As a class, developers have had a fantastic year in 2010.
We’ve made headlines, grabbed the limelight, been vilified and glorified beyond all reason and gotten paid pretty nicely along the way. And the bubble of consumer web apps just continues to swell, so there are no signs (yet) that 2011 will bring anything short of grandeur for the web and mobile development communities.
While work continues on developing the fundamentals for super-fast quantum computers, a group of researchers has shown that, at least for some sorts of problems, classical computing could match the eventual speed of a working quantum computer -- with the correct software algorithms in place.
"We're putting lots of money into building quantum computers, but we shouldn't underestimate the power of algorithms," said John Watrous, who works at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo at Ontario, Canada.
In the world of Android, things can move pretty fast.
Case in point: Just weeks ago, Google took the wraps off of Android Gingerbread, the latest and greatest version of its mobile operating system. Aside from the newly launched Samsung Nexus S device, no phone even has the software yet -- heck, plenty of users are still waiting for the Android 2.2 upgrade -- but that's not stopping people from looking even further ahead.
Looking at the drama going on between MuscleNerd and P0sixNinja on Twitter, I feel like I am watching a full season of the Young and the Restless. Quick heads up for those of you who didn’t follow the whole conversation.
ProFTPD has updated its popular open source file transfer application to close a zero-day bug that hackers used to attack the developers' own website and plant a backdoored version of the software late last month.
Version 1.3.3d of ProFTPD plugs a critical flaw in the SQL module of the FTP software package. The buffer overflow-related bug was first reported in hacker magazine Phrack, but escaped the immediate attention of developers if not those of criminal hackers.
If you decided to update to iOS 4.2.1 and jailbreak using RedSn0w, you most likely have a tethered jailbreak, which requires you to plug your iPhone in and kickstart it with RedSn0w every time you reboot. Very inconvenient. We’ve had words for a while that the Dev Team was working on an untethered jailbreak, which MuscleNerd confirmed would be available before Christmas.
Two weeks after it debuted a sandbox to isolate Adobe's Flash Player plug-in, Google today pushed the security enhancement to the more reliable beta channel of its Chrome browser.
Chrome users already running the beta build will be automatically updated to the version that includes the sandboxed Flash. A "sandbox" isolates processes on the computer, preventing or at least hindering malware from escaping an application to wreak havoc on the machine.
THE CONFLICTED OWNER of major open source software projects, Oracle has updated MySQL and Open Office and launched its cloud-based productivity suite.
Since taking over Sun Microsystems, Oracle's posturing has led many to believe that the open source projects MySQL and Open Office are set for the closed source scrapheap. Both MySQL 5.5 and Open Office 3.3 are the first major releases since the takeover. Somewhat surprisingly, Oracle is stressing the continuing free software character and free availability of both of these important open source products.
In 2008, security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered and helped develop a patch for one of the most fundamental flaws ever found in the infrastructure of the Internet. Lately he’s been working on a fix for a very different infrastructure problem: the faulty photoreceptors in my eyes.
A safe and secure society is at the heart of the new PatriotApp for iPhones, and while it's quickly gaining popularity, it's also attracting scorn from people who disagree with the controversial law on which it is based.
