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Comment Re:Because text is the only medium that's varied e (Score 1) 876

by EtaCarinae (#46196171) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code?
This. Artifacts that can be edited an put in a repo by any serious project need to be in a format understandable by quality diff and 3-way merge tools. Some automatic conflict resolution of trivial but unrelated changes in an artifact is also highly needed. IBM RSA (UML) has come some way here, don't know about LabView - guess there's some diff at least, but 3-way merge? Doubt it.
Never mind code generation, I would be glad/surprised if there was a structured graphics format with good diff/merge support! (not counting the language-based ones such as TeX/pic then...)

Comment this (Score 1) 50

by EtaCarinae (#40025943) Attached to: Superflares Found On Sun-Like Stars
Yeah,
I wager rotation speed lies behind this. Even if it is possible to see the surface speeds using Doppler spectrum spreading or something, maybe the cores can rotate even faster? A high rotation speed could also be indicative of a different early formation history making the likeliness of close Jupiters small. Another explanation could be that these suns have indeed had close gas giants in the past which now has long crashed into the sun and thereby increased the spin.
Earth

40 Million Year Old Primate Fossils Found In Asia 91

Posted by samzenpus from the look-who's-coming-to-dinner dept.
sosaited writes "It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of four primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old, during which period Africa was thought to not have these species. The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa."
NASA

NASA Parodies Reach New Level of Awkwardness 28

Posted by samzenpus from the go-back-to-film-school dept.
MMBK writes "NASA TV recently produced six movie-trailer parodies about current projects for a 'themed exhibit at an international conference.' But for the most part, the attempt remains pretty corny, far, far away from the imaginative, inspiring work of space artists like Bruce McCall."

Comment Real solution: Forbid and detect (Score 1) 870

by EtaCarinae (#33571184) Attached to: Preventing Networked Gizmo Use During Exams?
The real solution should be to forbid all kinds of radio/IR transmission during test and to deploy detectors of the typical frequencies used (WLAN/Bluetooh/Cellular). There should be many detectors to be able to triangulate and sort out exterior sources. This shouldn't be too complex. It shouldn't be too expensive in long term either since the problem is global. There should be a market for this kind of gear.

Comment Emacs... (Score 1) 350

by EtaCarinae (#33153538) Attached to: Why Wave Failed

Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...

Emacs, of course, has supported this since a long time when running under X Windows. See e.g., "New Frame on Display..." menu item under File...
PC Games (Games)

Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans 202

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-right dept.
Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Duke Nukem Forever Not Dead? (Yes, This Again) 195

Posted by Soulskill from the you-didn't-think-it-was-over-did-you? dept.
kaychoro writes "There may be hope for Duke Nukem Forever (again). 'Jon St. John, better known as the voice of Duke Nukem, said some interesting words during a panel discussion at the Music and Games Festival (MAGFest) that took place January 1 – 4 in Alexandria, Virginia, according to Pixel Enemy. Answering a question from the crowd regarding DNF, St. John said: "... let me go ahead and tell you right now that I'm not allowed to talk about Duke Nukem Forever. No, no, don't be disappointed, read between the lines — why am I not allowed to talk about it?"'"

Comment Re:Latency? (Score 3, Informative) 46

by EtaCarinae (#28863143) Attached to: Verizon 4G LTE Tests Planned For Seattle, Boston
Latency can get below 5 ms under good radio conditions. LTE as well as older standards (W-CDMA etc) has retransmission on top of error correction. LTE uses a rather cool retransmission strategy. Search HARQ. Retransmissions can of course ruin ping times, but even this has been improved in LTE since decisions are being made closer to the antenna in the E-NodeB.

What kind of connection, firewalling and shaping the operator has to the internet is then another matter...

Comment Re:Just fearmongering (Score 1) 31

by EtaCarinae (#28236911) Attached to: New Denial-of-Service Attacks Threaten Wireless Data Networks

Yet TFA provided examples of 3G disruptions.

I for one can easily imagine scenarios where our mobile networks are heavily degraded due to viruses on phones and maybe even due to subtle DoS attacks between operators! I know there are products where operators actually may drain (very little) of its own customer's battery time to make measurements on its competitors' coverage. It's a war out there. Possibly the radio networks have to be governmentally run in the long run.

I have no idea how hardened the signaling in RRC etc in 3G/LTE is against DoS attacks. Maybe very little energy is needed to fake paging, disrupt calls, degrade bit-rates etc. Don't dismiss the wires yet!

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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