Archive for April 24th, 2008Pickens writes “Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen states not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. ‘Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,’ says Jansen. ‘The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Checkers and Pogo writes “Grayware inhabits a murky area between pure malware and useful apps, and it’s a growing problem. 38.1% of all malicious Personal computer software falls into the grayware category, and so-called ‘grayware 2.0′ is targeting social-networking sites. Ars Technica’s Jeremy Reimer notes, ‘The “threat” of rogue applications like SuperWall wasn’t immediately obvious: they seemed more like annoyances than real security risks. But as users entered more and more personal information into their Facebook accounts, it became clear that the possibilities for abuse were rampant. For example, because Facebook grants users to “tag” pics with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute pics that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. ancientribe writes “Dark Reading reports that a group of European researchers has found a way to disrupt the huge Storm botnet by infiltrating it and injecting “polluted” content into it to disrupt communication among the bots and their controlling hosts. Other researchers have historically shied way from this controversial method because they don’t “want to mess with other peoples’ Personal computers by injecting commands,” said one botnet expert quoted in the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. dp619 writes “HTML 5 is extensive and might take years to finish. Microsoft’s solution to hasten its development is to carve it up. The company wants to divide HTML 5 into sub-specifications overseen by different working groups. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson stated that HTML 5 features including its Canvas APIs, offline caching of Web applications’ resources, persistent client-side data storage, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework would be useful outside of HTML. The WC3 seems to be receptive to the idea and states that a consensus is forming among working group members to do just that.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. evanbro writes “ZDNet is reporting on ksplice, a system for applying patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting. ksplice requires no kernel modifications, just the source, the config files, and a patch. Author Jeff Arnold discusses the system in a technical overview paper (PDF). Ted Ts’o comments, ‘Users in the carrier grade linux space have been clamoring for this for a while. If you are a carrier in telephony and don’t want downtime, this stuff is pure gold.’” Update: 04/24 10:04 GMT by KD : Tomasz Chmielewsk writes on LKML that the idea seems to be patented by Microsoft. Read more of this story at Slashdot. An anonymous reader writes “The bill to ban genetic discrimination in employment or insurance coverage is moving forward. Is this the death knell of private insurance? I think private health insurance is pretty much incompatible with genetic testing (GT) for disease predisposition, if stated testing turns out to be of any use whatsoever. The great strength of GT is that it will (as technology improves) take a lot of the uncertainty out of disease prediction. But that uncertainty is what insurance is based on. If discrimination is granted, the person with the bad genes is out of luck because no one would insure them. However, if that isn’t granted, the companies are trouble. If I know I’m prone to get a certain condition, I’ll stock up on ‘insurance’ for it. The only solution I can see is single-payer universal coverage along the lines of the Canadian model, where everyone pays, and no one (insurer or patient) can game the system based on advance knowledge of the outcomes. Any other ideas? This bill has been in the works for a while.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Rambus has won its appeal in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision said that it wasn’t sufficient to prove that Rambus lied or harmed competitors; the FTC had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law. This is, unfortunately, a very hazardous ruling in light of some of Microsoft’s activities relating to OOXML because it raises the bar on the proof required to act against such behavior. However, the ruling in the Rambus case was merely vacated and remanded for further proceedings, not overturned. So, if the evidence warrants, the lower court might be able to decide that consumers were actually harmed by Rambus’ conduct and rule against them. Alternatively, this ruling could be appealed to the Supreme Court by filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, but the Supreme Court only allows a few of those per year.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points to a Yahoo! story which begins “Google on Wednesday handed over data stored by suspected pedophiles on its Orkut social networking site to Brazilian authorities, ceding to pressure to lift its confidentiality duty to its users, officials said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Filed under: Internet, Web services, Browser Tips, Social Software, web 2.0  Facebook has finally rolled out its new chat feature to all users. That means you can chat with anyone on your Facebook contact list if the two of you’re logged into the Facebook web page at the same time. But what if you like the idea of chatting with your Facebook friends, but hate the idea of keeping Facebook open in a browser tab all day? Mozilla Links discovered a nifty trick for adding Facebook chat to your browser sidebar in Firefox. All you have to do is click on your bookmark toolbar and create a new bookmark. Give it whatever name you like, and enter this for the URL: http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php Make sure to choose the button that states “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” and you should be all set. Note that you can drag the sidebar divider to make the Facebook Chat window more massive or smaller. If all you want to do is see your contact list, the sidebar doesn’t take up much space as all. But if you want to actually open a chat window with one or more of your contacts, you’ll need to widen the sidebar a bit, which will cost you some valuable web browser real estate. Facebook Chat isn’t the only instant messenger you can open in a Firefox sidebar. You can also create bookmarks for Google Talk and Meebo. |
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