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IOS

7 Swift 2 Enhancements iOS Devs Will Love 123

Posted by timothy from the magic-buttons dept.
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Solt outlines how Apple has made good on Swift's emphasis on performance, approachability, and ease in its latest update, offering up seven worthwhile enhancements to Swift 2, along with code samples. 'Many of the enhancements to Swift, through both the Swift 2.0 update and subsequent Swift 2.1 update, have made the language more explicit and intentional, and in turns, Swift 2 code will be safer and easier to maintain for years to come (especially now that Swift is open source). New language constructs (keywords) in Swift 2 improve the readability of control flow — the order in which lines of code are executed. Thanks to these new keywords, collaborating on Swift code will be much more productive and efficient.'

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Can't Slashdot Classic and Slashdot Beta Continue to Co-Exist? 9

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Slashdot has been a big part of my life since I had my my first stories accepted over ten years ago. Some people my age do crossword puzzles to keep their mental agility, some do sudoko, or play bridge. I enjoy searching for and putting together a story a day for slashdot because it helps keep me on my toes to have readers find errors and logical fallacies in my submissions and I enjoy learning from the different points of view expressed on a story I have submitted. That's why I have been so discouraged in the past several years to see readership in slashdot drop off. As a close observer of this web site, I know that ten years ago it was unheard of for any accepted story to get less than 100 comments and there was at least a story a day that got over 1,000 comments. Those days are long gone. Not it's not uncommon to see some stories garner only a few dozen comments. That's how web sites die. If you slip below a critical level of readership, readers will abandon the site completely. I know from my own experience running a web site devoted to the Peace Corps that I used to have hundreds of comments to some of my stories but once comments slipped below a certain threshold, then they disappeared altogether. I think that slashdot is nearing that threshold and I fear that imposing Slashdot Beta on the site's readership will push it over the edge and I don't want to see that happen. I'd like to propose that slashdot continue running slashdot classic and slashdot beta in parallel. I'll stick with classic most of the time. One of the best features of slashdot classic is that comments can be displayed in four formats (threaded, nested, no comment, and flat) and in two directions (oldest first and newest first) providing a lot of flexibility in watching conversations develop. I switch between the formats several times a day depending on what I want to see. But slashdot beta also has its advantages in certain situations. Slashdot needs a blockbuster story or two every day where people can pile on and slashdot beta facilitates this by putting the most commented story at the top of the page and I think that is a good thing. Still I'll use slashdot beta occasionally when I'm on a mobile device but slashdot classic will be the format I use on my desktop. So don't deprecate slashdot classic. That would be like Microsoft disabling Windows 7 and forcing everyone to use Windows 8. And not even Microsoft is that stupid.

Submission + - NSA Confirmed to Monitor 75% of Domestic Internet Traffic, Store Domestic Emails (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by ilikenwf
ilikenwf writes: Today it has been confirmed that the NSA, contrary to their own word, has the capability to monitor 75% of domestic internet traffic, and stores all domestic emails. So much for their cyber spying programs being limited to suspects and foreign nationals — does this mean they consider every U.S. citizen a criminal? Heap in the fact they're working on a real time facial recognition system to use live with security camera feeds, and you have a situation that makes George Orwell spin in his grave.

Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 1) 88

by pshuke (#44065921) Attached to: Megatokyo Gets a Visual Novel Game
Care to state which VNs you consider the greatest? *Puts on weeaboo hat* Looking at the top list at vndb (http://vndb.org/v/all?q=;fil=tagspoil-0;o=d;s=rating), the majority of the western audience predominantly considers the greatest titles to be those produced by big companies like Key and Nitro+ -- hardly a couple of kids in their basements. Higurashi and Umineko are doujin titles, but they were hardly slapped together over a summer holiday.

As far as western VNs go, the most popular is probably Katawa Shoujo, and that took literally years to make. And even as a finished product, it can hardly be considered even remotely in the same league as MLA or CrossChannel. Other western VNs made by a basement dwellers are invariably bad. It's also worth noting that doujin software tends to have more salability in Japan than indie software has had in the west until recently (though this seems to be changing for the better).

While I doubt the megatokyo vn is going be all that great, I can understand the need for financial support if it's going to have a hope of being anywhere half-decent. I chucked the guy my $10 and wish him well -- not because I am particularly hopeful of this specific title, but because I think it's nice that the medium gets some exposure apart from the lolcartoonporn kind.
ISS

Speeding Object Makes Small Hole In the ISS Solar Array 119

Posted by Soulskill from the oh-right,-great-peril dept.
New submitter cute_orc writes "The International Space Station has been hit by a small object. Chris Hadfield, an astronaut currently on the ISS, described it in his Twitter feed as 'a small stone from the universe.' He also said he was glad it didn't hit the hull. Jim Scotti, a planetary scientist from the University of Arizona, thinks the object may have had a different origin: 'It's unlikely this was caused by a meteor; more likely a piece of man-made space debris in low Earth orbit.'"

Comment Re:It Could Be More (Score 1) 295

by pshuke (#42488567) Attached to: Valve Reveals First Month of Steam Linux Gains
Works fine on arch (yaourt -S steam), and I haven't heard anyone else complain. Just because valve packages steam for ubuntu, doesn't mean it doesn't work on other distros. It's unreasonable to expect valve to package its software specific to each and every distro, version and architecture. I don't know if your last comment was supposed to be funny, but repackaging hardly requires a software engineer.

Comment Better example (Score 2) 91

by pshuke (#40006761) Attached to: Student Makes Real-Life Portal Turret
While definitely cool project, I think there are better examples out there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QcfZGDvHU8#t=16 also shows an auto tracking turret with portal voices. However in this case the tracking seems quick enough to be useful, and it actually hurts people. Add some white plastic, and you're pretty close to the "real" deal.

Submission + - Boltzmann equation solved, the new way

Submitted by xt
xt writes: The Boltzmann equation is old news. What's news is that the 140 year old equation has been solved, using mathematical techniques from the fields of partial differential equations and harmonic analysis, some as new as five years old. This solution provides a new understanding of the effects due to grazing collisions, when neighboring molecules just glance off one another rather than collide head on. We may not understand the theory, but we'll sure love the applications!

Submission + - Trademark attack on Open Source project

Submitted by jfbilodeau
jfbilodeau writes: I've been contributing and releasing open-source projects for a number of years now, and managed to stay (mostly) clear of conflict. One of my projects BSOD(roid) have been available on the Android Market for nearly a year. Last night, I've received a email asking me to rename my product because it infringes on the trademark ROID. This trademark has been filled nearly six month after my project was on the market. The two projects are completely unrelated and do not compete. Renaming the project is not the issue here. Responding to mindless corporate bullying is. I'm curious to know if this happened to other slashdotter and what suggestions you may have.

Submission + - First Anarchist's Cookbook Convictions (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by analysethis
analysethis writes: In the UK last month the author/compiler of the well-known-in-internet-circles 'terrorist handbook' pleaded guilty to seven counts of collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism, with a maximum jail term of 10 years. Today the first people caught with downloaded copies have been put behind bars — a white supremacist father and son pairing getting 10 & 2 years respectively, convicted of three counts of possessing material useful for acts of terror. How many will be emptying their recycle bins after this conviction?

As of writing, the book is still freely available on Amazon.com to buy.

Comment Re:Ubuntu (Score 3, Interesting) 279

by Runaway1956 (#32148586) Attached to: Critical Flaw Found In Virtually All AV Software

But, an earlier poster mentioned the fact that corporate and financial institutions have all this money to pay high powered administrators. If the administrators are working with a decent operating system, and if the administrators are competent, then Enterprise is safe, right? And, the military too, right?

How's that British thing working out now? Windows for Submarines? The last I heard, it was down. Who has more expertise in securing computers than the US or the UK departments of defense? If THEY can't secure Windows, then who can?

What Free IDE Do You Use? 1055

Posted by kdawson from the ides-of-may dept.
postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."
The Internet

Canada's Conference Board Found Plagiarizing Copyright Report 232

Posted by timothy from the no-no-we-got-it-from-the-internet dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There is a storm brewing in Canada as the prestigious Conference Board of Canada has been caught plagiarizing US copyright lobby group documents in a report on copyright reform. The report was funded by the Canadian copyright lobby as well as by the Ontario government. The Conference Board has acknowledged some errors, but stands by the report, while the Ontario government admits spending thousands of dollars and it now wants some answers."
The Internet

Sony CEO Proposes "Guardrails For the Internet" 708

Posted by timothy from the red-light-cameras-too dept.
testadicazzo writes "Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: 'Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"

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