Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.
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Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
Nintendo said Wednesday that its Wi-Fi Connection service--which allows Nintendo DS users to play wirelessly against each other--has surpassed 5 million users.
All told, the video game giant said, users have initiated more than 200 million sessions, playing games like Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, Metroid Prime Hunters and others wirelessly.
Sony Corp. says it will introduce its first HD Radio products in July, joining the growing group of companies seeking to make the next-generation digital radio technology a standard feature in audio products over the next several years.
HD Radio is new form of digital radio broadcasting that allows radio stations to deliver extra music content on up to four side channels that piggyback on the frequency it already uses. So far, more than 1,200 radio stations nationwide have adopted the technology, according to the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a group of broadcasters promoting the new format.
A listener, however, needs a special radio receiver to hear HD Radio signals, which also boasts improved sound quality. About 50 models are available already, often sold as part of a car stereo or home audio component, according to the alliance.
"Digital terrestrial radio is the last frontier in audio," said Andrew Sivori, a senior product marketing manager at Sony's personal audio division. "And it's coming to price points that are becoming more reasonable for consumers."
Sony's first HD Radio products will be the XDR-S3HD, a $200 tabletop AM/FM/HD radio, and the XT-100HD, a $100 tuner module for vehicles that will work with most Sony car stereo units.
The HD Radio alliance projects that more than 1.5 million HD Radio devices will be sold in 2007, as prices have dropped significantly from the time the first products debuted more than two years ago at about $800.
Apple has released an update that patches more than a dozen OS X vulnerabilities, several of which can lead to the remote execution of malicious code.
The most serious vulnerability resides in an OS X feature called mDNSResponder, which enables computers to locate and connect to devices such as printers and webcams on a local network. An attacker could use it to execute code by sending malicious packets to Macs connected to the same subnet, making the exploit ideal for use in internet cafes and offices.
"Remote roots like this don't come out every day," he said of the vulnerability.
This is just a small tutorial showing that ubuntu is as good as windows and supporting all kinds of softies and devices.
Main things included like mp3,dvds,digicam,ipod etc...
Show how its good and why its useful. All above this, its a open source so you don't need to give a penny for it!
When Dell Computer announced it was making the Ubuntu operating system available as a preinstalled option on select Inspiron notebook and Dimension and XPS desktop models in late May, Linux geeks and open-source advocates started hopping with joy. But what's in it for the non-geek computer user? And what is Ubuntu, anyway?
Ubuntu is a free, Linux-based operating system distributed by Canonical. It appeared in October 2004 and has since won over waves of converts, including high-profile geeks like Cory Doctorow. Even Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell runs Ubuntu 7.04, nicknamed "Feisty Fawn," on his personal laptop.
The Dell computers hit the shelves today, and other banner PC manufacturers like Toshiba are expected to follow suit with their own models soon.You should take this time to familiarize yourself with exactly what's in store if and when you pick up one of these machines.
If you ever need help getting started with the open-source OS, the user community at places like Ubuntu Forums tends to be pretty patient with newbie inquiries. That's important, because Ubuntu will prompt many questions.
ffmpeg is a wonderful library for creating video applications or even general purpose utilities. ffmpeg takes care of all the hard work of video processing by doing all the decoding, encoding, muxing and demuxing for you. This can make media applications much simpler to write. It's simple, written in C, fast, and can decode almost any codec you'll find in use today, as well as encode several other formats.
The only problem is that documentation is basically nonexistent. There is a single tutorial that shows the basics of ffmpeg and auto-generated doxygen documents. That's it. So, when I decided to learn about ffmpeg, and in the process about how digital video and audio applications work, I decided to document the process and present it as a tutorial.
There is a sample program that comes with ffmpeg called ffplay. It is a simple C program that implements a complete video player using ffmpeg. This tutorial will begin with an updated version of the original tutorial, written by Martin Böhme (I have stolen liberally borrowed from that work), and work from there to developing a working video player, based on Fabrice Bellard's ffplay.c. In each tutorial, I'll introduce a new idea (or two) and explain how we implement it. Each tutorial will have a C file so you can download it, compile it, and follow along at home. The source files will show you how the real program works, how we move all the pieces around, as well as showing you the technical details that are unimportant to the tutorial. By the time we are finished, we will have a working video player written in less than 1000 lines of code!
In making the player, we will be using SDL to output the audio and video of the media file. SDL is an excellent cross-platform multimedia library that's used in MPEG playback software, emulators, and many video games. You will need to download and install the SDL development libraries for your system in order to compile the programs in this tutorial.
This tutorial is meant for people with a decent programming background. At the very least you should know C and have some idea about concepts like queues, mutexes, and so on. You should know some basics about multimedia; things like waveforms and such, but you don't need to know a lot, as I explain a lot of those concepts in this tutorial.
Oracle is buying product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Agile Software in a deal likely to result in an overhaul of its existing PLM suite.
The database giant, which has bought more than 30 companies in three years, is spending $495m, or $8.10 per share, for Agile. It hopes the purchase will squeeze SAP.
The deal serves up Oracle 1,250 Agile PLM customers, with Agile expected to announce a 12 per cent increase in revenue to between $37m and $38m for its fourth quarter.
Oracle president Charles Philips said in a statement Agile will serve as the foundation for Oracle's PLM offering while furthering the strategy of delivering industry specific enterprise applications.
Oracle's existing PLM suite spans CAD, project collaboration, project management and sourcing, and is available through eBusiness Suite. The suite provides a unified data model for a single view of the product from inception through to design, delivery and service.
Wi-Fi overseer the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA) will in June begin testing pre-standard next-generation 802.11n wireless networking kit to make sure the products all work with each other, the organisation said today.
The WFA announced earlier this year that it would begin interoperability tests despite the fact that 802.11n has yet to be formalised by standards-setting body the IEEE. Draft 1 of the 802.11n specification was held to be be near enough what the final standard will be for vendors to ship product based on it, and with Draft 2 recently agreed, support for the ratified specification is seen to be just a firmware update away.
The WFA is basing its testing on Draft 2. As yet there are not Draft 2-based products on the market, but the likes of Netgear, Belkin and D-Link have promised Draft 2 firmware updates in Q2, and with the WFA's announcement those are likely to appear promptly.
With uTorrent's WebUI, you can add, remove, and manage the downloads you've got running at home no matter where you are. Hit the jump and I'll show you how to get it all set up.
NOTE: uTorrent is Windows-only, but you can access and control uTorrent via the WebUI using virtually any browser on any platform (except for IE6, that is, which "is not supported and never will be").
First, you'll need to grab a copy of uTorrent if you don't already have it. It's a standalone executable, so just put it wherever you like, give it a run, and let's get started.
Next you've got to grab the WebUI files (the first link in the post). Here's a direct link that should work for now, but I can't guarantee it'll always be the latest, so you might want to check the first link to make sure.
The file you've downloaded should be called something like webui_v0.310_beta_2.rar. The .rar extension is an archive, so use your favorite unzipping program (like Lifehacker favorite 7-Zip) to get to the goods inside.
In a year when Hollywood is launching its biggest blockbusters ever, a video game is set to conquer them all. “Halo® 3,” the final chapter in the groundbreaking “Halo” trilogy, is set to shatter day-one entertainment sales records when it is released worldwide beginning Tuesday, Sept. 25. Created by legendary developer Bungie Studios and exclusive to the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system, “Halo 3” will set a new standard for interactive storytelling and social gaming by engaging consumers worldwide in Master Chief’s epic battle to save humankind. “Halo 3” will be available to audiences around the world starting Sept. 25 and will release in Europe on Sept. 26.So here we go! ready for the game buddies...
Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, the browser just gets better and better.
But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.
1) More screen space.
2) Smart keywords.
3) Keyboard shortcuts
4) Auto-complete
5) Tab navigation
6) Mouse shortcuts
7) Delete items from address bar history
8) User chrome
9) Create a user.js file
10) about:config
11) Add a keyword for a bookmark
12) Speed up Firefox
13) Limit RAM usage
14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized
15) Move or remove the close tab button
While it was originally spotted on the Entertainment Software Rating Board earlier this year, Microsoft kept mum on its Xbox Live Arcade game Aegis Wing until today, when it dropped a couple of smart bombs about the side-scrolling shooter.
First of all, Microsoft said the game would be free to download for all Live Silver and Gold users for a limited time. Second, it's going to be released this Wednesday at 2 a.m. Pacific time. Finally, the game is the product of a trio of students, conceived during a summer internship with Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade division and developed in conjunction with Carbonated Games (makers of Uno for Live Arcade).
More @ GameSpot
A team led by Toyko University researchers has set a new "land speed record" for IPv6 Ethernet, transferring data over a distance of 30,000km at an application rate of 9.08Gbit/s.
The team leader, Dr Kei Hiraki, claimed this will not be beaten for the 10Gig generation because the contest organiser, the Internet2 consortium, demands that each new record shows a 10 per cent improvement over its predecessor.
The team actually broke the record twice - first sending 7.67Gbit/s using standard protocols, and then two days later sending 9.08Gbit/s using modified protocols - and they did so in both the single and multi-stream classes. The record-breaking run took place last December but has only just been reported, at a recent Internet2 members meeting in the US.
"These records are final for the 10Gbit/s era because they represent more than 99 per cent of the upper limit of network capacity," said Dr Hiraki.
He added that the test crossed six international IP networks, thanks to the team also including the WIDE Project, NTT Communications, JGN2, SURFnet, CANARIE, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and other institutions. Data travelled from Tokyo to Chicago, on to Amsterdam, then Seattle, and finally back to Tokyo.
Microsoft and SanDisk have inked a deal to create USB flash drives and memory cards with built-in software and user preferences to replace SanDisk's existing U3 Cruzer line.
Under the agreement, Microsoft will develop new software and SanDisk will cover the hardware for the products.
The hardware/software pairing will allow customers to carry applications as well as their customized Windows interface on a flash storage device.
SanDisk rep Mike Lanberg said the disks will let users access their encrypted financial, corporate, and personal data on public or shared computers without leaving the information behind when they leave.
The partnership will replace and expand upon SanDisk's current application-launching flash storage line, U3. The offering is expected to be commercially available starting in the second half of 2008. The U3 line will be sold and supported until the new release, Lanberg said.
SanDisk said its partnership with Microsoft will allow the applications to be more tightly integrated with Windows operating systems, as well as enhance data security. The flash storage drives will support both XP and Vista.
With as many.NET developers as there are BlackBerry users, it’s about time Research in Motion provided some Visual Studio development tools. There's not too long to wait, as RIM used its Wireless Enterprise Symposium this week to unveil its first Visual Studio plug-in.
Don't be confused - this isn't a .NET solution, and RIM hasn't ported the .NET CLR to its BlackBerry handsets. The company is remaining resolutely Java. Instead, RIM is taking its MDS Studio rapid application development tool and is turning it into a VSIP Visual Studio extension. As MDS Studio uses JavaScript and XML to deliver form-based applications that consume web services, it's easy to see how this fits in with Visual Studio and .NET.
RIM is expecting developers to use the MDS plug-in to add BlackBerry user interfaces to existing and new applications. Once it's installed, all you’ll need to do is add a BlackBerry MDS project to your existing solution (which will need to expose web services to the outside world). Application development takes a similar approach to MDS Studio, with a layout-based development environment, a set of controls that can be dragged onto the layout. Controls can be programmed declaratively, with additional business logic coming from JavaScript code snippets.
More @ RegDeveloper.co.uk
It is "Blue Hat" time again and Microsoft has gathered an exclusive group of responsible hackers this week at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.
It is the fifth such event on the Microsoft campus. Employees are getting a security reality check from hackers who will talk about Microsoft's product security, Web security, mobile security and hardware security, among other topics. A schedule is posted on Microsoft's Web site.
In 2005 Microsoft invited several hackers to Redmond for the first time. That get-together was such a success that Microsoft decided to host such events twice a year.
Microsoft modeled and named Blue Hat after the widely known Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Many of the Black Hat talks dive deep into security flaws found in software. The Blue Hat name is tweaked to reflect Microsoft's corporate color, in particular the blue badges worn by Microsoft employees.
The multiday meeting of Microsoft insiders with hackers provides each side with a glimpse into the other's world. The goal, for Microsoft, is to improve its relationship with security researchers and find ways to develop more secure software, the company has said.
Source:CNETThe main goal with these tips is readability. This is important because usually your code has to be changed or reviewed by other people, and writing readably makes these people's jobs a lot easier. That may be obvious. What's less obvious is that it also makes your own job easier, because working on simple code is a lot easier than working on complex code, even while you are writing it, and the more readable code is always simpler.
An important part of making your code readable is to always work to communicate your intent. The basic idea is that it's usually not difficult to see what a single line of code does. The tricky thing is to see why it's doing what it does. So the more you can make your code communicate the thinking behind the code, the better it is. You'll see this point recurring repeatedly below.
I should add that most people seem to be aware of most of these rules, in a general kind of way. The main point of this posting is really to convince people that these rules are important. So important, in fact, that you should try to always follow them, and that you should have a really bad conscience about any code that breaks them. So bad that you just never write any such code. Some of these rules require you to write a little extra code, but I think I can claim that none of them cause you to actually lose time, on any project.
1. Always know why you are catching an exception
2. Never declare implementation types
3. Use descriptive variable names
4. Cut-and-paste code
5. Variables and communication
6. Don't preserve return values you don't use
7. Omit needless code!
Some people (and yes, we know who) found a security hole on our web site (in fact, actually in this blog).
They have got a copy of the user database. That is, your username and passwords. But, the passwords are stored encrypted, so it's not a big deal, but it's still very sad that it's out there. All e-mails are for instance encrypted as well, they will most likely not be able to decrypt them either (they are _very_ encrypted).
We encourage all our users to change passwords as soon as possible - and if you have the same password on the bay as other places, you should update them as well.
Sorry for the mess, but we are all human and we miss something sometimes.
In this review, Benchmark Reviews will evaluate the progression of technology into a product which hopes to establish itself as the pinnacle of PicturePhone evolution: Logitech's QuickCam Ultra Vision Special Edition Webcam.
Enjoy true-to-life video calls with twice the image clarity of conventional Webcams, thanks to the precision-engineered, 5-element glass lens. QuickCam Ultra Vision uses Logitech RightLight2 Technology to give you the highest quality image regardless of your lighting, and RightSound for clear, echo-free audio. It´s video calling that truly is true-to-life.
It may look similar to most of the other products sitting on store shelves, but it is in fact very different. To begin with, it features a five-element glass lens system which works together to render 640x480 video quality on the level of high-end security cameras. Then, add to it a 1.3 megapixel sensor, and the still-image resolution climbs to 1280x960. Finally, mix in a few unique touches: a snapshot and video button, video activity signal, echo-free audio, adjustable angle lens, and a counter-balanced flexible stand. When it's all taken into consideration, the QuickCam Ultra Vision shares very little with the competition.
In today’s web of information, it’s easy to get caught up in the constant news stream. In fact, I have over 50 RSS feeds in my feed reader. Talk about a mental meltdown.
So, what do you do when you wake up to thousands of new items in your feed reader, with hundreds of items which
don’t even interest you? A few smart hacks will enable you to look through all of your favorite feeds in just 30 minutes or less using the power of Google Reader.
Google reader is extremely powerful and has a very clean interface. Google Reader allows you to read your favorite blogs in much the same manner as you would read your email.
Some of it’s many features include tagging, folder-based navigation, Firefox integration and the ability to import and export subscription lists as an OPML file. You can also star items for easy access, share your favorite items, and save your favorite items to del.icio.us.
All of these features have come to make Google Reader a dream machine for the productivity enthusiast.
Here are some tips for getting the most out of Google Reader.
1. Sort your feeds by priority.
Google Reader makes it easy to organize all of your feeds by topic. However, I would also suggest that you categorize
your feeds by priority as well. This way, you know which items are “Must Read” and which items “Can Be Skipped” on days that you’re busy.
2. Use Keyboard Shortcuts.
You can’t become a Google master without learning the keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader. These little tweaks can save you a good bit of time in the long run.
Some of the most common shortcuts include:
j/k: item down/up
o: open/close item
s: toggle star
m: mark as read/unread
t: tag an item
For a complete list of Google Reader shortcuts, grab this Cheat Sheet
