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Jan writes "Microsoft has open sourced the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool by releasing it under the GPLv2 license. The code is now available on CodePlex, Microsoft's Open Source software project hosting repository, over at wudt.codeplex.com. The actual installer for the tool is now again available for download at the Microsoft Store (2.59MB). (Microsoft previously took responsiblity for the violation.)"

Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive.

ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."

John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting: "Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."

hweimer writes "The German government plans on paying to set up a call center to help Windows users with malware infections. I think this has the effect of being a malware bailout for Microsoft, discouraging them and other software companies from writing better code and giving users little incentive to switch to more secure alternatives. How much government money is needed to run the call center is also not revealed." The call center, running in cooperation with ISPs (but not manufacturers), is envisioned to have a staff of about 40.

An anonymous reader writes "Molinker, a Chinese developer of iPhone apps, has been booted from the App Store after being caught trying to game the App Store review system. It seems reviewers were being paid off with free apps in return for 5-star reviews." This means the removal of over 1000 apps, described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."

zaxl writes "Palm is being sued by Artifex Software over the PDF viewer in Palm's Pre smartphone, which may violate the GNU GPL. Artifex alleges that Palm has copied Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, and integrated it into the Palm Pre's PDF viewer application without the proper licensing conditions. The entire application must be licensed under the GPL if muPDF is part of the application. It seems more and more cell phones are shipping with open source code, but in a closed manner."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TGDaily: "Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware. [A video describing their research is available.] 'Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,' says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. 'It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.' The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost."

CWmike writes "Microsoft has revamped the browser ballot screen demanded by European Union antitrust regulators and may get final approval as early as Dec. 15, a source familiar with the case has told Computerworld. As first reported by Bloomberg, Microsoft modified the ballot screen after rivals, including Opera Software and Mozilla, demanded changes. Last month, Opera, Mozilla and Google submitted change requests to the European Commission, asking that the order of the browsers be randomized and that the ballot be displayed in its own application, not in Internet Explorer. According to the source, who asked not to be identified because the terms of the settlement have not been officially approved, the top five browsers — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari — will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed."

An anonymous reader tips news that Intel has canceled plans for a consumer version of their long-awaited and oft-delayed Larrabee chip, opting instead to use it as a development platform product. From VentureBeat: "'Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,' said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. 'Larrabee will not be a consumer product.' In other words, it’s not entirely dead. It’s mostly dead. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, it will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. But Knuppfler said that Intel will continue to work on stand-alone graphics chip designs. He said the company would have more to say about that in 2010."

A course at the University of Michigan ends with a live concert featuring students using iPhones as instruments. “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“ teaches students to code musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit. Georg Essl, assistant professor of computer science and music, says, "What’s interesting is we blend the whole process. We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profits are donated to Free Software projects which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today." Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually.

jshamacher writes "I've used MythTV for several years (first on Slackware, now via Mythbuntu) and it's good. But not great — I have a list of annoyances as long as my arm. For example, even 0.22 still has problems playing many DVDs and I frequently have to fall back on Xine. Since upgrading to new hardware, I've had issues with sound dropping out; these problems only occur for Myth, not for anything else. So now I'm trying out alternatives. Freevo seemed promising when I tried it a few months ago but it had its own issues. I'm also increasingly getting pressure from my family to get things like NetFlix streaming working on this machine. This seems to imply migrating to a Windows-based solution. I threw XP on it and tried MediaPortal but could never get that to control my Motorola cable box via the IR blaster. So my questions to you: What DVR software do you use? Are you happy with it? What don't you like? Are there any packages out there that 'just work' as media hubs and for time-shifting cable TV?"

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."

Martijn de Boer writes "The book has been written to provide the reader with a short introduction to the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture with Java. The book covers the theory and analysis from the start and is progressing to a more intermediate level slowly throughout the different chapters. This book has been written for software architects and programmers of the Java language who have an interest in building software using SOA concepts in their applications. The cover hints to a series called “From Technologies to Solutions”, and that is exactly what this book tries to do, it tries to explain the SOA technology with different case studies and a path for solutions for your applications." Read below for the rest of Martijn's review.

Barence follows up to the ongoing Black Screen of Death Saga by saying "Microsoft says reports of 'Black Screen of Death' errors aren't caused by Windows Updates, as claimed by a British security firm. The software giant claims November's Windows Updates didn't alter registry keys in the way described by Prevx, which said that the Microsoft Patches caused PCs to boot with just a black screen and a Windows Explorer window. Microsoft is now blaming the problem on malware. Prevx has issued a grovelling apology on its own blog."

coondoggie writes "Soldiers may go into battle better prepared to handle equipment and with a greater knowledge of their surroundings after an intellectual property licensing deal Monday between Microsoft and Lockheed Martin that will deepen the defense giant's access to visual simulation technology. The intellectual property agreement between the two focuses on Microsoft ESP, a games-based visual simulation software platform for the PC."

MojoKid sends in a piece that takes a step back from Google's much-analyzed OS to look at what it is trying to accomplish. "Last week, Google open-sourced its Chromium OS project, more than a year before the operating system is scheduled for release. In doing so, Google hopes a variety of developers and companies will become involved in the project, and has pledged to release regular updates as well as a comprehensive log of bug reports and fixes. This article takes a look at Google's design vision for Chromium, the unique benefits it offers, and a bit of why Google is throwing its hat into this particular ring in the first place. Chromium, after all, is a Linux-based OS entering the smartbook/netbook market at a time when the product segment is already being well served by a variety of Linux distros, XP, and Windows 7. In the midst of all these options, do we need another operating system? We just might."

Arguendo writes "Martin Goetz, who obtained the first software patent in 1968, has penned a thoughtful defense of software patents for Patently-O. Goetz argues that there is no principled difference between software and hardware patents and that truly patentable software innovations require just as much ingenuity and advancement as any other kind of patentable subject matter. The Supreme Court is of course currently considering whether to change the scope of patentable subject matter in the Bilski case, which we've discussed before." Does it weaken Goetz's argument that his description of the software lifecycle harks back to the waterfall days and bears little resemblance to current development practice in open source and/or Internet contexts?

Ponca City, We love you writes to tell us that a new software approach to police sketch artists is finding surprising success in a trial run of 15 police departments in the UK and a few other sites. The software borrows principles from evolution with an interactive genetic algorithm that progressively changes as witnesses try to remember specific details. Current field trials are reporting an increase in successful identification by as much as double conventional methods. A short video with a few working shots of the new "EFIT-V" system is also available on YouTube. "[Researcher Christopher Solomon]'s software generates its own faces that progressively evolve to match the witness' memories. The witness starts with a general description such as 'I remember a young white male with dark hair.' Nine different computer-generated faces that roughly fit the description are generated, and the witness identifies the best and worst matches. The software uses the best fit as a template to automatically generate nine new faces with slightly tweaked features, based on what it learned from the rejected faces. 'Over a number of generations, the computer can learn what face you're looking for,' says Solomon. The mathematics underlying the software is borrowed from Solomon's experience using optics to image turbulence in the atmosphere in the 1990s."