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Privacy

Submission + - Woman arrested at ABIA after refusing enhanced pat (kvue.com) 1

Submitted by masterwit
masterwit writes: In the wake of recent articles involving the arguable privacy issues and constitutional rights violations involved with the new technology employed by the TSA , back scanners...this happened:
The article states: "One of the first people in line after that shutdown never made it through. She was arrested and banned from the airport.
Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim and who has a pacemaker-type device implanted in her chest, says her constitutional rights were violated. She says she never broke any laws. But the Transportation Security Administration disagrees."
It will be interesting to see the fallout from this unfortunate situation.
Games

Submission + - Record Set for World's Youngest Chess Champion 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Hou Yifan, a 16-year-old chess player from China, became the youngest world chess champion on Friday, in the final of the Women’s World Chess Championship held in Antakya, Turkey, toppling a record held since 1978. Currently, the top-ranked woman is Judit Polgar of Hungary, who is thought to be the best female player in history but Polgar, once ranked No. 8 in the world among all players, men and women combined, does not compete in women’s tournaments and did not play. No one really knows why the best female players are typically not as good at chess as the best men. One theory, common among some top male players, is that men are usually more aggressive by nature than women, and are therefore better suited to a game that simulates warfare. Another, cited in at least one university study, is that the talent pool among women has not been big enough to produce many great players. Ms. Hou said she had no idea why the gender disparity exists in chess, but whatever the reason, she says she finds men more difficult to play against."

Submission + - Christmas Robotics Videos (ieee.org)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Several robotics labs in the US and Europe have decided to make themed Christmas/New Years videos. The subject was left open but in the end it should have had a) something to do with the robotics research in each lab and b) a connection to the holidays. Here's the official announcement on the IEEE Spectrum blog. The videos, including a computer-controlled quadrocopter attempting to play jingle bells on a yamaha keyboard, are available on the are Robotics Podcast YouTube channel.

Could make for a nice holiday post... just a suggestion :-) Thanks, and Merry Christmas :-)
(Disclaimer: I made one of the videos!)

Submission + - A Real World HTML 5 Benchmark (clubcompy.com) 1

Submitted by
KidCompy
KidCompy writes: "The newest browsers boast huge performance improvements, but how much do you trust benchmarks trotted out to prove those claims? Do they reflect the real uses to which developers will put HTML 5 and JavaScript? We've extracted several benchmarks from our existing programs to measure actual versus theoretical performance."
Google

Submission + - Rooting or Openness? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by jamlam
jamlam writes: The Android developers blog has a comment from their dev team on the recent 'rooting' of their Nexus S phones. It contains a call from Google to handset manufacturers to open up their phones to give users choice, but will this ever happen in a market dominated by lock-em-down cellular networks?
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft and Motorola add 9 patents-in-suit (blogspot.com)

Submitted by FlorianMueller
FlorianMueller writes: Patent suits are the IT industry's new Christmas cards: Microsoft and Motorola just added new accusations to their row. Motorola filed another suit in the Western District of Wisconsin, for the first time also attacking the Kinect. Microsoft threw in seven patents in Southern Florida. Two of them cover touchscreen technologies and two allegedly read on Motorola's DVRs. At this stage of the game, 35 patents are in suit between the companies. Afraid to lose track of so much peace and harmony? There's a visualization available (detailed reference material included).
Apple

Submission + - Apple Forces Steve Jobs Action Figure Off eBay (tomsguide.com) 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Kevin Parrish writes in Tom's Guide that last month, just in time for Christmas holiday gift-giving, M.I.C. Gadget began the manufacture and sale of a Steve Jobs action figure featuring an oversized head, Steve's trademark black shirt/blue jeans outfit, and a new iPhone 4 like a magical world-saving talisman in Jobs' left hand. The action figure, selling for $79.90, came with an Apple logo stand and cartoon balloons for writing custom messages. Soon a warning letter from Apple stated that the figurine violated a California statute prohibiting the use of a person's likeness in a product without prior authorization and sales ceased. But shortly after production stopped, the figurines began to appear on eBay selling for up to $2,500. Now Apple's lawyers have raided the online marketplace, zeroing in on one Canadian eBay seller who had already sold the figurine for $1,125 and eBay has removed other listings, telling sellers that the object for sale "violates a celebrity's right of publicity." Although Steve Jobs fans can stlll purchase magazines featuring Jobs' likeness, the made-for-TV movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley," and a Steve Jobs "Hope" T-Shirt, you may have a long wait to find a Steve Jobs action figure in your stocking."
Books

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

Submitted by eldavojohn
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.
Perl

Submission + - 23 Years of Culture Hacking with Perl (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
Modern Perl
Modern Perl writes: "Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, reflects on Perl's history of hacking its culture, from subverting the reductionist culture of Unix to reinventing the ideas of programming language and culture in Perl 6 and the verbal aikido used to encourage honest detractors to become valuable contributors. Perl turned 23 years old last week, and Perl 6 is available."

Submission + - Crookes, RIAA, MPAA, ICE: 'linking is publishing' (p2pnet.net) 1

Submitted by newtley
newtley writes: What do Canada's Wayne Crookes, the Big 4's RIAA, Hollywood's MPAA and brand new ICE agent Andrew Reynolds have in common? They all claim linking is the same as publishing. Crookes is using it to demand Canada's Supreme Court effectively shut down the net in Canada. With the RIAA and MPAA providing the 'initiative', the Obama government is using Andrews [read ICE — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to try to shut down innocent sites for, and on behalf of, Hollywood and Big Music. The sites are "accused of contributing to online piracy, and it was essential for the domain names to be seized without a trial and without giving the sites a chance to respond. Why? Such sites are destroying the US economy". Forget about legally appointed courts, proof or due process. Hollywood and Big Music rule.

Submission + - Problems with Truncation on the Common Application (nytimes.com)

Submitted by jaroslav
jaroslav writes: A combination of rigid caps on space and poor documentation of the space limits is adding stress on students applying for college using the Common Application, the New York Times reports. The story explains that the application lists word limits for questions, but actually enforces space limits. As a result, an answer with wide characters, such as 'w' or 'm', may run over space even without reaching the stated word limit. It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits.
Government

Submission + - White House warns of supercomputer arms race (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The White House's science advisors, in a report last week, said a petaflop-by-petaflop race to achieve number one on the Top500 could prove costly and divert money from supercomputing research. "While it would be imprudent to allow ourselves to fall significantly behind our peers with respect to scientific performance benchmarks that have demonstrable practical significance, a single-minded focus on maintaining clear superiority in terms of flops count is probably not in our national interest," the report said. It is urging the supercomputing community to expand its benchmark measures beyong the Top500's Linpack. It says the Graph500, for data-intensive applications involving the rapid execution of graph operations, "will be more relevant," but also acknowledges that it will difficult to rely on any one measure.

Submission + - Solar Reactor Unveiled, Solar Plane Breaks Records

Submitted by chrb
chrb writes: Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have unveiled a new solar reactor prototype that directly converts carbon dioxide or water into hydrogen or carbon monoxide. Science Magazine have the paper: High-Flux Solar-Driven Thermochemical Dissociation of CO2 and H2O Using Nonstoichiometric Ceria.

In other news, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale has confirmed that the UK-built solar-powered Zephyr aeroplane broke three world records following a non-stop two-week flight earlier this year.
Iphone

Submission + - 13 Year old girl sues Apple over moisture sensors (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: A 13 year old Korean girl is suing Apple for charging her for repairs to her iPhone 3G which was still under warranty. Apple claimed that the warranty was void because the moisture sensors inside the phone had been triggered. The family is asking for $251 in compensation because they believe the moisture sensors were triggered without actually being exposed to water. The family was actually approached by a lawyer to settle but the family declined and still wanted to pursue it in court. The family wants Apple to realize their poor positioning of moisture sensors and not falsely trigger for someone else.
Hardware

Submission + - 20 stunning PC mods from 2010 (bit-tech.net)

Submitted by arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes: Who says PC modding is dead? UK tech site bit-tech has rounded up 20 of the best PC mods from the year, showcasing an incredible amount of innovation, skill and craftsmanship. From a PC made of concrete, through a replica of a Cray-1 chassis to an Art Deco style wooden radio, these 20 stunning PC mods are just amazing pieces of work.

Submission + - The animal world has its junkies too (pjonline.com)

Submitted by
Phoghat
Phoghat writes: "Research scientists have used many animal species in investigating mind-altering drugs, but it may come as a surprise to learn that animals in the wild — from starlings to reindeer — also make use of psychoactive substances of their own accord.
It seems that many of these species have a natural desire to experience altered states of consciousness, and man may well have found his way to some of his favourite recreational drugs by observing the behaviour of animals."
Science

Submission + - Scientist Alleges Religious Discrimination

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that astronomer Martin Gaskell claims he was passed over for the job of Director of the University of Kentucky's MacAdam Student Observatory three years ago because he is an evangelical Christian and because statements that Gaskell made were perceived to be critical of the theory of evolution and has sued the university, claiming lost income and emotional distress. "There is no dispute that based on his application, Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position," wrote U.S. District Judge Karl S. Forester in the ruling allowing the case to go to trial. According to court records, university scientists wondered to each other in internal e-mails if Gaskell's faith would interfere with the job, which included public outreach and cited a lecture Gaskell gave in 1997 called "Modern Astronomy, the Bible and Creation" which he developed for "Christians and others interested in Bible and science questions." Gaskell says his views on evolution are in line with other biological scientists and distances himself from Christians who believe the earth is a few thousand years old, saying their assertions are based on "mostly very poor science."""
Software

Submission + - Progress in Algorithms Beats Moore's Law (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by
Relic of the Future
Relic of the Future writes: "Seen on the blog "Algorithmic Game Theory", a report to congress and the president about past and future advances in information technology notes that, while improvements in hardware accounted for an approximate 1,000 fold increase in calculation speed over a 15 year time-span, improvements in algorithms accounted for an over 43,000 fold increase."

Submission + - Blizzard gets judgement overturned over WoW bots (mondaq.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ninth Circuit reversed a $6.5 million judgment for Blizzard against MDY Industries saying that making bots is not copyright infringement. The bad news? They did violate the DMCA Section 1201(a)(2) which prohibits trafficking in products that circumvent technologies designed to control access to copyright protected works.
Youtube

Submission + - TSA Investigates Pilot who Exposed Security Flaws (go.com)

Submitted by stewart_maximus
stewart_maximus writes: The TSA is investigating a TSA deputized pilot who posted videos to YouTube pointing out security flaws. Flaws exposed include ground crew clearing security with just a card swipe while pilots have to go through metal detectors, and a 'medieval-looking rescue ax' being available on the flight deck. Three days after posting the video, 6 government officials arrived at his door to question him and confiscated his federal firearm (and his concealed weapon permit).

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