money. After all, MySQL has always had paid support. Something that IBM likes to do.

Hehe, and I thought *that* was the shaky point. ;)

Comment Horrible article (Score 2, Interesting) 292

by Jonboy X (#27347685) Attached to: What an IBM-Sun Merger Might Mean For Java, MySQL, Developers

Wow. Just...wow. All IBM gets out of the deal is the Java name. All the other assets are basically bogus, which the market has already figured out.

  1. Glassfish is still pretty much a toy, as far as J2EE app servers go. If users want free, they go with JBoss. If they wanna pay money for scalability and features and support, they already go with IBM's WebSphere.
  2. IDE's don't bring in money for consulting companies. Besides, Eclipse has been the standard for Java development for so long and by such a wide margin that it's barely even a debate except among industry wags. Also...Java IDE's don't compete with Visual Studio. Sheesh!
  3. MySQL is great and all, but if someone's using it, they're probably doing so to *avoid* high consulting and licensing fees.

InfoWorld hits another high score in tech buzzword bingo, but misses the point completely...
Programming

Are Quirky Developers Brilliant Or Dangerous? 1134

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hey-wait-a-minute dept.
jammag writes "Most developers have worked with a dude like Josh, who's so brilliant the management fawns over him even as he takes a dump in the lobby flowerpot. Eric Spiegel tells of one such Josh, who wears T-shirts with offensive slogans, insults female co-workers and, when asked about documentation, smirks, "What documentation?' Sure, he was whipsmart and could churn out code that saved the company millions, but can we please stop enabling these people?"
Privacy

Berners-Lee Says No To Internet Snooping 113

Posted by timothy from the and-what-does-this-guy-know? dept.
Jack Spine writes "The inventor of the World Wide Web has pointed out some of the dangers of deep packet inspection. Sir Tim said that ISPs 'snooping' on data was similar to the interception of mail. 'This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium,' Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. TBL's comments come as the UK government is gearing up to intercept all web communications in the UK through the Intercept Modernisation Programme, and echo comments he made last year about Phorm."
Education

Smart Immigrants Going Home 770

Posted by kdawson from the no-longer-the-only-land-of-opportunity dept.
olddotter writes "A 24-page paper on a reverse brain drain from the US back to home countries (PDF) is getting news coverage. Quoting: 'Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain," finds that the vast majority of these returnees were relatively young. The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master's degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master's and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups — precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the US economy and to business and job growth." Adding to the brain drain is a problem with slow US visa processing, since last November or so, that has been driving desirable students and scientists out of the country.
Security

Google NativeClient Security Contest 175

Posted by kdawson from the insert-favorite-salt-pun-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You may remember Google's NativeClient project, discussed here last December. Don't be fooled into calling this ActiveX 2.0 — rather than a model of trust and authentication, NaCl is designed to make dangerous code impossible by enforcing a set of a rules at load time that guarantee hostile code simply cannot execute (PDF). NaCl is still in heavy development, but the developers want to encourage low-level security experts to take a look at their design and code. To this end Google has opened the NativeClient Security Contest, and will award prizes topping out at $2^13 to top bug submitters. If you're familiar with low level security, memory segmentation, accurate disassembly of hostile code, code alignment, and related topics, do take a look. Mac, Linux, and Windows are all supported."
Image

Science Unlocks The Mystery Of Belly Button Lint Screenshot-sm 161

Posted by samzenpus from the extreme-navel-gazing dept.
After three years of research, including examining 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button, Georg Steinhauser has discovered a type of body hair that traps stray pieces of lint and draws them into the navel. Dr Steinhauser's observations showed that "small pieces of fluff first form in the hair and then end up in the navel at the end of the day." Chemical analysis revealed the pieces of fluff were not just made up of cotton from clothing. Wrapped up in the lint were also flecks of dead skin, fat, sweat and dust. Unfortunately, further study has failed to yield a hair or fiber that would give Dr. Steinhauser the last three years of his life back.
Medicine

Why Doctors Hate Science 1064

Posted by kdawson from the comparative-effectiveness-research dept.
theodp writes "A 2004 study found some 10 million women lacking a cervix were still getting Pap tests. Only problem is, a Pap test screens for cervical cancer — no cervix, no cancer. With this tale, Newsweek's Sharon Begley makes her case for comparative-effectiveness research (CER), which is receiving $1 billion under the stimulus bill for studies to determine which treatments, including drugs, are more medically sound and cost-effective than others for a given ailment. Physicians, Begley says, must stop treatments that are rooted more in local medical culture than in medical science, embrace practices that have been shown scientifically to be superior to others, and ignore critics who paint CER as government control of doctors' decision-making."

Android Gathers Steam Among Open Source Developers 176

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gonna-be-huge-they-figure dept.
svonkie writes "Despite launching on the T-Mobile G1 with little mainstream fanfare, Google Inc.'s Android OS appears to have gained strong interest in the open source development community. According to a survey of Black Duck Software's Knowledge Base, Apple Inc.'s iPhone led the industry with 266 open source project releases during 2008, while Android followed in second place with 191 releases. Black Duck compiled the data after scouring through over 185,000 of open source projects across 4,000 Internet sites."

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