Hurd's Oracle gig: Is Ellison perk or problem?

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson, Ap Technology Writer – Thu Sep 9, 8:14 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – As co-president at Oracle Corp., ousted Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd will have to adapt to a new role playing second fiddle to one of Silicon Valley's most domineering bosses — Larry Ellison.
Although the two men have been pals for several years, working together may test their friendship given that they have both been accustomed to being the top dog. Ellison, in particular, has never left any doubt who's calling the shots at the business software juggernaut that he co-founded 33 years ago.
"Larry is well-known for his strong personality, and there is always a possibility of a personality clash with Hurd," said Kaushik Roy, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "Friendships are not permanent — especially not in business."

read more : http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100910/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_oracle_hurd_who_s_the_boss;_ylt=Aoe741A4U2zkwIfNhfOtzTEjtBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTMyNXZubWgyBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwOTEwL3VzX3RlY19vcmFjbGVfaHVyZF93aG9fc190aGVfYm9zcwRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDaHVyZHNvcmFjbGVn

Cheerleaders Gone Wild clickjacking tempts Facebook users

This Cheerleaders Gone Wild clickjacking attack hid behind a fake content warning.

(Credit: Sophos)

A new clickjacking scam was spreading on Facebook luring victims with a purported video of "cheerleaders gone wild," a security expert warned on Thursday before Facebook shut the attack down. Victims' accounts were posting messages that said "cheerleaders gone wild - have to see this" with a photo of, you guessed it, a cheerleader carrying pom poms. Clicking the link led to a warning that the content may be inappropriate for some users and prompted users to confirm that they are 18 or older, said Graham Cluley of Sophos, who bravely clicked the link for research purposes only, of course.
Another warning then popped up pretending to be an antispam mechanism that asked the user to click three buttons numbered 1, 2, and 3 in a specific order. Once that was done and the "submit" button was clicked, the user's account then submitted that it "likes" the Cheerleaders Gone Wild page and that message was broadcast from the victim's account to his or her newsfeed for all friends to see, Cluley said.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/security/?tag=hdr;snav#ixzz0z89WUNUS

Microsoft to fix 13 holes in Windows, IIS, and Office

Microsoft will issue nine bulletins fixing 13 vulnerabilities on Tuesday that affect Windows, Internet Information Services, and Microsoft Office, the company said on Thursday.
Four of the bulletins are rated "critical" and the rest are rated "important," according to the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.
Affected software includes Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7; Windows Server 2003 and 2008; and Office XP, 2003, and 2007, with the older versions affected by the critical bulletins, according to the security advisory announcing the plans for September's Patch Tuesday.
"Organizations running Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are running much more secure environments and, as an added benefit, this Patch Tuesday will practically be a non-event for them," said Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at Lumension. "Organizations stuck on Windows XP and Server 2003 need to take a hard look at the cost and risk factors associated with staying on these dated platforms."


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/security/?tag=hdr;snav#ixzz0z89DkHph

A flood of phishing sites and how to avoid them

This pie chart shows the business categories targeted by phishers and their respective proportion of fake sites, according to PandaLab's latest report.

(Credit: PandaLabs)

You could call it the Web site phishing deluge. Cybercriminals are cranking out fake Web sites branded as eBay, banks, and other financial companies to the tune of tens of thousands every week, according to new research.
During a three-month study of its global malware database, Panda Security found on average 57,000 new Web sites created each week with the aim of exploiting a brand name in order to steal information that can be used to drain peoples' bank accounts.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20016026-245.html?tag=topStories2#ixzz0z88YINKy

Apple's new App Store rulebook (FAQ)

(Credit: Apple)

There are just Ten Commandments, but making an iPhone app means complying with the 113 rules Apple handed down Thursday.
Two years after the launch of the App Store, Apple suddenly unveiled a set of policy changes to its iOS developer community that more clearly spells out what the company is looking for in third-party apps but mostly what it is not looking for. Up until now, Apple has largely had developers guessing at what they could and could not implement within their applications.
As part of the change, Apple introduced a new "living document" called the App Store Review Guidelines that details everything developers are unable to do within applications. To go along with that, the company made tweaks to several sections of its developer license agreement to ease up on the use of third-party development tools allowed in the creation of apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20016014-37.html?tag=topStories1#ixzz0z887TNtS

Google Instant: Search for the now generation

Google Instant, which the company unveiled Wednesday, is a fundamental shift: instead of search as an outcome, Google is trying to get people to think of search as a process in which you constantly refine your query without actually "searching," or hitting the button to produce a concrete result.
Google is betting that in a world of nearly instant communication that search is going to have produce an answer just as fast as updates are spat out from Twitter or other real-time Web services. It's a bit chaotic at first and will certainly throw a few searchers off their game as well as make those in the search-engine optimization game a little anxious.
Should it prove popular with users, however, Google Instant is also the type of search innovation that might be difficult for competitors to duplicate in a matter of weeks or even months, giving Google a distinct advantage heading into a new era of Internet search.




For more details, visit http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20015902-265.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks

Microsoft to deliver public betas of CRM 2011 and app store in mid-September

The betas won't be available until later this month — next week some time in the case of Dynamics CRM 2011, and before the end of the month, in the case of the Dynamics Marketplace, Microsoft officials said. The sign-up site for the CRM 2011 beta is http:///www.crm2011beta.com. The final version of the 2011 release of the CRM Online service — which users can opt to have hosted by Microsoft or Microsoft's partners — is slated for before the end of 2010. The final version of the Dynamics CRM 2011 software is due in early 2011.

Microsoft has been testing privately its next CRM release, codenamed "CRM 5," since earlier this year. The coming beta is the first public test build. The beta of the service will be available in eight languages and 36 markets when they launch next week.

The Dynamics Marketplace, which is Microsoft's answer to Salesforce's AppExchange store, will be a free way for customers to find hundreds of applications and services that build on top of Microsoft's CRM/xRM platforms. Earlier this summer, Microsoft officials said the Marketplace would launch in September, but didn't mention it would be a beta that would be available.

CRM 2011 will add a native Microsoft Outlook Client, an Office-like Ribbon and more user personalization options. It also will provide guided process dialogs, inline data visualizations, performance and goal management capabilities and real-time dashboards, company officials said.

For more details, visit http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-deliver-public-betas-of-crm-2011-and-app-store-in-mid-september/7327

Complete IDE for Web Application Development

Summer's almost over but there's a new tool to try! Develop & deploy your web apps with the Agile Platform. Try it and see why thousands of developers enjoyed a cooler summer with it.

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The Agile Platform Community Edition can be used freely to build web apps with around 400 daily visitors. We give it away for free because we expect you to like it and upgrade to a higher edition or recommend it to your friends, peers and managers.

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Windows XP Professional, Server 2003 or 2008, Vista or 7 (Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or Ultimate). Pentium IV-compatible 2GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, 200 MB of disk space.

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7 Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-clutter Your Interfaces

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being natural, plain and easy to understand. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in devices and software. Yes, some people find joy in figuring out how something works, but for most of us, being unable to operate a device leads to wasted time and frustration, and that’s not a good thing.

1. Modal windows.

2. Hover controls.

3. Controls on demand.

4. Expanding forms.

5. Labels inside input forms.

6. Icons instead of text.

7. Context based controls.

 Visit here to more detail : http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/02/7-interface-design-techniques-to-simplify-and-de-clutter-your-interfaces/

 

Windows Phone 7 Jumpstart Training On-Demand

 Microsoft will spend about $400 million to promote the launch of its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 operating according to Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg, adding his forecast doesn't include the millions the software giant has already committed to pay its handset manufacturer partners to offset non-recurring engineering costs. Goldberg derives his estimate based on conversations with Microsoft brass during a recent visit to the company's Redmond, Wash. headquarters, with execs anticipating that overall spending will reach billions of dollars once its operator and manufacturer partners' marketing spending is factored into the equation. TechCrunch adds that according to another source, Microsoft will invest more than a billion on WP7's launch, half of promotion and half on other development costs.

Visit here To more detail : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikeormond/archive/2010/08/19/windows-phone-7-jumpstart-training-on-demand.aspx

or

http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/analyst-microsoft-will-spend-400m-market-windows-phone-7/2010-08-30

Five Text Processing Tools You Should Know

In the world of UNIX text is king. Almost anything one wants to know about a system can be gathered from reading a file. Often times that file can be a few thousand lines long. Sometimes it can be twelve million lines long.

This is where text processing comes in. Text processing aims to do one thing: given a source of information answer a question. Everybody has questions for their systems. “How many 404 errors has my website gotten?” “Has anyone tried to access my server without me knowing?” “What program is using the most CPU right now?”

This article will explore the most common ways to answer these questions with a set of tools that will by extension provide a method to answer hundreds of other questions. Questions will be answered with one-liners, or the stringing together of these tools to provide answers without writing a script itself.

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Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.

And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000?  Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”.  As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

More Detail Visit Here : http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/

China's wired youth forget how to write

HONG KONG — Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising tens of thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as "embarrassed" have slipped from her mind.

"I can remember the shape, but I can?t remember the strokes that you need to write it," she says. "It?s a bit of a problem."

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed "character amnesia", is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

More detail Visit Here : http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i7H6m6WDrtjv4FmGnUv1mvr6KTnw

Click Here “Do you have an application created on Windows Azure? Send it to us for a chance to win a laptop”

Submit a screenshot of your Azure app and you could win one of FIVE Intel® i7 laptops. Plus, the winning entry can get great exposure through The Code Project and partners.

Here are some examples:

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Here's How
Build your app and take a screen shot and send to contest@codeproject.com

At the end of the contest we will choose from best apps and the winner will receive an Intel® i7 laptop!
Windows Azure One Month Pass USA

    * Learn the Windows Azure platform. No steep learning curve.
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Windows Azure one MONTH pass is provided so you can put Windows Azure and SQL Azure through their paces. NO credit card required.
What You Could Win

Intel i7 laptop

    * Intel® Core™ i7-720QM processor with 1.60GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.80GHz
    * 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 DIMM)
    * 500GB (7200RPM) Hard Drive (SATA)
    * Nvidia GeForce GT 230M with up to 2815MB

    * Additionally, winners could possibly gain exposure with MTBC and other Code Project partners that could result in: Application marketing and exposure, Technology licensing, Customer/supplier relationships, and additional exposure in the marketplace.

ViSit Codeproject.com To more detail : Visit Here

HttpWatch 7.0: Change the way you develop, debug and tune websites today!

• Seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without changing network settings or adding proxies
• See low-level HTTP information such as headers, cookies, etc and millisecond accurate timings.
• Real-time page and request level time charts show performance bottlenecks
• Your users and customers can send you log files for free
• Automatically detects and highlights potential configuration, performance and security problems
• Use it in automated tests written in C#, Ruby, Javascript, ..

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Write SQL amazingly fast with SQL Prompt

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How Microsoft Is Using SharePoint & Colligo for ECM & Records Management

SHAREPOINT 2010 WEBINAR

How Microsoft Is Using SharePoint & Colligo for ECM & Records Management

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern

4:00 PM London / 5:00 PM Paris

Join Microsoft guest speaker Nishan DeSilva on September 21st for the webinar: “How Microsoft Is Using SharePoint 2010 & Colligo for ECM & Records Management.” Nishan DeSilva is the Director of Information Management & Corporate Records Compliance at Microsoft. He will provide an inside look at how Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs Department (LCA) is leveraging SharePoint 2010 and Colligo Contributor to address compliance while empowering users to get their work done.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Microsoft’s strategy in LCA for information & records management
• How to effectively move unstructured content & email into SharePoint
• How to apply consistent classification & compliant retention policies
• How Colligo Contributor facilitates email management in SharePoint
• How to improve the user experience to drive adoption & compliance

More Detail Visit : https://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/regeventweb.aspx?id=79&cid=PrgmM1East

Dropdown Problem with Firefox

Basically, what Firefox did was keep the right div floating to the right, but underneath the middle div. This wasn’t what I wanted at all, and after about half an hour of fiddling with the code I managed to fix it.

The Solution

All I did was cut the right div out of the code and placed it before the middle div. It still had the same style attributes, all that was needed was a quick swap. And hey presto! It worked!

The CSS

#left {float: left;}
#middle {float: left;}
#right {float: right;}

Enterprise Library 4.1

Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 4.1 consists of a library of Application Blocks.

Apllication blocks can be added as a different layer in .Net framework. Application blocks can be used in any application or can be modified and extended according to requirement.

Application blocks are helpful due to the following reasons:
- Avoid redundant code.
- For example, in an application that require data to be accessed, we have to write the same data access code for establishing connection, retrieving data in a data set, executing a command and many other such operations several times. The data access application block takes care of all these operations of data access and provides a simple way to use them in an optimized way.
- Provide maintainability.
- For example, sometimes any application require changes, then that changes can be done in to the class.

Enterprise Library is not

- A part of .Net Framework
- A microsoft product
- An application framework that imposes an architectural style.

But, it is

- A set classes which work in any architectural style.
- A collection blocks which can be used "as is" or extended and modified.
- Which solve common challenges.

There are seven application blocks that comprise the Enterprise Library. They are as follows:

1) Caching Application Block
2) Configuration Application Block
3) Data Access Application Block
4) Cryptography Application Block
5) Exception Handling Application Block
6) Logging and Instrumentation Application Block
7) Security Application Block

How robots think

A future full of helpful robots, quietly going about their business and assisting humans in thousands of small ways, is one of technology's most long-deferred promises. Only recently have robots started to achieve the kind of sophistication and ubiquity that computing's pioneers originally envisioned. The military has hundreds of UAVs blanketing the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan, and Roombas are vacuuming living rooms across the country. At the bleeding edge, there's the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This grueling, 140-mile, no-humans-allowed race through the desert showcased full-sized, completely autonomous robot cars that could navigate across rugged desert terrain, avoiding rocks and cliffs and cacti in a race for a $2 million cash prize. The follow-on 2007 Urban Challenge went even further, with the robotic competitors required to drive alongside humans on crowded roads, recognizing and avoiding other cars and following the rules of the road. Suddenly, the robotic future doesn't look so far off.

In some ways, the remarkable thing is that it took so long to get here. In the 1960's, researchers in artificial intelligence were boldly declaring that we'd have thinking machines fully equivalent to humans in 10 years. Instead, for most of the past half-century, the only robots we saw outside of movies and labs were arms confined to factory floors and were remotely operated by humans. Building machines that behaved intelligently in the real world was harder than anyone imagined.

The biggest challenge for robots then and now lies in making sense of the world. With perfect information, many of the hardest problems in robotics would be nearly trivial. We've gotten very good at building and actuating robots, but in order for them to use their abilities to the fullest they need to make sense of their surroundings. A robot car has to know where the road is and where other cars and people are. A robot servant needs to be able to recognize household items.

Today's robots are starting to be able to make these difficult determinations. The question we're here to answer is: how? What allowed robots to go from blind, dumb, immobile automatons to fully autonomous entities able to operate in unstructured environments like the streets of a city? The most obvious answer is Moore's Law, and it has certainly been a huge factor. But raw processing power is useless without the right algorithms. A revolution has taken place in the robotics world. By embracing uncertainty and using the tools of probability, robots are able to make sense of their surroundings like never before.

In this article, we'll explore how robots use their sensors to make sense of the world. This discussion applies mostly to robots that carry an internal representation of the world and act according to that representation. There are lots of successful robots that don't do such "thinking": the military's UAVs are mostly remotely piloted, linked by an electronic tether to human eyes and brains on the ground. The Roomba does its job without building a map of your house; it just has a series of simple behaviors that are triggered by timing or bumping into things. These robots are very good at what they do, but to autonomously carry out more complicated tasks like driving, a robot needs to have some understanding of the world around it. The robot needs to know where it is, where it can and can't go, and decide what to do and where to go. We'll be discussing how modern robots answer these questions.

Sensing and Probability

As it turns out, the big challenge in many robotics applications is the same: it's easy to do the right thing, but only if you know what the right thing is. We've known how to steer a car automatically for a long time. What's hard is knowing where the road is and whether that shape by the road is a fire hydrant you can ignore or a child about to run across the street. To operate in an unstructured environment, a robot needs to use sensing to understand the state of the world relative to itself. Sensing is the key to successful robots, and probability is the key to successful sensing.

Sensing is difficult because the world is a complicated, unpredictable place. Remember that the robot doesn't get to "see" reality directly. It can only take measurements through its sensors, which don't perfectly reflect the true state of the world. Just because your sensor tells you something doesn't mean it's true. For example, GPS position measurements can jump by several meters, even when the receiver is stationary. Some things aren't even possible to measure directly; if you're trying to distinguish between a person and a cactus, there's no sensor that directly measures "humanness." You have to look at different measurable properties like shape and size and so on to infer if you're seeing a person.