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Submission + - New Analyst Report Calls Agile a Scam, Says Easy Out for Lazy Devs (adtmag.com)

Submitted by msmoriarty
msmoriarty writes: We recently got a copy of a new Voke analyst report (for sale here) on Agile and the firm basically blasts the movement from top to bottom. Some highlights: "The Agile movement is designed to sell services," "Out of over 200 survey participants, we received only four detailed comments describing success with Agile," "Survey participants report that developers use the guise of Agile to avoid planning and to avoid creating documentation required for future maintenance," and " Be aware that the Agile movement might very well just be either a developer rebellion against unwanted tasks and schedules or just an opportunity to sell Agile services including certification and training." So did the analysts just talk to to the wrong 200 people?
Crime

Submission + - Justice Dept., FBI to review use of forensic evidence in thousands of cases (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by NotSanguine
NotSanguine writes: From The Washington Post Article:

The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday. The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery.
Cloud

Submission + - City Brought To Its Knees By Datacenter Outage

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On July 11th in Calgary, Canada, a fire and explosion was reported at the Shaw Communications headquarters. This took down a large swath of IT infrastructure, including Shaw's telephone and Internet customers, local radio stations, emergency 911 services, provincial services such Alberta Health Services computers, and Alberta Registries. One news site reports that "The building was designed with network backups, but the explosion damaged those systems as well.". No doubt this has been a hard lesson on how NOT to host critical public services.

Submission + - Building a "Crowdsourced" IT Support System for a Large Organization

Submitted by BerkeleyNerd
BerkeleyNerd writes: I work for a large federal agency that is exploring different ways to lower IT support costs and reduce wait times for users who need help with application features, network problems, agency IT policies, etc. One solution could be: help users share popular IT support "fixes" and identify emerging problems by providing some kind of agency-wide user support forum.

For example, Xerox created the Eureka peer support system in 1996, which was used by field techs to quickly share information. There have been some academic studies on peer support, such as The Usefulness of Electronic Weak Ties for Technical Advice and Peer Collaboration: Building an Infrastructure for Enhancing Technical Support. Also, the Economist recently featured an article on "Unsourcing" — a consumer-oriented spin on the same idea, and the concept of Social IT Support has been discussed.

Does the Slashdot community know of any peer IT support "success stories" in other large institutions, or any software tools that we should evaluate for this purpose, such as UserResponse or StackExchange?
Security

Submission + - Researchers Hack Popular Point-of-Sale System, Alter Transactions (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A security researcher has found several serious vulnerabilities in a widely deployed point-of-sale system that enables an attacker to change transactions, steal card data and take other malicious actions. The attacks could be executed remotely under certain circumstances or done through a local interface.

The research, done by Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs in Germany, shows that some PoS terminals made by VeriFone Systems have a series of weaknesses that give attackers some pathways into the system. The vulnerable system is called Artema Hybrid, and it is the most popular PoS system in Germany.

VeriFone officials said they're aware of the issues but haven't been able to reproduce the bugs or the attacks.
Idle

Submission + - Rolls-Royce Unveils World's First LEGO Jet Engine Made from 152,455 Bricks (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Elliot Chang
Elliot Chang writes: "Rolls-Royce debuted the world’s first ever LEGO Jet Engine at the Farnborough International Airshow this week in England. The model is a half-size replica of the enormous Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 that powers the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It took 152,455 LEGO bricks, eight weeks, and a team of four fulltime employees to assemble the model. While the real engine weighs in at 1.25 tons, the LEGO replica still weighs a hefty 676 pounds and measures 4.9 feet long and 6.5 feet wide."
Earth

Submission + - Mysterious Sprite Photographed by ISS Astronaut (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "A very rare and beautiful view of a red sprite has been photographed by Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) hovering just above a bright flash of lightning in a thunderstorm over Myanmar. First documented in a photo in 1989, red sprites are very brief flashes of optical activity that are associated with powerful lightning discharges in storms — although the exact mechanisms that create them aren't yet known. But the orbiting outpost seems like the perfect vantage point to learn more about them!"
Data Storage

Submission + - Will Windows Storage Go from SAN Back to NAS with SMB 3.0? (redmondmag.com)

Submitted by msmoriarty
msmoriarty writes: According to Redmond magazine columnist Greg Sheilds, with Windows 8/Windows Server 2012, the Windows world may be moving away from SAN and back to NAS. From the article: " "Consider the high-level requirements you place on storage: excellent performance with low CPU overhead, fault tolerance, load balancing, simultaneous access by multiple cluster hosts, back-up support...Achieving all of this today with a SAN requires added protocols, techniques and management tools because today's SMB protocol doesn't support today's storage requirements. But why not just update the SMB protocol?" And that's what it appears Microsoft has done with SMB 3.0.
Patents

Submission + - Nokia sues HTC, RIM and Viewsonic (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Nokia has filed claims in the U.S. and Germany saying that products from HTC, Research In Motion (RIM) and ViewSonic infringe a number of the company's patents. Nokia has filed actions against all three companies in Mannheim's and Munich's respective regional courts. Nokia has also filed complaints against HTC before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), the Federal District Court of Delaware and the regional court in Düsseldorf. RIM will also have to dispatch its lawyers to Düsseldorf for a Nokia lawsuit filed there, while ViewSonic's legal team have to defend the company against a suit in Delaware."
Hardware

Submission + - Former MakerBot COO creates the world's first $500 3D printer (geek.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At first glance Sam Cervantes and his latest invention may seem questionable, but after spending some time talking with him I’m sure what he’s showing off is legit. Cervantes and his team are working on the first $500 3D printer, a device known as the Solidoodle. At the risk of sounding cliche, what you’re witnessing in the video is truly game-changing; the Solidoodle is a significant step towards making 3D printing accessible to the average consumer.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - When Was Slashdot's Heyday? 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the past few years, Slashdot editors have introduced a multitude of changes to our site that have been met with mostly negative comments. Yesterday, SlashdotBI was introduced. A few weeks ago, Slashdot editors announced plans for their SlashdotTV. Slashdot's last overhaul occurred on January 25th 2011, which revamped the existing HTML and CSS code. In all of these announcements and many more, a multitude of Slashdot users have expressed concern that the site simply is not good enough as it was in the past. This concern goes back all the way to a 2000 Geeks in Space episode, where Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda asked the GIS panel: "When did Slashdot start sucking?" A lot of people reminisce about "the good old days" and how things were inherently "better" back then. My question to Slashdot users everywhere is: Is Slashdot's best years gone? When was Slashdot's heyday in terms of popularity, enjoyment, information, and intelligent discussions? How can Slashdot return back to what many users regard as their former glory?

Comment Re:HuluPlus? (Score 1) 648

by msmoriarty (#39851257) Attached to: Hulu To Require Viewers To Have Cable Subscriptions

I don't see anywhere in that report where it clarifies on HuluPlus. Would like to see that specifically addressed, just to confirm (BTW:if so, I'll be cancelling my Hulu Plus -- already annoyed by ads, and lack of cable was only thing that drove me to them in the first place. I'm not going to have both.

Submission + - Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore Business Machines, dies at age 83 (forbes.com)

Submitted by LoTonah
LoTonah writes: Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore Business Machines and later, the owner of Atari, died Easter Sunday. He was 83. He undoubtedly changed the computing landscape by bringing low cost computers to millions of people, and he started a price war that saw dozens of large companies leave the market. He also took a bankrupt Atari and managed to wring almost another decade out of it. The 6502 microprocessor would have withered on the vine if it weren't for Tramiel's support. Could anyone else have done all of that?
NASA

Submission + - Planetary Cosmic Pinball: 30 Million MPH planets shoot through space (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Christian Science Monitor reports: "Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light." The report cites a report from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, describing stars that are thrown out of the Milky Way, and how some of those starts which themselves had planets could hurl those planets as the "fastest objects" in space, potentially creating a game of "cosmic pinball". The hypervelocity stars were discovered in 2005, travelling at a mere 2 million MPH velocity."
Microsoft

Submission + - Steep SQL Server 2012 Price Hikes Due To Licensing Changes (redmondmag.com) 2

Submitted by msmoriarty
msmoriarty writes: Thanks to changes in the way Microsoft will license SQL Server 2012 (including switching the licensing basis from counting processors to counting cores), organizations that have machines with more than four cores per processor can expect steeper pricing with the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2012. The difference amounts to pricing increases in the tens of thousands of dollars (see chart).

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