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Comment GIst of the problem is ... (Score 5, Insightful) 250

by Taco Cowboy (#47840369) Attached to: IT Job Hiring Slumps

... the economy of US is not booming

No matter if one can write high level code or whatnots, it still gonna be linked to the economy

People do not hire IT workers just because they have too much money - people hire IT workers because their companies have IT problems to be solved

And ... this is the kicker ... when the economy is not expanding, companies don't see their profit jumps, and when that happen, they will start looking for ways to save money, and one way to save money is to NOT hiring

The spending power of the people inside the U. S. of A. ain't booming - plus, the US exports also not growing leaps and bounds either

Face it, the economy of the United States of America hasn't been in too great a shape since the 1990's, and the future sure ain't look so bright

Comment STEM =! Convergent Thinking (Score 1, Interesting) 58

by Taco Cowboy (#47832897) Attached to: Music Training's Cognitive Benefits Could Help "At-Risk" Students

We've bought into the myth that all you need to succeed in STEM fields is convergent thinking

Don't use the "we" when it was you who thought so

STEM was never, is never, and will never be a product of "convergent thinking"

And I have a problem with your description of art being the source of "divergent thinking"

Take the so-called "art" that we have, for example - Music ... these days you listen to one song you listen to all songs --- all of them sound so similar as everybody tries to sound like everybody else --- the beats, the rhythm, who the fuck cares anymore who sings what since they all sound just so much alike

Creativity ? Where IS creativity nowadays ?

Certainly not in the art field --- When a guy put a crucifix into a container filled with urine that guy instantly becomes an "artist" and his "crucifix in urine" was described as "creative", I dunno about you, but "creativity" sure ain't the right adjective to use in this case

Comment Now I know why Tsinghua is involved (Score 5, Insightful) 254

by Taco Cowboy (#47830885) Attached to: UCLA, CIsco & More Launch Consortium To Replace TCP/IP

I was puzzled with the involvement of Tsinghua University of China with this thing

After reading your comment it starts to make sense

The China Communist Party needs to regain control of the Internet (at least inside China), that explains why they endorse this new scheme so much

Submission + - Lifeform out of the "Tree of Life" found off the coast of Australia (bbc.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A mushroom-shaped sea animal discovered off the Tasmanian coast back in 1986 has defied classification in the tree of life

A team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen says the tiny organism does not fit into any of the known subdivisions of the animal kingdom. The organisms, which were originally collected in 1986, are described in the academic journal Plos One. Such a situation has occurred only a handful of times in the last 100 years

The authors of the paper recognise two new species of mushroom-shaped animal: Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides. Measuring only a few millimetres in size, the animals consist of a flattened disc and a stalk with a mouth on the end. The authors of the article note several similarities with the bizarre and enigmatic soft-bodied life forms that lived between 635 and 540 million years ago — the span of Earth history known as the Ediacaran Period. Those organisms, too, have proven difficult to categorise and some researchers have even suggested they were failed experiments in multi-cellular life

During a scientific cruise in 1986, scientists collected organisms at water depths of 400m and 1,000m on the south-east Australian continental slope, near Tasmania. But the two types of mushroom-shaped organisms were recognised only recently, after sorting of the bulk samples collected during the expedition. "Finding something like this is extremely rare, it's maybe only happened about four times in the last 100 years," said co-author Jorgen Olesen from the University of Copenhagen

The new organisms are multicellular but mostly non-symmetrical, with a dense layer of gelatinous material between the outer skin cell and inner stomach cell layers. The researchers did find some similarities to other animal groupings, such as the Cnidaria — the phylum that comprises corals and jellyfish — and the Ctenophora, which includes the marine organisms known as comb jellies. But the new organisms did not fulfil all the criteria required for inclusion in either of those categories. Dr Olesen said the new animals could either be a very early branch on the tree of life, or be intermediate between two different animal phyla

One way to resolve the question surrounding Dendrogramma's affinities would be to examine its DNA, but new specimens will need to be found. The original samples were first preserved in formaldehyde and later transferred to 80% alcohol, a mode of treatment that prevents analysis of genetic material. Accordingly, the team's paper in Plos One calls for researchers around the world to keep an eye out for other examples. "We published this paper in part as a cry for help," said Dr Olesen. "There might be somebody out there who can help place it"

Comment Seeing it from the other side (Score 1) 546

by Taco Cowboy (#47822403) Attached to: Does Learning To Code Outweigh a Degree In Computer Science?

I wouldn't say learning to code outweighed a college degree

I started as a college student, spending days and night digging into each and every details to the machines (big irons) that we were using in order to make things work

Then I worked, starting as a coder, then a team leader, then in charge of the entire department, then I was hired by another company, and another, and another, and end up I started one company, and the next, and the next ...

What you say may be true, from the end of the coder, but if you see it from the other side, as I have done, for more than the past 3 decades, you will know that hiring people base on their sheepskin alone is beyond stupid

Of the people that I hired, and those who ended up being my partners in my businesses, most of them didn't even finish their college degree - but they possess the skill that no college student have, they have the experience and the instinct to know where to look and what to fix when something fucks up

Submission + - Current extinction rate of life forms is 1,000 fold before human era (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: It was widely believed that the extinction of flora and fauna increased 100 fold after human (homo sapiens sapiens) roam the earth. Now, according to a new study, the rate of life form extinctions has actually increased 1,000 folds when compared to the pre-human era

Extinctions are about 1,000 times more frequent now than in the 60 million years before people came along. The explanation from lead author Jurriaan de Vos, a Brown University postdoctoral researcher, senior author Stuart Pimm, a Duke University professor, and their team appears online in the journal Conservation Biology

In absolute, albeit rough, terms the paper calculates a "normal background rate" of extinction of 0.1 extinctions per million species per year. That revises the figure of 1 extinction per million species per year that Pimm estimated in prior work in the 1990s. By contrast, the current extinction rate is more on the order of 100 extinctions per million species per year

"The diversification rate is the speciation rate minus the extinction rate," said co-author Lucas Joppa, a scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash. "The total number of species on earth has not been declining in recent geological history. It is either constant or increasing. Therefore, the average rate at which groups grew in their numbers of species must have been similar to or higher than the rate at which other groups lost species through extinction"

For a third approach, de Vos noted that the exponential climb of species diversity should take a steeper upward turn in the current era because the newest species haven't gone extinct yet

"It's rather like your bank account on the day you get paid," he said. "It gets a burst of funds — akin to new species — that will quickly become extinct as you pay your bills"

By comparing that rise of the number of species from the as-yet unchecked speciation rate with the historical trend (it was "log-linear") evident in the phylogenies, he could therefore create a predictive model of what the counteracting historical extinction rate must have been

Comment They still need to orchestrate a show and tell ! (Score 2) 419

Doesn't Parallel Construction cover this already?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

True

But they (meaning NSA + Microsoft + US Department of Justice) still need to orchestrate a very public show and tell, something that the whole world can see, something that tells the whole world that Microsoft has BIG AND STRONG BACKBONE, so much so that they dare to stand against the US Department of Justice, the NSA, and so on ...
 
From TFA---

"Let there be no doubt that Microsoft's actions in this controversial case are customer-centric. The firm isn't just standing up to the US government on moral principles. It's now defying a federal court order "

Ain't you so glad now that Microsoft has finally becomes a company with "MORAL PRINCIPLES"???

TFA is nothing but a propaganda piece, and /. has become a willing partner in the act of spreading Pro-Microsoft propagandum

Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft Shutting Down MSN Messenger After 15 Years Of Service

Submitted by airfuz
airfuz writes: Microsoft took a bold move announcing that users have to move away from the old version of internet explorer to the new version 11. And now not long after that, Microsoft announced that they are shutting down the 15 year old MSN Messenger. Most people have moved away from the service to Facebook and other mobile based messenger such as Whatsapp and so MSN is left with few users. But still, ending a 15 year messaging service like the MSN Messenger means something to the one's who grew up using it.
[spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Hidden Obstacles for Google's Self-Driving Cars (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Lee Gomes at Technology Review wrote an article on the current limits of Google self-driving car technology: "Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn't drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn't be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole? If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014. Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can "drive anywhere a car can legally drive." However, that's true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It's vastly more effort than what's needed for Google Maps. ... Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google's vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation's millions of miles of roads and driveways. Urmson says Google's researchers "don't see any particular roadblocks" to accomplishing that. When a Google car sees a new permanent structure such as a light pole or sign that it wasn't expecting it sends an alert and some data to a team at Google in charge of maintaining the map. ... Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains. Nor has it tackled big, open parking lots or multilevel garages. ... Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels — meaning, Urmson agrees, that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop. ..."

A deeper issue I wrote about in 2001 is whether such software and data will be FOSS or proprietary? As I wrote there: "We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?"

Submission + - Wi-Fi Router Attack Only Requires a Single PIN Guess (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New research shows that wireless routers are still quite vulnerable to attack if they don't use a good implementation of Wi-Fi Protected Setup. Bad implementations do a poor job of randomizing the key used to authenticate hardware PINs. Because of this, the new attack only requires a single guess at the hardware PIN to collect data necessary to break it. After a few hours to process the data, an attacker can access the router's WPS functionality. Two major router manufacturers are affected: Broadcom, and a manufacturer to be named once they get around to fixing it. "Because many router manufacturers use the reference software implementation as the basis for their customized router software, the problems affected the final products, Bongard said. Broadcom's reference implementation had poor randomization, while the second vendor used a special seed, or nonce, of zero, essentially eliminating any randomness."

Submission + - Reformatting a Machine 125 Million Miles Away (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Opportunity rover has been rolling around the surface of Mars for over 10 years. It's still performing scientific observations, but the mission team has been dealing with a problem: the rover keeps rebooting. It's happened a dozen times this month, and the process it a bit more involved than rebooting a typical computer, taking a day or two to get back into operation every time. To try and fix this, the Opportunity team is planning a tricky operation: reformatting the flash memory from 125 million miles away. "Preparations include downloading to Earth all useful data remaining in the flash memory and switching the rover to an operating mode that does not use flash memory. Also, the team is restructuring the rover's communication sessions to use a slower data rate, which may add resilience in case of a reset during these preparations." The team suspects some of the flash memory cells are simply wearing out. The reformat is scheduled for some time in September.

Submission + - States Allowing Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Narcotic painkillers aren't one of the biggest killers in the U.S., but overdoses do claim over 15,000 live per year and send hundreds of thousands to the emergency room. Because of this, it's interesting that a new study (abstract) has found states that allow the use of medical marijuana have seen a dramatic reduction in opioid overdose fatalities. "Previous studies hint at why marijuana use might help reduce reliance on opioid painkillers. Many drugs with abuse potential such as nicotine and opiates, as well as marijuana, pump up the brain’s dopamine levels, which can induce feelings of euphoria. The biological reasons that people might use marijuana instead of opioids aren’t exactly clear, because marijuana doesn’t replace the pain relief of opiates. However, it does seem to distract from the pain by making it less bothersome." This research comes at a time when the country is furiously debating the costs and benefits of marijuana use, and opponents of the idea are paying researchers to paint it in an unfavorable light.

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