| The Real Purpose of DRM Mar 19th 2013, 23:43 Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "Ian Hickson, author and maintainer of the HTML5 specification, comments about the real reasons for DRM. They're not what you might think. Ian nails it in my opinion. He wrote, 'The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted. ... Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     |  | Are Lenovo's ThinkPads Getting Worse? Mar 19th 2013, 23:00 writertype writes "Over the weekend, Lenovo launched the ThinkPad T431s, a ~$950 notebook with chiclet keys, no trackpad buttons, an integrated battery, and Windows 8 but no touchscreen. The T431s is also thinner and lighter than the bulletproof bento boxes we all know and love. The argument ReadWrite makes is that ThinkPads are becoming slowly, but significantly, worse. Do you agree?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Golf Channel Testing Out New Octo-copter Drone To Film Golfers This Weekend Mar 19th 2013, 22:38 An anonymous reader writes "In what seems like a surreal mixture of life imitating art, the Golf Channel has taken the wraps of a new camera drone. The hover camera appears to have 8 independent rotors supporting what looks like a gyro-stabilized HD camera. Though it is far from silent, the new drone will be on the course this week at the PGA Tour event taking place at Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in Florida. No word on whether or not Lord Vader will be using these to monitor rebel activity on Hoth." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | EA CEO's Departure Might Be Good For the Company Mar 19th 2013, 22:17 Nerval's Lobster writes "Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello might have resigned in the wake of the company's disastrous SimCity launch, but his departure might not be a bad thing for EA as a company. On Glassdoor, his 59 percent rating was 9 points below the average. One outside recruiter says Riccitiello's taken the fun out of the game maker's culture. 'They've never had a problem getting good talent and that's not likely to change,' says the recruiter, who requested anonymity because of his business dealings with the company. 'But, they've had problems getting great talent and that's not likely to change.' Let this be a lesson to gaming executives everywhere: if you're going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers, make sure you have enough backend infrastructure in place to actually handle the load." A related article suggests EA needs to worry less about piracy and more about the company's apathy and legitimate customers who demanded a refund. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Go To Uni, Earn a Degree In Drones Mar 19th 2013, 21:36 New submitter KernelMuncher writes "Curricula and research projects related to drones are cropping up at both large universities and community colleges across the country. In a list of 81 publicly-funded entities that have applied for a certificate of authorization to fly drones from the Federal Aviation Administration, more than a third are colleges... Schools — and their students — are jockeying for a position on the ground floor of a nascent industry that looks poised to generate jobs and research funding in the coming years. 'We get a lot of inquiries from students saying, "I want to be a drone pilot,"' says Ken Polovitz, the assistant dean in the University of North Dakota's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Ask Slashdot: How To (or How NOT To) Train Your Job Replacement? Mar 19th 2013, 20:55 An anonymous reader writes "I am a contract developer from a major U.S. city. My rate has never been the lowest, but it's nonetheless very competitive considering the speed and quality of the work I have always delivered, as well as the positive feedback I've received from most clients. In the past ~3 years, I have been working on a sizable project for a major client. For the most part it has been a happy arrangement for both parties. However, for various reasons (including the still ailing economy), starting this year they hired a fresh college graduate in-house, and asked me to teach him all 'secrets' of my code, even though they have the source code by contract. The implicit (although never openly stated) goal is of course for him to take over the project and hopefully reduce cost, at least in the short-term. I say 'hopefully' because I am pretty sure that, because they are unfamiliar with the software industry, they underestimated what it takes to make quality, production-ready code. I am not afraid of losing this particular client, as I have many others, but I want to ask Slashdot: how do you handle this type of situation — training someone whom you know will eventually replace you at your job?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Study: Piracy Doesn't Harm Digital Media Sales Mar 19th 2013, 20:13 r5r5 writes "European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies has published a study which concludes that the impact of piracy on the legal sale of music is virtually nonexistent or even slightly positive. The study's results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute for legal digital music and that a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchase websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting a complementary relationship between these two modes of music consumption. According to the results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites leads to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchase websites." It's worth noting that this study only measured the effect of piracy on online purchases, not on revenue from physical formats. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Sewage Plants Struggle To Treat Fracking Wastewater Mar 19th 2013, 19:30 MTorrice writes "When energy companies extract natural gas trapped deep underground using hydraulic fracturing, they're left with water containing high levels of pollutants, including benzene and barium. Sometimes the gas producers dispose of this fracking wastewater by sending it to treatment plants that deal with sewage and water from other industrial sources. But a new study (abstract) suggests that the plants can't handle this water's high levels of contaminants: Water flowing out of the plants into the environment still has elevated levels of the chemicals from natural gas production." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Google Implements DNSSEC Validation For Public DNS Mar 19th 2013, 18:48 wiredmikey writes "Google on Tuesday announced that it now fully supports DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on its Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, the search giant accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but didn't actually perform validation. 'With this new security feature, we can better protect people from DNS-based attacks and make DNS more secure overall by identifying and rejecting invalid responses from DNSSEC-protected domains,' Yunhong Gu, Team Lead, Google Public DNS, wrote in a blog post. According to Gu, about 1/3 of top-level domains have been signed, but most second-level domains remain unsigned. According to NIST, there has been no progress in enabling DNSSEC on 98 percent of all 1,070 industry domains tested as of March 18, 2013. 'Overall, DNSSEC is still at an early stage and we hope that our support will help expedite its deployment,' Gu said." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | LazyHusband Smart Phone App Compliments Your Wife for You (Video) Mar 19th 2013, 18:06 The guy who came up with the LazyHusband app, Ethan Duggan, isn't married. That's good, because he's only 12 years old. One of his local (Las Vegas) TV stations says this about him: "...the 12-year-old from Henderson, Nev., said he was tired of always replying to his mother's questions of how she looked in an outfit, he came up with common phrases that, with a touch of the screen, can tell his mother, 'You look amazing today.'" The app costs 99 cents for iOS, Android or Kindle. Ethan admits that Dad helped, but says the app is his own work and was his idea. He's now working on Lazy Kid and Lazy Wife. The TV story says, "Phrases for Lazy Kid include, yes, I did my homework and I love you. Ethan said he is having a hard time coming up with common phrases that a wife might say to her husband." Pro basketball retiree turned business guy Shaquille O'Neal is reportedly interested in LazyHusband, which means you may hear plenty more about LazyHusband and the prodigy who created it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Where Can You Find an Electric Vehicle Charging Network? Estonia Mar 19th 2013, 17:24 MatthewVD writes "How hard can it be to find an electric car charger? So hard that New York Times reporter David Broder had to drive in circles and drain his Tesla's battery. Charging infrastructure has been ultimate chicken or egg problem for electric cars adoption but finally, there's a good test case. In Estonia, drivers need to travel only 37 miles to reach a CHAdeMO quick charger. There are 165 of the direct current plug-in chargers, that can charge a car's lithium battery in 30 minutes for an average cost of $3.25. The question now is, will the electric vehicles follow?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | UK Bloggers Could Face Libel Fines Unless Registered As Press Mar 19th 2013, 16:45 Diamonddavej writes "The Guardian warns that Bloggers in the U.K. could face costly fines for libel with exemplary damages imposed if they do not sign up with a new press regulator under legislation (Clause 21A — Awards of exemplary damages) recommended by The Leveson Inquiry into press behavior and ethics. Kirsty Hughes, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, said this a 'sad day' for British democracy. 'This will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on everyday people's web use.' Exemplary damages, imposed by a court to penalize publishers who remain outside regulation, could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, easily enough to close down smaller publishers such as Private Eye and local newspapers. Harry Cole, who contributes to the Guido Fawkes blog says he does not want to join a regulator, he hopes his blog will remain as irreverent and rude as ever, and continue to hold public officials to account; its servers are located in the U.S. Members of Parliament voted on Clause 21A late last night, it passed 530 to 13." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | iStella e le partenze "stellari" delle startup italiane: quando il giornalismo manca di spirito critico. Mar 19th 2013, 16:02 Renato Soru: «iStella non è solo un’alternativa a Google, abbiamo trovato una ragione diversa per questo servizio» Non è che voglio fare polemica a tutti i costi. Lo giuro. In genere è pur vero che quando uno inizia un discorso in questa maniera la vuole automaticamente fare. Però scusate, pure voi ci mettete la vostra a stuzzicare i malpensieri. Oggi è il giorno di iStella. Il motore di ricerca italiano fortemente voluto da Renato Soru, fondatore di Tiscali. Sulle vicende di questo motore ne ho parlato già in un precedente post qualche settimana fa. Dategli una letta. Fa bene. In breve, di iStella se ne parla da mesi, con i soliti toni incensatori di cui solo certo giornalismo nostrano è capace. Di esempi recenti simili ne abbiamo in abbondanza. Da Volunia, a Egomnia, a Faceskin. Tutti “esperimenti” molto chiacchiarati sulla stampa. Peccato che i risultati non siano stati granché brillanti. Non voglio parlare dell’iniziativa iStella. Realisticamente, credo che in pochi lo utilizzeranno al posto di Google. Soru, sulla copertina di Wired di oggi si lascia andare a una dichiarazione di candido entusiasmo irrefrenabile: «Non siamo solo un’alternativa a Google, abbiamo trovato una ragione diversa per questo servizio». In che senso, chiedo io? Siete addirittura qualcosa in più? Magari ho capito male. Ma se uno, tre righe sopra, legge che «in fondo però la prima impressione è che iStella sia un sostituto del motore di ricerca di Mountain View, di cui riprende funzioni come instant search, ricerca per esempio dei film o le schede di Google Now» bhè, allora il sospetto di un eccesso di megalomania ti viene. iStella da settembre del 2012 ha avuto una compertura mediatica impressionante. Annunciato da tutti come il messia dei motori di ricerca. Huffington Post, la Repubblica, Wired, Il Sole 24 Ore e chi più ne ha più ne metta. Per un’iniziativa che è stata presentata oggi mi pare niente male. Volunia non v’ha insegnato proprio niente. Mi domando perché si continui a dare così tanta visibilità a certe iniziative, soprattutto considerando che su alcune “vetrine” non ci finite mai per caso o perché inviate una email alla redazione. Il giornalismo italiano nell’ambito tecnologico ha preso una piega assai poco interessante. E’ diventato una specie di ufficio stampa privo di qualsiasi spirito critico. iStella, dopo Volunia ne è l’ulteriore dimostrazione. Cavalchiamo l’onda dell’ennesima sfida a Google. Che naufragherà nel nulla lasciando solo vaghi ricordi su qualche articolo sparso qua e là sul Web.  | | Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Doctrine Mar 19th 2013, 15:05 langelgjm writes "In a closely-watched case, the U.S. Supreme Court today vindicated the first-sale doctrine, declaring that it "applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad." The case involved a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher's permission. The 6-3 decision has important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion (PDF) that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing Mar 19th 2013, 14:23 redkemper writes with an excerpt from BGR.com of interest to anyone in the market for a new phone: "Samsung's Galaxy S 4 might not offer much in the way of an exciting new exterior design, but inside, it's a completely different story. The retooled internals on the U.S. version of the Galaxy S 4 were put to the test by benchmark specialists Primate Labs and the results are impressive, to say the least. The Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5's score of 1,596. That score was also good enough to top the upcoming HTC One, the Nexus 4 and the previous-generation Galaxy S III." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Revealed: Chrome Really Was Exploited At Pwnium 2013 Mar 19th 2013, 13:29 Freshly Exhumed writes with an "inconvenient truth" as reported at Internet News: "Google Chrome running Chrome OS was hailed as being a survivor in the Pwnium/Pwn2own event that hacked IE, Firefox and Chrome browsers on Windows. Apple's Safari running on Mac OS X was not hacked and neither (apparently) was Chrome on Chrome OS. Google disclosed [Monday] morning that Chrome on Chrome OS had in fact been exploited — albeit, unreliably. The same researcher that took Google's money last year for exploiting Chrome, known publicly only as 'PinkiePie' was awarded $40,000 for exploiting Chrome/Chrome OS via a Linux kernel bug, config file error and a video parsing flaw." Asks Freshly Exhumed: "So, was it really Google Chrome, or was Linux to blame?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | A Case Study: The Art Of Storytelling Around An App Mar 19th 2013, 12:53 Every app tells a story. Apps like Pandora tell the story of music; apps like Tip N Split tell a story of a calculator; and apps like Temperature tell the story of weather. Then we have storybook apps like Alice for the iPad, which literally tell stories! The story of the cluttered app market is well known! Biz Report recently reported that the number of app downloads is estimated to reach 56 billion in 2013. And the San Francisco Chronicle has just reported that over 700,000 apps are for sale in the iTunes Store. Getting noticed is a major concern for app developers, and getting noticed sometimes requires not only a breakthrough app, but a compelling story. For any app developer, conveying an app's story at launch is critical. And just as important as promoting the story of your app is developing a story around the app that promotes the app's story, that helps the app to stand out on digital store shelves, and that differentiates the app from its competitors. To that end, what follows is a story about storytelling for a storybook app! 
"The House That Went on Strike" and her troops.
The Big Brands And Storytelling Storytelling has been described as a method of explaining a series of events through narrative. Storytelling is used by marketers as a tool to entertain or to establish an emotional connection; it can be employed to illustrate a concept, to steer an argument and to encourage consumer loyalty. "The digital age equals a commitment to storytelling," explains Marian Salzman, Havas PR North America CEO and author of the annual trend-spotting book What's Next: What to Expect in 2013. "As such, brands are always looking to create stories around their products as a way to relate more personally to the consumer and, at the same time, capture the attention of the media. Storytelling was a trend in 2012, and will continue to be on the upswing in 2013." Indeed, this year's Super Bowl advertisements and viral videos reinforced the focus on storytelling by brands. Taco Bell told a tale of seniors gone wild, a group of elderly partiers who escape their beds and hit the pools and bars one evening, ending their night by eating at Taco Bell. The spot tied the brand to youthfulness. Volkswagen's clever use of famous YouTube "anger" stars dancing in a field to "Come On Get Happy" — the theme to '70s sitcom The Partridge Family — tied the brand to the emotive story of happiness. Taking a page from the major brands' use of storytelling and applying it to the release of its book app, Jumping Pages sought ways to tell the story of "The House That Went on Strike." And as the team did with its first production, "David and Goliath" (hopefully you read about that in "The Art of Launching an App"), it set out to provide backstories that support the house's strike and to provide promotional opportunities for storytelling. The House That Went On Strike It all began one day while filmmaker and founder of Jumping Pages, Rania Ajami, was juggling her job, two kids and her home — and the home unfortunately seemed to be losing out. "One day, I just felt like I couldn't keep up and, feeling unappreciated, threatened to go on strike. Then, as I looked around my own home, it occurred to me that with the TV blaring, lights burning, washer and dryer continually spinning, a kitchen resembling a 24-hour diner — maybe the house wanted to strike, too, and that's when the idea for the story struck!" Thus, "The House That Went on Strike" was born. The rhyming tale of an errant family that repents after its neglected house and appliances go on strike became a critical hit. MyMac called the story the "epitome of interactive books." The ultimate critic in the book industry, Kirkus, hailed the book app as "a lesson… delivered in a blend of equally lively sound, art and animation." And the storytelling that the team generated to promote the book provided a myriad of media stories. The book app was positively featured in political, publishing and home stories in newspapers, magazines and websites around the US. But achieving these results wasn't easy. The process was well thought out. Building Stories As all app developers know, the production process follows a formula, and it's no different when adapting a book into an app. The Jumping Pages team began the production route for "House" by writing a story about how a home would lead her troops (i.e. her appliances) on a strike to teach the residing family a lesson. The script was then transformed into a sequence of panels for the iPad, with each panel containing interactive and animated scenes that directly related to the story. With the prose and plans for each panel in place, the company's graphic artist, Walter Krudop, added the wonderful images, and the production team completed the visual, aural, musical, animated and interactive components. The next step was to choose a narrator. The team wanted a celebrated mom, one who had a background as a leader, because calling a strike would require the heft of an authority figure. It's easy for creative developers to fall into the trap of insisting on a trained actor to read their story. Naturally, you want the quality of the narration to match the quality of the app and the story. Yet a trained actor might not draw attention to your app or have the background to storytell around the app. Therefore, just as designing, coding and building an application take some creativity, so does selecting a voice for the app. For "The House That Went on Strike", Jumping Pages rocked the house with its selection. 
John Casey with Congresswoman Pat Schroeder during the recording of "The House That Went on Strike."
Former congresswoman Pat Schroeder is not only a member of the National Women's Hall of Fame, but is a former presidential candidate, the first mother to serve on the US House Armed Services Committee, and the former CEO of the Association of American Publishers. Schroeder was literally a "house mom," and her memoir, 24 Years of House Work… And the Place Is Still a Mess, was a complementary metaphor for the Jumping Pages story. She was the perfect choice not only because of her background, but because she excels in narration and has since received numerous plaudits for her work. Finally, she helped to provide multiple storytelling tracks. In The News One way to storytell is to find something in the news that relates to a component of your app. By anyone's standard, members of the US House of Representatives didn't get along too well in 2012, and its low approval ratings and ongoing negative headlines bore that out. As a former member of this esteemed body, Schroeder had firsthand experience dealing with that rancorous House. In fact, she had suggested that one way to get the representative body to work together was to call for a House strike. Using that angle, prominent political publications in the US, including the National Journal and Roll Call, wrote articles about Schroeder's narration of the app and how its message could help the US House become more orderly. As Roll Call reports: “Schroeder said she used to dream of leading her colleagues on a strike against "the messy House" they created and hopes that the house in this story will inspire Congress to take similar action. "They oughta strike," she said about Congress' ongoing fights in the Roll Call article.” Effect On The Industry As book app developers know, the market is exploding. Some book apps are quite fancy, with a lot of interactivity, animation, and even videos and games embedded within. "The House That Went on Strike" contains interactivity, sounds and animation that relate directly to the story. And that is the difference. It's a storybook first, and it's important for this story to be told. After leaving the House of Representatives, Pat served for over 10 years as the head of the Association of American Publishers, representing the top publishers in the US. Thus, she provided an authoritative voice about books and was recognized as a leader in the publishing industry. Furthermore, she could lend a stamp of approval about a book app, particularly one targeted at children. While most parents have to weigh the pros and cons of downloading a book for their kids on an iPad, Pat could offer reassurance that the app was just fine for kids, provided that it was a storybook first and that any additional components of the app tied directly to the story. Consequently, she penned a blog post in the Huffington Post's books section titled "A House Grandma's iPad Story," which spoke at length about her experience working on "The House That Went on Strike" and offered insight into how books should be produced for the mobile format (it's even perhaps a must-read for developers who produce kids content for the mobile platform). Furthermore, Pat's experience in the industry helped the app get featured in Publisher's Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry. Teaching A Lesson Most stories have a lesson, and indeed most apps do, too. "The House That Went on Strike" provided a lesson not only for kids, but for their parents: treat your home with respect. And while newspapers, magazines and blogs about the home traditionally feature decorating and "fashion" tips, the Jumping Pages team worked to create a story angle about how the app could help families come together to take care of their home. The result was a nationally syndicated newspaper column by prominent home columnist Marnie Jameson, which appeared in over 30 newspapers in the US, including the San Jose Mercury News (the newspaper of Silicon Valley), the Denver Post and the Orlando Sentinel. The headlines from across the country, chosen by editors of the papers, ranged from "House on Strike: All Must Pitch In" to "Pat Schroeder Narrates a Book on Keeping the Home Tidy" to, appropriately enough, "The House That Went on Strike." The story even made Marnie's year-end "Lessons Learned in 2012." 
The "House" teaches a lesson!
Media Success Indeed, the "The House That Went on Strike" was a lesson in successful storytelling. The app generated dozens of media stories about several storytelling themes. The book app, and the slew of publicity around it, helped Jumping Pages secure work for a soon-to-be-released animal app for kids by a prominent animal expert, and a groundbreaking app for kids related to the entertainment industry. In addition, the company plans a sequel to ride the success of the original "House" production. Storytelling is fun for kids, adults and the media, and it can be fun for app developers, too. When promoting your app, remember that it's not always about the final product, but perhaps rather about something indirectly related to it. The best brands sell to you by telling stories around their products. Similarly, "The House That Went on Strike" became a media darling and a hit on the strength of its heartwarming storytelling. As a media success story, the "House" cleaned house! Four Tips On Storytelling Deciding on the story for your app will require some careful thought and creativity. The first rule of thumb is to find a story that will resonate with a very specific niche audience, and then determine the optimal time to launch the app along with the story. For example, the app KillsWitch, which makes it easy to entirely eliminate your ex's presence from your Facebook timeline, was launched this past Valentine's Day. Why? Simple: the developers created a story about all of the lonely and scorned lovers who seek revenge for their plight on the day traditionally celebrated for love. The app's story had a clear demographic in mind, and it allowed the media to take an opposing angle for stories around the holiday. Here are some other tips to keep in mind when crafting your app's story: - Emotional component
Does your app capture memories (Instagram) or make you happy (Emoticon App) or sad (Crying Translator)? Find the emotion that best matches your app, and find a reason for a niche audience to laugh or cry about it. Will your app make people cry? Create a story about grown men crying, and launch it on World Smile Day. - Newsworthiness
If something is making the news, grab hold of it. Speaking of which, seasonal stories are always a good hook — for example, the Boating Weather app is tied to spring, and the TanningBooth app gives you a "tan" in winter. In addition, marking an anniversary is always a great way to keep your story newsworthy; for example, Jaeger-LeCoultre's app marks the brand's 180th anniversary in 2013, and the financial app Wonga Bazaar launched on the 25th anniversary of Black Monday. - Industry effect
An app can have an impact on the industry it was created for — and some crazy stories can be woven to grab that industry's attention. Was Vine's story about pornography? - Lessons learned
Does your app provide insight, have a special message or raise awareness? Climate Mobile provides information and lessons about global warming, particularly relevant this year as the subject gains traction. Does your app promote a lesson in thriftiness, like ExpenseTracker; a smart launch at the start of the holiday shopping season might appeal to stingy dads. (al)
© John Casey for Smashing Magazine, 2013. | | Telstra Bigpond To Use Outlook.com As Email Handler Mar 19th 2013, 12:45 New submitter sidevans writes "It looks like Australia's largest ISP is working closely with Microsoft and will soon be letting them handle customers emails using Outlook.com. The setup guide is available here. An interesting move, considering the National Broadband Network rollout is coming. What's in the future for other ISPs and how they handle email in Australia? Are the days of ISPs providing in-house email servers coming to an end?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Aaron Swartz's Estate Seeks Release of Documents Mar 19th 2013, 12:04 theodp writes "The Boston Globe reports that the estate of Aaron Swartz filed a motion in federal court in Boston Friday to allow the release of documents in the case that has generated national controversy over the U.S. attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence. The Court filing (PDF) suggests that the U.S. attorney's office is still up for jerking Aaron around a little posthumously, seeking what his lawyers termed overbroad redactions, including names and titles that are already publicly known. Swartz's family also seeks the return of his seized property (PDF). Last week, Swartz's girlfriend accused MIT of dragging its feet on investigating his suicide. Meanwhile, Slate's Justin Peters asks if the Justice Department learned anything from the Aaron Swartz case, noting that Matthew Keys, who faces 25 years in prison for crimes that include aiding-and-abetting the display of humorously false content, could replace Swartz as the poster boy for prosecutorial overreach." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? Mar 19th 2013, 10:04 jrepin writes "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you'll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | New Insights Help Shed Light On Star's Death That Created Kepler's Super Nova Mar 19th 2013, 09:07 skade88 writes "Wired has a good article that covers the origins of the white dwarf super nova Johannes Kepler observed in 1604. From the article: 'Up until now, it was unclear what lead to the star's explosion. New Chandra data suggests that, at least in the case of Kepler's remnant, the white dwarf grabbed material from its companion star. The disk-shaped structure seen near the center suggests that the supernova explosion hit a ring of gas and dust that would have formed, like water circling a drain, as the white dwarf sucked material away from its neighbor. In addition, magnesium is not an element formed in great abundances during Type 1a supernovas, suggesting it came from the companion star. Whether or not Kepler's supernova is a typical case remains to be seen. '" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Papa Francesco: eutanasia, aborto, omosessualità e pedofilia. La vera sfida della nuova Chiesa guidata da Bergolio. Mar 19th 2013, 09:05 «Cusodire la Chiesa con umiltà . Vicini a Ratzinger con riconoscenza» Stamattina, guardando le foto di Piazza San Pietro gremita in occasione dell'intronizzazione di Papa Francesco, faccio una sola considerazione. Messa per un attimo da parte la sua contagiosa empatia, la semplicità con cui ha inaugurato il pontificato e l'indiscussa ventata di entusiasmo che la sua elezione ha portato in una Chiesa assopita e travolta dagli scandali, la grande partita di Jorge Mario Bergoglio da questo momento in poi dovrà giocarsi tutta sul piano del rinnovamento. Bergoglio appartiene all'ala conservatrice della Chiesa cattolica. Quella più dura al cambiamento e all'apertura verso molte tematiche che da trent'anni a questa parte alimentano una discussione cruciale nella società laica e in quella cattolica come l'aborto, l'eutanasia, l'omosessualità e l'uso del preservativo. Papa Francesco dovrà sciogliere prima di tutto questi nodi. Ma soprattutto dovrà affrontare, mettendo da parte il pudore e con più coraggio di quanto non abbiano fatto i suoi predecessori, la maxima culpa della Chiesa moderna. Quella che più di tutte, nella storia recente, ha inquinato e stuprato l'essenza spirituale della grandezza di Dio di cui la Chiesa si fa portavoce. La pedofilia e gli abusi sessuali commessi con drammatica sistematicità da molti sacerdoti in ogni parte del mondo di cui la Curia romana, col suo silenzio, si è resa implicitamente complice. La missione di questo Pontificato dovrà lasciare il segno più profondo inciso dalla Chiesa negli ultimi secoli. Non solo a livello spirituale e teologico. C'è bisogno di una vera e propria riforma, lasciatemi passare il termine, di carattere "sociale". Altrimenti, senza scelte coraggiose, non basteranno i gesti e i sorrisi a guidare in acque tranquille una nave alla deriva in mezzo a un mare in tempesta.  | | Internet Defense League To Be Deployed Against CISPA Mar 19th 2013, 07:07 yanom writes "Slashdotters may remember the launch of the Internet Defense League, a network for website owners that would allow for the replication of a media campaign similar to the one that took down SOPA. Now it plans to spring into action in response to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which is now making it's way through Congress. The IDL wants its members to embed anti-CISPA banners into their websites, which will be activated tomorrow, March 19th." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | How I Built Paint 4 Kids Windows Store App Mar 19th 2013, 07:01 
Advertise here via BSA Paint 4 Kids is a Windows Store app, specifically designed for kids. A simple app for coloring and drawing. You can read of the consumer's features directly from the Windows Store site, where you can also see some screen shots. For this article, you can simply think of an app that has several drawings and you can interact with them. From a technical perspective, it is entirely built using standard web technologies, like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SVG. Consider an important aspect here: with Windows 8, we are writing an app reusing our web skill and we are developing for the web platform, using the underlying HTML5 support of the Internet Explorer 10 rendering engine. So one immediate benefit is that we do not have to test and support all the different browsers versions and do not have to use some polyfills to emulate the new API features in old browsers. We can use the best of the web platform and use some specific API of Windows 8 directly in JavaScript. This article is about to discuss the use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Paint 4 Kids, starting from some requirements of the project, going to address them and some pitfalls using SVG. I hope that some of these considerations could apply to your apps as well. Requirements and why using SVG Windows Store app give you a great opportunity in terms of markets where you can distribute and sell your apps and in terms of devices where your app can run. Think that your app can be used on devices with different screen sizes, different screen resolutions and pixel densities. This must be considered and looking through this article gives you a very good technical understanding on how to scale your app to different screens and how to test your app using the Windows Simulator. 
One of the requirement is that we want to have a single drawing that will show well at different resolutions. We ended to use SVG that is a vector image format for two-dimensional graphics. Our approach is to create a drawing at a specific resolution 2560×1440, see later for details, scaling down to the current user's resolution. Another advantage is that is very simple and fast to fill a path with a color in SVG, that it is one of the main feature of the app. When a user tap the screen it is simple to intercept the corresponding portion of the drawing and fill the path with a specific color.
Another requirement is that we want to reuse some drawings made in XAML and have a good tooling support so that we can create and add new drawings to the app in a simple and fast way. Inkscape suits very well for this purpose. You can import a XAML drawing and export it into an SVG file and because the two vector based formats are very similar the export ends quite always successfully.
One disadvantage of using SVG is that the DOM manipulation can become slow with the increase in the number of objects added to the DOM, so some performance test and optimizations are often necessary. You can read a good table with pro and con of using SVG vs. Canvas from this Internet Explorer blog post to help deciding when using Canvas, SVG or both in the same app. Another Paint 4 Kids' requirement is that the user can be able to save his drawing. Unfortunately, it is not possible, at the time of writing, to create an image from an SVG file, so we ended up converting the SVG file into a Canvas object. An alternative approach could be to use Canvas instead of the SVG. With Canvas you have to create different raw imagines for different resolution, at least if you want that your drawing look very well at different resolutions, otherwise the lines will look pixelate. Another consideration is how to fill a shape in a drawing. While you are using Canvas with touch points, you are dealing with a raw image, made only of pixels; you cannot deal with shapes like a rectangle, circle and path in an easy way. If you want to feel a shape bounded by a black color line, you have to implement a flood fill (or seed fill) algorithm to accomplish the purpose and if the area to fill is big (relatively to screen size) you will see the area while is filled, whereas using SVG the fill effect is quite instantaneous. Adapting the drawing to different form factors: viewport and viewBox As outlined, we start our SVG drawing with a specific resolution in pixel of 2560 x 1440 and every drawing is loaded dynamically into the DOM from a file inside the Windows Store app. This specific value has been chosen for convenience, you can start fixing others as well. In Paint 4 Kids we want use a single drawing and make it scale at different resolutions. Look at the following images of the same drawing running in the Windows Simulator at different resolutions. 
 The first one is taken simulating a 10-inch monitor at the resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels and the second one on a 27-inch monitor at the resolution of 2560 x 1440. This fixed resolution give us a sort of virtual space coordinate system. In SVG we can set this coordinate system using the viewBox attribute. If you use a tool to draw using this coordinate system, all the graphical elements are relatively to this coordinate system. Now if you want to scale down (or up) from this resolution to a specific one, suppose for example that your tablet has a resolution of 1366 x 768, you have only to set the width and height attributes on the SVG element that contains your drawing. These last two attributes define the viewport of the SVG, that is the actual resolution of our device in this scenario. The value of the viewBox consists of four numbers that represent the minimum x-coordinate, minimum y-coordinate, width and height of the coordinate system that you want to map and scale on the viewport. So combining the viewBox, width and height attributes give us the expected result. The following is the root SVG element of every drawing, a simple XML file. The coordinate system starts at the top, left corner or the screen, as you may expect if you have already worked with SVG. <svg viewbox="0 0 2560 1440">... When the drawing is loaded into DOM that happens when the user select a drawing to color, we can set the viewport attributes.
To find the root of an unnamed SVG element we use document.querySelector API, using a pseudo-class selector to find the first SVG element. Because this API is called only once, when user select an element to draw, we can overlook any performance lag. var svgd; svgd = document.querySelector("svg:first-of-type"); svgd.setAttribute("width", window.innerWidth); svgd.setAttribute("height", window.innerHeight); The code sample also use the window object and its properties inner* to get the actual resolution in pixel at runtime. Another consideration when dealing with viewport and viewBox is aspect ratio. If the two coordinate systems have different ratio of width and height, sometime you want that the resulting image fit non-uniformly. In other scenarios, you may want that the aspect ratio is preserved and the image scaled uniformly. SVG use the preserveAspectRatio attribute to decide if the image have to be scaled uniformly or not. We will discuss this later when we speak about "stamps". For the drawings the default behavior that scale the viewBox uniformly to fit the viewport just works as we want. How to fill a path with colors and images Fill a SVG shape, like a path, a rectangle or others is a very easy step and it is quite instantaneous, because it is like setting a style property in CSS, so you don't need to write the code to find every single pixel surrounded by a line. You can look at the code below that it is the call back function when a tap event is fired inside the SVG area. var el = document.elementFromPoint(e.x, e.y); var selectedColor = "255,0,0,1"; el.setAttribute("style", "fill:rgba(" + selectedColor + "); stroke-width:3;); In the code above the e is an object of type MSPointerEvent. This object is very important, you can get this object if you subscribe to some of the MSPointer* events (like MSPointerDown). With a single line of code you can subscribe to an event that comes from mouse, touch and even from a pen! Also inside the MSPointerEvent you can, if needed, read the pointerType property that give you the detailed information of which kind of device generate the event. If you are interested on this topic, you can read this blog post on the APIs for the touch input on IE 10 and Windows Store apps. Back to the code, the e object here is only used to get the x, y point coordinates from the input device, using the elementFromPoint API. el now is the specific shape we want to fill with a color, and it is of type SVGPathElement. The rest of the code is straightforward, setting the fill color and the line stroke width of the SVGPathElement, regardless of the actual shape that it really is. Instead of using the setAttirbute API you could also directly set the fill and strokeWidth property on the SVGPathElement, avoiding the string parsing can give you more performance; even though will not be perceived by the user in this scenario. In the sample, the color is a standard solid RGBA color that the user can chose from a colors' palette, but you can also fill the shape with a path coming from an image or using gradients. Paint 4 Kids defines not only a common set of colors, but also some images, like stones, grass etc. To do that in SVG you can define some patterns as in the code below: <pattern id="imgPatterns_1" patternUnits="userSpaceOnUse" width="128" height="128"> <image xlink:href="../images/BRICK.PNG" width="128" height="128" /> </pattern> Two thinks to note in the code: first, we are defining a SVGPatternElement that it based on the imaged contained. Second, you can define the patternUnits property that define how to fill a shape with the pattern itself. The userSpaceOnuse simply repeat the image more and more times without padding between them. Once the pattern is defined, we can use in the fill property used above using the following syntax: var selectedColor = "url(#imgPatterns_1)"; el.setAttribute("style", "fill:" + selectedColor + "; stroke-width:3;); Looking at the code, you can notice that the fill property it is now a url that use the id of the pattern element defined above, preceded by the # symbol (e.g. #imgPattern_1). See the images below so see some pattern effects in use. 
Reusing SVG elements for the "Stamps" Paint 4 Kids give you also the possibility to insert some shapes into your drawing as stamps that you can attach to the painting. For the user a stamp is a shape like a pumpkin, or a ball that they can put into the drawing wherever they want, they can also decide the size of the shape; and they can insert the same shape more and more times into the drawing. From an SVG perspective, every shape could be complex, as you want, so inserting the same shape more and more times, could eventually make your DOM bigger and bigger and at the end making your app to some performance lags on slow devices. It is crucial here to optimize how manage this scenario. To implement that feature we have used a combination of a symbol and a use element in SVG. The symbol element provide a way to group element, but when a symbol element is added to the DOM of the page it isn't displayed, so you can use it as something that you can re-use. Therefore, we can insert a complex SVG shape onetime and reuse it more and more times using the use keyword. In the following example, you see some SVG code. <symbol id="bottiglia" viewBox="0 0 40 40" preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet" > <path …> </symbol> <use id="onlyforimg" xlink:href="#bottiglia" height ="80" width="80"></use> A path – omitted for brevity – that contains the actual shape is contained into a symbol element that also defines a viewBox to set the size of the shape when it was originally drawn. The viewBox here is necessary because we can resize the shape in the use element underneath, where we set the height and width doubling the original size – this was another desideratum as explained above. The use element has a reference to the id attribute of the symbol element as you can easily notice from the code above. Furthermore, the use is very small and thank to this, we can reuse it more and more times, eventually changing the size of the drawing, reducing the size of the DOM. In the real app, the use element is created dynamically in JavaScript setting not only the width and height, but also the x and y coordinate to position the shape in a way that the center of the shape is where the use tap the screen. To do this some math – that it is not explained here – is necessary to set these two coordinates. To make all the stuff work, we need to use the preserveAspectRatio using the meet attribute to obtain a uniform scaling, so that the viewBox is fully contained, not sliced when mapped on the viewport and also set the alignment. xMin aligns the minimum x of viewBox with left corner of viewport and yMin aligns the minimum y of viewBox with top edge of viewport. You can get the full reference of these values from the SVG specs here. Loading SVG files The preceding part of the article discussed about standard SVG that could eventually run directly into a modern browser. From now on, we will mix some Windows Store APIs that can be used for build a Windows Store app that are specific of the Windows 8 platform, and could eventually be called from other supported languages. Because Paint 4 Kids uses many drawings, a single drawing is loaded asynchronously when needed from the appx file and then put into the DOM of the page. The async loading is done using Windows 8 load async API as it shown in the code. A Windows Store app prevents us from loading dynamic code into the DOM, this is because in general this code can come from an external call and eventually create some security issues in your app if the code is malignant. However, the code that we are loading is trusted, because it already in appx file and it is provided by us. You can safely call the WinJS.Utilities.setInnerHTMLUnsafe function that allow us to load the drawing into the DOM when needed. svgfolder.getFileAsync("drawing.svg").then(function (file) { file.openAsync(Windows.Storage.FileAccessMode.read).then(function (stream) { inputStream = stream.getInputStreamAt(0); reader = new Windows.Storage.Streams.DataReader(inputStream); size = stream.size; reader.loadAsync(size).then(function () { svg = reader.readString(size); WinJS.Utilities.setInnerHTMLUnsafe(document.getElementById("s1"), svg); }); }); }); The svgFolder is an object of type StorageFolder, you can call an async method for searching a storageFile object – here error handling is omitted – on which we can open a stream and a dataReader object for reading the content. At the end, the svg variable contains a string that represents the entire SVG drawing. As explained above we can call the setInnerHTMLUnsafe to add the drawing to the s1 DOM element. Nice here is that the SVG can be inspected into DOM Explorer in Visual Studio 2012, as show below: 
You can select, for example, a specific shape from the app at runtime – it also works from the Simulator – and the DOM Explorer will show you the associated SVG at runtime, the one that could be the result of the dynamic loading and subsequent transformation applied to it. Very cool stuff! Converting the SVG drawing into Canvas and saving to an image Something you need a jpeg of the drawing, for example if you want to save the drawing to the file system or if you want to use the Windows 8 Share Charm or in general in other parts of the app. To do that we have used the canvg library that converts an SVG file to a Canvas object. The conversion can takes some times, depending of the SVG file size and your hardware platform, so you can notify the user that something it is going on, we use flyout with a progress ring that shows up when the conversion starts. Now that you have the Canvas object you can get a reference to the entire byte array, then you can use Windows encoding API to get an image of the desired format and size. Below a sample function: function doSaveDrawingToFileEnd (fil) { var Imaging = Windows.Graphics.Imaging; var stream, encoderId, cc, offset, outputPixelData; fil.openAsync(Windows.Storage.FileAccessMode.readWrite).then(function (_stream){ stream = _stream; return Imaging.BitmapEncoder.createAsync(jpegEncoderId, stream); }).then(function (encoder) { cc = document.getElementById('canvas'); //ignore the realBRectHeight variable below //it is not important to understanding the logic offset = (height - realBRectHeight) / 2; outputPixelData = cc.getContext("2d").getImageData(0, offset, cc.width,cc.height - offset); encoder.setPixelData(Imaging.BitmapPixelFormat.rgba8, Imaging.BitmapAlphaMode.straight, width, realBRectHeight, 90, 90, outputPixelData.data); return encoder.flushAsync(); }).then(null, function (error) { console.log(error.message); }).then(function () { if (stream) stream.close(); }) } First you get a reference to a storageFile object – not outlined into the code – the fil variable, that will be our final jpeg image; than you open a stream for writing and create a BitmapEncoder object setting the encoding type to jpegEncoderId, this is used to encode the byte array into your desired image. The cc variable is a reference to the canvas object that contains the converted SVG file. Using the standard getImageData method, we get the bytes that we want to convert – in the code you can see an offset value used to clip a specific part of the drawing, but you can ignore this value here because it is not particularly useful to understand the logic. Now using the setPixelData API with the encoder you can set some values for the image to be generated, the image is actually generated when the flushAsync is called. Wrapping Up Throughout this article, we have seen some technical consideration about SVG and how it has been used in Paint 4 Kids. SVG is a very fun and powerful web technology that you can leverage to build amazing Windows Store apps with JavaScript. You can also play with SVG directly into the browser searching some funny samples on IE Test drive site. I hope this helps if you have a similar scenario. If you want to learn more about how to build Windows Store app, check out App Builder About the Author Pietro Brambati is a passionate developer ninja. He likes working with different kind of languages and frameworks, working on different size applications, scaling from mobile device apps to large, enterprise- ready applications. He has been working with Microsoft as Technical Evangelist where he has the opportunity to work with developer and academic community. You can reach him at the main developer events and hackathon all around Italy or from his blog or twitter. SponsorsProfessional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications  | | ITU Aims At 20Mbps Broadband For All By 2020 Mar 19th 2013, 04:06 Mark.JUK writes "Dr Hamadoun Touré, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has proposed to 'dream big' by setting a new broadband access target for the world. 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