Roblimo writes "Wow. Atlassian sent press releases out about this, and we're happy for them. But isn't Git easy to install and use — for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not open source and public? Whatever. Some people seem to feel better about proprietary software than about FOSS, and the majority of Atlassian's business comes from meeting the needs of behind-the-firewall, proprietary code repositories. At least Atlassian has free versions of its repository for FOSS and small-scale proprietary developers. Which is sort of nice."

rtj writes "We have released an open-source (BSD licensed) implementation of the HDCP encryption/decryption algorithms. The code includes the block cipher, stream cipher, and hashing algorithms necessary to perform an HDCP handshake and to encrypt or decrypt video. The code passes the test vectors provided in the HDCP specification and can encrypt video at a rate of about 180 640x480 frames/second on a 2.33GHz Intel Xeon CPU. This isn't quite fast enough to decrypt 1080p content in real-time on a single core, but decryption can be parallelized across multiple cores. There are also many opportunities for further optimisation, such as using SSE instructions. We are releasing the code in hopes that others will further optimize it and use it in their HDCP-related projects."

javab0y writes "The folks over at basementcoders did a podcast with James Gosling, The Father of Java, last week at a coffee shop in San Francisco during the JavaOne conference. In a raw and no-holds-barred interview, James let loose on Oracle, the Google Lawsuit, and his experience with IBM. You know its going to be good when he starts out saying, 'I eventually graduated in '83. Went to work for IBM which is, you know, is within the top 10 of my stupidest career decisions I've made.' The podcast was fully transcribed."

tekgoblin writes "Joshua Walker spent the last few months creating a masterpiece. He created the Starship Enterprise 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Minecraft using just blocks. He recorded a short video of him explaining how he did it and even gave us a sneak peek at the partially completed ship." He also posted on the Penny-Arcade forums about how he did it. If you aren't impressed by that, perhaps you should check out a 16-Bit ALU also implemented in Minecraft which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.

An anonymous reader writes "JS1k has a simple goal: to get programmers producing demos written in JavaScript that are 1k in size or less. That's just 1024 bytes to play with. There's even additional bonus points on offer if a demo's code can fit inside a single tweet. Now that the contest is finished and there is a top-ten, I'm wondering what they can do if given some extra bytes." I like the Tetris clone. The pulsing wires demo is neat too but kinda stuttery on my machine.

Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."

CWmike writes "A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC. The survey polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity."

Julie188 writes "That was probably the only time 'DNS' will ever be a trending term on Twitter. The cause was Facebook's 2.5 hour outage on Thursday, which incorrectly told users trying to access the site that a DNS error was to blame. In truth, experts who've read Facebook's explanation say the site went down because Facebook gave itself a distributed denial-of-service attack when a system admin misconfigured a database. So why was DNS blamed? The 27-year-old communications protocol has been known to cause other, somewhat similar outages."

marpot writes "Recently, the 1st International Competition on Wikipedia Vandalism Detection (PDF) finished: 9 groups (5 from the USA, 1 affiliated with Google) tried their best in detecting all vandalism cases from a large-scale evaluation corpus. The winning approach (PDF) detects 20% of all vandalism cases without misclassifying regular edits; moreover, it can be adjusted to detect 95% of the vandalism edits while misclassifying only 30% of all regular edits. Thus, by applying both settings, manual double-checking would only be required on 34% of all edits. Nothing is known, yet, whether the rule-based bots on Wikipedia can compete with this machine learning-based strategy. Anyway, there is still a lot potential for improvements since the top 2 detectors use entirely different detection paradigms: the first analyzes an edit's content, whereas the second (PDF) analyzes an edit's context using WikiTrust."

HW_Hack writes "In my early career in the '90s I had a hardware tech degree, but also a strong interest in software. I completed software courses in assembly, Pascal, HTML, and C as I prepped for a CS degree. I then got my chance to do hardware design for a major US firm and went that direction for a good 18-year career. I now work in a good sized school district doing IT support work at a large high school. I plan to revive my programming skills this winter so I can write apps for the flood of mobile devices. I am very much platform / OS agnostic and I support on any one day OS X, XP, Win 7, Linux servers, and now iOS as we pilot iPads in our school. My question focuses on three topics: Which programming environment (iOS or Android) is easier to jump into from a technical perspective / number of languages needed to master? Which one has a better SDK ecosystem of documentation, programmer support, and developer community(s)? Where is the market and the money going? I do not expect to get rich doing this, but with my insights into K12 needs I hope I can write effective apps for that market."

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook officially gave out more technical details on the endless loop in a database control mechanism that forced a 2.5-hour shutdown of the social site, and the resulting combination of a productivity burst, increased fertility (check back on June 25, 2011) and mass hysteria all around the world."

eldavojohn writes "As you're probably aware, HTML is in a transition period, lost somewhere in the mire between versions 4 and 5. That doesn't stop us from using the latest and greatest, but it does create a requirement for gracefully falling back when a user does not have native support for features like canvas, video, audio, local storage, web workers and geolocation. HTML5: Up and Running is a great resource for someone tasked with bringing HTML4 webpages up to HTML5 standards, but it's mediocre-to-poor in illustrating advanced usage. For example, author Mark Pilgrim invests around thirty pages on video, while putting at most half a page toward web workers. Some of this is not his fault, due to support (or lack thereof), but the book felt skimpy at a couple hundred pages. For me, this book had value if only for the many wrapper scripts and workarounds like Modernizr, complete with code snippets. This book is for the beginner to intermediate developer and also for developers tasked with implementing HTML5 immediately. I received my copy for review from O'Reilly, but you can also find a draft of it under CC-BY-3.0 license. And the sample code is available online, so you can follow along." Read on for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

colordev writes "Yesterday Nokia and AT&T announced a mobile software coding contest worth $10 million in prize money. The move is intended to help Symbian compete with Android and iOS. The day before this announcement, Sony Ericsson said it would not be making any new Symbian devices and is instead focusing on Android. That left Nokia pretty much alone with Symbian, and now it wants to find new coding 'friends' to keep the platform alive. Natural selection seems to be slowly eroding Symbian's future. Is this contest too late?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish elections were held recently (the third Sunday of September to be exact) and it seems that a few people tried to interfere with the election by voting for parties which were in effect named to be SQL injection attacks or similar. Clever stuff! Little Bobby Tables in real life." That wasn't the only oddity of the election; reader MZeroOne writes: "The Swedish Election Authority published the results of last Sunday's general election and even though the current prime minister retained power, the candidate who got the most individual handwritten votes was Disney's Donald Duck." Maybe the existence of the Hard Alcohol Party (237 votes) helps explain why the Pirate Party didn't have a better showing.

Ignorant Aardvark writes "Xiph.org just released the first installment in its video series 'A Digital Video Primer For Geeks,' which covers digital audio and video fundamentals. The first video covers basic concepts of how digital audio and video are encoded, and does so in an understandable fashion. The video is hosted by Monty, the founder of Xiph.org (the people who brought you Ogg), and explains a lot of concepts (FourCC codes, YUV color space, gamma, etc.) that many watchers of digital video have long been exposed to, but don't quite understand themselves. The intent of the video series (in addition to general education) is to spur interest in digital encoding and get more free software hackers involved in digital audio/video."

patio11 writes "Diaspora, the privacy-respecting OSS social network, did a code release last week. Attention immediately focused on security. In fact the code base included several severe security bugs. This post walks through the code, showing what went wrong, and what it would let an attacker do to someone who was using Diaspora." The developer who wrote the post ends with: "You might believe in the powers of OSS to gather experts (or at least folks who have shipped a Rails app, like myself) to Diaspora’s banner and ferret out all the issues. You might also believe in magic code-fixing fairies. Personally, I’d be praying for the fairies because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed."

databuff writes "About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo by over 8 per cent. The leader is a Portuguese physicist, followed by an Israeli mathematician and then a pair of American computer scientists."

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at OpenWorld, Oracle announced a 'new' Enterprise kernel for its so-called Unbreakable Linux. What's the real truth? The company is simply sticking a 2.6.32-based kernel on top of its re-branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone and trying to spin it as a new and innovative development."

theodp writes "Valleywag reports that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd is paying dearly to roll with Oracle, giving up millions of dollars to settle the HP lawsuit that threatened to prevent him from working at his new job. Hurd will forfeit about 345,000 restricted HP shares that he was given as part of his HP exit package, which had a market value of $13.6 million. In addition to announcing the truce against the backdrop of Oracle's OpenWorld conference, HP and Oracle also reaffirmed their vows to each other."

Bruce Perens writes "Codec2 is an Open Source digital voice codec for low-bandwidth applications, in its first Alpha release. Currently it can encode 3.75 seconds of clear speech in 1050 bytes, and there are opportunities to code in additional compression that will further reduce its bandwidth. The main developer is David Rowe, who also worked on Speex. Originally designed for Amateur Radio, both via sound-card software modems on HF radio and as an alternative to the proprietary voice codec presently used in D-STAR, the codec is probably also useful for telephony at a fraction of current bandwidths. The algorithm is based on papers from the 1980s, and is intended to be unencumbered by valid unexpired patent claims. The license is LGPL2. The project is seeking developers for testing in applications, algorithmic improvement, conversion to fixed-point, and coding to be more suitable for embedded systems."