Submission + - Prankster Jailbreaks Apple Store Display iPhone (thinq.co.uk)
Stoobalou writes: A prankster has snuck into his local Apple temple of consumerism and footled with one of the display models.
Submission + - NASA, ESA pick key Mars joint mission instruments (networkworld.com)
coondoggie writes: Scientists at NASA and the European Space Agency have picked the all-important instruments for their joint Mars mission set to blast off in 2016. The mission instruments onboard ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will focus on nailing down components in the Martian atmosphere — in particular looking for methane because mapping methane will let scientists investigate whether or not Mars is a living planet, researchers stated.
Submission + - Wikileaks: "No regrets - we are changing the game" (thelocal.de)
praps writes: In a remarkably open interview, Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Schmitt says that he has no regrets about releasing 92,000 classified US documents on the Afghanistan war, although he acknowledges the "possibility that someone might be harmed". Schmitt claims that the site is "changing the game" of journalism, but admits to some disappointment that the New York Times didn't even link to Wikileaks after getting all the material for free. And there are some interesting insights into the way the organisation works — not least that everyone involved is living on savings.
Submission + - UK Government refuses to ditch Microsoft IE6 (computerworlduk.com)
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: The UK government has said it will not upgrade its departments computers from Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 because it would not be 'cost-effective'. A recent online petition posted to Number10.gov.uk received 6,223 signatures that called for the “Prime Minister to encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6” due to its alleged vulnerability to attack, and because it requires web developers to specially craft sites to support the browser. This raises the question, what is the cost of an upgrade compared to a massive security breach?
Submission + - Film studios don't want to sue downloaders anymore (itnews.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes: Lawyers for the film industry have submitted that it is "not desirable" to sue individual internet users alleged to have infringed copyright on day one of an appeal in a high-profile court case in Australia that got underway earlier today. The Hollywood studios have claimed that Australian laws mean they don't have to sue the "primary infringer" of copyright — the individual user — but that an alternative person can be held responsible. The film industry wants to make internet service providers responsible for the actions of users on their networks. It lost the original court hearing last year but lodged an appeal.
Submission + - Twitter reveals secret Imperial documents (npr.org)
djconrad writes: Greg DiCostanzo's parody of the Wikileaks scandal is inspiring many to imagine the secrets the Empire does not want you to know. Many Bothans died to bring you this information.
Submission + - Terry Childs is denied motion for retrial (idg.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "The former San Francisco network administrator who refused to hand over passwords for one of the city's networks was denied a new trial on Friday and is expected to be sentenced on August 6. Terry Childs had been due for sentencing Friday but the court instead heard two defense motions, one requesting a new trial and the other for arrested judgment — essentially to have his original conviction overturned."
Comment Wonder if their ISPs will be asked to block them (Score 1) 142
Now that they're using the blind ultimate evil that is BitTorrent.
Submission + - HADOPI Ready to Enforce Three Strikes Law (zeropaid.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly a year after France passed its controversial three strikes law, no disconnections have taken place and no letters have been sent. That's all about to change thanks to a decree coming out of France that says HADOPI is greenlighting the activity of collecting IP addresses. This was on the heals of UMP members expressing doubts on the controversial law and HADOPI having to launch a public consultation to figure out what is a standard secure internet connection.
Submission + - Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games. (blogspot.com)
spidweb writes: One Indie developer has written a nuanced article on how software piracy affects him, approaching the issue from the opposite direction. He lists the ways in which the widespread piracy of PC games helps him. From the article, "You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both. Most of the time. Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off." The article also tries to find a middle ground between the Piracy-Is-Always-Bad and Piracy-Is-Just-Fine sides of the argument that might enable single-player PC games to continue to exist.
Submission + - Drupal 6 Content Administration
Trevor James writes: Finally, here's a Drupal book specifically for Drupal content editors and site managers, those folks responsible for posting new content and editing existing content on a Drupal site. While many of the Packt series of Drupal books focuses on code, development and are written for Drupal developers, this title is for anyone who is dealing with management of Drupal based content and any individuals or teams responsible for the management of Drupal sites on a daily and hourly basis. This book is also perfect for introductory Drupal classes and I will not hesitate to use it in my Drupal 101 classes in the near future.
In Chapter 1, the author gives a concise and streamlined introduction to the Drupal CMS and the elements of a Drupal Web site from both the frontend and backend perspectives. I liked seeing the detailed explanations of a Drupal powered front end layout — explaining the differences between the site header, navigation areas, and content areas. I'd recommend this first chapter to anyone who is just starting to use Drupal and wants a basic introduction to the Drupal framework. It's hard to emphasize how important it is to understand the basic intro level concepts and functionality of the Drupal CMS and its all here in this intro section. To any of my intro Drupal users I would hand this chapter out and ask them to read it.
Chapter 2 moves into a detailed discussion of Drupal-based content and asks the simple question (but important one), what is content? In Drupal we know that content includes nodes and node types, node IDs (nid), comments, Blocks, and Views. The author defines the core node types including Story and Page. Note here to Drupal 7 users ... the story type is renamed "Article" and the Page type is "Basic Page" in the new D7 release. I also love the fact that Green defines what the Drupal front page or home page is and what that home page contains. I am asked this question all the time by new Drupal users — how do I post content to my home page and how do I customize the home page. Read the definition on p. 19 of this book.
At this point I'd encourage those readers who are using the book to go ahead and start creating content on their Drupal site following the author's instructions. It's a great book of examples of tutorials to follow along with hands-on. The author gets you creating story content and editing it quickly. He also spends a good deal of time discussing integrating a WYSIWYG text editor to your content node form so you can use the text editor buttons to format content.
Chapter 3 continues the content discussion by showing you a bunch of enhancements you can do to your posted content. The author aptly calls these "seasonings". This includes creating teasers, creating links to other node content using the text editor, uploading images using the text editors and manually via the Drupal node editor, linking your images, embedding audio content, and linking to downloadable files such as PDFs. My only concern here is that the author shows you how to link to PDF files via the text editor but there's actually simpler methods of doing this in Drupal using Drupal's default file attachments module (part of core). This is the preferred method since it easily opens up the attached file to be used in other areas of your site via the Views module for instance. I always encourage Drupal users to add attached files using the core Drupal file attachments since I think it's simpler and more streamlined and it's the "Drupal" way of attaching files. I would add this method first and then show the text editor option second.
The author shows us how to upload and embed video content using SWF Tools module. I would have spent a bit more time in this chapter showing the user more details about uploading Flash based content using a combination of the Flash node and the SWF tools modules and integrating various player options in SWF Tools such as the Flowplayer utility. But again these are technicalities. The information the author presents is great and detailed. It's a good starting point for more beginning Drupal users.
Chapter 4 moves into more advanced content editing topics. The author shows you how to use HTML and CSS to create table based layouts (without using table code) in your text editor and in a Drupal node. So for everyone who needs an introduction to CSS this is a great place to start. The author spends time showing us how to add the CSS files so they are recognized by our Drupal theme — this is going to be a bit more advanced for the new Drupal user but its good stuff to learn. He even shows us how to create a CSS file from scratch and how to build the table layout without using table code. Sticking to CSS is going to give you cleaner code and work better with Drupal so it's great that he emphasizes this here. For dealing with more table based code Green shows us some tricks to injecting this code using PHP. Again this is more advanced but good tips and tricks for those involved with code. He also shows us how revisions and workflow work in our Drupal site.
Chapter 5 deals with how to use tagging, tag clouds and how to re-name our URLs with human friendly path aliases using Drupal's core Path module. This will help our site become more searchable, browser and user friendly. Tagging is the focus here and he gives a nice walkthrough of Drupal's taxonomy system. Anyone interested in setting up tagging on their Drupal site should read this chapter. Chapter 6 moves into using Blocks, Views and setting up Blogs on your site. This chapter is the one to read if you're managing blocks and Views and want a good introduction to the Views module. Packt has published books specifically on using Drupal Views but I would start here first if you're just using Views for the first time.
The section on blogging is good too. Often I hear folks report that Drupal is only a fancy blogging tool or blogging application. This book actually shows that Drupal is a full scale and robust CMS and that blogging is only one miniscule part of the entire framework. If you're just going to be blogging on your site Drupal may actually be overkill. The author shows this by spending a smaller amount of time showing you how to set up your Drupal site for blogs, but of course it also shows you that Drupal does blogs too and you can easily use a Drupal site to just blog. I would argue that this is a great book to look at the overall impact of Drupal on building Web sites and how we can leverage it to build powerful, rich and robust content management driven sites. We can add a blog if we want to but it's not just a blogging-based piece of software.
Chapter 7 deals with setting up users, roles and permissions on your site. It's good to leave this chapter towards the end of the book since Drupal permissions can be a bit tricky and time consuming to set up. We moved through a bunch of fun material earlier in the book and now we have a chapter on permissions. I like the attention the author placed on how to organize this section into the overall book's theme and layout. Chapter 8 shows you some tricks for dealing with issues like pasting Word content into a Drupal node; and using the Blog API module to work on blog posts in remote software and then post those blog entries to your Drupal site via a Web service. A nice touch here to add a small section on using Web services to post content. Finally the Appendix shows you how to install Drupal.
This is definitely one of the best books I've read on Drupal from an introductory standpoint. It's up there with O'Reilly's Using Drupal book and I would recommend it to anyone who is installing Drupal for the first time. I'll use it in my introductory Drupal classes for sure. It will be nice to see this book revised for Drupal 7 soon. Excellent work again from J. Ayen Green.
Title: Drupal 7 Content Administration Author: J. Ayen Green Publisher: Packt Publication Date: 2009 Pages: 179
You can buy J. Ayen Green's book Drupal 6 Content Administration here: https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-content-administration/book
In Chapter 1, the author gives a concise and streamlined introduction to the Drupal CMS and the elements of a Drupal Web site from both the frontend and backend perspectives. I liked seeing the detailed explanations of a Drupal powered front end layout — explaining the differences between the site header, navigation areas, and content areas. I'd recommend this first chapter to anyone who is just starting to use Drupal and wants a basic introduction to the Drupal framework. It's hard to emphasize how important it is to understand the basic intro level concepts and functionality of the Drupal CMS and its all here in this intro section. To any of my intro Drupal users I would hand this chapter out and ask them to read it.
Chapter 2 moves into a detailed discussion of Drupal-based content and asks the simple question (but important one), what is content? In Drupal we know that content includes nodes and node types, node IDs (nid), comments, Blocks, and Views. The author defines the core node types including Story and Page. Note here to Drupal 7 users
At this point I'd encourage those readers who are using the book to go ahead and start creating content on their Drupal site following the author's instructions. It's a great book of examples of tutorials to follow along with hands-on. The author gets you creating story content and editing it quickly. He also spends a good deal of time discussing integrating a WYSIWYG text editor to your content node form so you can use the text editor buttons to format content.
Chapter 3 continues the content discussion by showing you a bunch of enhancements you can do to your posted content. The author aptly calls these "seasonings". This includes creating teasers, creating links to other node content using the text editor, uploading images using the text editors and manually via the Drupal node editor, linking your images, embedding audio content, and linking to downloadable files such as PDFs. My only concern here is that the author shows you how to link to PDF files via the text editor but there's actually simpler methods of doing this in Drupal using Drupal's default file attachments module (part of core). This is the preferred method since it easily opens up the attached file to be used in other areas of your site via the Views module for instance. I always encourage Drupal users to add attached files using the core Drupal file attachments since I think it's simpler and more streamlined and it's the "Drupal" way of attaching files. I would add this method first and then show the text editor option second.
The author shows us how to upload and embed video content using SWF Tools module. I would have spent a bit more time in this chapter showing the user more details about uploading Flash based content using a combination of the Flash node and the SWF tools modules and integrating various player options in SWF Tools such as the Flowplayer utility. But again these are technicalities. The information the author presents is great and detailed. It's a good starting point for more beginning Drupal users.
Chapter 4 moves into more advanced content editing topics. The author shows you how to use HTML and CSS to create table based layouts (without using table code) in your text editor and in a Drupal node. So for everyone who needs an introduction to CSS this is a great place to start. The author spends time showing us how to add the CSS files so they are recognized by our Drupal theme — this is going to be a bit more advanced for the new Drupal user but its good stuff to learn. He even shows us how to create a CSS file from scratch and how to build the table layout without using table code. Sticking to CSS is going to give you cleaner code and work better with Drupal so it's great that he emphasizes this here. For dealing with more table based code Green shows us some tricks to injecting this code using PHP. Again this is more advanced but good tips and tricks for those involved with code. He also shows us how revisions and workflow work in our Drupal site.
Chapter 5 deals with how to use tagging, tag clouds and how to re-name our URLs with human friendly path aliases using Drupal's core Path module. This will help our site become more searchable, browser and user friendly. Tagging is the focus here and he gives a nice walkthrough of Drupal's taxonomy system. Anyone interested in setting up tagging on their Drupal site should read this chapter. Chapter 6 moves into using Blocks, Views and setting up Blogs on your site. This chapter is the one to read if you're managing blocks and Views and want a good introduction to the Views module. Packt has published books specifically on using Drupal Views but I would start here first if you're just using Views for the first time.
The section on blogging is good too. Often I hear folks report that Drupal is only a fancy blogging tool or blogging application. This book actually shows that Drupal is a full scale and robust CMS and that blogging is only one miniscule part of the entire framework. If you're just going to be blogging on your site Drupal may actually be overkill. The author shows this by spending a smaller amount of time showing you how to set up your Drupal site for blogs, but of course it also shows you that Drupal does blogs too and you can easily use a Drupal site to just blog. I would argue that this is a great book to look at the overall impact of Drupal on building Web sites and how we can leverage it to build powerful, rich and robust content management driven sites. We can add a blog if we want to but it's not just a blogging-based piece of software.
Chapter 7 deals with setting up users, roles and permissions on your site. It's good to leave this chapter towards the end of the book since Drupal permissions can be a bit tricky and time consuming to set up. We moved through a bunch of fun material earlier in the book and now we have a chapter on permissions. I like the attention the author placed on how to organize this section into the overall book's theme and layout. Chapter 8 shows you some tricks for dealing with issues like pasting Word content into a Drupal node; and using the Blog API module to work on blog posts in remote software and then post those blog entries to your Drupal site via a Web service. A nice touch here to add a small section on using Web services to post content. Finally the Appendix shows you how to install Drupal.
This is definitely one of the best books I've read on Drupal from an introductory standpoint. It's up there with O'Reilly's Using Drupal book and I would recommend it to anyone who is installing Drupal for the first time. I'll use it in my introductory Drupal classes for sure. It will be nice to see this book revised for Drupal 7 soon. Excellent work again from J. Ayen Green.
Title: Drupal 7 Content Administration Author: J. Ayen Green Publisher: Packt Publication Date: 2009 Pages: 179
You can buy J. Ayen Green's book Drupal 6 Content Administration here: https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-content-administration/book
Submission + - Eclipse 4.0 released for early adopters (eclipse.org)
crabel writes: Eclipse released version 4.0 for early adopters. It is compatible to version 3.6, has lots of improvements for rich client developers (using RCP) and a new model-based user interface.
Submission + - HDMI and its stupid labelling requirements (pcauthority.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes: In many ways HDMI has revolutionized the way we connect devices. By unifying video and audio into a single cable manufacturers have been able to make their products easier to setup than ever before. Until recently there hasn't actually been much difference in HDMI cables. But things are about to get confusing with the introduction of HDMI 1.4. By the 1st of January 2012 manufacturers of products with HDMI ports won't actually be able to call HDMI 1.4 by itst real name. In fact, come November 18 this year those selling cables won't be able to use HDMI 1.4 or HDMI 1.3 to delineate between different products. Instead cables that support version 1.4 of the HDMI standard will have to use one of five different labels. The new labels? Well, as this story explains, they're going to cause a new level of confusion for anyone hooking up a home cinema. Add to this the fact that the HDMI organisation keeps the specifics of its specifications secret and translation between version numbering and marketing speak is nigh on impossible.
Submission + - Government Confirms Long-Awaited Spectrum Auction (eweekeurope.co.uk)
geek4 writes: The government has announced a radio spectrum auction for next year, in a move that could prompt the introduction of next-generation mobile broadband.
Submission + - What do we do about violators of CC licenses? 1
An anonymous reader writes: In the past, I've seen my pictures used by big commercial companies despite the Creative Commons license that clearly limits them to non-commercial use. I just let it slide because a friend who's a lawyer says that all I can do is sue. They've ignored emails and comments. Today, I saw two other examples that show that this is pretty rampant. These big commercial corporations are some of the tech savvy publications around but they just grabbed the image. One, BoingBoing, even reprinted the "non-commercial" clause warning others to stay away. But they've got their ads from Cheerios, HP and Mazda running along side. Does anyone care that we've gone to all this trouble to create new, more flexible licenses? Does it even matter when very smart people just flip the bird to the license? Is the only alternative to sue? I wouldn't mind asking for $150k and settling for $1 for each copy made, but that seems a bit crazy. I hate to type out DMCA notices but their attitude is that only uncool people complain about this and I should be happy about the publicity. Then they can be happy about not sharing their ad revenue artists or photographers. What can I do?
