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Businesses

Ask Slashdot: How To Gently Keep Management From Wrecking a Project? 276

New submitter miserly_content writes "I work in a large, hierarchical technology company. I have been developing technical specs for a new strategic and challenging software project, and the project is slowly gathering steam and support. This is already a career building success for me, and everyone acknowledges my technical capabilities. But the program manager is an MBA-type, and wants to bring in new multiple team leaders and consultants. This is not really a surprise, but I feel we are sliding towards a too-many-chiefs-too-few-indians scenario, especially at this early stage. How can I pitch upper management about this issue, without appearing selfish or disruptive? What positive approach can I try with the PM, with whom I have a good working relationship?"

Comment Re:oh Linus you so funny (Score 2) 464

As far as I know, ISA is still used for some legacy hardware, e.g. PS/2 keyboard, PC speaker, floppy controller, but it's almost purely conceptual by now. The ISA bus might not even exist outside a single chip (e.g. SuperIO controller.) I don't know about MCA, but I think that was only on some 386 and 486 IBMs, so that would certainly be irrelevant to have in by now.

Businesses

Ask Slashdot: Troubling Trend For Open Source Company 451

An anonymous reader writes "I'm one of the original founders of an open source company which offers a popular open source product (millions of downloads) targeted primarily to small businesses. We have been doing this for 10 years now and we fund the development of the open source product with the usual paid support services, custom development and addons, but over the last few years, we've noticed a troubling trend. Companies that have downloaded our product from one of the many free download sites have a question they want answered, so they call our support line. Once we politely explain the situation and that telephone support has a reasonable fee associated with it, more and more of them are becoming seriously irate, to the point of yelling, accusing us of fraud and/or scamming them. For some reason, they think a free product should have free telephone support as well, and if we don't offer free telephone support then it's not really a free product. These same people are then resorting to social media in an attempt to 'spread the word' with the same false accusations, which is starting to take its toll on our reviews, ratings, and in turn our bottom line. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions on how we can reverse this trend? How do other open source companies handle similar situations?"
Power

Crushed Silicon Triples Life of Li-Ion Batteries In the Lab 123

derekmead writes "Batteries rule everything around us, which makes breakthroughs a big deal. A research team at Rice says they have produced a nice jump: by using a crushed silicon anode in a lithium-ion battery, they claim to have nearly tripled the energy density of current li-ion designs. Engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature's Scientific Reports (it has yet to be published online) that by taking porous silicon and crushing it, they were able to dramatically decrease the volume required for anode material. Silicon has long been looked at as an anode material because it holds up to ten times more lithium ions than graphite, which is most commonly used commercially. But it's previously been difficult to create a silicon anode with enough surface area to cycle reliably. Silicon also expands when it's lithiated, making it harder to produce a dense anode material. After previously testing a porous silicon 'sponge,' the duo decided to try crushing the sponges to make them more compact. The result is a new battery design that holds a charge of 1,000 milliamp hours per gram through 600 tested charge cycles of two hours charging, two hours discharging. According to the team, current graphite anodes can only handle 350 mAh/g."

Comment Re:Le sigh. (Score 3, Informative) 552

Except that they don't. If you write Metro apps in C++ you don't use .NET. If you write them in JScript you don't use .NET. They were careful at the //build conference last year to explain that the WinRT API is native C++ but there is a transparent marshalling layer to the .NET runtime. The host for JScript/HTML apps is presumably also native code that marshals the objects.

But yes they must run on all the platforms, of which C++ is the only that will need to be built for every platform.

Comment Or maybe it's used to change speed limits (Score 1) 422

In the US, speed limits are legally to be set after the 85th percentile of actual speeds. So if everyone is speeding, the speed limit should legally be changed such that at most 15% of drivers will be speeding at that stretch of road.

This kind of data might just as well be used to help determine areas where the speed limit is wrong.

Comment Re:Confusing symbols (Score 1) 1268

I remember seeing this kind of notation in my grade school textbooks. (I'm from Denmark by the way.)
Though usually it'd be presented with otherwise marked fields, rather than parentheses, and accompanied by short instructions. In earlier grades accompanied by a drawing representing the kind of problem solving needed, instead of written instructions. Like this:

Fill in the blanks, so both sides are equal:
4 + 3 + 2 = ___ + 2

In later grades, regular equation notation was then introduced, substituting x and y for blanks to fill in. Then you'd get a question like this:

Find the value of x in each equation:
4 + 3 + 2 = x + 2
x = ___

GNU is Not Unix

GCC Moving To Use C++ Instead of C 546

An anonymous reader writes "CodeSourcery's Mark Mitchell wrote to the GCC mailing list yesterday reporting that 'the GCC Steering Committee and the FSF have approved the use of C++ in GCC itself. Of course, there's no reason for us to use C++ features just because we can. The goal is a better compiler for users, not a C++ code base for its own sake.' Still undecided is what subset of C++ to use, as many contributors are experts in C, but novices in C++; there is a call for a volunteer to develop the C++ coding standards."

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