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+ - Oracle's attempt to copyright its Java APIs->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The remarkable outpouring of support for Google in the Oracle v. Google appeal continues, with a group of well-known innovators, start-ups, and those who fund them — innovators like Ray Ozzie, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Dan Bricklin, and Esther Dyson — standing with yesterday's group of leading computer scientists in telling the court that Oracle's attempt to copyright its Java APIs would be damaging to innovation."
Link to Original Source

+ - Facebook 'Trusted Contacts' lets you pester friends to recover account access->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "Facebook Thursday said it’s making available globally a feature called "Trusted Contacts" that lets users select three to five friends who can help users recover account access such as if they forget their password. Facebook said the idea is that once these friends are identified as “trusted contacts” through the user’s security settings, Facebook will provide each of them with a special code. “Enter the codes from [at least 3 of] your trusted contacts, and you’ll be able to access your account,” Facebook says. “After you set your trusted contacts, we’ll notify them so that they can be ready to help you if you ever need it.”"
Link to Original Source
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the cycle-is-nearly-complete dept.
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.
Hardware Hacking

3-D Printing Pen Can Draw In the Air 85

Posted by Soulskill
from the sign-your-checks-in-three-dimensions dept.
Several readers sent word of a new addition to the 3-D printing industry. Most 3-D printers are roughly the size of regular printers, and require design files on the computer to guide the extruder. Now there's a much smaller and much simpler alternative: the 3Doodler pen, which lets you draw 3-D objects by hand. The people making the pen set up a Kickstarter project yesterday with a $30,000 goal. They reached that within hours, and now have pledges exceeding $800,000. "The 3Doodler pen is 180mm by 24mm. The pen weighs less than 200 grams or 7 ounces (the weight of a typical apple), although the exact weight will depend on the final shell specifications once in production. And we are using a universal power supply, so provided you have the correct adapter for your country, 3Doodler will work just fine on 110v or 240v. ... While the plastic extruded from 3Doodler is safe to touch once it has left the pen, the pen itself has a metal tip that can get as hot as 270C." The pen uses the same ABS/PLA plastic as most 3-D printers, and they're planning to host stencil designs on their website so that users have patterns to sketch from.

Comment: Re:Just a failed publicity stunt (Score 1) 200

by fmaxwell (#41807701) Attached to: Google Nexus 4 Prototype Lost In a Bar
I realize that you are personally invested in seeing this phone succeed, and that you can site some minority of smartphone users who are fine with massive phones, but it doesn't change the fact that my argument is sound. If you want to talk into something the size of a small tablet, I'm not going to stop you, but don't be surprised when Apple outsells it with phone-sized phones.

Comment: Re:Just a failed publicity stunt (Score 1) 200

by fmaxwell (#41796951) Attached to: Google Nexus 4 Prototype Lost In a Bar

Hmm - if that is true, I wonder why Google wants to create the impression it has a security team that is quite happy to pretend to be law enforcement.

Because, unlike Apple, they could not get actual law enforcement interested in getting involved. So they needed to do something to add some drama, intrigue, and a sense of danger to the situation.

Comment: Re:Just a failed publicity stunt (Score 1) 200

by fmaxwell (#41796907) Attached to: Google Nexus 4 Prototype Lost In a Bar
I don't think it was intended to be funny. I think that it was intended to make people think that there is the same kind of buzz around this phone that there was around the iPhone that was left in the bar. The whole intimidating security routine was all part of the "just like Apple" routine they were doing.

I'm sure that there are some folks with big pockets that will like the phone, but I just don't see it having the kind of mass appeal that the iPhone does. On the other hand, a huge phone definitely can't be missed on a display filled with normal size phones, so it will get attention at Best Buy.

I've seen women with hands big enough to hold this phone comfortably. Of course, they used to be men. ;)

If you can imagine a 4.7" display functioning as a laptop replacement for routine stuff, you've got way better eyes than I have. I go nuts having to work on a laptop with a 13" display.

Comment: Just a failed publicity stunt (Score 1) 200

by fmaxwell (#41795635) Attached to: Google Nexus 4 Prototype Lost In a Bar
What's really funny about this is that it's a transparent publicity stunt -- but almost no one in the mainstream press even noticed.

Even if you're Google, you can't create much buzz about the release of yet another Android phone into an already overcrowded marketplace. It's about as exciting as a new inkjet printer.

Outside of the nerdosphere, there really isn't a lot of call for a phone that is almost the size of a small tablet . It dwarfs the iPhone 5 shown next to it, and bigger isn't always better in something that is supposed to be portable. Well-heeled consumers can afford both a smartphone and a tablet. They don't need a phone so large that it requires its owner to only buy clothes with massive pockets.

Comment: Re:Never designed to be network-aware (Score 1) 182

by fmaxwell (#41795485) Attached to: Craig Mundie Blames Microsoft's Product Delays On Cybercrime

Microsoft's entire security model was based on the idiotic notion that one could take a single user OS with no security (Win 3.x/95/98/Me) and years later create successors (NT/2K/etc.) that didn't break applications that were already written. It wasn't users -- it was coddling the software vendors that drove the convoluted, unmanageable pseudo-security that got pasted on to the OS.

No rational OS architect would have permitted end-user applications to write to OS system directories, nor would they have allowed Dynamically Linked Libraries to be created and added to OS directories with no entity controlling the namespace (meaning you could create a blorm.dll that installed with your product and I could create a blorm.dll that overwrote it when my product was installed).

Other ideas, like allowing some kid in the Philippines to e-mail you a script that automatically ran when viewed, were just examples of the level of stupidity that had permeated the Microsoft campus.

User Journal

Journal: in which i am a noob all over again 17

Journal by CleverNickName

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

Comment: Re:God,talk about Sensitizing (Score 4, Insightful) 180

by thehossman (#36924794) Attached to: Java 7 Ships With Severe Bug

a) some of these bugs where filed months ago, and yet those hotspot "optimizations" are still on by default

b) it's true that some problems can be avoided by deliberately disabling these optimizations, but w/o raising big warning alarms to users, people aren't going to know they need to go out of their way to do that. For crash bugs, it may not be so bad -- they see the crash and google to find out why it crashed. For miss-evaluation of loops that can lead to silent data corruption it's a different story -- how would users ever know that they need to disable those options if developers don't yell and holler from the roof tops?

Programming

Ask Slashdot: Web Site Editing Software For the Long Haul? 545

Posted by timothy
from the when-tripods-collapse dept.
MouseR writes "It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed. I have used GoLive's CyberStudio before it got engulfed as GoLive from Adobe. Both got trashed. I eventually used Apple's .Mac HomePage. It got trashed and replaced with iWeb. I then used iWeb, hosted on MobileMe, and Apple just killed it again, along with the hosting. So, as I'm preparing to move my stuff on various web sites, onto my own hosting server (outsourced), I'm wondering what kind of visual web site editor(s) I could use, for the long haul. I'm rather sick of changing tools every other year and as a software developer, would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it. Any suggestions?"
Perl

+ - Perl 5.14 Released->

Submitted by
chromatic
chromatic writes "Pumpking Jesse Vincent has just released Perl 5.14, the latest stable version of the venerable Perl 5 programming language. The list of changes in Perl 5.14 includes several enhancements, including performance tuning, Unicode improvements, and updates to the core libraries and documentation. Perl 5.16 is on track for a release next April."
Link to Original Source

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