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Comment Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score 1) 571

by cheetah_spottycat (#42178621) Attached to: Microsoft Steeply Raising Enterprise Licensing Fees

Have a look at SOGo. Comes with native Outlook and active directory support, can use any IMAP/smtp server as backend, supports funambol for mobile device support, has a pretty slick web interface ... unless you have some VERY specific requirement for single Microsoft novelty features, this is your exchange replacement right there.

Comment Re:I would expect to be held responsible (Score 1) 285

by cheetah_spottycat (#42092677) Attached to: "Anonymous" File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal By German Court

Postal services around the world have been delivering anonymous mail for centuries, and never has any of them ever been made responsible for the content of anonymous letters.

But somehow, in the digital world, everyone wants the messenger shot, comparing a bunch of ones and zeroes with drugs and bombs as if bits could kill.

Reality check, pretty please?
Android

Submission + - Flash is dead (thenextweb.com) 1

Submitted by
mgv
mgv writes: "Flash has died — at least on the mobile platform

As of now, adobe is discontinuing flash (other than a few minor security updates for an unspecified period of time) for mobile devices."

Submission + - Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, (zdnet.com) 3

Submitted by awjr
awjr writes: Jason Perlow has a bit of a scoop on Adobe discontinuing Flash on mobile browsers. This probably explains the recent purchase of Phonegap. For those who do not want to RTFA:

"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates."

Maybe Steve Jobs was right on this one.
Programming

Submission + - How Facebook Ships Code

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "yeegay has a very interesting article about how Facebook develops and releases software that he has gathered from talking with friends at the company. The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week “Boot Camp” training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. "All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don’t invite them to," writes yeegay. "It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.” What is interesting for a compnay this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day: many times a day and every employee is using a version of the site that includes all the changes that are next in line to go out. All employees are strongly encouraged to report any bugs they see and these are very quickly actioned upon. Facebook has about 60,000 servers with the smallest level comprising only 6 servers and there are nine levels for pushing out new code. For new code the ops team observes those 6 servers at level 1 to make sure that they are behaving correctly before rolling forward to the next level. If a release is causing any issues (e.g., throwing errors, etc.) then the push is halted, the engineer who committed the offending changeset is paged to fix the problem, and then the release starts over again at level 1."
Government

Submission + - U.S. Needs Cyberwar Skunk Works, Expert Says (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: In order to address the fundamental questions surrounding the concept of cyberwar and what it might mean for both the government and the enterprise, the United States should develop a skunk works-type thik tank comprising highly skilled private-sector security experts as well as operational and policy experts from the government, a former deputy Secretary of Defense said.

Franklin Kramer, who served in the Clinton administration on international and cybersecurity policy, said Tuesday that because the concept of using computers as weapons is still so new, policy makers and security experts don't even know which questions to ask, let alone what the correct answers are. As a result, the public and private discourse both in Washington and in other countries has been focusing on the sensational elements--cyberwar, cyber-espionage, anything with cyber as a prefix--rather than the questions of when and how such tactics might be deployed and what that would mean for the people on both sides.

"We've only really begun to think about this. It's new," Kramer said in his keynote speech at the Black Hat DC conference here. "There's no clarity on the problems to solve or the solutions. We need to bring policymakers like me and techies like you together in a wonk-geek coalition to enlarge the problem spaces that we each work on."

Submission + - 12% of federal judges are 80+ years old (propublica.org) 1

Submitted by zokuga
zokuga writes: When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the average American lived to be 40. The framers didn't express much worry about the possibility of senile judges when they granted life tenure to federal judges. Today, according to a report by the investigative news site ProPublica, 12% of the nation's 1,200 sitting federal judges are 80-years or older.

The aging bench has raised questions of whether senior judges can grasp the cultural and technological shifts that happen during their decades of service, and whether their minds are fit in the first place. ProPublica recounts an anecdote of a federal judge who didn't understand e-mail and asked his lawyers, "It pops up in a machine in some administrative office, and is somebody there with a duty to take it around and give it to whoever it's named to?" It was unclear to the lawyers present, ProPublica reports, whether the judge (who's office came with a mimeograph machine when he began his term) was out of touch with technology or had a defective memory, as his previous most famous case involved a Silicon Valley banker and a single e-mail as the decisive evidence.
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone 5 and iPad 2 to get a dual core processor (geekword.net)

Submitted by TechieAlizay
TechieAlizay writes: Rumors surrounding iPad 2 and iPhone 5 just keep coming at us don’t they? The latest round of speculation sees the next gen iPhone and iPad getting dual core CPUs and GPUs which will bring with it the set of added benefits.

AppleInsider, which is filling in the source shoes is suggesting the incorporation of dual-core SGX543 GPU from Imagination technologies into iPhone 5 and iPad 2. If you think on this from the logical side of things, this makes sense if Apple is to provide a high resolution display screen which according to a rumor will have resolution of 2048×1536 pixels.

The multiple core GPU chip will bring faster video processing capabilities which will delight movie watching and game playing fans. Moreover you can expect the likes of iPhone 5 and iPad 2 to support HDMI output which simply put is an exciting prospect.
Education

Submission + - Cosmological Constant Not Fine Tuned for Life (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A common argument one might encounter in intelligent design or the arduous process of resolving science with religion is that the physical constants of our world are fine tuned for life by some creator or designer. A University of Alberta theoretical physicist claims quite the opposite when it comes to the cosmological constant. His paper says that our ever expanding universe has a positive cosmological constant and he explains that the optimum cosmological constant for maximizing the chances of life in the universe would be slightly negative: 'any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life. Therefore the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is positive, is evidence against the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned for life.'

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