Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Cloud

Video Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video) 409

Posted by Roblimo from the old-stewball-was-the-most-loyal-server-horse-we-ever-done-had dept.
Curtis Peterson says admins who hang onto their servers instead of moving into the cloud are 'Server Huggers,' a term he makes sound like 'Horse Huggers,' a phrase that once might have been used to describe hackney drivers who didn't want to give up their horse-pulled carriages in favor of gasoline-powered automobiles. Curtis is VP of Operations for RingCentral, a cloud-based VOIP company, so he's obviously made the jump to the cloud himself. And he has reassuring words for sysadmins who are afraid the move to cloud-based computing is going to throw them out of work. He says there are plenty of new cloud computing opportunities springing up for those who have enough initiative and savvy to grab onto them, by which he obviously means you, right?
Math

Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius 208

Posted by Soulskill from the ace-your-exam-in-one-easy-step dept.
mpicpp sends in the story of Jason Padgett, a man who developed extraordinary mathematical abilities as the result of brain trauma when he was attacked outside a bar. "Padgett, a furniture salesman from Tacoma, Wash., who had very little interest in academics, developed the ability to visualize complex mathematical objects and physics concepts intuitively. The injury, while devastating, seems to have unlocked part of his brain that makes everything in his world appear to have a mathematical structure 'I see shapes and angles everywhere in real life' — from the geometry of a rainbow, to the fractals in water spiraling down a drain, Padgett told Live Science." "He describes his vision as 'discrete picture frames with a line connecting them, but still at real speed.' If you think of vision as the brain taking pictures all the time and smoothing them into a video, it's as though Padgett sees the frames without the smoothing. "
Bug

Bug Bounties Don't Help If Bugs Never Run Out 235

Posted by Soulskill from the trying-to-bail-the-ocean dept.
Bennett Haselton writes: "I was an early advocate of companies offering cash prizes to researchers who found security holes in their products, so that the vulnerabilities can be fixed before the bad guys exploited them. I still believe that prize programs can make a product safer under certain conditions. But I had naively overlooked that under an alternate set of assumptions, you might find that not only do cash prizes not make the product any safer, but that nothing makes the product any safer — you might as well not bother fixing certain security holes at all, whether they were found through a prize program or not." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Comment Re:Great school that is self pace, accredited and (Score 1) 370

by qbzzt (#46577169) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Fastest, Cheapest Path To a Bachelor's Degree?

I got my M.Ed. there. The main advantage of WGU is that it isn't class based but competency based. You do assignments (and tests) to prove your knowledge. They don't really provide much in the way of materials, but if you already know it and just need the diploma you can advance very quickly. It is ~$3000 for an all-you-can-study semester.

Comment Re:Edit, but disclose (Score 1) 112

by qbzzt (#46222365) Attached to: IBM Employees Caught Editing Wikipedia

I don't know specifically about the 401(k), but frankly I don't care either. I don't put money in it - all the retail investments that are available will depreciate when as the baby boomers attempt to retire and realize the demographics don't support it.

Note: My opinion, obviously not IBM's.

Comment Re:Edit, but disclose (Score 5, Informative) 112

by qbzzt (#46218733) Attached to: IBM Employees Caught Editing Wikipedia

This is pretty much IBM's policy. We're allowed to post about IBM, provided what we post is:

1. Non confidential (I can't tell you about the time machine we're building in the basement in Austin)
2. Not damaging (I am not allowed to be defamatory, for example - although I will say all of HP's employees who are black with yellow polka dots are habitual liars)
3. Clearly stated to be the opinion of a specific IBM employee, rather than the IBM corporation

It would be silly not to let IBM employees, for example, post about mainframes. A lot of the world's mainframe expertise is at IBM.

Disclaimer: I am an IBM employee, but these are my own opinions. They do not reflect the opinions of the IBM corporation in any way, shape, or form. Considering that IBM is not a natural person, I'm not sure if it even has opinions, beyond "money coming in good, money going out bad".

Slashdot Top Deals

Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

Close