Archive for July, 2007

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta)

Microsoft has released a new RDC client for MAC OSX.
Remote Desktop Connection Client lets you connect to a Microsoft Windows-based computer and work with programs and files on that computer from your Macintosh computer. Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta) includes the following new features:
Universal Binary
Runs natively on both Intel-based and PowerPC-based Macs.
Remote [...]

Safest Seat on a Plane, Or How to Survive a Crash

REALITY: It’s Safer In the Back.
That’s the conclusion of an exclusive Popular Mechanics study that examined every commercial jet crash in the United States, since 1971, that had both fatalities and survivors. The raw data from these 20 accidents has been languishing for decades in National Transportation Safety Board files, waiting to be analyzed by [...]

iPhone ‘Hello World’ Application

After many, many hours of intense work from “Nightwatch”, the first independent “Hello World”* application has been compiled and launched on the iPhone. This was made possible using the “ARM/Mach-O Toolchain”, Nightwatch’s “special project”, that he has been working on so carefully over the past few weeks. Certain parts of the toolchain (such as the [...]

Papervision 3D version 1.5 now 40% faster

I’ll start off with the high level info: This version of the engine has seen a 40%+ increase in speed! The API didn’t change a bit, and we added some new features like culling and InteractiveScene3D with Interactive materials.
Read more here

Six Minutes of Terror – Landing Humans on Mars

Universe Today has a fascinating article discussing the difficulty of executing EDL (entry, descent, landing) on Mars for vehicles bigger than MER, Viking and Pathfinder, and the challenges for manned craft in particular. Airbags can’t be used for obvious reasons, but the atmosphere is too thin to be used for parachutes or aerobraking by large [...]

IE Dropping, Now Near 70% In Europe

XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. The ascension of Firefox continues… Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn’t loose ground [...]

How can you possibly test modern software fully?

The common assumption about software testing is that “more is better”, and testing all the possible states and variable combinations guarantees you will find all the bugs.
In the real world, however, there is not enough time or enough testers to test every combination of every variable. Not all bugs will be found, making quality assurance [...]

PHP 4 End of Life Announcement

The PHP development team has announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. Critical security fixes will be made available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, there [...]

Microsoft .NET Patch May Make PCs Go “Haywire”

Various people are reporting that the MS07-040 patch for .NET released on Tuesday can cause a variety of seemingly unrelated problems. According to the SANS Internet Storm Center ‘the reports we got so far seem not to lead to any specific thing that happens in many cases, just various things going haywire.’ Some commentators on [...]

Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold

“Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next [...]