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Submission + - JDK 7 Unexpectedly Gets "Simple" Closures (infoq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: During his Devoxx talk, Mark Reinhold has announced that JDK 7 will have Closures. With the inclusion of this much debated feature, JDK 7 schedule will be extended until around September 2010.

This sudden change in plans has made people like Fabrizio Giudici skeptic about the decision process:

I don't want to discuss whether it's a good or a bad thing (you know I think it's bad I suspend any judgment as I understand that the proposal is neither BGGA nor CICE, but something new). I'm only appalled that after a few weeks that the final word of Java 7 had been said with Project Coin (the famous final five or so), somebody changed his mind all of a sudden. What kind of decisional process is this?

Ah, I got it — it's tossing a coin, now I get where the project name came from. I fear Java 7 could be the most chaotical Java release ever — a very good idea if you want to kill it prematurely (as it there weren't already many other sources of entropy, such as the Oracle deal or the Jigsaw / OSGi debate).

Similarly Geertjan Wielenga thinks that the inclusion of Closures was a very unexpected development:

Great news and maybe best if no one asks too many questions about how that process ended up throwing up this solution! First, we have a whole bunch of proposals, all of which get lukewarm reception. Then, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, we have "simple closures". (I wonder if any of the existing proposals are called "complex closures". Isn't simplicity the whole purpose of closures in the first place?) OK, the closures will be simple in the sense that there will be no non-local return, no control statements, and no access to non-final variables. Still, how was that decision made?
Security

Submission + - New Scareware Downloads Porn (channelinsider.com) 1

Submitted by dasButcher
dasButcher writes: AVG has found new scareware (or rogue software) that tricks users into buying a special cleanup tool by telling them that have porn on their machine. The trick is: the scareware downloads lewd images so there's something to find. Users are more apt to buy into this scareware because no one wants to get caught with naked pics of Britney Spears.
http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/AVG-Finds-Scareware-that-Downloads-Porn-200355/
Microsoft

Submission + - Office 2010: The Suite That Users Built? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister offers a first look at Office 2010 Beta, noting that, although many of the changes are subtle, every decision was informed by real-world usage data. 'Not content to leave well enough alone, the Office development team has made countless incremental improvements to existing features, always with the goal of making Office easier and more efficient to use — and I, for one, have to hand it to them. In many ways, Office 2010 is a textbook study of how to approach software upgrades for mature applications, one that should serve as an example for any software development house.' Office 2010 certainly won't be for everyone, but as McAllister sees it, Microsoft's use of anonymous, opt-in usage data, which has allowed it to tally which actions users execute in each Office application per hour, per day, has helped its developers make working with Office more grounded in real-world user experience."

Submission + - T-Mobile staff sold personal data (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers, a spokesman for the firm has confirmed.
The suspected illegal trade emerged after the firm alerted the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham.
He said brokers bought the data and sold it on to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers, as their contracts were due to expire.
A T-Mobile spokesman said the data was sold "without our knowledge".
Security

Submission + - 64-bit Windows safer, claims Microsoft (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Windows users running 64-bit versions of the OS are less likely to get infected by attack code, Microsoft's security team said on Monday. But that doesn't mean they won't, countered an outside security researcher. "64-bit Windows has some of the lowest reported malware infection rates in the first half of 2009," said Joe Faulhaber of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center in a post to the group's blog yesterday. Windows 64-bit is safer to run, he argued, in large part because malware, which is written for the much more widely used 32-bit versions of Windows, is "confused by 64-bit." That's not necessarily true, said Alfred Huger, formerly with Symantec and currently vice president of engineering at security start-up Immunet. "There's a lot of 64-bit malware," said Huger. "They can run their code in compatibility mode, or they can compile it for 64-bit. The reason they're not is that there's still not a lot of 64-bit deployment. There's 64-bit malware out there, just like there's Mac OS malware out there. But right now, [64-bit] is just not as opportune a target as 32-bit."
Linux

Submission + - 10 of the Best Free Linux CRM Software (linuxlinks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In simple terms, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents the way an organisation keeps track with its existing and potential future customers. CRM software offers the means to support these processes. This type of software stores information about customers. But its functionality far extends that of say a traditional database. It also allows companies to measure and control contacts with customers, to provide the flexibility to get the right information to the right individual at the right time.

The purpose of this article is to focus on software which helps to improve the level of service provided by a firm to its customers, as well as to maximise the organisation's profitability.

Read more

Submission + - FOSS Alternative to Exchange for Small Business (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by
CelticWhisper
CelticWhisper writes: "I'm the one-man IT department for a small manufacturing company. Recently, our support company (who provided all our IT support until I was called in, and still helps out with application development, ERP, etc.) has been making rumblings about installing Exchange to move our E-mail system off of the dedicated appliance it's on now and onto a proper mail server. I'm hoping to avoid this, as I've seen Exchange used in the past and it caused the sysadmins at that place no shortage of problems. Additionally there are the obvious matters of licensing costs. Thing is, while I've been here a year and a half, I'm still not as well established as the support company is and so countermanding one of their suggestions, while by no means impossible, has to be a careful process and I need a solid plan of action. What I'm hoping to do is introduce a FOSS alternative to Exchange that has E-mail and shared calendars at a minimum, is easy to administer and maintain, and plays nice with as many E-mail clients as possible (or, if not, whose native client is at least marginally Outlook-like). This way I can say to the management that not only will there be an improvement to E-mail/collaboration software, it will be done with significantly smaller licensing fees, or none at all.

I can't stress enough, though, that it needs to be easy to administer. Easy. Easy easy easy. I am still a one-person department and my time is extremely limited most days. I do not have the luxury of R'ing TFM for too long to figure out a problem or how to do something, and calls to the support company (who tend to be Microsoft-centric) are $150/hour. I don't want to install this thing and then realize we're stranded.

So, to recap, I'm looking for a recommendation for a FOSS alternative to MS Exchange that's reliable and easy to setup and use, has shared calendars, and will cause minimal user annoyance if/when the users are moved off of Outlook. Bonus points if it runs on Windows servers but I can get a Linux server in here if need be. Also, I'll deal with office-politics issues myself as needed. I'd like to keep this article to the technology as much as possible."

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