Discover the world of computing, learn software design and development while solving puzzles with world renowned lecturer Richard Buckland.
UNSW Computing 1 is presented by OpenLearning with original content derived from UNSW COMPUTING’s first year computing course. Take the course for online for free, the next cohort starts on December 3rd 2012.
via UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming – (OpenLearning).
For example, the BlackBerry knows when it’s in a holster. It knows when it’s on a nightstand so it can do all kinds of “I’m in a nightstand now” things. You know what’s “incoming” without taking it out of its case – you can tell that from the LED indicator. (Enthusiasts have written programs to allow you to set sophisticated ‘Blinkenlights’ sequences of coloured flashes, telling you in much more detail what is going on.) The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key. You can set up a custom shortcut key to show you all the emails from Alice in the last three months, for example.
via BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe • The Register.
Once you’ve got used to it, and that the Hub is the home screen, BB10 is by some distance the most brutally efficient multitouch interface I have used so far. It makes the others look like hard work.
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
via “Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak.
The new design is obviously optimized for touchscreen use (where big targets are helpful), but Microsoft is also imposing this style on its traditional PC users because all of Windows 8 is permeated by the tablet sensibility.
How well does this work for real users performing real tasks? To find out, we invited 12 experienced PC users to test Windows 8 on both regular computers and Microsoft’s new Surface RT tablets.
via Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
The underlying problem is the idea of recycling a single software UI for two very different classes of hardware devices. It would have been much better to have two different designs: one for mobile and tablets, and one for the PC.
Why not Linux?
Linux-based distributions stack up software — the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt — that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be. [top]
Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout
via General FAQ | Haiku Project.
What platform(s) is Haiku targeted to run on?
The main target for Haiku R1 is the x86 (Intel, AMD, and compatible) platform. There are ports to other platforms underway, such as PowerPC, MIPS and ARM. However, it is not clear whether these will be supported or not. What platforms we support in the future will heavily depend on the availability of resources to support their development
I have never gotten into the KDE vs GNOME debates, so this is not GNOME bashing, nor, as you’ll soon see, are these systemic development problems limited to GNOME. Yet what I’m hearing is that with GNOME v3 the goal is to promote their “brand” and make it dominant, in part by greatly limiting what users can change on their own systems, and partly by breaking or simply removing whatever support they’re no longer promoting as ‘The Way’. The reach of this selfish and narrow-sighted development goes beyond GNOME and affects GTK apps in general.
via GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes « IgnorantGuru’s Blog.
What follows is a sampling of quotes from various places and assorted devs which paint a picture of a growing culture of anti-user, conformist philosophies. There’s a bit of text to review here, but I think it’s worth it to hear what GNOME devs have to say about their intentions and goals, in their own words, and what others are saying about that!
Physicists have attempted to solve the problem by sending photons through a shared fibre along a ‘quantum channel’ at one characteristic wavelength. The trouble is that the fibre scatters light from the normal data traffic into that wavelength, polluting the quantum channel with stray photons. Andrew Shields, a physicist at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, UK, and his colleagues have now developed a detector that picks out photons from this channel only if they strike it at a precise instant, calculated on the basis of when the encoded photons were sent. The team publishes its results in Physics Review X.
via Quantum cryptography conquers noise problem : Nature News & Comment.
Still, 90 kilometres is a “world record that is a big step forward in demonstrating the applicability of quantum cryptography in real-world telecommunications infrastructures”, says Vicente Martín, a physicist at the Technical University of Madrid.
To enable the ability to capture traffic sent and received on other switch ports, Cisco Catalyst switches include a feature called the switch port analyzer feature (SPAN), as well as remote SPAN (RSPAN) and VLAN access control lists (VACLs).
SPAN is the traditional method of monitoring LAN traffic on Cisco switches. SPAN uses the concept of mirroring traffic from a set of source ports to a single destination port, which has a network capture tool connected to it.
Now, a new study of online video viewing (via GigaOm) provides more evidence of how advances in media and networking technology reduce the patience of human beings. The researchers, Shunmuga Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman, studied a huge database from Akamai Technologies that documented 23 million video views by nearly seven million people. They found that people start abandoning a video in droves after a two second delay and that the abandonment rate increases 5.8 percent for every second of further delay:
Reconnaissance, while commonly overlooked and discounted, is a key phase providing successful targeted attackers (and penetration testers) with information about the target, the target’s server and application technologies in use, employees, location, and much more. Often called OSINT, or open-source intelligence because it uses publicly available sources, the recon phase is anything that can help the attacker obtain his goal. Security pros can leverage the same tools and techniques as the attackers to identify unintentionally exposed devices on the Internet and users leaking sensitive information via social networking sites, and address those issues before they’re used during an actual attack.
via Tech Insight: Better Defense Through Open-Source Intelligence – Dark Reading.
There’s also the excellent Shodan computer search engine that contains service banners from Internet-accessible servers all over the world. Security pros can find all sorts of juicy information, like internal network and host names exposed through DNS, or unintentionally exposed services that Shodan has found without scanning or touching the target network.