About a month ago we mentioned in a post that Microsoft will earn $444 millions from Android patent agreements. Microsoft has won another battle in the Android patent war and it now has its tenth licence agreement. The newest agreement is with Compal, a Taiwanese company with about $28 billions annual revenue. Big news for Microsoft which now has agreements with more than 50% of the companies who produce Android devices (about 55%).
avaFX is a platform for developing rich client applications and also rich internet applications (RIA). With JavaFX 2.0 you can create JavaFX applications completely with Java code. This was not able with the previous version and it was a main reason why many developers didn’t choose JavaFX for their applications. Now you write the application and then you can deploy it as a desktop application or as a web application. In JavaFX 2.0 you can use FXML, a new XML-based markup language, to define the user interface. Version 2.0 has also a new graphics engine to handle modern GPUs and a new media engine based on the GStreamer multimedia framework.
Few months ago I had some reports (PDF files) that I wanted to bind them into one. I had a utility that until that time was merging my files successfully, I don’t want to name it here. Those reports seemed to have some characters that the utility could not read and it was failing. I have searched the internet and I have found several PDF binders, mergers and joiners but the ones I tried didn’t meet my needs, so I have decided to create one. The result of this story is the Ultra PDF Merger. It succeed when others have failed.
ilver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm, works with Microsoft in order to bid on Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! in the past and apparently it didn’t give up. If we consider the search market share of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, it is obvious why Microsoft wants Yahoo!. Google’s search market share in the U.S is about 65.4%, Yahoo!’s is about 17.2% and Microsoft’s 13.4%. Microsoft is in the third place and has about the 1/5 of Google’s market share. By acquiring Yahoo! Microsoft is automatically moved to the second place with almost the half search market share of number one in the U.S which is huge.
You do know the story about the Trojan Horse, don’t you? Here is the summary of the story. During the Troy war and after a long and unsuccessful siege, Greeks found this clever plan. They left a big wooden horse outside the Troy walls as a victory trophy and they got into their ships and they pretended to sail away. That nasty horse had Greek men inside and Trojans pulled it inside the city walls. During the night Greeks sailed back and the men that were inside the horse opened the gates and you can imagine (if you don’t already know) the result.
As you might already know, all information that is passed over the Internet and it is not encrypted can be viewed by anyone (with the knowledge). The only way to secure your data and your privacy is with SSL encryption, also known as HTTPS. Google will force logged in users to use secured searching by redirecting to https://www.google.com and then back to http://www.google.com after logging out. One letter can make the difference, the extra ‘s’ means privacy and secured searching. Google was testing this feature for a while through https://encrypted.google.com which is still in beta.
I couldn’t have a category science (even in news) and not posting this one. Quantum Levitation, it is amazing. The video is from Association of Science – Technology Centers (ASTC) 2011. The group that shows this is the superconductivity group from Tel-Aviv university (school of physics and astronomy). It shows a superconductor locked in a magnetic field. I have watched this video three times and then I searched more and I have found the next video which is even cooler.
There are many hacktivists and several hacker groups out there and new ones are added almost daily. A new (to me) group with the name “Team SwaStika” have released the details of 10000 facebook accounts. The details were released to Pastebin but now are not there, at least not to their original post as Pastebin removed both parts. Team Swastika claims to be the most powerful hacking group of Nepal and their next target is Nepal Government website. Their slogan is “Fight for justice. Justice to freedom. Never give up. Never back down”. Their logo is a swastika but it is the result of a combination of 4 ‘L’s, “(Good) Luck”, “Love”, “Light” and “Life”.
Extension Methods allow you to extend existing types by adding methods to them. The extension methods are special static methods and they are called the same way as type’s instance methods. In this example we will implement an extension method called IsPalindrome which extends strings and you can check them if they are palindrome. After that you can use the IsPalindrome() method just like any string method, for example Trim().
If you have an Android phone you probably have Google Translate app. If you don’t, you can download it from the market, it is free and very useful app. The newest version supports conversations, you can speak in English and your friend listen to you in Spanish and then respond to you in Spanish but hear him in English. It started looking a lot like the Babel fish from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Google Translate support 16 languages in Conversation Mode so far, English, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Czech, Polish, Russian and Turkish.