Learn how to use the different file functions of PHP. Review basic file functions, such as fopen, fclose, and feof, learn reading functions, such as fgets, fgetss, and fscanf. And discover functions that process entire files in one or two lines of code.

First time accepted submitter Sabine Hauert writes in with news about a robotic bartending system called Makr Shakr. "You're at a busy bar. You order your personalized cocktail through a smart phone app; a drink dispenser measures out the beverage according to your instructions and a Kuka robotic arm give it a shake (or stir), while another garnishes it with a slice of lemon; the made-to-order concoction is delivered to your waiting hand via a slick little ten-lane conveyor belt. The 'mixology system' tracks your order from start to finish: a large display behind the bar shows you the number of drinks ahead of yours in the queue, the current wait time, and lets you know when your drink is ready to be picked up. It also shows you what's popular to drink tonight among both the ladies and the gents in the crowd, and lets you influence drinking trends in real-time by incorporating your suggested tweaks on popular recipes."

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itwbennett writes "Today's CIOs speak business-buzzwords as a second language. And there's a good reason for that. There is a trend among CIOs to distance themselves from being regarded as technologists and to put themselves forward as business strategists. It boils down to one simple rule: Just as you should never be the first to mention compensation in the interview process, you should never be the first to break out the tech jargon in a business setting."

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Nerval's Lobster writes "But at this year's Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google announced that it has a plan to make Google Plus users more engaged, courtesy of new features backed by a handful of data-analytics tricks. Google Plus postings now feature Google-generated hashtags that, when clicked, direct the user to related content from across their network. From a backend-infrastructure perspective, that sort of thing leans heavily on Google's semantic analysis and the ability to make the right connections between various pieces of data. Google Plus will also automatically highlight certain photos out of dozens or even hundreds of shots. Say you went on vacation to India and took some photos of your significant other in front of the Taj Mahal; Google Plus will leverage its database of information to recognize that as a prominent landmark and pluck those photos out of the pile as 'special.' In the words of that posting on the Google+ Blog: 'Your darkroom is now a Google data center.' Are all these nifty, analytics-intensive features enough to change the larger fortunes of Google Plus? That's the big question. Google has a handsome-looking platform, one that performs certain activities with a high degree of polish and zip—but is that enough to counter Facebook?"

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An anonymous reader writes "Despite the fact that I am fairly young at twenty-four years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use Lynx, IRC, Pine, have many consoles open, and am currently typing this on an older plain black laptop that has a matte 4:3 display and no chiclet keys. As the days progress, I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation. Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should. How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"

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kkleiner writes "Rice University professor Moshe Vardi has been evaluating technological progress in computer science and artificial intelligence and has recently concluded that robots will replace most, if not all, human labor by 2045, putting millions out of work. The issue is whether AI enables humans to do more or less. But perhaps the real question about technological unemployment of labor isn't 'How will people do nothing?' but 'What kind of work will they do instead?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Phoronix comes news that Ubuntu is revisiting replacing Firefox with Chromium as the default browser. Reasons include that Chromium is the basis of Ubuntu Touch and their new web apps platform, and using a single browser for all versions of Ubuntu would simplify maintenance. From the article: "Expressed shortcomings of switching to Google's Chromium open-source web-browser is that data migration from Firefox isn't too obvious, extensions don't migrate between browsers, Chromium isn't supported on all architectures (e.g. PowerPC), the browser doesn't work with the Orca screen reader and doesn't integrate well for accessibility reasons, there is no native PDF plug-in, and Chromium is said to have worse performance under memory pressure. There were also some concerns expressed about differences with WebApps in Chromium. ... It looks like the switch to Chromium will happen in the name of a better user experience for the desktop with Chrome/Chromium now arguably surpassing Firefox in its features and performance while pushing Chromium as the default leads to a more consistent experience across Ubuntu form factors from phones/tablets to the desktop." The Ubuntu community will have their input solicited as the next step. The Ubuntu Developer Summit session has notes and a full video of today's discussion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Google I/O opening keynote came and went without the announcement of any new hardware (unless you count the Samsung Galaxy S4 with stock Android). But that doesn’t mean we won’t see some new devices from Google soon.

A sharp-eyed reddit user noticed that the Nexus 7 tablet in a promo video from Google Hangouts had an unusual feature.

Here are some of the day’s tech news stories and conversations from around the web.

• Sign of a new Nexus 7? Hangouts promo video shows an N7 with a notification light
  A lot of folks expected Google to launch a refreshed Nexus 7 tablet during the Google I/O keynote this week. That didn’t happen. But a promo video for the Google Hangouts app does show a Nexus 7 doing something unusual – it flashes a notification light. That’s funny… my Nexus 7 doesn’t have an LED for notifications. [reddit]
• More new Chrome OS devices showing up in the source code (Falco, Peppy, Slippy, Fox)
  It looks like four new Chrome OS devices are in the works, each one with an x86 processor. At least one will have a Haswell chip if and when it’s released. [François Beaufort]
• OLPC XO Tablet runs custom Android UI, launching at Walmart.com in June
  OLPC started showing off an Android tablet with a kid-friendly user interface at CES in January. Now it’s expected to go on sale at Walmart starting in June. It’s aimed at kids ages 2-3. [Engadget]
• List of some of the first Android games with Google Play Games integration
  Want to start using Google Play Games to track your stats, compare high scores, and play games with your friends? Here are some of the first games that’ll let you do that. [Android Police]
• Lenovo showcases furniture design concepts for its Horizon Table PC
  Can’t figure out what you’d do with a 27 inch tablet designed so you can lie it flat and use it like a table? Lenovo and friends have come up with a few ideas, including a kid-friendly tree trunk PC and an easel-like digital art station. [Lenovo]

You can keep up on the latest news by following Liliputing on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Lilbits (5-16-2013): New Nexus 7? is a post from: Liliputing

New submitter zlives writes in with news that Florida's DOT changed some language in their yellow light timing regulations, leading to a decrease in the yellow delay. Especially at lights with red light cameras. "From the article: 'Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million.' I wonder what the camera company cut is?" At least one areas has promised to undo the reduction now that they have been caught.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

astroengine writes "Dust devils are a well-known atmospheric phenomena on Mars, and as these new HiRISE observations show, the devilish vorticies can carve beautiful patterns in the Martian dust. What's more — in side-by-side comparisons of observations of the same Mars region years apart — it appears that the active Mars atmosphere acts like an Etch A Sketch, rubbing out the dust devils' tracks, only for the dust devils to make brand new tracks years later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laptops with 1080p displays are so last year. A handful of notebooks including the MacBook Pro with Retina, Google Chromebook Pixel and Toshiba Kirabook already have higher-than-full-HD screens. Now Sharp wants to step things up a notch with its new IGZO displays for notebooks.

IGZO screens use less power than traditional LCD displays, but because of the technology used to produce them, it’s also easier to squeeze pixels together at high densities.

Sharp is plans to start production of three new IGZO displays this year:

• 11.6 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel screen
• 14 inch, 3200 x 1800 pixel screen
• 15.6 inch, 3200 x 1800 pixel screen

The smallest of the displays will have a pixel density of 253 pixels per inch, while the 14 inch model is a 262 ppi display, and the 15.6 inch screen has 235 pixels per inch.

While it’s nice to see progress in laptop displays, high-resolution screens can be a bit of a mixed blessing on a Windows laptop. Full-screen apps downloaded from the Windows Store tend to scale well to high-res displays. But desktop-style apps (which includes almost every Windows app released in the past 20 years) can be another story.

Windows includes tools that let you adjust the DPI settings so that text and graphics don’t look incredibly small on a computer with a high resolution screen. But many third party apps aren’t designed to take advantage of that option, which means that some apps will look better on a higher-resolution screen, while others look far worse.

It’d be nice to say that’s a sign that either Microsoft will roll out a better resolution-independent apps with Windows 8.1 or that these screens are destined for devices where they’ll do the most good (like new MacBook or Chrome OS notebooks). But as the Toshiba Kirabook, and even the Microsoft Surface Pro demonstrate, just because Windows isn’t really ready for high-res screens doesn’t mean device makers won’t release them.

Sharp plans to begin production of its new IGZO displays in June.

via 9to5Mac

Sharp introduces new IGZO laptop displays with resolutions up to 3200 x 1800 pixels is a post from: Liliputing

mask.of.sanity writes with news of the jail sentences for three members of LulzSec. From the article: "Three members of the hacktivist group LulzSec have been sentenced to a total of six years in prison. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam were charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institution and he will serve half of the sentence. Al-Bassam received a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years and 300 hours unpaid work. Ackroyd was given a 30-month sentence; he will serve half. Cleary also pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse images following a second arrest on October 4, 2012. He will be sentenced at separate hearing." The Guardian has a short article on the remaining loose ends in the story of LulzSec.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most major PC makers may have left the netbook market for dead. But Chinese vendors have continued cranking out cheap mini-laptops with 10 inch or smaller displays. Some models run Windows, but many of the cheapest feature inexpensive ARM chips and run Android or Windows CE.

But it looks like some slightly more powerful models could be on the way.

Chinese site Padhz spotted details for a few new Android laptops powered by Allwinner A20 and Allwinner A31 chips.

The A20 is an ARM Cortex-7 dual-core chip with Mali-400 graphics, while the A31 is a Cortex-A7 quad-core processor with PowerVR SGX 544 graphics.

Both chips should offer significantly better performance than the single-core VIA WM8850 chips that are so popular with Chinese makers of Android netbooks these days.

According to Padhz, these new devices will come in two sizes. The N101-A has a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, an Allwinner A20 chip, 1GB of RAM, up to 32GB of storage, WiFi, HDMI, and Ethernet. It should get up to 7.5 hours of battery life and it runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.

The N70-A and N70-B both have 13.3 inch displays, but the A model has an Allwinner A20 chip and 1GB of RAM, while the B has an Allwinner A31 quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM.

For some reason the larger models have smaller batteries which top out at around 5.5 hours of run time.

Most devices that ship with Allwinner processors are tablets and Android TV boxes. These are among the first netbooks sporting the company’s new dual-core and quad-core chips. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any details about the release date or price.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an Android netbook with an Allwinner processor. But up until now, most models had featured slower Allwinner A10 ARM Cortex-A8 single core chips.

 

Android netbooks with Allwinner dual, quad-core processors is a post from: Liliputing

Linus Torvalds, Jon 'maddog' Hall, and many other names closely associated with Linux are also closely associated with beer. (Ed. note: I have personally watched them associate with beer, and may have even joined them.) It comes as no surprise, therefore, when Linux advocate and LinuxAutomation.org founder Kurt Forsberg talks about using Linux to control his beer brewing. Kurt is a strong believer in Linux Automation who talks about home thermostats, sprinklers, and many other application, "anything you can automate..." but, he adds, "we spend all our time brewing beer so we haven't explored many of those yet." He says this with a big smile, of course. And if you want to keep up with Linux Automation on Faceboook, go ahead; like everyone + dog they have a Facebook page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter Stratus311 writes "An article from The Verge shows a video leaked from Microsoft that parodies Google's Chrome ad. From the article: 'Microsoft and Google have been locked in a war of words over a YouTube Windows Phone app, but in the midst of the arguments a new Scroogled ad has emerged. Designed to be an internal-only video, a copy has somehow managed to find its way onto the web right in the middle of Google's I/O developer conference.'" "Somehow" leaked.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from the H: "Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the Open Source office suite. 10 million of those downloads happened since the beginning of March. In contrast, LibreOffice claimed it had 15 million unique downloads of its office suite in all of 2012."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frederik and Ernest Lotter from Blue Horizon Embedded Systems in South Africa are driving from the UK to South Africa via Russia and the Middle East, taking in seventeen countries on their way.

They are making the journey in a Land Rover Defender which is fitted with a Raspberry Pi-based distributed light control system. The Raspberry Pi, and their lighting rig design, will be put to the test over 22000km of harsh conditions and rough terrain.

The Lotter brothers are experienced electronic engineers and are offering to meet up with groups of potential Raspberry Pi or ARM enthusiasts along the way. There may even be a Pi-themed reward available if you can find them using the live GPS tracking system they have installed.

You can track them live online, and if you want them to come and talk to your school, business or another group about Raspberry Pi and ARM processors while they’re in your country, they’re inviting you to email them - please get in touch as soon as possible if you’d like them to visit. Watch the video to learn more, and to find out what their route looks like. Thanks Fred and Ernest; we’re looking forward to tracking your progress!

ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.