Microsoft Fixes 22 Bugs in July Patch Tuesday – Mobile and Wireless – News & Reviews – eWeek.com.

Read the whole article at PCWorld

Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are enjoying Google+ right now. What’s stopping Google from letting millions more join in the fun?

By Lance Ulanoff

Google+ will not become the social network it wants to be until Google lets everybody in. Open the doors, Google. Take the heat. It’s going to take some time to reach three quarters of a billion users.

Google+ is only a week old, but I’m now on record demanding that the search engine giant open thisremarkably polished social-networking playground to the masses. It seems, though, I am alone in my opinion. When I posted the above sentiment on Google+, I was met with a flood of disagreement (and a teeny tiny bit of agreement).

"It’s in beta," they argued. I reminded them that Gmail was in beta for years, yet open to all. "Limiting supply" will only fuel demand, they told me. They reminded me that Google often starts with closed betas (they did do this on Gmail), and I countered with "foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds." Actually, I never said that. In fact, the conversation was so interesting—it even included a surprise appearances by TwiT founder and star Leo Laporte and lengthy posts from Geek.com’s Russell Holly—that I decided to let the conversation speak for itself.

Where possible, I’ve removed the timestamps and anything that was clearly off-topic, and cleaned up egregious typos and misspellings (not just my own). You’ll note that I informed all who were in the thread that I might turn the whole conversation into a column. By the way, for all I know the conversation is still ongoing. You can view it here if you have a Google account, but you can’t participate unless you’re a Google+ member.

By Ian Paul, PCWorld    Jul 4, 2011 10:45 AM

This story originally posted at 6:03 Pacific Time; it was updated at 10:45 a.m.

An official Fox News Twitter account falsely reported that President Barack Obama had been assassinated after hackers gained access to the account early Monday. The phony messages were posted to the Fox News Politics Twitter account sometime before 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time Monday and were still live more than five hours later.

The account has more than 33,000 followers. A group calling itself the Script Kiddies claimed responsibility for the hack, according to The Next Web.

By mid-morning Eastern Time, Fox had regained control of its Fox News Politics Twitter account, a spokesperson told PCWorld. The company removed the offending tweets and says it is working with the microblogging service to deal with the hack as quickly as possible.

"We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts," says Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital.

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http://burlingame.patch.com/articles/blame-ben-franklin-for-daylight-saving-time-14

Google Releases Recently-Acquired Instantiations Development Tools, Free Of Charge

Jason Kincaid

10 hours ago

Back in August Google acquired Instantiations, the developer of a suite of popular development tools focused on Google’s Google Web Toolkit, a Java development environment that makes it easier to build AJAXy applications. The most well-known of these tools is GWT Designer — a powerful plugin for Eclipse that allows developers to visualize their programs. Before the acquisition GWT Designer and Instantiation’s other programs used to cost hundreds of dollars. Today, Google is releasing them for free.

It’s not a surprising move, but it will sure make GWT developers happy: they’ll save hundreds of dollars, and the apps will now be prominently featured on GWT’s home page so developers who may not have been aware of them before will see them.

Here’s an outline of what each product does, from Google’s GWT blog:

GWT Designer
A powerful set of Eclipse-based development tools that enables Java developers to quickly create user interfaces for AJAX/rich internet applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

CodePro AnalytiX
A comprehensive automated software code quality and security analysis toolkit to improve software quality, reliability, and maintainability in developer applications.

WindowBuilder Pro
Java graphical user interface designer for Swing, SWT, RCP, XWT and GWT UI framework.

WindowTester Pro
Test GUI interactions within Java client rich applications for the SWT and Swing UI frameworks .

VA set to spend billions on IT.

Computerworld - The U.S. Veterans Administration is making upward of $12 billion in IT contracts available to businesses over the next five years, as part of an effort to modernize its operations.

The VA spends about $3.5 billion annually in IT, a figure that Input, a government market research, estimates is increasing at 10% annually as demand for veterans’ services increases, said Kevin Plexico, an analyst at the Reston, Va.-based firm.

The VA has changed how it acquires technology, creating a program called Transformation Twenty-One total Technology or T-4 for short. Previously, the VA would acquire much of technology through blanket contracts that General Services Administration negotiated with tech vendors.

But with T4, the VA is shifting to its own purchasing and creating a one-stop shop. It is doing this to gain more control more control over vendor selection and management, said Plexico.

In a speech this month at a meeting of Veterans small businesses convention, Eric Shinseki, the VA secretary, told the group that the “VA’s information technology issues are significant.”

The agency has been canceling IT projects that haven’t met expectations, including a decision this month to drop a $500 million project to modernize financial management systems.

The VA’s T4 spending plan includes $7 billion in VA IT procurement, or about $1 billion a year over the next five years. Another $5 billion will come through other VA contracts with other agencies. The VA last week

The VA contracts will cover a full range of IT services, including security, networks, and hardware from the desktops to data centers.

The agency is also hiring IT workers. Of the 1,200 IT jobs being advertised by the federal government, approximately 200 are VA related. The Department of Homeland Security has 274 IT openings.

Federal agencies are, overall, more optimistic about their ability to hire IT workers in the months ahead, according to a new survey. An ongoing survey of federal and state hiring trends by the CDW in its IT Monitor found that 29% of federal IT decision makers expect to hire IT staff, up 9 percentage points from April.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues forComputerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at  @DCgov or subscribe toPatrick’s RSS feed . His e-mail address ispthibodeau@computerworld.com.

Google Crowned ‘King of Malware’.

see tutorial

Today we’re going to take a look at sprite animation. There’s been a lot of talk this year about the future of technologies like Adobe’s Flash and for good reason – with the performance of JavaScript frameworks having come so far since they were first conceived, it’s now possible to create equally as powerful animations and effects without needing to use any third party plugins.In today’s screencast I’m going to show you what a sprite is and just how easy it can be to create an entire animated scene using jQuery, CSS & Sprites. You’ll also get to see some pretty cool out-in-the-wild examples of jQuery Sprite Animation in action, so why not check it out in my screencast below!

YouTube Mobile Site Trumps Dedicated App.