Technology News: The Hottest Technology Trends for 2014
Perhaps the most dynamic agent of change in the modern world is Technology. Positive technological innovations promise e breakthrough but due to absence of generous investment, backdated regulatory frameworks and gaps in understanding, solutions to many pressing global challenges are left unanswered. Technology and innovations mostly have a positive impact in our lives. We have expectations from these in the upcoming years. We should definitely be informed about what the firms are doing and in what they are investing and how they are willing to serve the people through such innovations. In this article the top technological trends for the year of 2014 have been highlighted.
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Programming News: GitHub data shows developers are turning to Swift
It’s been about six weeks now since Apple released Swift, its new language for iOS and OS X development, which is meant to eventually replace Objective-C. Not surprisingly, since its high visibility debut at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Swift has already attracted a noticeable amount of interest from developers. It debuted this month at number 16 on the TIOBE Programming Community index, which is based on search web results, and at number 10 on the PYPL Popularity of Programming Language index, which is based on searches for programming language tutorials. Clearly and, again, not surprisingly, Swift is off to a strong start in gaining a foothold with developers. Since the TIOBE and PYPL indices are based on what people are searching for, I wanted to take a look at how much actual Swift code had been written in the first few weeks. Are all of those searches resulting in developers actually learning and writing applications using Swift? To find out, I dug into GitHub Archive data using Google’s BigQuery.
Read full story => ITworld

Photography News: How to Ensure Your Lenses Always Give You the Sharpest Images
It’s a fact: your lenses are much more important than your cameras. They almost define the image quality that will come from the sensor, and they far outlast any DSLR or mirrorless camera made these days. But in order to make sure that these lenses last that long, you’ll need to properly maintain them and calibrate them for the best performance.
Read full story => ThePhoblographer

Technology News: CIOs must grasp emerging digital business technologies or face being marginalised
A range of new digital business technology represent a pressing challenge to IT managers but many CIOs do not grasp either the threat or the opportunity they pose according to the latest research from the analysts Gartner. For harassed CIOs the problem is simple to explain but difficult to deal with – there is just too much new technology for them to come to terms with. So Gartner has identified six core technology areas that CIOs and IT managers have to consider, although it admits that these do not represent all the areas they might want to consider.
Read full story => ZDnet

Programming News: 7 Blogs You Should Really Read If You Are A Student Programmer
If you want to succeed as a programmer, you need to immerse yourself in the programming culture. This is more true if you’re still a pupil. The field of programming is so broad and there’s so much information to absorb that you’ll never come out on top if you participate from a distance. Fortunately, blogs are a readily accessible medium keep you in the loop. Just to be clear, these programming blogs are NOT meant to replace hands-on practice or proper instruction. If you’re a complete novice, you should first pick a programming language to learn and then start by learning the basics. Once your feet are wet, that’s when these blogs will come in handy and boost your skills up a few notches.
Read full story => MakeUseOf

Photography News: 23 Photos That Are So Hard To Believe, You’ll Think They Were Photoshopped
Photoshop experts can create photos so convincing that they play tricks on our mind and convince us that what we are seeing is real. What is even more amazing than clever photoshopped pictures are pictures that you can’t believe aren’t photoshopped. From natural phenomenons to perfectly timed photographs, these photos will have you scratching your head.
Read full story => Diply

Technology News: Future Looks Bright From Silicon Valley
Maybe embracing the future is an occupational hazard of working for a Silicon Valley high-tech enterprise. Or maybe it’s inherent in our times – times when the pace of change and stunning innovation seems to accelerate hourly. But I found myself nodding enthusiastically while reading (in the print edition, no less) the Wall Street Journal’s special section on the future. The section, published to celebrate the Journal’s 125th anniversary, was written by entertainment, arts and industry leaders, who by-and-large see great things ahead – most of it powered by technological evolution. No doubt, dark forces will remain with us. The old questions about using technology for good or evil will remain, though my guess is we’ll become even more sophisticated about how we embrace technology and how we mitigate the potential downsides that even positive change can produce.
Read full story => HuffingtonPost

Programming News: 6 Reasons Not to Switch to Java 8 Just Yet
Java 8 is awesome. Period. But… after we had the chance to have fun and play around with it, the time has come to quit avoiding the grain of salt. All good things come with a price and in this post I will share the main pain points of Java 8. Make sure you’re aware of these before upgrading and letting go of 7.
Read full story => Dzone

Photography News: 40 Movies about Photograph every Photographer should watch
Film making and photography go hand-in-hand. In film making, the art of cinematography is lost with photography. The skill to present moving images in such postcard-like material is in itself a direct descendant of the art of still-photography. If a photographer truly wants to improve his or her craft, they need to study how filmmakers and cinematographers captures moving images on the screen. Just as important is for still photographers to watch films that depict he art of photography through Hollywood’s eye and also visit the stories of celebrated photographers through documentaries. Here are 40 notable movies about photography every photographer should watch… in no particular order.
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Technology News: Technology 101: What Do We Need To Know About The Future We’re Creating?
Are we awake to the world we’re building, or are we, as an old Sufi saying goes, merely asleep in life’s waiting room? The petroleum economy, nuclear power, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, lasers, organ transplants, telephone and television and personal computer networks — today’s technologies have put staggering amounts of power into the hands of billions of people. More power is on its way in the next several decades, as present scientific knowledge drives future technological capability. Do we know what to do with the powers over matter, mind, and life that tomorrow’s technologies will grant us?
Read full story => HybridPedagogy

Programming News: 10 Tips to Push Your Git Skills to the Next Level
Recently we published a couple of tutorials to get you familiar with Git basics and using Git in a team environment. The commands that we discussed were about enough to help a developer survive in the Git world. In this post, we will try to explore how to manage your time effectively and make full use of the features that Git provides.
Read full story => SitePoint

Photography News: Combining Rules of Composition to Improve Your Landscape Images
One of the most elusive and frustrating elements of photography is finding the right composition. Many otherwise good images are often derailed by poor compositional choices. There are several primary rules of composition to be aware of, and by being aware of them, and then combining them, you can give your landscape photos a real boost in terms of interest.
Read full story => DigitalPhotographySchool

Technology News: US Appeals Court rules warrantless phone location tracking is illegal
A US court has ruled that police and other law enforcement agencies must obtain a search warrant before acquiring location data stored in cellphones and smartphones. Three judges in the US Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit agreed on Wednesday that acquiring records of which cell towers connect to a smartphone and tablet, as well as when they connect, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures.
Read full story => ZDNet

Programming News: An Introduction to Event-Based Programming
This post looks at how applications components typically interact. Event-based programming, also called event-driven architecture (EDA) is an architectural style in which one or more components in a software system execute in response to receiving one or more event notifications.
Read full story => Dzone

Photography News: 10 Safety Tips For Photographers When Traveling
10 Safety Tips For Photographers When Traveling – Here’s a quick list of 10 tips to help you keep your camera safe while on holiday.
Read full story => ePhotoZine

Technology News: The FCC Was Hacked After John Oliver Called for Net Neutrality Trolls
When HBO host John Oliver called for Internet trolls to deluge the Federal Communications Commission with comments about net neutrality, he may not have expected for the FCC’s site to get shut down. That, however, is exactly what happened, but it wasn’t because Oliver’s viewers overwhelmed the site with public comments, as was widely reported. In fact, shortly after Oliver’s 13-minute rant last Sunday, the FCC’s website was compromised by an external barrage that effectively shut down the site’s commenting system using database Denial of Service tactics, the FCC confirmed to Motherboard on Tuesday.
Read full story => Motherboard

Programming News: Google Open Sources Its Secret Weapon in Cloud Computing
When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg. Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.
Read full story => Wired

Photography News: 20 Gifts Every Photographer Father Can Enjoy for Father’s Day
With Father’s Day right around the corner, we all know that Dad wants something a bit better than what he has right now. And in all honesty, he probably deserves it. If you want some suggestions for the photographer Dad, here are some ideas of great gifts to get him.
Read full story => ThePhoblographer

“Survey: More Teens Are Buying iPhones, And Craving An iWatch” (It’s Forbes so no link).

Which is useful information, because now we can gauge how teens react to things about which they know nothing. Turns out they crave things about which they know nothing!
Read full story => Macworld

Technology News: Internet Of Things Demands Open Standards
Next-generation computing and Internet networking – a combination I call “connected computing” – promises great potential as we move toward an Internet of Things-enabled future. But first, we must vastly improve interoperability and communications protocols, common processing and programming interfaces, and tools to dissolve the barriers between diverse computing platforms, devices, and operating systems. If this effort fails, the Internet of Things will be seriously hampered at best. At worst, it will be little more than the Internet of Babel. The Internet of Things describes a vast array of Internet-connected devices, appliances, sensors, and objects, and their virtual representations – “things” that are managed, inventoried, and monitored wirelessly. ABI Research estimates there will be more than 30 billion wirelessly connected devices by the end of the decade. By 2020 – a mere six years from now – Gartner Group predicts the aggregated value and economic benefit of IoT will exceed $19 trillion.
Read full story => InformationWeek

Programming News: Bloody Cert Certified
Oh, Information Disclosure vulnerabilities. Truly the Rodney Dangerfield of vulns, people never quite know what their impact is going to be. With Memory Corruption, we’ve basically accepted that a sufficiently skilled attacker always has enough degrees of freedom to at least unreliably achieve arbitrary code execution (and from there, by the way, to leak arbitrary information like private keys). With Information Disclosure, even the straight up finder of Heartbleed has his doubts:

Neel Mehta @neelmehta – Heap allocation patterns make private key exposure unlikely for #heartbleed #dontpanic.

So, can Heartbleed leak private keys in the real world or not? The best way to resolve this discussion is PoC||GTFO (Proof of Concept, or you can figure out the rest). CloudFlare threw up a challenge page to steal their key. It would appear Fedor Indutny and Illkka Mattila have successfully done just that. Now, what’s kind of neat is that because this is a crypto challenge, Fedor can actually prove he pulled this off, in a way everyone else can prove but nobody else can duplicate.
Read full story => DanKaminsky

Photography News: 5 digital camera features no photographer should be without
Every camera has a plethora of different features and functions, but it can be bewildering to know which ones to use and when, so we’ve come-up with the five essential digital camera features you need to master to help you get perfect results every time. Some of these, such as back-button focusing, take a little time to master, but it’s well worth taking the time to get to grips with them, as once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them. No matter what subject you’re shooting, we guarantee they will change the way you shoot forever, and will result not just in better images, but images that you previously thought were impossible. Don’t believe us? Read on to learn more…
Read full story => DigitalCameraWorld

Technology News: Twitter Blocked in Turkey as Prime Minister Pledges to ‘Eradicate’ It
There’s electioneering, and then there’s what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Thursday on the campaign trail. “We will eradicate Twitter,” Erdoğan told a rally in Bursa in the west of the country. “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” There are roughly 10 million Twitter users based in Turkey. To drive the point home, Erdoğan added: “Twitter, mwitter!” — although there appears to be some dispute about how to translate that — it’s either a “semantically empty phrase” or an indication that Erdoğan will shut down Twitter and similar websites. What happened next was no laughing matter. The Prime Minister’s office issued a statement saying that Turkish officials had “no option” other than to ban Twitter, according to Reuters. Shortly afterwards, tweets and screenshots began to show that Twitter (and possibly also Facebook) was being blocked in Turkey, as of 4:30pm ET.
Read full story => Mashable

Programming News: Top ten best PHP frameworks for 2014
PHP is a very powerful and well known platform. Almost 50% of the web is powered by PHP. If you are a PHP developer then you should know that framework make things simple, manageable and fun to work with. There are many PHP frameworks out there so its probably hard to chose one. In this post i have compiled a list of top ten PHP frameworks for 2014. Every framework stated here has it’s advantages and disadvantages. In this post i have briefly described about each framework and their uses. Enjoy!
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Photography News: Nine Important Tips for Travel Photography
Travel photography involves the presentation of an area’s customs, cultures, history, people and landscape. Travel photographers have to face numerous challenges in their endeavors since they have to shoot a wide range of subjects under different conditions. Here are a few tips that can help travel photographers.
Read full story => Jugglu

Technology News: Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too
Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s widespread efforts to eavesdrop on the web’s most popular services — including Google and Microsoft and Facebook — the leaders of these companies have called on the government to be more transparent about the data it’s lifting wholesale from their private operations. But lost in this debate over privacy and national security is another question: How often are these internet companies snooping on their customers themselves? You can now read polished and detailed “transparency reports” that explain how often Google, Facebook, and Microsoft respond to government requests for user data, but these reports don’t say how often the companies are doing this on their own.
Read full story => Wired

Programming News: Java 8 Released! — Lambdas Tutorial
To celebrate the release of Java 8 which was released just minutes ago, I am publishing a draft version of my Java 8 Lambdas Tutorial. It is a nice visual way to learn the Streams API, and will help you get started taking advantage of lambdas in your own applications from day 1. This article is scheduled to appear in the next Java Magazine release, so please look forward to the final version, and I will do my best to incorporate comments and feedback if they meet the publication deadline. Java lambdas are the most impactful feature to enter the Java language since the release of generics in Java 5. It fundamentally changes the programming model, allowing a functional style of development, and supports efficient parallelization of code to take advantage of multi-core systems. Although as a Java developer you will first notice the productivity improvements that you gain using the new lambda-enabled APIs in Java 8. In this article we will walk you through the new Streams API for working with collections and data by using a retro game written in JavaFX. This game is both a simple Java 8 application written from the ground up to showcase lambdas best practices, and also a visual guide to programming with the Streams API. However, we will first lay the foundation with an introduction to the lambdas language changes.
Read full story => JavaCodeGeeks

Photography News: The Ultimate Guide to Bokeh
Bokehliscious photos. That is the ultimate goal for any photographer no matter the experience level. When “bokeh” is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the lens and the aperture. Although both play vital roles in bokeh, there are a few key elements that play an even more important role in achieving the finest milkyness in a photo. These requisites aren’t often discussed or even seen as necessary. Three years ago, I picked up my good friend’s DSLR for the first time. The first question I asked him was “how do photographers blur out the background and keep their subject sharp?” It was bokeh that attracted me to photography and to this day, melting away the background and separating it from my subject is still one of the most important things to me.
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Technology News: Techies see future where Web flows like electricity
As the World Wide Web celebrates its 25th year Wednesday, top techies are looking ahead over the next 25 years, to a future when the Web will be woven more deeply, and seamlessly, into our lives. A Pew Internet Research Project report finds that techies believe that by 2039, accessing the Internet will be like flipping a switch for electricity today. “Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own social networks, which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation,” David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT, told Pew researchers, according to the report. “More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices.” Connected devices, he added, will be more pervasive and less visible, working behind the scenes.
Read full story => ComputerWorld

Programming News: A Problem So Simple That It Took Decades To Solve
Last week’s article was the last in a series discussing the problems of floating-point input and output conversion, leading up to a seemingly simple question: What is the ideal default precision for floating-point output? This question does not arise for floating-point input because we know the precision of both the input that the user provided and the variable in which the input is to be put. With output, however, we know only the variable’s precision; we do not know how many decimal digits should represent that variable. We have already established that idempotence is important. That is, when we convert a floating-point value to decimal with enough precision, and we read that converted value in again, we should get exactly the same bits. It is even easy for us to figure out how many digits will preserve the number’s value exactly, namely the same number of digits after the decimal point as the number of bits that the original number had after its binary point. But here is where the easy part of the problem ends.
Read full story => DrDobbs

Photography News: 10 beginner tips to the 28mm focal length
So, you just got a camera that has it’s lens stuck at the 28mm focal length. Maybe the Ricoh GR, the Nikon Coolpix A or maybe the Fuji WCL X100 adapter. You’re freaking out. The world is HUGE! How are you going to make images with such a wide field of view??? Stop. Don’t panic, breathe. It’s going to be ok. Here’s the beginner’s guide to the 28mm focal length to get you started. A 28mm lens is considered a wide angle lens. The free photography course will get into the inner workings of what that maeans, but for now, it basically means that you can cram more into your image than a longer lens like 50mm.
Read full story => TheInspiredEye