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Submission + - Corporate FOSS Users seek to tell developers what to do.

Submitted by jralls
jralls writes: OK, maybe the headline is a tiny bit inflammatory. The New York Times broke a story today (paywalled if you look at more than 10 stories a month) about ToDo, "an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS, "including ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively". The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.

Submission + - Funding Tech For Government, Instead of Tech For Industry (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're a creative engineer looking to build a product, you're probably going to end up starting your own business or joining another one. That's where ideas get funding, and that's where products make money. Unfortunately, it also siphons a lot of the tech-related talent away from government (and by extension, everybody else), who could really benefit from this creative brilliance. That's why investor Ron Bouganim just started a $23 million fund for investment in tech companies that develop ideas for the U.S. government. Not only is he hoping to transfer some of the $74 billion spent annually by the government on technology to more efficient targets, but also to change the perception that the best tech doesn't necessarily come from giant, entrenched government contractors.

Submission + - Australia's Submarine Play: Run Silent, Run Japanese? (nationalinterest.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Australia resides in a tough neighborhood. China is rising and building weapons that soon will have the ability to hit most targets in Asia thanks to advances in ballistic and cruise missiles. At the same time, Australia sells China a ton of natural resources--making Beijing its largest trading partner. So needless to say Australia needs to hedge its bets. Other nations around the region are building advanced, conventional arms as fast as possible. But they are also working together to develop systems that can compete with China just in case conflict did ever occur. It seems Australia will be buying Japanese submarines--some of the most advanced in the world.

The deal looks promising, and much more affordable than a domestic solution while Australia gets one of the worlds most advanced subs:

"By all accounts, Australia will be getting a good deal. At roughly $1.87 billion dollars each, the Soryu-class submarines are a bargain against Future Submarine Program projections of $3 to $5 billion each. Yet the decision to buy Japanese is a politically risky one for the government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott. A survey by the Australian Industry Group estimated a next Australia generation submarine program would employ “about 5,000 workers and 1,000 Australian businesses”.

Submission + - Google's Android One initiative launches in India with three $100 phones

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has unveiled its first set of Android One low-cost smartphones in the Indian market, partnering with Indian hardware vendors Spice, Micromax and Karbonn. The three phones will be available online on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal and via Reliance Digital, Croma and The Mobile Store, offline. The phones provide a minimum set of features determined by Google, which has sourced several of the components to help cut manufacturing costs. The company has also teamed up with a local network to make it cheaper to download Android updates and new apps.

Submission + - School to fingerprint students to 'monitor their diets' (eagnews.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: STOURBRIDGE, England – A school is implementing a biometric system to better track what students are eating each day.

The Express & Star reports students at Redhill School in Stourbridge, England will be fingerprinted in an attempt to reduce lunch lines and “monitor pupils’ diets.” The system requires pupils to press a finger against a machine which converts the print into biometric data. This can then be used to identify individual pupils accounts.

Headteacher Stephen Dunster wrote to parents, “We are aiming to have a cashless system throughout the school. The catering system is better for parents because they don’t have to provide children with lunch money every morning. From our perspective it is far more efficient as it reduces waiting times. We will also be able to monitor what children are buying to make sure they are eating a healthy diet.”

Submission + - U.S. Scientists See Long Fight Against Ebola (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite recent advances in medicine to treat Ebola, epidemiologists are not hopeful that the outbreak in west Africa will be contained any time soon. Revised models for the disease's spread expect the outbreak to last 12 to 18 months longer, likely infecting hundreds of thousands of people. "While previous outbreaks have been largely confined to rural areas, the current epidemic, the largest ever, has reached densely populated, impoverished cities — including Monrovia, the capital of Liberia — gravely complicating efforts to control the spread of the disease. ... What worries public health officials most is that the epidemic has begun to grow exponentially in Liberia. In the most recent week reported, Liberia had nearly 400 new cases, almost double the number reported the week before. Another grave concern, the W.H.O. said, is 'evidence of substantial underreporting of cases and deaths.' The organization reported on Friday that the number of Ebola cases as of Sept. 7 was 4,366, including 2,218 deaths." Scientists are urging greater public health efforts to slow the exponential trajectory of the disease and bring it back under control.

Submission + - Justice Sotomayor Warns Against Tech-Enabled "Orwellian" World (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke on Thursday to faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma City about the privacy perils brought on by modern technology. She warned that the march of technological progress comes with a need to enact privacy protections if we want to avoid living in an "Orwellian world" of constant surveillance. She siad, "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t knowcan pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."

Submission + - Apple disappoints fans in China: No iPhone 6 for awhile (latimes.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Apple disappointed millions of Chinese fans this week when it said that its latest iPhone would not go on sale in mainland China on Sept. 19, the date it is to hit stores in the U.S. and nine other territories.

Some observers say Chinese authorities want to make sure the homegrown TD LTE standard can dominate the country’s 4G networks before allowing a foreign-developed 4G standard in.

Last week, a document that purported to be a leaked internal directive from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which oversees the country’s telecommunication industry, surfaced on Chinese social media websites. It said that all smartphones sold in China would be required to lock out the FDD LTE functionality.

That seems to raise the question of whether Apple would be willing to comply with such restrictions on its crown jewel. Chief Executive Tim Cook said during Tuesday’s keynote that the device would support more than 200 carriers globally, including China Mobile.

“It’s possible that Apple is willing to wait until the iPhone can be released in China without any restrictions on its FDD LTE network support,” said Xu Hao, who monitors China’s smartphone market for Beijing based consulting firm Analysys International.

Cook has called China “one of the most important markets” and when Apple announced its latest quarterly earnings in July, revenues from greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, were up by 28% from a year earlier, largely outperforming the company’s overall year-over-year growth rate of 6%.

Submission + - Debug Chrome, Safari apps from Firefox with new add-on (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: A few months ago Mozilla released its WebIDE project to make the browser a complete environment not just for consuming Web apps but for developing and deploying them as well. At the time, though, WebIDE had a gap: Web applications generally have to run in a range of browsers, and WebIDE only worked with Firefox and Firefox OS.

With a new add-on released today, WebIDE is going cross platform. The catchily named "Firefox Developer Tool Adaptor" lets Firefox connect to Chrome (both on the desktop and on Android) and Safari (on iOS) remotely, enabling developers to use the Firefox development environment to debug apps running on those other browsers.

Specifically, Web devs will be able to use Firefox's JavaScript debugger, DOM inspector, and CSS editor with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Each browser has its own remote debugging protocol, and the add-on translates from those "foreign" protocols back to Firefox's own built-in remote debugging protocol.

Mozilla hopes that this will make developers' lives much easier, letting them stick with one set of tools while still testing and debugging across different platforms. This recognizes an important aspect of Web development. As much as Web apps are meant to be cross-platform and browser-independent, testing in different browsers and addressing the little annoyances and problems that occur in them remains a core part of the Web development experience.

The company says that future development of the add-on will be guided by developer feedback, with possible future features including wider browser support (Internet Explorer is currently not supported, for example), or richer capabilities such as JavaScript and WebGL performance profiling.

Submission + - Apple Product announcement only available to fanbois and grrls. (apple.com) 3

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes:

Live streaming video requires Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X v10.6.8 or later; Safari on iOS 6.0 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later.

From the preaching-to-the-moneyed-choir-department.

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