Apartments in Dubai - What you get for $10 Million ?
Published May 3rd, 2007 in Dream Homes
Monday, May 07, 2007
Top 5 javascript frameworks
By Justin Silverton
5) Yahoo! User Interface Library
The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.
Features
Two different types of components are available: Utilities and controls. The YUI utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh.
utilities available:
- Animation: Create “cinematic effects” on your pages by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements. These effects can be used to reinforce the user’s understanding of changes happening on the page.
- Browser History Manager: Developers of rich internet applications want bookmarks to target not just pages but page states and they want the browser’s back button to operate meaningfully within their application’s screens. Browser History Manager provides bookmarking and back button control in rich internet applications.
- Connection Manager: This utility library helps manage XMLHttpRequest (commonly referred to as AJAX) transactions in a cross-browser fashion, including integrated support for form posts, error handling and callbacks. Connection Manager also supports file uploading.
- DataSource Utility: DataSource provides an interface for retrieving data from arrays, XHR services, and custom functions with integrated caching and Connection Manager support.
- Dom Collection:The DOM Utility is an umbrella object comprising a variety of convenience methods for common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.
- Drag & Drop: Create draggable objects that can be picked up and dropped elsewhere on the page. You write code for the “interesting moments” that are triggered at each stage of the interaction (such as when a dragged object crosses over a target); the utility handles all the housekeeping and keeps things working smoothly in all supported browsers.
Controls available:
- AutoComplete: The AutoComplete Control allows you to streamline user interactions involving text-entry; the control provides suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality based on a variety of data-source formats and supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
- Button Control: The Button Control provides checkbox, radio button, submit and menu-button UI elements that are more impactful visually and more powerful programmatically than the browser’s built-in form widgets.
- Calendar: The Calendar Control is a graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
- Container: The Container family of controls supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog and SimpleDialog. The Module and Overlay controls provide a platform for implementing additional, customized DHTML windowing patterns.
- DataTable Control: DataTable leverages the semantic markup of the HTML table and enhances it with sorting, column-resizing, inline editing of data fields, and more.
- Logger: The YUI Logger provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the FireBug extension for Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console. Debug builds of YUI Library components are integrated with Logger to output messages for debugging implementations.
- Menu: Application-style fly-out menus require just a few lines of code with the Menu Control. Menus can be generated entirely in JavaScript or can be layered on top of semantic unordered lists.
Download and more information: here
4) Prototype
Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.
Features
- Easily deploy ajax applications: Besides simple requests, this module also deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling.
- DOM extending: adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $(’comments’).addClassName(’active’).show() to get the element with the ID ‘comments’, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).
- Utilizes JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is a light-weight and fast alternative to XML in Ajax requests
Download and more information here
3) Rico
Designed for building rich Internet applications.
Features
- Animation Effects: provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on
- Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.
- Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.
- AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.
Download and more information here
2) Qooxdoo
qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source multipurpose AJAX frameworks, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL. It includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.
Features
- Client detection: qooxdoo knows what browser is being used and makes this information available to you.
- Browser abstraction: qooxdoo includes a browser abstraction layer which tries to abstract all browser specifics to one common “standard”. This simplifies the real coding of countless objects by allowing you to focus on what you want and not “how to want it”. The browser abstraction layer comes with some basic functions often needed when creating real GUIs. For example, runtime styles or positions (in multiple relations: page, client and screen) of each element in your document.
- Advanced property implementation: qooxdoo supports “real” properties for objects. This means any class can define properties which the created instances should have. The addProperty handler also adds getter and setter functions. The only thing one needs to add - should you need it - is a modifier function.
- Event Management: qooxdoo comes with its own event interface. This includes event registration and deregistration functions.
Furthermore there is the possibility to call the target function in any object context. (The default is the object which defines the event listener.) The event system normalizes differences between the browsers, includes support for mousewheel, doubleclick and other fancy stuff. qooxdoo also comes with an advanced capture feature which allows you to capture all events when a user drags something around for example.
Download and more information here
1) Dojo
Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”.
Features
- Multiple Points Of Entry: A fundamental concept in the design of Dojo is “multiple points of entry”. This term means that Dojo should work very hard to make sure that users should be able to start using Dojo at the level they are most comfortable with.
- Interpreter Independence: Dojo tries very hard to ensure that it’s possible to support at least the very core of the system on as many JavaScript enabled platforms as possible. This will allow Dojo to serve as a “standard library” for JavaScript programmers as they move between client-side, server-side, and desktop programming environments.
- Unifies several codebases: builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, and f(m)).
Download and more information here
Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated
WASHINGTON — When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”
For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.
The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued.
Recent investigations by state attorneys general and Congress have highlighted how the department failed to clamp down on gifts and incentives that lenders offered to universities and their financial aid officers to get more student loans. Under this pressure, the department is now seeking to set new rules.
The subsidy payments that Mr. Oberg uncovered are another corner of the lending system on which the department long failed to act, critics say, letting millions of dollars flow from the public treasury to about a dozen lenders.
The department now says it did not fully understand the extent of the maneuvers the loan companies were making to get the subsidies until last September, when its inspector general investigated and issued a report detailing manipulations carried out by a Nebraska lender, Nelnet. The audit recommended that the department recover $278 million from the lender, but education officials instead reached a settlement allowing Nelnet to keep the money but cutting it off from further subsidies that it claimed it was eligible to receive.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education committee, has asked Ms. Spellings to turn over documents related to the settlement decision. She is likely to come under questioning about the Nelnet settlement on May 10, at a hearing of the House education committee.
Mr. Oberg, now retired, has a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska and a doctorate in political science from the Free University of Berlin. He is a former Navy officer, university professor, and aide to Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat, from 1979 to 1984. He was an Education Department liaison to Congress under the Clinton administration.
The subsidy payment issue that came to preoccupy Mr. Oberg grew out of decisions Congress made in the 1980s to ensure that low-cost student loans were available at a time when the economy was souring. Lawmakers guaranteed nonprofit lenders a rate of return of 9.5 percent on student loans that were financed by tax-exempt bonds to protect the companies from spiraling costs.
Congress eliminated much of the subsidy program in 1993 because interest rates had dropped, but at that time retained the 9.5 percent return for existing loans. By 2002, lenders had devised ways to inflate the volume of loans for which they received the 9.5 percent subsidies. Congress closed one loophole in 2004, but lenders found others. Congress further restricted the subsidies in 2006.
In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed legislation to eliminate all references to the subsidies from the Higher Education Act in an effort to rein them in. Mr. Oberg took the legislation to Sally Stroup, who was then serving as senior aide to the Republican chairman of the House education committee.
“Sally told me there was no way that language was coming out,” Mr. Oberg recalled. “She didn’t give a reason — just forget it.” Ms. Stroup, who went on to become an assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration, and who is now back as an aide on Capitol Hill, did not return several phone calls and messages left for comment.
In 2000, Mr. Oberg transferred to the department’s research operation, and two years into the Bush administration, began to review the government filings of Nelnet and other lenders. He found that not only were payments to lenders rising rapidly, but also that the base amounts of the loans lenders were claiming as eligible for the 9.5 percent subsidies were exploding.
“Several big lending agencies were gaming the system,” Mr. Oberg said in a recent interview at his home in Rockville, Md.
He notified the Education Department’s inspector general’s office. He also told his superiors but felt they were brushing him off. So in November 2003, he wrote a memorandum for general distribution throughout the department warning that lender manipulations could cost the government billions unless stopped, and he recommended that the secretary could end the abuse with a letter to lenders clarifying government rules.
That is when his supervisor, Mr. Whitehurst, director of the department’s Institute for Education Sciences, stepped in. Mr. Whitehurst said that he had forwarded Mr. Oberg’s memorandum to appropriate senior officials, whom he declined to identify, but acknowledged that he “wasn’t real happy” because he considered Mr. Oberg’s research to be outside his job description.
“Plus, I didn’t understand the issues,” Mr. Whitehurst said recently. “In retrospect, it looks like he identified an important issue and came up with a reasonable solution. But it was Greek to me at the time — preferential interest rates on bonds? I didn’t know what he was doing, except that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”
He told Mr. Oberg to stop because he wanted him to be monitoring grants, not lending practices. Officials also rewrote Mr. Oberg’s job description, documents show, barring him from further research into the subsidies. Although Mr. Oberg was a civil servant, the Bush administration may have seen him as a holdover from the Clinton administration.
Mr. Oberg said he decided to continue his research in his free time because, “If you tell some people they can’t do something, they want to do it all the more.”
But when he requested from his own department data on payments to lenders, known in the bureaucracy as the 9.5 percent Special Allowance Payments, Donald Conner, an analyst in the department’s postsecondary division, e-mailed Mr. Oberg saying, "I’m not permitted to give any 9.5 percent SAP information."
Mr. Whitehurst, in an interview, suggested that Mr. Oberg was viewed by some senior officials as an annoyance. “I was told he was like a dog on a bone, agitating on this issue,” Mr. Whitehurst said. Ms. Spellings did not reply to a memorandum Mr. Oberg sent her about waste in the loan program just before his 2005 retirement, Mr. Oberg said.
But Mr. Oberg’s warnings prompted a clamor in Congress and a string of reports by government investigators calling for a stop to the giveaways. Senior department officials disputed or declined to follow the recommendations of all of them.
A 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office urged the department to rewrite its regulations to save billions of dollars in future loan subsidy payments. But Ms. Stroup, who had once worked for one of the lending companies that is now under investigation for the subsidies, argued in response that it would be simpler for Congress to clamp down with new legislation. Mr. Paige repeated that argument in a letter to Mr. Kennedy, who was pressing the department to curb the subsidies.
Then, in 2005, the Education Department’s inspector general recommended that $36 million be recovered from a New Mexico lender. Ms. Spellings overruled the finding that the payments were improper and declined to recover the payments. And in January 2007, after the inspector general recommended that $278 million in overpayments be recovered from Nelnet, the department instead reached a settlement under which Nelnet could keep the money — if it dropped plans to bill the department for another $800 million in subsidies.
Nelnet was the nation’s most generous corporate donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2006, and its top three executives were the largest individual donors to the committee as well, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.
Nelnet was also well connected at the department. Don Bouc, Nelnet’s president through 2004 and president emeritus thereafter, sat on the department’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance from 2001 through Feb. 1 of this year, even while the department was auditing the company’s subsidies and negotiating the settlement. Mr. Bouc resigned from the committee 11 days after the department announced that it would not seek to recover the $278 million.
Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said Mr. Bouc’s service for the committee was unrelated to the audit.
Robert Shireman, a researcher in Berkeley, Calif., who co-authored a private nonprofit group’s 2004 report on the subsidies called “Money for Nothing,” said, “There has been an outrageous lack of interest at the Education Department in doing anything to stop the bleeding.”
Then this January, turning to a measure Mr. Oberg had recommended in 2003, the department issued a “subregulatory guidance” letter cutting off subsidy payments to all lenders except those who prove their eligibility with an audit.
Kristin D. Conklin, a senior adviser at the department, said the department had been unaware, until its inspector general issued its Nelnet audit last September, that lenders were collecting subsidy payments on loans that were clearly ineligible.
That audit documented how Nelnet had transferred loans repeatedly into and out of tax-exempt bonds issued before 1993 to expand the volume of loans eligible for the subsidies. The audit identified so-called first-generation loans, financed from the pre-1993 bonds, and second-generation loans, financed from the proceeds of the first-generation loans, as eligible for the government subsidies. It said later-generation loans were ineligible.
“It’s not like we were sitting on this big problem and didn’t address it,” Ms. Conklin said. “We didn’t know the extent to which these third- and fourth-generation loans were being used. The full scope of this problem first became known to us in September, and we moved seriously to address it in the following months.”
Ms. Conklin also said the department had previously lacked the power to cut off overpayments using a simple letter. Only intervening legislation passed by Congress made that possible, she said. Today, with Mr. Oberg’s predictions proven accurate, he has become a bit of a celebrity. Mr. Kennedy arranged his testimony before the Senate in February.
“Taxpayers owe a tip of the hat to former Nebraskan Jon Oberg, who blew the whistle on the scheme that allowed companies to grab hundreds of millions in subsidies,” the Lincoln Journal Star wrote in October.
HOWTO own a 128-bit number!
Would you like to be the exclusive owner of a number, with the right to sue other people for knowing your number or telling other people what it is? Now you can.
Last week, the AACS consortium made history by issuing legal threats against the 1.8 million web-pages (and counting) that mentioned its secret code for preventing HD-DVD discs from being copied.
In effect, AACS-LA (the AACS Licensing Authority) claimed that it owned a randomly chosen 128-bit number, and that anyone who possessed or transmitted that number was breaking the law. Moreover, it claimed to own millions more random numbers -- claimed that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises telling people how to break anti-copying software, gave it exclusive dominion over its many keys.
Why should the AACS get all the fun? Princeton prof Ed Felten has come up with a great way of giving out legally protected 128-bit numbers to anyone who wants them. If he gives out 2^128 of these, then all 128-bit numbers will be owned and no one will ever be able to use a 128-bit key without breaking the law. Good times.
Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.My number is AF BC 9C 5D DA 6B 7A A8 7C 33 A1 2B E7 D3 EA 11. You aren't allowed to know this number. I also reloaded the page and generated a few more numbers. I'm not telling you what they are, but I'll be setting up a Google alert for them and if I catch you using them, I'm gonna take your house away. LinkThe haiku is copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten:
We own integers, Says AACS LA. You can own one too.
See also: AACS vows to fight people who publish the key AACS DRM body censors Cory's class blog Digg users revolt over AACS key Secret AACS numbers, the photoshopped edition Side effect of AACS turmoil: MSM turns on Web 2.0? UPDATED Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken - processing keys extracted EFF explains the law on AACS keys More AACS spoofs: WOW protest, and PSA vid: Think Before You Post HD-DVD/Blu-Ray cracker muslix64 interviewed Web-page aggregates links to "forbidden numbers" used to break HD-DVD
Photobucket Was A Steal v. Google/YouTube
Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8 billion. Photobucket is being acquired for just less than 1/5 of that - $250 million plus an earnout of up to $50 million
At the time of the announcement of their acquisition in October 2006 YouTube had very little revenue. Photobucket, however, is on track to blow through their projection of $25 million this year.
Also, the relative sizes of the two companies aren’t that far off. At the time of the acquisition, Comscore suggested that YouTube had approximately 25 million U.S. monthly visitors. Today, Photobucket has around 20 million U.S. monthly visitors, or 80% of what YouTube had when it was acquired.
Photobucket has 40 million registered users and is gaining another 85,000 or so per day. Their users are highly active, and upload a lot of content to the network. YouTube’s registered users were far below Photobucket’s 40 million at the time of their acquisition. YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and posting content.
Leaving revenue aside, the traffic numbers indicate a comparable price of $1.3 billion for Photobucket, 4x the price they actually received from MySpace. To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13.
Did Google overpay for YouTube? Did MySpace get Photobucket for a steal? Perhaps both. But in the end, being no. 1 in a category means you get a premium on acquisition. In the case of YouTube, that premium seems to be about 4x.
Another factor: Photobucket just didn’t generate the bidding hype that YouTube saw. It looks like the final bidders were IAC and MySpace, with a number of other bidders falling off in the last few weeks (perhaps spooked by the MySpace blockage of Photobucket videos).
In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price.
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