Mozilla v1.5 (Alpha) was just announced. There's a couple of new features, but the biggest news to me was that they've had to delay the release of Firebird. According the official Mozilla Roadmap:
It's clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone. Instead, we expect Mozilla 1.5 to coincide with Mozilla Firebird 0.7. But we intend to implement the new application architecture in the next several milestones, till most of the community is won over to the new apps.
Audiopad was invented by two Media Lab graduate students at MIT, James Patten and Ben Recht. To quote James' website:
Audiopad has a matrix of antenna elements which track the positions of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop surface. Software translates the position information into music and graphical feedback on the tabletop. Each object represents either a musical track or a microphone.
The demo is pretty cool. Make sure to watch the second part of it, that's the part where they really show off how it works. It's an interesting user interface (UI) that they've developed as well. Make sure to check out the videos on both the Audiopad and as well as the generic video which shows off some of the different implementations of the physical model UI elements he's working on.
Windows users should expect to have another update from Microsoft waiting for them on their computers.
The software giant issued a patch Wednesday morning to plug a critical security hole that could allow an attacker to take control of computers running any version of Windows except for Windows ME.
A group of Polish hackers and independent security consultants, known as the Last Stage of Delirium, discovered the flaw and worked with Microsoft to fix it.
"It should be emphasized that this vulnerability poses an enormous threat, and appropriate patches provided by Microsoft should be immediately applied," the group said in an advisory posted to its Web site. The group said that programs designed to exploit the vulnerability will likely be available on the Internet soon.
The flaw is in a component of the operating system that allows other computers to request the Windows system perform an action or service. The component, known as the remote procedure call (RPC) process, facilitates such activities such as sharing files and allowing others to use the computer's printer.
Tulip Computers, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games, the company said in a statement Friday.
I find this announcement by Tulip Computers to be interesting. There are a ton of C64 emulators on the market already, so it's interesting that they'll be licensing an official software emulator.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of hardware emulators they ship. Are they looking to do some kind of PDA form factor device? I wouldn't mind playing some of my old C64 games on a small portable device. I think I need to dust off that old C64 of mine... :)
Macromedia announced their new product activation initiative. It makes me wonder how much money they spent coming up w/this method to try to bypass people pirating their software.
While this method will certainly curtail those buddies who simply share their serial numbers with friends, I don't think it'll make much of an impact on the overall scale. People who a content w/stealing software are always going to find ways to break product activation procedures. The problem with implementing any kind of copy protection, is that the copy protection itself always ends up having to be implementing in the software itself—which means somebody with a memory monitoring and little bit of knowledge can hack the executable to bypass the copy protection—or in this case can simply figure out the registration algorithm and implement a key generator for calculate validate keys to use in the telephone registration.
If you use a commercial software package and rely on it to do work, you should pay for it. The only way a company can stay in business is to make money and the way a software company makes money is by selling it's product. While I think you need some level of protection in there—to bypass the casual user sharing serial numbers—I also think it's a waste of money R&D money to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with new ways to thwart pirates from stealing your software. If there's a will, there's a way...
Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open source development, today announced the launch of a new foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine. The Mozilla Foundation will continue and expand on the efforts of mozilla.org, the group managing the daily operations of the Mozilla project since its inception.
Ok, AOL announced today that their breaking off Mozilla into it's own foundation called The Mozilla Foundation. They're providing $2 million in funding over the next 2 years, but that's not really that much money (but should last them get them through 2 years if they're budget conscious.) As Robi's often stated, open source really needs financial backing in order for projects to prosper—with AOL backing out financially, will anyone else step in? If not, is this the beginning of the end for Mozilla? With Microsoft claiming their discontinuing Internet Explorer as a standalone product and this news, there hasn't been much good news in the browser market over the past 2 months.
Mozilla's a pretty strong product right now—at least it's getting better and better with each release—so I'm sure if things are handled correctly over the next 2 years it won't go away. I still am complexed on why AOL never tried to leverage this product. I always assumed they were putting money in this project to use it as the basis for their AOL Software, but that obviously isn't the direction they chose to go with it. I'm really curious as to why they never leverage Mozilla into their software.
Are you tired of remembering all of your computer and online passwords? There's one to log on to your computer, another one for your e-mail at work, one more for your AOL, Yahoo! or MSN account and potentially another for your ISP at home. If you bank or trade shares online, then you have to remember those passwords as well.
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[Fellowes'] Secure Touch Optical Mouse allows users to replace their passwords with a fingerprint reader. When you arrive at the logon screen, just place your fingerprint on the sensor built on to the mouse and you're in. The same goes for anything on the Web that requires a password.
This is an interesting idea, maybe a step backwards in ergo dynamics, but and interesting idea. I certainly hope that when creating a password for each application that it uses some kind of hash algorithm with a unique key for each password—the last thing you want to have happen is to use the same password for each site. If all the device is doing is converting your fingerprint signature into an ASCII key, then it might be using the same password for every site/application. That would be a real no-no—never use one password for everything you do.
I also wonder how it would work in a network environment. If you have a bunch of PCs all connected using this mouse, could you go from one computer to the next and have it work on each box? I'd imagine you could—if not, that's a problem that would need to be resolved.
Microsoft on Wednesday warned of three new security gaps in its software, including one "critical" Windows flaw that could allow a hacker to run unauthorized code on victims' PCs.
The most serious of the flaws is what is known as a buffer overrun vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to use an unchecked buffer to run their own executable code.
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Because the security hole can be exploited without any action on the part of the user, Microsoft described it as critical, the highest rating in the software maker's four-level system.
It always amazes me how much cool stuff has come from Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) branch. Graphical user interfaces (i.e. Windows and the Mac both use GUIs), the mouse, Ethernet, e-mail, WYSIWYG editors—all of these and more came from the minds of employees at PARC. Xerox really failed in the early 70s by not jumping on these experiments. However, that didn't stop people like Steve Jobs—who based many of the Apple features on things he saw during a trip to PARC—from capitalizing on the things the creative minds at PARC were creating.
Something the guys at PARC have been working on for a while now is DataGlyphs(r). I first remember reading about this probably a few years ago and at the time I didn't really give it much thought (other than to say: "Hey, that's cool.") I was watching TechTV last night and they brought on a researcher from PARC. He gave a demo on using a normal scanner with some custom built software that relied on DataGlyphs to read in the positions of chess pieces on the board. While this in itself wasn't all that practical of a use, DataGlyphs themselves are.
Essentially DataGlyphs give you the ability to embed binary data into a print-ready material that in unobtrusive to the human eye. It essentially is a replacement for the barcode system we currently use. To represent data, it uses a series of backward and forward slashes that represent ones and zeros.
In a setback to Nullsoft's plans, Winamp3 in March gave way to the earlier Winamp 2.x version, pending a broader overhaul that will incorporate aspects of both in Winamp 5. In the meantime, AOL has discontinued supporting plug-ins developed using Wasabi and will instead fold Winamp3 graphical interface designs, or "skins," into Winamp 2.x.
I just ran across this in the news. Good to see the Nullsoft developers are smart enough to listen to the community. I know they spent a lot of time working on WA3—and it's always hard to turn your back on code you've spent a lot of time developing—but let's face it, WA3 blew. I upgraded for like a day, but quickly went back to WA2.
I don't want lots of gimmicks with my mp3 player. I want a small thin visual interface and it should use as little system resources as possible. In my opinion, no other mp3 player has even tempted to switch from WA2—except for WA3 of course, which I had high hopes for.
Reasoning recently did a review of Apache's code and found that the defects per thousand lines of code were on par with commercial products in the same stage of development. Although the number of defects were slightly higher (by .02 per thousand lines of code,) Reasoning determined that the end result may turn out to be a better product due to the nature of open source projects—implying that bugs found are more likely to be addressed quickly by the public, since anyone has the ability to track down and repair the bugs.
"The open-source code seems to start at the same defect rate for early commercial code as well," Jeff Klagenberg, director of project management, said in an interview. "Over time, it can gain higher levels of quality. That appears to be because of the natural inspection process inherent in open source."
I hate to see blanket statements like this. I do think when an open source project has financial backing by a large company, that this probably holds true, but let's face it, there's only so much energy someone will put into a open source project before needing some kind of monetary return.
The KITTY (Keyboard Independent Touch Typing) Project is another new entry into the world of portable computing. The end result is a glove-like device that attaches to a something akin to a watch—which uses wireless technology to transmit keystrokes recorded by your fingers to a computing device. They've got a Flash demo of how the device works. Seems like it would be uncomfortable to type that way for long periods of time, but I already have carpal tunnel, so maybe that has something to do with it.
As expressed by Dr. Mehring from UC Irvine, the new device tries to give glove-based or finger-mounted systems a new shot at the portable input device market by taking advantage of the existing skills of its potential users. As of today, user acceptance for newly developed ultra-portable input devices which can provide high rates of data-input required for ever more powerful pocket computers is limited by the requirement imposed on the user to learn new ways of data input.
Wired Magazine has a cool article on how the Slammer Virus really brought the 'net down to it's knees.
PHP 5 has gone into public beta 1. It's been a while since I've used PHP, so I'll probably try to check this version out in my spare time—which I may have an abundance of in the coming months.
One of the key new features of PHP 5 is it support for Abstract Classes and Methods. While this is nice and all, I'm not sure that PHP is the right language to be doing intensive business logic in. I view PHP much like I view ColdFusion—being primiarily a presentational language. Granted, CFMX now has components, but Java just seems like a more natural choice to rely on for enterprise level processing.
Today on CF-Talk, Scott Wilhelm posted a link to a good link checker called Xenu's Link Sleuth. The price is right on the program—it's free—and from the brief playing around I did with the software, it seems to do a really good job of spidering dynamic web sites. So, if you looking for a good link checker/validator, check it out.