Comment Re:Burying Bodies (Score 1) 172
I have seen the only Zombie movie I ever need to see. The rest have no rhythm.
"This video contains content from Vevo, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds" - that is a good-ass movie.
Comment Re:Burying Bodies (Score 2, Insightful) 172
and the living won't be pestered with all those stupid zombie movies anymore.
cremation = no zombie.
Have you ever even seen a zombie movie?
Hint: Few feature the grave.
At Commonwealth Games, the World's Largest Aerostat 76
GillBates0 writes "Last weekend saw the world's largest aerostat of its kind featured at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. The helium balloon or aerostat measures 40x80x12 meters, contains 20,000 cubic meters of helium and features lights, mirrors, cameras, a 360 degree projection screen, projectors and a reflective underbelly. During the show, it was raised 25 meters off the ground and transformed into a giant Bodhi Tree and a meditating Buddha, with giant puppets to complement the cultural performances beneath. These slideshows tell the story."
Submission + - How Well Will Linux Handle Future Multicores? (mit.edu)
eldavojohn writes: Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign.
Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0 322
Esther Schindler writes "After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, has throughput of up to 5 gigabits per second. That's even faster than the 3Gb/sec of SATA hard drives and 1Gb/sec of high-end networking in the home. USB 3.0: Everything You Need to Know goes into plenty of the techie details. But is it already obsolete — will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?"
How To Index and Search a Video By Emotion
76
robotsrule writes "Here's a a demonstration video of EmoRate, a software program that uses the Emotiv 14-electrode EEG headset to record your emotions via your facial expressions. In the video you'll see EmoRate record my emotions while I watch a YouTube video, then index that video by emotion, and then navigate that video by simply by remembering a feeling. The web page for EmoRate explains how I used Emotiv's SDK to build the software program, and how I trained the system by watching emotionally evocative videos on YouTube while wearing the headset."
Comment Re:Why? (Score 5, Funny) 377
It's just a research venture. Intel is trying to figure out how McAfee can use up so much of a CPU that it should be put out of its misery.
Nah, Intel actually bought HP - McAfee just came bundled.
Comment Re:False assumption (Score 1) 814
haha, this made me laugh... there's always a war between the developers here at work on whether to use spaces or tabs...
So get someone higher to publish a mandatory coding standard... advised by you, of course.
Comment Re:C-sharp (Score 3, Funny) 565
I would recommend starting with C#, also. One big advantage is the excellent and free IDE available from Microsoft (C# Express). There are also some excellent books available, such as Programming Microsoft Windows with C#, by Petzold. Also, C# is similar in syntax and structure to Java and C++, so you can more easily transition to these languages, if needed.
Haven't tried C# express but I did use SharpDevelop in a previous gig when doing a little windows dev - it struck me as very polished.
I ended up doing what I needed with Win32 API calls and building with wxDev-C++ but I don't like talking about it... (Because of Winsock2 rather than wxDev-C++.
Troll, eh? Is that because winsock2 is actually good or because I didn't close the bracket?
Comment Re:C-sharp (Score 2, Interesting) 565
I would recommend starting with C#, also. One big advantage is the excellent and free IDE available from Microsoft (C# Express). There are also some excellent books available, such as Programming Microsoft Windows with C#, by Petzold. Also, C# is similar in syntax and structure to Java and C++, so you can more easily transition to these languages, if needed.
Haven't tried C# express but I did use SharpDevelop in a previous gig when doing a little windows dev - it struck me as very polished.
I ended up doing what I needed with Win32 API calls and building with wxDev-C++ but I don't like talking about it... (Because of Winsock2 rather than wxDev-C++.
Comment Re:FORTRAN, COBOL etc. (Score 5, Interesting) 565
Why update at all? There are still legacy systems using FORTRAN and probably COBOL as well. While there are C#, Java, PHP developers all over the place I imagine that finding a developer to maintain a legacy system is extremely hard. Of course that means there will not be many jobs out there for you but the pool of qualified applicants will be extremely small.
Plenty of money in COBOL but there is a need to suit up (physically and mentally) - not for everyone.
I have found a small but significant niche in embedded *nix programming. Small yet powerful systems requiring every scintilla of juice tempered with a familiar API - C Systems programming work is common enough (yet not common enough!). This is where I hope to spend the next while.
An "old school" approach to knowing the architecture inside-out and attention to detail is clouded by the bizarre abstractions of C# and Java. PHP isn't even an abstraction, it's a distraction (I grew tired of the inconsistency so no longer practise).
Perl is unfashionable in some circles and has a reputation for having magic constants (or whatever it is the detractors call "I don't want to learn this language") but I recommend it if you want dynamically typed "chops".
I find these "chops" are overrated. I enjoy low-level thinking so don't need to bloat up with virtual machines[1] (the real ones work fine for me), OO[2] (I know how to pass a pointer to my data to a lib) or design patterns[3] ("ways to do things" - if you learn one way as "the way" you may be unlikely to think there may be a better way)
[1] I use virtual machines but it's perverse running the dozens of MB JVM (and waiting around for it) for a browser bound animation or trivial desktop app. There may be a better case for this messing on the application server, but I don't care.
[2] OK, I will make an argument for OO in GUI programming - a large and complex library of heterogeneous components is difficult to arrange sensibly in a procedural manner. gtk_status_icon_set_from_file(foo_icon, "bar.png") or fooIcon.fileSet("bar.png")? There may be a similar argument to be made for other systems but for the most part I find the OO model a needless abstraction.
[3] Right... most programmers aren't brilliant - I know I'm fucking terrible for the most part - so having established methods for common situations is no bad thing... just don't get too attached.
Comment Re:And this is news? (Score 1) 270
Excuse me, COBOL itself is still the COBOL of the 21st century, as it still makes banking, airlines and quite a lot of brick and mortar industrial companies keep on rolling. Maybe average slashdotters are out of this reality, but it is still alive and kicking. Please don't blame me, I've never programmed a line of COBOL in my whole live.
I have... and I'm not even that old.
I once worked writing COBOL for VMS and Mainframe systems in various government departments. It's the job that inspired me to go get a degree.
Comment Re:yellow dog linux still around? (Score 1) 417
personally i'd send it to China for "recycling"...
Aye, junk it. One of the considerations now in my bang for buck considerations in running home servers is the power bill. Sure, it was cool to have my old P3 tower sitting there as a little slackware workhorse doing mail, web, shells and everything else for me but at the same time it's sucking up 200W... I could get a dual core atom box which runs on 50W for little money.
BP Caught Photoshopping Disaster Response Photos 560
An anonymous reader tipped a post up on Americablog revealing that BP Photoshopped a fake photo of their crisis command center and posted it on their main site. The blogger commented, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center." While this story was just being picked up by the Washington Post, an Americablog reader spotted another doctored BP photo on their website, this time of a "top kill" working group. How many others?
Comment Re:1 vote / 100% (Score 2, Funny) 375
I had an 8' floppy disk back in 1982 which I kept on my bedroom wall for years.
Wow, 8 foot!
