Comment Re:What a name! (Score 1) 128
jejune, must remember that one...
Comment Re:Sad, but... (Score 1) 66
In the mid 80s, my school forced us to read The Hobbit. It bored the shit out of me and my 12yo classmates.
15-20 years later and Peter Jackson becomes a zillionaire. After wading through Tolkien as a pre-teen, I had no curiosity for any of the movies.
My loss, I guess. *Hands in geek card*
Ask Slashdot: Best Rapid Development Language To Learn Today? 466
An anonymous reader writes "Many years ago, I was a coder—but I went through my computer science major when they were being taught in Lisp and C. These days I work in other areas, but often need to code up quick data processing solutions or interstitial applications. Doing this in C now feels archaic and overly difficult and text-based. Most of the time I now end up doing things in either Unix shell scripting (bash and grep/sed/awk/bc/etc.) or PHP. But these are showing significant age as well. I'm no longer the young hotshot that I once was—I don't think that I could pick up an entire language in a couple of hours with just a cursory reference work—yet I see lots of languages out there now that are much more popular and claim to offer various and sundry benefits I'm not looking to start a new career as a programmer—I already have a career—but I'd like to update my applied coding skills to take advantage of the best that software development now has to offer. (More, below.)
Comment Re:Tracking you and selling your information (Score 1) 114
Unless you bother to switch your USB connection to ultra-tinfoil-hat 'charge only' mode, they possibly have device-id related info when you plug a phone into their USB sockets.
Comment Re:Why not just an outlet? (Score 1) 114
Since I don't have a car in which to plug a USB charger into a cigarette lighter socket, I often slip a charger into my backpack when commuting. Starbucks isn't ubiquitous in my country but other cafes don't seem to mind if I ask for free electricity for charging.
USB is quite common in some airport lounges these days. The freedom to just carrying around a usb cable would be an advantage - rolls up into a jacket pocket without the lumpy bits of an associated wall wart.
Obviously may require the expensive services of a certified electrician to replace the face plate on your wall socket with one that includes a USB port.(5 min job but at least where I'm from they charge a flat fee for a call-out)
Comment Re:Any chance at getting one? (Score 1) 82
Ah, for the OS? None of those sub $100 Android devices, by definition, come with Firefox OS preinstalled.
If you're asking why anyone would be curious to try Mozilla's platform, well that's a different question entirely.
Comment Re:For the Fi-curious (Score 1) 82
It's a phone built for Indians by Indians. If you reside outside of India, you'll have to find someone within that country to post it to you.
Comment Re:Any chance at getting one? (Score 1) 82
Mozilla aren't selling these.
They have merely attracted the interest of *Indian* entrepreneurs to produce phones for the *Indian* market. Nothing stopping these guys from certifying these phones to worldwide standards and opening a webstore to ship internationally. Or partnering with Walmart to import 20,000 of them.
Comment Re:Any chance at getting one? (Score 1) 82
Surely you jest, Tony is making a splash with O'Bama as we speak.
Comment Re:Let gay men donate (Score 2) 172
Is there a half-life on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?
They won't let "mad cows" from Britain donate here in Australia. But the outbreak over there was a couple of decades ago.
Comment First Contact (Score 2) 686
Zefram Cochrane has another 49 years to 'invent' warp technology.
A primitive society as found on Earth is of little interest.
Comment Re:New OS? (Score 1) 257
So the future of computing is a hypervisor, booting Linux inside a pseudo-ramdisk where 'legacy' f/s operations are optimised away?
Docker 1.0 Released 88
Graculus writes: "Docker, the company that sponsors the Docker.org open source project, is gaining allies in making its commercially supported Linux container format a de facto standard. Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software for movement over the network or Internet. Once at their destination, they launch in a standard way and enable multiple containers to run under a single host operating system. 15 months and 8,741 commits after the earliest version was made public, Docker 1.0 has been released."
Comment Re:Please, please just stop... (Score 1) 270
Stable exists. Run the Eric S Raymond release (ESR), which is currently pinned to v24.
Greenland Is Getting Darker 174
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Greenland's white snow is getting darker. Scientists have generally attributed that darkening to larger, slightly less white snow grains caused by warmer temperatures. But researchers have found a new source of darkening taking hold: impurities in the snow. The new darkening effect could easily add 2 centimeters to the projections of 20 cm sea level rise by 2100—and perhaps more if impurity levels grow with time."
