Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment They already have (Score 5, Informative) 667

The scientific method is for experiments. If you wanted to use it to see if global warming was real, you would make a forecast like "The world will get hotter than it's ever been.", and see if it comes true or not. It did come true. Last year was hotter than it has ever been, globally. Scientists were telling us that would happen for years.

It's time to stop denying. It's time to stop saying "they should use the scientific method" when you know full well they have. You know, that is, unless your head is in the ground or your preferred news network is putting it there.

Businesses

The Tech Industry's Legacy: Creating Disposable Employees 271

An anonymous reader writes: VentureBeat is running an indictment of the tech industry's penchant for laying off huge numbers of people, which they say is responsible for creating a culture of "disposable employees." According to recent reports, layoffs in the tech sector reached over 100,000 last year, the highest total since 2009. Of course, there are always reasons for layoffs: "Companies buy other companies and need to rationalize headcount. And there's all that disruption. Big companies, in particular, are seeing their business models challenged by startups, so they need to shed employees with skills they no longer need, and hire people with the right skills."

But the article argues that this is often just a smokescreen. "The notion here is that somehow these companies are backed into a corner, with no other option than to fire people. And that's just not true. These companies are making a choice. They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe. ... Many of these companies are churning through employees, laying off hundreds on one hand, while trying to hire hundreds more."

Comment Re:"Half Baked"? (Score 1) 243

I use an S5. I don't hate it.

I used to use a Samsung DVD player - I actually loved that thing.

I was slightly less impressed with the GG2. (running Tizen).

I am appalled and horrified by their absolutely craptastic "SmartHub" system on their TV. Not sure if it's Tizen-based, but it's really, really bad.

Submission + - Interior of burnt Herculaneum scroll read for first time 1

Solandri writes: When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it destroyed a library of classical works in Herculaneum. The papyrus scrolls weren't incinerated, but were instead carbonized by the hot gases. The resulting black carbon cylinders have mostly withstood attempts to read their contents since their discovery. Earlier attempts to unfurl the scrolls yielded some readable material, but were judged too destructive. Researchers decided to wait for newer technology to be invented that could read the scrolls without unrolling them.

Now, a team led by Dr Vito Mocella from the National Research Council's Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR-IMM) in Naples, Italy has managed to read individual letters inside one of the scrolls. Using a form of x-ray phase contrast tomography, they were able to ascertain the height difference (about 0.1mm) between the ink of the letters and the papyrus fibers which they sat upon. Due to the fibrous nature of the papyrus and the carbon-based ink, regular spectral and chemical analysis had thus far been unable to distinguish the ink from the paper. Further complicating the work, the scrolls are not in neat cylinders, but squashed and ruffled as the hot gases vaporized water in the papyrus and distorted the paper.

Full paper in Nature Communications (paywalled).

Comment Just another in a long series of misguided mergers (Score 5, Insightful) 53

HP has a very long history of buying companies only to unload them for cents on the dollar a few years later. Remember Palm and WebOS? Take a look at the HP Acquisition List on Wikipedia. Not many of those companies were good buys.

This was another of many issues that contributed to staff depression while I was there and continues to this day. We could see it was wrong, but could do nothing about it.

They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.

Comment Re:Planet X / Nibiru !!! (Score 1) 170

We've explored more of this rock than any other. That's the "mostly".

Finding the lost airliner isn't a matter of lack of exploration. That is, we can't recheck an entire ocean in a short period to see if the airliner is there now. I believe that part of the ocean was already mapped, so it has already been "explored".

Your airplane argument would be like saying you haven't explored your back yard, if someone tossed a beer can over the fence yesterday, and you didn't know about it.

BTW, I tossed a beer can over your fence yesterday, you should go clean it up, your yard is a mess.

Comment Re:Planet X / Nibiru !!! (Score 1) 170

Dude, it's from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I picked it on purpose, just to show that I wasn't totally serious. Damn, you'd think an obvious landmark from an extremely popular science fiction movie would be a hint to some people.

I'm not saying that it's an alien spacecraft. What I'm saying is, we wouldn't necessarily know if we saw one. Hell, people find all kinds of "lost" things in their own back yards. In the last year, someone found a viking burial site. Someone else literally found buried gold. Would you know if there was an ancient spacecraft buried 20 feet under your house?

I wasn't even trying to propose that alien spacecraft do have rock shielding. What I'm saying is there's a lot we *don't* know. Short of seeing a spacecraft that looks like a spacecraft as we'd expect it, we could easily overlook it.

Slashdot Top Deals

Kleeneness is next to Godelness.

Working...