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Comment Neo Luddite (Score 1) 204

by SuperKendall (#49324867) Attached to: Apple Doubles MacBook Pro R/W Performance

They've been dead in a lot of our worlds for years.

I guess you must be the modern equivalent to the Amish, shunning useful technology because it is the work of something you designate arbitrarily to be the Devil.

How sad for you and your kind, though I look forward to buying whatever the equivalent is of fine wooden furniture from your group of castaways at some point in the future.

Comment Cheer up, you are batter off in some ways. (Score 1) 204

by SuperKendall (#49323837) Attached to: Apple Doubles MacBook Pro R/W Performance

So buy another one next year after the next jump, and then it will someone who bought the 2015 MBP will be all sad they are missing whatever.

As it stands, I have a late 2013 MBP. I accepted when I bought it, that things would advance without me... eventually I will get a new laptop, and the balance will be restored.

Personally I'm really looking forward to a Force Touch version of the MBP, so I would be kind of sad to buy a 2015 MBP knowing that very soon I'd have a strong reason to buy a newer version. At least you will get a good bit of use out of your MPB before the next one with that and other nice features comes out.

Submission + - Meet the White House's new open source-happy IT director (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The White House has plucked 28-year-old David Recordon, engineering director at Facebook, as its first IT Director. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blo... A strong open source advocate (OpenID, Open Web Foundation, etc.) with a decidedly non-button-down appearance, Recordon will be charged with modernizing the White House’s technology. Here’s a closer look at one of our newest public servants

Submission + - Turns out nobody's sure what should count as a Cyber Incident (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Despite a lot of attention to the problem of cyber attacks against the nation's critical infrastructure (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/04/15/2032239/lack-of-us-cybersecurity-across-the-electric-grid), The Christian Science Monitor notes that there is still a lot of confusion about what, exactly, constitutes a "cyber incident" in critical infrastructure circles. The result: many incidents in which software failures affect critical infrastructure may go unreported. (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2015/0323/How-cyberattacks-can-be-overlooked-in-America-s-most-critical-sectors)

Passcode speaks to security experts like Joe Weiss, who claims to have a list of around 400 incidents in which failures in software and electronic communications lead to a failure of confidentiality, integrity or availability (CIA) — the official definition of a cyber incident. Few of them are considered cyber incidents within critical infrastructure circles, however.

His list includes some of the most deadly and destructive public sector accidents of the last two decades. Among them: a 2006 emergency shutdown of Unit 3 at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama, the 1999 Olympic Gas pipeline rupture and explosion in Bellingham Washington that killed three people and the 2010 Pacific Gas & Electric gas pipe explosion in San Bruno, Calif., that killed eight people and destroyed a suburban neighborhood.

While official reports like this one about the San Bruno pipeline explosion (http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/85E17CDA-7CE2-4D2D-93BA-B95D25CF98B2/0/cpucfinalreportrevised62411.pdf) duly note the role that the software failure played in each incident, they fail to characterize them as 'cyber incidents' or note the cyber-physical aspects of the adverse event.

Weiss says he has found many other, similar omissions that continue even today. One obstacle to properly identifying such incidents is that the popular understanding of a cyberincident borrows too much from the information technology industry, which focuses on malicious actors and software based threats operating in traditional IT environments. “In the IT world, ‘cyber’ is equated with malicious attacks,” Weiss said. “You’re worried about a data breach and stolen data, or denial of service attacks.”

Weiss argues that applying an IT mindset to critical infrastructure results in operators overlooking weaknesses in their systems. “San Bruno wasn’t malicious, but it easily could have been,” Weiss notes. “It’s a nonmalicious event that killed 8 people and destroyed a neighborhood.”

Submission + - Bring On The Boring Robots (popsci.com)

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke's "butler bots" are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke's CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines. This is my post for Popular Science about why the rise of the boring robot is good news for robotics.

Submission + - High-skill immigration and the new Senate leadership (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: The first hearing on high-skill immigration under the new Senate leadership had a very different tone from what we've gotten used to. Instead of focusing on the "skills gap" and corporations' need for an expanded labor pool, last week's hearing "focused largely on the practice of replacing existing, often longstanding, employees with cheaper guest workers and preferentially hiring guest workers over Americans under the H-1B visa program and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which permits work on extended student visas."

Comment Re: Responsibility (Score 1) 569

And where are you supposed to learn responsibility? They don't teach it in schools and they don't teach how to avoid being a parent when you aren't responsible, nor do they teach that you should avoid being a parent when you aren't responsible. Most people have only a vague notion of what responsibility is.

Submission + - The Next Great IT Job Killer May Already Be Here

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: A quiet revolution with a potential impact on the IT workforce reminiscent of outsourcing may be under way in the form of robotic process automation, InfoWorld reports. 'Geared toward automating a variety of business and computing processes typically handled by humans, RPA will stir passions at organizations that deploy the technology, with its potential to slash jobs, shake up the relevant skills mix, and if implemented strategically, stave off the specter of outsourcing.' BPOs and enterprises alike are implementing the technology and seeing positive results in slashing labor costs. 'I would say most IT infrastructure support jobs will be eliminated over the next three years,' says Frank Casale, founder of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation. That sentiment may be a bit bullish on the tech, but early results suggest that a shakeup of the IT workforce could be near, as RPA puts higher-value IT tasks in automation's cross-hairs.

Submission + - Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A year ago the animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite to eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into wild. Free non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.

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