Orome1 writes "Firesheep's authors can be the satisfied with the gradual migration towards SSL that most of the biggest social networks, search engines, online shops and others have embarked upon since its advent. Google, which has already taken care of its users and encrypted its Web Search, Gmail and Google Docs, has now turned its attention to the APIs used by developers."

snydeq writes "MySQL fork Drizzle has been released for general availability, giving companies a viable alternative to Oracle-owned MySQL, InfoWorld reports. 'Organizations that have been seeking a less-expensive alternative to Oracle's brand of MySQL — or a variant devoid of feature bloat — now have an option that Drizzle's creators deem ready to package in Linux distributions.'"

An anonymous reader writes "TheRegister says Google's attempt to purge copyright from header files has put mobile developers at risk of being forced to reveal their own source code, according to legal experts. This time it's not patents or Android's reinterpretation of Java that's causing problems, but the Linux code that compiles down into Android itself. The discussion started with a Huffington Post article by IP lawyer Edward Naughton, who has serious doubts about Google's approach to the Linux kernel header files. He in turn links to copyright law professor Ray Nimmer's blog post on disclosure risks on copyleft platforms. And IP blogger Florian Mueller believes Google faces a serious Linux copyright issue."

Antique Geekmeister writes "Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting and innovative UI applications. The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,' with much tighter control of user interfaces for 'security' and 'consistency.'"

theodp writes "Worried that his love-hate relationship with math might force him to give up the pursuit of computer science, CS student Dean Chen finds comfort from an unlikely source — the postings of CS professors on the SIGSE mailing list. 'I understand that discussing the role of math in CS is one of those religious war type issues,' writes Brad Vander Zanden. 'After 30 years in the field, I still fail to see how calculus and continuous math correlate with one's ability to succeed in many areas of computer science...I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it.' Dennis Frailey makes a distinction between CS research and applied CS: 'For too long, we have taught computer science as an academic discipline (as though all of our students will go on to get PhDs and then become CS faculty members) even though for most of us, our students are overwhelmingly seeking careers in which they apply computer science.' Frailey adds that part of the problem may be that some CS Profs — math gods that they may be — are ill-equipped to teach CS in a non-mathematical manner: 'Let's be honest about another aspect of the problem — what can the faculty teach? For a variety of reasons, a typical CS faculty consists mainly of individuals who specialize in CS as a discipline, often with strong mathematical backgrounds. How many of them could teach a good course in cloud computing or multi-core systems or software engineering or any of the many other topics that the graduates will find useful when they graduate? Are such courses always relegated to instructors or adjuncts or other non-tenure-track faculty?' So, how does this jibe with Slashdotters' experience?"

darthcamaro writes "It took nearly 3 years for the open source Drupal 7 content management system to hit general availability. The plan for pushing out Drupal 8 is to be faster. How are they going to do that? '"At no point in time will there be more than 15 critical bugs," Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal said. "I will not pull in a big change if we know there are known bugs. This gives us the ability to do timely releases because we know at most the release is only 15 critical bugs away from being ready."'"

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister takes a first look at Wallaby, Adobe's experimental tool for transforming Flash content into HTML5, and finds the tool an interesting idea with little yet to offer. 'Wallaby engineers have made sound decisions in designing the tool, but what you actually get when you convert a Flash project to HTML5 is extremely limited,' McAllister writes, in large part because many Flash features are not supported, leaving developers to add their own interactivity with jQuery."

rick446 writes "In late 2009 SourceForge embarked on a plan to 'reboot' our developer tools on an open platform including Python, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and SOLR. The result was the Allura platform, and was released under the Apache License in February 2011." Note: Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of Geek.net.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."

An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed 'Wallaby.' Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad."

Shlomi Fish writes "The best way to react to people trolling on Internet forums is not to feed them, right? Wrong! 'Don't feed the trolls' is also usually ineffective. Luckily, however, there is more effective approach, inspired by the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns."

Atriune writes "The creator of the renowned Creatures artificial life series is at it again. Fifteen years after the initial success of the Creatures Trilogy, Steve Grand continues his quest to go beyond simulation, and create real artificial life." It's hard to tell if the approach is realistic, but it is certainly novel. Perhaps this will succeed in the areas the Lisp hackers of the '80s failed.

mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."

trebonian writes "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early '60s. We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java. We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday. It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms. As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday. Expect another update around 2025."

jbrodkin writes "Gianugo Rabellino, founder of the Italian Linux Society and a key member of the Apache Software Foundation, traded his Linux and Mac PCs in for a Windows 7 laptop and took on a newly created job at Microsoft designed to encourage collaboration between Redmond and open source communities. 'Developers nowadays are mostly to be found in the open source world,' the new Microsoft executive says. 'We need to go where they are.' With Rabellino's help, Microsoft is expanding its successful partnership with PHP developers , but Steve Ballmer and crew are a long way from completely erasing their poor reputation in Linux and open source circles."

fidget42 writes "It appears as if Research In Motion is trying to discourage people from developing for the PlayBook by making the process too darn complicated." This is a pretty serious rant; has anyone had a better experience with RIM's system? Sometimes the gap between developers and users (even when those users are other developers) can be more of a chasm.

tgeller writes "Drupal developer Ben Buckman attended the BostonPHP Framework Bake-Off with the hopes of pitting the CMS against CakePHP, Symfony, Zend, and CodeIgniter. He was told that he couldn't because Drupal is 'not a framework,' a response he felt was 'coder-purist snobbery ("it's not a framework if you build any of it in a UI").' So he decided to unofficially compete in the back of the room by accepting the challenge of building a job-posting app in 30 minutes, while the official competitors did the same from the stage. He recorded the results, which are impressive. In the process he raised the question: What is a framework, anyway?"

GMGruman writes "Google's experimental technology to run native x86 binaries in the browser shows lots of potential, writes Neil McAllister. He's previously said it was a crazy idea, but a new version of Native Client (NaCl) caused McAllister to take a fresh look, which has led him to conclude the technology is crazy like a fox. McAllister explains what NaCl is useful for, how to use it, and why it's not a Java or a Flash or a JavaScript replacement, but something else."

teh31337one writes "Google has released the SDK for their tablet OS, Android 3.0 'Honeycomb.' Google states on its developers' blog that the APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11." Google has posted here an overview of the new user and developer features.

beret found a nifty little pie chart breaking down profanity in code comments broken down by language. He used Carlin's Seven Words, and C++ came out on top while PHP users are either wholesome or perfect.