Comment Re:Not Getting Paid (Score 1) 121
Seeing as Germany is the only country that has come thru this recession smelling like roses, pardon me if I take your opinion with a grain of salt.
Comment Re:Not Getting Paid (Score 1) 121
That has got to be the single worst attempt at a straw-man I've ever seen. Did you even read what he wrote?
Comment Re:When going into business with Friends (Score 1) 183
I gotta admit, as a kid I liked the 2 CRPG "GoldBox" versions of Buck Rodgers.
Comment Re:Games with known linux ports? (Score 1) 81
I should have been more clear. I don't remember all of the particulars, but I couldn't even get the port of Alpha Centauri running on Kubuntu 12.04.
Comment Games with known linux ports? (Score 2) 81
There are a few GoG games that have known Linux ports already, like Unreal Tournament 2004. Personally, I hope we see a modernized Alpha Centauri Linux port on GoG soon. The Icclus one doesn't seem to fare to well on modern systems.
Comment Re:Time will tell (Score 3, Funny) 354
I had forgotten NetFlix still mailed DVDs.
Comment Re:This is just a repeat (Score 1) 282
Companies that do these mass layoffs should be banned from utilizing H1B visa employees for one month per employee terminated.
Comment Anecdote (Score 2) 619
One of the most fair, hard-working & awesome people I know was born & raised in East Germany. She was also one of the first people over the wall when it came down. I've worked with her for 19 years & I'm pretty sure she'd have an exception to this "study".
Comment Re:Propaganda won't help this time (Score 1) 503
The US and the Netherlands are special cases. For example in English you don't say "The Australia", "The Brazil" or "The Canada".
Thanks for the elucidation. I've always thought "the Ukraine" was a special case as well.
Comment Re:It is the fault of.. (Score 1) 503
Bingo, they are both just tribalism when boiled down.
Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs? 509
An anonymous reader writes: My niece, who is graduating from high school, has asked me for some career advice. Since I work in data processing, my first thought was to recommend a degree course in computer science or computer engineering. However, after reading books by Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil (How to Create a Mind), I now wonder whether a career in information technology is actually better than, say, becoming a lawyer or a construction worker. While the two authors differ in their political persuasions (Rifkin is a Green leftist and Kurzweil is a Libertarian transhumanist), both foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof? Would it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts, since creativity is looking to be one of humanity's final frontiers against the inevitable Rise of the Machines?
Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? 502
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Back in the day (which is a scientific measurement for anyone who used to walk to school during snowstorms, uphill, both ways), integrated audio solutions had trouble earning respect. Many enthusiasts considered a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It's been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced, a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs, in general. These days, the Sound Blaster ZxR is Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's integrated audio solution. It also features a built-in headphone amplifier, beamforming microphone, a multi-core Sound Core3D audio processor, and various proprietary audio technologies. While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects and it also produces noticeably superior audio in music and movies, provided your speakers can keep up."
The World's Best Living Programmers 285
itwbennett (1594911) writes "How do you measure success? If it's by Stack Overflow reputation, Google engineer Jon Skeet is the world's best programmer. If it's winning programming competitions, Gennady Korotkevich or Petr Mitrechev might be your pick. But what about Linus Torvalds? Or Richard Stallman? Or Donald Knuth? ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today."
The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong's Subway Engineers 162
Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptimes: 99.9%, which beats London's tube or NYC's sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10,000 people would be carrying out 2,600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the ones carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn't a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chun of Hong Kong's City University, who designed the AI system, says, "Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen." Chun's AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedule less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chun's team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong's AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chun. "We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works," he says.
Encryption Keys For Kim Dotcom's Data Can't Be Given To FBI, Court Rules 149
the simurgh writes: As many who follow the Kim Dotcom saga know, New Zealand police seized his encrypted computer drives in 2012, copies of which were illegally passed to the FBI. Fast-forward to 2014: Dotcom wants access to the seized but encrypted content. A New Zealand judge has now ruled that even if the Megaupload founder supplies the passwords, the encryption keys cannot be forwarded to the FBI.
