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Comment Happy to Beta Test (Score 2) 66

by Giant Ape Skeleton (#37316014) Attached to: Stanford AI Class 'Beta' For Commercial Launch?
I completed my enrollment the other day and am extremely psyched to have the opportunity to participate. Opted for the 'Basic' track as I don't have the time/energy for the whole enchilada. If they want to use my feedback to help develop a monetized version, that's fine with me; I get to learn cool stuff from smart people, and the provider of the service gets to improve their product.

Comment Re:sources close to the investigation (Score 1) 135

by Giant Ape Skeleton (#36138988) Attached to: Amazon Servers Used In Sony Playstation Hack

TFA is totally bullshit.

I think that the hackers used a few open L1 proxies on Amazon AWS.

In my list of open proxies, there are around 20 proxies on Amazon AWS, of the form ec2-??-??-??-???.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 where ??-??-??-?? is an IP address.

...so in order to find the perpetrators, we simply need to determine which seven of those proxies were used in the attack!
Graphics

Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced 184

Posted by Soulskill from the ach-mein-framen dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."
Censorship

Submission + - Great Firewall of Belgium

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Popular ISP's of Belgium (Telenet, Belgacom, Belnet, Mobistar, Base of Scarlet) where ordered by Belgian courts to block childporn sites. It was Minister of Enterprise and Simplification Vincent Van Quickenborne in early 2009 who called for a flexible system for blocking websites. He then negotiated with the ISPs and the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU) of the federal police to a closing agreement under which websites can be blocked. Unfortunately one of the first sites to be blocked is stopkinderporno.eu (stopchildporn). When you do surf to the blocked sites you see a large stop sign and the text: "You are being redirected to this page because the website you are attempting to visit provides content considered illegal by the Belgian law." The article and the google translation, other article on same story and and its translation
Space

Submission + - Lunar Oasis: Greenhouse on the Moon (engineeringtv.com)

Submitted by
Curtis Ellzey
Curtis Ellzey writes: "The first Moon flower will become a reality when private lunar expedition partners Odyssey Moon and Paragon Space Development Corporation deliver a biological greenhouse to the lunar surface. Google Lunar X PRIZE contender Odyssey Moon partnered with Paragon, a Tucson-based firm and manufacturer of key components for NASA's Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. The lunar plant will be another space biology first for Paragon, having bred the first animals through complete life cycles in space, and grown the first aquatic plant in space. Also watch this episode: Growing Plants on the Moon: http://engineeringtv.com/blogs/etv/archive/2009/04/23/growing-plants-on-the-moon.aspx"
AMD

Submission + - AMD unleashes speed demon processor (pcauthority.com.au)

Submitted by Slatterz
Slatterz writes: AMD has launched its fastest ever processor, which has smashed records by being overclocked to 6.5GHz. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 chip has been designed with the gaming, workstation and high-end graphics markets in mind. AMD is claiming that this is its fastest ever quad-core processor and is releasing it unlocked so that overclocking is possible. The new processor gives significant performance increases over previous AMD chips in the same line — the 940 and 920 — as well as against competing Intel products. For example, benchmarks show greater performance for the X4 955, which is priced at $245, than Intel's new Core 920 i7, priced at $289, in photo filtering, slideshow rendering and gaming. Up till now, the only good thing people to be said about AMD's Phenom is that it's good value, so it'd good to see AMD playing again in the performance space.
Communications

Submission + - TED 6th sense technology (vtualerts.com)

Submitted by boogerme0
boogerme0 writes: "This video shows the new wearable technology that makes takes personnel computing to a whole new level. This is done by an Indian Student who is in MIT — Pranav Mistry." This is a cross between an iphone and a projector; a pretty cool device. http://www.vtualerts.com/inspirational-stories/must-watch-the-future-of-personal-computing-and-communication/ On a side note, when can I get one?
Security

Submission + - US military prepares for cyber command (defencetalk.com)

Submitted by Young Wild and Free
Young Wild and Free writes: The US administration is planning to create a new military command to counter cyber attacks on the country's sensitive computer networks, a US defense official said on Wednesday. The move would be part of a planned overhaul of cyber security policies now being weighed by the White House, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
Toys

Submission + - Toys for Telekinesis? (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Kaliann
Kaliann writes: Toys that respond to brainwaves are the next generation of unique user interfaces. The Washington Post looks at the current market appeal and future uses of technology that can meaningfully respond to the thoughts of a user. Currently the toys have a fairly simple basic idea: the harder you concentrate the more the object moves. A sensor on the forehead picks up brain waves that are associated with concentration, then levitates a ball in response: basic biofeedback. While this may seem to be a rather humble beginning, progress in this field could have astounding consequences in the advancement of technologies devoted to thought-controlled devices. As the author points out, Jedi Beer Pong is within our grasp.
Cellphones

Submission + - T-Mobile's German Cell Phone Network Down

Submitted by botticelli
botticelli writes: Yesterday, the german T-Mobile cell phone network went down for about 3 hours (german) (Babelfish translation here), official press release (also german) (Babelfish translation here). They took their time fixing the problem as they were not able to contact many of their own technicians since those own the company's cell phones, of course. Now, T-Mobile offers free short messaging on sunday as a compensation but no money as reported by Deutsche Welle. Why am I glad not to be a customer?
Space

Submission + - Is "Space Junk" always?

Submitted by Hqrsie
Hqrsie writes: After reading the article on Brazilian pirates using US military satellites for communication, I've wondered what's done with decommissioned satellites. I always thought they would be viewed as a precious commodity due to their complexity, expense, and status. However, with many critical systems reliant on them, it seems likely that replacements are sent prudently before critical failure. What I wonder is if there are functional satellites that are simply not in use. Or is anything in orbit that continues to work already re-purposed until it is of no further use at all? Is "space junk" always truly that?
Programming

Submission + - Humor in code: unprofessional or not? 2

Submitted by DrVomact
DrVomact writes: Do you ever inject humor into the comments of your code or—heaven forfend—into the code itself? I recently had a "code review" of a Perl automation program I had written for my department. The salient criticism that emerged was that there was "sarcasm" in my comments, and that this was unprofessional. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the criticisms concentrated on my comments, as no one else in this group does much programming (the PHB claims to have "been a coder" once upon a time...I think he wrote COBOL on punch cards); nevertheless I was dumbstruck. What kind of world is it where you aren't allowed the occasional funny comment in your code? Do we have to be serious all the time? I asked a programmer in the "R & D" group of this paleolithically conservative company I work for, and he responded with a complete unsolicited psychoanalysis: he advised that I should develop a "professional personality" that was different from my real one I use at home. I was shocked—nay, mystified: where do you learn how to do that?

But let's concentrate on the smaller, more manageable issue: is humor in comments truly verboten? Am I the only one who makes the occasional light remark, or even a self-deprecating reminder to "Change this, you idiot...what were you thinking"? I've resolved to take the humor issue to a jury of my peers: to wit, the esteemed denizens of Slashdot.

I received an annotated copy of my code from my PHB, pointing out all my lapses into "unprofessionalism." Here are a few of the lines from my program that were deemed "unprofessional", along with my comments, and meta comments). I cannot actually guarantee that there is any genuinely funny stuff here, only that my completely humorless PHB suspected that it might be tainted. (Sorry about the lack of indenting...couldn't figure out how to make Slashdot's subset of HTML do that.)

BEGIN {
if ($^O eq 'MSWin32') {
use Win32::Console;
Win32::Console::Free( );
}
}
Weirdly, nobody thought this was at all funny or objectionable.

# Set the directory if we got lucky
This was in a set of nested conditional tests that tried to find a file, no matter what crazy place the person running the program had stuck it. I fail to see this as sarcasm...I call it "cheerful optimism".

# Fix nasty problem where...
Comment in code that fixes crazy stuff in input files. Apparently, the word "nasty" is nasty.

$sysreturn = $proc->wait; # This gets exit code of process (it's already gone, so it's not really going to wait)
The parenthetical comment was marked as objectionable. You got me; I thought this was a potentially confusing line of code, and that the comment helped.

} else { # For all others, we just need to recover the original declarations that got eaten by the XSLTs
The word "eaten" was deemed unprofessional, sarcastic, or something.

my $status = shift @_; # 1 means the error causes certain death, undef or 0 means it's a warning (user gets to try again), 2 means it's a "notification"
Describes possible values passed to an error handler; "certain death" was deemed objectionable. Perhaps it was construed as a threat?

my %args = @_; # Stuff arguments into a hash, so we can look them up one at a time
"stuff" is an offensive word, apparently. All instances of "stuff" were marked as offensive. Good thing I didn't use "slurp", or "suck", huh?

if($name ne "subsection") { # We want the minor stuff included with first subsect file
To my great consternation, "stuff" is objectionable both as a verb and a noun! I think maybe PHB was using search-and-replace for his code analysis, though.

$button_text="Bummer!"; # It's NOT OK, man!
This one caused the most outrage. It's actually part of the code, unlike the other cases—it's the text of a button in a fatal error dialog. I completely hate when an application notifies me of a fatal error and asks me to click a button labeled "OK"—as if asking for my approval for having screwed up. Like my comment says...it's not OK. PHB wanted "OK", but I finally changed it to "Exit".

So, I ask you, my peers of Slashdot, to pass judgment on me: am I hopelessly unprofessional? Or have I discovered the real reason why so many programmers don't comment their code?

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"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

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