dsginter - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Programming (Score 4, Interesting) 547

by dsginter on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @05:54PM (#31850608) Attached to: How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?

As long as you're interested in what you program, you can easily do it full work days.

I think that you are missing the lower level question:

How many hours per day will your brain allow you to be functional at a given task?

When I did lots of SQL-based web development, I would toil away for 12-16 hours on some days only to have the answer in my head after a good night's rest. This happened a lot (and was a little frustrating to do in 10 minutes what could not be done in 10 hours the day before). Maybe I just suck at SQL-based web development but the whole concept of a mental limit is interesting to me.

OpenNMS Celebrates 10 Years 37

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @07:32PM from the aged-in-oak-barrels dept.

mjhuot writes "Quite often is it claimed that pure open source projects can't survive, much less grow and create robust code. One counter example of this is OpenNMS, the world's first enterprise-grade network management application platform developed under the open source model. Registered on 30 March 2000 as project 4141 on Sourceforge, today the gang threw a little party, with members virtually attending from around the world. With the right business savvy and a great community, it is possible to both remain 100% free and open source while creating enough value to make a good living at it."

Comment Democracy? (Score 4, Insightful) 865

by dsginter on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @07:17PM (#31679310) Attached to: James Lovelock Suggests Suspending Democracy To Save the World

Here in the US, we don't have democracy now. We have a two party, democratic REPUBLIC. The politicians can pretty much do whatever they want after they have been elected because the media has conditioned us to believe that we have only two parties from which to choose (i.e. - "bipartisan").

Ban the party system. At this point, the legislative vending machine that we call "government" will fall apart and we'll have something much closer to "democracy".

Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 27, 2010 @11:55AM from the stay-above-the-belt dept.

CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."

High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @05:30PM from the subsidies-cause-fatter-corn-farmers dept.

krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @05:21PM from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.

ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

OpenSSH 5.4 Released 127

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @04:40PM from the but-it's-secret dept.

HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"

Venezuela Bans Hostile Videogames and Toys 335

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 04, 2010 @06:41PM from the hostile-autocrats-still-ok dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In an effort to 'help improve child education and prevent misconduct,' the Venezuelan government began enforcing a law on March 3rd banning war videogames and toys, imposing a fine and 2.5 years in prison on the production, distribution, sale, hiring and use of video games and toys inciting violent behavior. Alberto Federico Ravell, former director of opposing news network Globovision, has already come on twitter denouncing the authorities for seizing imported Gameboy, Wii and PlayStation 3 consoles, due to considering them violent."

Submission + - Does DIY Enterprise SAN Exist?

Submitted by Anonymous Cow Nerd on Saturday February 20, 2010 @05:45PM

Anonymous Cow Nerd writes: All of my research indicates that, when it comes to storage area networks, you should just fork out the big bucks to the experts. Before I drop $100,000 of my employer's money, I wanted to ask if any slashdotters have succeeded in the elusive enterprise-capable DIY SAN. My notable goal is simply iSCSI storage for virtual servers and I am willing to go it alone in terms of 'official' hardware compatibility since our existing $45k (3TB) SAN is already on the list. Has OpenSolaris and ZFS matured into this yet? Do any of the commercial software SAN solutions fit the bill? I'm willing to pay for proper hardware but I'd like to ensure that I put the decimal at the correct magnitude. I'd use AoE but there are no adapters for my blade environment. Thin provisioning, IOPS, high availability and asynchronous replication — oh my!

Submission + - Tax Law Cited in Software Engineer's Suicide Note (nytimes.com)

Submitted by RevWaldo on Saturday February 20, 2010 @03:24PM

RevWaldo writes: The suicide note left by software engineer Joseph Stack before flying a small plane into a building with IRS offices in Texas on Thursday cited a 1986 tax law as a major motivation for his action. An article in the New York Times states the law, known as Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, "made it extremely difficult for information technology professionals to work as self-employed individuals, forcing most to become company employees." Harvey J. Shulman, a tax lawyer, states "This law has ruined many people's lives, hurt the technology industry, and discouraged the creation of small, independent businesses critical to a thriving domestic economy. That the law still exists — even after its original sponsors called for its repeal and unbiased studies proved it unfairly targeted a tax-compliant industry — shows just how dysfunctional and unresponsive Democratic and Republican Congresses and our political system have been, even on relatively simple issues."

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:03PM from the new-and-shiny dept.

Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."

Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot 398

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 04, 2010 @04:00PM from the more-guns-less-crime dept.

cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @05:30PM from the people-of-earth-you're-on-your-own dept.

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."

Nmap 5.20 Released 36

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 23, 2010 @11:32AM from the more-and-better dept.

ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"

Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE 142

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @05:40PM from the you-saw-this-coming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."

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