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Comment Re:Just be honest - it's not for *US* (Score 1) 2219

by elashish14 (#46182339) Attached to: Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!

UX research of whom may I ask? Have you considered that this UX research may well not apply at all to your average slashdot user (or even the great majority thereof)? This just highlights once again that the beta redesign is out of touch with the /. community - what we like, and how the design completely clashes with that.

The beta is a generic design and will attract a generic audience, along with the thousands of other generic websites. And the community of /. is unique. We don't care how it looks as long as its functional. Generic designs and functionality don't appeal to us. Look at Gnome 3 if you want an example - and I think you know pretty well /. users think of Gnome 3.

Just stop trying to be like everyone else and be happy for who you are. Life isn't always about being like everyone else - and this is a situation where it's important to not be like everyone else.

Submission + - Dice, what are you getting by butchering Slashdot ? 2

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Before I register my account with /. I frequented it for almost 3 weeks. If I were to register the first time I visited /. my account number would be in the triple digits.

That said, I want to ask Dice why they are so eager to kill off Slashdot.

Is there a secret buyer somewhere waiting to grab this domain, Dice ? Just tell us. There are those amongst us who can afford to pay for the domain. What we want is to have a Slashdot that we know, that we can use, that we can continue to share information with all others.

Please stop all your destructive plans for Slashdot, Dice.

Submission + - What site would you recommend to replace Slashdot? 1

Submitted by koreanbabykilla
koreanbabykilla writes: Now that it looks like I'm no longer going to be able to use Slashdot due to beta.slashdot.org, I need somewhere to kill a few hours a day at work. Any suggestions?
NASA

NASA Pondering Two Public Contests To Build Small Space Exploration Satellites 127

Posted by samzenpus from the build-it-for-us dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it was looking into developing two new Centennial Challenge competitions that would let the public design, build and deliver small satellites known as Cubesats capable of operations and experiments near the moon and beyond. The first challenge will focus on finding innovative ways to allow deep space communications with small spacecraft, while the second focuses on primary propulsion for small spacecraft."
Programming

HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack" 573

Posted by samzenpus from the lets-try-this-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I have been working on an HTML5 app for Panasonic VIERA TVs, specifically a client for the Plex Media Server. After paying $129 for the developer program, version 1.0 was submitted for inclusion in their VIERA Connect marketplace several weeks ago. After a few requested tweaks, they inquired about how the client communicated with the Plex Server. As many/most web developers do, I used jQuery and its $.ajax call (which is just a wrapper for XMLHttpRequest()). They insisted this was not standard Javascript, and after several communications with them, they replied back with "A workaround like this is considered a hack.". I'm stunned that anyone familiar with HTML would consider jQuery a hack. I've been patient in attempting to explain how jQuery works, but I am getting nowhere. Any thoughts on how I can better explain jQuery to an app reviewer? Yes, I know I can write my app without any Javascript library, but I am really hoping avoid that."
Biotech

Designer Seeds Thought To Be Latest Target By Chinese 164

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-seeds dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Economic espionage is nothing new but one of the biggest areas being targeted now is agriculture. Here's a story about a FBI investigation to track down theft of seeds from research farms. 'The case of the missing corn seeds first broke in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was traveling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answered his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away, federal authorities said.'"
Government

Lawmakers Threaten Legal Basis of NSA Surveillance 206

Posted by Soulskill from the please-don't-be-grandstanding dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "The author of the Patriot Act has warned that the legal justification for the NSA's wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer if the White House doesn't restrict the way the NSA uses its power. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire during the summer of 2015 and will not be renewed unless the White House changes the shocking scale of the surveillance programs for which the National Security Administration uses the authorization, according to James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), an original author of the Patriot Act and its two reauthorizations, stated Washington insider-news source The Hill. 'Unless Section 215 gets fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will get absolutely nothing, because I am confident there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize it,' Sensenbrenner warned Deputy Attorney General James Cole during the Feb. 4 hearing. Provisions of Section 215, which allows the NSA to collect metadata about phone calls made within the U.S., give the government a 'very useful tool' to track connections among Americans that might be relevant to counterterrorism investigations, Cole told the House Judiciary Committee. The scale of the surveillance and lengths to which the NSA has pushed its limits was a "shock" according to Sensenbrenner, who also wrote the USA Freedom Act, a bill to restrict the scope of both Section 215 and the NSA programs, which has attracted 130 co-sponsors. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has sponsored a similar bill in the Senate."
Networking

Utah Bill Would Prevent Regional Fiber Networks From Growing 111

Posted by Soulskill from the stop-obstructing-my-internet dept.
symbolset writes "On the heels of the smackdown received by cable lobbyists in Kansas, Ars reports out of Utah that the cable companies aren't giving up hopes of preventing competition through legislation. The bill, called Interlocal Entity Service Prohibition, would prevent a regional fiber consortium from building infrastructure outside the boundaries of its member cities and towns — a direct attack on Google's work in Provo and the UTOPIA network. Utah is the third state to be involved in the Google Fiber rollout of gigabit fiber to the home."
Biotech

Amputee Has Prosthetic Hand Wired To Nerves 72

Posted by Soulskill from the thumbs-up dept.
New submitter kalman5 writes "Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first amputee in the world to feel sensory rich information — in real-time — with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm. Sørensen could grasp objects intuitively and identify what he was touching while blindfolded. The surgical team 'attached electrodes from a robotic hand to a 36-year-old volunteer's median and ulnar nerves. Those nerves carry sensations that correspond with the volunteer's index finger and thumb, and with his pinky finger and the edge of his hand, respectively. The volunteer controlled the prosthetic with small muscle movements detected by sEMG, a method that dates to the 1970s and measures electrical signals through the skin—unlike the electrodes attached to his nerves, sEMG is not invasive.' The results? 'The volunteer was able to complete the requested tasks with his prosthetic thumb and index finger 67 percent of the time the first day and 93 percent of the time by the seventh day of the experiment, Micera and colleagues report. He found the pinky finger harder to control: he was only able to accomplish the requested grip 83 percent of the time by the end of the experiment.'"
OS X

North Korea's Home-Grown Operating System Mimics OS X 252

Posted by Soulskill from the north-korea-suddenly-very-hip dept.
CambodiaSam sends the latest on "Red Star OS," North Korea's attempt at a home-grown operating system. Previously, it had closely resembled Microsoft Windows, but a new update now strongly mimics Apple's OS X. "Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology - including mobile phones. However, devices are heavily restricted. Internet access, for instance, is locked down, with most users able to visit only a handful of sites mostly serving up state-sponsored news. The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. An earlier version of Red Star OS was made available worldwide in 2010 after a Russian student posted it online. The latest version is believed to have been released some time in 2013."
Cloud

Fire Destroys Iron Mountain Data Warehouse, Argentina's Bank Records Lost 463

Posted by Soulskill from the offsite-backups-are-for-wimps dept.
cagraham writes "A fire at Iron Mountain's data warehouse in Buenos Aires left the facility 'ruined' and killed nine first-responders, according to the Washington Post. The origin of the fire is unknown. The facility was supposedly equipped with sprinkler systems, fire control systems, and had a private emergency team on standby. Among the records destroyed are Argentina's bank archives, the loss of which could have some surprisingly far-reaching implications."
Transportation

Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps 457

Posted by Soulskill from the another-thing-to-tweet-about-while-driving dept.
cartechboy writes "Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? What about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars."
Verizon

Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down? 298

Posted by Soulskill from the didn't-take-long dept.
hondo77 points out a blog post by Dave Raphael, who noticed some odd discrepancies between two different Verizon broadband connections he has access to. His personal residential plan and his company's business plan both went through the same Verizon routers, but his residential plan is getting unusably slow speeds to places like AWS. He suggests that Verizon is already waging a war on high-bandwidth services like Netflix after the recent court decision against net neutrality. His discussion with a Verizon service representative seems to confirm this, though it's uncertain whether such an employee would have access to that information.
Medicine

Video Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video) 74

Posted by Roblimo from the better-communication-can-lead-to-better-medical-care dept.
Do you remember the worries about getting different health care software systems to work with each other as health care providers starting moving away from paper? It's still a problem, but Joanne Rohde's company, Axial Exchange, is working to cure that problem not only as an entrepreneur but also because she has personal reasons to see health care providers communicate better with each other. In a 2012 interview for Huffington Post, she said, "While I was working for Red Hat, I got very sick... I ultimately had to go to 10 doctors to be diagnosed. Going from doctor to doctor, I could not believe I had to start over each time. No one actually talks to each other I became convinced that if I had had all the information, I probably would have been able to figure it out faster." In fact, Joanne got so sick that she quit her job as Red Hat COO after four years with the company. Once she started getting decent treatment for her Fybromyalgia and started getting better, she decided to apply open source principles to health care IT -- and to start a new company to do it. Opensource.com talked with Joanne in September 2013, and in January 2014 she talked with Health Care Finance News for an article titled Patients key to reducing readmissions. A phrase Joanne seems to be using a lot lately is "patient engagement," which has become a major part of Axial Exchange's work to improve communications not only between different health care providers but also between those providers and their patients. Update: 02/05 20:16 GMT by T : If you're seeing this post on beta.slashdot.org, note that we're still ironing out the details of video display here. You can view the video on tv.slashdot.org, instead. Please pardon our dust.

Comment Re: Should Everybody Learn Calculus? (Score 1) 387

by elashish14 (#46146755) Attached to: Should Everybody Learn To Code?

I'm curious as to whether you were studying CS in a large, public engineering university, or a small liberal arts-type school (or somewhere in between). No doubt, there are lots of programs which cater solely to the theoretical side of work. I attended an engineering school where the math was certainly theoretical, but you could still see the potential for applications of the calculus program in fields like fluid dynamics, or thermodynamics, and the like.

But CS 101 was the reason I strayed far clear of computer science. I would have never appreciated what it means to be a good computer engineer with the way sorting algorithms and data structures were introduced. Concepts were never really taught from a 'how is this useful to me?' perspective. I can't really describe it better than that. I became a programmer/computer engineer later when my interest in the field developed as a result of real world applications and uses (like understanding how Python or the internet works). I figured that this might happen, hence why I felt comfortable forgoing the study in school ;-)

That said, there are still great computer engineering programs at large universities where the focus is on engineering and software development as opposed to the pure, theoretical science of software engineering (think Master's of Engineering programs, as opposed to Master's of Science). They dip into some concepts as well such as agile development and systems engineering (which are silly in my opinion) but nevertheless good to know, and helpful in the world of industrial software engineering.

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