blackbearnh - Slashdot User

Submission + - Fail Blog and the Ethics of Crowdsourcing (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday December 20, 2011 @12:31PM

blackbearnh writes: Sites like Slashdot, reddit, and especially Cheezburger Network sites such as Fail Blog depend on crowdsourcing for most of their content. But what are the ethical considerations that need to be taken into account when accepting material from (sometimes anonymous) third parties? In particular, Fail Blog is vulnerable to being used for cyber bullying.

O'Reilly Radar asked Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh to talk about the guidelines they use when accepting material for Fail Blog, and how he views the future of crowdsourcing as a strategy for content generation. Frequent Fail Blog readers will be happy to hear that they do, in fact, make sure that no one is seriously injured in any of the videos they post, so you can enjoy your schadenfreude with a clear conscious.

Comment Re:CS Monitor? (Score 1) 220

by blackbearnh on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @02:45PM (#37923722) Attached to: Is the Maker Movement Making It Cool For Kids To Be Nerds?

Are we confusing Christian Science with Scientology? If not, I worked for 3 years in the newsroom of the Monitor, and Christian Scientists are among the least proselytizing, most laid back folks I ever ran into.

Submission + - Is the Maker Movement making it cool for kids to b (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @03:52PM

blackbearnh writes: For most adults into technology, childhood was a alienating experience, pigeon-holed as a nerd and relegated to the A/V, Computer or Gaming club in high school. But according to a Christian Science Monitor article that looks at young Makers, the next generation of tech geeks are social and gaining increasing support for corporate America. Radio Shack is stocking Arduinos, Autodesk bought Instructables, and teens are flocking to local Hackerspaces to learn how to create their own gear. WIRED Geek Dad David Giancaspro, thinks that people's need to create with their own hands is responsible. "As we've moved further and further away from that, towards what people call 'knowledge work,' as opposed to producing something physical, that urge is starting to come back," he says.

Submission + - Dear FOSS Zealots: Proprietary has a Place Too! (oreilly.com)

Submitted by

blackbearnh

on Thursday July 21, 2011 @09:13AM

blackbearnh writes: "After years of having the more extreme elements of the Free Software community imply that he and his kind are akin to war criminals for writing proprietary software, O'Reilly Radar commentator James Turner has had enough.

In an essay out today, Turner argues that FOSS has it's place in the software ecosystem, and that it naturally tends to dominate it. But, equally, there are places where FOSS makes no sense at all, and it's silly to demand that all software should be free. He's especially fed up with demands that he settle for less than the best software he can get, simply to support the FOSS movement unconditionally. TFA: "In many cases, proprietary software fills niches that FOSS software does not. If individual activists want to 'wear a hair shirt' and go without functionality in the name of FOSS, that's their decision. But I like linen, thank you.""

Submission + - Is Process Killing the Software Industry? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @09:09AM

blackbearnh writes: We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative?

A piece on O'Reilly Radar is arguing that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. TFA:"The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to 'make' their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on."

Submission + - What Monty Python Teaches Us About Computing

Submitted by

Esther Schindler

on Monday April 18, 2011 @11:35AM

Esther Schindler writes: "Does the computer industry seem just a little too strange? Never fear: Monty Python encapsulated several nuggets of wisdom years ago that summarize exactly what is behind the sometimes-tawdry behavior of vendors, the open source community, and marketing departments."

Comment Re:Gah, Mixed Units! (Score 1) 167

by blackbearnh on Sunday April 17, 2011 @01:34PM (#35848824) Attached to: A 9V Battery To Your Brain Can Improve Your Gaming

Sorry, meant to say it assumes a 100V signal (100V x 2mA = 200mW, or 1/500 of 100W)

Submission + - Is Apple Playing Favorites With Their App Store Po (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Thursday April 07, 2011 @06:46PM

blackbearnh writes: Recently, Apple improved the transparency of their iOS review criteria by publishing a list of no-nos. This was an attempt to deflect criticism that they employed arbitrary standards when determining which applications to be allowed into the store. But it may turn out to be a double-edged sword, because it is now much easier to spot examples of applications that appear to break the rules. As an Christian Science Monitor story points out, the new "Atari's Greatest Hits" app seems to fall squarely into that category, by allowing the application to download code.

Submission + - A Kickstarter project to Free the Wii (kickstarter.com) 1

Submitted by blackbearnh on Thursday March 31, 2011 @11:34PM

blackbearnh writes: The Wii is a great gaming platform, but it suffers from a range issue with the sensor bar. Specifically, it's really short. As more and more games for the Wii are sit and shoot, rather than stand and twist, being able to use your Wii from a couch across the room is becoming a useful thing, not to mention trying to use a Wii with Netflix. My son and I have decided to fix the problem of the wimpy sensor bar, and have launched a Kickstarter project to produce a really high-powered sensor bar replacement.

The MegaBar has not one, not two, but 9 IR emitters on each 'end' of the bar, and is visible from 10' away on the lowest Wiimote setting. If we can get 100 like-minded souls to come in on the project, the project will fund.

Submission + - Improving healthcare in Zambia with CouchDB (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Thursday March 31, 2011 @12:50PM

blackbearnh writes: In the developing world, the integration of medical records that we take for granted is a rare thing. But a project in Zambia is trying to improve healthcare in rural areas by keeping volunteer works in rural villages in contact with clinics and supervisors. A big component of making this work is the NoSQL database called CouchDB, because it provides reliable synching of medical records over slow and sometimes unreliable connections. In an interview over on O'Reilly Radar, one of the principal architects of the system talks about the project, and why CouchDB was such a good fit.

Submission + - O'Reilly Running Contest to Create the Best API (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Monday March 21, 2011 @10:06AM

blackbearnh writes: O'Reilly usually is where you go to learn about APIs, but now they're turning the tables by opening up their data and asking third parties to create interesting APIs to access it. They're using the FluidInfo writable API technology, and the person who creates the best API will win a free trip to OSCON, including hotel and airfare. Runners-up can win iPads (or a Xoom) and books

Submission + - Indexing the Social Signal: Search & Social Me (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @07:59PM

blackbearnh writes: Search engines have gotten pretty good at indexing the semi-static web, but new information sources such as Twitter and Facebook are starting to change the game. How do you find the meaningful tweets about protests in Egypt, when they're being drowned out by a thousand times as many retweets, not to mention stuff about Justin Bieber.

Social Media guru Charlene Li thinks that finding search value in 140 character tweets requires an entirely new approach to ranking the value of information, and in a new interview, she talks about why PageRank doesn't work for this kind of real-time information, as well as how the increasing searchability of social media is changing how people use it. "With PageRank, the more links that came into a piece of content the more meaningful and important it was. That works in a static web, and it tends to lean toward things that have better longevity. When things are coming in real-time, how do you determine whether content is important or relevant to a particular search query? How do you understand the social signal and all of the metadata that surrounds it? There's very little metadata associated with a 140-character tweet."

Submission + - Is HTML5 a Friend or Foe to Flash? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday February 01, 2011 @03:44PM

blackbearnh writes: One of the promises of HTML5 is that it will reduce the reliance on proprietary technologies such as Flash and Silverlight when creating Rich Internet Applications. In an interview with Adobe's Duane Nickull, their senior technical evangelist, he argues that Flash and HTML5 can play nicely together, and that the days of Flash are in no way threatened. "Most of the time, a Flash-based application deployed to the Internet is done so within an HTML container. It uses JavaScript to invoke and instantiate an instance of the Flash Player browser plugin. One could summarize that HTML and Flash always play nice together, and in fact, Flash relies on HTML."

Submission + - Will Cheap 3D Fab Start a Innovation Renaissance? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Friday December 10, 2010 @01:58PM

blackbearnh writes: An article over on O'Reilly Radar makes the argument that, just as inexpensive or free software development environments has led to a cornucopia of amazing web and mobile applications, the plummeting cost of 3D fabrication equipment could usher in myriad new physical inventions. The article was prompted by a new Kickstarter project, which if funded, will attempt to produce a DIY CNC milling system for under $400. TFA: "We're already seeing the cool things that people have started doing with 3D fab at the higher-entry-level cost. Many of them are ending up on Kickstarter themselves, such as an iPhone 4 camera mount that was first prototyped using a 3D printer. Now I'm dying to see what we'll get when anyone can create the ideas stuck in their heads."

Submission + - Google Plans "Searchless" Search (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510 on Friday December 10, 2010 @01:25PM

rsmiller510 writes: Google has a vision for the future of search where instead of explicitly entering keywords, Google serves you results automatically based on what it "knows" about you and where you are in the world at any given moment. Creepy, fascinating or both?

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