It's not the languages available. It's the accessibility of the ability to create and execute code.

Jumping through a few hoops to get your code running on the device or, at a minimum, distributed to a wide audience, gives the developer the feeling that someone is watching and therefore ... is supposed to... cut down on malware and generally increase code quality. If it actually works is yet to be seen in my opinion, and even if it does work, I'm not convinced it's worth the functionality loss- but it's where we are in the mobile space.

IMHO, Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) see any easily user-accessible build-and-run-able code as a potential security hole. Doesn't matter if it's compiled binary or interpreted script, in order for it to do anything interesting, it would need hooks into the OS. And, well, that means holes.

If users can copy and paste a script off a website and run it on their phone, they will. And when that script deletes everything on their phone just after sending everyone in the phone's contact list an SMS to go download the script, people will blame the OS vendor. By making it a bit less accessible, they are trying to make it a bit more 'secure' - and while that may work for a while, it's going to frustrate us who just want some BASIC (or Hypercard, or whatever else) to be available on our platform.

I like KDE. I don't hear that said often, though. So I figured I'd say it, and relate my excitement and thanks for all the hard work that's gone into this impending new release.

Thanks, devs.

I like this play. They've realized they have to open up in order to stay relevant at all. Managing other platforms is a great step one.

Step two, though, is to phase out BleakBerry OS and go to a modified Android for their handsets. They could bring a lot of good, missing functionality (and focus) to Android, and have a killer product. Perhaps they could provide some of the apps to all android users (for a small fee, of course).

Naturally the thing to do is to not announce this path, though. It will just make current users run away faster... but if they are able to bring it up alongside the current ecosystem and shift over to the new one cleanly, it could keep them around.

Who Wouldn't?

Yet another user who *can't stand* Lion.

New UNNECESSARY CAPITALIZATION Worm Infecting Unpatched Headlines

Unfortunately, that's what the majority of the news is these days.

Years ago, a kernel regression that didn't result in a lockup or massive data corruption would have been borderline slow-news-day material. Today, software quality as a whole has increased, and there's not as much of that (or as many groundbreaking new features) going on. There's still some interesting stuff going on in the mobile world, but PCs and Servers have largely been figured out for the time being. At least compared to what it was a while back.

As much as I'd like to jump on this "Blame slashdot, slashdot sucks now" bandwagon, they're just reporting what's happening, IMHO.

And if they aren't reporting what you think is newsworthy, blame yourself for not submitting 'real' stories and/or not drinking from the firehose.

Have you ever actually played World of Warcraft?

If so, what's your opinion on it?

I don't know about you, but I live fairly near the cape- and the last thing I want is half a rocket returning to Florida with... well, anything... not working.

It's rather easy to miss your mark when re-entering. It's even easier to miss your mark when you can't maneuver freely after heating. Things get worse yet still if the booster has a guidance failure or gimpy motor.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a reusable rocket and I'm excited they are willing to try something so very, very ambitious. But I am certainly beginning to feel a bit of the "Not in my back yard" syndrome.

You're about to receive a large amount of hardware from the vendor, and you haven't decided upon which GPU's to use, which interconnect for communications, what OS would be appropriate, or the types of workloads your users will be running (beyond your base set)? Really? If that's the case, no amount information from slashdot will solve your problems.

If you have no interconnect chosen, how will you rack the systems in the case that cable lengths are an issue, as they are for IB? Do you even have nodes that natively support both 10GBe and IB? I highly doubt it. What about you core network switches- 1200 ports (plus switch fabric) of IB or 10GBe might cost more than those 1200 nodes. You're also talking about adding GPU's and a high speed network adapter to each of 1200 nodes; what kind of manpower do you have for the task of installing 2 PCIe cards per node for 1200 nodes. I'm assuming that you'd want to be in operation sometime before Christmas. I won't even ask about what kind of large scale storage you have planned. I shudder to think of what power and cooling requirements you've already overlooked or made impossible.

Who's your vendor? If they really let you purchase 1200 nodes without any sort of planning, they should be dragged behind horses and shot. What a waste of money.

I'm sorry to be so negative, but you guys really screwed the pooch on this one. When you are designing a supercomputer, the very first thing to be decided is what the use cases are, especially if you're trying to generate revenue from the system. You have a limited amount of money to buy computing power, interconnect, storage, and facilities, so you have to optimize your purchase in those areas around to the expected use of the system. Not to mention operating costs.

Sheesh. I hope you're just pranking us.

My boss suggested that I attend a weekly "geek lunch" that a group of the older computer savvy fellows held at the U of I's Beckman Institute and met him there. I was aware of Project Gutenberg before that but hadn't used it much. Michael was a good advocate for ebooks before anyone got around to coining that particular terminology. The last few times we met, I remember him being very excited as he had samples of various new ebook readers to try out. He was testing them to see well they integrated the Gutenberg Project and was glad that more people would have easy access to it.

Over last fall, the group met weekly and I helped him with the process of making digital copies of the Gutenberg archive on different filesystems on individual drives. The entire Gutenberg archive is about 300GB with everything extracted and we could dual format a 750GB drive to fit a copy on NTFS and another one on ext3. That was a fun experience; most people don't get to play with a real life 300GB data set.

I hadn't been to a meeting in a while, darn it. I'll miss him.

I care. "Broadcast" is a very different with very different meanings "Network." Yes, an 800mbps light-based digital broadcast system is incredibly useful, but it's not being represented properly.

If we don't use the right terms and describe new technology properly, who will?

Seems to me that this is a one-way digital broadcast. There's no mention about how the receiver talks back to the ... ceiling. As such, it's not really a network, is it?

> What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?

All of them.