There is more than one way to do it.

Perl can pretty much integrate anything with anything. Hardware or Software.

It is the Duct tape of the interwebs.

It is a swiss army chainsaw.

And yes,it can be nearly impossible to decipher what the code is doing, Oh, but the moment of enlightenment you have when you do figure out an obscure but elegant piece of code.

That, my friend, is "Why Perl?".

-Xanthos

Helicopter mommies don't buy congressmen, lawyers do.

Product liability lawyers don't want this potential cash cow to die just yet. All they need is a judge who doesn't believe in science because they personally "know better."

When ever a keyboard article come along you get a bunch of old farts pining away about their venerable old Model M keyboards.

I know. I am an old fart and I have one. I love it but unfortunately it ruined me. I am totally unable to use a laptop keyboard.

They all suck. suck suck suck. The keys are in the wrong place, they don't feel right, and I keep hitting the effing touchpad with my thumbs and suddenly I am typing a porn url in the browser bar.

Now get off my lawn!

from the 2011 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2060321/)

"Depending on the benchmark, our results show that Fusion produces a 1.7 to 6.0-fold improvement in the data-transfer time, when compared to a discrete GPU. In turn, this improvement in data-transfer performance can significantly enhance application performance. For example, running a reduction benchmark on AMD Fusion with its mere 80 GPU cores improves performance by 3.5-fold over the discrete AMD Radeon HD 5870 GPU with its 1600 more powerful GPU cores."

So if your interest is in crunching lots of data, you can do it a lot more efficiently with an APU since you don't have to shuttle across the bus.

My cat likes to knock eveything off my desk. She can't move my Model M, it weighs more than she does.

I disagree with Kahn calling these Computer Science courses, but I have to admit that I am at a loss as to what to call them. Computer Fundamentals perhaps?

It is a disservice to those looking at these to think that Computer Science is making an iPhone app or game. It really trivializes how powerful computers are and the concepts they embody.

this has great potential for epic fail. perhaps it is time to dust off the old disassembler.

Japan is +14 hours to us, Europe +5 to +8. That whole instantaneous communication thing is hard to do with someone who is sleeping and they are not in the next cube. If they are asleep in the next cube, then its fun.

Dug around in Wikipedia a little and found that White Knight 2 has a carrying capacity of 35,000 lbs (~16k kilos). The X-37B is listed at 11,000 (5k) fully loaded, the crewcab version X-37C should be under 25,000 and even the old pre-composite X-15 was 34,000(15.4k). Now the X-15 was far shy of orbital velocity, but rocket design has advanced some in the 40+ years since the end of the program and building a standby vehicle for quick launch to orbit might be getting feasible.

I, like many, have mourned the decline of manned space exploration. However, I see the work of Virgin Galactec and SpaceX as reasons to hope that not all is dead.

Maybe the parts are coming together.

-Xanthos

American businesses cannot find the people they need because they have stopped looking. As has been mentioned here before, many HR departments are now dependant on robo analysis of electronicly submitted resumes to do their inital vetting. If you don't meet the robo criteria you don't get past square one. This results in many qualified candidates being passed over and under qualified candidates getting through because they know how to game the system.

I have personally seen several examples of both. In one instance the guy filled out an online resume form (you were not allowed to just upload your pdf), hit enter, and within a minute got a reply email saying "Thank you for applying, but after careful consideration we have determined that you are not qualified for the position." Careful consideration? Hardly. Needless to say his opinion of this particular company is less than what it was before he applied.

In another example, a guy who could not get past HR finally had a friend hand deliver his resume to the manager who was hiring. HR was furious for being bypassed, but the guy got the job.

Finally, a good friend of mine was pulling her hair out trying to find a good sqlserver admin. It seems that the only candidates that HR passed on to her happened to come from the same contracting company, with almost identical resumes, and all admitted in the interviews that they were actually programmers, but the consulting company thought they could do the job and had "tweaked" the resumes to make them look competent.

Companies that take shortcuts in the hiring process will pay for it in the end. A good HR department has to be willing to put in the effort to find good candidates.

Cheap, fast or good. Pick two.

-Xanthos

Don't use either anymore except for the occasional hack of existing C code, but in the olden days (Borland) when you compiled a C++ program you actually were running a pre-compiler to turn the C++ into C and then that went through the C compiler. Is that two pass methodology still used today or are there C++ specific compilers now?

As a couple of others have stated, it is important in identifying who may be behind the code. "Authors" in certain parts of the world tend to use a certain set of tools for financial fraud, another group uses a different set of tools for industrial espionage, yet others may use either set of tools to mimic these groups while they do plain old espionage for a nation state.

As a defender, you probably are more worried about one group than the others. A small startup data mining firm is probably more worried about somebody stealing their IP and less about giving away any government secrets.

From the article;
    "Caltech lawyers contend Coppedge was one of two Cassini technicians and among 246 JPL employees let go last year due to planned budget cuts."

The interesting thing is he is pretty much admitting that he shoved his views in others faces, otherwise why would it be a reason to let him go?

What people fail to notice is the "Analog Hole" part of this demonstration. Paget did not clone the RFID card. She transferred information from a secure environment (RFID) to an insecure environment (mag stripe). As long as the amount of money lost through theft is a fraction of the cost of upgrading the infrastructure to get rid of magstripe, this capabillity will remain.

FWIW, the who needs RFID cards is defintely an American bias. When I was in Paris last year there were a number of times where not having a RFID card was a real PITA.

-Xanthos

Unless of course that $15 is per student per year. The ebook business model only makes sense when the distribution of the material is restricted.

I was disappointed to find out that I am unable to share a book I bought on my Kindle Fire with my wife because the publisher doesn't allow it. We are talking about something published back in the 90's that I still had to pay $12 for, I can probably find a workaround but I wish I didn't have to.