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Comment Re:Conservation and smart practices (Score 1) 652

by Unknown Lamer (#48076523) Attached to: Living On a Carbon Budget: The End of Recreation As We Know It?

Now look at how many people in the world have no access to reliable power, and think about what happens when they want it. It's unfair to tell them "sorry, but you and your children and their children unto the end of time get to live in a hut because you were born in an area without an established industrial base."

Comment Re:Good luck with that. (Score 1) 652

by Unknown Lamer (#48076363) Attached to: Living On a Carbon Budget: The End of Recreation As We Know It?

You know how the U.S. economy is in shambles? The cost of living is skyrocketing? Well, we have less energy available. Energy is the fundamental limiter all economic development, and cutting to 1/10th of current consumption would destroy modern technological society. And there's no reason... just build tons of nuclear, work on fourth gen reactors, and dump what is effectively a pittance (I mean, how much do we blow on securing an oil supply? Trillions and trillions.. for what?) into fusion research in the hopes that it is feasible. And then everyone can enjoy a high quality of life.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 171

by Unknown Lamer (#48031095) Attached to: Grooveshark Found Guilty of Massive Copyright Infringement

Yeah, I just got a grooveshark anywhere account a few months ago. It integrates nicely with Clementine (KDE music player) and XBMC. The nice part of the xbmc extension is that you can queue whatever in with your local music in party mode, keeping party guests from axing the playlist and throwing a keyboard around to listen to music using youtube videos (kids these days...). Unlike spotify, there's no proprietary library and DRM. Just an authenticated REST api and rate limited mp3s (+ api calls to keep it streaming). Which is how it should be (ideally with Vorbis, but that's because I'm a no good fsfnik).
Programming

Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer? 275

Posted by Soulskill from the become-a-complacent-manager-instead dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home. They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way. This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.

Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge. I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent. What is your advice?
Hardware

Scientists Craft Seamless 2D Semiconductor Junctions 49

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the flat-is-in dept.
vinces99 (2792707) writes Scientists have developed what they believe is the thinnest-possible semiconductor, a new class of nanoscale materials made in sheets only three atoms thick. The University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that two of these single-layer semiconductor materials can be connected in an atomically seamless fashion known as a heterojunction. This result could be the basis for next-generation flexible and transparent computing, better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and solar technologies.

"Heterojunctions are fundamental elements of electronic and photonic devices," said senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering and of physics. "Our experimental demonstration of such junctions between two-dimensional materials should enable new kinds of transistors, LEDs, nanolasers, and solar cells to be developed for highly integrated electronic and optical circuits within a single atomic plane."
Cloud

Google Buys Zync Cloud Graphics Rendering Service 20

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the cloud-tracing dept.
mpicpp (3454017) writes To beef up its cloud platform with more specialized packages, Google is acquiring Zync for its large scale rendering service for movie special effects, called Zync Render. Google plans to offer the Zync service on its Google Cloud Platform, where it can be used by motion picture studios that do not want to build their own rendering farms.
Businesses

GOG Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store 126

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the am-I-dreaming? dept.
Via Engadget comes news that GOG, the DRM-free game store platform, has launched a DRM-free movie store. The initial set of movies are gamer oriented, and you won't find major studio releases (yet, and not for a lack of trying on the part of GOG). From GOG: Our goal is to offer you cinema classics as well as some all-time favorite TV series with no DRM whatsoever, for you to download and keep on your hard drive or stream online whenever you feel like it. We talked to most of the big players in the movie industry and we often got a similar answer: "We love your ideas, but we do not want to be the first ones. We will gladly follow, but until somebody else does it first, we do not want to take the risk". DRM-Free distribution is not a concept their lawyers would accept without hesitation.

We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.
Education

Limiting the Teaching of the Scientific Process In Ohio 528

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the thinking-leads-to-questioning dept.
frdmfghtr (603968) writes Over at Ars Technica, there's a story about a bill in the Ohio legislature that wants to downplay the teaching of the scientific process. From the article: "Specifically prohibiting a discussion of the scientific process is a recipe for educational chaos. To begin with, it leaves the knowledge the kids will still receive—the things we have learned through science—completely unmoored from any indication of how that knowledge was generated or whether it's likely to be reliable. The scientific process is also useful in that it can help people understand the world around them and the information they're bombarded with; it can also help people assess the reliability of various sources of information." The science standards would have "...focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; and prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts in favor of another." Political interpretation of scientific facts include humans contributing to climate change according to the bill's sponsor, who also thinks intelligent design would be OK under the law.
Earth

Climate Damage 'Irreversible' According Leaked Climate Report 708

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the midsummer-2045 dept.
New submitter SomeoneFromBelgium (3420851) writes According to Bloomberg a leaked climate report from the IPPC speaks of "Irreversible Damage." The warnings in the report are, as such, not new but the tone of voice is more urgent and more direct than ever. It states among other things that global warming already is affecting "all continents and across the oceans," and that "risks from mitigation can be substantial, but they do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation action."
Chromium

Chromium 37 Launches With Major Security Fixes, 64-bit Windows Support 113

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the almost-makes-up-for-<dialog> dept.
An anonymous reader writes Google has released Chrome/Chromium version 37 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Among the changes are better-looking fonts on Windows and a revamped password manager. There are 50 security fixes, including several to patch a sandbox escaping vulnerability. The release also brings stable 64-bit Windows support which ...offers many benefits for speed, stability and security. Our measurements have shown that the native 64-bit version of Chrome has improved speed on many of our graphics and media benchmarks. For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance. Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels confirm that 64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content. Finally, on 64-bit, our defense in depth security mitigations such as Partition Alloc are able to far more effectively defend against vulnerabilities that rely on controlling the memory layout of objects. The full changelog.
The Internet

Time Warner Cable Experiences Nationwide Internet Outage 133

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the left-the-intern-alone-for-30-seconds dept.
Wolfrider (856) writes Reports are coming in from multiple U.S. states that TWC is having a major Internet outage since early this morning. ... TWC's customer service reps are reportedly a bit overwhelmed by call volume at the moment, and no ETA yet. According to CNET, most locations should be more-or-less back online as of 7 a.m. EDT or so (my TWC connection came back around 7:30 a.m. EDT). TWC says it's maintenance gone wrong: In response to a query by CNET, Time Warner Cable issued this statement: "At 430am ET this morning during our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services. As of 6am ET services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online."
Stats

Statistics Losing Ground To CS, Losing Image Among Students 115

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the big-bad-data dept.
theodp (442580) writes Unless some things change, UC Davis Prof. Norman Matloff worries that the Statistician could be added to the endangered species list. "The American Statistical Association (ASA) leadership, and many in Statistics academia," writes Matloff, "have been undergoing a period of angst the last few years, They worry that the field of Statistics is headed for a future of reduced national influence and importance, with the feeling that: [1] The field is to a large extent being usurped by other disciplines, notably Computer Science (CS). [2] Efforts to make the field attractive to students have largely been unsuccessful."

Matloff, who has a foot in both the Statistics and CS camps, but says, "The problem is not that CS people are doing Statistics, but rather that they are doing it poorly. Generally the quality of CS work in Stat is weak. It is not a problem of quality of the researchers themselves; indeed, many of them are very highly talented. Instead, there are a number of systemic reasons for this, structural problems with the CS research 'business model'." So, can Statistics be made more attractive to students? "Here is something that actually can be fixed reasonably simply," suggests no-fan-of-TI-83-pocket-calculators-as-a-computational-vehicle Matloff. "If I had my druthers, I would simply ban AP Stat, and actually, I am one of those people who would do away with the entire AP program. Obviously, there are too many deeply entrenched interests for this to happen, but one thing that can be done for AP Stat is to switch its computational vehicle to R."

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