programming news

Brocade Execs Offer Look Under OpenScript Engine's Hood

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:27:17 GMT

Can customers predict the future? Brocade is suggesting the notion as it launches its latest switch innovations.

This week, Brocade rolled out software advancements to its Brocade ServerIron ADX Series of cloud-optimized delivery switches. Brocade's stated goal is to help customers gain greater application control and service scalability.

The latest iteration of Brocade's ServerIron ADX comes equipped with a new OpenScript engine, an open platform that sets the stage for innovation. That is where the "predicting the future" comes in. The OpenScript engine can intelligently predict the effect of a script on a network before the script is deployed into production.

"Basically, we ported the Perl programming language to the ADX application processor so that you can use APIs to control application delivery with a script," said Greg Hankins, a global solutions architect at Brocade. "This means you get all the Perl goodness that you know and love for writing custom scripts to read or write layer three to seven headers based on your particular application needs."

Customizing Services

Keith Stewart, director of product management at Brocade, stressed that OpenScript allows network operators to bring new services to market faster, and tailor them to the specific needs of their customers and business models.

"Unlike other closed and proprietary systems, Brocade OpenScript provides the scalability that network operators need, built on top of an open, standards-based Perl platform," Stewart said. "Brocade OpenScript gives operators the flexibility they need without locking them into a proprietary implementation."

Brocade OpenScript and Brocade ADX are key elements of Brocade's strategy for next-generation data centers, according to Stewart. He pointed out that Brocade is an active supporter of the Open Networking Foundation, and is building the enabling platforms for a world where applications and data can reside anywhere in the cloud.

IPv6 Improvements

IPv6 increases the pool of global IP addresses and simplifies...

Brocade Opens Up Cloud-Optimized App Delivery Switches

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:18:55 GMT

Brocade and Cisco are making a big splash in cloud-optimized switches this week. While Cisco is pushing 100-gigabit Ethernet capabilities to its switch portfolio, Brocade is rolling out advancements to its ServerIron ADX series of cloud-optimized application delivery switches.

Dubbed OpenScript, ADX now offers an open platform that paves the way for intelligent predictions of network impacts before developers introduce scripts into production. OpenScript is built on Perl, a standards-based programming language, and allows ADX customers to customize service delivery to drive performance and scalability improvements.

"Brocade has been dancing around the application delivery controller space for years -- since they acquired Foundry. F5 has been the run away leader in that market for some time," said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.

"Brocade's core competency was historically on the network side while Foundry was always focused on performance. The traditional app delivery space went more down a path where application prowess started being more than pure horsepower and raw speed, which was Foundry's strength."

Critical Customization

With its latest innovation, Brocade is showing that it understands how critical service customization and traffic manipulation are for businesses as they move to deliver cloud-based services. The OpenScript engine promises network operators the freedom they need to deploy custom capabilities to meet their individualized needs.

And the Brocade OpenScript Performance Estimator lets network operators estimate the performance impact of custom scripts before implementing them in live production environments. That opens the door for more accurate service capacity requirement planning. Customers are responding positively to the new version.

"Application delivery performance, scalability and flexibility are critical requirements for our customers. These requirements have a direct effect on our ability to scale our business while exceeding customer expectations," said Rob Jackson, solution line leader for networking and security at Rackspace.

Jackson said the ADX solution would let Rackspace implement "stable,...

Brocade Leveraging Perl to Boost ADCs

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:03:43 GMT

"The programming language behind OpenScript is Perl, which offers the advantage of a large base of developers as well as access to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network libraries.

Murach's Java Programming (4th Edition) Book Review

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:25:20 GMT

If you're looking for a Java programming book that does a good job of getting you programming Java code quickly then you might be interested in the latest edition of Murach's Java Programming. It's aimed at complete beginners and programmers who are coming from another programming language who want to get up to speed with Java.

...

Read Full Post

Java.net Weblogs: Guest Post: Is Java the best language to meet my needs?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:08:55 GMT

This email came into our site feedback alias this morning, and I thought this would be a great topic to ask the community. I'm a big believer in using the right tool for the job, even if it's not Java at the moment. I asked his permission to post it here, so please meet Mike:

To whom it may concern,

I need your advice. Back in 2000 I was a post-doctor at the University of Caledonia in Berkeley. While there, I became ill with a type of brain cancer called a medulloblastoma, and was forced out of research.

After release from the hospital, I started programming rehabilitation games similar to the ones used in brain injury rehabilitation. I decided to do this because these types of games, although a medical tool, are quite expensive. I wanted to produce my own version of these games that were free. The results of my efforts can be seen at http://www.msty-neurotraining.com and are registered at the Brain Injury Association of America (http://www.biausa.org/) as a rehabilitation tool.

However, I have a serious problem. These programs were made using Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6, and the programs made with it will soon become obsolete and no longer run modern versions of Windows computers. Therefore, I am looking for an alternative. Preferably one which is open source (like Java) to keep in spirit that the games are a free medical tool. Do you have any suggestions as to what open source programming language would be appropriate for my needs? I need something that can produce programs capable to manipulate 2D graphics, save and retrieve files and use a joystick. I am not restricted to using a programming similar to Visual Basic; I can also program in C++ (the programming language we predominantly used at Berkeley).

Would Java be a good alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Basic? If not, what other programming tool would you advise using?

Also, how do I go about starting an Open Source project to create a rehabilitation tool like the one the I created with VB6? Starting such a project would be preferable to working alone, because I feel that a team working together always gets better results than an individual working alone.

Sincerely,

Michael Tarsitano (PhD)
Bruchsal, Germany

2012 Conference Planning: Key Events for Your Radar (31-Jan)

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:05:41 GMT

Our industry event planner gives you the heads-up on what key industry events are coming around the corner. If we’ve missed something, don’t hesitate to add your event to the list. (You can see all events here.)

Pro .NET Best Practices Book Review

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:38:00 GMT

I personally do not find software development an art form. It is not an unpredictable activity driven by crazy business users that come to work every day inventing a new way to operate their businesses just to savagely changing your requirements. Project teams that use changing requirements as an excuse for their dates constantly slipping and bugs being pushed to production are simply not good development teams and they are poorly managed. Even when you're in an environment where requirements are volatile, proper architecture and process engineering can level the playing field.

One of the reasons for incompetent software development teams is what I like to call home brewed enterprises. A company that does not welcome external resources to the table when they are changing to meet the demands of today's hi-tech requirements for doing business will usually create a home brewed mess. The attitude that 'we have figured out how to run our business over the past 30 years and can figure out how to move forward on our own', is shortsighted and destine to fail. If your people are not continuously learning what the newest industry standards, best practices, programming language features, process engineering techniques, and management skills that have become available are, then you need to turn to outside consultants that are doing that to help you through changing times.

One other thing, you have to actually take and execute their advice. I don't know how many times I have seen consultants brought in, asked for their opinion, only to have their advice ignored because the internal team did not have the skillset to execute their advice. If you don't have the skillsets available for building software right, you should not be building software, period.

There is a much bigger gap between the professional software engineer and the average company software developer than most companies realize. They miss it because they have no one on their team that has experienced an actual software development project run right. Most company's IT departments are hitting about 10% of their potential. The reason the business doesn't know any better is because some improvement, no matter how little, is better than no improvement.

The business simply believes the productivity gains they are getting for the half million dollar projects are what they have to pay. When in reality a shop that is practicing best practices could deliver five to ten times more functionality with a much higher quality for the same cost. Getting the message through to them after years of developing garbage is tough cookie to crack. That would mean a lot of people, from IT to the business, would actually have to say I was wrong. It would also mean that things would need to change, and home brewed enterprises hate change.

The author of this book has done every software developer who does not want to be just another home brewer a great service. He has taken today's best practices from the .NET world and compiled them into one place. Granted a lot of the topics he covers will require further reading, but he has done a great job of introducing a ton of best practices along with the tools and resources you need to implement them.

He does not just give you a bunch tools with an example, he also gives you sound advice on how to determine whether or not the tool or practice is right for your environment. This author has a very clear understanding of the fact that there are different teams with different skillsets in different environments and not every practice is right for every team.

An example is his advice with agile processes, which is that you must have an open and trusting environment for agile to succeed. I have repeatedly seen agile process jammed down team's throats that couldn't handle it. They were not mature enough. They should have first been run with an experienced architect and project manager in place under the unified process in order to gain experience.

The book starts out with a chapter that introduces several healthy concepts that should be understood about best practices in general. They include Practice Selection, Target Areas for Improvement, and Overall Improvement.

The book continues with 12 more chapters. They include .NET Practice Areas, Achieving Desired Results, Quantifying Value, Strategy, .NET Rules and Regulations, Powerful C# Constructs, Automated Testing, Build Automation, Continuous Integration, Code Analysis, Test Frameworks, and Aversions and Biases.

The book covers a ton of topics some of them include Technical Debt, Retrospective Analysis, Prospective Analysis, Application Lifecycle Management, Patterns and Guidance, Research and Development, Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle, Success Conditions, Documented Architecture, Improving Manageability, Increasing Quality Attributes, Personal Process, Commitment to Excellence, Coding Standards and Guidelines, Code Smells, Brownfield and Greenfield Applications, Boundary Analysis, Test Code Maintainability, Unit Testing, Automated Integration Testing, MSBuild Fundamentals, Automated Deployment, The CI Server, CI Lifecycle, Static and Dynamic Code Analysis, Mock Object Frameworks, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Ostrich Effect, Gambler's Fallacy, Ambiguity Effect, and Focusing Effect.

The downloadable code is very well organized and usable. Each chapter includes a readme document that describes the code samples. The download also includes an Excel spreadsheet of the .NET Best Practices Scorecard that is found in Appendix B.

Appendix A is a nice collection of all the resources used in the book including books, articles, guides and tutorials, and tools.

My wife has accused me of going to work and speaking a foreign language and that is why no one understands what I am saying. The foreign language I have been use is called Best Practices and Industry Standards. It is a language that is constantly evolving. This book has the most current version of it as it relates to .NET. If I get my way, this book will be mandatory reading to be able to join my team. I suggest your team do the same.

I highly recommend this book to any role involved with developing .NET software.
Pro .NET Best Practices

computing: A basic introduction to Java

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:21:09 GMT

Java was first released in 1995 by Sun Mircrosystems as a type of programming language and computing platform, and quickly became one of the leading IT technologies.

Syntax of the day: IS TRUE and IS FALSE

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:09:23 GMT

What makes for a true statement? We usually test statements using a WHERE clause: SELECT * FROM world.City WHERE Population > 1000000 The "Population > 1000000" statement makes for a boolean expression. Using WHERE is just one way of evaluating it. One can also test with IF(): SET @val := 7; SELECT IF(@val > 2, 'Yes', 'No') TRUE and FALSE The two are keywords. They also map for the numerals 1 and 0, as follows: mysql> SELECT TRUE, FALSE; +------+-------+ | TRUE | FALSE | +------+-------+ | 1 | 0 | +------+-------+ Like in the C programming language, a nonzero value evaluates to a true value. A zero evaluates to false. A NULL evaluates to... well, NULL. But aside from 3-valued logic, what's important in our case is that it is not true. However, simple value comparison is incorrect: mysql> SELECT @val, @val > 3, @val > 3 = TRUE as result; +------+----------+--------+ | @val | @val > 3 | result | +------+----------+--------+ | 7 | 1 | 1 | +------+----------+--------+ mysql> SELECT @val, @val = TRUE as result; +------+--------+ | @val | result | +------+--------+ | 7 | 0 | +------+--------+ To test for the truth value of an expression, the correct syntax is by using IS TRUE: SELECT @val, @val IS TRUE as result; +------+--------+ | @val | result | +------+--------+ | 7 | 1 | +------+--------+ Likewise, one may use IS FALSE to test for falsehood. However, if you wish to note NULL as a false value this does not work: SELECT @empty, @empty IS TRUE, @empty IS FALSE; +--------+----------------+-----------------+ | @empty | @empty IS TRUE | @empty IS FALSE | +--------+----------------+-----------------+ | NULL | 0 | 0 | +--------+----------------+-----------------+ If you're unsure why, you should read more on three-valued logic in SQL. To solve the above, simply use IS NOT TRUE: SELECT @empty, @empty IS NOT TRUE; +--------+--------------------+ | @empty | @empty IS NOT TRUE | +--------+--------------------+ | NULL | 1 | +--------+--------------------+ In summary, use IS TRUE and IS NOT TRUE so as to normalize truth values into a 0, 1 value range, C style, including handling of NULLs.

2012 Conference Planning: Key Events for Your Radar (24-Jan)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:05:37 GMT

Java vs. JavaScript: Similarities and Differences

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:41:17 GMT

Java is an Object Oriented Programming language created by James Gosling of Sun Microsystems.

The Rust Compiler 0.1 Released

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:10:55 GMT

"Today Mozilla and the Rust community are releasing version 0.1 of the Rust compiler and associated tools. Rust is a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency. This is the initial release of the compiler after a multi-year development cycle focusing on self-hosting, implementation of major features, and solidifying the syntax. Version 0.1 should be considered an alpha release, suitable for early adopters and language enthusiasts. It's nifty, but it will still eat your laundry."

Q&A: An Introduction to the Scala Programming Language

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:37:21 GMT

What is the Scala programming language, how does it work with Java, and what is its role in high-performance computing? We learn from the language's inventor, Martin Odersky , who is also the chairman and chief architect of Typesafe , which packages Scala, Akka middleware, and developer tools into an open source stack.

The Polybius Square Encoder / Decoder 1.0

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:04:56 GMT

The Polybius Square Encoder / Decoder software was designed with the help of the Python programming language as a small script that allows you to encipher / decipher a plaintext / ciphertext.

The Server Side: Why Polyglot Programming Stinks.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:26:54 GMT

Did you, programming language creators ever try to teach a new programming language to “normal”, 9 till 5 programmers? I’m not talking about 9 (am) till 9 (pm) programmers who love to learn new languages every day. It is definitely tough to be proficient in one programming language.

25+ Cloud, Social, E2.0 and CXM Events for Your 2012 Calendar

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:04:02 GMT

Summer Coding: U.S. CTO Wants You to Get Tech Skills This Year (Mashable)

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:09:54 GMT

Mashable - Missed out on that New Year's resolution to learn a programming language -- the goal that 300,000 people signed up for, including New York Mayor Bloomberg? Too busy with school to make it happen? You'll get another, even easier shot at that goal this summer. Codecademy, the brand-new entity behind that plan, has announced "Code Summer +" -- a condensed version of its curriculum, starting this May. The announcement was part of an event with U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.

R in Action: Data Analysis and Graphics with R reviewed at TechBookReport

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:11:10 GMT

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computation and graphics.

Planet Eclipse: Stefan Winkler: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff — Or: How to Sort Bugzilla Mails

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:48:26 GMT

One challenge in my daily work with my email is dealing with automated mails from Hudson or Bugzilla. As I am involved with several customer projects, I cannot keep track of all the Eclipse committer-related mail during the day.

As I am using GMail, I have become used to the mail filtering mechanism GMail offers to make email sent from Bugzilla or Hudson bypass the inbox and land in a separate IMAP folder (GMail uses a label metaphor, but when accessing mails via IMAP, GMail labels are mapped to IMAP folders).

Until recently, however, there was one problem, which I had not solved for months. As perhaps a lot of people do, I am not only receiving Bugzilla notifications related to bugs for which I am reporter, assignee, or on the CC list, but I also watch other Bugzilla accounts; most notably I, follow the emf.cdo-inbox@eclipse.org Bugzilla notifications to keep myself up to date (at least theoretically ...) with all the current bugs of CDO. The problem was that I wanted to separate the more important notifications (those for which I am reporter, assignee or explicitly part of the CC list) from the less important ones (namely those to emf.cdo-inbox). Most of the time (and here comes practice ...), I have too little time to dig through all the Bugzilla notifications and identify the important ones which I should really care about (or at least read) right now.

Of course, this is not a fault of Bugzilla, as Bugzilla sets really useful headers for its emails. In particular, the mails which I denoted as "more important" above can be identified by checking the content of the X-Bugzilla-Reason header. If this header contains CC, Reporter, or AssignedTo, I regard the notification as important. The actual problem is that GMail does not support filtering emails by arbitrary headers (or at least they have hidden that feature so well that I did not find it ...)

To solve the problem for me, I have not installed a small Unix utility called IMAPFilter on my virtual server which I am also using to host this blog. IMAPFilter can be configured via a config file written in the Lua programming language. This way, one can write arbitrary (and sophisticated, if needed) rules and commands to process email stored on one or more IMAP servers. In my case, a quite simple config file does the trick (Note: I still use GMail filtering rules to sort Bugzilla emails into the CDO/Bugzilla folder, because this was configured already, and it makes the IMAPFilter configuration a bit easier):

config.lua myaccount = IMAP { server = 'imap.googlemail.com', username = 'myself@googlemail.com', password = 'S3cr3t!!!', ssl = 'ssl3' } results = myaccount['CDO/Bugzilla']:contain_field('X-Bugzilla-Reason','Reporter') + myaccount['CDO/Bugzilla']:contain_field('X-Bugzilla-Reason','CC') + myaccount['CDO/Bugzilla']:contain_field('X-Bugzilla-Reason','AssignedTo') results:move_messages(myaccount['CDO/Bugzilla-Important'])

(Note: the plus signs have to be read as logical OR)

That's almost it. The config.lua file goes into ~/.imapfilter and to execute the utility on a regular basis, I have created a crontab entry which calls imapfilter all 15 minutes:

0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/bin/imapfilter

Naturally, the above is only a simple example. Experiment for yourself to unleash the power of complex mail sorting.

2. List - Cons, Car, Cdr & Co

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:24:03 GMT

Lists are the most important data structures in functional languages. it is not for nothing that the first functional programming language, that is by the way the second oldest programming language is called LISP which stands for "LISt Processing languages". LISP is all about working with lists to the point that even its source code is written with ... (more)

What is Ruby on Rails?

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:25:12 GMT

From Wikipedia : "Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features.

25+ CXM, EIM, E2.0 Events for Your 2012 Calendar

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:05:27 GMT

Apple iOS strength prompted Objective-C language growth in 2011

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:41:00 GMT

Demonstrating continued momentum for Apple's iOS platform for mobile devices, the Objective-C language used to develop applications for iOS showed the most growth in popularity in 2011 as a programming language.

Planet Eclipse: Ian Skerrett: Support for New Emerging Languages

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:18:04 GMT

In the last number of years there has been a boom in the creation of new computer languages. Some might wonder why we need so many new languages but one thing I have found is that software developers can be very passionate about software languages.

Another gratifying trend is the ‘almost natural’ step for language communities to provide tooling support based 0n Eclipse. One of the highlights at EclipseCon 2012 is the opportunity to learn and see the support being developed for many of these languages. A quick summary of the language support you can see at EclipseCon 2012:

Dart is a new web programming language being developed at Google. Some see Dart as a structured version of JavaScript or even a JavaScript replacement. Dart in Action is a session led by Dan Rubel from Google who is working on a Dart Editor based on Eclipse

Lua might not be a new language but it certainly seems to be gaining momentum, especially in the embedded and M2M industry. Lua tooling on steroids will demonstrate the current status of the Eclipse Koneki project which aims to provide a first-class Lua IDE.

Ceylon is a new JVM based language, developed at RedHat, positioned as a language for writing large programs in a team environment. Ceylon – the language and its tools should give a nice overview of the new language and the tools they have built based on Eclipse.

Xtend is another new JVM language being developed at Eclipse. In the session Eclipse Xtend – A Language for Java Developers, Sven Efftinge will be introducing Xtend to the EclipseCon attendees.

JavaScript is not a new language but the support being provided by Orion is new. There is a session and tutorial on Orion that will educate anyone interested in the future of JavaScript and web tooling at Eclipse.

If you want to learn about new languages and their tools, then EclipseCon 2012 will have be a great place to be.

10 programming languages that could shake up IT

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:04:01 GMT

Do we really need another programming language? There is certainly no shortage of choices already.

Frink 2012-01-03

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:24:27 GMT

Frink was developed to be a practical calculating tool and programming language designed to make physical calculations simple, to help ensure that answers come out right, and to make a tool that's really useful in the real world.

Red/System Language Gets Os X, Arm, Android Backends

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:42:54 GMT

Red/System, the new programming language that is used in the Syllable project , has reached its next milestone: an ARM code generator backend for its compiler.

Red/System Language Gets OS X, ARM, Android Backends

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:42:35 GMT

Red/System, the new programming language that is used in the Syllable project, has reached its next milestone: an ARM code generator backend for its compiler. It supports Android (screenshot) and generic ARM Linux (screenshot on Debian). Earlier, the backend for generating Mac OS X executables was already completed (for x86 CPUs so far).

Hands-on with Dart

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:46:48 GMT

Dart is a new programming language for the web, developed by Google. It's intended to bring more structure to programming for the browser.

Virtual Teachers Provide Lessons on the Go

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:50:43 GMT

Do you want to learn to recognize bird calls? Pick up a new computer programming language? Learn Chinese?

Chances are, wherever your academic pursuit takes you, there's an app for a tablet or smartphone that will help. There are 19,000 apps in the iTunes Store's education category.

At the Android Market, there are 13,000. But beware, not every educational app is the ideal tutor. A study by German consumer goods tester Stiftung Warentest, comparing English vocabulary trainers, found many with weaknesses in their contents and approach.

So what should a good academic app look like? "It's important that it's interactive, with multimedia capabilities and individuality," says Michael Cordes, director of the continuing education team at Stiftung Warentest.

Thus, an app that only tutors -- as opposed to one that offers exercises and then quizzes the user about information learned -- will have less value.

The targeted use of images and sound can't be underestimated either; ditto when it comes to the option of making lessons suit an individual's needs.

"The more influence I can have, the more I can use the program in a targeted fashion," says Cordes, who has a background in educational science.

"Change of pace is also important," he says. Some apps that were tested turned boring quickly. Especially when it comes to complex topics, it's important that exercises offer some variety.

When it comes to IT topics, it's best to use a problem-based approach, says Christoph Sahner of video training service Video2brain. "The presentation of workflow is the real strength of video-oriented teaching."

For example, Video2brain offers an iPad app that is not just for use underway, but for practicing new software or learning a programming language at one's desk.

That way you can watch the video on the tablet and try out the same steps yourself, says Sahner. "Tablets are great because they are big...

Tim Bray: Type-System Criteria

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:17:34 GMT

Starting some time around 2005, under the influence of Perl, Python, Erlang, and Ruby, I became convinced that application programs should be written in dynamically-typed languages. You get it built faster, there’s less code to maintain, and the bugs are no worse. I’ve felt negative not just about statically-typed tools in general, but about the Java programming language in particular. Living in the Android world has forced me to think about this more.

The Old Argument

It’s remarkable that, fifty or so years after “Software Engineering” joined the mainstream, we have so little consensus on these issues. There are many people, including some here at Google, who think that doing large-scale software engineering without recourse to static typing is unprofessional, verging on malpractice. There are others, particularly in the community of Web builders, who think that static typing in general and Java in particular are evidence of old thinking and low skill.

Millions of words have been spent on this debate, but here are a few of the highlights as bullet points; I’ll use “dynamic” and “static” as a shorthand.

Dynamic gets systems built faster.
Static gives you a richer toolset for specifying interfaces, which encourages modularity, particularly in large systems.
Dynamic produces less code. Less code is better.
Static programmers use more advanced IDEs with strong refactoring support; this eases maintenance and reduces the burden of the extra code.
Dynamic developers have a strong unit-testing culture, partly because they lack the static-typing crutch; this supports fearless refactoring.
The Java language in particular suffers from excessive ceremony and boilerplate. Also it lacks important constructs such as closures, first-class functions, and functional-programming support.
Static software supports optimizations that allow faster performance.
Static software typically exposes shared-mutable-state threads, and experience shows that application developers have difficulty understanding and using these correctly.

Remembering Dennis Ritchie, Creator of the C Programming Language and UNIX Co-Creator

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:38:50 GMT

Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language , died this past weekend after a long illness.

dcm4che 1.4.31

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:38:39 GMT

These applications have been developed in the Java programming language for performance and portability, supporting deployment on JDK 1.4 and up.

5 Stunning Art Masterpieces You Won't Believe Were Created with Microsoft Excel

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:51:23 GMT

Most Windows users known Microsoft Excel as "a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X; it features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications." These five mind-blowing art masterpieces show what else ... (more)

Scala sets sights on top-tier status among the Java faithful

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:42:46 GMT

To hear Typesafe tell it, the Scala programming language is about to join the ranks of top-tier development tools such as Java, C++, Ruby, and PHP.

The Lives They Lived: Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:12:40 GMT

In a sense, Ritchie, the creator of C and co-author of the book “The C Programming Language,” has enabled us to all become programmers.

Java.net Weblogs: The State of Java: Meeting the Multicore Challenge

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:52:32 GMT

"The multicore challenge" is the challenge to developers of software products to write code that effectively utilizes modern multi-core / multi-processor computers. Two years ago, I wondered if the multicore challenge was still relevant. In part, I was thinking about how applications were moving from the desktop into the cloud. So, if the apps people are running are running in a browser, does it matter if their desktop system (or pad or phone) is multicore?

Today many mobile phones can really be looked at as being computers. In an article about the contributions mobile phones are making in poor countries, the Economist noted that "Mobile phones are the world's most widely distributed computers." And many of the newer mobile phones are multicore.

So really, whether the target computer for your software is a traditional tower, a laptop, a pad, or a phone, the multicore challenge remains relevant today -- and its relevance will only increase in the coming years. Browsers, one would think, are going to have to evolve to utilize multiple cores and processors. The ones that do so will ultimately take away significant market share from the ones that don't. How they'll accomplish this is another question...

Java already has basic capabilities for utilizing multiple processors -- in the threads library, for example. But, clearly that's considered inadequate for meeting the needs of the future. Which is why we have JSR 335: Lambda Expressions for the Java(TM) Programming Language. The development of JSR 335 takes place in Project Lambda, a component of the OpenJDK project.

At JavaOne 2011, Alex Buckley presented a very well attended session titled "Project Lambda: To Multicore and Beyond" that outlined the vision and plan for bringing Lambda expressions into Java. This will happen in Java 8 -- so, we're still a ways away from having a formal release.

The key element, in my view, is that Lambda expressions (also called "closures") will be implemented largely via a rewrite of the underlying JDK libraries wherein they will "automatically" do the low-level work of divying up the task at hand and passing segments of it to the available processor cores. This will enormously reduce the effort for Java application developers to convert their existing programs such that they can utilize multiple processors/cores.

Writing multithreaded code is hard. I've been doing it for 18 years, starting out on 8-processor Sun machines where we took scientific C and Fortran code delivered by researchers and revised it to parcel out data segments to different threads. Tiny mistakes inevitably result in overwritten data, which produces non-repeatable erroneous results, crashes, hung threads, and other "fun" head-scratchers... Yeah, it's hard to write threadsafe code!

The approach taken by the Java 8 architects and developers is going to in essence hide all that complicated threading stuff from the higher level app developer, by implementing the multithreading and fork/join processing within the Java libraries themselves. This is an enormous effort in itself, but it's a much smaller effort than if every Java application development team had to multithread their apps, having to rewrite function after function to be threadsafe.

Of course, the efficiency of the apps on multicore computers will thus depend on how much of the processing actually occurs within the core Java libraries. It's not going to be a situation where, because of Project Lambda, all apps will suddenly utilize all available cores 100% of the time, and immediately speed up by nC times (where nC is the number of cores in the computer).

Still, Project Lambda is a major innovation, a key step into the future for Java.

If you find all this interesting, you may want to take a look at Mike Duigou's JavaOne 2011 presentation "Bulk Hauling: Parallel Data and Lambdas in Java 8." The PDF for that is available in the JavaOne Content Catalog.

java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, quite a few people have posted interesting new java.net blogs:

Kirk Pepperdine, Is setting -Xmx==-Xms still considered harmful?;
David Herron, The DLJ project is dead - long live the OpenJDK;
Brian O'Neill, Programmatically submitting jobs to a remote Hadoop cluster;
Manfred Riem, Using HtmlUnit, Glassfish and Maven in a multi-project setup for integration testing;
Bongjae Chang, Introduction to Grizzly-Thrift and sharing the benchmarking results; and
Carol McDonald, Finding bugs that matter with Findbugs .

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks you to respond to The most important Java/JVM related happening in 2011 was. Voting will be open until Friday, December 23.

Articles

Our latest java.net article is SWELL - An English-Like DSL for Swing Testing by Sanjay Dasgupta and Chirantan Kundu.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Maurizio Cimadamore outlines the Lambda Integration Plan;
Jasper Potts demonstrates Styling FX Buttons with CSS;
Geertjan Wielenga celebrates an Industry Award for Microchip's NetBeans Platform Application;
Michael Kopp presents How to manage the performance of 1000+ JVMs;
Geertjan Wielenga shares NetBeans API Video Tip 1: Decoupling via Lookup.Provider;
Adam Bien reports Java FX 2 …Comes With Java SE 7 Update 2;
The JCP Program Office is asking JCP participants to Participate in the JCP Survey!;
Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine celebrates Serli does it again! GlassFish VMWare Plugin; and
Geertjan Wielenga provides specifications for Calling Back to NetBeans Platform Actions.

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Pieter Humphrey's OTN Virtual Developer Day returns! WebLogic Server 12c, Coherence in Jan/Feb 2012 :

Join us for a new breed of free, hands-on virtual developer workshops at Oracle Technology Network's Virtual Developer Day. Java Developers and Architects can attend live moderated sessions and hands on labs at the event, where you will learn about how Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle Coherence are the foundation for modern, lightweight development...

Previously we featured David Heffelfinger's new article Spring to Java EE Migration, Part 2:

In this part, we continue rewriting the Pet Clinic application, once again fully taking advantage of the Java EE tooling available in NetBeans. We develop Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1 session beans that act as our Data Access Objects (DAOs), as well as JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 managed beans and pages...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:17:16 GMT

If you want a well rounded introduction to JAVA 7, look no further. This book touches on all the things you would expect in an introduction to a programming language.

Event Planning: Top 20+ CXM, EIM, E2.0 Events for Your Calendar

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:07:21 GMT

Antlr Ide 2.1.2

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:48:10 GMT

ANTLR IDE is an open source and free Eclipse plugin for ANTLRv3 grammars. ANTLR IDE is written in the Java programming language.

UNKNOWN IPTables-0.05 5.8.9 on freebsd 8.1-release

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:13:36 GMT

From: brian greenfield Subject: UNKNOWN IPTables-0.05 v5.8.9 FreeBSD Date: 2011-12-15T13:56:34Z This distribution has been tested as part of the CPAN Testers project, supporting the Perl programming language.

Hans H�bner: Learning Ruby, and Ruby vs. Lisp

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:15:00 GMT

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works.

As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors.

The book makes a good read in general. There are plenty of code examples, but not too much to obscure the prose. What I found first interesting, later annoying, was the frequent use of words like "complex", "complicated", "confusing", "surprising" or "advanced" to describe features of the language. I'd rather decide myself about using such attributes to describe something that I've just learned.

Having spent so much time with Common Lisp, I almost forgot that programming languages usually evolve over the years. Ruby is no exception, and the fact that there are significant differences between Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9 kind of bothers me - I'll probably never write code in Ruby 1.8.7, but the differences between the two versions seem to be rather subtle and I'm curious to see how much that is going to be a bother in the future, working with legacy code.

The common theme for Ruby seems to be succinctness. This comes at the expense of making the syntax rather complex, with several special case rules required to solve ambiguities. I don't have the practice to judge whether this is a problem, but from the book, it seems there are quite some things to remember.

It seems that Ruby started off as a purely object oriented language and only later discovered that function-oriented programming is nice, too. The deep roots of object orientation made it rather hard to actually get free functions (which are not member functions of an object) integrated. Contrary to what I am used to, member functions are not a special case of free functions, but rather something quite different. It requires explicit conversion steps to convert a member function into a free function (called procs in Ruby), and invocation syntax is also different between the two. Again, the description may sound worse than it is in practice.

What I really liked was the generalization of code blocks into fibers. Ruby does not have full coroutines, but the restricted form that is available is generalized well and seems like it could be useful for building pretty wild asynchronous systems. Also, it is nice that the bindings of closures can be accessed.

But then, Ruby is an interpreted language and this fact is re-stated throughout the book. With Just In Time compilation, this could become a non-problem, but I'm not sure how well Ruby can be optimized due to its very dynamic nature. Just to see how fast it is compared to Common Lisp, I implemented the Sudoku solver from chapter 1 of the Ruby book in CL and gave the two implementations a puzzle to solve. It took the Ruby solver 0.890 CPU seconds (Ruby 1.9.2p290), whereas the Lisp solver (Clozure CL 1.7) used 0.087 CPU seconds to solve the puzzle. Ten times slower, whatever you'll make of that.

In the book, it is mentioned how little code the Sudoku solver actually uses. This is true, but then, the Lisp version is not longer. It does not seem as if adding syntax is actually the best way to add the possibility to write succinct programs to a language, and the price of the complex grammar is rather high.

Writing the CL solver, I found myself not writing tests again and then poking around in problems of my implementation without knowing what works and what does not. As I want to practice more TDD, I stepped back and added tests. This led me to solve a problem that I had with my previous attempts to practice TDD in Lisp - I do not want to export all the symbols that the tests exercise from the packages that I use, but I also don't want to import the unit testing library into my own library packages. Thus, I wrote a deftestpackage macro that creates a new package to contain the tests that I write and automatically imports all symbols from the package being tested. That way, I can easily keep tests and library source separate and don't need to qualify internal symbols in the tests.

My overall takeaway on the Ruby is this: Ruby seems to be a language that has grown from being purely object oriented to supporting functional programming. That growth was not completely natural, and it seems that if Ruby is not used as a pure object oriented language, the syntax becomes rather messy and hard to grasp. This is similar to C++, which in its first versions was relatively nice (I hear you "ow"!), but has grown into into an incomprehensible mess once people recognized how templates can be abused for metaprogramming.

I can see the appeal of Ruby, but there seems little it has to offer to me that Common Lisp cannot provide. The lack of a formal specification and the ugly grammar put me off. Then again I'm pretty sure that Ruby is more enjoyable than many other popular languages. I'm looking forward to see my theoretical conceptions be shaken by actual practice.

Why We Need More Programming Languages

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:35:47 GMT

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'

RIM gets licensing deal with Dolby, ends BlackBerry lawsuits

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:05:00 GMT

RIM put an end to Dolby's lawsuits over audio Monday by negotiating a patent licensing deal. BlackBerry phones and the PlayBook tablet will now have a license to use Dolby's mobile-friendly HE AAC audio format. Neither side said how much the deal costs, although RIM had quietly obtained the license on August 4....

Scientists build WiFi hunter-killer drone and call it SkyNET... Viene Tormenta!

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 09:58:00 GMT

You'd think scientists would proscribe certain names for their inventions -- you wouldn't be taken seriously if your supercomputer was called HAL 9000, WOPR or Proteus IV would you? Well, a team from the Stevens Institute of Technology isn't listening, because it's developing an aerial drone and calling it SkyNET. A Linux box, strapped to a Parrot A.R. Drone, can fly within range of your home wireless network and electronically attack it from the air. Whilst internet-only attacks are traceable to some extent, drone attacks are difficult to detect until it's too late -- you'd have to catch it in the act and chase it off with a long-handled pitchfork, or something. The team is working on refining the technology to make it cheaper than the $600 it currently costs and advise that people toughen up their domestic wireless security. We advise they stop pushing us ever closer towards the Robopocalypse.

Scientists build WiFi hunter-killer drone and call it SkyNET... Viene Tormenta! originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Sep 2011 05:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Crave | SkyNET Paper (PDF) | Email this | Comments

Facebook to delete prison inmates' active accounts

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 04:10:49 GMT

Social-networking giant is working with prison officials to prevent inmates from using their user accounts to deliver threats or unwanted sexual advances.

Teenage Hacker Breaks Into Norway Shooter's Email

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:17:00 GMT

Hackers have reportedly broken into Norway shooter Anders Behring Breivik's email account and turned the contents over to police in an effort to help their investigation.

Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Porn

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:54:56 GMT

As the mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States drag on, detail on the collateral damage this extortion-like scheme is costing becomes clear. It is likely that thousands of people have been wrongfully accused of sharing copyrighted material, yet they see no other option than to pay up. One of the cases that stands out is that of a Californian man who's incapable of watching the adult film he is accused of sharing because he is legally blind.

Students Love Technology: Infographic

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:15:57 GMT

Is the idea that students love technology surprising? No, but this infographic sheds a little light on this gadget-addicted generation.

Hacker group vows to 'kill Facebook'

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 20:01:13 GMT

Apparently, "Anonymous" won't be accepting your friend request.

Google+, the Mac App

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:29:47 GMT

Sully Taylor, Creative Director for Teens in Tech Labs and Founder & CEO at Sully Creative, has released a Google+ application for Mac users. The app is a very simple one, however. "Just a ported browser," he says, "not a native app." Yes, we know that you can use Fluid.app to do pretty much the same thing - that is, if you prefer to do the work yourself. But Taylor says Fluid won't be robust enough for what he plans to do with the app in the next week. Oh, really?

Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:28:21 GMT

How well a system works is only half the picture: the other half is how badly it fails

Raid on Russian firm explains the demise of Mac Defender malware

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:18:37 GMT

Mac Defender was a piece of malware that came in with a bang and curiously disappeared just as quickly

Facebook's New Green HQ Designed to Attract Employees

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:16:01 GMT

In the competive Silicon Valley culture, Facebook is working very hard to make sure it has the first pick of the best talent. Part of that strategy is a new green HQ, energy-efficient and very comfortable for occupants.

Privacy Groups Protest Massive DHS Database of Secret Watchlists

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:03:40 GMT

Homeland Security plans to operate a massive new database of names, photos, birthdays and biometrics called Watchlist Service, duplicated from the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database which has proven not to be accurate many times in the past. DHS wants to exempt the Watchlist Service from Privacy Act provisions, meaning you will never know if you are wrongfully listed. Privacy groups worried about inaccurate info and mission creep have filed a protest, arguing the Privacy Act says DHS must notify subject of government surveillance.

Bit.ly Buys Social Media Publishing Tool Twitterfeed

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:47:11 GMT

The web's dominant URL shortener has acquired social publishing tool Twitterfeed.

Looking Beyond: 3 Technology Trends Your Company Can't Ignore

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:46:16 GMT

As someone who has been accurately predicting the future of technology for over 25 years, I urge all leaders to focus on the following three emerging trends that will reshape the business landscape as we know it.

THE DVD IS DEAD: Here's How To Carry Around Your Entire Movie Collection In Your Pocket

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:18:30 GMT

The best pocket-sized Wi-Fi hard drives for bringing all your media with you.

Rioters' phones could help police

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:13:58 GMT

Police may be able to use rioters' mobile phone information to help convict them, say legal experts.

VIDEO: Chrome OS For Tablets Caught On Film

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:32:35 GMT

Google’s Chrome OS was originally designed as a lightweight operating system for devices such as netbooks, which have a constant internet connection. The search giant already has Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) and will soon offer Android Ice Cream Sandwich for tablets but apparently that hasn’t stopped Google from optimizing a version of Chrome OS for use on slates.

Today, Aug. 9, 1995: When the Future Looked Bright for Netscape..But now?

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:20:26 GMT

1995: Netscape Communications stages a successful initial public offering, making it one of the first companies to capitalize on the growing World Wide...But what happened after is history...

Apple’s iPad is Eating Notebooks for Lunch

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:10:05 GMT

The influence of Apple’s iPad on mobile computing is made fairly obvious by the huge numbers of competitor products that we’ve seen from just about every mobile and computer company under the sun, but a new report from Deutsche Bank makes it even more apparent.

Freezing the Fluid Emotions of Dance

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:07:03 GMT

This was how Clive Barnes, then the dance critic for The New York Times, summed up the conviction that motivated Martha Graham, when he wrote an appreciation of her work in 1965. The essay was illustrated by a Sam Falk.

Evolution Of Tablets: From 1968 To Date

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:02:05 GMT

From our caveman days to the present, how the tablet—and we—have evolved.

Toshiba Releases Glasses-Free 3D Laptop To Much Rejoicing

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:01:23 GMT

The Qosmio F755 3D laptop is now available for those who wish to live in the 2D world but – and only occasionally – may also want to view things in 3D. The laptop uses a “15.6-inch diagonal full HD TruBrite® display with Active Lens” to display both 2D and 3D images (sample shown here may not represent actual display, your results may vary, consult a doctor before playing 3D games, 3D gaming could cause headaches, nausea, a feeling that 3D is BS, the croup, accidental ingestion of your wedding ring, dance, Gary Oldman’s Disease, vestigial tail growth).

Nokia: the N9 Isn't Coming to America

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:59:02 GMT

Cellphones, Mobile Handsets Nokia: the N9 isn't coming to America By Darren Murph posted Aug 9th 2011 10:30AM If you've been eagerly awaiting September 23rd so you can grab your very own Nokia N9 in America, the company's first (and last) MeeGo smartphone may not be shipping in your region after all.

Cryptocat Creates a Private, Encrypted Chatroom on Any Computer with a Web Browser

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:48:05 GMT

If you need to have an encrypted, private chat but don't have the tools handy to do so, you can just use Cryptocat. While anyone will be able to enter the chatroom if they know its name, nobody without your secret key will be able to see what you're saying.

Government To Block Sharing Sites, But Music Biz Must Cut Prices

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:19:29 GMT

As the phenomena of blocking file-sharing sites continues to spread around the world, the government of Indonesia is tackling the issue from two directions. Alongside an announcement confirming that ISP blocks will be put in place against some of the most popular file-hosting services, record labels are also being told they need to reduce prices in order to deter piracy.

The Camera That Goes to ONE MILLION FPS

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:00:44 GMT

Vision Research, with their Phantom line of high-speed video cameras, has kind of outdone themselves this time with the Phantom v1610. A MILLION FPS!?

Building A Mini AMD Fusion PC

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:51:08 GMT

AMD's new Fusion APU technology makes it easy to construct a small home PC that pack big media-processing power, but require only a minuscule amount of your green. Here's how you can build one.

Digg Launches Real-Time “Newswire” Service:Innovative Method of Social News Curation

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:13:16 GMT

In what looks like an effort to advance the social discovery characteristic of Digg, the service has launched a new feature called the Newswire. “Newswire”, is a real time Top News section on Digg that enables users to be editors and help to opt the Top News instead of just reading it.

IPad rivals have better chance in Europe: Forrester

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:18:25 GMT

Read 'IPad rivals have better chance in Europe: Forrester' on Yahoo! News. LONDON (Reuters) - Would-be rivals to Apple's iPad have more of a chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to cut prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Don’t Blame Facebook for Facial Recognition’s Creepiness

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:54:52 GMT

We all know Facebook is an easy privacy punching bag. The social network has a tendency to tinker with our personal data, and deservedly lands in hot water now and then with paranoid users, pundits and politicians.

The Big Players in This New Era of Video Chatting (Graphic)

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 01:10:15 GMT

The Alive Web is something more than the static pages and events we're used to. The Alive Web is more interactive and immersive.

Why every Android user needs this green app

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:54:06 GMT

Android cell phones are notoriously bad at battery drain. But recently I discovered the single app that has smartly and simply solved many of these battery life problems for me: the PowerMax Android app made by Volt-Up.

Digg's New Newswire is a Radical Experiment in Social News

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:55:26 GMT

... added a highly customizable, real time Newswire. Want to see the freshest videos about technology that have been validated enough to get 10 or more Diggs but aren't so popular that they've been dugg more than 50 times? Text posts about business with more than 50 Diggs? Those kinds of views are now available.

Watch LulzSec Strike Back At The Empire [Video]

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:11:08 GMT

Rebellious groups Anonymous and LulzSec have formed a hacktivist Voltron to strike back against international police efforts to arrest their members; they've hacked the police. It's a war, now. And we've developed a war-room style video of Lulzsec's history.

DIY hacker drone: Home-made surveillance craft can launch airborne cyber attacks

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:37:44 GMT

The Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform - or Wasp - was constructed from a former U.S. Army target drone by two computer security experts.

This Sexy Coffee Gadget Probably Won’t Ever Exist

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:30:23 GMT

What is it? A laser cutter? A mod photo enlarger? A microscope? A tattoo remover? Nope, it’s a coffee maker, but an extremely svelte coffee maker. In fact, I imagine this little Nespresso-friendly caffeine inducer would look pretty sweet in your typical “ice hotel” or ad agency lobby.

Man Lines Up Over A Month Early For The iPhone 5 (But Mostly For Attention)

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:08:53 GMT

Each time a new iPhone is set to hit the shelves, I get my pre-order in nice and early. Waiting in line is for chumps, right?

Amazon’s New(ish) Social Network — Now Lifting Even More Info From Facebook, Twitter

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:08:18 GMT

Amazon’s “Public Notes” feature for Kindle has been available for months. So why did my following and follower counts rocket up overnight to five times what they had been?

A Month With Google+ Shows Why This Social Network Has Legs

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:05:13 GMT

If you’re a stranger who follows me on Google+, you might think I rarely use the service. That’s because the majority of my posts have been limited to the seven circles I created for friends, acquaintances, family, Ars staffers, and other people I like to expose to various aspects of my personality. You had no idea? That’s exactly the point.

Jailbroken Apple TV plays HTML5 Blackjack, iOS gambling rings can't be far behind

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:02:51 GMT

It was all the way back in October of 2010 that a few ingenious devs jailbroke the second gen Apple TV. Since then, we've seen a weather app, web browser, and finally a port of XBMC, but there hasn't been much progress getting apps up and running. Well, today's news doesn't bring us any closer to playing Cut the Rope on Apple's "hobby" but it does show that HTML5 is a viable option for getting games on the tiny media streamer. The fairly bare-bones Blackjack game isn't going to wow anyone with its graphical prowess or stun with a deep level of interactivity, but it's certainly a worthwhile proof of concept. While you wait for internet poker and online gambling to come to the little black box, check out the video after the break.

Digg Launches ‘Newswire’ Showing User Buries for First Time

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:41:03 GMT

Digg users have already started to notice a new Beta feature called 'Newswire' that Digg announced on its blog this morning. 'Newswire', a real time Top News

China may block access to Windows Phone Marketplace

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:45:14 GMT

The Chinese government might be blocking access to the Windows Phone Marketplace from smartphones, according to anecdotes.

Sifting for Diamonds with the Digg Newswire

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:15:47 GMT

Today Digg is launching the Digg Newswire, which is a tool for discovering breaking stories on Digg and speeding them on their way to Top News.

'Stone-Like' DVD Etches In Movies, Pics, Data To Last Forever

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:06:59 GMT

Start-up Millenniata is planning to introduce a new optical disc and player that etches bits of data into a stone-like material that it claims lasts forever and can be played on any moden DVD or Blu-ray player.

The Long-Shot Rifle That Can Drop a Taliban Fighter from 1.5 Miles Away

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:05:13 GMT

1.54 miles. That's the world's longest recorded sniper strike. It's the distance at which British Corporal Craig Harrison eliminated a Taliban machine gun team in Afghanistan in 2009. This is the gun he used: the L115A3 rifle.

Tech Can Identify Faces (and Social Security Numbers) in a Crowd

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:16:07 GMT

A new study from Carnegie Mellon can cross reference a person's face with currently available photos on the Web and find information, including their interests -- and in some cases their social security numbers.