News (288)

Laptop laws easier on US flights

Some travellers in the US will now not have to unpack their laptops when going through airline security, according to new guidelines released last week. Read more »

Open source licence victory in model-railway case

A federal appeals court in the US has upheld the right of a copyright holder to distribute software under a free or open source licence while preventing such code being used commercially without following the licensing conditions. Read more »

Data breach laws years away

The Australian Law Reform Commission yesterday released a report recommending Australia introduce data breach disclosure laws — but Senator John Faulkner said that bridge would not be crossed by government at least for the next 18 months. Read more »

Judge halts Defcon hacking speech

A federal judge on Saturday in the US granted the Massachusetts transit authority's request for an injunction preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation about hacking smartcards used in the Boston subway system. Read more »

Google: No such thing as complete privacy

Google's Street View service didn't invade a Pittsburgh couple's privacy, the search giant said in a response to the couple's April lawsuit over the matter. Read more »

San Fran gets codes to hijacked network

The computer network hostage crisis in San Francisco is over, thanks to the city's mayor. Read more »

When do we declare Google a monopoly?

I did a double take recently after listening to Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell acknowledge that his company was ready to lose even more money in online services in the near term, if that's what it takes to catch Google. Read more »

LinkedIn retrieves Australian domain

US-based business social networking company LinkedIn has taken action to retrieve the Australian version of its internet address from local digital marketing agency Clear Blue Day. Read more »

Kevin Mitnick: Social engineering 101

Kevin Mitnick has proven that the weakest link in any security system is the person holding the information. Read more »

UK govt to monitor all telecoms

UK internet service providers will be invited to tender for a British government scheme to monitor all internet communications and telecommunications in the country. Read more »

Features (76)

Programming for Cell

As the Cell has seven usable cores and some exotic memory features, it can offer more parallelism than other chips in the marketplace but it comes at the cost of ease of programming. We discuss the challenges faced by this difficult yet highly parallel architecture. Read more »

What does a DBA do all day?

Data integrity is a DBA's number one responsibility, but do you know what else they do all day? Read more »

Inside the San Fran network lockout

A strange sort of techno-drama is playing out in the city of San Francisco, California right now. The blame for the fiasco may not be as easily assigned as it at first appears. Read more »

10 ways to explain things more effectively

In the course of your work, you may sometimes need to explain technical concepts to your customers. Having them understand you is important not only for technical reasons, but also to ensure customer satisfaction. Read more »

10 ways to be more persuasive and win your case

This article shows 10 tips on how you can persuade people. Read more »

Handling conflicts of interest

Because conflict of interest decisions sometimes have to be made in the spur of the moment, I advise conservatism when making them. It may lead to a missed opportunity, but I would rather miss out on a -good deal" than deal with the repercussions of a bad choice. Read more »

Spry: Standards, Dreamweaver & the future

We caught up with Scott Fegette, technical product manager for Dreamweaver to discuss the ins and outs of the upcoming Spry release. Read more »

10 signs that you aren't cut out to be a support tech

So you want to be a computer support technician? Or perhaps you are one already, but you can't decide whether you're just having a bad week or you're really not cut out for the job. What does it take to be an effective support tech? Is this a career at which you can excel and be happy? Read more »

80% of software is no brain work: Ivar Jacobson

Efficiency, Code Reuse and Artificial Intelligence -- we sat down with one of the inventors of UML and the RUP to talk about how the software industry has to change in the next five years. Read more »

10 things you can do to give old servers a second life

Often, you can give old servers a new lease on life by upgrading to a bigger hard drive and adding RAM. The nature of your network will dictate what's best for you, but here are some ways you might get additional mileage from an old server. Read more »

Video (1)

Moore's Law: No more

Gordon Moore, "We have another decade, a decade and a half"

At the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore discusses the end of Moore's Law, which he believes will hit a wall in the next 10 to 15 years. Read more »

Blog (22)

Do you trust data in the cloud?

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Cheap hosted storage, app engines, and hosted code libraries. Can you really trust your data, or your client's data in the magical Web 2.0 cloud? Read more »

Introducing the new "nerd whistle"

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Certainly the iPhone 3G has changed a lot about how we think of our mobile devices, but I guess I never thought we would discover the ultimate geek magnet -- the nerd whistle of all App Store apps -- the Phonesaber. Read more »

Know when to walk away, know when to run

David McAmis [blogs:theneteffect] -- As a software developer, there are certain projects you want to avoid. For me, that is usually the project where the end-users design the entire application -- you know the type I am talking about. Read more »

Quote of the year (so far)

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Hats off to James Gosling for this corker about developers who insist on using Emacs for their developer needs in the face of better tools. Read more »

Samba gets an inside look at Microsoft documentation

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software. Read more »

Busybox settles a second GPL suit

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- The folks behind Busybox have settled a second lawsuit that argued a company violated the widely used free and open-source license. Read more »

Blogger declares shenanigans on advertisers -- piracy or plagiarism?

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- MIT academic calls notices some suspicious similiarities between a lecture he wrote and an Australian made printer ad. Could this be piracy, or merely plagiarism. I call in the lawyers to find out. Read more »

How Microsoft beat Linux in China and what it means for freedom, justice, and the price of software

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Thanks to some major concessions on source code and a precipitous price drop, the Chinese government has now thoroughly embraced Windows and Office, what does this mean for the world? Read more »

Is the $100 laptop the end for Moore's Law?

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Here we are, extolling the virtues of laptops such as the pricey Sony Vaio TZ, when for most users the US$100 XO would be just as effective. Read more »

5 reasons restricting hacking is not like gun control

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- Let's get it out of the way: Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. People with hacking tools can steal your personal data, shut down your system and deface your web site -- but is that any reason to ban them? Read more »

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  • Staff Share a keyboard and mouse with Synergy

    Even in the era of virtualization, many IT pros (including myself) have a small army of computers sitting on, under, and around their desks. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Staff Android devs less than gruntled

    Yet more discouraging news on the Android front. Having hacked off its developer community by releasing updated SDKs to just a small group of chosen devs, Google has now given the brush-off to a petition that called for more to be given to the wider community. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Staff VMware shows how not to do it

    As a developer there will be a time when you ship a bug -- be it a stub that you left in, or a flaming, crashtastic segfault. The next time this happens and your bosses come baying for blood, point them in the direction of VMware, who this week gave the developer world a great example of how to ship a showstopper bug. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

What's on?

  • Club Builder: Captain Obvious vs the Crackpots

    In the case of the bleeding obvious, IBM says open source needs good designers; a claim is made that China can activate your phone to snoop on you; and we take a look at the Defcon conference.