Comment Which will come first... (Score 1) 292
the year of desktop Java, or the year of desktop Linux?
I wonder if phones and tablets will totally replace desktops, before either Java or Linux "takes over the desktop."
Comment Re:Metro or .NET, why use any? (Score 2) 319
Development on Metro will allow apps to be sold in Microsoft's upcoming app store. Whether you personally like or respect it, there will be many millions of computer users on Windows 8 who will buy apps this way.
The runtime prevents or intercepts many types of programming mistakes, while automatically adapting the software to run on different types of hardware. There are many options for caching, optimization and debugging, so that a
A huge number of developers are available, along with consultants, books, training materials and so forth. The majority of all of these advantages are also available to open source developers, through the Mono project's re-implementation of
You might prefer other approaches, but it's clear that for many shops, one can consider or even adopt
Comment Re:FUD (Score 1) 319
I think that article submitters should be scorable, just as comments are. If you want to set your front page to show stories with a score of 0 or less, then you'd see this kind of article. If you move the slider towards the higher setting, you'd not see this kind of timewaster.
Comment New career? (Score 1) 171
If the editor needs a new gig, I'm sure there's room for them at Slashdot!
Comment Slashdot needs competent editors, not user surveys (Score 4, Insightful) 319
Slashdot just did a survey, that asked whether readers would recommend Slashdot to others. Here is a perfect example of why I answered No to that question, and would have picked Hell No if that option had been in the survey. An increase in job postings for
Submission + - Predator Drone Virus Could be Military Monitoring (techzwn.com)
jjp9999 writes: The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman there are vendors that sell security monitoring packages to the Defense Department which are ‘essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.’ The virus is a keylogger that was found at pilot stations, and could be keeping tabs on keystrokes used by pilots to control the UAVs, found Wired’s Danger Room blog. Fidelman adds ‘I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally.’
Submission + - Physicists localize 3-D matter waves for first tim (sciencemag.org)
RogerRoast writes: University of Illinois physicists have experimentally demonstrated for the first time how three-dimensional conduction is affected by the defects that plague materials. Understanding these effects is important for many electronics applications. The report appears in Science.
Submission + - Who's Bankrolling the Climate-Change Deniers? 1
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Bryan Walsh writes in Time Magazine that climate denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science. "The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine," say sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Peabody Energy — which obviously have a business interest in slowing any attempt to reduce carbon emissions — have combined with traditionally conservative corporate groups like the US Chamber of Commerce and conservative foundations like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to raise doubts about the basic validity of what is, essentially, a settled scientific truth. The naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking. For both Big Oil and Big Smoke, that playbook is lethally simple: don't straight-up refute the science, just raise skepticism and insist that the findings are "unsettled" and that "more research" is necessary."
Submission + - Java LINQ (github.com) 3
nicholas22 writes: "A Java library providing LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) has been developed, using a Scala-style programming library called lombok-pg, that supports features not found in standard JDK libraries, such as extension methods, yield coroutines and functions.
Examples (valid Java):
String[] names = new String[] { "james", "john", "john", "eddie" }.where(startsWith("j")).distinct();
char[] alphabet = new Character('A').to(new Character('Z')).unbox();
This Java code would take approximately 4x the number of lines of code."
Examples (valid Java):
String[] names = new String[] { "james", "john", "john", "eddie" }.where(startsWith("j")).distinct();
char[] alphabet = new Character('A').to(new Character('Z')).unbox();
This Java code would take approximately 4x the number of lines of code."
Submission + - FBI to launch nationwide facial recognition servic (nextgov.com) 1
hessian writes: "The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.
The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings."
The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings."
Submission + - slashdot blocked in china 2
tvlinux writes: I woke up this morning, and accessed /. I received a "connection reset". After living in China to a few years, I know what that means. Slashdot is being blocked by "Golden Shield". I am in ShenZhen, anybody else being blocked?
Slashdot is a great place to keep track of the latest technology advances. Google is some times throttled. Many other technical sites are blocked just because they are on a blog site.
Is China cutting it throat learning about new technology?
Slashdot is a great place to keep track of the latest technology advances. Google is some times throttled. Many other technical sites are blocked just because they are on a blog site.
Is China cutting it throat learning about new technology?
Submission + - Windows 8 to reduce memory footprint (msdn.com)
bheer writes: "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."
Submission + - Oracle to bring Dtrace on Linux
mvar writes: Dtrace co-author Adam Leventhal writes on his blog about Dtrace for Linux:
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging.
Even among Oracle employees, there’s uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn’t have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise.
Leunissen stated that only the kernel components of DTrace are part of the port. It’s unclear whether that means just fbt or includes sdt and the related providers. It sounds certain, though, that it won’t pass the DTrace test suite which is the deciding criterion between a DTrace port and some sort of work in progress.
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging.
Even among Oracle employees, there’s uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn’t have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise.
Leunissen stated that only the kernel components of DTrace are part of the port. It’s unclear whether that means just fbt or includes sdt and the related providers. It sounds certain, though, that it won’t pass the DTrace test suite which is the deciding criterion between a DTrace port and some sort of work in progress.
Submission + - Sprint Tells Investors it Needs More Cash (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: "Sprint stocks tumbled Friday after the company's CFO told investors that it may be forced to seek more funds via capital markets or the company's credit line. This news comes just days after Sprint announced a make-or-break gamble to buy 30.5 million iPhones from Apple over the next four years, with no prospect of seeing profits on the deal until 2014."
Submission + - Run a Company Intranet on WordPress and BuddyPress (wpmu.org)
softservenet writes: "Step by step review of the features of BuddyPress (the WordPress social networking plugin) adapted for use as an intranet."
