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Android

Submission + - Google Maps is going indoors (blogspot.com)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: Google have blogged about a new feature for their Maps app on Android — indoors mapping.

The feature is designed to replace the "you are here" maps found in shopping malls and department stores. It will automatically zoom into an indoors map if you enter a mapped building, and should also change maps as you move between different floors

Currently the maps are only available in certain airports, shopping malls, and department stores in the USA and Japan, but Google say they'll be adding more worldwide locations soon.
Science

Submission + - Physicists: Walking Through Walls Might Be Possibl (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you've ever tried the experiment, you know you can't walk through a wall. But subatomic particles can pull off similar feats through a weird process called quantum tunneling. Now, a team of physicists says that it might just be possible to observe such tunneling with a larger, humanmade object, though others say the proposal faces major challenges.

Submission + - Gaming History and the People Who Made It (thomasaknight.com)

Submitted by
Synchis
Synchis writes: "It's not very often that the world changes in a significant way. Often change is rejected, feared, and denied. That's just part of human nature. But some people throughout history defied this nature — innovators in an established industry, and pioneers of entirely new ones. Steve Jobs was one such visionary, whose contributions to the computing and entertainment industry were nothing short of monumental. Others have shared his place at this prestigious level of human accomplishment, though not all of them have been celebrated as widely as Jobs has.

So here is a list of six people who changed the gaming world. A celebration, if you will, of human accomplishment:"
Education

Submission + - Coding - the new Latin (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by FBeans
FBeans writes: The BBC Reports: "The campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills — particularly coding — in schools is gathering force.

Today the likes of Google, Microsoft and other leading technology names will lend their support to the case made to the government earlier this year in a report called Next Gen. It argued that the UK could be a global hub for the video games and special effects industries — but only if its education system got its act together."

The report says that the 16,500 students studying a computer science degree in 2003 fell to just 10,600 by 2007. "although it's recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that's at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%."

Personally, I don't see how the "Latin" analogy this story uses works. Although the point is clear:

Computer Science is becoming niche and "un-cool" and is not taught well enough in schools. This needs to change and it seems the cogs are starting to turn.
Mars

Submission + - NASA (MSL) Rover "Curiosity" set for Launch (nasa.gov)

Submitted by
arcite
arcite writes: "The latest and greatest Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover Curiosity, an SUV sized rover packed to the gills with the latest scientific instruments and innovative landing system is set to launch sometime today. As the heaviest and largest Mars Rover yet, if it is successful in touching down on the red planet, will be the best bet yet for NASA to find signs of life. Stuffed with turkey and burned out on holiday shopping, Geeks everywhere will be watching the skies above (or the livestream here) and wishing NASA’s Curiosity GODSPEED!"
Power

Submission + - Worldwide support for nuclear power drops (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years.

However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The USA remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly.

Much of the decline in opinion has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers opinions had not been affected by the events, and an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events.

With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
Encryption

Submission + - $350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection (ruhr-uni-bochum.de)

Submitted by LBeee
LBeee writes: German Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum built a FPGA board based mand-in-the-middle attack against the HDCP copy protection used in HDMI connections.

After a leak of a HDCP master key in 2010, Intel proclaimed that the copy protection is still secure, as it would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream.

It is now proven, that a system can be built for around $350 (200 Euros), that can do the task. It is however, of no great practical use for pirates. It can be easily be used to burn films from Blu-ray discs, but receivers which can deliver HDTV recordings are already available — and they provide the data in compressed form. In contrast, recording directly from an HDMI port results in a large amount of data.
Businesses

Submission + - Book Review: The Economics of Software Quality (benlinders.com)

Submitted by
BenLinders
BenLinders writes: "The book The Economics of Software Quality provides solutions to quantify Software Quality, helping you to manage software development and maintenance. It contains software quality data that you can use to build a business case to improve the quality of your software, and decide upon processes and techniques that can help to implement the needed improvements in your organization.

Quantifying software quality is not an easy thing. Several measurements exist, for instance estimating and tracking the number of defects that are found (both within development/maintenance and from customers), measuring software quality with static analysis tools (complexity, fan in/fan out), or measuring the effectiveness of software development methods and techniques (like inspections, test, and Cost of Poor Quality). This book covers Software Quality Factors that influence the quality of software products as perceived (and believed!) by customers. An extensive list of factors is provided, where the authors have selected those factors that they consider most significant to achieve quality.

Many software development processes and techniques are covered in this book, from a quality and economic point of view. This also includes agile methods, where a body of data is available about the effects of agile techniques like user stories, Test Driven Design, Scrum Sessions, Measuring Technical Debt, and Pair Programming. For instance, about agile user stories the book states “... the user story method seems to be concise and fairly trouble-free, User stories average below 0.5 pages per function point and seem to contain fewer than 0.5 defects per function point`. This kind of information can be very helpful to build a business case for using agile methods in your organization.

Most of the data on software quality that the book provides is in “Defects per Function Point”. A backfiring table is also provided, to translate language statements/lines to function points. So if you are not using function point, but programming in Java, Ruby, C++ or any other popular programming language, the data can still be used.

There is a full chapter covering defect prevention. Methods like Reuse, Formal Inspections and Quality Function Deployment are the most effective in preventing defects, and also techniques like Root Cause Analysis and PSP/TSP are claimed to be very effective. Given that the top ten techniques reduce defects with 40% — 85%, makes it interesting for many organizations to investigate the business case to improve the quality of their products, using these methods and techniques.

Additional information is provided on how to measure the effects on quality from a given method or technique. The book also provides warning for quality measurements that can be unreliable. An example is measuring cost-per-defect. When the quality of your development activities increases, for instance by improving requirements practices and implementing defect prevention for design and coding, the number of defects that testing finds will go down. Since test case preparation is a fixed cost, the cost per defect for testing will go up when the software has fewer defects. This makes such a measurement potentially unreliable. I believe that the main benefits will come when you can reduce your testing activities, based upon measurements that quantify the quality of your products before testing starts. Techniques like risk based testing can also reduce your testing hours, thus saving time and money on tests that are not needed.

Defects measurements and tracking are used in more then 55% of the military and defense software applications (using CMMI, TSP, QFD, etc), but in less then 15% of IT, commercial, web or embedded applications. Given their prevention effectiveness of -35%, and removal effectiveness of 25%, it is still surprising to me that this is not used more often. The data needed for these kinds of measurements is usually available in the defect management systems, though some addition effort is needed to classify defects and to do Root Cause Analysis. The benefits of using these kinds of measurements, combined with estimations of the expected quality at release, to decide and steer software development and prevent defects during the development and before release are significant.

The book also gets into methods to quantify structural quality issues that are not exactly “defects” but have an important impact – “Technical Debt” being one of these methods of quantification. These kind of measurements help to manage the quality of your code base, being able to see the impact on quality from changes, and take action to get quality back on the desired level when needed.

Reviews and inspections are very effective ways to remove defects before testing. Several techniques are described, both informal and formal techniques. Several of them are also usable within agile methods, supporting teams in developing better quality software. Applying these techniques effectively requires training, and arrangements within your company that enable employees to use them. The book makes clear that if you want to reduce post release defects and lower your maintenance costs, the work needs to start with early software development activities, like using better techniques for managing requirements, software modeling and design, reviews and inspections, and automatic code analysis. Testing alone is not sufficient to improve quality, and is also very costly.

The relationship between quality and risks is also explored. Many major software problems are related to the quality of the software products, e.g. outages, data loss, security issues or regulatory non compliances. Investigating such issues, for instance with Audit or Root Cause Analyses, and taking action to prevent similar problems in the future can be essential for your business. Measuring the losses and estimating potential benefits from preventive actions helps you to select the right improvements, and acquire commitment and funding to implement them.

The capabilities and skills of the staff that develops the software have significant impact on the quality. The benefits of training, skill development, and sharing of experiences to develop a learning organization can be huge. Software methods like Agile and RUP include mechanisms to continuously evaluate, learn and improve the capabilities of your staff. E.g. using retrospectives and scrum boards, to identify and follow up with improvement actions.

Overall the book covers the economic perspective of quality. The information provided can be overwhelming for some readers. If you need to improve your product quality, and are limited in time and money to do it, this book helps you to select effective quality methods and techniques, and to measure and track your progress when implementing improvements.

Ben Linders is a specialist in quality, process improvement and organizational development."

Comment Re:Products in the pipeline? (Score 1) 226

by ProbablyJoe (#38148024) Attached to: HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

This seems likely. I remember when HP bought out Palm, they were talking about using WebOS in printers, and having integration between phones/tablets/printers/every device running WebOS. This made some amount of sense when there were devices to integrate with, but now they're basically giving up on WebOS in mobile devices, there's not much point.
Android

Submission + - Facebook developing phone with HTC (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: AllThingsD is running a series of stories this week about a possible new Facebook phone, codenamed 'Buffy'.

The phone is said to be in development by HTC, who collaborated with Facebook earlier this year for the Salsa and ChaCha/Status phones, which both had physical Facebook buttons, and a degree of integration with the social network.

While these rumours have been going around for quite a while, the article contains some new information, and neither Facebook or HTC are denying the rumours.

The phone will be based on Android, but like Amazon's Kindle Fire, will be heavily modified to integrate with Facebook, potentially using Facebook's HTML5 platform.

While we're unlikely to see any official announcements or releases any time soon, Facebook are eager to compete with Google and Apple, and are likely to want a phone of their own on shelves as soon as possible.
Displays

Submission + - Wireless, contact lens display now a reality (extremetech.com) 5

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "It has finally been done: A team of US and Finnish bioengineers have embedded an antenna, radio receiver, control circuitry, and LED into a wearable contact lens. The team, led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington, Seattle, has successfully displayed a single, remotely-controlled pixel onto a contact lens worn by a rabbit. Power from an external battery is transmitted via RF to an antenna that runs around the edge of the contact lens (the gold ring that you see in the image below), so that the wearer’s vision isn’t obstructed. An integrated circuit harvests the energy, and then powers an LED (which emits a nice blue light, incidentally, and is focused by way of the entire contact lens being a Fresnel lens). The IC doesn’t do much else at the moment — it’s basically just a 450 picofarad storage capacitor built with a 130nm CMOS processor — but this is enough to discretely control an on-lens pixel from a remote radio source. The next step is a multi-pixel display (using an array of micro-Fresnel lenses), and human testing. The bionic, Terminator-like HUD is finally here."
Linux

Submission + - The Many Names of Linux Kernels (ubuntuvibes.com)

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes: Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. They are not publicized as such but some of them are really hilarious. How does 'Pink Farting Weasel' sounds?
Science

Submission + - Engineers developing 'Bionic contact lens' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: The BBC reports that researchers at Washington University have made a breakthrough in developing a contact lens that will be able to overlay text and images on top human vision.

The research is still in early stages, so far just being able to light one LED on the lens, and requiring a battery no more than 1cm away. But researchers claim the main problem has already been overcome — getting the human eye to focus on an image generated on its surface.

While a long way from completion, the team hopes to soon increase the display to hundreds of pixels, and overlay text on the lens. The technology could eventually be used in future augmented reality applications, allowing futuristic 'Terminator' style vision.
United States

Submission + - Hackers 'hit' US water treatment systems (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by FBeans
FBeans writes: The BBC reports:
"Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois."

"Hackers with access to the utility's network are thought to have broken the pump by turning it on and off quickly."

"The comments by the DHS prompted a hacker using the handle "pr0f" to claim he had access to the control systems for a second US water utility.

In an interview with the Threat Post website, Pr0f said the hack of the South Houston network barely deserved the name because only a three-character password had been used to protect the system."

Pr0f's evidence that he has access to the second Water utility can be found on pastebin here

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