Cody Taylor

kokito writes “OSNews managing editor Thom Holwerda reviews Haiku, the open source successor of the Be operating system. According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience and ‘personality,’ boasting very short boot times, the same recognizable but modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons, a file system with support for metadata-based queries (OpenBFS) and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general.” (More below.)

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kokito writes “OSNews managing editor Thom Holwerda reviews Haiku, the open source successor of the Be operating system. According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience and ‘personality,’ boasting very short boot times, the same recognizable but modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons, a file system with support for metadata-based queries (OpenBFS) and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general.” (More below.)

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compumike writes “If you have a significant other to impress this Valentine’s Day, consider putting your programming skills to use. This video tutorial shows how to build an LED Heart Valentine’s card, powered by a microcontroller running C code, with a neat randomized ‘twinkling’ effect in an interrupt handler. Think about it: how many ladies can say that their Valentine’s card runs at 14 MHz?”

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Philip Hingston writes “Computers can’t play like people — yet. An unusual kind of computer game bot-programming contest has just been held in Perth, Australia, as part of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. The contest was not about programming the bot that plays the best. The aim was to see if a bot could convince another player that it was actually a human player. Game Development Studio 2K Australia (creator of BioShock) provided ,000 cash plus a trip to their studio in Canberra for anyone who could create a bot to pass this ‘Turing Test for Bots.’ People like to play against opponents who are like themselves — opponents with personality, who can surprise, who sometimes make mistakes, yet don’t robotically make the same mistakes over and over. Computers are superbly fast and accurate at playing games, but can they be programmed to be more fun to play — to play like you and me?” Read on for the rest of Philip’s thoughts.

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A first look into new content from Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 4, featuring new music, weapons (auto-shotgun, grenade launcher, pipe bombs), characters, television programming, Internet, and minigames, as well as new multiplayer modes and “superpeds”. Motorcycles have also been tweaked so that they’re much easier to ride and harder to fall off of.

jcatcw writes “Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn’t that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API.”

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svonkie writes “C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby’s been a hot topic for many.”

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