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Android

Holo Theme Is Now Mandatory For Android Devices 206

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the a-breath-of-fresh-tron dept.
tripleevenfall writes in about the new theme changes in Android 4.0. From the article: "Starting with Android 4.0, support for the 'Holo' theme will be mandatory for phones and tablets that have the Android Market installed. Holo is the stock Android theme, known for its sharp angles, thin lines and blue hue. Third-party developers can now create apps and widgets using the default Android aesthetic, knowing that's how it'll look on every major Ice Cream Sandwich device that has the Android Market. " This is not banning custom themes; instead it is merely giving developers a consistent theme that is guaranteed to be installed if they want a consistent look across all devices. There are even a few improvements to the style protocol to help developers deal with dark and light themes.
Android

Feature Phones Make Java ME, Not Android, the #2 Mobile Internet OS 286

Posted by timothy from the feature-creature dept.
bonch writes "According to a report from NetApplications, which has measured browser usage data since 2004, Oracle's Java Mobile Edition has surpassed Android as the #2 mobile OS on the internet at 26.80%, with iOS at 46.57% and Android at 13.44%. And the trend appears to be growing. Java ME powers hundreds of millions of low-end 'feature phones' for budget buyers. In 2011, feature phones made up 60% of the install base in the U.S." Looking at the linked chart, it looks Java ME's been ahead of Android for all of 2011, too, except for the month of October.
Cloud

Testing the MongoDB Global Write Lock Improvements 38

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the heckling-haskell-hackers dept.
rick446 writes "I took some time to benchmark the global write lock improvements in MongoDB 2.0. From the article: 'MongoDB, as some of you may know, has a process-wide write lock... Per-database and per-collection locking is on the roadmap ..., but it's not here yet. What was announced in MongoDB version 2.0 was locking-with-yield. I was curious about the performance impact of the write lock and the improvement of lock-with-yield, so I decided to do a little benchmark, MongoDB 1.8 versus MongoDB 2.0.'"
GUI

The Semantic Line Interface 123

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the do-what-i-mean-not-what-i-click dept.
First time accepted submitter yuriyg_ua writes "[The] semantic line interface may combine features of both command line and graphical interface, which would allow even more complex applications than we have seen before." The idea is that the layer underlying user interfaces should define the semantic relations between data enabling the UI to provide better contextual information. Kind of a modern version of the CLIM presentation system.
IT

Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users 348

Posted by Soulskill from the rayguns-not-on-the-list dept.
GMGruman writes "The BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control slip. But for these five technologies — mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps — it has already slipped, and Forrester and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many just won't deliver what IT hopes."
Wikipedia

The Curious Case of Increasing Misspelling Rates On Wikipedia 285

Posted by Soulskill from the curiouser-adn-cuoriuesr dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better. One particular student who was curious about this conducted rudimentary text mining on a sampling of the Wikipedia corpus to discover how misspelling rates on Wikipedia change through time. The results appear to indicate an increasing rate of misspellings through time. The author proposes that this consistent increase is the result of Wikipedia contributors using more complex language, which the test is unable to cope with. How do the results of this test compare to your own observations on the detail accuracy of massively crowd-sourced applications?"

Comment ATSB Report (Score 1) 603

by SJ2000 (#38431194) Attached to: Software Bug Caused Qantas Airbus A330 To Nose-Dive
In-flight upset - Airbus A330-303, VH-QPA, 154 km west of Learmonth, WA, 7 October 2008

Although the FCPC algorithm for processing AOA data was generally very effective, it could not manage a scenario where there were multiple spikes in AOA from one ADIRU that were 1.2 seconds apart. The occurrence was the only known example where this design limitation led to a pitch-down command in over 28 million flight hours on A330/A340 aircraft, and the aircraft manufacturer subsequently redesigned the AOA algorithm to prevent the same type of accident from occurring again.

ADIRU = Air Data Inertial Reference Unit

Comment Re:Wait and see (Score 1) 52

by SJ2000 (#38381748) Attached to: E-Crime Police Raid Melbourne Newspaper
If that's the case, Unauthorised access to or modification of restricted data requires states "A person who-causes any unauthorised access to or modification of restricted data held in a computer; and... knows that the access or modification is unauthorised; and... intends to cause the access or modification- is guilty of an offence"
Doesn't causation indicate that the whistleblower is the one who committed an offence against this section? Not the paper?

Comment Re:Pissweak Cybercrime Legislation (Score 2) 52

by SJ2000 (#38381700) Attached to: E-Crime Police Raid Melbourne Newspaper
Under Crimes Act 1958, Section 247B ("Unauthorised access, modification or impairment with intent to commit serious offence") one can claim they did not know access was unauthorised because no policy was stated as mentioned by the Australian Institute of Criminology amongst a variety of things. Also, it requires intent to commit another serious offence.
The Crimes Act 1958 Section 247G ("Unauthorised access to or modification of restricted data") states that 'restricted data' is "...data held in a computer to which access is restricted by an access control system associated with a function of the computer." so if there is no access control governing access to the data then it's not restricted data thus no offence has been made against the section.
Assuming parent is correct regarding there being no access control, the investigation is a fishing expedition, which has happened before to the Australian media and they've always seized far more then was required. If they aren't using encryption and data compartmentalisation by now. then they aren't really serious about keeping their sources confidential.

Comment Why? (Score 1) 230

by SJ2000 (#38295390) Attached to: Upcoming Changes To 'Ask Slashdot'
Why bother to use Ask Slashdot in the first place? The chance of getting your submission picked is practically next to nothing, which is a good thing in other ways, I don't want to be spammed with questions on my feed. Ask Slashdot question quality isn't that great anyway, too much of the time the question is regarding something legal (Thus any answer not from a lawyer is irrelevant), has bad assumptions, is flamebait, is too vague/generic/incomplete or any power/technical user/consumer should already know or know how to find out themselves.
Censorship

UK ISP Disconnecting Filesharers 106

Posted by samzenpus from the no-torrent-for-you dept.
bs0d3 writes "A small VPN service, Koppla, has had its service terminated by its host, Santrex Hosting Solutions. Despite actively advertising their services to be oriented toward file-sharing including torrents and XDCC, even going so far as to put 'Seedbox Hosting | An Effective Solution' in the title of their contact page, the UK based Santrex will independently act to terminate users who are thought to be distributing content that they don't own the copyright to. This is regardless of whether the infringement is done by a third party, as is the case with a VPN service such as Koppla."

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