Renato’s lifestream

 

Mmmhh LinkedIn is down. Strange strategy about communication of outgages

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

Looking at news, it seems like we will not able to rebuild the nation...

Peter Popham, writing in the Independent last week, provided a good run-down on the latest scandals here, together with a forthright attack on everything which he sees as wrong with the bel paese:

Italy today is devouring its own entrails. Private affluence and public squalor; constantly shrinking budgets which inflict vicious blows on schools and universities and hospitals and museums while the entrenched gerontocracies which preside over them are untouched; talented and vigorous youth who flee abroad to find study and work opportunities in ever-greater numbers, while their less-enterprising contemporaries struggle to make ends meet in jobs with miserable pay and no security; organised crime which constantly extends its reach; fear and hatred of immigrants, cynically encouraged by politicians in the government: this is Berlusconi's dismal legacy.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot

Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot

February 27, 2010

in Microsoft

Introduction

The story first hit in last week on the Slovakian tech site DSL.sk.  Since I am not linguistically equipped to follow the Slovakian tech scene, I didn’t hear about the story until it was brought up in English on TechCrunch.  The gist of these reports is this: DSL.sk did a test of the “ballot” screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser.  It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser.  However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of the browsers was far from random.

But this wasn’t a simple case of Internet Explorer showing up more in the first position.  The non-randomness was pronounced, but more complicated.  For example, Chrome was more likely to show up in one of the first 3 positions.  And Internet Explorer showed up 50% of the time in the last position.  This has lead to various theories, made on the likely mistaken theory that this is an intentional non-randomness.  Does Microsoft have secret research showing that the 5th position is actually chosen more often?  Is the Internet Explorer random number generator not random?  There were also comments asserting that the tests proved nothing, and the results were just chance, and others saying that the results are expected to be non-random because computers can only make pseudo-random numbers, not genuinely random numbers.

Maybe there was cogent technical analysis of this issue posted someplace, but if there was, I could not find it.  So I’m providing my own analysis here, a little statistics and a little algorithms 101.  I’ll tell you what went wrong, and how Microsoft can fix it.  In the end it is a rookie mistake in the code, but it is an interesting mistake that we can learn from, so I’ll examine it in some depth.

Are the results random?

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   EFF   Microsoft  

Comments [0]

Now we could receive the Holiness Tweets, The Dalai Lama is tweeting

Dalai Lama to 'Tweet' on Tibet

February 23rd 2010

Washington, DC, USA, 23 February 2010 (AFP) - The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has joined micro-blogging service Twitter, attracting over 55,000 followers in just two days.

The Dalai Lama's Twitter feed -- @DalaiLama -- was launched on Monday, a day after he met in Los Angeles with Evan Williams, one of Twitter's founders.

"Met the Dalai Lama today in LA. Pitched him on using Twitter. He laughed," Williams "tweeted" following the meeting.

The next day, however, the Tibetan spiritual leader had an account and received a "Welcome @DalaiLama" message from Twitter's new spokesman, Sean Garrett.

The Dalai Lama's account has sent seven messages so far although they are not pearls of wisdom from His Holiness but rather links to articles and photos of his activities during his current US visit.

The creation of a Twitter account by the Dalai Lama comes a year after Twitter suspended an account set up by an imposter which attracted tens of thousands of followers.

Following the incident with the fake Dalai Lama account and other impersonations Twitter began a system of "verified accounts" for public figures. The new Dalai Lama account is a "verified account."

The Dalai Lama visited the developer of Twitter team in SF last week !
But they didn't get any pix of the event,
bad guys

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Life  

Comments [0]

Oracle killed: NetBeans, GlassFish & Sun Cloud. Could Oracle kill MySql too ? http://bit.ly/a3Ry1U

You can read the full article on InfoQ Website: http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/01/sunset

Source: InfoQ

MySql 

Edward Screven, Oracle's chief open-source architect, stated that his company will continue to support MySQL database which Oracle views as complementary to its core database technologies and not a competitive product. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insisted that his company will do a better job of improving MySQL than its previous stewards, without mentioning Sun or the open source community. Oracle will offer MySQL through a separate sales team, while enhancing its compatibility with other Oracle software applications.

Netbeans

As InfoQ has reported in the past, the future of Netbeans is uncertain after the acquisition.

Tony Baer is certain that Netbeans will become a second rate citizen in favor of JDeveloper:

You can play around with NetBeans, which Oracle’s middleware chief Thomas Kurian characterized as a “lightweight development environment,” but again, if you really want to develop enterprise-ready apps for the Oracle platform, you will still use JDeveloper, which of course is written for Oracle’s umbrella ADF framework that underlies its database, middleware, and applications offerings. That’s identical to Oracle’s existing posture with the old (mostly) BEA portfolio of Eclipse developer tools. Actually, the only thing that surprised us was that Oracle didn’t simply take NetBeans and set it free – as in donating it to Apache or some more obscure open source body.

Similarly Stephen O'Grady believes that there is a significant chance that Oracle will not be investing in Sun’s IDE:

[…] Likely candidates like NetBeans or OpenOffice.org were explicitly mentioned on yesterday’s call, which presumably wouldn’t be the case if the plan was to immediately retire them. […]Yes [it will survive], although it sounds as if it will take a backseat to JDeveloper.

GlassFish

As Thomas Kurian, Oracle's senior VP of product development stated, Sun's Web app server will continue to get support from Oracle, but it will be offered primarily as a departmental solution, while Oracle's own WebLogic Server will continue to be marketed as the enterprise solution.

Stephen O'Grady feels that GlassFish will not be endorsed by Oracle:

It will be, as Oracle phrased it, a reference implementation. Beyond that, Oracle didn’t have much in the way of promises. GlassFish, as someone reminded me this morning, is not getting its own sales and marketing organization, as MySQL is. Which you can read two ways. First, as a commenter wrote, that “Oracle sees more opportunity for joint selling of GF+WLS to address the differing needs of projects.” Or, more cynically, that they see the product as potentially disruptive to their WebServer product line, and will kill it softly through organizational dynamics. How incented do you think the WebLogic sales folks are going to be to push a lower priced alternative?

The Cloud

Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, has stated that this company will not be offering Sun's long-planned Cloud service. Sun had original announced its plans for an Amazon-style cloud with compute and storage that would support Linux, Windows, and Solaris on a mix of Sparc and x64 machines, using Sparc blades and both Xeon and Opteron processors on x64 blades as well as open-source products ZFS and Crossbow.

Sun's Cloud initiative had followed it older plans for a grid utility computing work, Network.com, which failed to attract customers and was eventually phased out in anticipation of the cloud.

 

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Oracle  

Comments [0]

First step the Nexos One Google, next step the "iPad One": Google's tablet UI concept pictures

Whilst Google's upcoming Chrome OS is being primarily designed for netbook computers, as we reported recently, it could be the ideal operating system to run on a tablet device - and this is an option that Google is considering. More information about how the new operating system could be optimised for such a form factor is revealed in documentation on Google's Chromium projects website.

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Google  

Comments [0]

How Will You Carry Your iPad?

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Apple  

Comments [0]

German TV on the Failure of Full-Body Scanners

Check this out !

- Boing Boing post on their blog
- Bruce Schneier wrote a post

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Life  

Comments [0]

I heard a few month ago in NYC about developing using screenshots instead coding: a MIT project !

A new MIT project called Sikuli allows people to program using screenshots in lieu of written code. Basically, it lets you reference user interface elements like a Microsoft Word icon, Trash Can or search bar with pictures of the button or icon instead of script. (If you look at the picture to the right, you’ll see functions referencing icons and screenshots of buttons instead of text. It’s best explained in the video below.)

The idea is to make it dead-simple for casual computer users to write their own programs without having to know a programming language. Let’s say you’re building a location-based app that uses real-time bus locations to tell you when the next one is going to arrive. If the city transportation Web site keeps a map of where buses are at all times, you could take a screenshot of the map and instruct the program to send a notification when the marker pin reaches a certain point on the map, instead of entering latitude and longitude coordinates.

Sikuli catalogues user interface elements from online tutorials, computer books and documentation. It analyzes the text surrounding the icons in documentation, performs optical character recognition and uses cutting-edge computer vision techniques to figure out what different visual elements are responsible for.

The team behind Sikuli, which means ‘God’s Eye’ in the language of Mexico’s Huichol Indians, have also found other uses for their technology. You could use it as a visual search engine when you’re lost and don’t know what to do in specific application. If you’re clueless about what a certain button does, you could just take a screenshot of it and use it to search for help. Google’s Goggles mobile app has similar functionality but for landmarks, logos and business cards.

Popout

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

Comments [0]

Amazon, Scared of the Apple Tablet

Amazon, Scared of the Apple Tablet, Tweaks Its Kindle Publisher's Cut

BY Kit EatonToday

Kindle

Though everybody believes next week Apple will be revealing an exciting tablet PC, complete with reputed e-reader powers, the event has clearly got Amazon running scared: It's just improved its deal for Kindle publishers, significantly.

In a press release to announce the news, Amazon comes directly and efficiently to the point (a slightly unusual step for press releases!) with the words "Amazon.com [announces] a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell." The company is preserving some of its existing DTP royalty share options, but is adding in a new 70% option--giving 70% of list price (net of delivery costs) to authors or publishers.

Incredible, they failed by themselves producing a horrible product !!!
How did they thought to survive on the market with a fake product, they sell books... and probably they will sell soon the Apple tablet too,

Nice Try

Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

Comments [0]