Google has published code for Java to reduce the amount of hand coding needed for commonly occurring or popular features in applications. The search giant has slipped out its Google Collections Library 1.0, extending Sun Microsystems’ existing Java Collection Framework. The code has already been tested in Google’s GMail, Reader, Blogger, Docs & Spreadsheets, AdWords, [...]

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NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which searches for Earth-like planets in habitable zones beyond our solar system, has found five new exoplanets. NASA said on Monday that the exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system, are called Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b. Finding those planets, NASA says, justifies using Kepler as a means of [...]

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Google has asked the Federal Communications Commission to designate it as one of the administrators of a database for “white space” devices. For several years, Google has been among the companies urging the FCC to open up the “white spaces”–small amounts of spectrum between broadcast television channels–to unlicensed use. Google joined the White Spaces Database [...]

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Thinner laptops, 3D television and e-book readers are expected to be among the highlights of this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show that begins in Las Vegas on Thursday. The event, which serves as an annual kick-off for the world’s electronics industry, is expected to attract around 110,000 people, on par with last year. The show [...]

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A “monstrous” jump in demand for Android-equipped smartphones has turned the market upside down, a retail pollster said today. Of the people who told ChangeWave Research in a mid-December survey that they planned to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 21% said they expected to purchase a handset powered by Google’s Android operating [...]

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After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust — the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property. Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she is supporting two [...]

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It is easy to take a DVD to a friend’s house and watch it on his TV. But things are more complicated when digital video downloads are involved. A movie file bought from Blockbuster.com will not work on a Sony HDTV, for example, and videos from iTunes work only on devices with Apple software. At [...]

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With more than a week until Adobe is scheduled to patch a critical vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications, online thugs are targeting it with an unusually sophisticated attack. The PDF file uses what’s known as egg-hunting shellcode to compress the first phase of the malicious payload into 38 bytes, a tiny size that’s [...]

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The U.S. reached the 85,000 H-1B visa cap late last month thanks to a fourth quarter spike in demand. And, according to data recently released by the AFL-CIO labor union, most of the visa-holders are less than 35-years-old and most likely from India. About half work in computer-related occupations. The AFL-CIO compiled its numbers from [...]

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The approach, known as “sparse coding”, builds a virtual library of an artist’s works and breaks them down into the simplest possible visual elements. Verifiable works by that artist can be rebuilt using varying proportions of those simple elements, while imitators’ works cannot. The work is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...]

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