borroff - Slashdot User

Comment Re:COBOL (Score 1) 569

by borroff on Sunday March 22, 2009 @07:32AM (#27287099) Attached to: Programming Language Specialization Dilemma

At some point in time, aren't we going to have to port COBOL to some other language? We're going to be losing COBOL experts to old age soon, for goodness sake, never mind the machines they run on may become unsupportable!

Personally, I've started poking at COBOL, just so I can understand the process of migrating our computing infrastructure to new systems. We don't have as much COBOL code as others may, but what we do have is at the core of our reporting infrastructure.

Comment Re:Good News! (Score 1) 569

by borroff on Sunday March 22, 2009 @07:27AM (#27287079) Attached to: Programming Language Specialization Dilemma

Whenever I see people advising functional languages as a means to expanding one's programming experience, I always see Lisp, Haskell and Erlang. Everyone seems to ignore Ocaml and F#. In particular, with many commenters advising .Net exploration, I'm surprised F# doesn't come up more often. A bunch of Microsoft's financial extensions to Excel are written in F#. Many F# programs are valid Ocaml.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but find it curious that these two languages are mostly omitted.

Comment Re:Anyone know more info about this guy (Score 5, Interesting) 105

by borroff on Thursday February 05, 2009 @01:11PM (#26739737) Attached to: DC CTO Vivek Kundra Named To Top Federal IT Job

In a previous Slashdot posting, some DC residents commented that he was the real deal. He knows his stuff, and gets things done.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1097003&cid=26519833

There's also a Washington Post article about Kundra linked to in the comments:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010401235.html

Comment Re:Lame (Score 1) 717

by borroff on Thursday January 22, 2009 @03:26PM (#26564043) Attached to: Whistleblower Claims NSA Spied On Everyone, Targeted Media

Of all the biases exhibited here at Slashdot---and there are many!---the bias favoring low-id users is probably the most idiotic.

Interesting, but I'd accept your premise a lot more readily if you had a 5-digit id...

Obama Moves To Link Pentagon With NASA 491

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 04, 2009 @10:25AM from the thought-they-wanted-to-save-money dept.

Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg: "President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."

Linux Kernel 2.4 Or 2.6 In Embedded System? 178

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 04, 2009 @09:11AM from the comfort-on-the-trailing-edge dept.

snikulin writes "My 6-year-old embedded software happily runs on kernel v2.4 on an XScale CPU. The software gets a bunch (tens of megabytes) of data from an FPGA over a PCI-X bus and pushes it out over GigE to data-processing equipment. The tool chain is based on the somewhat outdated gcc v2.95. Now, for certain technical reasons we want to jump from the ARM-based custom board to an Atom-based COM Express module. This implies that I'll need to re-create a Linux RAM disk from scratch along with the tool chain. The functionality of the software will be essentially the same. My question: is it worth it to jump to kernel 2.6, or better to stick with the old and proven 2.4? What will I gain and what will I lose if I stay at 2.4 (besides the modern gcc compiler and the other related dev tools)?"

Universities Patenting More Student Ideas 383

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 04, 2009 @05:23AM from the thanks-for-the-research dept.

theodp writes "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem — as long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NYTimes reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."

"Back Door" Cheating Scandal Rocks Online Poker 427

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @04:05PM from the know-when-to-hold-'em dept.

AcidAUS sends us the story of an online poker cheating ring that netted an estimated $10M for its perpetrators over almost 4 years. The article spotlights the role of an Australian player who first performed the statistical analyses that demonstrated that cheating had to be going on. "In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analyzed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate. His findings led to an internal investigation by the parent company that owns both sites. It found rogue employees had defrauded players over three years via a security hole that allowed the cheats to see other player's secret (or hole) cards." The (Mohawk) Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which licenses the two poker companies, has released its preliminary report. MSNBC reporting from a couple of weeks back gives deep background on the scandal.

RealNetworks, Film Industry Headed To Court 173

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @12:41PM from the in-your-face-film-industry dept.

netbuzz writes "Apparently tired of waiting to be sued by the movie studios over its new DVD-to-PC copying software, RealNetworks this morning announced it will file a preemptive lawsuit in an attempt to authoritatively establish that the product does not infringe on copyright restrictions. Within an hour or so, the Motion Picture Association of America said it would have a litigation announcement of its own this afternoon."

Safe Stem Cells Produced From Adult Cells 207

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 28, 2008 @11:51AM from the spare-parts dept.

hackingbear writes "Wired, citing a paper published in Science magazine, reports that Harvard scientists may have found a safer way of giving a flake of skin the biologically alchemical powers of embryonic stem cells by turning adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage. The technique involves 'adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA.' Four-month trials on mice demonstrated that the resulting stem cells are free from unpredictable cancer-inducing mutations. This is definitely a breakthrough in stem cell research." Additional coverage is available at Yahoo, and Science hosts the research paper, although you'll need a subscription to see more than the abstract.

Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem' 363

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 28, 2008 @10:41AM from the rabbit-neutality-is-all-you,-though dept.

RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."

Naphthalene Found In Outer Space 180

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 20, 2008 @10:38PM from the wake-me-up-when-they-find-remulac dept.

Adam Korbitz writes with an excerpt from his blog on an exciting discovery in space: "A team of researchers led by Spanish scientists has published their discovery of the complex molecule naphthalene in an interstellar star-forming cloud, indicating many prebiotic organic molecules necessary for life as we know it could have been present when our own solar system formed. According to the new research — published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters — the naphthalene molecules were discovered 700 light-years from Earth in a star-forming region of the constellation Perseus, in the direction of the star Cernis 52."

Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System? 660

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 20, 2008 @04:29PM from the hell-you-say dept.

cgenman writes "What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text? Quite frequently, I'll need to boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two. XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable, and Ubuntu loads in about 60 seconds. Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around. What is the best operating system that people have found which would load to useable in under 20 seconds, can edit text files in something a little more friendly than VI or EMACS, yet can still access fat32 formatted USB drives? GUIs aren't required, but commands which require arcane foreknowledge or a cheat sheet are out."

Submission + - SPAM: IC3 issues FBI fraud warning

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday January 15, 2008 @01:20PM

coondoggie writes: "The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) today issued a warning that it has receieved reports of fraudulent schemes misrepresenting FBI agents, officials and/or FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. The fraudulent e-mails give the appearance of legitimacy due to the usage of pictures of the FBI Director, seal, letterhead, and/or banners. The types of schemes utilizing the names of FBI agents, officials, or the Director's name are typically lottery endorsements and inheritance notifications.Some observers think 2008 is going to be nasty year for security-related problems. Look for a rising number of compromised Web sites that quietly attack unsuspecting visitors, "parasitic" malware that eats desktop files, and a stream of exploits targeting high-profile events such as the 2008 Olympics and the U.S. presidential elections, experts warn. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - YouTube censoring atheists. (youtube.com)

Submitted by Metaleks on Monday December 24, 2007 @09:18PM

Metaleks writes: 'Tis the season to be jolly. But all is not well. It would seem that YouTube is censoring those who lack Christmas spirit. One after another, atheists on YouTube are being removed from Top 100 lists, and having their channels stripped of any honours. To prove this wasn't some sort of YouTube glitch, one atheist went as far as creating another account. As soon as he was "discovered" of being an atheist his videos were stripped of any honours and his name taken off of the Top 100 lists. Why is YouTube censoring atheists?

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