Cody Taylor

An anonymous reader writes “Companies using software other than Microsoft’s are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as ‘Vortalgate.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

waderoush writes “If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn’t be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes “The first touch-screen flexible e-paper has been developed by a team from Arizona State University and E-Ink (the company that makes the technology for Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader). Jann Kaminski and colleagues at ASU’s Flexible Display Center say the main challenge is that most touch-screen technologies do not respond well to being flexed. So they used an inductive screen, which relies on a magnetized styluses to induce a field in a sensing layer at the back of the display. The first adopters for the technology are likely to be the US Army. Watch a video of the device being tested.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently discussed the perspective that the harrowing of Wall Street was caused by over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk. Wired has a piece profiling David X. Li, the quant behind the formula that enabled the creation of such simple risk models. “For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. … [T]he real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

arcticstoat writes “Intel has surprised the industry by announcing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Taiwanese silicon chip maker TSMC to manufacture Atom CPUs. Although TSMC is already employed by AMD, Nvidia and VIA to make chips, it’s not often you see Intel requiring the services of a third fabrication party. Under the MOU, Intel agrees to port its Atom CPU technology to TSMC, which includes Intel’s processes, intellectual properties, libraries and design flows relating to the processor. This will effectively allow other customers of TSMC to easily build Atom-based products similarly to how they might use an ARM processor in their own designs. However, Intel says that it will still pick the specific market segments and products that TSMC will go after, which will include system-on-chip products, as well as netbooks, nettops and embedded platforms.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you’re strapped for cash for a can’t-avoid-it purchase, sometimes it’s worth sacrificing a few frills. We zeroed in on a desktop, a laptop, a color laser printer, a camera, and an HDTV. Each represents a great value in its category.

Web applications have made huge leaps and bounds in improving user experience thanks to a lot of recently developed Ajax technology. When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of javascript you can produce some pretty cool results. In an effort to help you take it up a notch, we’d like to share some methods …

ZosX writes “An article over at Popular Mechanics announces that, for the first time, solar cells have been manufactured for the much sought-after figure of /Watt. They also talk about a new study of the cost of the particular raw materials used in different manufacturing processes. The conclusion is that the company that just achieved the /W milestone, using cadmium telluride technology, may not prove to be the long-term winner capable of meeting demand when it rises into the terawatt range.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes “A company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama’s helicopter. ‘We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president’s helicopter,’ says Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, a security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology. Tiversa was able to track the file, discovered at an IP address in Tehran, Iran, back to its original source. ‘What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,’ says Boback, adding that someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, without realizing the potential problems. ‘I’m sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.’ Iran is not the only country that appears to be accessing this type of information through file-sharing programs. ‘We’ve noticed it out of Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China. They are actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gov IT writes with this excerpt from NextGov: “Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. … The basic technology that runs peer-to-peer networks inadvertently exposed the files probably without the computer user’s knowledge, Johnson said. A health care worker might have loaded patient files onto a laptop, for example, and taken it home where a son or daughter could have downloaded a peer-to-peer client onto the laptop to share music.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.