Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Lots of great new stuff! (Score 5, Interesting) 81

Digia and the Qt Project has been exploding with great new work.

Qt 5.1 is adding initial support for Qt Quick Controls formerly "Desktop Components". These are packaged Qt Quick controls such as sliders and tables with skins for each of the different platforms.

The Qt Project has just recently started shipping the Qt Installer Framework which is a cross-platform installer framework (that is used by the Qt installers). After managing multiple installers on different platforms for my own open source work, I'm really looking forward to digging into this.

Another huge project is the new Qt Build System or qbs. This is a replacement for QMake and I'm really excited to see how it shapes up against CMake.

With the recent advancements in the C++ standard and Qt, it is a very exciting time to be a C++ developer.

Comment Re:Rip off arm from nearby human (Score 3, Insightful) 70

No kidding. Let this be a lesson to human kind.

In the beginning a robot and it's creator are the best of friends. I mean literally nestling you in sweet embrace.

The second that you think it will make a good dance partner and decide to hold onto it's jagged pincers, it will go berserk, breaking cinder brick walls and threatening to throw you from a five story building.

Comment Re:reaction (Score 5, Informative) 44

Gene therapy creates the opportunity to prevent Gattaca like scenarios. Within the Gattaca universe it was possible to sequence a person's DNA, but everyone was stuck with what they were born with. If you were luckily born with "good" genes, or if your parents selected for the sperm and eggs with the "best" genes with which to make a test tube baby, then your life was set. If you were born with less than "stellar" genes you were deemed inferior and discriminated against.

What is so exciting about this advance is that if you are born with a defective gene that results in illness, for a certain spectrum of genes, it is now possible to insert a non-defective version into a virus, inject that virus into muscle cells, and you are now as good as new.

This advance is about changing what genes you have at run-time, rather than being stuck with what you are born with. At the moment the changes we make are only additive, but give it time :)

Comment Crazy smart ISA portability (Score 3, Informative) 332

Native Client was designed to easily allow portability across all popular current platforms using cross-compilation. On a single development machine you can currently build executables for x86-32, x86-64, and arm. There is currently support for Windows, Linux, and OSX. Here is an article on the generals.

Much more excitingly though, the team is working hard on integration with LLVM so that you will be able to compile your application into a single LLVM bytecode package. This bytecode would then be sent to any current or future architecture and the final compilation step would occur on that architecture. Here is a pdf concerning that effort.

You are also significantly underestimating the effort that they have put into this BSD licensed project.

Comment Re:Why not? (Score 2) 726

I would recommend doing a basic google search before proposing that evolution's predictions are untestable or unverifiable.

For anyone interested in experimental evolution, one of my favorite long-term and currently running experiments is the E. coli long-term evolution experiment. For more than 20 years the team has been taking regular snapshots (frozen samples) of twelve diverging populations from the same original E. coli culture.

The event that brought this experiment fame was that in 2008, one of the populations evolved the ability to utilize an energy source that is not available to E. coli. The ability to metabolize citrate is used to define species divisions in bacteria, so in effect, members of this population diverged into another species while being watched closely by the researchers.

Slashdot Top Deals

Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker

Working...