jguthrie - Slashdot User

Submission + - Kaleidoscope: Implementing a Language with LLVM (llvm.org)

Submitted by

sabre

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @03:09AM

sabre writes: "The LLVM Compiler System is being used for all sorts of interesting things these days. It basically provides an extremely modular and easy to use set of open source (BSD-licensed) compiler libraries that can be used to build various applications from. Despite this, many people don't really understand it, and are scared away by the breadth of the project or by compilers in general.

The Kaleidoscope tutorial starts out from scratch and slowly builds up a simple language to show how LLVM can help out with this. We end up with a JIT compiler for a fairly interesting little language with less than 700 lines of code. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, once you start with LLVM, there are all sorts of things you can do."

Submission + - Navisite Massively Botches Datacenter Move (navisite.com)

Submitted by

9InchRails

on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @02:45PM

9InchRails writes: "In a move to consolidate a newly acquired datacenter, web hosting provider Navisite shutdown, boxed and transported hundreds of servers, effectively stranding in excess of 200,000 web sites and authoritative name servers. This fiasco is in its fourth day as noted here and here. How could a company been so completely incompetent?"

Submission + - Microsoft Windows PowerShell update (msdn.com) 1

Submitted by

Marco Shaw

on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @02:42PM

Marco Shaw writes: "Microsoft just released a Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview) which provides insight into what is being worked on for the next release of their next-generation command line shell and scripting language. Three of the major new features are: *Compatibility with PowerShell 1.0 *PowerShell Remoting *Background Jobs To read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/06/what-s-new-in-ctp-of-powershell-2-0.aspx"

Submission + - Ten Storage Strategies for the Home (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

ThinSkin

on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @02:28PM

ThinSkin writes: "Many computer users store data on their computers without a safety net, that is, without properly backing up important information onto an additional storage device. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech has come up with ten storage strategies for keeping that crucial digital information safe in case of a hard drive failure, fire, and so forth. Some strategies are cheap or cost nothing (storing data online) while other methods will cost you some money, such as setting up a RAID or a NAS (network attached storage)."

Submission + - DIY CPU Demo'd Running Minix

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Sunday November 04, 2007 @02:43AM

__aajbyc7391 writes: Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, today at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus.

Submission + - Are CS students poor programmers? 2

Submitted by

DavidHumus

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @04:04PM

DavidHumus writes: "Recently, at a computer conference, I heard two separate people say the same thing during the same day: computer science students are usually very poor programmers. Both these people were college professors in areas that do a lot of computing — mathematics and biology (population genetics) — and have dealt with a lot of students who have had to write programs for their courses.

The specific complaint of both professors was that CS students seem to have very superfical knowledge, that they don't understand things like the limitations of floating point arithmetic and verifying their output. One professor recounted the story of a student who wanted a good grade on a program because it ran to completion — never mind that the answers it gave were off by many orders of magnitude.

Do slashdotters agree or disagree with this? If it is true, why? Shouldn't computer science students be good programmers?"

Submission + - Funny and Informative: Signs Not to be a Developer (com.com)

Submitted by

neilbaby

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @08:57AM

neilbaby writes: "TechRepublic has a list of Top-10 reasons not to be a developer. It is both informative for potential future developers (e.g.: "#2: You like regular working hours") as well as humorous (e.g.: "#10: You do not like the geek type of person"). My personal favorite is "#5: You are easily frustrated" — I seem to have done fine being easily frustrated — although my monitors may have suffered a bit."

Submission + - Source Control for Large Code Base?

Submitted by fenodyree on Thursday October 25, 2007 @03:42PM

fenodyree writes: We're looking to move our source control away from subversion, as subversion was not designed for the parallel development methods, which we use, and with our large code base (>1GB), merging is next to impossible after 2-months of effort in a branch. We are spending literal days waiting for a merge and resolving unnecessary conflicts. I have looked into using Bitkeeper, but the costs are prohibitive ($1,245/User/Year). Bazaar definitely seems the best option with the use of a centralized repository, however, in past tests it was slow with even 100MB codebase. With a distributed source control the amount of network traffic for our codebase would be significant. So what do other large base projects use? What experiences have you had?

Submission + - Linus blasts GCC developers (lkml.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25, 2007 @11:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: Linus blasted GCC developers on LKML today stating that "The gcc developers seem to have had a total disregard for what people want or need, and every time some code generation issue comes up, there's a lot of people on the list that do language-lawyering, rather than admit that there might be a problem." He also noted OpenBSD's efforts but regarded them as impractical, stating that "I think the OpenBSD people decided to actually do something about this, and I suspect it had *nothing* to do with license issues, and everything to do with these kinds of problems. I wish them all the luck, although personally I think LLVM is a much more interesting project." Read more on the LKML GCC flamewar here : http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/25/186

Submission + - Stolen unencrypted laptop contains 159,000 records (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by

DLa Voie

on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @12:14PM

DLa Voie writes: "I received a letter from Administaff yesterday stating my data (SSN and other personally identifiable information) was one of the 159,000 records contained on the unencrypted laptop. The laptop computer, which was reported missing on Oct. 3, contained data that was being compiled "in response to a governmental reporting requirement", according to Administaff. How long will it be before this negligence stops, and what type of action do you suggest when this reoccurring scenario happens?"

Submission + - Ankh 2 : A Linux-Port if 250 Pre-orders (ixsoft.de)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday October 18, 2007 @10:34AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "IxSoft, a german online retailer specialized in selling Linux software, offers a Pre-Order campaign for the port of Ankh 2, an adventure game currently available on Windows. According to IxSoft, RuneSoft demands at least 250 pre-order through the IxSoft Web Shop, before porting this game to Linux. The aim of this campaign is to make Ankh 2 for Linux profitable. The campaign will end October, 31st If it is succesful, the port should be finished before christmas"

Submission + - Why Users Ditch OS X for Windows (osweekly.com) 7

Submitted by

coward

on Thursday October 18, 2007 @02:12AM

coward writes: "OSWeekly.com says users ditch OS X for Windows. Why? It's too pricey, the article claims. "If one more person points me to a Mini and tells me this is going to replace a 2.00GHz PC with standalone video and a SATA drive, I'm going to scream. Despite Apple providing a superior OS for the casual consumer, it remains a price issue for most people. You take any unsuspecting cash conscious family and if you actually tell me that they are going to be willing to drop $1,099 versus $499 on a notebook for their child, you had better present one serious sales pitch. Even considering the long-term value, malware-free environment, those parents would be presenting their soon to be college aged kid, the fact is they are not informed enough to understand that the $499 notebook is an utter junk, thanks to poor hardware quality."

Submission + - Do OpenOffice users save in Microsoft format? (zdnet.co.uk) 8

Submitted by

superglaze

on Wednesday October 17, 2007 @04:00AM

superglaze writes: "Looking through an article on the Series 60 office suite Quickoffice, I noted a claim by a company executive that OpenOffice users usually save their documents in a Microsoft (eg. .doc) format (hence no plans at Quickoffice to support .odf). I guess I can see the rationale for this — it helps if you're sending a document to an MS-using company — but what's the general /.-user's experience of this?"

Submission + - Indian AI unmasked using second order turing test (daz.com)

Submitted by

jacquesm

on Monday October 15, 2007 @04:50AM

jacquesm writes: "Indian IT experts have been testing a new generation of highly intelligent bots in IRC channels. One such bot was unmasked in an irc room after failing to pass a second order Turing Test. The bot had to be tricked into accepting the challenge and tried every trick in the book to avoid detection.

The full transcript of the interaction with the bot (called 'asterix') is here : http://ww.com/asterixbot.html , the really interesting breakthrough I think is the fact that the bot uses 'broken english' to masquerade its lack of genuine understanding, but we have become so accustomed to that because of the outsourcing of jobs that it is no longer politically correct to accept nothing less than passable english. This psychological loophole has been used to great profit by the team involved.

It's only a matter of time before you'll have to administer Turing Tests to your chat room friends to see if they are not too tired of communicating with you face to face and have replaced their online identities with bots to keep up appearances."

Submission + - Hurricane Expert Calls Gore Theory "Ridiculous (smh.com.au) 5

Submitted by DrWho520 on Sunday October 14, 2007 @06:20PM

DrWho520 writes: ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

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