This summer, Microsoft is turning off the DRM servers for Microsoft Reader. This means that people who bought Microsoft Reader ebooks over the decade since 2002 now find that their ebooks are trapped inside a rapidly ageing, obsolescent slab of plastic and glass. In another 5-10 years, 95% of those books will be unreadable because the machines they're locked into were designed by a CE industry obsessed with the 2-3 year upgrade cycle — they're not durable

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which for all intents and purposes is the standards body of the Internet Protocol, has declared that “IPv6 is no longer considered optional.” In RFC 6540 officially published the other week as an Internet Best Current Practice, the IETF cites the impending depletion of IPv4 address space with the continued growth of the Internet as drivers for widespread IPv6 deployment. While the RFC defines requirements for all developers of IP nodes, the main target seems to be consumer device vendors, many of whom have delayed implementation of IPv6.

om Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

Learning VIM while playing a game

Jordan Mechner, creator of the classic bestselling video-game Prince of Persia recently discovered the floppies with the game's original sourcecode in a closet, where they'd sat for more than 20 years. He'd long believed the discs to be lost. Jubilant at their rediscovery, he's released the game as free/open code, with the source available on GitHub. The source awaits your download and remixing!

Selenium is a well-known web application testing framework used for functional testing. The new version, Selenium 2, merges the best features of Selenium 1 and WebDriver (a parallel project to Selenium). In this article, learn how to make the easy transition from Selenium 1 to Selenium 2. Examples show how to use Selenium 2, how to test remotely, and how to migrate your written tests from Selenium 1 to Selenium 2.

This article gives you insight into the memory usage of Java™ code, covering the memory overhead of putting an int value into an Integer object, the cost of object delegation, and the memory efficiency of the different collection types. You'll learn how to determine where inefficiencies occur in your application and how to choose the right collections to improve your code.

As the name suggests, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) can be used as a stylesheet. Like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XSLT helps to separate style from content. You can simplify and enrich your XHTML documents with XSLT, which relieves the XHTML document of navigation. In this article, learn how to use XSLT as stylesheets, which can be executed on the server or in every modern Internet browser. Several examples show how to start developing your own XSLT stylesheets.

This introduction to text manipulation on UNIX platforms provides an overview of some common commands widely available and installed standard on most UNIX-based releases. Many times these standard utilities are ignored in favor of more modern text-processors such as Perl, Python, or Ruby, which are not always installed on a system. An introductory review of these tools helps practitioners who are learning UNIX or Linux or those who may be looking to renew forgotten knowledge.

Unsere Studie „FOSS Management“ innerhalb der europäischen Automobilindustrie hat ergeben, dass die große Mehrheit der Unternehmen Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) einsetzt. Gleichzeitig zeigt die Studie Defizite im Bereich der FOSS Steuerungs- und Management-Prozesse entlang der Wertschöpfungskette.

PubSubHubbub is an open protocol of web hooks for notifications of updates to news feeds in a publish/subscribe framework. It is defined as a set of HTTP server-to-server interactions integrated into Atom and RSS extensions. Despite the odd name, PubSubHubbub is fairly straightforward to use for designing applications with a lot of information updates. Learn about the standard and open-source implementations and support software for PubSubHubbub.

Design patterns represent just one way to solve problems, but if you primarily use object-oriented languages, you may come to think in design patterns. In this installment of Functional thinking, Neal Ford illustrates solutions to a common problem — incompatible interfaces — using traditional design patterns, metaprogramming, and functional composition. Each approach has pros and cons, but thinking about the design of the solutions helps you see problems in new ways.

Meet the gKrypt engine, the world's first package to employ general purpose graphics units (GPGPUs) for data encryption, which is an important tool for information security. It uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) based 256-bit block cipher to provide robust security. In this Part 1 of a two-part series, explore the AES, the GPU port of the Rijndael algorithm for Linux®, the parallelizing of the AES algorithm, and the use of the gKrypt Engine supporting CUDA for NVIDIA-based GPUs.

Inspired on Escher's works. A free vision on how could be his workplace.

Throughout the course of this animation we see many objects. I imagined that these things could be his travel souvenirs, gifts from friends, sources of inspiration… Some are tridimensional representations of works by Escher and others might be just his tools as artist and engraver. Here you will find some brief explanatory notes about those elements which have a highly mathematical nature, including the works of that great Dutch artist that appears along the film.

It should be clear, particularly from the last rule outlined above, that we don’t need to be following a semicolon-free coding style to fall foul of JavaScript’s ASI feature. Perfectly innocent line breaking can lead to semicolons being inserted into our token stream without our permissions so it’s important to be aware of the kinds of situations where this can happen. Much of the recent debate about semicolons misses this point. Additionally, love or hate ASI, it’s with us and is not going away so perhaps it would be more productive to embrace it as a feature and use it where it suits us and work around it where it doesn’t.

Regardless of your preference, ASI and other obscure rules in non-trivial languages such as JavaScript mean that our build tools should involve some kind of syntax checking mechanism. Strongly-typed languages such as Java have sophisticated editors that can understand the intent of your code and provide real-time feedback as you type.

Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstags von Alan Turing werden heuer weltweit zahlreiche Ausstellungen, Kongresse und Symposien veranstaltet. Trotz der Arbeit vieler Biografen bleiben Leben und Werk des britischen Wissenschafters schwer fassbar.

The grid below illustrates the list of Twitter accounts (passwords intentionally removed - if we didn't, anyone viewing this page will be able to login into any of the accounts below!) that reusable.py was able to login to using email/password combinations from the leaks described in our disclosures. We have listed only those accounts that have at least 1000 followers to reduce the load time of this page. But this just shows how easy it is for anyone to pick a list of email/password combinations and programmatically attempt to use them to login into other popular sites and these may include your email accounts on Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.

The biggest news is that Cordova-JS is now on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry! Cordova-JS brings a unified Javascript layer to the PhoneGap project making it more consistent and streamlined. “The inclusions of Cordova-JS paves the path for public plugin API and associated tooling,” says Brian LeRoux, one of the key PhoneGap dev leads. You can read more about Cordova-JS here.

In yesterday’s blog post, Making the HTTP Archive faster, one of the biggest speedups came from not using a script loader. It turns out that script loader was using document.write to load scripts dynamically. I wrote about the document.write technique in Loading Script Without Blocking back in April 2009, as well as in Even Faster Web Sites (chapter 4). It looks something like this:

document.write('<script src="' + src + '" type="text/javascript"><\/script>'):

The problem with document.write for script loading is:

Every DOM element below the inserted script is blocked from rendering until the script is done downloading (example).
It blocks other dynamic scripts (example). One exception is if multiple scripts are inserted using document.write within the same SCRIPT block (example).