Did Someone just code up the Rules of Robotics?

Interesting report on the efforts to reduce moral judgments into code.  Its a fun fun read just to try your hand at the trolley problem.  Are you as moral as a machine?  Or less?

Can Robots Make Ethical Decisions? | LiveScience

The authors of the paper claim that they have been successful in modeling these difficult moral problems in computer logic. They accomplished this feat by resolving the hidden rules that people use in making moral judgments and then modeling them for the computer using prospective logic programs.

More on Google’s lost Gears

Here is a good article that summarizes the moves to provide browsers that manage offline storage (without a need for Google’s Gears) and that these plans are not really tied so much to HTML5 but to other working group specs.   Its an interesting discussion about the best choice for the implementation of the offline storage management: SQLite or NoSQL?

assertTrue( ): Will HTML5 be SQL-free?

Be that as it may, the decision facing the browser-makers at this point is what kind of offline storage to use for browser-mediated web apps. Specifically, will the underlying store support SQL, or not?

Goodbye to Gears

We hardly knew ye.

Google Dumps Gears for HTML5

As one Google rep told the L.A. Times, “We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.”

Glassfish v3 Essential Survival Guide

Handy tips for when you trade up from v2.

Putting GlassFish v3 in Production: Essential Survival Guide | Javalobby

At the end, once your OSGi/EE 6 application is ready, you still want to have the same great performance you’ve got with GlassFish v2. This blog will gives some hints about how to configure and prepare GlassFish v3 for production use.

Java 7 time savers

Here’s a nice summary of some of the less controversial language changes in Java 7.  Very glad to see the automatic resource management, for example.

New language features in Java 7 « JoeJag :: Tech

Here are 7 of the new features that have been completed:

* Language support for collections
* Automatic Resource Management
* Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation (diamond)
* Underscores in numeric literals
* Strings in switch
* Binary literals
* Simplified Varargs Method Invocation

via DZone

What it costs to lose a developer

Well, OK.  This post is a little gratuitous and self-serving.  But the article is full of little tidbits, not the least of which are in the comments.  For example: Alex writes: “The rule of thumb in HR is that it will cost, on average, between 1.5 and 2 times the annual salary to replace someone.”  Which might make your average Scotsman wonder: “Could I be earning twice my income by repeatedly flipping my job for HR instead of holding on to it?”

The High Cost of Losing a Developer – Dave Laribee – CodeBetter.Com – Stuff you need to Code Better!

Yes, you might be able to replace someone at a lower annual salary, but you have to take into account the complexity of your code portfolio in how long it’ll take to make that person productive. A $60K/annum employee may very well take $120K before reaching the productivity level and contribution of the developer who left the team.

Installing Go on Mac Leopard

Helpful tip son installing Google’s new programming language on a Mac.  Enjoy.

Installing Google Go on Mac OS X Leopard (Wongo’s Scraps of Code)

Google released a new programming language named GO that offers the benefits of a dynamic language like Python with the speed of a compiled language like C/C++. In this walkthrough, I’m going to be installing the Google Go programming language on my Mac.

Use Google Voice to control just about any computer.

Here you go.   This guy has an example and some hints.  Basically, you write some code to grab messages that are transcribed by Google Voice and then parse and act on the results.  A python version of the Google Voice interface is available at Google Code.  I didn’t see a Java interface, but it should not be too difficult to build.

This is a poller, but if Google ever enables Voice with pubsubhubbub, this could make a pretty passable way to enable cell-based real-time voice control over just about any process.

The Davis Blog » Blog Archive » Voice2LED Project

The other python script, named checkvoicemail.py is where all the cool stuff happens. Using the PyGoogleVoice module of python, this script checks my Google Voice account for voicemails. I have it set to only read the most recent message. It parses the voicemail and checks it to see if “Message” is the first word. If it isn’t, it sits back and waits for one that does.

Bootable Rescue SD card or USB for Mac OS X

Here you go.  Instructions for building a bootable flash device for Mac OS X.   The article is about SD cards and newer Macs, but the coments point to USB as an alternative for older Intel-based Macs.

Build a Bootable Rescue SD Card For Your Mac | Mac|Life

For the hardcore users out there, Apple decided to give the SD port super powers — you can use it to build a bootable SD card. That bootable card can then become an awesome tool for performing emergency hard drive repairs, data recovery, recovering deleted files, and much more

Oracle and Netbeans

Here is the most in-depth dissection of Oracle’s position on suporting the NetBeans IDE that I have yet seen.

InfoQ: Oracle Announced Plans for the Future of Sun’s Products, but Raised Concerns about NetBeans

The announcement makes clear that the Oracle will continue to invest in Sun hardware, in Solaris, SPARC, GlassFish and OpenOffice.

…

Likewise Oracle’s statement about NetBeans is unclear and doesn’t guarantee that the company will continue to invest in this IDE:

via Slashdot.