Technology News: Who Controls the Future of Technology?
I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, then got to my inbox to find both it and its opposite forwarded to me by Brad. The Journal says that the consumerization of technology wins out in the end, and that:

In the past, CIOs and their staff had a reputation for being snarky, geeky guys who were always looking for ways to tell employees what they couldn’t do. Now, at the most progressive companies, the tech department’s main job isn’t to say no. Instead, it’s to find a way to let employees safely run any device or program they like. The thinking goes like this: Employees are most productive when they’re allowed to work with the tools that make them happy.

Read full story => BusinessInsider

Programming News: PRADO – An Event Driven Web Programming PHP Framework
PRADO PHP is an open source PHP web programming framework for developing professional web applications. PRADO abbreviates to PHP Rapid Application Development Object Oriented. PRADO is allows event driven programming through its component based model. PRADO PHP has a pluggable & configurable modular architecture with stupendous support for Ajax Components. Prado as well supports localizable and customizable error handling , selective output caching & generic caching modules. In order to use this framework you only need a Web Server with PHP 5.1.0 and is ideal for building both commercial and open source applications. PRADO has a revised BSD license. You can use PRADO for building web apps that are user interactive , forums , e-commerce solutions , simple blogs, complex content management systems and even simple blogs.
Read full story => WebDeveloperJuice

Photography News: Waterfall Photography Tips and Techniques
Waterfalls seem to grab the hearts and minds of people. Go to any location that has one or more waterfalls and it is pretty much a guarantee that they will be a major attraction, if not the main attraction, of the area. However, as beautiful as waterfalls are, it is not so easy to capture that beauty with a camera. It is easy to produce pictures of waterfalls; it is not so easy to produce powerful images. Waterfalls provide their own unique set of problems which requires a unique set of solutions. This article is about those unique problems and the solutions that allow photographers to produce images that communicate the power and beauty that is inherent in the waterfalls that stand before their lenses.
Read full story => PictureCorrect

Technology News: Internet Is Energy Efficient, Despite What The Coal & Media Industries Might Tell You
For 14 years, I (and other scientists) have been debunking a myth created by the coal industry that the Internet is an energy hog. My first debunking (coauthored with California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld) dates back to December 1999, “The Internet Economy and Global Warming,” which the UK Guardian called a “seminal work.” I even testified to Congress on this not once but twice (see Senate testimony here). In fact, not only is the Internet not an energy hog, it often saves energy through dematerialization and substitution. Consider those movie videos you stream. You used to have to drive your car to Blockbuster to get them. Then you got DVDs in the mail. Now you get bits over the Internet. Sounds like progress. Heck, you may have noticed that transportation oil consumption in this country peaked years ago in part because Millennials weaned on the Internet and mobile devices aren’t buying cars and driving them as much as previous generations.
Read full story => CleanTechnica

Programming News: Object-Oriented PHP for Beginners
Twice a month, we revisit some of our readers’ favorite posts from through out the history of Nettuts+. This tutorial was first published in July, 2010. For many PHP programmers, object-oriented programming is a frightening concept, full of complicated syntax and other roadblocks. As detailed in my book, Pro PHP and jQuery, you’ll learn the concepts behind object-oriented programming (OOP), a style of coding in which related actions are grouped into classes to aid in creating more-compact, effective code.
Read full story => Tuts+

Photography News: How to Know if You’re Ready for a DSLR
You love taking pictures. You aren’t necessarily trying to make money from it, it’s just something you thoroughly enjoy — photography for photography’s sake. But one day at the zoo or at a graduation or at the beach during sunset, you slip your ultra slim point and shoot out of your pocket and are suddenly overcome with feelings of inadequacy when you look around and notice some of the impressive looking “professional” cameras that others are sporting. Of course you shouldn’t assess your worth as a photographer (or as a person) by what camera you own. That’s ridiculous. If you’re happy with your camera and what it can do for you — or, better yet, what you can do with it — then that’s all the really matters. But some people will inevitably grow disillusioned with their point and shoot camera. Some people will see others with their fancy DSLRs and feel compelled to make a similar upgrade, not necessarily out of envy, but out of a pressing desire to do more creatively.
Read full story => LightStalking

Technology News: 10 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time
In the technology world, bold predictions abound, and they should. Placing big bets in one direction or another is how this industry works. Some pundits try to make educated guesses about where tech is headed, while others prognosticate in reaction to disruptive technologies that could boost (or threaten) their business. As we all know, foretelling what’s going to happen in 5, 10 or 30 years is pretty much impossible, but some predictions are so spectacularly wrong that they should be immortalized. That’s why I’ve selected these gems from some of the biggest names, publications and research firms to present the 10 worst tech predictions of all time. A couple of these timelines haven’t yet passed, but I feel comfortable predicting them as total fails now.
Read full story => Yahoo! News

Programming News: 10 Best PHP Frameworks For Developers To Build Complex Web Apps Quickly
Technically, it is an open source server scripting language extensively used for the development of online properties. Generally, it is the most popular web development tool in the web world. PHP have introduced a revolution of building websites with designing pages instantly. Beginners consider it as a boon since understanding database connection, presentation code and interactive functions has become simpler and quicker. Plus, PHP frameworks help in writing reusable code. The pattern followed by PHP framework is MCV pattern that ensures separation of logic and presentation. Without diving in deeper arguments, checkout the 10 Best PHP Frameworks available right now.
Read full story => BestDesignTuts

Photography News: Tip Of The Day
Welcome to another new section from your favorite mobile photography website and one of the most popular in the world. Today, we’re publishing our eighteenth Mobile Photography/Art Tip Of The Day to our brand new section of the site. Each day we publish a short quick tip to help you with your mobile photography, this may be related to editing your image, capturing your image, printing your image, all manner of things, across the complete photographic and art mobile genre – we’ll be featuring great mobile street photography tips, great blending tips, great cloning tips, we will cover it all from some of the greatest mobile photographers and artists in the world. We’ll also have a widget in our right hand column, displaying the Tip of The Day every day, just click on that and you will be taken to our tip of the Day archive.
Read full story => TheAppWhisperer

Technology News: Shift to mobile hits tech giants’ bottom line
With the shift to mobile Internet gaining pace, some of the big tech firms are adapting and others are not. The latest earnings from the sector show that mobile is hitting the bottom line, either in positive or negative ways, at giants like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple. Facebook’s quarterly report this week showed how the world’s biggest social network profited from that shift, as it delivered earnings of $331 million and drew 41 percent of its ad revenues from mobile. Shares jumped 30 percent after the earnings, helping Facebook approach its price after its public offering in May 2012.
Read full story => ABS-CBN News

Programming News: Facebook invents a PHP virtual machine
Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems. “Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly,” said Joel Pobar, a Facebook engineering manager. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year.
Read full story => ComputerWorld

Photography News: “What’s In My Camera Bag?” Group Interviews: Travel Bloggers
The team at ViewBug is happy to present their first in a series of crowd-sourced photographer interviews, starting with travel bloggers! We’ve managed to catch ten top travel bloggers with a focus on photographer to share “What’s in their Camera Bag?” with our readers. From lists of lenses, high-tech accessories to minimalist setups, our group covers a range of what camera gear is used by popular travel bloggers. If you want to know any specific gear pictured but not mentioned, leave us a comment or ask the bloggers themselves on twitter. And if you love travel photography, make sure to share this post!
Read full story => ViewBug

Technology News: Technology kills a lot of industries, but why won’t the fax machine just die?
If Franz Kafka had written a “Seinfeld” scene, this would be it. After negotiating for two hours, the student loan provider promised to e-mail me the documents. I just needed to sign and send them back to end the nightmare. “You take e-mail, right?” I asked. “Actually, fax them to us,” she said. “The number’s at the top of the document.” “Really? I can’t just e-mail?” I asked. “We prefer faxes,” she said. “If we did everything over e-mail, we’d get an avalanche of messages. Things would get lost in the flurry.” “I guess I can see that,” I conceded. I know technology often creates as many problems as it solves, but faxing is, well, annoying. I tried again. Couldn’t I, just this once, e-mail back the files? Pretty please? She only laughed. “We get that all the time, too,” she said. “We can only take your document via fax — sorry.” Sheeh! Who faxes, anymore? Well, it turns out, more people than I thought.
Read full story => Time Techland

Programming News: From Procedural to Object Oriented PHP
This tutorial was inspired by a speech given by Robert C. Martin that I watched a year or so ago. The main subject of his talk is about the possibility of picking The Last Programming Language. He addresses topics such as why should such a language exist? And what it should look like? However, if you read between the lines, there was another interesting idea that caught my attention: the limitations that each programming paradigm imposes upon on us programmers. So before we get into how we could go about converting a procedural based PHP app into an object oriented one, I want to cover a little bit of theory beforehand.
Read full story => NetTuts+

Photography News: Lighting Techniques in Still Life Photography
Lighting Techniques in Still Life Photography requires careful planning of lighting and,in most cases, this is achieved by means of artificial light sources. The method, in essence is somewhat like the ways we wrote in DIY Photography Studio Setup Guide. In this Lighting Techniques in Still Life Photography we will see what is probably the most characteristic of this photographic genre. Usually, in essence proper lighting for each still life is achieved by means of artificial light sources, just as the portraits in the studio for fashion photography. The main light is the one that which determines the overall effect of the image, all other lights should scale. It is said that the light is more powerful, but it certainly is the most important, as it is entrusted with the task of illuminating the most interesting part of the subject.
Read full story => TheCustomizeWindows

Technology News: This is what the world will look like in 2045
“It’s not so hard to predict the future, but it’s sometimes hard to connect the dots.” In the opening of his lecture to the Global Futures 2045 Congress, famed geneticist Dr. George Church neatly summed up what being a futurist is all about, though he was reminding the audience rather than the other speakers assembled at Alice Tully Hall in New York City this past weekend. Gathered there by a young Russian tech tycoon on a mission to do nothing less than achieve immortality through technology, a who’s-who of renowned technologists, scientists, futurists, and entrepreneurs painted a sometimes terrifying, sometimes electrifying picture of what the world is going to look like in the decades to come, describing how technology is going to drastically alter economies, biologies, and perhaps even consciousness itself.
Read full story => CNN Money

Programming News: You use PHP because you don’t know better
My typical response when asked to defend a given offhand, derogatory comment I’ve just made about PHP is to cite the most excellent PHP is a fractal of bad design. But, spurred, by the numerous comments hating on me for hating on PHP on this Portugese translation of my PHP vs Python vs Ruby vs Clojure piece (which, to be fair, is emphatically biased), I’m going to go ahead and let the hate out now, as one big rant, so that I have something to refer to in the future (even though I bet I’ll find it embarrassing and childish then). PHP, as a programming language, is the worst language among all the languages I know how to program in. I have written and deployed code in PHP, C, Python, Java, Clojure, Coffeescript and Javascript, and dabbled in many others. PHP is, by a wide margin, the least consistent, most error-prone, worst-designed language of any I know.
Read full story => AdamBard

Photography News: Does Your Camera Define You?
I see the folks in the camera forums take sides all day long. “Canon is better than Nikon,” one guy says. The other says, “Nope Nikon is better than Canon.” Then it gets even more granular. “The D600 is better than the D7100,” one guy says. The other says, “Nope other way around.” Some people go so far as to use screen names like “NikonShooter” or “CanonShooter.” As I watch this back and forth I came to realize that much of my career I have been camera agnostic.
Read full story => PhotoFocus

Technology News: Happy Birthday, Raspberry Pi! A Chat With Creators Eben And Liz Upton, Pi-Friend Limor Fried
The Raspberry Pi project is one year old today, having launched on February 29, 2012 (they’re going to have a rager of a party in 2016.) I sat down with the Pi-parents themselves, Eben and Liz Upton, as well as Pi-supporter Limor Fried AKA Lady Ada of Adafruit Industries to talk about the special occasion. The current incarnation of the Pi, the Model B, just sold its millionth unit and the Uptons are hard at work at new versions of the beloved mini-computer. The popularity has stunned supporters in the UK and the US alike and we talked about education, the future of the Pi, the mystery of the ultra-rare Model A owned by Lady Ada, the only unit of its kind in America.
Read full story => TechCrunch

Programming News: PHP has reached its limit
Web developers need to get stuff done. Web development is constantly changing and the pressure from clients can be pretty high. Because, hey, it can’t be so hard to output that HTML and a bit of information from the database. Some time ago I switched to Ruby from PHP, because I was getting more and more frustrated. This meant to find new clients and learn some basic things from scratch. But it was rewarding. PHP strangely worked for many years but, although still many developers are using it, its time is over. It’s over because PHP has reached its limit where it simply cannot compete with other languages, specifically Python and Ruby.
Read full story => SloBlog

Photography News: Beginner Tips for Shooting Action Photography
Digital camera owners who are not that experienced in taking photos often find it hard to capture those action scenes they so desire. With their subjects being mobile, they may not be aware of what to do with their camera to take the best action shots. Indeed, it can be quite a challenge to engage in sports and action photography. Movements are fast and unpredictable, so you need to be quick in clicking your camera. Whatever type of digital camera you have, one really needs to take the extra effort to take clear pictures of people and animals in motion. It’s also best to learn the right techniques so you won’t get frustrated with your photos.
Read full story => PictureCorrect

Technology News: Will the personalised Web destroy discovery?
It’s been a big month for the evolution of the personalised web, led by Mark Zuckerberg and the unveiling of Graph Search. Much as the product has been lauded – it filling a gap in social search that we didn’t even really know existed – it has also been met with some criticism, not least around the fact that it limits the breadth of information you can access. The more tailored you make your search, the more limited the search results will be, with the default option of showing you Bing results really being no different to the current search experience in Facebook.
Read full story => The Next Web

Programming News: PHP 6: Pissing in the Wind
Before posting this article I sent it out to a few friends to give me a reality check. I got enough thumbs up to feel confident posting it, but Chris Hartjes asked me to check outside for the “wahmbulance”. I understand that this article is pointless, which to be fair – is the point.
Read full story => Phil Sturgeon

Photography News: Focus on: Water Photo Contest
Enter photos that emphasize the versatility of water. Whether it is a photo depicting the benefits of water (such as water used for farming, transportation, energy, or just plain fun) or a photo telling the tale of exactly how fierce water can be can, we want to see water from your perspective.
Read full story => Photo Compete

Technology News: China tightens ‘Great Firewall’ internet control with new technology
The Chinese government has introduced new technology to tighten controls on internet visibility within the country. China appears to be tightening its control of internet services that are able to burrow secretly through what is known as the “Great Firewall”, which prevents citizens there from reading some overseas content.
Read full story => The Guardian

Programming News: PHP sucks (but, some frameworks don’t)
I started web development with PHP, and I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Why? Keep reading. PHP (the language) sucks. There, I said it. You’ve probably heard this a ton of times before, but, here it is again. THERE ARE JUST WAY TOO MANY GLOBALS. Why in the world does md5() need to be global? Do you seriously use md5() in every single file? This is also a common occurrence, why on the planet are things like the order of haystack and needle the same everywhere? Is it really that hard to do?
Read full story => Pixelstech

Photography News: Quick Tip: Kill Reflections and Enhance Colors with a Polarizer
We mostly think of using polarizing filters to get saturated skies, but in fact they also work in the deep forest, to add pop to your pictures by eliminating reflections and enhancing colors. Polarizers do, in fact, remove reflections from non-metallic surfaces. The other truth about them is that they work best at an angle of 90 degrees to the sun, and that they are not the best choice if you’re using an extreme wide-angle lens (something wider than 28mm will cause problems): the effect will be uneven and you’ll probably not like it. Also polarizers can give you skies more blue than you want. Beware!
Read full story => Photo Tuts+

Technology News: How much would you pay to never see an online ad again?
Imagine a $120 box that sits between your cable modem (the box that brings the internet into your house) and your wireless router (the thing that fills your house with wifi) and blocks every kind of ad that can be delivered over the internet. No more ads on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. No more ads on webpages, in music streams, in front of videos, or on mobile apps.
Read full story => Quartz

Programming News: Marg – A Simple Request Router written in PHP
Marg is a simple HTTP Request Router, written in PHP. It has a very simple API and is motivated by my understanding and experience of using existing frameworks like Django, Flask, Drupal and some other pieces of code I have read in the past. Though I have written this code for my personal use, its free for anyone to use. The idea behind writing Marg was to have a boilerplate code for myself which I can use for my own projects.
Read full story => Vaidik Kapoor

Photography News: Places To Shoot
I have been thinking about compiling a list of interesting places around the US where close-up/macro photographers can shoot, and I’m not talking about the obvious well-known place like the national parks, I’m talking about the little unknown places.
Read full story => TinyLanscapes