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Comment Re:Ted Dziuba (Score 3, Interesting) 619

OK, I did actually read this blog he wrote and yes I think his position is valid. To summarize: Coding in your free time does not make you a good coder. Neither does not coding in your free time make you a balanced person. Both unrelated, thankyouverymuch. This is all in all a discussion you can have or simply ignore.

The one point I'd like to make is ... have your read this guys other posts? To summarize: He's a little young fuck with little experience raining down on everyone. It's mixture of the standard troll and Mr. Whiney-Whiney; with a focus on whiney-whiney. Cheers.

Comment Re:Sigh. Not this shit again (Score 1) 1073

1) Countries don't do an even job testing their students. In the US, everyone gets tested, even kids with severe emotional disabilities (meaning from broken homes and such). In some countries, only kids who are in the "college track" schools get tested. Yes, in some places young kids are tracked like that. In Germany students go to the Gymnasium, Hauptschule, or Realschulabschluss depending on ability. The Gymnasium is for kids who are going to university, the Realschulabschluss is for kids going directly in to the work force. Unless they changed it since last I checked, they only test kids in the Gymnasium with these higher level math tests.

Meeep ... they check Hauptschule and Realschule against the tests your junior high does. And test those from grades 10-12 of the Gymnasium against your high school attendees of comparable grades.

So to retort the fallacy, why don't they test kids that dropped out after junior high with those higher level math tests? ...See that easy.

Programming

The Best First Language For a Young Programmer 634

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As he sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"
Patents

Submission + - IBM and Amazon settle patents row

schmu_20mol writes: According to this BBC article, IBM and Amazon settled their patent-infringement lawsuits. ''Under the deal, Amazon said it would pay IBM an undisclosed sum of money, while both firms agreed to allow the other access to some of its technology.''
Science

Speed of Light Exceeded? 393

PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it." This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It's impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein's special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.

Edgy Eft Knot 2 Released 183

Klaidas writes "The Ubuntu project has released a second Knot CD — an alpha version of Edgy Eft. Notable new features include a new 2.6.17 kernel, Gnome 2.16 beta 2, Firefox 2.0b1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 and much more. It is availible for download on Ubuntu's image server. The final stable version is still slated for release in October 2006."

Aussies Brace for DMCA 121

Rusty writes "Aussies are counting down to the introduction of the US-FTA-required DMCA legislation, and trying to pressure the government to listen to consumers and innovators, not just industrial copyright holders. Linux Australia has kicked off the campaign with iownmydvds.org and iownmymusic.org."

Five Men Arrested in LexisNexis Data Theft 74

An anonymous reader writes "Five men aged 19-24 were arrested last week in connection with the reported theft last year of some 310,000 personal records from database giant LexisNexis. The Washington Post reports that some of the individuals were also involved in the theft and online posting of revealing photos from socialite Paris Hilton's cell phone. All are being charged with 'aggravated identity theft,' which carries a mandatory 2-year jail sentence for those found guilty."

Windows Live Messenger with VoIP 169

V-man writes "Microsoft has just launched Windows Live Messenger with free PC-to-PC phone calls and PC-to-phone calling as a pay service provided by Verizon Web Calling. Of course, most people doing PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calling are probably using Firefox...too bad the Launch Page isn't Mozilla friendly."

Linux 2.6.17 Released 444

diegocgteleline.es writes "After almost three months, Linux 2.6.17 has been released. The changes include support for Sun Niagara CPUs, a new I/O mechanism called 'splice' which can improve the performance greatly for some applications, a scheduler domain optimized for multicore machines, driver for the widely used broadcom 43xx wifi chip (Apple's Airport Extreme and such), iptables support for the H.323 protocol, CCID2 support for DCCP, softmac layer for the wireless stack, block queue IO tracing, and many other changes listed at the changelog"

New Caldera Promised 291

An anonymous reader writes "SCO has announced their plans to release a new version of Caldera Linux by the end of the year. From the announcement: 'To provide extensive reliability and performance features, the Linux Kernel 2.5 codebase has been merged with recently developed additions to SCO's world leading UNIX core operating system. Already contained code owned by SCO is still included benefiting the stability and overall experience opposed to recent Linux kernel releases.' The question is, is anyone listening?"

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