Comment Re:You seem to think .NET is a language (Score 2) 421
There are dozens of languages that compile to the
Yeah but really who uses them?
95% of
In essence it is a c# based environment.
Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 1) 421
I welcome it if it is more open and cheaper. 100k to start a website for unlimited licenses is freaking nuts.
But that was a few years ago.
MS is changing because they have lost and can no longer use leverage like they once did. Witness IE and visual studio where lots of free competition exists?
I welcome an alternative to java and hopes it encourages python and php to get their acts together. More competition the better for everyone
Comment Yes MS has lost and is now nice (Score 4, Interesting) 421
The old gray beards today might say the same with IBM or Digital but once market forces correct a monopoly the company either whithers or adapts.
Doesn't mean MS is no different than any other corporation even if that opinion is unpopular here on slashdot. Timewarner/AT&T/Comcast are far more evil and God forbid what Jobs would have in store if Apple won the Pc wars in the 1980s and achieved 90% marketshare! MS would be tame in comparison.
Under a free market people play nice or loose out.
Today I like Microsoft even though I hated them hence my name 13 years ago. Here are the facts in late 2014
1. IE is not a bad browser anymore. It used to be both feared and loathed in the old days as it was a threat to win32 applications. Today they no longer will ever have the control they did in 2004 when you needed to go to a library to use IE 6 if you used a mac or linux to fill out job apps. Yes I remember doing that. Monster.com was optimized for IE 6 quirks back then.IE 11 is modern and has great debugging tools and behaves like a real browser behaves and has the best security with sandboxing. IE 12 will even have an add-on framework ala Chrome/Firefox. I use adblock on IE today
2. Visual Studio 2015 supports Android and Linux Xiarmin development?? No I am lying. Go google it as emulators are included including CLANG support.
3. Office is available for Android and IOS. Full suite is coming soon
4. MS more liberal with pricing for non corporations. Google VS Community edition. It is pro and free!
5. MS is opening sourcing
6. Azure supports non win32 operating systems.
7. MS is putting more effort in security and stabilizing and fixing bugs now that competition exists.
Am I a fanboy? No. I am agnostic this day but I find MS getting much better and if it were not for Metro I would be a fan even of their desktop products. Windows 7 is a very stable desktop oriented OS. It is not and I repeat not the POS slashdotters who have not run Windows in 15 years remember.
MS woke up and realized oh shoot. IOS and Android are eating our lunch! Eclipse will eat our lunch! Amazon will eat our lunch! Firefox and now I should say Chrome has eating our lunch! Ms has so much competition today on so many fronts it can't go back and use leverage of a monopoly in one area for another. Blocking Android on Windows? Who cares about Windows blah. Block W3C standards iwth IE? Fine I will use another browser etc.
This was unthinkable in 1999. So Linux did not win the desktop wars like we hoped but open source software did win everything else. Browsers are competitive. Mobile operating systems competitive. Development environments are competitive. Clouds and virtual services for legacy win32 apps scare the crap out of them so soon if mega corps want to leave they can.
MS is done. I welcome the new MS. As some (I did not say all folks) products are fairly decent and play well with others.
Comment Re:So the question is... (Score 1) 99
I wonder why they think the noise was the instigation. We know that tornados have significant currents and magnetic fields; and we know that migrating birds have significant magnetic sensitivity.
Is it far fetched to think they might have felt its magnetic effects?
Comment Re:Supreme Leader (Score 1) 177
If you're right they blew it. They should have blamed Russia and added more pressure. As it happens I don't think they're just making stuff up.
Comment Re:Including Slashdot? (Score 0) 396
It isn't documented any where and I can't recall where I first learned of it because it was years ago but you can get TLS on Slashdot.
Subscribe.
Once subscribed and logged in it should transition you to TLS, at least it does for me.
If it does not you can force the matter with Noscript.
Off hand has anyone noticed Noscript unblocking Google analytics and other domains and certain other analytics domains with each new update?
I also use the Calomel TLS grading extension for Firefox.
Slashdot has been graded Red for years. Dice just upgraded the cert a couple of days ago and it is now graded Blue with PFS. Not Green but at least it's not Red anymore.
Comment Dubious because facts (Score 5, Informative) 182
Marc Rogers disagrees strongly, and poitns at a long list of evidence that make it much more likely that it was a vengeful inside-job badly disguised into a Nork attack for unrelated publicity added-value:
- elements of language that do not fit north-korean lingo
- hardcoded filepaths indicating insider knowledge
- social-network savvyness unlike anything the DPRK ever did
- no mention of The Interview movie until after the possible tie with DPRK was suggested
Comment Re: Ugh, WordPress (Score 1) 31
But it works in IE 6?!!
Comment Re:it can be air filled (Score 4, Interesting) 200
Also mind the day duration: the Venus sidereal day is 243 Earth days. That makes for a worse than polar night, solar panel-wise, and that's not even counting the permanent, thick cloud cover. There just is no point in reaching the venusian ground and its lead-melting heat. It's far better to hang in the high atmosphere, well above the sulfuric acid clouds, and loft around in the 200 mph winds, circling the planet every 4 or 5 Earth days.
Comment Re:As with all space missions: (Score 1) 200
Meat starts cooking at around 60C.
Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates 688
HughPickens.com writes: Claire Cain Miller notes at the NY Times that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
ODF Support In Google Drive 40
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.
Comment I would just request (Score 5, Funny) 330
that we not get it all at once please.
Comment Re:It's required (Score 5, Insightful) 170
Your indignation should not be directed at Verizon - it should be directed at Washington, DC.
A fun part of this is that the government employees at ARPA back in the 1960s explained it all to us. They firmly rejected building any sort of encryption into the network itself, on the grounds that such software would always be controlled by the "middlemen" who supplied the physical connectivity, and they would always build what we now call backdoors into the encryption. They concluded that secure communication between two parties could only be done via encryption that they alone controlled. Any encryption at a lower level was a pure waste of computer time, and shouldn't even be attempted, because it will always be compromised.
This doesn't seem to have gotten through to many people today, though. We hear a lot about how "the Internet" should supply secure, encrypted connections. Sorry; that's never feasible, unless you own and control access to every piece of hardware along the data's route. And the ARPA guys didn't consider that, because that first 'A' stands for "Army", and they wanted a maximally-redundant, "mesh" type network that would be usable in battle conditions. They went with the approach that you use any kind of data equipment that's available, including the enemy's, and you build in sufficient error detection to ensure that the bits get through undamaged,. Then you use encryption that your team knows how to install on their machines and use. And you probably change the encryption software at irregular intervals.
Anyway, the real people to direct your anger at are the PR folks in both industry and government, who keep trying to convince you that they can supply encryption that's secure. Yeah, maybe they can do that, but they never have and they never will. And the odd chance that they've actually done so in some specific case doesn't change this. The next (silent, automatic;-) upgrade will introduce the backdoor.
Unless you have all the code, compile it yourself, and have people who can understand its inner workings, you don't have secure encryption; you have encryption that delivers your text to some unknown third parties. It's the US government's own security folks who explained this to us nearly half a century ago.
Comment Have times changed that much? (Score 1) 280
It used to be that any degree would get your "foot in the door" with HR. Some of the best programmers I worked with over the years had degrees in English, Philosophy, and even a History major.
University teaches you how to learn new material, how to prioritize it, how to summarize, how to reach the meat in the middle of the chaff. It does not teach you how to program. While there are benefits to knowing computing theory, it's not theory that gets the job done -- experience does that.
I'm surprised you're having such a tough time finding work if you're actually good at programming. Perhaps it's the way you're presenting yourself in your resume, because, as I said, it doesn't really matter what your degree is in for getting your foot in the door.
