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Comment Re:It's stupid - switch to GMT (Score 1) 613

by Lirodon (#48290871) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time?
I did the exact opposite; we moved from Ontario to Saskatchewan a few years back (after me, not knowing of this quirk on a road trip that had a stop in the province about a decade ago, accidentally set a hotel clock back to CDT from CST and goofed up our itinerary a bit). The only awkwardness it causes is when we have to adjust our television viewing habits to work around the time differences that develop, but we use that to our advantage.

Submission + - Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, not Pipeline (fortune.com)

Submitted by FrnkMit
FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause they shook the sand of the tech industry from their shoes, never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck". In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all", stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.

Comment I share the opinion of a Wikipedia IP editor (Score 1) 349

by Lirodon (#48059913) Attached to: Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility
Mainstream media, please stop perpetuating this speculative misinformation. It is VERY unlikely, given that, according to an IP editor who removed my addition of this alleged, speculative information, "even if their assertion were correct, the confluence of events required to run on 95/98 *and* an unreleased Windows 9 without modifications is improbable. While that code exists in the wild (with modifications), none of it is remotely modern. They're using JDK6/7 internal test tools and code from a 13 year old version of jEdit as an example as to why "Windows 9" was skipped."

Submission + - The single vigilante behind Facebook's 'real name' crackdown (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: Given the timing and the accounts suspended, they believe that they are in fact the mystery “individual” who threw a wrench into Facebook’s system, noted in Facebook’s explanation of the events. “Considering the hours and hours I spent reporting accounts over the course of the past month, it is likely that I am.”

Submission + - Unofficial patch extends Windows XP support

Submitted by dfsmith
dfsmith writes: Many companies, my employer included, have stopped supporting Windows XP starting today. Luckily, a couple of engineers at Microsoft have released simple patch to extend XP support. "Our patch extends March indefinitely. For example, with the patch, today is March 32nd. And we wish you Merry Christmas later this month, on March 300th!", explained Rolf Paoli. Seems like an ingenious way to fix an awkward problem.

Submission + - Hacker crashes Google Play -- twice (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: New Android apps and updates were blocked from appearing in Google's Play Store on Monday, after a hacker attacked Google's app publishing system.

Ibrahim Balic, a Turkish hacker, claimed responsibility for the attack. He said the developer console crashed when he tried to test a vulnerability he discovered.
Balic wrote an app to exploit the flaw, which he expected to fail. But he said he didn't expect it to knock everyone offline as well.

Submission + - Ubuntu to switch to systemd (markshuttleworth.com)

Submitted by GuerillaRadio
GuerillaRadio writes: Following the decision for Debian to switch to the systemd init system, Ubuntu founder and SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth has posted a blog entry indicating that Ubuntu will now follow in this decision. "Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously."

Submission + - Patent troll sues US gov't for interfering with its business (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by inode_buddha
inode_buddha writes: According to El Reg — MPHJ Technology, one of the most notorious patent trolls in America, has filed a lawsuit against the US Federal Trade Commission, claiming that the agency's attempts to interfere with its business are in violation of its constitutional rights.
The obscurely named MPHJ is a patent-assertion entity that demands royalties of about $1,000 per employee from companies that own networked scanners with a "scan to email" function.
By its own admission, MPHJ has so far sent letters to about 16,000 businesses, warning them that their use of such scanners is in violation of its patents.
Links to the case are in the article, for the armchair lawyers and ex-groklawers...

Submission + - Yoga site gets patent for pointing a 3-foot high camera at a person (yogainternational.com)

Submitted by Lirodon
Lirodon writes: The online yoga class site YogaGlo has been granted a patent for filming yoga classes by placing the camera at the back of a crowd with an aisle in the center (and the teacher at the end of said aisle). While the patent was rejected several times by the USPTO for prior art, somehow they accepted it after Yogaglo added the requirement that the camera have "a height of about three feet". A non-profit group thinks this patent is unenforcable, however, citing Yogaglo's own videos as prior art.

Submission + - The Double Life of Memory Exposed with Automata Processor (hpcwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Nicole Hemsoth over at HPCwire reports "In a nutshell, the Automata processor is a programmable silicon device that lends itself to handing high speed search and analysis across massive, complex, unstructured data. As an alternate processing engine for targeted areas, it taps into the inner parallelism inherent to memory to provide a robust and absolutely remarkable, if early benchmarks are to be believed, option for certain types of processing."

Submission + - Are Prizes Bad For Hackathons? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A growing number of hackathons are offering bigger and bigger prizes: Last week's LAUNCH Hackathon offered $1.6 million in cash and prizes. Next week, Salesforce will be hosting a hackathon at their Dreamforce conference, at which they'll be handing out a $1 million first-place prize. And GlobalHack recently announced plans to give away a $1 million first prize in a new series of annual hackathons. But, as ITworld's Phil Johnson discovered, some developers don't think this is such great idea, mainly because corporate hosted hackathons with prizes feel more like a job — or exploitation. What do you think, do big prizes make bad hackathons?

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