Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Brexit Could Spell Trouble for CETA, TTIP, and TPP (freezenet.ca)

Submitted by Dangerous_Minds
Dangerous_Minds writes: After the Brexit vote, many are fearing the unknown in the face of uncertainty. While a lot of the coverage surrounding the aftermath of Brexit has been generally negative, there could be a silver lining. Freezenet is pointing out that there are those that believe that CETA, TPP, and TTIP could be in jeopardy. These trade agreements contain provisions surrounding a three strikes law, government mandated surveillance at the ISP level, criminal liabilities for circumvention of a DRM, the unmasking of DNS owners, the seizure of cellphones at the border for the purposes of enforcing copyright laws, and, of course, the infamous ISDS provisions that would allow corporations to sue governments for passing laws that gets in the way of profit or future potential profit. A compelling case that Brexit may not be all bad news.

Submission + - ECMAScript 2016: New Version of JavaScript Language Released (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMASCript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for twenty years. The operator is **. Along with the possibility of searching data much easier inside an array (Array.prototype.includes function) these are basically all the most important features of ECMAScript 2016.

From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team, since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year. Support for async functions, initially announced for ES2016, has been deferred to next year's release.

Submission + - China New Rocket Makes Successful Maiden Flight (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: China's developing space program took another major step forward on Saturday with the launch of its Long March 7 rocket, a new class of booster capable of lifting up to 13.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit (LEO). The primary payload of the flight was a dummy version of its next-generation crew capsule and some CubeSats. It marked the first launch from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, located on Hainan Island, the country's southernmost point, though they should build a launch site on one of its small islands in the South China Sea which is even closer to the equator. This allows better access to geostationary orbit for Chinese satellites. The Long March 7 also operates with kerosene and liquid oxygen fuels, rather than more environmentally dangerous hypergolic fuels used to power earlier launchers that were based on 1970s technology. Later this year, China will debut another new rocket, the Long March 5, capable of delivering 25 tons to LEO. The rocket's core stage is powered by two YF-100 engines, which China has been developing for more than a decade. The engine has a thrust of about 270,000 pounds at sea level, which is less than one of the space shuttle's main engines (418,000 lbf), but more than one of the Merlin 1D engines (190,000 lbf) used by SpaceX in its Falcon 9 rocket.

Submission + - Snap Packages Become the Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions 1

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Canonical informed us that they've been working for some time with developers from various major GNU/Linux distributions to make the Snap package format universal for all OSes. Snap is an innovation from Canonical created specifically for the Snappy technology used in Snappy Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down version of Ubuntu designed from the ground up to be deployed on various embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Starting with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Canonical launched the Snap packages for the desktop and server too. At the moment, we're being informed that the Snap package format is working natively on popular GNU/Linux operating systems like Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian GNU/Linux, OpenWrt, as well as Ubuntu and its official flavors, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, and Lubuntu.

Comment Wordpress- sorta (Score 1) 222

by Tumbleweed (#52300653) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's The Best CMS?

Wordpress.com - don't self-host because you don't have the experience to secure and maintain it properly. Once you start adding plugins, the maintenance and security issues pile up exponentially. It _can_ be both performant and secure, but only by someone who REALLY knows what they're doing.

Comment taught myself (Score 1) 515

by Tumbleweed (#52251581) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code?

I learned my first programming language - Apple BASIC - from computer magazines back in the early 80s, then had it reinforced in 'Computer Math' classes in high school, and learned a few more languages in college (Fortran 77 and Turbo Pascal in classes, and REXX on my own). Then took C in a college course in the mid-90s, plus learned all the web stuff on my own starting in '94. Everything I use professionally, I learned on my own, other than the logic course I took first semester of college (which should be a required course in high school, IMO).

Submission + - Texas narrowly rejects allowing academics to fact-check public school textbooks (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by jriding
jriding writes: AUSTIN, Texas â" Top Texas education officials rejected Wednesday letting university experts fact-check textbooks approved for use in public-school classrooms statewide, instead reaffirming a vetting system that has helped spark years of ideological battles over how potentially thorny lessons in history and science are taught.

Slashdot Top Deals

NOWPRINT. NOWPRINT. Clemclone, back to the shadows again. - The Firesign Theater

Close