Computer Scientist Gary Kildall created just such an operating system in 1974 for a small computer called the ”Intellec-8ó that Intel had designed to showcase their new microprocessors. Called ”CP/M”, it was unlike most other operating systems for small computers because it was written in PL/M, a portable higher-level language that he had designed earlier, rather than in the assembly-language of a particular computer. That meant that CP/M could be ported to run on many different personal computers. And if the applications were written in PL/M, they could be ported as well. ...

The goal for this research was to identify the most common problems and challenges that Android developers face with the devices they build for. The 288 unique Android device models represent a significant volume of Android use: approximately 92 to 97% of global Android volumes, depending on how it gets measured and what regions and markets are included. This research represents remarkable coverage of Android usage globally, and it shows the most obvious problems as well as the status of Android hardware and software from a developer’s point of view. ...

Researchers at the security startup Shape Security say they’ve found a strain of malware on a client’s network that uses that new, furtive form of ”command and control””the communications channel that connects hackers to their malicious software”allowing them to send the programs updates and instructions and retrieve stolen data. Because the commands are hidden in unassuming Gmail drafts that are never even sent, the hidden communications channel is particularly difficult to detect. ...

Pues bien, se trata más bien de un ’side project’, es decir, el típico proyecto en el que te embarcas fuera de tu actividad principal, dedicándole o bien pasta o bien algo de tiempo. En mi caso han sido ambas cosas, pero es totalmente compatible con mis otros menesteres, como pegar los carteles de nvivo.es. » txantxez | txarly.com

In case anyone’s wondering how I approached this as a programming problem, a quick trick is to not get drawn into writing a whole chessboard representation. Use a tool like pgn-extract to convert SAN moves (e.g. ”Nc3”) to long algebraic moves (e.g. ”Nb1c3”) - since we can safely assume all moves in the PGN are legal, this saves a lot of effort implementing the rules of chess (although you still have to handle castling and en passant carefully). » png-extract » SurvivingPieces ...

I’m putting a team of Debian developers together to work full time on a derivative distribution of Debian. The idea is to provide a high-quality regular release based on Debian unstable, ensuring that all patches are given back to Debian, and ensuring that the install disk of our distribution consists entirely of Free software. Martin and I spoke at length about the project and he seemed to like the idea very much. I’m sure he’d be happy to let you know his thoughts directly. If you’re interested I’d like to give you a call to discuss it further with you. I’m based in the UK so we’re roughly in the same timezone, just let me know when and what number to reach you on. ...

Las máquinas de vídeopóquer Game King llegaron a los casinos en 1970 y fueron un éxito inmediato. Con los años, su software se fue actualizando, incluyendo nuevos juegos y opciones. En 2002 lanzó su quinta gran actualización, que presumía de unos gráficos de calidad nunca vista antes en uno de estos aparatos, así como sonido en estéreo mejorado respecto a versiones anteriores. Lo que este programa incluía también, y nadie se dio cuenta, fueron una serie de sutiles errores de código que tardaron siete años en ser descubiertos. ...

Nick Holonyak Jr., the person widely credited with the development of the first visible-light LED, the device that now lights up countless clocks, traffic signals, and other electronic displays, might be one of them. On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to three inventors of the blue light-emitting diode. Holonyak isn’t exactly complaining that he isn’t among them; his objection is that his 1962 invention has never been singled out for recognition by the academy. ...

DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, ”MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.” ...

The problem we discussed is laid out in some detail in my Brain Drain post, but a quick summary is this: scientific research in many disciplines is becoming more and more dependent on the careful analysis of large datasets. This analysis requires a skill-set as broad as it is deep: scientists must be experts not only in their own domain, but in statistics, computing, algorithm building, and software design as well. Many researchers are working hard to attain these skills; the problem is that academia’s reward structure is not well-poised to reward the value of this type of work. In short, time spent developing high-quality reusable software tools translates to less time writing and publishing, which under the current system translates to little hope for academic career advancement. » Jake Vanderplas | The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble ...