Dart, for the uninitiated, is a web programming language Google developed, and revealed last year at the GOTO conference. “At Google we’ve written our share of web apps, and we’ve tried in many ways to make improvements to that development process, short of introducing a new language,” Google says on the official Dart site. “Now we think it’s time to take that leap. We designed Dart to be easy to write development tools for, well-suited to modern app development, and capable of high-performance implementations.”

DartBox2D is actually the result of Google’s “20% time” culture.

“Box2D has been ported to other languages, including JavaScript, but this release opens the door to Dart becoming a language for games on the web, which, as we all know, is what the web is really for (that and pictures of cats, of course). The work was started by two interns at Google, Greg Bigelow and Ahmed Hussein, continued by Joel Webber, and finished up by Dominic Hamon,” says Hamon, part of Google’s “Make the Web Faster” team.

“DartBox2D is a straight port from the Java version and isn’t yet using all of the great features the Dart developers have built into Dart, but moving forward it will become a template for how to write great Dart code,” he adds. “The ease with which this port was developed speaks to the great job the Dart team have done with the language.”

So far they’ve created the following demos:

BallCage
Bench2D
BlobTest
CircleStress
DominoTest
DominoTower

A Google Group has been created for discussion of Dartbox2D.

Broadband Choices put out the following infographic.

Sources for the data are listed at the bottom of the graphic.

via

The news first started as rumor reported on by TechUnwrapped but eventually was confirmed by Facebook to multiple sources. Facebook hasn’t yet specified what Hotz will be doing for the company, only stated that he is now on the payroll.

The 21-year-old is also known as Geohot and gained fame back in 2007 when he unlocked the iPhone, allowing it to run on any network. He eventually traded the hacked gadget for a Nissan 350Z.

More recently, he just ended a long battle with Sony over his hacking of the PS3. After successfully jailbreaking the console, he disseminated his methods online. Sony threw a fit and eventually won a restraining order against Hotz. He was barred from further distribution of his techniques on the web and was also forced to surrender his computers to Sony. This made some people a little bit angry.

Anonymous launched OpSony party becuase of how Sony treated “fellow hacker GeoHot.” They released a statement accusing Sony of “abusing the judicial system in an attempt to censor information.”

A few months after the restraining order, Hotz and Sony quietly settled the matter and released a joint statement that failed to go into much detail. Hotz then said he was “happy to have the litigation” behind him.

Here’s some of the Twitter response, and boy is there a lot –

I guess the big question is why? For Facebook, were they simply impressed by his talents and grabbed him to fill their team with the best people around? As many have suggested, is it a keeps your enemies closer type of thing? Maybe they hired the hacker to help tighten up their own security?

One speculation is that he may have been brought on to aid in developing Project Spartan, an HTML platform that would take on Apple’s App Store. Others say that its possible that Hotz will be working on the new Facebook app for the iPad.

Whatever the reason, it’s clear that Facebook has chosen to embrace the hacking culture. Years ago they hired Chris Putnam, another hacker that created a way to face Facebook resemble MySpace. After tracking it to him, they offered him a job. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?

Original Article: Google has open sourced its own programming language, which it simply calls "Go." The company still calls Go experimental. Google’s Go Team describes the language:

Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Go comes with built-in support for concurrency, what Google calls a "novel" type system, and as mentioned above, it is apparently really fast. Google says most builds take well under a second.

The following clip provides some more info about the language:

The Go site offers a number of documents, such as a tutorial, a FAQ page, a tech talk, language specification, memory model, and more. There are how-tos for installing Go and contributing code. There is command documentation, package documentation, and source files. If you’re a developer itching to mess around with a new language, go dig in.

Related Articles:

> Google Developers Produce New Programming Language

> Open Android Alliance Poses Problem For Google

> Google Gives Android Developers a Donut

Other parts of the new Noop homepage (which is hosted by Google Code) explain that Noop "in source form looks similar to Java.  The goal is to build dependency injection and testability into the language from the beginning, rather than rely on third-party libraries as all other languages do."

Then, "Immutability and minimal variable scope are encouraged by making final/const behavior the default and providing easy access to a functional style.  Testability is encouraged by providing Dependency Injection at the language level and a compact constructor injection syntax."

The Noop website is pretty well built out if you’d like more information.  Google’s developers provided all sorts of details about the current state of things and where Noop may go, as well as a place or two in which folks can give feedback.

It’ll be interesting to see what sort of traction this Google-y venture into programming languages gets.  Reactions seem a bit muted so far.

Hat tip goes to Darryl K. Taft.

Here’s the cached copy.

Impending crises need at least a 30 year run-up—we knew there’d be an energy crisis for at least that long, right?—and it’s not too early to sound the alarms on this one. It may sound unlikely, we’re already Moore’s Law generations past 32-bit systems; just think what we’ll be running three decades. 

I generally preferred words to math and programming, so talk of “signed integers” and “time_t” is lost on me, but I did gather from Wilcox’s post that at eight seconds past 3:14 a.m., on January 19, 2038, most computers in the world will think it’s actually a quarter to 9 p.m. on December 13, 1901.

That’s a big, big problem, and apparently a more complicated one than what we faced in 2000.

“So, if all goes normally,” writes Wilcox, “19-January-2038 will suddenly become 13-December-1901 in every time_t across the globe, and every date calculation based on this figure will go haywire.  And it gets worse.  Most of the support functions that use the time_t data type cannot handle negative time_t values at all.  They simply fail and return an error code.  Now, most ‘good’ C and C++ programmers know that they are supposed to write their programs in such a way that each function call is checked for an error return, so that the program will still behave nicely even when things don’t go as planned.  But all too often, the simple, basic, everyday functions they call will ‘almost never’ return an error code, so an error condition simply isn’t checked for.”    

Why won’t we beyond 32 bit by that time? Also included in the original post is an explanation about the expense of building new systems and how computer companies tend to rely on cheap, older technology for building basic new technology. In this case, some technology in use in 2038, might span all the way back to the 1970s.

Hey babe, dust off Dad’s old 8-track so we can share some Earth Wind & Fire magic with the grandkids.
 

Snow is falling outside the lead-lined writers’ room at WebProNews, a chilly enough afternoon that one’s thoughts turn to a hot cup of Java after being outside playing “where’s the icescraper” in the trunk of the car.

For those in warmer climes, or perhaps nestled somewhere away from windows that aren’t of the code-development variety, programmers started receiving the news today about the 2008 edition of JavaOne.

Sun announced today they had culled nearly 1,700 submissions to a neighborhood of 350 for conference sessions. Some featured ones mentioned cover topics like JavaServer Faces, touch UI in mobile Java-based devices, and creating location-based services and apps on the Java platform.

Java University takes place May 5, the day before JavaOne opens. Morning and afternoon classes, a few bonus evening classes, and an all-day course on enterprise application design list in the curriculum.

As a final note, the Duke’s Choice awards return for a sixth appearance. Submissions for award consideration need to be made by March 14th, only a month away. Who will be the next Bang! Howdy?

What is MapReduce? What does it do?

Suppose you’re at work, and you need to do something that’s going to take a long time to run on your computer. You don’t want to wait. But you don’t want to go out and spend a couple of million dollars buying a supercomputer. How do you make it run faster? One way is buy a whole bunch of cheap machines, and make it run on all of them at once. Another is to notice that your office has lots of computers – pretty much every office has a computer on the desk of every employee. And at any given moment, most of those computers aren’t doing much. So why not take advantage of that? When your machine isn’t doing much, you let you coworkers borrow the capability you’re not using; when you need to do something, you can borrow their machines. So when you need to run something big, you can easily find a pool of a dozen machines.

The problem with that approach is that most programs aren’t written to run on a dozen machines. They’re written to run on one machine. To split a hard task among a lot of computers is hard.

MapReduce is a library that lets you adopt a particular, stylized way of programming that’s easy to split among a bunch of machines. The basic idea is that you divide the job into two parts: a Map, and a Reduce. Map basically takes the problem, splits it into sub-parts, and sends the sub-parts to different machines – so all the pieces run at the same time. Reduce takes the results from the sub-parts and combines them back together to get a single answer.

The key to how MapReduce does things is to take input as, conceptually, a list of records. The records are split among the different machines by the map. The result of the map computation is a list of key/value pairs. Reduce takes each set of values that has the same key, and combines them into a single value. So Map takes a set of data chunks, and produces key/value pairs; reduce merges things, so that instead of a set of key/value pair sets, you get one result. You can’t tell whether the job was split into 100 pieces or 2 pieces; the end result looks pretty much like the result of a single map.

Mark adds that “The beauty of MapReduce is that it’s easy to write.” and that MapReduce (or “M/R”) programs are “really as easy as parallel programming ever gets.” For a more in-depth look at MapReduce and some actual source code, take a look at the Google research publication on the subject.

[Via Friendfeed. Mark’s post is Creative Commons-licensed.]

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Hot on the heels of Google’s Android initiative, Yahoo is announcing its own developer platform. The Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform will provide tools for developers to code and launch mobile widgets for a wide range of cell phones. Here are the details from Yahoo:

• The platform is an open environment for developers to create mobile Widgets for instant access by millions of consumers.
• Widgets created on the Mobile Widget Platform will be available to consumers from various starting points, including Yahoo! Go 3.0 and Yahoo!’s new mobile homepage.
• The platform will enable developers to write code once and publish their content across Yahoo!’s mobile network, allowing accelerated delivery of a feature-rich mobile experience.
• The platform will enable consumers more control over their experience, as well, by providing the functionality to add and delete Widgets at any time.
• Full-featured SDK for developers to be introduced over the coming weeks.
• Third-party Widget launch partners include, eBay, MySpace, and MTV.

In addition to the new mobile widget platform, Yahoo is today launching Yahoo Go 3.0 beta. Along with some interface upgrades, Yahoo Go 3.0 provides an “open” environment offering Yahoo!’s full selection of Mobile Widgets developed by third parties.

The announcement will be officially made at around 11 a.m. PT at CES.

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After playing Pokemon online he got the notion that he wanted to make something like that. He pestered me for days about setting him up so he could make cool games where his friends could checkout his games. I struggled for a few days trying to find a solution for him. He’s seven so there has to be some reward for the initial work he does to keep his interest. You can’t just throw a seven year old in the deep end and let him flounder.

What could I do to get a kid that age making web pages that were interesting quickly? I could set him up on my server but I didn’t want to do that just yet. The thought of installing Dreamweaver on his box teaching him how to use it didn’t seem like fun. Naturally after thinking about it, it came down to finding a service  with good online editor. Google Page Creator of course popped into my head and the rest was history.We signed him up for Google Apps for families. It was very painless. I bought him his domain for $10 via Google Checkout and that was it. I had him signed in, added as an admin, and having him customize his domains start page in 30 minutes.

Then he started make pages asking me for help as needed. He uploaded a pic of his dog, added a protest about coal power, and shared his newest obsession, Turtle programing, in short order. He thought the results were “awesome!“.

It just makes a nerd dad proud.

I know soon he’ll  outgrow the training wheels  that Googles Page Creator is providing him. For now though this is just the thing. It gets him him started and opens the door to conversations about how it all works.

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