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Submission + - United's Woes Show What's Hard About Networking

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A router failure is reportedly to blame for yesterday's grounding of United Airlines planes. 'While it might seem like redundant routers and cables could keep that kind of problem from having a nationwide impact on an airline, networking problems are rarely as simple as routing around a failure,' writes Stephen Lawson. And that's because a router failure can mean a lot of things besides a total shutdown, and simple failover mechanisms only work for total failures that can be immediately detected, says Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa.

Submission + - Hacker Group That Hit Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Intensifies Attacks (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The hacker group, which security researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Symantec call Wild Neutron or Morpho, has broken into the networks of over 45 large companies since 2012. After the 2013 attacks against Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft were highly publicized, the group went underground and temporarily halted its activity. However, its attacks resumed in 2014 and have since intensified, according to separate reports released Wednesday by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec.

Submission + - Intel's Software Chief Out; Botched McAfee Deal To Blame? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Renee James, Intel's president and head of the company's software group has departed, supposedly to "pursue other opportunities." But a high-profile heir apparent doesn't just leave voluntarily, and it seems likely that she is in part taking the fall for Intel's acquisition of McAfee, the promised synergies of which have failed to materialize. Then again, Intel is a traditionally very stable company, but there's been a lot of churn in the uper ranks lately: is something wrong?

Submission + - Nvidia Hopes To Sell More Chips By Bringing AI Programming To The Masses (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Artificial intelligence typically requires heavy computing power, which can only help manufacturers of specialized chip manufacturers like Nvidia. That's why the company is pushing its Digits software, which helps users design and experiment with neural networks. Version 2 of digits moves out of the command line and comes with a GUI interface in an attempt to move interest beyond the current academic market; it also makes programming for multichip configurations possible.

Submission + - Chinese Consumer Group Sues Samsung Over Phone Crapware (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: For everyone who's created a folder on their phone called "dumb apps I can't remove" or the like, a ray of hope has come from China. The Shanghai Consumer Council has filed a suit against Samsung for not only placing so much bloatware on their phones, but also making it impossible for the user to easily remove the apps. The lawsuit is meant to discourage smartphone vendors from weighing their products down with pre-installed software

Submission + - Click-Fraud Trojan Politely Updates Flash On Compromised Computers (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Kotver is in many ways a typical clickfraud trojan: it hijacks the user's browser process to create false clicks on banner ads, defrauding advertisers and ad networks. But one aspect of it is unusual: it updates the victim's installation of Flash to the most recent version, ensuring that similar malware can't get in.

Submission + - Japanese And U.S. Piloted Robots To Brawl For National Pride (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Japan may have just lost the Women's World Cup to the U.S., but the country is hoping for a comeback in another competition: a battle between giant robots. Suidobashi Heavy Industry has agreed to a challenge from Boston-based MegaBots that would involve titanic armored robots developed by each startup, the first of its kind involving piloted machines that are roughly 4 meters tall. 'We can’t let another country win this,' Kogoro Kurata, who is CEO of Suidobashi, said in a video posted to YouTube. 'Giant robots are Japanese culture.'

Submission + - Watching People Code Is Becoming An (Even Bigger) Thing (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Faithful Slashdot readers may recall the story of Adam Wulf, who spent two weeks live-streaming himself writing a mobile app. The phenomenon has quickly become thing, by which we mean a business. Twitch.TV, Watch People Code (which is an offshoot of the subreddit by the same name), Ludum Dare, and, of course, YouTube, are bursting with live or archived streams of lots of people writing lots of code for lots of different things. And just this week, Y Combinator-backed startup Livecoding.TV launched. The site has signed up 40,000 users since its beta went live in February, but unlike the other sites in this space what it doesn't have (and doesn't have plans for) is advertising. As co-founder Jamie Green told ITworld: 'We have some different ideas around monetisation in the pipeline, but for now we are just focussed on building a community around live education.'

Submission + - TracFone Finally Agrees To Allow Phone Unlocking (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: While most Slashdot readers probably enjoy the latest and greatest smartphones and heavy-use data plans, millions of Americans use low-cost, prepaid featurephones, and many of those are sold under various brand names owned by TracFone. Today, after much pressure from the FCC, TracFone admitted that its customers also have the right to an unlocked phone that they can port to a different provider, including those low-income customers who participate in the government-subsidized Lifeline program, widely (though incorrectly) known as "Obamaphone".

Submission + - Why Software Development Isn't A Straight March Forward (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: In Pali, the term for which is paiccasamuppda ('mutual arising') means that every action contains the seeds of unknown others, including ones that work toward its own destruction. We can see this in our national political life — when, for instance, a young white man who tried to start a race war by killing nine black people spurred a movement to remove Confederate flags from statehouses instead. And, according to webmaster Sasha Akhavi, we see it in software development as well, where our actions cause nowhere near the linear march towards success that we would like.

Submission + - Why Isn't Anyone Talking About the Botched Apple Music Launch?

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: When Apple Music launched yesterday, it only launched on iOS apps at the appointed time. Peter Smith writes this about the desktop experience:

The Apple Music site had a Try Now button up for desktop users all day, and clicking it opened iTunes. iTunes 2.1.2 if you were up to date. The problem was that Apple Music requires iTunes 2.2, and as late as 6 PM ET that wasn't available. If you clicked the Try Now button, iTunes would open and inform you that you needed iTunes 2.2 and offered an Upgrade button. That Upgrade button would take you to the web to download the old version of iTunes that didn't support Apple Music.

But nowhere in the tech press did you see mention of the botched launch. VentureBeat wanted to make sure you knew how not to get charged for Apple Music, as did Engadget and TheVerge. And TechCrunch thought things were "going pretty well so far" when, at 6:20 PM ET, some Mac users finally started getting the update ( seven hours after scheduled launch).

Submission + - Celebrating Workarounds, Kludges, and Hacks (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: We all have some favorite workarounds that right a perceived wrong (like getting around the Wall Street Journal paywall) or make something work the way we think it ought to. From turning off annoying features in your Prius to getting around sanctions in Crimea and convincing your Android phone you're somewhere you're not, workarounds are a point of pride, showing off our ingenuity and resourcefulness. And sometimes artful workarounds can even keep businesses operating in times of crisis. Take, for example, the Sony employees, who, in the wake of the Great Hack of 2014 when the company's servers went down, dug out old company BlackBerrys that, while they had been abandoned, had never had their plans deactivated. Because BlackBerrys used RIM's email servers instead of Sony's, they could still communicate with one another, and employees with BlackBerrys became the company's lifeline as it slowly put itself back together.

Submission + - How Computer Science Education Got Practical (Again) (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of young people who had grown up tinkering with PCs hit college and dove into curricula designed around the vague notion that they might want to "do something with computers." Today, computer science education is a lot more practical — though in many ways that's just going back to the discipline's roots.

Submission + - Mob Programming: When Is 5 Heads Really Better Than 1 (or 2)? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Proponents of Mob programming, an offshoot of Pair programming in which the whole team works together on the same computer, say that it increases both quality and productivity, but also acknowledge that the productivity gains might not be readily apparent. 'If you measure by features or other classic development productivity metrics, Mobbing looks like it's achieving only 75 to 85 percent of individual or Pair output for, say, a team of six or seven working for a week,' says Paul Massey, whose company Bluefruit Software is a heavy user of the Mob approach. So, where does the productivity come from? Matthew Dodkins, a software architect at Bluefruit says the biggest gains are in code merges. 'In a day spent using traditional collaboration, you would have to first spend time agreeing on tasks, common goals, deciding who's doing what... and then going away to do that, write code, and come back and merge it, resolve problems,' says Dodkins. By bringing everyone into the same room, 'we try to merge frequently, and try to do almost continuous integration.' Matt Schartman, whose company Appfolio also uses Mobbing and wrote about his experience, gave Mobbing high marks for producing a quality product, but didn't find that it improved productivity in any measurable way.

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