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Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey

Submitted by
mritunjai
mritunjai writes: "Mozilla foundation has started work on IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey projects this summer. According to an interview given to Artima, this would be beginning of The Browser Scripting Revolution. IronMonkey is an effort to integrate Microsoft .NET CLR into Tamarin Javascript VM donated by Adobe to Mozilla. This would enable Mozilla browsers to eventually be able to run web applications written in Python (IronPython) and Ruby (IronRuby) and presumably other .NET languages like C# apart from Javascript. ScreamingMonkey is an effort to integrate the (.NET enabled) Tamarin VM into other browsers starting with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Java was not considered as it was not open source when the decision was taken."
Space

Submission + - Deathbed confession swears by Roswell aliens (news.com.au)

Submitted by
hellbreaker
hellbreaker writes: "Lieutenant Walter Haut, the public relations officer at Roswell base in 1947, died last year; but he left behind a sworn affidavit (to be opened in the event of his death) describing a spacecraft, and little green men that he himself witnessed. Okay, maybe not green, but this just brings the whole question back: what exactly happened there?"

Apple iPhone Dissected 338

Posted by CowboyNeal from the better-them-than-you dept.
Conch writes "Only hours after the launch, the Apple iPhone has been dissected. The good folks at AnandTech violated one of the first iPhones to still our curiosity about whats inside the aluminum shell. 'Please note that we're doing this so you are not tempted to on your recent $500/$600 expenditure, while it is quite possible to take apart using easy to find tools we'd recommend against it as it will undoubtedly void your warranty and will most likely mar up the beautiful gadget's exterior.'"
Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla Sunbird 0.5 Released (mozilla.org)

Submitted by linux pickle
linux pickle writes: Mozilla has released version 0.5 of Sunbird, its calendar app. New features in this release include numerous stability and usage improvements, Google Calendar synchronization support, as well as much improved printing support. Check out the release notes or go grab a copy!
The Courts

Submission + - New Obviousness Standard Destroying Bad Patents

Submitted by
Stop Software Patents
Stop Software Patents writes: "We finally have the first case citing the new standard of obviousness the Supreme Court created for patents via KSR v. Teleflex. In Leapfrog v. Fisher-Price, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that, although the specific combination of existing toy features Leapfrog patented had not been patented before, the combination did nothing that would not have been anticipated by someone skilled in the art of toymaking. The article goes on to say that this may indicate that many obvious internet patents, which closely mirror existing offline business practices, will soon become deservedly worthless."
Security

Submission + - Quantum Cryptography Hacked

Submitted by mrbluze
mrbluze writes: Nature reports on a eavesdropping technique developed by researchers at MIT for intercepting quantum-encrypted messages:

To listen in, the team used a quantum-mechanical principle known as entanglement, which can link together two different traits of a particle. Using an optical setup, the team was able to entangle the transmitted photon's polarization with its momentum. The eavesdropper could then measure the momentum in order to get information about the polarization, without affecting the original polarization.
This stuff is beyond me, but I can't wait to read Slashdot's explanation!
Power

Submission + - Indian project shows solar power affordable - U.N

Submitted by sas-dot
sas-dot writes: A solar power project in India supplying electricity to 100,000 people will be widened to other developing nations after showing that clean energy can be cheaper than fossil fuels, a U.N. report said on Sunday. BBC News says that the $1.5m project, led by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), supports Indian bankers who offer finance to people who want to purchase a unit. The sunlight-powered systems are used to light homes and shops instead of expensive and polluting kerosene lamps. Officials hope to expand the scheme to Tunisia, China, Ghana and Indonesia. Before the UN project was set up, purchases were predominately cash only — making the devices too expensive for most people. The Indian Loan Programme helps its bank partners offer lower interest rates, longer payback periods and smaller deposits. "This project removes one of the main barriers to the shift to solar power — lack of financing," said Jyoti Painuly, a UN senior energy planner. "Asking customers... to pay cash for solar systems meant asking them to pay upfront an amount equal to 20 years of electricity bills." In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the UN says a single wick lamp each year burns about 80 litres of kerosene, which produces more than 250kg of carbon dioxide. An estimated 100 million families in India use kerosene lamps.
Music

Submission + - Court rules playlist customization not interactive

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Is music played via customized playlist delivered interactively (i.e., via user participation) or non-interactive (i.e., decisions are made on the server side)? The question does seem metaphysical, but it took Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Yahoo! six years to figure it out. User-driven playlists are bucketed with on-demand music services, while server-driven playlists are equaled to broadcasts, thereby causing different licensing mechanisms to take place. Yahoo! inherited the legal wrangle when it purchased a music startup Launch, which built a music recommendation feature. Court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site."

Comment Re:Questions about OS X - somewhat offtopic (Score 1) 528

by parmadil (#18229490) Attached to: Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?
I am a Mac developer (on Mac, for Mac), so I'll try to address your questions - bear in mind though I have little experience with non-Mac systems.

1: Terminal.app is bare-bones but fairly usable. If you need more bells and whistles by all means go for iTerm. Also, I recall reading somewhere that Leopard will have an upgraded Terminal with more features.

2: My familiarity with Linux/UNIX is not high, but I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is launchd. You can manage launchd's daemons via the command-line launchctl, which I assume can be done through ssh though I've never tried it. (There's also a very nice FOSS Cocoa app called Lingon that interfaces with launchd locally).

3: X isn't bad; it starts automatically when you attempt to open an X app, which can be packaged and opened from the Finder just like a native one or from the command line. In my experience it's a bit slow, especially on first startup, but usable. There are a few quirks of integration with the OS X window manager and controls, but nothing too serious. Oh, and Fink is very very valuable, though it can be somewhat out of date (you absolutely must use the unstable package tree).

4: Of a sort, yes; there is a hierarchical list view and a column-based browser. I find both very clumsy myself and tend to stick with the old-style Mac icon view. Fair warning, the Finder is widely -- and correctly -- considered a piece of junk needing a total rewrite. It's not well (or at all?) multithreaded and tends to balk on things Konqueror wouldn't even bat an eyelash at.

Hope this helps.

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