Burque Design Group: Your Daily digest for Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

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Astronomers Probe Mysterious Gas In Titan's Atmosphere

Mar 13th 2013, 23:36

sciencehabit writes "A fluorescent glow high in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, signifies the presence of a gas that astronomers have yet to identify. The glow appears only on the daytime side of the moon at altitudes between 600 and 1250 kilometers, with the largest intensity occurring at an altitude of about 950 km. Detailed analyses reveal that the glow doesn't stem from a problem with the Saturn-orbiting Cassini craft, and it isn't associated with methane or any of the other hydrocarbons already identified as constituents of Titan's atmosphere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask Slashdot: Mac To Linux Return Flow?

Mar 13th 2013, 22:47

jasnw writes "I'm one of apparently many people who moved to OS X from Linux in the early/mid 2000s for their desktop system, keeping Linux boxes around for the heavy lifting and server work. I may also be part of a large segment of that group now considering a return because of all the iOS-ification of OS X, despite the fact that the Linux desktop still falls short in the 'it just works' area. I'm angry enough at Apple, and wary enough of Linux, that I might just go to using Windows 7 for the desktop (not Win8, however). What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

H&R Block Software Glitch To Delay 600,000 U.S. Tax Refunds

Mar 13th 2013, 22:06

mrquagmire sends this quote from a Reuters report: "Tax refunds for about 600,000 taxpayers claiming an education credit will be delayed, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday, citing a software glitch at some tax-preparation companies, including industry leader H&R Block Inc. Refunds may be delayed four to six weeks from mid-February, likely not showing up until late March, the IRS said. ... On Tuesday, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc executive said shoppers had cashed about $2.7 billion in tax refund checks at its U.S. stores so far this year. At this point last year, that amount was about $4 billion. The IRS delayed the start of the tax filing season by eight days, to January 30, due to the enactment of tax law changes made to resolve the "fiscal cliff."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT Crypto Experts Win 2012 Turing Award

Mar 13th 2013, 21:45

alphadogg writes "A pair of MIT professors and security researchers whose work paved the way for modern cryptography have been named winners of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, also known as the 'Nobel Prize in Computing.' Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Silvio Micali, the MIT Ford Professor of Engineering, are recipients of the award, which will be formally presented by the Association for Computing Machinery on June 15 in San Francisco. According to the ACM: 'By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science.' Goldwasser and Micali will split a $250K prize."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success

Mar 13th 2013, 21:25

dp619 writes "Outercurve Foundation technical director Stephen Walli has written a blog post arguing that attracting users is fundamental to the ability of open source projects to recruit 'new blood' and contributors who are willing to code. 'So in the end, it's all about freeloaders, but from the perspective that you want as many as possible. That means you're "doing it right" in developing a broad base of users by making their experience easy, making it easy for them to contribute, and ultimately to create an ecosystem that continues to sustain itself,' he wrote."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Obama Administration To Allow All Spy Agencies To Scour Americans' Finances

Mar 13th 2013, 20:42

New submitter KrisJon writes "The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters. Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of 'suspicious customer activity.' A move like the FinCEN proposal 'raises concerns as to whether people could find their information in a file as a potential terrorist suspect without having the appropriate predicate for that and find themselves potentially falsely accused,' said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel for the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a non-profit watchdog group."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenSUSE 12.3 Is Out

Mar 13th 2013, 20:20

houghi writes "OpenSUSE 12.3 is out. There are several methods of downloading, as well as different media. It is also possible to boot the live CD from a USB stick. When using the DVD or Net install ISO, the standard is to select between KDE or GNOME, but XFCE and LXDE are also options. ARM images are available as well. More information about the release can be found in this feature guide"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Rubin Steps Down As Chief of Google Android

Mar 13th 2013, 19:58

Nerval's Lobster writes "Andy Rubin is stepping down as head of Google's Android division, according to the company. 'Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android — and with a really strong leadership team in place — Andy's decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google,' Google CEO Larry Page wrote in a March 13 note on Google's official blog. 'Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps.' If Rubin had any other reasons for departing, the blog posting left them unexplained. Android has been activated on 750 million devices around the world, according to Google, on top of some 25 billion apps downloaded from the Google Play storefront. It remains to be seen whether 'start a new chapter at Google' is some sort of polite corporate euphemism for Rubin's eventual departure from the company, or if he really is taking over another project or division. Page suggested in his blog posting that Pichai 'will do a tremendous job doubling down on Android as we work to push the ecosystem forward,' which doesn't offer a lot about the operating system's future direction: Pichai does have direct control over three core platforms, raising the possibility that Google could try and exploit further crossovers between the three. But what form that will take is anyone's guess."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Pope Selected

Mar 13th 2013, 19:40

Freshly Exhumed sends this quote from CBC: "Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina has been selected as Pope of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. He will be known as Pope Francis. He is the first Pope from the Americas. The 76-year-old was the runner-up to Benedict XVI during the last conclave. He is well-known for his humility and espouses church teachings on homosexuality, abortion and contraception. He has no Vatican experience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Point and Shoot 3D Modeling (Video)

Mar 13th 2013, 19:16

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Book Review: Hadoop Beginner's Guide

Mar 13th 2013, 18:35

First time accepted submitter sagecreek writes "Hadoop is an open-source, Java-based framework for large-scale data processing. Typically, it runs on big clusters of computers working together to crunch large chunks of data. You also can run Hadoop in "single-cluster mode" on a Linux machine, Windows PC or Mac, to learn the technology or do testing and debugging. The Hadoop framework, however, is not quickly mastered. Apache's Hadoop wiki cautions: "If you do not know about classpaths, how to compile and debug Java code, step back from Hadoop and learn a bit more about Java before proceeding." But if you are reasonably comfortable with Java, the well-written Hadoop Beginner's Guide by Garry Turkington can help you start mastering this rising star in the Big Data constellation." Read below for the rest of Si's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users Flock To Firewall-Busting Thesis Project

Mar 13th 2013, 17:53

itwbennett writes "Daiyuu Nobori, a Ph.D. student at Japan's Tsukuba University designed 'VPN Gate' to help individuals in countries that restrict Internet use circumvent government firewalls. The service, which has drawn 77,000 users since its launch last Friday, encourages members of the public to set up VPN servers and offer free connections to individual users, aiming to make the technology more accessible. Nobori had originally planned to host the service on his university's servers, but they have been down recently so he switched it to the Windows Azure cloud platform. He has spent about US$9,000 keeping it up so far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce Schneier: A Cyber Cold War Could Destabilize the Internet

Mar 13th 2013, 17:13

moon_unit2 writes "In an op-ed piece over at Technology Review, Bruce Schneier says that the cyber espionage between the U.S., China, and other nations, has been rampant for the past decade. But he also worries that the media frenzy over recent attacks is fostering a new kind of Internet-nationalism and spurring a cyber arms race that has plenty of negative side-effects for the Internet and its users. From the piece: 'We don't know the capabilities of the other side, and we fear that they are more capable than we are. So we spend more, just in case. The other side, of course, does the same. That spending will result in more cyber weapons for attack and more cyber-surveillance for defense. It will result in move government control over the protocols of the Internet, and less free-market innovation over the same. At its worst, we might be about to enter an information-age Cold War: one with more than two "superpowers." Aside from this being a bad future for the Internet, this is inherently destabilizing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Punishment? Lecture Those They Snooped On

Mar 13th 2013, 16:32

theodp writes "When Aaron Swartz tapped into MIT's network and scooped up data from one non-profit company, the U.S. Attorney threatened him with 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. So what kind of jail time did 38 Attorneys General threaten Google with for using its Street View cars to scoop up passwords, e-mail and other personal information by tapping into the networks of their states' unsuspecting citizens? None. In agreeing to settle the case, the NY Times reports, Google is required to police its own employees on privacy issues, lecture the public on how to fend off privacy violations like the one Google perpetrated, and forfeit about 20% of one day's net income. Given the chance, one imagines that Aaron Swartz would have happily jumped at a comparable deal." The fine being $7 million. At least EPIC isn't as cynical and thinks the outcome was positive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal

Mar 13th 2013, 16:03

A bit over a year since having their case rejected by the Swedish Supreme Court and appealing to the European Human Rights Court, it looks like basically all legal options have been exhausted for the Pirate Bay Founders: their case has been rejected. From the article: "The EHCR recognizes that the Swedish verdict interferes with the right to freedom of expression, but ruled that this was necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders. In its decision the Court also considered the fact that The Pirate Bay did not remove torrents linking to copyrighted material when they were asked to. 'The Court held that sharing, or allowing others to share files of this kind on the Internet, even copyright-protected material and for profit-making purposes, was covered by the right to "receive and impart information" under Article 10 ... However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake – i.e. the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright – when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian Attack Dolphins Are On the Loose

Mar 13th 2013, 15:34

Hugh Pickens writes "The Ukrainian Navy has a small problem on their hands. The Atlantic reports that, after rebooting the Soviet Union's marine mammal program last year with the goal of teaching dolphins to find underwater mines and kill enemy divers, three of the Ukrainian military's new recruits have gone AWOL. Apparently they swam away from their trainers ostensibly in search of a 'mate' out in open waters. It might not be such a big deal except that these dolphins have been trained to 'attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.' Dolphins were trained at Sevastopol for the Soviet Navy as far back as 1973 to find military equipment such as sea mines on the seabed as well as attacking divers and even carrying explosives on their heads to plant on enemy ships. The U.S. has its own dolphin program in San Diego with 40 trained dolphins and sea lions and another 50 in training. U.S. Navy dolphins were deployed in Bahrain in 1987 during a period when Iran was laying down mines in the Persian Gulf to disrupt oil shipments. No word yet on whether 'sharks with frickin' laser beams attached' have been added to the U.S. arsenal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deal of the Week: Ultimate WordPress Theme Builder

Mar 13th 2013, 14:58

Advertise here via BSA

Sure you’ve got the ideas, but you don’t have any programming experience, and you do not know how to setup a basic blog on WordPress. Now you can now get yourself up and running quickly thanks to Ultimatum. This robust drag-and-drop template builder works with WordPress to create limitless layouts for your site. No need to ever hunt down another template again. With Ultimatum you can easily just create a new one.

The Ultimatum Developer’s Edition gives you everything you need to make your mark on the Internet. Besides a true drag-and-drop layout builder, you’ll be able to use unlimited templates on your sites, access a powerful Style Editor for countless CSS options, as well as integrate unlimited fonts, forms, slideshows and SEO throughout all of your sites.

Best of all? You can grab the full featured Ultimatum Developer’s Edition for just $57 right now! That’s more than 50% off the standard price of $125, or if you’re just looking for a more basic Starter License for a single site, it’ll run you just $35, instead of the normal $65.

How Does A WordPress Theme Work?

In WordPress, themes drive a website and determine what it contains, how it behaves and what it looks like. The theme is separate from the content, which is held in the database. This means you can use the same theme on more than one website, regardless of the content of the websites — which you might already be doing if you've downloaded themes from WordPress' theme repository.

A theme consists of a number of template files, all stored in the theme folder, which you'll find in wp-content/themes in your WordPress installation. Every WordPress theme has to include at least two files: index.php and style.css. The index file defines what content is displayed by the theme, and the style sheet (you guessed it) styles it, as well as contains meta information about the theme that WordPress uses to make the theme work correctly.

Actually, most themes have a few additional files:

header.php
Contains the <head> section of each page, plus the header of the website's design.
sidebar.php
Contains the sidebar, including any widget areas.
footer.php
Contains the footer, which may or may not have widget areas.
functions.php
Contains any functions that are specific to your theme. You can find out about the functions file in the WordPress Codex.
Files that contain the loop, which call the content from the database. Depending on which part of the website you're working in, this could be one of a number of files:
- page.php
  For static pages
- single.php
  For individual posts (blog posts, for example)
- index.php, archive.php, category.php, etc.
  For pages that list a number of posts

Yoast has written a great visual representation of how theme files work, and the WordPress Codex includes a detailed description of themes, including details on the various files and when they are called.

I would argue that the style sheet, however, is the most important file and the one you are likely to begin with, because a "child theme" (more of that shortly) needs a style sheet even if it contains nothing else. The style sheet contains important meta information about the theme itself, which is commented out before all of the styles. Below are the opening comments for WordPress' current default theme, Twenty Eleven:

/*     Theme Name: Twenty Eleven     Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentyeleven     Author: the WordPress team     Author URI: http://wordpress.org/     Description: The 2011 theme for WordPress is sophisticated, lightweight, and adaptable. …     Version: 1.3     License: GNU General Public License     License URI: license.txt     Tags: dark, light, white, black, …  */

This information is commented out so that it isn't read by browsers, but it is read by WordPress, and it provides information to anyone using your theme. We'll come back to this shortly when we look at how to create a child theme.

Now that you know how themes work, the next step is to figure out how to go about building your own. Before starting, it would be worth considering some points that will help you make that decision.

What To Consider When Developing A WordPress Theme?

Before deciding which approach to take to develop your theme, identify your constraints. These likely include the following:

Time
How much time do you have to develop your theme, or to learn how to do it?
Budget
This is related to time but also has to do with whether you can afford to pay for a premium theme or a theme framework.
Capability
How familiar are you with theme development, with CSS and PHP and with how themes work? If you're not familiar, how much do you want to learn?
Future-proofing
Will your theme need to be updated in future? Will other developers be working on it in addition to you? If so, then your approach will need to be as robust as possible.
Repetition
Do you see yourself developing a number of similar themes in future? If so, your approach will have to allow for code to be reused.

We'll revisit these considerations at the end of the article and identify which development options are most suitable for various situations.

Theme Development: Your Options

A few options are available for developing your theme or themes, and investigating them before you roll your sleeves up and start coding would be worthwhile. Picking the right approach will result in a better theme, with more robust code, and it will minimize the amount of revisions you'll have to do later. It will also help you to build the theme more efficiently.

The options we'll look at here are:

Build a theme from scratch,
Edit (or "hack," some might say) an existing theme,
Use the theme customizer to tweak an existing theme,
Create a child theme to make changes to an existing theme,
Create your own parent theme (using one of the approaches above) and child themes,
Use a theme framework.

1. Build A Theme From Scratch

This approach is the most difficult if you're inexperienced. But if you're a seasoned WordPress developer, it will give you the most control. It might be the most appropriate method if you're importing HTML from an existing static website that is being upgraded to WordPress with no other changes.

However, when transferring a website to WordPress, conducting a review of it as part of the process, rather than simply copying the code across, is a good idea. If you are copying a static website, you'll need to keep a close eye on your code to ensure that it's clean, efficient and valid.

2. Edit (or Hack) an Existing Theme

This is how most people start with WordPress theme development: in working on a theme that they've downloaded, they see that some styling isn't quite right, so they delve into the style sheet and make some edits. Starting like this is tempting because it feels like a quick and easy way to achieve the effect you want. But there are some dangers:

If you ever switch themes, that update will override any changes you've made.
It's easy to add repetitive code by adding new styles lower down in the style sheet that override styles higher up, rather than removing what you don't need.
The website could end up with a lot more code than it needs.
If the theme isn't well coded or commented to begin with, you could get yourself into a bigger mess and find that you have to make a lot of fixes.

However, hacking a theme can work if you go into it with your eyes open. It may be an option if the following are true:

The theme you’re using is well written, valid and commented (e.g., the default WP theme, Twenty Eleven);
The changes you're making are so drastic that you wouldn't need to update the original theme;
You understand the PHP and CSS contained in the theme and are comfortable editing, adding to and removing it without breaking the theme.

If you do decide to go down this route, keeping a backup of the original theme and commenting your code thoroughly are important. I would also advise commenting out any code that you don't want and then testing to see what happens before deleting anything.

3. Use the Theme Customizer to Tweak an Existing Theme

The theme customizer was released with WordPress 3.4. It gives you the option to customize a theme without writing any code, simply by using a WYSIWYG interface. Depending on how well the customizer is written into the theme itself, you can use it to change images, titles, colors and even the layout. Expect to see more themes with the customizer integrated into them.

Using the WordPress theme customizer with the Twenty Ten theme.

The theme customizer stores your changes in a separate file, not in the theme's style sheet, so there will be repetitive code.

For more information, take a look at Otto on WordPress' video tutorial or guide to integrating the theme customizer into your own themes.

4. Create a Child Theme to Make Changes to an Existing Theme

This approach is similar to editing an existing theme, but safer. It consists of creating a brand new theme that is defined as a child of the existing theme. Where your child theme doesn't have a particular file but the parent theme does, it will use that. Where the child theme does have a file, that file will override the equivalent in the parent. Let's look at an example:

Parent theme files	Child theme files
`style.css` `page.php` `single.php` `archive.php` `header.php` `sidebar.php` `footer.php`	`style.css` `page.php` `header.php`

In the example above, WordPress would use the following files to deliver content:

style.css from the child theme,
page.php from the child theme,
single.php from the parent theme,
archive.php from the parent theme,
header.php from the child theme,
sidebar.php from the parent theme,
footer.php from the parent theme.

You can see how this would be useful if you wanted to use most of the parent theme's markup but change the content of the header (adding, say, your logo and address details) and any static pages (maybe changing the way that meta data is displayed).

The one file that every child theme must have in order to work is the style sheet, because it contains the information that WordPress needs to make the child theme function correctly. To do this, add some extra code to the style sheet's comments:

/*  	Theme Name: Twenty Eleven Child Theme  	Theme URI: http://example.com  	Author: you!  	Author URI: http://example.com/  	Description:  Child theme based on Twenty Eleven.  	Template: twentyeleven  	Version: 1.0  	Tags: your tags (optional)   */  @import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");

Can you spot the extra lines? The first one is:

Template: twentyeleven

This line tells WordPress that the theme is a child theme and that Twenty Eleven is its parent. You would add the name of the parent theme's directory, not its full name.

And the second one:

@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");

This line tells the browser to load the parent theme's style sheet before rendering any of the styles in the current style sheet. This frees you from having to duplicate any styles in the parent theme that you want to use.

So, that's how child themes work. But when is this the best approach? I would suggest using it in the following cases:

You already have a theme (to be used as the parent) that contains most of what you need for your theme;
You want to be able to update your parent theme (for example, when theme updates are released following a WordPress update);
You don't want to get tied up in knots from hacking an existing theme;
You want the option to revert to the parent theme or to develop another similar theme in future (which would be a new child theme);
You're developing a number of similar websites with some minor stylistic or content differences (I did this when building similar websites for a client that owned multiple companies);
The difference between your child and parent themes is not so huge that you need to start from scratch, or not so huge that your child theme's code will override anything affected by updates to the parent theme.

5. Create Your Own Parent Theme (Using One of the Approaches Above) and Child Themes

The situation I just alluded to, of building a set of websites for a client with multiple companies, is an occasion when you might create a parent theme and then set up child themes for individual websites. You might also want to do this in the following cases:

You plan to develop a lot of websites with similar content and markup in future (not just for one client);
You manage a lot of websites and have to dip into each of them regularly, and you want the code to be very similar;
You're comfortable creating your own parent theme, editing the code to create a robust parent that will work well with child themes.

If you decide to adopt this approach, you could either build your parent theme from scratch or hack an existing theme. For most of the websites I build, I use a parent theme that I developed by hacking the Twenty Ten theme, the former default theme for WordPress. I made so many changes that I no longer needed to activate updates to the original theme. I was also comfortable with the code in the theme and wanted to make significant changes to it, reducing the code, restructuring it to fit the way I work and removing code that I knew I wouldn't need.

You could also create a child theme based on an existing theme and then create child themes for that — effectively, grandchildren of the original theme. The advantage of this is that you will not overwrite the code in the original theme, while having the flexibility to make modifications to the child theme that will be passed down to the grandchild themes. A word of warning here, though: with three themes in use, it's easy to get confused about what's happening, and you could end up with a lot of unnecessary code.

6. Use a Theme Framework

The final option is one used by thousands of WordPress users and developers. A number of theme frameworks exist that you can use as a kind of parent theme, but with much more functionality, and in some cases with the option to make quite fancy layout and style changes without writing a line of code. Some frameworks are free, while others are premium. They have been reviewed in detail already on Smashing Magazine, but the main ones are listed below.

Free WordPress frameworks:

Theme Hybrid includes a myriad of hooks and widget areas to help you customize your themes. It also has some child themes available. The framework and child themes are all free, but if you want support, you'll have to pay for it by registering on Theme Hybrid's website. Working with it can be quite complex unless you understand PHP or use one of the child themes.
Wonderflux is based on a flexible grid system. It has options for adjusting layout and styles without having to write code, and it includes a lot of hooks and widget areas. It's free to use and supported via the WordPress forums.
Carrington is the most established of the free frameworks, and it has a number of child themes.
Thematic is developed by Automattic, which develops WordPress itself. It includes a number of hooks, filters and widget areas.

Premium WordPress frameworks:

Its developers describe Genesis as "the industry standard." It comes with a wide variety of child themes, options to customize without writing code, and SEO features.
Thesis is the other big premium framework, and it also gives you the option to customize child themes without writing code.

Summary: Choosing An Approach

Chances are that, having read this, you've got an idea of which approach to go with. But in case you're still scratching your head, here's a summary of when each method is appropriate:

Approach	Time	Cost	Capability	Future-proofing	Repetition
Build from scratch	High	Low	High	Low	Low
Hack existing theme	Low	Low	Medium	Low	Low
Use theme customizer	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low
Create child theme based on existing parent	Medium	Low	Medium	High	High
Create parent theme	High	Low	High	High	High
Theme framework (free)	Medium	Low	Medium	High	High
Theme framework (premium)	Medium	High	Low to medium	High	High

All in all, each approach has its place; it just depends on the website and on you. The important thing is to choose an approach after having weighed the pros and cons — not just to dive in and have a go, only to discover that you've broken a theme or that you've created a lot of rework for yourself.

And as always, whatever you decide, don't forget to keep backups!

(al)

ARM Based Server Cluster Benchmarked

Mar 13th 2013, 12:49

An anonymous reader writes "Anandtech compares the Boston Viridis, a server with Calxeda's ARM server technology, with the typical Intel Xeon technology in a server environment. Turns out that the Quad ARM A9 chip has it weaknesses, but it can offer an amazing performance per Watt ratio in some applications. Anandtech tests bandwidth, compression, decompression, building/compiling and a hosted web environment on top of Ubuntu 12.10." At least in their tests (highly parallel, lightweight file serving), the ARM nodes offered slightly better throughput at lower power use, although from the looks of it you'd just be giving money to the server manufacturer instead of the power company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Government May Not Be Able To Fix Cell Phone Unlocking Problem

Mar 13th 2013, 12:12

An anonymous reader writes "We recently discussed what appeared to be a positive response from the Obama administration on the legality of cell phone unlocking. Unfortunately, the Obama administration may not be able to do anything about it. It has already signed away our rights under a trade agreement with South Korea. Lawyer Jonathan Band, who works for the Association of Research Libraries, wrote, 'The White House position, however, may be inconsistent with the U.S. proposal in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and existing obligations in the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) and other free trade agreements to which the United States is a party. This demonstrates the danger of including in international agreements rigid provisions that do not accommodate technological development.'You can read more about this issue in a short eight page legal primer by Jonathan Band (PDF). An interesting, related note that the U.S.-KOREA FTA is possibly inconsistent with our domestic patent/drug law in the Hatch-Waxman Act as well. The trade agreement requires us to grant injunctions until the patent is invalidated as opposed to thirty months under current domestic law."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using Truth Serum To Confirm Insanity

Mar 13th 2013, 09:20

xclr8r writes "James Holmes representation did not enter a plea today in with regards to the Aurora, Co. Movie theater shooting so the Judge entered a plea of not guilty for James that could be changed at a later date by Holmes' attorney. The judge entered an advisory that if the plea was changed to Not Guilty by insanity that Holmes would be subject to a 'narcoanalytic interview' with the possibility of medically appropriate substances could be used e.g. so called truth serums. Holmes defense looks to have initially objected to this but as the previous article seems to infer that some compromises are being worked out. This certainly raises legal questions on how this is being played out 5th, 14th amendments. The legal expert in the second article states this is legal under Co. law but admits there's not a huge amount of cases regarding this. I was only able to find Harper v State where a defendant willingly underwent truth serum and wanted to submit the interview on his behalf but was rejected due to the judge not recognizing sufficient scientific basis to admit the evidence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Corporate Identity Photoshop Mockup for Free

Mar 13th 2013, 07:01

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Every designer should have designed a corporate identity at some point in his career. In fact brand identity building is an essential part of design. Every company, agency, firm, TV Chanel soccer team and even freelancers need a logo and a corporate identity. These identities usually consist of Letterheads, business cards, envelopes, CD cover, CD box, bag, pen, pencil, calendar and more.

Corporate Identity Photoshop Mock-up helps designers to present their identity design in a modern and pretty way for their clients or for presentation in their portfolios. This mockup is totally made with photoshop and not based on any real photo. This is vector based and build with vector shapes, this makes it resizable without quality loss.