The Visiting Priest - Slashdot User

Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters 610

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @03:30PM from the taking-a-personal-detective-day dept.

No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."

TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter 76

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 04, 2010 @10:51PM from the try-the-clarke-kubrick-corridor dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 04, 2010 @06:45PM from the making-it-go-away dept.

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"

Frustrated Reporter Quits After Slow News Day 178

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:01AM from the take-this-job-and-shove-it dept.

Norwegian radio journalist Pia Beathe Pedersen quit on the air complaining that her bosses were making her read news on a day when "nothing important has happened." Pedersen claimed that broadcaster NRK put too much pressure on the staff and that she "wanted to be able to eat properly again and be able to breathe," during her nearly two-minute on-air resignation.

Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus" 65

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday September 11, 2010 @11:43PM from the time-to-upgrade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update to the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"

Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced 165

Posted by timothy on Friday May 21, 2010 @10:41PM from the vintage-2010 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set): many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."

Dinosaur Feather Color Discovered 219

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @05:28PM from the horsefeathers-still-a-mystery dept.

anzha writes "Do you remember being a kid and told we'd never know what colors the dinosaurs were? For at least some, that's no longer true. Scientists working in the UK and China have closely examined the fossils of multiple theropods and actually found the colors and patterns that were present in the fossilized proto-feathers. So far, the answer is orange, black and white in banded and other patterns. The work also thoroughly thrashes the idea that fossils might not be feathers, but collagen fibers instead. If this holds up, Birds Are Dinosaurs. Period. And colorful!"

Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE 142

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @05:40PM from the you-saw-this-coming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."

Comment ExpLab (Score 2, Informative) 122

by The Visiting Priest on Sunday April 20, 2003 @04:59PM (#5770027) Attached to: Open Source Experiment Management Software?

I'm in precisely the same situation as Alea, so I read the suggestions here with considerable interest.

I'd like to mention ExpLab.

Though I haven't used ExpLab yet, these folks have been associated with other very high quality work (CGAL) so I expect good things. Here are three goals they list for the project:

to provide a simple way to set up and run computational experiments;
to provide a means of automatically documenting the environment in which an experiment is run so the experiment can be easily rerun (provided the same environment is still available) and the results can be more accurately compared to the results of other computational experiments;
to eliminate some of the tedium involved in collecting and analyzing output by providing basic text output processing tools.

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