loxfinger - Slashdot User

Submission + - Print Version of RoR Tutorial Second Edition is "Hopelessly Mangled", For Now (railstutorial.org)

Submitted by loxfinger on Thursday August 16, 2012 @09:05PM

loxfinger writes: Michael Hartl, author of the recently released "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Second Edition" has advised that people NOT buy the print version of the book since "the print book's source code listings have been hopelessly mangled, with all angle brackets, curly braces, and quotes inexplicably omitted. This makes the source listings worse than useless. (The online HTML book and PDF are unaffected and remain correct as before.)"

Comment Re:The cloud (Score 2) 162

by loxfinger on Sunday June 10, 2012 @04:17PM (#40277245) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Training To Rekindle a Long Tech Career?

"C'mon fellas, it's all ball bearings these days!"

Comment Re:Honest question (Score 1) 90

by loxfinger on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @04:42PM (#38284476) Attached to: Book Review: Head First HTML5 Programming

Depends how your learn. Some people actually enjoy paging through a book, writing notes in the margins, flipping back to a previous page to review a diagram, whatever. A (good) book presumably has a qualified author, editor, and reviewers. They've put time and effort into explaining material clearly. You can check reviews on Amazon or wherever to get an idea if the book would be a good "fit" for you. There are so many websites with so much information, it can be hard to know which ones are best or even mostly correct. If you like researching on the web, that's great, go do it. If you prefer to have an experienced author do the research for you and create a physical book, that's great too.

Comment Re:Why do you want to be hired? (Score 1) 523

by loxfinger on Monday November 28, 2011 @12:00PM (#38191182) Attached to: How Does a Self-Taught Computer Geek Get Hired?

The competition can be pretty fierce in the website business. Seems like there's a lot of folks out there who'll paint any website for $99.95.

Comment Re:dmr (Score 4, Interesting) 725

by loxfinger on Thursday October 13, 2011 @10:13AM (#37701208) Attached to: Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

My computer science professors, back in the mid 1980's, were highly suspicious of any computer book thicker than "The C Programming Language." I understand now how they respected Dennis' gift for concision.

Submission + - Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse (informationweek.com)

Submitted by matty619 on Saturday January 08, 2011 @07:22PM

matty619 writes: An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration which were deployed in 1979 may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half $Billion upgrade which won't be ready until 2015.
One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to the report. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center (NCC) — built in 1979 — as the SSA's "primary IT investment" in the next few years.
The agency has received more than $500 million so far to replace the outdated center, which is now so severely strained by an expanded workload over its time of operation that it may not be able to function by 2012, according to the report.

Submission + - Universities Responsible For Lack Of IT Security? (adamonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08, 2011 @02:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: The UK is short of some 50,000 IT Security Staff, and with the increase of computer related attack coverage in the news means the demand for security staff is only going to rise, but what are universities doing to cope with this demand? I read an interesting article at http://adamonsecurity.com/ that raises some fair (and at times shocking) points about how much real world security skills are actually taught on security qualifications by Universities in the UK. The article is heavy handed at times but definitely holds some interesting points about the state of IT education and the damage that it is potentially causing. So what actually will UK security students get for their now 9000GBP per year?

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