Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Traders Look to Wireless for Lowest Latency (highfrequencytraders.com)

Submitted by
kruhft
kruhft writes: "Traders are exploring wireless solutions as a potentially lower cost and lower latency alternative to fiber. High Frequency Traders takes a look at the technology and its place in the industry's future.

Traditionally, high frequency traders seeking the fastest connections between markets have looked to fiber-optic networks. It's been a largely successful endeavour. Latency between the markets of Chicago and New York has been cut as low as 13.3 milliseconds.

But experience tells us that this is an industry that never sits still. In pursuit of the even faster times that can make all the difference in high frequency trading, some firms are looking to wireless solutions to give them the edge."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Front Page Change

Journal by kruhft

So it seems that Slashdot has decided to remove the number of comments/threshold comments from stories on the front page. This used to be a good barometer of how popular the story was before clicking on it to go through to the comments. Now it seems that the clicks are more important than showing the popularity. This is probably a way to increase ad impressions and to even out the pageviews on the stories. We'll see if it sticks around.

Comment Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score 1) 538

by kruhft (#37875594) Attached to: Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language?

Yes, I realise that my editor (emacs) has an indent region function, and I use it when I move python code around. But I still have to think about how much to indent, and if i don't I can change the meaning of my code. In braced languages, I can simply re-indent the lines without thinking and the meaning of my code still stays the same. If python had braces I would say it would be one of the most perfect high level languages, without it...just a decent one.

Comment Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score 1) 538

by kruhft (#37869016) Attached to: Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language?

I find brace-less languages fantastically difficult to move code around in. At least with braces you can cut from the start brace to the end brace, and then paste without losing your scope. Doing anything like that in Python means you not only have to get the code you cut correctly bound, you also have to make sure that you get the correct amount of whitespace on every line of code you paste so as not to lose your original scoping. It's a nightmare.
AI

Submission + - Cleverbot Passes Turing Test (geekosystem.com)

Submitted by
kruhft
kruhft writes: "It seems that Cleverbot, the chatbot so ready to admit that it was a unicorn during a discussion with itself, has passed the Turing test. This past Sunday, the 1334 votes from a Turing test held at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India were released. They revealed that Cleverbot was voted to be human 59.3% of the time. Real humans did only slightly better and were assumed to be humans 63.3% of the time. That being the case, Cleverbot's success in conning people into thinking it was human is greater than chance, and therefore, one could argue that it has technically passed the Turning test."

Comment Missed a closing bracket in the submission (Score 1) 1

by kruhft (#36909710) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Using Code with an Expired Patent

I was recently doing some research into Genetic Programming and found a library through a blog post that looks to be useful. After looking over the code and license, I found that this was the first piece of code I had seen that was protected by a patent, issued on June 19, 1990. I read that patents last for 20 years, meaning that the patent that this code refers to is expired. Is there any way for me to be sure that using this code is safe from any patent troll attacks if I choose to use it? Would rewriting the code keep me from violating any other patents that the author might have regarding the use of such an algorithm? Does the code pass into the public domain after the patent expires?
Patents

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Using Code with an Expired Patent 1

Submitted by
kruhft
kruhft writes: "I was recently doing some research into Genetic Programming and found through a blog post that looks to be useful. After looking over the code and license, I found that this was the first piece of code I had seen that was protected by a patent, issued on June 19, 1990. I read that patents last for 20 years, meaning that the patent that this code refers to is expired. Is there any way for me to be sure that using this code is safe from any patent troll attacks if I choose to use it? Would rewriting the code keep me from violating any other patents that the author might have regarding the use of such an algorithm? Does the code pass into the public domain after the patent expires?"

Comment Disable Select all Text on Click in URL Bar (Score 1) 599

by kruhft (#36599672) Attached to: The Enterprise Is Wrong, Not Mozilla

I have to work on windows at work and the default behavior for clicking in the URL bar is to select all text, which is generally because *normal* people don't want to edit the url, they want to replace it. Exactly the opposite of what I need.

The best thing is that in Firefox this is a user configurable option in about:config: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll. I haven't seen an option like that in any other browser, so for now, things like this keep me with Firefox (and NoScript, and AdBlock and Firebug and....).

Slashdot Top Deals

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

Close