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Submission + - Lunch, Anyone?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'I've been on teams that eat together every day,' writes Joel-on-Software Spolsky, and it's awesome. I've been on teams that don't, and lunch every day is, at best, lonely.' Spolsky is firmly in the camp that believes where and with whom we eat lunch is a much bigger deal than most people care to admit. 'There's a lot of stuff that's accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange,' he concludes, 'but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.'
NASA

Submission + - NASA wants public to join in Hubble's 20th party (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Hubble Space Telescope has taking snapshots of the universe for 20 years this week and as part of that anniversary, the space agency is looking to crowdsource new galaxy images and promote social network celebrations. Specifically, NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute and the online astronomy project Galaxy Zoo are making almost 200,000 Hubble images of galaxies available to the public at Galaxy Zoo: Hubble. What they want are volunteers from around the world to help astronomers classify these photos by answering simple questions about what they are seeing — for example, identifying the number of spiral arms visible, shape of galaxy, or spotting galaxies in the process of merging, according to NASA.
Security

Submission + - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by skids
skids writes: File this under "no, really?" CBS news catches up with the fact that photocopiers, whether networked or not, tend to have a much longer memory these days. When they eventually get tossed, very few companies bother to scrub them. Coupled with the tendency of older employees to consider hard-copy to be "secure", and your most protected secrets may be shipped directly to information resellers — no hacking required. "The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas — loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore."
Google

Submission + - Samsung's ARM roadmap leads to quad-core 'Aquila' (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung's semiconductor division is working on an lengthy roadmap of ARM-based processor up to the so-called Aquila, which has four cores, according to this EE Times story. The roadmap targets netbooks, mobile internet devices and even smartphones. It is based on the premise that Microsoft Windows running on Intel microprocessors will gradually give way to Chrome browser on the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system running on ARM-based microprocessors.

But like Intel, the forthcoming application processors have to have exciting names. In Samsung's case they are Orion and Pegasus due in 2011 and Hercules sampling in 3Q11 and set for mass production in 1Q12. Mercury is due in 2010/11 while Venus, Draco and Aquila are slated to arrive in 2012 or 2013.
NASA

Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US 139

Posted by kdawson from the boom-boom dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."

Submission + - Gartner Issues Smackdown on Open Core (gartner.com)

Submitted by
Sortova
Sortova writes: "Those of us who are concerned about the growing prevalence of the open core (or fauxpen source) business model are often ignored when those VC-backed companies have much more to spend on marketing, as well as the few but profitable acquisitions accomplished by VCs such as Benchmark. We're often labelled as open source "zealots" and enterprises are told to ignore us.

However, enterprises tend not to ignore the advice of Gartner, one of the most respected analyst organizations out there. Today, Brian Prentice posted Open-Core: The Emperor's New Clothes which is a scathing critique of the business model, not as a road to VC riches, but as a solution that enterprises should consider.

There are way too many good quotes to pick just one, but he sums things up with "You see, when you start peeling back some of the value propositions being attached to open core business models what starts to appear is a picture of a bog standard software provider trying to use the latest phraseology to cut through the noise of a crowded marketplace".

In a similar blog post back in 2008 I wrote "The emperor is naked, folks." It is nice to see someone with influence agreeing with me."
IT

Submission + - The Black Art of SQL Performance Tuning (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Sean McCown offers SQL developers 7 performance tips for faster SQL queries in hopes of smoothing the transition of the 'relatively immature' database field from development to production systems. 'I don't expect SQL developers to become administrators, but they must take production issues into account when writing their code. If they don't do it during initial development, the DBAs will just make them go back and do it later — and the users suffer in the interim.' Chief among McCown's tips are favoring CASE over UPDATE, avoiding the temp table double-dip, and deleting and updating in smaller batches. 'There's a reason why we say tuning a database is both an art and a science. It's because very few hard-and-fast rules exist that apply across the board. The problems you've solved on one system aren't issues on another, and vice versa,' McCown writes. 'But these techniques should give you a little more insight into the minds of your DBAs, as well as the ability to start thinking of processes in a production-oriented way.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Open Source v Sharepoint: The trouble with bundles (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: "So if I can summarise this, would I be right in saying that Sharepoint does an awful lot of things adequately whereas your Open Source offerings do fewer things really well?" Thus spake a delegate at a recent 'Sharepoint' conference at which I was presenting an alternative Open Source e-learning stack which included Alfresco, Moodle and Mahara. “Right on” I thought, then “double right on” when MS's chief Sharepoint bloggist weakly nodded assent!
Naturally enough I was inclined to agree with him.
And, after all as he pointed out at the meeting, Sharepoint 2010 is very much better than SP 2007, much quicker and a lot more stuff works properly now...a complete rewrite apparently and there are a host of third party software packages that will make all of the features work just fine!
My head was spinning a little by now. Admittedly I am not a Sharepoint expert but my counterpart presenters were. How do they cope with the sheer complexity of the features, the third party fixes and the extras?
To borrow a phrase from the vernacular “bundles do my head in”

Comment Re:I live there (Score 1) 483

by getagrip (#29998070) Attached to: Computer Failure Causes Gridlock In MD County
Rockville Pike can be faster to travel on in morning and evening rush hour than nearby 12 lane Interstate 270. When the synchronization is working it works very well. Of course, during the day, all the shoppers driving on the Rockville Pike just turn it into an extended parking lot no matter what the traffic signals are doing.
Security

Submission + - New attack breaks WPA WiFi crypto in 1 minute (threatpost.com)

Submitted by
Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: "First it was WEP, then TKIP and now WPA. A pair of Japanese researchers have developed a new technique for decrypting wireless packets encrypted with WPA , the most common wireless encryption protocol, in about a minute. The attack is an improvement on an existing technique and makes it simple for attackers to sniff and then crack supposedly secure wireless traffic. Threatpost.com reports: "The attack builds on the work done earlier by another pair of researchers who found a way to break the WPA encryption protocol that is used on many WiFi routers. Known as the Beck-Tews attack, the method involved making minor changes to packets encrypted with TKIP, a predecessor to WPA, and then sending the packets back to the access point. The vulnerability was in the way that the checksum was used. However, the attack required a significant amount of time to execute, as much as 15 minutes, making it somewhat impractical to execute in the real world. The newer attack, developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi and Masakatu Morii, improves on the Beck-Tews attack and lowers the amount of time needed to execute it to about one minute.""
Social Networks

Submission + - we're in the midst of a literacy revolution(Wired)

Submitted by
Mike Sauter
Mike Sauter writes: ""Andrea Lunsford... is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples--everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions." http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Rumors Of Upcoming World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Submitted by Ninjakicks
Ninjakicks writes: Rumors of a new World of Warcraft series that is on the horizon, have hinted at the potential that game developer Blizzard Entertainment will take an iterative approach to the game's current engine. Rather than venturing into an altogether new content or world, Cataclysm will reportedly update the existing world of Azeroth, open new dungeons and areas--some of which have been closed since WoW launched nearly five years ago--and will reportedly allow travel to underwater zones. While the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors have some fans crying foul, anyone even slightly familiar with Warcraft's lore knows there are plenty of areas in Azeroth that have never been unlocked.

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