Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Attach who? (Score 2, Informative) 77

by rubies (#34339906) Attached to: Attachmate To Retain Novell Unix Copyrights

The name is a blast from the past for anyone who worked in IT in the 1980s.

They sold a line of IBM 3270 terminal emulation software and some IBM PC compatible communication cards so you could work at your new fangled PC while still looking at the corporate software on the IBM mainframe. I thought they died when 3270 comms protocols went TCP/IP but apparently a shell of the company has struggled on for years sitting on a bunch of acquired patents from subsumed competitors.

Their SDLC cards were a total bitch to work with too - especially if you were a gumby like me and had never seen a 3270 terminal or mainframe but the sales guy wanted to ship a bunch of PCs into some government department "ready to wear". For this reason the company name gives me the shudders.

Comment OR mappers all suck (Score 0) 72

by rubies (#34262974) Attached to: NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook

They do. I've been struggling with commercial and free ones since C++ was the hottest environment around and they all basically do the same thing: spit out useless code that is impossible to optimise on a large database. You can't tune it reliably, you end up with indexes out the kazoo all over your database trying to catch all the special cases that the damn OR mapper makes up and they all have truly, ugly, broken interfaces to anything a normal database programmer uses like stored procedures.

I wrote one myself for the last project I worked on and, yep, it sucked just as hard as the commercial offerings for all the same reason.

They are, however, infinitely superior to object databases which truly are the spawn of the devil.
Books

Submission + - Confessions of a Used-Book Scanner

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "In a good example of how advancing technology, the internet, and informationally efficient markets can work together to create new niche opportunities for entrepreneurs, Michael Savitz writes how, armed with an a laser bar-code scanner fitted to a Dell PDA, he makes a living spending 80 hours per week haunting thrift stores and library book sales to scan hundreds of used books a day and instantly identify those that will get a good price on Amazon Marketplace. "My PDA shows the range of prices that other Amazon sellers are asking for the book in question," writes Savitz. "Those listings offer me guidance on what price to set when I post the book myself and how much I'm likely to earn when the sale goes through." Savitz writes that on average, only one book in 30 will have a resale value that makes it a "BUY" but that he goes through enough books to average about 30 books sold per day and earn about $1,000 a week in profit. "If I can tell from a book's Amazon sales rank that I'll be able to sell it in one day, I might accept a projected profit of as little as a dollar. The more difficult a book will be to sell, the more money the sale needs to promise." Savitz writes that people scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops and that libraries are beginning to advertise that no electronic devices are allowed at their sales. "If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?" concludes Savitz. "The bibliophile bookseller, and the various other species of pickers and flippers of secondhand merchandise, would never be reproached like this and could never be made to feel bad in this way.""
Security

Submission + - Anti-US hacker takes credit for worm (idg.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Credit for the "Here You Have" worm (recently discussed on Slashdot), has been taken by a hacker known as "Iraq Resistance" who says the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool. He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. "I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't," said the hacker. "I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!" In other parts of the message, he was critical of the U.S. war in Iraq. For a brief period early the worm accounted for about 10 percent of the spam on the Internet.
The Internet

Submission + - Ask.com to shut down Bloglines (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Bloglines, the venerable RSS reader, will cease to exist in a few weeks, according to its owner, Ask.com. Users should export their syndicated feeds to another RSS reader, as Bloglines will be shut down on Oct. 1, Ask.com said Friday in a blog post. Ask.com has posted instructions on the Bloglines home page for exporting feeds to another RSS management service."
Crime

Submission + - Burglary Ring Uses Facebook Places To Find Targets (wmur.com)

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglaries, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. "'Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites,' said Capt. Ron Dickerson. 'We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites.'"
Well, I guess the prophecies came true.

Comment Re:The female responses . . . (Score 4, Interesting) 286

by rubies (#33516942) Attached to: The Real 'Stuff White People Like'

More that our external representations of ourselves rarely match the actual. Look at the crazy pictures people put on Facebook for their profiles - 40 year olds with some photo from their mid-twenties before they got fat. Listing a bunch of interests you rarely participate in (unless bumping into your dusty huffy n the garage counts as cycling).

Submission + - Indian govt. claims to have '$35 laptop' (hindu.com)

Submitted by adityamalik
adityamalik writes: From the article — "NEW DELHI: India on Thursday launched a low cost access-cum-computing device for learners and teachers which would be made available through educational institutions by 2011.
"The price of the device is expected to be around $35 (Rs. 1,500), gradually dropping down to $20 and ultimately $10 per piece,â Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said, while unveiling the device here."
Google

Submission + - Google exec frustrated by Java, C++ complexity (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Today's commercial-grade programming languages — C++ and Java, in particular — are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon."
Google

Submission + - Java, C++ Too Complex for Google (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing."
NASA

Submission + - NASA satellite spots Buckyballs bouncing in space (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have spotted large soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules known as "Buckyballs," in space for the first time. The molecules are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere, NASA stated. Observed in a laboratory 25 years ago, the molecules were thought to be floating in space, but had escaped detection until now, NASA said

Slashdot Top Deals

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

Close