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  1. As a bonus the apt complex has emergency supply on What Happens When Robots Can Deliver Your Groceries? (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    As a side bonus if there is an earthquake/hurricane/other then there is a week or so of calories stored near the apartment complex. Albeit mostly in Doritos. But still - this is a big bonus.

  2. A sign of intelligent life? on Class of Large But Very Dim Galaxies Discovered (nature.com) · · Score: 2

    Did they check in infrared? Maybe most of the stars are surrounded by Dyson spheres as is what one would expect will happen to our galaxy in a few million years if we don't kill ourselves off first. If so these galaxies should be quite bright in the infrared.

  3. On the other hand, salaried can do below 40 hours on Who Owns Your Overtime? · · Score: 2

    For 15 years I worked for a company that also tried to get exempt people to work more than 40 hours. I took the logic and worked 37.5 hours. When asked what my hours were I got answers like "enough to get your work done". So I got it done in less time. Sure twice a year I had to come in on a weekend for some emergency (or artificial) deadline but on average I worked 7.5 hours a day (8.5 minus an hour for lunch). But I worked hard those 7.5 hours. I did good work. And my bosses all valued that. My bosses were always happy that I did more work than my colleagues and with a good attitude and with minimal oversight and I had good communication and didn't care that I worked fewer hours (although I kept my hours as quiet as possible). So... that "salaried" or "exempt" thing can work both ways.

  4. Re:Stick to what you know on Ask Slashdot: It's 2014 -- Which New Technologies Should I Learn? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the plus side, Embedded programmers get about twice as much as web programmers. Switch to contracting if you want more money - around $50 per hour for web developers $30 to $75 and around $100 per hour for embedded programmers ($75 to $200). I'm not an expert on rates. This is just people I've met. It's a small sample but it makes sense. Embedded C programmers with more than 3 years of experience are damn hard to find. It's a niche market.

    On the minus side, there are fewer Embedded programming jobs out there so you have to travel farther and often you can't work from home because you need to be with the hardware and often there aren't enough hardware to let you take one home. Or you need expensive debugging equipment like oscilloscopes, etc. Again I'm talking about contracting where you will have to travel to different places every time you get a new contract and they will be farther away than those web development contracts.

    I recommend you stick with embedded C and if you want to learn something, learn how to use an oscilloscope, read a schematic and study some basic electronics so that when something doesn't work you can tell the Electrical Engineer exactly what is wrong instead of just saying "it's broken". This is how you get in the upper end of the salary range.

    If you do switch to web programming then obviously you need to know: html, javascript, SQL. Those are the most basic and key things you need to understand.

  5. most cheap printers don't care about gravity on NASA Wants To Test 3-D Printing Aboard ISS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The common, cheap, FDM printers (the ones that squirt out hot plastic from a nozzle) can print just fine upside down. So obviously they will print fine with zero gravity.

  6. Re:What would I do without the web? on Developers May Be Getting 50% of Their Documentation From Stack Overflow · · Score: 1

    Before the web, microsoft would let you click on any keyword or function and hit the F1 key and it had great documentation hyperlinked to similar functions and with examples and it told you what .h files to include and so on. It was great. It still is somewhat decent.

    Before GUI's, everything was paper doc and the languages were simpler and there were fewer of them to learn and you had to "ask someone" when you ran into problems that you normally see on stack overflow. I was one of the people that had stream of people asking questions.

  7. php does documentation best on Developers May Be Getting 50% of Their Documentation From Stack Overflow · · Score: 1

    Don't flame me because you think php is a bad language. I'm just saying it has the best documentation out there. It's on the web and each piece has good examples and then - most importantly - anyone can comment below for each function and feature - issues they've run into. The kind of stuff normally found on stackoverflow. I've been programming since everything was paper (the computers printed on paper only, and the documents were all on paper). I love paper docs, but online, editable, wiki like documents are the best.

    Trust the crowd.

  8. DDR and Just Dance Kinect on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Get My Spouse To Start Gaming With Me? · · Score: 1

    Even if she is 200 pounds overweight these games are fun. Get a Kinect and 2 ddr dance pads. Hopefully you don't know this game very well yet. When she sees you miserably failing she'll give it a try. I haven't played "Just Dance" but I have tons of DDR experience and this is a great game for men and women. It's great exercise and great fun. This is a good way to get into gaming and into the habit of turning on the xbox when bored. If you advance faster than her it's okay as you can play at different levels at the same time on the same song.

  9. cell phones have too much delay on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk? · · Score: 1

    And calling cell to cell is the worst. It's much worse for conference calls with 3 people (or more). What happens is when one person stops talking the other 2 start in simultaineously and you get 3 words in before you realize two of you are talking and then you both stop for a whole second and then both start up. Plus the sound quality isn't as good because cell phone calls are overly-compressed.

    There's probably less delay calling Australia on a land line than downtown to downtown cell to cell.

    Cell phones are great - don't get me wrong - for a 1 minutes conversation. But a 1 hour intense business discussion - forget it.

  10. Limiting bet sizes hurts accuracy of the market on Legalizing Online Futures Betting · · Score: 1

    The more sure you are about something the more you are willing to bet.

    One of the reasons markets are more accurate than pundits is that some of them have inside information of sorts.

    The reason intrade is useful for predictions is that the people who bet there do very careful research. For example when betting on American Idol vote-offs they look carefully at the data at dialidol.com. The people who don't look carefully quickly learn not to bet on intrade as they lose too much money. They also used to be able to look at download quantites on itunes for the previous week's singers songs. There is data out there that is tricky to find and the people who find it sometimes jump on intrade and make a bet. Instead of trusting someone to integrate all the data, it's easier to let the people betting at intrade do it for you. Also some of those people are friends and they chat about the data and how they interpreted it and argue about what it all means. The smarter people make the most money and keep at it, and they are the ones with their bigger bets that set the market price accurately.

    There were hundreds of poll results but making heads or tails of it and including the electoral college of each state and figuring out which polls are biased and so on is a lot of work. Easier to just check intrade - let the experts (not pundits) make the bets.

    If democrats tried to fool intrade by betting on Obama, then why did Obama's price go down so much after the first debate?

    Maybe manipulating intrade isn't that easy in a big market like presidential win?

  11. don't bet on things affected by murder on Legalizing Online Futures Betting · · Score: 1

    You shouldn't let people bet on things that are strongly affected by murdering one person such as election results or who wins american idol. Or if you allow this then the max bet needs to be well under the cost for a cheap hit.

  12. Better pictures and video here on JAXA Creates Camera That Can See Radiation · · Score: 3, Informative

    On one picture you can see how the visual image and the gamma radiation agree at the corner of a wall. You can see that the radiation spot turns 90 degrees with the bottom edge of the wall and how the radioactive materials kind of puddled near the bottom of the wall. It's cool to see that the two images agree.

    Also there is video of the actual camera which is pretty big and not so portable. You probably want to keep it in a car most of the time.

    http://www.japanprobe.com/2012/03/30/camera-can-see-radiation/

  13. html5 on Ask Slashdot: How To Find Expertise For Amateur Game Development? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read about the canvas element. You should be able to write the whole thing in javascript. You should be able to get an extremely basic version up and running within a few hours. Just play around a bit in javascript and read about <canvas>. The physics is trivial - you store the x,y vx,vy value of everything that is moving (velocity x,y). You add vx to x every cycle through your loop. You adjust vy by gravity through every cycle. Also known as ay. And you also adjust vx,vy by every gravitational point nearby. You calculate the distance sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2 ) to each object and use gravity formula which is realted to 1/distance squared so you can get rid of that sqrt and make the code more efficient. Then find the portion of accel that is due to x and y. Anyway, it's just a few hours work. Just give it a shot - don't read any books - just find an html primer website that talks about <canvas>.

  14. Re:if you are a good programmer there will be no p on Ask Slashdot: Re-Entering the Job Market As a Software Engineer? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I know - it's hard getting people in Timbuktu, Idaho with 15 years of PHP & Javascript experience who will work for $8/hour .

    I'm in the Boston area and I already told you. Zero experience in javascript or any specific language is required. And we pay very well. Because we have to. Because the only people we can find we have to hire away from other companies. But damn it, you better know how to write code in *some* language. I figure they can learn javascript after we hire them. My ad in Monster got 20 responses over a month and when I called them all back they all had found jobs except for 4 crappy programmers who didn't know how to make for loops and one we made an offer to who also went elsewhere (he had 3 offers and ours was the highest). I keep hearing ads for Mathworks which has 200 open requisitions. I have neighbors who work there and they say they are able to find programmers but it is a struggle.

  15. if you are a good programmer there will be no prob on Ask Slashdot: Re-Entering the Job Market As a Software Engineer? · · Score: 2

    Good programmers are very hard to find right now. If you can write good clean code that is easy to maintain and read by others and if you are reasonably fast it shouldn't matter how old you are. I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone - I would love those skills (php, javascript especially) but I'll just take someone who knows how to write in java or c and train them. I think we may have finally filled both our positions (fingers crossed) but it took 18 months to fill 2 positions! It sucks out there if you are trying to hire. Other's I know who are trying to hire programmers have a similar story. Programmers have their companies by the short hairs right now. All of us should be asking for raises (the good programmers anyway).

    Also you should know that there is much less age discrimination with contract programmers versus permanent programmers. And the pay is better. If you are in an industry were someone with just 1 year javascript experience gets $50k then you can get $50 per hour ($90k, $90 per hour, etc this is the general rule but doesn't always work for every situation). Your second contract that rate will go up and within a few years you should be at $100 per hour. If you are good. Also if you go through an agency for the first few gigs you will find that they market you in ways that you can't market yourself ("his coworker, John, said he's the fastest programmer he ever met" or whatever). And life is less stressful for contract programmers because there is a little less emotional investment and also less meetings.

  16. I have the same need on Ask Slashdot: Chromeless Cross-Platform Browser? · · Score: 2

    We are happily using prism for our customer's (also in law enforcement) whose IT department refuses to let them install "firefox". Right now prism is great but it would be nice to eventually get those ff ver 4 and ver 5 faster javascript interpreters (engines?).

    I'm not sure if using --chrome would help us because I suspect I would have to use the firefox setup.msi file which would give away our secret as usually the IT department is the group going around installing our software on our user's machines. Unless creating my own ff installer is simple (I'm experienced creating an msi file but the prism one is so simple because all it does is copy files - no registering of dlls or registry changes).

  17. Re:Optimistic concurrency on Data Locking In a Web Application? · · Score: 4, Informative

    What shimmer says is exactly what you should do with 2 possible additions. Often people leave themselves in a web page for an hour and then start to make edits. So when the user makes the first edit, use ajax to see if there was already an edit done in the meantime so they know before they make lots of changes.

    Also you should consider using sequences instead of checking if the data changed. Both are good ideas in certain situations. For example with a table that is only edited once every few months, I use a sequence on the whole table. For a table that is changed 100 times per day by 3 different users, either do row based sequences or check to see if the 'from' part of the changes match the database.

  18. Re:$1700!?? WTF? on Recourse For Poor Customer Service? · · Score: 1

    $450 laptop *does* include windows. I have Toshiba and Acer laptops for $400 and $450 and they kick ass and play games just fine. Do you live in USA? Check the sunday ads for circuit-city or best buy. Or go online to dell.

  19. $1700!?? WTF? on Recourse For Poor Customer Service? · · Score: 1

    Why would anyone spend more than $400 for a complete computer or $450 for a laptop? Even Dell has these prices.

  20. git and svn have a fundamental diff not mentioned on Practical Reasons To Choose Git Or Subversion? · · Score: 1

    Noone seems to have mentioned that SVN is like CVS in that it is files based whereas GIT is branch based. This means the diffs are on the whole branch, not just a file. You don't look at file history in GIT. It doesn't make sense. You look at branch history. Also if you rename a file or move a file to a different folder GIT knows this. SVN doesn't. You don't have to tag a whole branch with GIT because every checkin is a whole branch. I've used both and I prefer GIT. I particularly like the ease of creating branches that can be either local or can track a master repository and then merged in. Making branches just seems so easy in GIT. I agree that the windows gui tool (gitgui) isn't very impressive on but it works. And the command line interface is very nice. I *do* love the graphical branch history display on windows. If it's good enough for the Linux Kernel it sure is good enough for the small projects I work on.

  21. There are not enough programmers in the world on Recruiting IT Students? · · Score: 1
    If you look at the expected need for programmers in the USA alone 10 years from now and you look at all the people studying computer science in the USA, India, China, Russia, and Ireland combined, and add in the existing programmers, there won't be enough programmers 10 years from now. Programming wages will be increasing for many years to come.

    People seem to think that just because there are a billion people in India, it can easily churn out 200 million programmers. It can't.