74062491
submission
jfruh writes:
In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of young people who had grown up tinkering with PCs hit college and dove into curricula designed around the vague notion that they might want to "do something with computers." Today, computer science education is a lot more practical — though in many ways that's just going back to the discipline's roots.
73987923
submission
itwbennett writes:
Proponents of Mob programming, an offshoot of Pair programming in which the whole team works together on the same computer, say that it increases both quality and productivity, but also acknowledge that the productivity gains might not be readily apparent. 'If you measure by features or other classic development productivity metrics, Mobbing looks like it's achieving only 75 to 85 percent of individual or Pair output for, say, a team of six or seven working for a week,' says Paul Massey, whose company Bluefruit Software is a heavy user of the Mob approach. So, where does the productivity come from? Matthew Dodkins, a software architect at Bluefruit says the biggest gains are in code merges. 'In a day spent using traditional collaboration, you would have to first spend time agreeing on tasks, common goals, deciding who's doing what... and then going away to do that, write code, and come back and merge it, resolve problems,' says Dodkins. By bringing everyone into the same room, 'we try to merge frequently, and try to do almost continuous integration.' Matt Schartman, whose company Appfolio also uses Mobbing and wrote about his experience, gave Mobbing high marks for producing a quality product, but didn't find that it improved productivity in any measurable way.
73981887
submission
itwbennett writes:
For years now, Foxconn has been talking up plans to replace pesky humans with robot workers in its factories. Back in February, CEO Terry Gou said he expected the automation to account for 70 percent of his company’s assembly line work in three years. But in the company's shareholder meeting Thursday, Gou said he had been misquoted and that 'it should be that in five years, the robots will take over 30 percent of the manpower.'
73963421
submission
itwbennett writes:
Despite the high demand for tech workers of pretty much all stripes, the hiring process is still rather drawn out, with the average time-to-hire for Software Engineers taking 35 days. That's one of the findings of a new study from career site Glassdoor. The study, led by Glassdoor's Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, analyzed over 340,000 interview reviews, covering 74,000 unique job titles, submitted to the site from February 2009 through February 2015. Glassdoor found that the average time-to-hire for all jobs has increased 80% (from 12.6 days to 22.9 days) since 2010. The biggest reason for this jump: The increased reliance on screening tests of various sorts, from background checks and skills tests to drug tests and personality tests, among others.
73940913
submission
itwbennett writes:
At the company's shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced a partnership with Oracle that could result in Yahoo becoming your default browser. Starting this month, when users are prompted to update to the next version of Java, they'll be asked to make Yahoo their default search engine on Chrome (and Internet Explorer, for what it's worth). And, according to a Wall Street Journal report, the button will be checked by default, so if you aren't looking out for it, you might unwittingly find yourself a Yahoo user.
73887571
submission
itwbennett writes:
'The Navy relies on a number of legacy applications and programs that are reliant on legacy Windows products,' said Steven Davis, a spokesman for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego. And that reliance on obsolete technology is costing taxpayers a pretty penny. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which runs the Navy’s communications and information networks, signed a $9.1 million contract earlier this month for continued access to security patches for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and Windows Server 2003.
73876553
submission
itwbennett writes:
While alleged hacking of in-flight systems has been much discussed recently, 'there are many more areas of vulnerability to address in the aviation industry,' says Tim Erlin, director of security and product management at security firm Tripwire. 'Like most industries today, aviation relies on a wide variety of interconnected systems, from air traffic control to reservations systems.' Case in point: LOT Polish Airlines was forced to cancel 10 flights scheduled to depart from Warsaw’s Chopin airport on Sunday after hackers attacked its ground computer systems.
73738985
submission
jfruh writes:
You can't enter a password into an Apple Watch; the software doesn't allow it, and the UI would make doing so difficult even if it did. As we enter the brave new world of wearable and embeddable devices and omnipresent 'headless' computers, we may be seeing the end of the password as we know it. What will replace? Well, as anyone who's ever unlocked car door just by reaching for its handle with a key in their pocket knows, the answer may be the embeddable devices themselves.
73710639
submission
itwbennett writes:
GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site, is reportedly seeking $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion. 'GitHub is an interesting company,' said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. 'It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site.' And it's a great place to recruit developers. But company-specific factors aside, there’s also a lot of money in the market 'looking for homes,' said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
73703413
submission
itwbennett writes:
Call it the grid of things. A computer science researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has devised a way to pool the unused computer cycles generated by smart home devices and use them to perform computational tasks.
73699873
submission
itwbennett writes:
The problem isn't new, but a report released Tuesday by Sonatype, the company that manages one of the largest repositories of open-source Java components, sheds some light on poor inventory practices that are all-too-common in software development. To wit: 'Sonatype has determined that over 6 percent of the download requests from the Central Repository in 2014 were for component versions that included known vulnerabilities and the company’s review of over 1,500 applications showed that by the time they were developed and released each of them had an average of 24 severe or critical flaws inherited from their components.'
73679649
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook today announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.
73679553
submission
jfruh writes:
Ten times over four separate nights in the past year, telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the FBI is investigating the incidents as potential sabotage.
73678869
submission
nickweller writes:
So many people are leaving Reddit that its closest competitor crashed and had to ask for donations to stay up.
Many users of the site protested and left when last week it banned five subreddits for harassment. And since, users have been making good on threats to leave the site — going instead to a Swiss clone of the site, Voat.
73552421
submission
itwbennett writes:
Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called “as pointless as a pigeon with a pager,” finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
