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Software

Is the Software Renaissance Ending? 171

An anonymous reader writes Writer and former software engineer Matt Gemmell adds his voice to the recent rumblings about writing code as a profession. Gemmell worries that the latest "software Renaissance," which was precipitated by the explosion of mobile devices, is drawing to a close. "Small shops are closing. Three-person companies are dropping back to sole proprietorships all over the place. Products are being acquired every week, usually just for their development teams, and then discarded. The implacable, crushing wheels of industry, slow to move because of their size, have at last arrived on the frontier. Our frontier, or at least yours now. I've relinquished my claim." He also pointed out the cumulative and intractable harm being done by software patents, walled-garden app stores, an increasingly crowded market, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. He says that while the available tools make it a fantastic time to develop software, actually being an independent developer may be less sustainable than ever.

Comment Re:Latest LEDs are Too New To Fail Yet (Score 1) 278

Reasonably priced LED light bulbs that put out enough light to be useful for room lighting are a pretty new thing. I haven't seen =$10 bulbs with lumens equivalent to 60-watt incandescents until last year, though it's possible they've been around slightly longer, and I'm still waiting to see cheap LED bulbs that are equivalent to 100 or 150-watt incandescents.

They exist. The problem is the size. If you look inside a LED bulb, you will see that is actually just a cluster of standard small LEDs. Since these are mass produced any big light just uses more of them, but that takes up space especially if you also want a reasonable direction.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 2) 129

The human eye CAN tell the difference. What it can't do it distinguish individual pixels, just like you normally can't see individual frames when a movie or game is faster than 24fps. If your eye-sight was so poor that you coun't see better than 300dpi at one meter, you would not be allowed to get a drivers license in most countries. Road signs are designed to be read by the minimal allowed vision at a certain distance, that means you must be able to read half a meter high letters at 1km, which requires 1/5cm resolution, which is the same as 600dpi at 1m, and that is minimum.

Comment Re:smartwatch (Score 2) 381

I'd like a very *simple* smart watch...

* Simple caller-ID and memo display, programmable shortcut buttons, nothing else.

* Very long charge life comparatively (2 weeks would be okay) and/or very easy charging (put it on a charging pad).

Closest I can think to those requirements are the Casio G-Shock Bluetooth models. Two year battery life and notifications for most of the common things you'd want. A comparison chart can be found here.

Unfortunately they don't really go so well with a suit - although I don't suspect that will be a problem for the majority of Slashdot readers.

Great idea, but why does they have to look like SHIT? The shape looks like something big and rubbery made for toddlers, and the display for 13-year old boys with a 1980's fetish.

Comment Re:Lie detectors... (Score 1) 70

Lie detectors only "work" if you tell the subject he is subject to a lie detector test and he believes you, and even then you will not get much better than 50/50 unless you are trained tester who can reach 80/20 under optimal circumstances. So, are you sure you want to ruin your relationship over a test that will be wrong 20% of the time, even when done under optimal circumstances by the best professionals?

Comment Re:"Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully." (Score 1) 497

"They fund a whole series of institutions doing science trolling." What institutions? What evidence is there the Koch brothers are involved?

Are you joking? Sorry for linking WP, but the information there is consistent with what is available everywhere else and it is more centralized.

Here are the two first I could find, there are many others but this should be enough: The Heritage Foundation and The Cato Institute. As for what evidence that the Koch brothers are involved? They are the official founders. For all the evil they do they do try to hide their involvement in political trolling of science.

Sorry, make that: they do not try to hide..

Comment Re:"Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully." (Score 1) 497

"They fund a whole series of institutions doing science trolling." What institutions? What evidence is there the Koch brothers are involved?

Are you joking? Sorry for linking WP, but the information there is consistent with what is available everywhere else and it is more centralized.

Here are the two first I could find, there are many others but this should be enough: The Heritage Foundation and The Cato Institute. As for what evidence that the Koch brothers are involved? They are the official founders. For all the evil they do they do try to hide their involvement in political trolling of science.

Comment Re:Does this mean the death of Minix3? (Score 1) 136

To manage the system, Minix has a so-called "reincarnation server" that restarts core system daemons if they go down unexpectedly. It's totally modular and redundant -- far more ambitious and advanced in its design than Linux or OS X. Minix is designed from the beginning to never go down. There is nothing else like that in the Unix world.

QNX?

Comment Re:"Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully." (Score 1) 497

I see people say this all the time. Some mysterious group is willing to pay for skeptic research. I've never seen any evidence of this. Can you post a link to something substantial.

You know of two people known as the Koch brothers? They fund a whole series of institutions doing science trolling.

And to step out of American politics: In Denmark normally considered an environmental and left-leaning country the right wing government of the early 2000s hired the famous sceptic Bjørn Lombog (who coined the term climate sceptic) to lead an institute called the Environmental Assessment Institutue a climate studýing institute supposed to "evaluate" the state of climate studies. The institute only purpose was to prove that climate science was wrong, but was never able to prove anything, and ended up having to shut itself down as it proved its mission pointless (though only after a long serious of weak articles and bad science).

Since then Bjørn Lomborg reluctingly stopped questiong whether global warming was happing or was man caused and is now running an initiate trying to argue that it is either not worthwhile or too late to do anything about it.

AI

The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI 285

meghan elizabeth writes If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it's time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a "program" that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can't be a hardware fluke. The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. In short, to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself.

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