May 1 2009

Windows 7 brings Microsoft to its knees

Get more from this author Only Microsoft Developer Network members and technet members were offered keys, but Microsoft still had to make some changes to keep the site up and running.

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May 1 2009

NoScript Adds Subscriptions To Adblock Plus

hahiss writes “Apparently, NoScript has taken to adding its own whitelist updates to Adblock Plus — so that the ads on the NoScript page show up — without notifying users. (It is described on the NoScript addon page, however.) This was a part of the last update to NoScript. Wladimir Palant, the main developer of Adblock Plus, describes the situation in an informative blog post.”

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Apr 30 2009

Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages

CWmike writes “Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet paid subscribers were supposed to find the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 RC available for download today. But in a snafu reminiscent of the problems Microsoft had in January when it tried to launch Windows 7 Beta, the download pages for the release candidate were inaccessible, despite numerous attempts over an hour-long span up until about noon Eastern. TechNet and MSDN subscribers were not happy. ‘Man, this stinks,’ said a user identified as Lyle Pratt, on a TechNet message forum at 10 a.m. ET. ‘I can’t believe we can still bring MSDN to its knees!’ said John Butler, a Microsoft partner. ‘Surely, they should be able to deal with this? Not a good advert for Microsoft.’ The Windows 7 RC is slated to be available for public download next Tuesday, May 5. Meanwhile, Microsoft said today that the RC would operate until June 2010, for 13 months of free use — a significantly longer time than it did with Vista’s previews.”

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Apr 30 2009

Can Avatars Make Contracts?

edadams sends in a story about the legal questions that are starting to crop up over property disputes in virtual worlds. A lawsuit in March 2008 that stopped one Second Life user from selling a virtual product created by another user marked the beginning of a significant amount of casework for several law firms, in large part due to the way Second Life’s currency interacts closely with real money. (And yes, apparently the product in that particular case was for cybersex — did you have to ask?) “As transactions grow in volume, it’s inevitable that disagreements will crop up. Linden says that although it will enforce its terms of service, including its ban on violating other users’ intellectual property, it can’t settle most disputes for users.” A lawyer for one intellectual property firm handled a case in which the co-ownership of virtual real estate had to be determined, ending with a financial settlement given to two users who helped a virtual land developer run a group of Second Life islands. As virtual worlds get more popular and their business models more directly affect real-life finances, we can expect these legal issues to become more common as well.

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Apr 30 2009

Web Analytics Databases Get Even Larger

CurtMonash writes “Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2/12 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff.”

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Apr 30 2009

Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

CWmike writes “Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. “Mature” programmers remember manual intervention and hand-tuning. Today’s dev tools automatically perform complex functions that once had to be written explicitly. And most developers are glad of it. Yet, young whippersnappers may not even be aware that we old fogies had to do these things manually. Esther Schindler asked several longtime developers for their top old-school programming headaches and added many of her own to boot. Working with punch cards? Hungarian notation?”

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Apr 29 2009

iTunes 8.2 hints at support for Gracenote’s video platform

Apple on Tuesday equipped iPhone developers with a beta of iTunes 8.2 that appears to add full support for Gracenote’s video platform, which includes components for organizing, searching and managing both DVD and Blu-ray optical discs.

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Apr 29 2009

Is Apache Or GPL Better For Open-Source Business?

mjasay writes “While the GPL powers as much as 77% of all SourceForge projects, Eric Raymond argues that the GPL is ‘a confession of fear and weakness’ that ‘slows down open-source adoption’ because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond’s argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy, an argument Michael Tiemann advocates, wouldn’t it make sense to use the most open license? Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation suggests that there are few ‘pure’ GPL-only open-source projects, as GPL-prone developers have to ‘modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.’ But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL. The old GPL vs. BSD/Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities.”

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Apr 28 2009

Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org

ericatcw writes “Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle’s purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun’s (and soon to be Oracle’s) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun’s tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle’s take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.”

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Apr 28 2009

Competition Seeks Best Approaches To Detecting Plagiarism

marpot writes “Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation.”

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