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Submission + - Init wars: Debian inclining towards upstart as default (itwire.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than a month and a half after Debian leader Lucas Nussbaum asked the technical committee to decide on the init system to be used in the next release, Jessie, the discussion is still ongoing. But some committee members have taken positions and at this stage it looks like upstart will end up being the default.

Submission + - If UNIX Were a Religion 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Charles Stross has written a very clever article where he describes the religious metaphor he uses with non-technical folks to explain the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX. There is one true religion in operating systems says Stross and it is UNIX although there's also an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy. If MULTICS is Judaism then UNIX is Christianity. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX which is probably POSIX. Stross says that today the biggest church in the whole of UNIX is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but "has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path." But lo, in the late 1980s, UNIX succumbed to the sins of venality, demanding too much money from the faithful and so, in 1991 Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. "The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists." More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux. "Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google." Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. "Is that clear?"

Submission + - Safeway Suspends Worker for SciFi Parody of His Firing

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After making light of a bad situation — Safeway's closing of its Chicagoland Dominick's grocery store chain and termination of 6,000 workers — with a satirical SciFi YouTube clip, Dominick's employee Steve Yamamoto found himself suspended just one day before the grocery chain closed up shop for good. "My store manager got a phone call that she had to suspend me," Yamamoto told NBC Chicago. "I was like, 'Are you serious?' It's crazy as it is. I'm just dumbfounded." Perhaps Safeway was concerned that viewers of Yamamoto's video might think that aliens, robots, and monsters did Dominick's in, although the Chicago Tribune suggests financial machinations as a more likely culprit: "By pulling the plug on Chicago [Dominick's], Safeway could not only satisfy [hedge fund] Jana, but also generate a $400 million to $450 million tax benefit."

Submission + - Next Carsharing Advance: Electric Cars From A Vending Machine

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: When you're in a waiting room and get hungry, what do you do? You hit the vending machine for a candy bar or some salty snack food. Now, if you're in China and you need to borrow an electric car from the local car-sharing service, you can do exactly the same thing: go and get one from the vending machine. Just like the Smart-car dispensers seen across Europe, the Kandi car-sharing service dispenses two-seat electric cars with a 75-mile range from a big tower that looks like a huge vending machine full of candy, errrrr, cars. It costs $3.25 an hour to rent one, and China hopes it'll help cut emissions from transportation. So the next time you're in China, and you need a car, just hit up the biggest vending machine you can find.

Comment Re:Yes, because moderation is oh so hard to do (Score 5, Insightful) 384

by DigiWood (#45795625) Attached to: Internet Commenting Growing Away From Anonymity

Companies like the ones you mentioned are all about not paying someone to do what to you and I would be something simple: Moderate the discussion. They also don't want the readership doing the moderation because that could potentially be at odds with the publications owners views.

Submission + - How Healthcare.gov Changed the Whole Software Testing Conversation (smartbear.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While several “software glitches” have been featured on the evening news, I can’t recall any that have caused a national conversation about the process of building and testing software unti Healthcare.gov. Suddenly, Americans are sitting at their kitchen tables – in suburbs, in cities, on farms – and talking about quality issues with a website. The average American was given nightly tutorials on load testing and performance bottlenecks when the site first launched, then crumbled moments later. We talked about whether the requirements were well-defined and the project schedule reasonably laid out. We talked about who owns the decision to launch and whether they were keeping appropriate track of milestones and iterations. After that came the public discussions about security holes, which, admittedly, is not an unfamiliar concept to most people.

Submission + - In Air Display and Interface Technology: A Big Step Forward (cnn.com)

Submitted by wjcofkc
wjcofkc writes: Interactive displays projected into the air in the spirit of Iron Man have been heralded as the next step in visual technology. Yet many obstacles remain. According to Russian designer Max Kamanin, creator of Displair, many the problems have now been largely cracked.

With this attempt at refining the technology, the image is created inside a layer of dry fog which is composed of ultra-fine water droplets so small they lack moisture. Three-dimensional projections are then created using infrared sensors. The projected screen currently responds intuitively to 1,500 hand movements, many of which are similar to those used on mobile devices, such as pinch and zoom. The most immediate applications include advertising and medicine, with the latter offering a more hygienic alternative to touchscreens.

The most immediate objection from home and office computer users is that they don't want to be waving their hands around all day, and while such questions as "What happens when I turn on a fan?" are not answered here, just imagine a future with a projected keyboard and trackpad that use puff-air haptic feedback with the option of reaching right into the screen whenever it applies to the application at hand — and applications that take advantage of such a technology would no doubt come along. Better yet, imagine for yourself in the comments. As always, pictures speak a thousand words, so don't neglect the articles gallery.

Submission + - Protesters Block Apple and Google Busses in California

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Business Insider reports that protesters have stopped a bus filled with Apple employees in San Francisco and a Google bus in Oakland. Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook provide free buses that take their employees from San Francisco to their headquarters in the suburbs. Protesters are mad at the tech companies because the wealthy tech employees have driven up the price of housing in San Francisco, which is pricing out some people. The buses also use public transit stops, and some protesters think that's wrong. Between 70 and 100 protesters gathered for the blockade of Apple private tech shuttle to protest evictions in the city of San Francisco. The activists in San Fransisco were from Eviction Free San Francisco, Our Mission No Eviction, Causa Justa /Just Cause. Protesters stood in front of a white shuttle bus holding banners and signs. Some peeked through cardboard signs fashioned in the shape of place markers on Google maps, with “Evicted” written across the front. Meanwhile violence occurred in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading “TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here” and “Fuck off Google" and "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window, making glass rain down on the street. Cold air blew inside the bus and the blockaders with their banners departed." Two weeks ago, protestors stopped a Google bus.

Submission + - Dubious patent approved for yoga class recording (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Todd Palin
Todd Palin writes: The Washington Post has an article describing another dubious patent:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has approved a patent on a technique for videotaping yoga classes. The patent claims the concept of an "image capturing device" being set up in "a studio having a front area and a rear area" and containing an instructor and a "plurality of students." In other words, if you run a yoga class, and you film it using the parameters described in the patent, you may owe royalties to the patent's owner, a company called YogaGlo.

Submission + - Ford Self-Driving R&D Car Tells Small Animal From Paper Bag at 200 ft.

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Autonomous driving is every car manufacturer's immediate R&D project. In car-building terms, even if a new technology isn't due for 10 years — since that's just two full vehicle generations away-- it has to be developed now. So now it is for autonomous car research and testing, and this week Ford revealed a brand new Fusion Hybrid research vehicle built for autonomous R&D with some interesting tech capabilities. Technologies inside the new Fusion Hybrid research vehicle include LIDAR (a light-based range detection), which scans at 2.5 million times per second to create a 3D map of the surrounding environment at a radius of 200 feet. Ford says the research vehicle's sensors are sensitive enough to detect the difference between a small animal and a paper bag even at maximum range. More road-ready differentiations include observation and understanding of pedestrians, cyclists, and plain old stationary objects. Ford is working on this project in cooperation with the University of Michigan.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do I convince management to hire more IT staff?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work at a manufacturing company. We have roughly 150 employees, 130 Desktops, 8 physical servers, 20 virtual servers + a commercial SAN. We're a Windows shop with Exchange 2013. That's the first part.

The second part is we have an ERP system that controls every aspect of our business processes. It is heavily customized with over 100 customizations (VB but transitioning over to C#). We also have 20 or so custom-made support applications that integrate with the ERP to provide a more streamlined interface to the factory workers in some cases, and in other cases to provide a functionality that is not present in the ERP at all.

Our IT department consists of:
1 Network Administrator (me)
4 Programmers (one of which is also the IT Manager)

I finally convinced our immediate boss that we need another network support person to back me up (but he must now convince the CEO who thinks we have a large IT department already). I would like them to also hire dedicated help desk people. As it stands, we all share help desk duties, but that leads to projects being seriously delayed or put on hold while we work on more mundane problems. It also leads to a good amount of stress, as I can't really create the solid infrastructure I want us to have, and the developers are always getting pressure from other departments for projects they don't have the manpower to even start.

I'm not really sure how to convince them we need more people. I need something rather concrete, but there are widely varying ratios of IT/user ratios in different companies, and I'm sure their research turned up with some generic rule of thumb that leads them to believe we have too many already.

What can we do?

Submission + - WWII Japanese Aircraft-Carrying Super Submarine Located Off Hawaii (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Scientists plumbing the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaii coast have discovered a Second World War era Japanese submarine, a technological marvel that had been preparing to attack the Panama Canal before being scuttled by U.S. forces. The 122-metre "Sen-Toku" class vessel — among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built — was found in August off the southwest coast of Oahu and had been missing since 1946, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa said. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around the world without refueling and could hold up to three folding-wing bombers that could be launched minutes after resurfacing, the scientists said.

Submission + - How to shove 50 meters of optical fiber into a microchip (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently said its program to develop cutting edge photonics products has yielded two chips that can support long optical delays with low loss useful for a number of applications including wideband wireless systems, optical buffers for all-optical routing networks, and ultra-stable optical interferometers for sensing applications.

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