JamJam - Slashdot User

Submission + - Typosquatting - What happens when you mistype a we (sophos.com)

Submitted by xsee on Wednesday December 14, 2011 @03:16PM

xsee writes: Sophos did an experiment looking into every one letter off variant of the domain names for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Sophos. More than 2/3 were registered, many leading to scams and misleading offers.

Submission + - Start-Up's 'Stone-Like' Optical Disc Lasts Forever (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Monday August 08, 2011 @01:29PM

CWmike writes: "Start-up Millenniata and LG plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using on any current DVD or Blu-ray player. The M-Disc can be dipped in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a Defense Department study backing up the resiliency of its product (PDF document) compared with other leading optical disc competitors. The company would not disclose what material is used to produce the optical discs, referring to it only as a 'natural' substance that is 'stone-like.' Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But there is no reflective, or die, layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser 'etches' pits onto the substrate material."

Submission + - What is your search engine of choice?

Submitted by Enigma23 on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @11:06AM

Enigma23 writes: I was amused by some of the comments on a recent story deriding a certain web search engine. *coughGooglecough*

So, if you don't like the way Google shakes and bakes your search results, what do you use instead, and why?

Submission + - Video: LG Unveils World's First 3D Phone (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by pbahra on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @11:05AM

pbahra writes: LG Electronics Inc. unveiled the world's first full 3-D smartphone, called the Optimus 3D, as well as a new tablet at an event on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With the Optimus 3D, consumers will be able to watch 3-D videos without wearing special glasses as well as capture 3-D content themselves via a special double camera on the back of the phone.In order to make it easier for consumers to share 3-D content online, LG said it has struck a partnership with online video channel YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc.The Optimus 3D is powered by a dual core chip—like most of the smartphones launched in 2011—but it also benefits from a dual channel and a dual memory, which LG said would make it faster for users to switch back and forth between tasks and improve speed when loading web pages. The Optimus runs on Google's Android operating system and has a 4.3-inch screen.

Submission + - Two-way radio breakthrough to double Wi-Fi speeds (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @11:00AM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Stanford University have built a radio that can transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. The breakthrough could lead to a twofold increase in performance for home wireless networks and end that annoying habit of pilots finishing every sentence with "over".

Comment thee way to revert back to original design (Score 1) 2254

by JamJam on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @01:52PM (#35010790) Attached to: Slashdot Launches Re-Design

I found a way to enable the old design just go to http://slashdot.jp. It looks great, is fast, just a little more difficult to read if your Japanese is rusty...

Comment IBM R&D (Score 1) 164

by JamJam on Wednesday December 29, 2010 @07:52PM (#34705230) Attached to: IBM Makes a Super Memory Breakthrough

Didn't RTFA to know this: At least IBM is still doing R&D, and has been for quite some time. That is usually the first budget item to be slashed in economic downturns and I am grateful that big blue (notice not capital B on those) is still doing it's part to better our computing environment. On a personal note I joined a banking company years ago, one of the reasons was because they had an R&D division (not to date myself but that was the Windows NT era). That was an early goal of mine to strive towards that division plus I liked the philosophy of the company that had a R&D aspect - you can grow your core business while still pursuing (chasing?) something big. As good or as bad as IBM is, it is still in the R&D game while living off, correct me if I'm wrong, it's mainframe fortunes.

Submission + - "Hello, Android" Third Edition Book Review

Submitted by eldavojohn on Friday December 24, 2010 @02:53PM

eldavojohn writes: The third edition of Hello, Android brings the book up to date on Android versions from 1.5 to 2.2 (FroYo). The book is predominantly tied to the Eclipse editing environment with several pages devoted to screen shots of the IDE. As the title suggests, this book aims to give the user the equivalent of a "Hello, world!" application in Android and succeeds in doing that but doesn't take the reader much further. From creating a sudoku application with increasing support to dabbling in OpenGL ES, the book's prime audience are people who know a little Java (with no aversion to Eclipse) and XML but absolutely no Android. You can find the source for all the examples.

The first aspect of this book that jumps out at me is that it assumes the user is using Eclipse — even late in the book like on page 231, an entire page is a screenshot of the project creation wizard in Eclipse. While this might be helpful for initiates to Eclipse, it seemed like a bit of overkill at times when actions in Ecipse are revisited throughout the brief book. For example that same screenshot with different options checked can be found engulfing page 10. "If you don't want to use Eclipse (there's one in every crowd)" says the author on page 4 before referring the reader to Android's command line reference. It gets to the point that when Burnette is going to sign his app at the end, he uses an Eclipse wizard.

The second aspect of this book that jumped out at me is that Android apps are written by extending Java classes and utilizing a very verbose XML. So between the overridden class methods and the layout meta data in the XML, there is a lot of code consuming vertical space in the book. Ellipses are provided to avoid redundancy in some instances but in others it seems there is no avoiding the space consumption. A strength of the book is that, when possible, it shows how to do something simple in both XML and Java and gives reasoning for picking a certain way the rest of the book.

The chapters are laid out with brief introductions and "Fast-Forwards" at the end of each chapter that try to push the user past this Hello, Android introduction to complex concepts. The book is well divided with part one (chapters 1 and 2) providing instructions for setting up your emulator and the basics of Android like a state transition diagram showing how all Android applications transition through Java methods in a life cycle. Part two (chapters 3 through 6) builds the sudoku application with increasing support. Part three (chapters 7 through 10) focus on more complex aspects of Android like device sensors, SQLite and OpenGL. The fourth and final section delves into the future of multi-touch on Android, writing for all resolutions and devices as well as publishing to the Android Market. Throughout the book the author takes care to to mention when you will need to put in a permissions requirement in the manifest file when utilizing something on the device.

In creating the sudoku application, Burnette does a good job at introducing the reader to some basic concepts like procedural designing versus declarative designing and Dips versus Sps. The author introduces the automatically managed R.java file and the first extension of android.app.Activity with a good explanation of how we're going to add menus from XML strings. This chapter nicely sets up the sudoku game to have an opening screen, a settings menu, a theme and exiting the game. It is lengthy but introduces the reader to click listeners as well as explicit information about how to debug. Android 2.2 adds a cute debug level of Log.wtf() which stands for "What a Terrible Failure."

Following that chapter, the author delves into some basic two dimensional graphical capabilities involving extending View in order to manipulate the canvas object inside onDraw. The chapter sums up drawables and gives a short example of text in a circle before returning to the graphics in our sudoku application. Burnette shows explicitly how to draw the game board and give it a nice embossed effect, how to add and center numbers in each of their cells, how to override key events to bring up an input screen with only valid numbers and how to continuously update the game screen. The chapter even goes as far as showing you how to shade the squares in order to give hints to the user. One thing I did not care for in this chapter (and something that persists through the rest of the book) is that the author has no qualms with calling a method in code (like calculateUsedTiles on page 68) and not defining what it does or how it works until the end of the chapter twenty pages later. Given that its signature is descriptive and it's not key to understanding Android, it's probably the best way to teach but left me doing a lot of page flipping since I like understanding apps from the bottom up. Something else to note about this chapter is that the author mentions on page 70 that he experienced "many false starts" of trying different approaches like multiple ImageView classes in XML before finding the fastest and easiest way of having only one view. There's just a couple paragraphs on this in a side box but I really wish the author had expanded on this as it sounds like a vital part of the learning Android process.

What good is a phone app without some sound? Chapter five covers Android's MediaPlayer which Burnette calls "a fickle beast" although it improves with each release of Android. The chapter also touches on playing video in Android which takes just a few lines of code. The author helps the reader by continually explaining what happens in Android when the device is rotated (in these examples the video restarts since the app is recreated). He explains how to avoid this several different ways. He also discusses why using a background service for music isn't a great idea if you intend the music to end when your program ends. By the end of the chapter, you've got some music for your sudoku app.

The next chapter very briefly covers local data storage. This is not the SQLite chapter but rather the PreferenceActivity API as well as the instance state stored via the Bundle in Android's application stack. The author doesn't spend a lot of time on these and wraps the chapter up with a brief description of accessing the internal file system as well as an external SD card.

The seventh chapter covers the need for a browser capability inside your Android application. At first I thought this would be very rarely used (you've already got a web browser) but the author points out that when you need some ability past basic text views, you might opt instead to provide that file through a lean web browser in Android as opposed to a basic test viewer. The author argues this isn't as crazy as it seems because you don't want to waste your time enhancing a text view with more and more functionality when the web browser can do that already. So you get a wrapper around WebKit that allows you to add another view to your application resulting in a browser. Should this connect to the internet, the author explains how to ask for permission to do so and how to access those pages inside your application. The next part of the chapter is probably going to put a lot of security minded folks on edge and the author makes sure to explain very carefully that allowing JavaScript to call Java can be dangerous. So internal to the WebView class, the author demonstrates JavaScript in the web browser invoking your method in Android (and vice versa). Finally the chapter covers the intricacies of interfacing with web services. What the author did really well in this section was discuss his methods of how he came about adding millisecond delays to accommodate the user. The other great thing that makes this chapter so lengthy is that the author introduces threads both through ExecutorService and Handler.

Chapter eight covers GPS and other sensors your device might have that are supported through the latest Android API. The author takes care to understand how you need to setup your emulator if you are testing this on your computer and discusses listening for updates from sensors as well as interpreting that data. Unsurprisingly, the Android API has a MapActivity class to extend for applications that wish to impose data onto a map. I feel the author could have spent more time on the more novel sensor types that are becoming prevalent in cell phones but the GPS and maps might be adequate for an introductory book.

The ninth chapter is an introduction to SQLite in Android. Android supports other data storage solutions like db4o but the author sticks to SQLite and covers all SQL relational database aspects up to a simple cursor. It's done very well and anyone with a little knowledge of SQL should be able to create, modify and update tables inside Android applications with this chapter. A very interesting thing about this chapter is that it covers how to implement inter-process communication by way of a content provider. Android utilizes URIs that programmers can define to provide a framework for storage. The book is mediocre at describing both SQLite and ContentProviders in this chapter although I felt like the ContentProvider has enough material to deserve its own chapter — even in an introductory book. I personally feel it would be interesting to consider a chapter devoted to defining a content provider with reuse by a community intended. We get an EVENTS and EVENTS_ID example but I feel this falls short of the real beauty of ContentProviders.

The next chapter is a venture into three dimensional graphics in OpenGL ES (embedded systems). Twenty pages isn't a lot of space to work with when you're discussing OpenGL but this is a good basic introduction that leaves the reader with the means to do very basic OpenGL. The chapter starts off with some good fundamentals but also carefully explains that your devices might not have 3D hardware. The API is still there but the lag might be intolerable. The author thanks John Carmack for "single-handedly" saving us from Direct3D and starts off on the very verbose code of OpenGL. In it, there are great explanations on some basic options like ambient, diffuse and specular lighting as well as discussions of fixed versus floating point. Several pages later we have a transparent rotating cube with an Android image for a surface.

Chapter eleven is devoted to the buggiest part of Android: multi-touch. A side note titled "Warning: Multi-bugs Ahead" warns the reader about how problematic the following code is going to be and how it might perform differently on different quality of hardware. As Burnette builds out the image viewing application it's a lot of similar code to view an image with the new stuff revolving around debugging logs to give the reader key insight into how the author's phone interpreted his multi-touch interactions. Dragging and pinching are covered to zoom and move the image in the viewer and seems simple enough with the exception of bugs.

Twelve will show you how to build widgets and implement live wallpapers. To a lot of developers this chapter might be a turn off but to a lot of people looking to make money with Android, this seemed like the fastest route. The example just displays a semi-transparent "Hello World!" string but it is then demonstrated how an overriding the update allows you to put date or whatever else you might need to display. The live wallpaper seemed to me like the perfect way to drain the battery on a phone. Although more complicated than the widget, the chapter covers extending the Engine class to provide a drawing engine that will redraw the background — even with our OpenGL code from a previous chapter that the author then implements. The author really goes the distance on the live wallpaper, even explaining how to extend the surface of your wallpaper so that when you transition to another part of your space it slides the rotating cube. For better or for worse, you too can have a continuous rendering of OpenGL code for your home screen!

Chapter thirteen addresses the "fragmentation" issue that so many people have been criticizing Android for. It discusses declaring and demanding an API version as well as building different emulators out on your computer in order to run your application (although earlier in the book, the author heavily criticized the emulator as being terribly slow compared to the real hardware and I experienced the same thing with my Motorolla DROID). The author does a great job of discussing the unfortunately lengthy and complicated process of preparing your software for all hardware. From subclassing to reflection to delegation/factory, he analyzes each one and explains the strengths and weaknesses. If you're having problems with your application across hardware, this chapter is a great starting point. In the next piece of this chapter, the author calls out the Android API on a bug in the ImageView class that prevents the setImageMatrix from working in some cases (this is from 1.5 and has since been fixed). For those of you who are seriously dependent on Android, the author describes in detail his five steps in discovering and addressing this bug with the final step being a peak at the commit comments to the source tree. It's good to see an author doing legwork like this and telling the story but it's also a little unnerving to see the bug. Nevertheless, I applaud the author on this frank discussion. The final parts of this chapter are spent addressing screen size (an increasing issue with tablets) and installation by way of the SD card (something that can be auto or preferred).

The final chapter addresses publishing to the Android market and provides some actually really good insight into how one should approach this and how to interact with your user community. I'd like to note a couple things that the author lists as lessons learned. The first I found interesting was "you can make a paid app free, but you can't make a free app paid." What that means is if you publish something as free and then you update the app to move a piece of what was one free functionality to requiring payment, the backlash might destroy your app's user base. The other thing is something I flat out don't agree with: "If possible, I suggest you perform frequent updates, every two weeks or so." He claims it makes users happy and gives them a feeling of support as well as bumping it up to the top of the recently updated apps in the Market. I personally find it annoying and if I have an app that I use infrequently that frequently requests updates, I uninstall it. Case in point for me is TuneWiki Social Media Player. It seemed every other week that app was requiring an update and since I used it seldom, it was promptly uninstalled. I don't know if I'm alone in this sentiment but I found this chapter to be very insightful with the exception to that suggestion.

The appendices of this book were actually fairly interesting. I didn't know what the subset of the current Android app was for the Java Standard Edition 5.0 library. You can find a list of packages that will be unavailable to you like much of javax. The author also gives great pointers like try to avoid the expensive reflection no matter how elegant it might be for you.

This book is well written with only a few minor editing mistakes. It has a lot of illustrations which are often Eclipse screen shots. While some aspects of this book might alienate a few users, it is a great learning tool for its intended audience. I found it to be "okay" for my needs but perhaps was geared a bit more towards a more novice programmer.

You can find Hello, Android at O'Reilly or Amazon.com.

Submission + - Barcode of Life

Submitted by JamJam on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @11:23AM

JamJam writes: Using barcodes assigned to unique DNA identifiers, scientists are working on a handheld scanner that would allow you to identify any plant or bug that you come across. Acting similar to a StarTrek Tricoder the handheld device would display the name of the species, its origin and an encyclopedic description of any living thing you touch with it. According to Barcode of Life Data Systems close to 80,000 species have already been assigned DNA barcodes with 500,000 to be added within the next 5 years.

Comment Siemens Patch Release (Score 1) 322

by JamJam on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @01:15PM (#33652516) Attached to: Stuxnet Worm May Have Targeted Iranian Reactor

Taking the tin foil hat off, it almost sounds like a "Siemens Patch" for the PLC device - then that got me thinking, wouldn't this be an interesting way to patch other (zero day) vulnerabilities in MSFT, Adobe Reader, and other products? Maybe that would only help for Joe Public who is not patching their software anyway...

Submission + - H.264 now free of royalties (businesswire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Cowardus on Thursday August 26, 2010 @04:59PM

Anonymous Cowardus writes: "MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as "Internet Broadcast AVC Video") during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today'(TM)s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing."

I hope that now FireFox and Opera will both support H.264 and that Microsoft will add direct support to Internet Explorer. Google may have tipped the balance with their WebM project, but now we can all agree to use H.264 since almost all new and most of current hardware supports it and we already have the encoding tools for that format.

Let's also hope the W3 will also specify H.264 as the standard format for the HTML5 video tag so that we can finally stop using Flash, at least for video.

Submission + - Trojan responsible for plane crash? FUD or fact? (electricalchemy.net)

Submitted by pariax on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @03:20PM

pariax writes: Tired of a week of stories hyping the role the malware infection may have played in the Spanair crash, a security consultant and pilot has dissected the official report on the incident and provides a detailed account of the chain of failures that led to the crash. AV vendors duck and cover!

Submission + - Sorting algorithms: boring until you add sound (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19, 2010 @06:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: Anyone who has ever done a programming course or tried to learn to code out of a book will have come across sorting algorithms. Bubble, heap, merge, there’s a long list of these methods of sorting data. The subject matter is fairly dry. Thankfully someone has found a way to not only make sorting more interesting, but easier to remember and understand too.

Submission + - Multi-core, Threads and Message Passing (igvita.com) 1

Submitted by igrigorik on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @01:35PM

igrigorik writes: It's not a question of whether threads, events or message-passing is a better model — the hardware trends require that we use all of the above. If message passing is a choice today, then in all likelihood, it won't be in the future when we hit the diminishing returns of a shared memory model (too much communication). With that in mind, the more interesting question to explore is not which abstraction is "correct" or "more performant" (one can always craft an optimized workload), but rather how do we make all of these paradigms work together, in a context of a simple programming model? We need threads, we need events, and we need message passing — it is not a question of which is better.

Submission + - Apple Wants Patent on Videogame Play iBooks 2

Submitted by theodp on Friday August 13, 2010 @10:18AM

theodp writes: Patently Apple reports that a new Apple patent application has surfaced describing an application that would record your personal journey through a video game and turn it into a custom comic or iBook when you're done playing. Imagine how thrilled little Billy's Mommy would have been had she only had the chance to read the story of her son's foray into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or see how he dealt with BioShock's Little Sisters.

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