tmcb - Slashdot User

Submission + - Live-Coding a complete, simple GUI game (youtube.com)

Submitted by jonastullus on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @05:34AM

jonastullus writes: It is almost impossible to look over the shoulders of a programmer to see how he develops a program from start to finish.

When video tutorial are put online, they are scripted, edited and cut.

This video shows live-coding the game of Sokoban including a GTK GUI to give an impression of the cul-de-sacs and confusion that is involved in a successful programming project ;)

Submission + - Visualizing immigration as a physics problem (yahoo.com)

Submitted by remember_clifford on Monday June 25, 2012 @04:47PM

remember_clifford writes: Michael Gastner, known for his sublime cartograms that use gas-diffusion formulas to reshape maps, has a new map on Yahoo that morphs the US-Mexico border based on immigration data, animated over time. No word on exactly what formulas he used, but looks like pretty basic pressure on maleable surface.

Submission + - 'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by dsinc on Saturday June 09, 2012 @10:47AM

dsinc writes: George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, made observations about the Adelie penguins' sex life. To his horror, the penguins' sexual activity included auto-erotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females, including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks and homosexual behaviour. When he returned to England, he deemed this part of the study to be too shocking and removed it "to preserve decency." Today, it is unearthed at the Natural History Museum.

Submission + - An HTTP Status Code for Censorship? (shkspr.mobi)

Submitted by Tryfen on Saturday June 09, 2012 @08:49AM

Tryfen writes: UK ISPs are being forced to block The Pirate Bay. One is using "HTTP 403 Forbidden" to tell users that they cannot access the site. So, should there be a specific HTTP status code to tell a user that they are being censored?

Submission + - Backdoor in hardware (cam.ac.uk)

Submitted by

udas

on Monday May 28, 2012 @03:36AM

udas writes: "Quo Vadis Labs has a paper that shows a "backdoor in a military grade FPGA" using their patented technique that uses "Pipeline Emission Analysis". They "were able to extract the secret key to activate the backdoor".

The repurcussions can be catastrophic. This implies that an attacker with knowledge of the backdoor can not only sniff data whenever the chip is used, but can even alter it's functionality. Because of the backdoor being in hardware, there is no alternative but to stop using them until a new, fixed batch can be fabricated, tested, and deployed. Even if the backdoor cannot be used directly, the delay it imposes is, in itself, of great value."

Submission + - Everything you know about electrostatics is wrong (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri on Wednesday May 23, 2012 @05:55AM

scibri writes: Bring two positively charged spheres together and what happens? They repel, right? Wrong.

Physicist John Lekner, has proven mathematically that they will attract when they get close enough together (paper's not live yet, but the link where it will eventually live is here). A region of positive charge on one sphere can cause the positive charge on the other to retreat, piling up further away and leaving a patch of negative charge behind.

English scientist William Snow Harris, who invented lightning conductors for ships, saw something like this in 1836 with charged disks. So now all that remains is for someone to prove Lekner's math experimentally today.

Submission + - Matt Groening Reveals the Location of the Real Springfield (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by dsinc on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @07:29PM

dsinc writes: Mystery solved: The Simpsons live in the Springfield that's in Oregon, the creator of the animated family reveals.

Submission + - Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by tmcb on Friday February 10, 2012 @05:10AM

tmcb writes: On Saturday protests are planned across the world against Acta — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The treaty has become the focus of activists associated with the Anonymous hacking network because of concerns that it could undermine internet privacy and aid censorship. First published in 1982, the comic series V for Vendetta charted a masked vigilante's attempt to bring down a fascist British government and its complicit media. Many of the demonstrators are expected to wear masks based on the book's central character. Ahead of the protests, the BBC asked V for Vendetta's writer, Alan Moore, for his thoughts on how his creation had become an inspiration and identity to Anonymous.

Submission + - If You're Fat, Broke, and Smoking, Blame Language (vice.com) 1

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @05:45PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Us Americans tend to spend more, save less, and carry more than a few extra pounds as compared to the rest of the world. We’re not alone; the Greeks, for one, have similar traits. Meanwhile, folks like the Germans are fitter, thriftier, and save more for retirement. The Chinese blow us away when it comes to saving money, and their savings rate continues to surge. What’s the deal? It’s long been acknowledged that some groups are better at focusing on the future than others, but explanations are usually based around a mix of history, culture, and psychology. But could it be language’s fault?

That’s the argument posed by this wonderful conversation-inducing paper (PDF) written by M. Keith Chen at Yale. Chen posits that the differences between cultures’ approaches to savings, health, and other long-term issues are rooted in grammar and syntax. In essence, he says that some groups don’t care about having an empty IRA and smoking a pack a day because the way they talk makes the future seem far enough off to ignore."

Submission + - Mr. Smith wants to watch you...all of you (slashgear.com) 2

Submitted by ads49 on Saturday January 21, 2012 @05:41AM

ads49 writes: Apparently this Lamar guy just doesn't know when to quit. He's now pushing a law that forces ISP's to record your search history, credit card usage, and IP addresses you've been assigned for the last 18 months. So now when you are eventually suspected of something, they already have plenty of "proof" against you. Gotta love that forward thinking. http://www.slashgear.com/sopa-sponsor-has-another-internet-bill-that-records-you-247-20210264/

Submission + - Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor to Govern 2

Submitted by Voline on Saturday January 07, 2012 @04:53PM

Voline writes: In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India's Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices.

The Indian government then "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a US government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on "the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship" between the US and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec.

If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?

Submission + - Diaspora* Finally Launches (launch.is)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01, 2011 @03:18PM

An anonymous reader writes: Diaspora has launched today, though you could join community-supported Diaspora* pods for awhile already. From the article: "Diaspora* sports some Google+ elements, such as the black bar at the top and a stream on the left-hand side with "Aspects" rather than Circles. Unlike other social networks, Diaspora* encourages people to follow hashtags rather than users, though it is possible to search for people. Similar to Google+ and Facebook, you can post publicly or with a select group of people and add your own "Aspects." ... When you join Diaspora*, you are asked to follow tags. In your first post, including #newhere lets others in the Diaspora* community know to give you a warm welcome. Tags include #music with 6K+ followers, #newhere with 1K+ followers and #occupy with 400+ followers, but there is currently no way to see the most popular tags."

Submission + - The Science of Humor 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday November 26, 2011 @02:06PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says that humor (or mirth, in research speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. "We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain’s reward for discovering its mistaken inferences," says Hurley, co-author of "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind," adding that with humor, the brain doesn’t just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the funniest joke in the world by American men. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading. Humor is "when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You’ve made an assumption about the state of the world, and you’re behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn’t hold at all, and you get a little chuckle.""

Submission + - Ext3, ext4, xfs and btrfs filesystems comparison o (ilsistemista.net) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18, 2011 @10:37AM

An anonymous reader writes: This article give an in-depth analysis at various Linux filesystems performance. It compare ext3, ext4, xfs and btrfs each other.

Submission + - Dennis Ritchie has died (biobiochile.cl)

Submitted by

rjh

on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @11:39PM

rjh writes: "Dennis Ritchie, father of both C and UNIX, has died at age seventy. (English-speaking news outlets haven't yet picked it up yet, but Google Translate does well with the link.) In a career that not only spanned modern computing but defined it, he developed many tools and systems that we take for granted today. He received a Turing Prize in 1983 for his services to the industry, but even then he didn't slow down: he had a sterling career with Bell Labs and Lucent until finally retiring in 2007."

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