"...ultra-purified form of a mineral, herbertsmithite, first discovered in Chile in 1972. Its electrons are arranged in a triangular lattice. Researchers say it could become the silicon of the quantum computing era."
This is the "silicon of the future"? If it wasn't discovered until the 1970s it doesn't sound exceedingly common...
At least we can be sure that "Dippin' Dots" will be "the ice cream of the quantum computing era."
"...called on the government to spur IT adoption in several industries, including health care, banking and transportation."
...because, as we all know, modern health care and banking is completely conducted using paper transactions. Seriously, did this "study" float through a time rift from the 1960's?
Nah, these days Slashdot is mostly PR pieces for large corporations. Here's a couple of "articles" cut and pasted from the desks of professional PR flaks:
There's a long-standing precedent for this: newspapers and other media have used "stringers" for years. These are people with some interest in subject/beat X and some ability to write articles about X who are hired on a per-article basis at below-market rates. (It's not free labor, but it's awfully cheap.)
Because Google's primarily a media company, like NBC, only with much finer detail about what you want to see. Like any media company, Google finds demographic data incredibly valuable because it allows them to "connect" you with the "correct" advertisers. There's no way in hell Google would let people be completely anonymous; it goes against their business plan. (I'd also bet three years from now we'll find through some court case that backup tapes somewhere really extend "anonymous after 18 months" to 4-5 years.)
Wired.com: 'We want out readers and our sources to be one and the same. We think it will make for better journalism.'"
No kidding. If you've ever been subjected to the "journalism" in Wired, you know they have nowhere to go but up. Whatever helps Wired, whether its "crowd sources" or monkeys and typewriters, is OK by me.
Why is the article titled "Changing The World With Videogames"? It sounds more like "Tuning Videogames to Provide People with a Better Way of Ignoring the World"
Linux users may need to stop being so fussy when putting demands on OEMs for pre-installed Linux PCs
The reason most of us got to be Linux users in the first place was fussiness: we didn't like what commercial OS vendors did with their stuff so we went to open source so we could improve upon it any time we wanted. The average user just doesn't care that much about the OS they're running; vanilla Windows or OS X is good enough for the masses.
If you Venn-ed "Linux users" and "people who can control their fussiness", you'd have very little overlap.
Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.
Google: "No shit. Here's your billion, we've got a couple more to spare. Muh-huh-huh-ha."
Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.
...this new push for games on the PC platform is nothing more than an extended advertising scheme to sell the Vista OS...
What's the news? That Microsoft is encouraging people to develop/port games for/to Vista so that its latest OS continues to be the one most often used with games? Even if this is news to most people, why would this be surprising to guy with a marketing job? (He either saw this coming or is probably not qualified for his job.)
I can remember similar whining around the time Windows 95 came out; "32-bit DOS is great and everyone knows the command-line: why should we launch from Windows 95?"
I think a lot of this whining (and a big reason that M$ is taking heat for "allow-allow-allow") is that game installers and designers are so used to being ROOT on any box they live on that when someone finally tells them to pay attention to where and what you can install, they start crying...
In the old days, when you had to manually compile and launch every service you wanted under Linux, this was partially true. However, people forget the first worms were based on sendmail and other *nix services full of security problems.
These days, with GUI-installed Linux distributions, Linux suffers from the same problem Windows used to be derided for: services are on by default.
Linux is "pro-developer."
I've been developing for about twenty years and Windows is still the most developer-friendly platform to develop for. The main reason for this doesn't have to do with availability of source code or documentation, but rather the ease with a single version of a product with a single installer can quickly get prospects up and running with the software. A lot of this advantage is eroding with web-based applications (that generally require no installation), but if you're writing "server" or "desktop" applications, it's generally less work to target "Windows" than "Linux" (or even Java).
Why could I point and click applications with Win 3.11 and 4MB of ram, but now Vista requires a min of 1GB of ram, and a processor that is 200 times faster? Heck, you can run a decently tuned BSD or Linux distro with only 128MB of ram easily (with X, Gnome, etc). Why did a full featured word processor with spell/grammar checking fit nicely on an 80MB HD in the 80s and now Word takes a half gigabyte? etc...
On the topic of bloatware: sorry, this is Slashdot, so I feel the need to undercut your low points.
I could point and click applications with AmigaOS and.5MB of RAM, ran my first Linux box (with XWindows) with 8MB of RAM and remember running a full featured point-and-click word processor that ran off of two "high density" floppies (about 3MB).
The majority of JavaScript books are of limited help in this regard, because they focus on the language details, illustrated only with code snippets. Many readers would benefit more from instruction via working examples, which is the approach used by The Book of JavaScript.
Working examples - isn't that what the Internet is for? If I see something neat going on on someone's site, the first thing I generally do is to borrow the code. Also, why advertise this on SlashDot? If you didn't learn Javascript in about half a day 10 years ago, you're probably not welcome here anyway.
Just because they want to help and release lots of open source software doesn't mean they have to release the family jewels.
If the average Slashdotter applied the same flawed logic to Microsoft, you'd have to say they're big open source sponsors too. After all, Microsoft has released GB of free source code for utilities, etc. for decades. Sure, the code mostly only works with their proprietary "family jewels" (the OS and development tools), but why quibble?
Mr Dibona, who is a long-standing Linux evangelist, said: "I am comfortable with where Google is operating. People are often upset and feel we should be releasing more.
"And I agree; I would love to release more. It's more a function of engineering time, than it is a function of desire."
I call B.S. "Lack of engineering time" is why we haven't seen the source to the core search engines or gmail?
I love the "babe in the woods" perspective I often see on Slashdot.
Because viewers are more likely to watch these clips than myriad user-generated ones, advertisers are willing to pay more for them.
No shit - you're saying that professionals in the TV and movie industries generally crank out better stuff that amateurs? And you're wondering why the companies that bankrolled the professionals so they could sell advertising inserted into the professionals' final product are getting annoyed that a competing company is copying the content and putting its own advertising on it? If that last bit's a mystery to you, I'm not sure I can help.
Generally, I think of YouTube as the next generation of "America's Funniest Home Videos". Entertaining? A little. $X billion entertaining? Dunno. Going to replace my viewing of DVDs and a handful of TV shows on cable? No.
This is where I get worried about where Google is headed. At its core, it's not really a tech company; it's a media and advertising company. Its "consumer product" is a search engine and now YouTube, but it doesn't really have any "premium content" or service that serves a unique need or performs it in a unique manner.
We recently had a "build the most efficient desktop PC you can" contest of sorts at work using a outlet-based usage meter. The winner was a guy who wasn't even competing using his off-the-shelf laptop. It was a bit of an eye-opener for the rest of us pseudo-greenies, but it makes sense: laptop makers are always trying to cut corners on power usage.
What's funny is that nobody seems to think its "unfair" that you can't make yourself more efficient by cutting a hole in the wall and creating your own doorway to the parking lot, but cutting a hole in IT security with filesharing is OK because it makes you more efficient.
That's the smartest/funniest thing I've read in a long time. God help me if I'm not using it in my own training by next week.
They need or want something that you, in your capacity as the provider of IT services, are not providing.
Never worked in IT, have you?
This is a classic example of a IT-provided service that employees already have (at least, if you've already invested in a good email system and a good secure file transfer system) that gets marketed directly to consumers as something they don't have. So...they "try it", often with something like a customer list or account statement that shouldn't really leave the company, and then just start using it without even telling the guy in the next cube, let alone IT.
Thus the need to ban (or at least listen for) such sites; if you don't, there will be people who just don't tell you.
I suppose I could safely modify my opening statement to, "Never worked with live humans, have you?" The same general principle I'm teaching you about today applies to other areas too. For example, if I don't lock my company's electrical closets, eventually someone will wander in there and do something that could get both of us in trouble. (Therefore I "ban" access to it by locking the door.)
Yippee - 6 more sites to add to the corporate "banned" list.
It's bad enough people try to use things like "Gmail" to send things that really ought to be sent securely. There are lot of semi-computer-literate yokels out there who see "SSL" and "SSH" and forget that their "private" data will be lying in the clear on someone else's server at the end of the day (free for the someone else or a server hacker to copy/read).
If I'm reading this right, an IBM back-end system (mainframe) with lots of IBM-delivered Linux workstations were in the mix here. Anyone know for sure (i.e. work there)?
I only have one maxim: don't make me try to care about your cheesy backstory. WarCraft III (OK, different genre) did a good job of this. If you had a lot of free time on your hands, you could sit back and watch the cut-scenes and middle-school-level plot. However, if it you clicked right through the cut scenes (as I did most of the time), it didn't affect the play of the next round. Same went for the manual. There may have been some backstory in there (didn't really read it), but I didn't care, nor did the game make me care.
All I really want from a video game is action. If I want a good story, I'll grab a book: actual authors do it better anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the "silicon of the future"? If it wasn't discovered until the 1970s it doesn't sound exceedingly common...
At least we can be sure that "Dippin' Dots" will be "the ice cream of the quantum computing era."
Nah, these days Slashdot is mostly PR pieces for large corporations. Here's a couple of "articles" cut and pasted from the desks of professional PR flaks:
4 6225/ 1942450 0
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/13
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/04
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/06/19372
There's a long-standing precedent for this: newspapers and other media have used "stringers" for years. These are people with some interest in subject/beat X and some ability to write articles about X who are hired on a per-article basis at below-market rates. (It's not free labor, but it's awfully cheap.)
Finally - the Star Wars fad is fading out. There's less than 30 comments here on what would have been a 300+ topic just a few years ago.
Remember when Star Wars was fun and even a little cool? Me too - it was 1983 and I was 7.
No kidding. If you've ever been subjected to the "journalism" in Wired, you know they have nowhere to go but up. Whatever helps Wired, whether its "crowd sources" or monkeys and typewriters, is OK by me.
Why is the article titled "Changing The World With Videogames"? It sounds more like "Tuning Videogames to Provide People with a Better Way of Ignoring the World"
The reason most of us got to be Linux users in the first place was fussiness: we didn't like what commercial OS vendors did with their stuff so we went to open source so we could improve upon it any time we wanted. The average user just doesn't care that much about the OS they're running; vanilla Windows or OS X is good enough for the masses.
If you Venn-ed "Linux users" and "people who can control their fussiness", you'd have very little overlap.
Google: "No shit. Here's your billion, we've got a couple more to spare. Muh-huh-huh-ha."
What's the news? That Microsoft is encouraging people to develop/port games for/to Vista so that its latest OS continues to be the one most often used with games? Even if this is news to most people, why would this be surprising to guy with a marketing job? (He either saw this coming or is probably not qualified for his job.)
I can remember similar whining around the time Windows 95 came out; "32-bit DOS is great and everyone knows the command-line: why should we launch from Windows 95?"
I think a lot of this whining (and a big reason that M$ is taking heat for "allow-allow-allow") is that game installers and designers are so used to being ROOT on any box they live on that when someone finally tells them to pay attention to where and what you can install, they start crying...
In the old days, when you had to manually compile and launch every service you wanted under Linux, this was partially true. However, people forget the first worms were based on sendmail and other *nix services full of security problems.
These days, with GUI-installed Linux distributions, Linux suffers from the same problem Windows used to be derided for: services are on by default.
I've been developing for about twenty years and Windows is still the most developer-friendly platform to develop for. The main reason for this doesn't have to do with availability of source code or documentation, but rather the ease with a single version of a product with a single installer can quickly get prospects up and running with the software. A lot of this advantage is eroding with web-based applications (that generally require no installation), but if you're writing "server" or "desktop" applications, it's generally less work to target "Windows" than "Linux" (or even Java).
On the topic of bloatware: sorry, this is Slashdot, so I feel the need to undercut your low points.
I could point and click applications with AmigaOS and
And so it begins, I'm sure...
Working examples - isn't that what the Internet is for? If I see something neat going on on someone's site, the first thing I generally do is to borrow the code. Also, why advertise this on SlashDot? If you didn't learn Javascript in about half a day 10 years ago, you're probably not welcome here anyway.
If the average Slashdotter applied the same flawed logic to Microsoft, you'd have to say they're big open source sponsors too. After all, Microsoft has released GB of free source code for utilities, etc. for decades. Sure, the code mostly only works with their proprietary "family jewels" (the OS and development tools), but why quibble?
I call B.S. "Lack of engineering time" is why we haven't seen the source to the core search engines or gmail?
No shit - you're saying that professionals in the TV and movie industries generally crank out better stuff that amateurs? And you're wondering why the companies that bankrolled the professionals so they could sell advertising inserted into the professionals' final product are getting annoyed that a competing company is copying the content and putting its own advertising on it? If that last bit's a mystery to you, I'm not sure I can help.
Generally, I think of YouTube as the next generation of "America's Funniest Home Videos". Entertaining? A little. $X billion entertaining? Dunno. Going to replace my viewing of DVDs and a handful of TV shows on cable? No.
This is where I get worried about where Google is headed. At its core, it's not really a tech company; it's a media and advertising company. Its "consumer product" is a search engine and now YouTube, but it doesn't really have any "premium content" or service that serves a unique need or performs it in a unique manner.
Forget the crappy "ciclops" site, try NASA...x .cfm
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/inde
We recently had a "build the most efficient desktop PC you can" contest of sorts at work using a outlet-based usage meter. The winner was a guy who wasn't even competing using his off-the-shelf laptop. It was a bit of an eye-opener for the rest of us pseudo-greenies, but it makes sense: laptop makers are always trying to cut corners on power usage.
That's the smartest/funniest thing I've read in a long time. God help me if I'm not using it in my own training by next week.
Never worked in IT, have you?
This is a classic example of a IT-provided service that employees already have (at least, if you've already invested in a good email system and a good secure file transfer system) that gets marketed directly to consumers as something they don't have. So...they "try it", often with something like a customer list or account statement that shouldn't really leave the company, and then just start using it without even telling the guy in the next cube, let alone IT.
Thus the need to ban (or at least listen for) such sites; if you don't, there will be people who just don't tell you.
I suppose I could safely modify my opening statement to, "Never worked with live humans, have you?" The same general principle I'm teaching you about today applies to other areas too. For example, if I don't lock my company's electrical closets, eventually someone will wander in there and do something that could get both of us in trouble. (Therefore I "ban" access to it by locking the door.)
Yippee - 6 more sites to add to the corporate "banned" list.
It's bad enough people try to use things like "Gmail" to send things that really ought to be sent securely. There are lot of semi-computer-literate yokels out there who see "SSL" and "SSH" and forget that their "private" data will be lying in the clear on someone else's server at the end of the day (free for the someone else or a server hacker to copy/read).
If I'm reading this right, an IBM back-end system (mainframe) with lots of IBM-delivered Linux workstations were in the mix here. Anyone know for sure (i.e. work there)?
3 447741
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/
I only have one maxim: don't make me try to care about your cheesy backstory. WarCraft III (OK, different genre) did a good job of this. If you had a lot of free time on your hands, you could sit back and watch the cut-scenes and middle-school-level plot. However, if it you clicked right through the cut scenes (as I did most of the time), it didn't affect the play of the next round. Same went for the manual. There may have been some backstory in there (didn't really read it), but I didn't care, nor did the game make me care.
All I really want from a video game is action. If I want a good story, I'll grab a book: actual authors do it better anyway.