thumpad » Software

Microsoft Apps for Symbian get announced, we rub our eyes

thumpad.com — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:05:44 +0000

When Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership a few months ago, most people back then all but left Symbian OS for dead. Since then, there have been a couple of major updates to the OS, and the news just keep pouring. Today, Nokia and Microsoft announced that the latest productivity apps from the software giant will gradually become available for Symbian Belle.

The apps will come to the OS in two stages. The first batch will become available in Q4 and will include Microsoft Lync 2010 Mobile, Micr……

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Google acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

thumpad.com — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:20:29 +0000

Google has announced it's going to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion ($40 per share). The Mountain View-based company plans to use Motorola's rich patent portfolio to help its Android platform in the numerous legal battles it's currently fighting, while Motorola itself should continue to function as before.

The first thing that should be noted is Motorola Mobility is not the entire Motorola. You might remember that the company split in two in January 2010 – Motorola Solution (be……

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Node.js? What is

thumpad.com — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:12:23 +0000

Learning Node might take a little effort, but it's going to pay off. Why? Because you're afforded solutions to your web application problems that require only JavaScript to solve. ……

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charging on the go Cellphone

thumpad.com — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:12:23 +0000

Getting an unlimited stream of power for smart pocket devices while on the go is on top of the wish-list of billions, regardless where one lives, in the urban jungle or in the forest jungle.
Wearable power, how to make good electrical use of all the kinetic energy people generate as by-product while going, running and jumping around all day is the focus point of research and experimentation.
Joining this growing line of people to crack the mobile power challenge is Argentine designer Soledad Martin who e……

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open source unlock genetic secrets – Big data

thumpad.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:21:35 +0000

Genomics scientist Charlie Quinn is combining experimental data with publicly available information to advance the life scien……

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From evaluation to your first production cluster: Get started with Hadoop

thumpad.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:21:35 +0000

Focusing on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and MapReduce, thi……

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Clojure: Lisp meets Java, with a side of Erlang

thumpad.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:21:35 +0000

OSCON speaker Stuart Sierra digs into Clojure: what it is, how it works, and why it's attracting Java developers. Read more.

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for the Samsung Galaxy S i9000, Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread leaks

thumpad.com — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:41:38 +0000

The Samsung Galaxy S I9000 may have gotten Android 2.3.3 Gingebread just a couple of weeks ago, but by the looks of it Samsung isn't going to stop there, as a the latest version of Android 2.3.4 becomes available for the company's former flagship phone.

The peeps over at Samfirmware have managed to dig out a build with the name “XXJVP” which makes your Galaxy S update to the latest Gingerbread version available at the moment. This makes the Samsung Galaxy S become even at software level to ……

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already jailbroken, iOS 5 beta is barely out the closet

thumpad.com — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:41:38 +0000

The jailbreak was done using the LimeRa1n exploit, which is used from iOS4 up until 4.3.3. Still it's only a tethered jailbreak, meaning that each time you reboot your iDevice you'll need it hooked up to a computer to work the jailbreaking magic anew.

Naturally, people are hoping that an untethered jailbreak will be available for iOS 5 even before it launches in the fall. But it seems that Apple has removed the possibility of jailbreaking iOS 5 (the untethered way) by patching the current n……

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JavaScript spread to the edges

thumpad.com — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:32:14 +0000

James Duncan, the chief architect at Joyent, is one of the people using JavaScript in s……

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HTC Sensation

thumpad.com — Sat, 28 May 2011 02:08:30 +0000

A hotly anticipated smartphone with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a “Super” 4.3-inch screen, and a manufacturer-skinned version of Android 2.3 — we must be talking about the Samsung Galaxy S II, right? Not on this occasion, squire. Today we're taking a gander at HTC's Sensation, a handset that's just begun shipping in Europe under a short-term Vodafone exclusive and which should be making its way to T-Mobile in the USA early next month. By beating its stablemate the EVO 3D and Mo……

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3 ways the Internet is shaping healthcare

thumpad.com — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:36:45 +0000

New research from the Pew Internet and Life Project sheds light on how online users are gathering and sharing health data. Here's a look at three important trends revealed in the survey. Read more.

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The secret is to bang the rocks together

thumpad.com — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:36:45 +0000

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those l……

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lets you buy apps in 99 new countries, Android Market gets a facelift

thumpad.com — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:39:57 +0000

The Android Market has gone through a major update after Google I/O conference. Google has done some refreshing design changes to the interface of the Market for both mobile and desktop and made discovering of new apps easier. On top of that paid apps are now available to 99 new countries, which is a win-win for everyone.

Let's start with the improvements made to the online version of the Android Market.

The Android Market is continuing to grow larger and larger and here are some statistics……

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Process kills developer passion

thumpad.com — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:32:54 +0000

The software industry is now full of “best practices,” and many of them make sense when considered in isolation. But when you lump them all on the backs o……

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to meet social and business needs Dashboards evolve

thumpad.com — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 08:08:20 +0000

A new class of dashboards is making data analysis more flexible. Some companies are even replacing stagnant cor……

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will focus on software instead, Microsoft reportedly kills off Zune hardware

thumpad.com — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:04:12 +0000

Details are still emerging on this one, but it looks like Microsoft has finally killed off the Zune — or the hardware side of things, anyway. According to Bloomberg, a “person familiar with the decision” has confirmed that Microsoft won't be producing any new Zune media players, and that the company will instead focus solely on the Zune software that already has a foothold on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone devices (it's not clear if the name will stick around). Microsoft will apparentl……

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Symbian’s new homescreen. a sneak peak

thumpad.com — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:54:48 +0000

During a recent Nokia event in China a sneak look at what appears to be a revamped Symbian was leaked. It looks like a Nokia N8 with a different homescreen layout.

You can see a dedicated status bar, which is different than the current one on Symbian^3. It looks stationary and will probably stay on the screen in most occasions. Also the bottom of the homescreen is changed.

The Nokia N8 with different homescreen

The widgets on the screen look similar to the current ones that the N8 uses. This m……

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“Copy, paste, map”

thumpad.com — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 07:12:48 +0000

IssueMap.org, a new project from the FCC and FortiusOne, aims to convert open data into knowledge and insight. Read more.

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Big data thwarts fraud

thumpad.com — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 07:12:48 +0000

Web-native payment platforms have a tremendous challenge combating fraud, but the solutions they have devised to deal with it have created enormous new opportunities. This is an excerpt from the “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity” report. Read more.

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unlock your N8 in a pop intelligently, Nokia Bubbles

thumpad.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:39:35 +0000

The humble unlock screen gets ever fancier, and Nokia Bubbles is one of the fanciest we've seen yet. Like a variety of aftermarket lock screens it enables you to control your media player or initiate calls before you even unlock your handset, but does so in an interesting way. You just grab the bubble for what you want and drop it on what you want to do. A simple unlock entails dragging the key onto the lock, and if you have a missed call you can grab that person's bubble and drag it to……

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Can HTML5 and Flash get along

thumpad.com — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:41:19 +0000

As HTML5 matures, the overlap between the new standard and Flash becomes a point of examination (or contention, depending on your perspective). In this i……

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Take a set-oriented approach if Need faster machine learning?

thumpad.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:39:38 +0000

We recently faced the type of big data challenge we expect to become increasingly common: scaling up the performance of a machine learning classifier for a large set of unstructured data. In this post, we explain how a set-oriented approach led to huge performance gains.

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survive the advent of big data. Will data warehousing?

thumpad.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:39:38 +0000

Data warehousing — and information management as a whole — must evolve in a radically new dir……

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Farmville likely to go down in history, Social gaming numbers on the rise

thumpad.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:32:40 +0000

We've seen console gaming numbers as a whole dip somewhat over the past few months, but gaming numbers on the social networking side have been anything but down. A new report on the matter from the NPD Group asserts that a full 20 percent (that's 1 in 5, if you're counting) of Americans ages 6 and older have played a social networking game of some sort, and we're guessing that number would be far higher if people weren't embarrassed to admit the truth. Unfortunately, the rep……

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MKV containers come along Another firmware update grants Roku owners USB channel,

thumpad.com — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:50:07 +0000

If you have a Roku player with a USB port, like the XDS above, you've been able to play media directly from USB storage for some time now using third-party channels. For whatever reason it's taken Roku this long to get an official USB playback channel on there, allowed in the latest firmware (2.9 build 1529) and finally available for download in the Channel Store. We're told that MKV playback has also been added, which might make watching those downloaded Top Gear episodes a little ……

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High Efficiency Video Coding / HEVC / H.265 : Beyond H.264

thumpad.com — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:31:32 +0000

JCT-VC develops next video compression standard

As of September 2010, work is continuing on the new video coding standard, currently known as “High Efficiency Video Coding” (HEVC). A Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) has been set up by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG. Following a Call for Proposals in January 2010, 27 proposals were submitted to the first meeting of the JCT-VC in April.

Elements of some of these proposals have been combined to develop an initial Test Model, a starting point for development of the new standard. The initial Test Model has similarities to earlier standards such as H.264/AVC, including block-based intra/inter prediction, block transform and entropy coding. New features include increased prediction flexibility, more sophisticated interpolation filters, a wider range of block sizes and new entropy coding schemes.

Coding performance varies across the different proposals. It looks like we might expect to see a 2x compression improvement compared with H.264/AVC (i.e. half the bitrate at the same visual quality), at the expense of a significant increase in computational complexity (perhaps 3x or more).

source (vcodex)

Hip hip hurray Cobol turns 50

thumpad.com — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:58:54 +0000

COBOL celebrated its 50th birthday on September 18, 2009. Many developers see COBOL as a relic, a dying dinosaur, or a stodgy language that has been superseded by more powerful systems. I believe that viewpoint as being uninformed. In honor of COBOL’s 50th birthday, here’s an overview of COBOL’s history and place in the current development landscape.
COBOL’s origins

COBOL was designed by the late, great Grace Hopper. Ms. Hopper had an extraordinary influence on the computing industry, including writing the first compiler, the “A compiler.” In addition, she served in the U.S. Navy, eventually attaining the impressive rank of rear admiral; there is even a U.S. Navy dest……

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