functor0 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Full text in case the link gets taken down (Score 1) 354

by functor0 on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @08:11PM (#37697030) Attached to: Google Employee Accidentally Shares Rant About Google+

Hiring standards vary according to the team because the needs of the team vary according to the team and according to what that person is going to be doing.

Just to play Devil's Advocate, what if the team was incompetent? It's not unheard of where all the good people leave the team, leading to hiring choices for similarly, incapable new employees.

Submission + - Windows 8 will have super fast boot times (windows8update.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09, 2011 @12:01AM

An anonymous reader writes: This post describes about yet another blog post from Steven Sinofsky where he talks about new features in Windows 8. He talks extensively about how they planned to achieve faster bootup times for the operating system.

Submission + - Monthly Ubuntu Releases Have Been Proposed (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2011 @08:19PM

An anonymous reader writes: Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there's features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time.

Submission + - FPS no more? New methods reveal deeper GPU issues (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture on Thursday September 08, 2011 @07:31PM

crookedvulture writes: Graphics hardware reviews have long used frames per second to measure performance. The thing is, an awful lot of frames are generated in a single second. Calculating the FPS can mask brief moments of perceptible stuttering that only a closer inspection of individual frame times can quantify. This article explores the subject in much greater detail. Along the way, it also effectively illustrates the "micro-stuttering" attributed to multi-GPU solutions like SLI and CrossFire. AMD and Nvidia both concede that stuttering is a real problem for modern graphics hardware, and benchmarking methods may need to change to properly take it into account.

Submission + - Patent Reform Bill Passes Senate (politico.com)

Submitted by nephorm on Thursday September 08, 2011 @06:51PM

nephorm writes: "The Senate gave final approval to the first major overhaul of the nation’s patent law in more than a half century Thursday, sending the America Invents Act to President Barack Obama for his signature.
The legislation won overwhelming approval in an 89-9 vote." Fee diversion from the USPTO will continue.

Comment Re:I like not equals assignment operators (Score 1) 623

by functor0 on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @11:46PM (#35803530) Attached to: Red Hat Uncloaks 'Java Killer': the Ceylon Project

:= was originally an ALGOL 58 feature, but I digress. The real problem is not with operator ==, but with C allowing assignment in the conditional part of if statements.

Comment Re:Java killer? (Score 1) 623

by functor0 on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @11:43PM (#35803512) Attached to: Red Hat Uncloaks 'Java Killer': the Ceylon Project

The new assignment operator ":="

Oh look, someone revived the Clipper dBASE compiler / Pascal syntax.

No, someone revived the the ALGOL 58 syntax (yes, that is 1958) . Everything old will be new again ...

Comment Re:Home Labs? (Score 3, Informative) 206

by functor0 on Friday June 04, 2010 @08:02PM (#32465602) Attached to: McDonald's, Cadmium, and Thermo Electron Niton Guns

Well, the "Smart Mama" (Jennifer Taggert) is someone that actually makes money through her XRF gun. According to the site below, she charges $5 per test or $100 per hour.

http://www.thesmartmama.com/xrf-testing/

Here's a media article where two families paid her to test their toys:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/25/AR2009122501674.html

Comment Re:No because they are different (Score 1) 205

by functor0 on Friday October 16, 2009 @11:28PM (#29775423) Attached to: Apple's Grand Central Dispatch Ported To FreeBSD

GCD sounds exactly like Microsoft's "Concurrency Run-time Resource Manager" to me. Except they've already incorporated it into the kernel while MS has just started mentioning about incorporating it into the NT kernel for future releases.

Comment Re:VM? (Score 1) 422

by functor0 on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @11:59PM (#29740947) Attached to: Washington Post Says Use Linux To Avoid Bank Fraud

Ok, so what about using the *host* OS for banking use, and the *guest* OS for daily use?

Submission + - Lawsuit shows how to sue spammers (com.com)

Submitted by

mytrip

on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @06:32PM

mytrip writes: "A recent decision in a lawsuit filed against a Florida credit counseling company offers a promising road map to follow for suing spammers.

An investigation of the sender traced the source back to a business called The Credit Counseling Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Hylkema, a Slashdot reader who once had an e-mail address at the aptly named Suespammers.org, filed a lawsuit in Washington claiming that Credit Counseling was spamming in violation of two state laws, and obtained a default judgment when the company never showed up to defend itself.

After receiving at least nine unsolicited e-mail messages offering credit counseling services, Washington state resident Joseph Hylkema did more than just consign the spam to his junk mail folder: he decided to get even.

Washington state law allows for damages of $1,000 per e-mail message. According to an announcement that Hylkema made in March 2002, though, a judge awarded him a default judgment of $31,575."

Submission + - Jesus: Tales from the Crypt

Submitted by

gollum123

on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:18PM

gollum123 writes: "Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you 'The Titanic' is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he's sinking is Christianity ( http://time-blog.com/middle_east/2007/02/jesus_tal es_from_the_crypt.html ). In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected — the cornerstone of Christian faith — and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene. Let's go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua. But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family. Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene."

Submission + - Improvements to the Download Process

Submitted by ant_tmwx on Saturday February 24, 2007 @05:55PM

ant_tmwx writes: Metalinks collect information about files in an XML format used by programs that download. The information includes mirror lists, ways to retrieve the file on P2P networks, checksums for verifying and correcting downloads, operating system, language, and other details. Using Metalinks details the Free Software programs you can use to download them with. There are also clients on Mac and Windows. With a list of multiple ways to download a file, programs can switch to another method if one goes down. Or a file can be downloaded from multiple mirrors at once, usually making the download go much faster. Downloads can be repaired during transfer to guarantee no errors. All this makes things automatic which are usually not possible or at least difficult, and increases efficiency, availability, and reliability over regular download links. OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, and other Linux/BSD distributions use them for large downloads.

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