QwkHyenA writes "I've recently cancelled my Linux Magazine subscription because they went paperless. I know, I'm a heartless geek and should be 'shunned,' but I enjoy the unplugged sensation of reading paper periodicals. What sort of magazines are out there that still are delivered via USPS that will scratch my Engineering, Coder, System Administrator and 3D Printer itch?"

theodp writes "In the Sixties, we could put a man on the moon. Nowadays, laments jocastette, America's tech giants can't even put a BASIC on the phone. Woz managed to crank out a BASIC interpreter for the 6502 in the '70s. As did Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So, why — at a time when development has never been easier — can't Google, Apple, and Microsoft manage to support a free BASIC or other programming-for-the-masses development environment on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones?" My limited experience with Android development showed using Java to be obtuse and downright obnoxious to do anything (at least without Eclipse, and even with it doing anything non-standard required digging through horrendous ant buildfiles). And, of course, without a REPL things were even more obnoxious. There is the android-scripting project, but it doesn't provide particularly exhaustive access to the platform.

mikejuk writes "It was on this day 220 years ago (December 26 1791) that Charles Babbage was born. The calculating machines he invented in the 19th century, although never fully realized in his lifetime, are rightly seen as the forerunners of modern programmable computers. What if he had succeeded? Babbage already had plans for game arcades, chess playing machines, sound generators and desktop publishing. A Victorian computer revolution was entirely possible."

cultiv8 writes "I am a developer and released some code at one point under GPLv2. It's nothing huge — a small Drupal module that integrates a Drupal e-commerce system (i.e. Ubercart) with multiple Authorize.net accounts — but very useful for non-profits. Earlier today I discovered that a Drupal user was selling the module from their website for $49 and claiming it was their custom-made module. I'm no lawyer, but my perspective is this violates both the spirit and law of GPLv2, most specifically clause 2-b: 'You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.' Am I correct in my understanding of GPLv2? Do I have any recourse, and should I do anything about this? I don't care about money, I just don't want someone selling stuff that I released for free. How do most developers/organizations deal with licensing infringements of this type?"

McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech interns are in high demand in the Bay area. According to the author, 'Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response — sometimes even luring candidates away from college.' Meanwhile in NYC, CIOs lament that they are unable to retain 20-something techies according to a report in Network World. Says one CIO, 'It puts us in a really uncomfortable position to have this kind of turnover because knowledge keeps walking out the door. We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they need to be, and boom they're gone. That has been my biggest struggle and concern.' It's the pay, stupid!"

An anonymous reader writes "The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard is known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. It provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft)."

First time accepted submitter dmiller1984 writes "I am a high school computer teacher and I've been put in the unique situation of designing my ideal computer lab since our high school will be undergoing a major expansion over the summer. I thought the Slashdot community might have some great ideas to help me out. I've never liked the lecture hall labs that I've seen in some schools, but I would like some way to get natural light in the room without worrying about glare on the computer screens (skylights, perhaps?). What are some of your ideas for a great computer lab for education?"

gzipped_tar writes "The 'Chinese Software Developer Network' (CSDN), operated by Bailian Midami Digital Technology Co., Ltd., is one of the largest networks of software developers in China. A text file with 6 million CSDN user credentials including user names, password, emails, all in clear text, got leaked to the Internet. The CSDN has issued a letter of apology to its users. In the letter, it is explained that passwords created before April 2009 had been stored in plain text, while later passwords were encrypted. Users created between September 2010 and January 2011 may still suffer from email address leaks. A summary of the most frequent passwords without the corresponding usernames is available at GitHub. Somewhat surprisingly, the cryptic sounding password 'dearbook' ranks 4th with 46053 accounts using it."

ghostoftiber writes "From the article: 'Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree.' Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for its devices since its release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty. The radio interface layer ... still exists as an ATI/Nvidia-esque shim loader scheme with modem 'drivers' being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."

chicksdaddy writes "Data from application testing firm Veracode suggests that the quality of application code submitted for auditing is pretty much constant throughout the year — except for the months of October and November, when the average density of vulnerabilities in the code jumps considerably. But why? Is it the pressure of deadlines? The stress of developers' lives (kids back to school, etc.)?"

MrSeb writes "Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "CryptDB, a piece of database software that MIT researchers presented at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in October, allows users to send queries to an encrypted SQL database and get results without decrypting the stored information. CryptDB works by nesting data in several layers of cryptography (PDF), each of which has a different key and allows a different kind of simple operation on encrypted data. It doesn't work with every kind of calculation, and it's not the first system to offer this sort of computation on encrypted data. But it may be the only practical one. A previous crypto scheme that allowed operations on encrypted data multiplied computing time by a factor of a trillion. This one adds only 15-26%."

New submitter happyscientist writes "This is a nice 'Hello World' for using Hadoop MapReduce on Common Crawl data. I was interested when Common Crawl announced themselves a few weeks ago, but I was hesitant to dive in. This is a good video/example that makes it clear how easy it is to start playing with the crawl data."

An anonymous reader writes "So, it's that wonderful time of year again. Instead of buying the latest, greatest whiz-bang, overpriced fad toy of the year, I thought I might try my hand at corrupting my nieces (ages 12 and 14) in a nerdier direction with some sort of introductory robotics kit. They have no programming experience, and part of my idea is that it would be encouraging for them to see interactions of their code that they write with the real-world by being able to control some actuators and read sensors. The first thing that comes to mind is Lego Mindstorms, but I find them a bit on the pricey side of things. My budget falls between $40 and $100, and the ideal kit would focus more on the software side than on soldering together circuits. I'd be looking for a kit that provides an easy to learn API and development tools that will work with a standard Windows PC. I don't mind spending a few afternoons helping them out with the basics, but I'd like for them to be able to be able to explore on their own after grasping the initial concepts. Has anybody gotten their younger relations into programming through robotics, and what kits might you recommend?"

New submitter an_orphan writes "Apparently, Oracle's 'Operating System Distributor License for Java' is expired, causing Ubuntu to not only remove sun-java from the partner repository, but from user's machines."

itwbennett writes "Use of the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL set of licenses is declining at an accelerating rate, according to new analysis by the 451 Group's Matthew Aslett. In fact, the 451 Group projects that GPL usage will hit 50% by September 2012. Instead, developers are licensing projects under permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL. The shift started in 2007 and has been gathering momentum ever since. Blogger Brian Proffitt posits that 'the creation of the GPLv3 and the sometimes contentious discussion that led up to it' may be partly responsible for the move away from the GPL."

An anonymous reader writes "Google Chariman Eric Schmidt recently addressed an Android user lamenting the fact that that mobile apps are often released on Apple's iOS platform well before they finally reach Android. Schmidt cooly and curiously explained that this dynamic will change in just 6 months. Here's why he's wrong. Though Google brags about the total number of Android users, developers care about certain kinds of users (those that pay for apps). A similar dynamic can be found in television advertising, where advertisers will more money for ad spots on less popular shows in order to reach desirable demographics, even though other programs may have many millions of more viewers."

jrepin duly notes the release of Qt 4.8.0, and extracts from the announcement some of the key changes for developers: "Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA) restructures the GUI stack to enable easier porting of Qt to different windowing systems and devices. Threaded OpenGL enables us to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently. HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. The file system stack received some heavy lifting under the hood. The result is better I/O performance."

angry tapir writes "Montclair State University is suing Oracle in connection with a troubled ERP (enterprise resource planning) project. Montclair's complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, states that Oracle made an array of 'intentionally false statements' regarding the functionality of its base ERP system, the amount of customization that would be required, and the amount of 'time, resources, and personnel that the University would have to devote.' 'Ultimately, after missing a critical go-live deadline for the University's finance system, Oracle sought to extort millions of dollars from the University by advising the University that it would not complete the implementation of the ... project unless the University agreed to pay millions of dollars more than the fixed fee the University and Oracle had previously agreed to,' it adds."

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox has gotten so large that it cannot be compiled with PGO on a 32-bit linker anymore, due to the virtual memory limitation of 3 GB. This problem had happened last year with 2 GB, which was worked around by adding a/3GB switch to the Windows build servers. Now the problem is back, and things aren't quite that simple anymore." This only affects the inbound branch, but from the looks of it new code is no longer being accepted until they can trim things from the build to make it work again. The long term solution is to build the 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system.