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Submission + - Celebrating Dungeons & Dragons' 40th Anniversary

Submitted by disconj
disconj writes: With the 40th anniversary of the release of Dungeons & Dragons coming up this weekend, the Internet is ablaze with reflections on its legacy. Dave Ewalt gives an intro for the uninitiated. Ethan Gilsdorf explains how "all I need to know about life I learned from 'Dungeons & Dragons.'" Jon Peterson presents a video show-and-tell of rare artifacts from D&D's development. How did D&D change your life, and what will you be doing to celebrate this Sunday?

Submission + - Insider Tips On Hiring Great Developers

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers an inside look at the hiring practices of top startups and dev shops when competing against the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in the escalating war for developer talent. 'One of the worst things in the world you can do is build your first 10 employees with B-level people,' says Steve Newcomb, founder and CEO of Famo.us. 'You will end up with 100 C-level people. That's why we hire very slowly.' Meanwhile, Box SVP of Engineering Sam Schillace has a single word he uses when recruiting candidates who are considering a competing offer from Google: 'That word is "Microsoft." I think Google has had a pretty good run, but it's gotten so massive that it's difficult to be nimble any more.'

Submission + - Linksys Resurrects WRT54G in a New Router

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A year after purchasing the Linksys home networking division from Cisco, Belkin today brought back the design of what it called 'the best-selling router of all time' but with the latest wireless technology. We are talking about the classic WRT54G, the router in blue/black livery, first released in December 2002. Back in July 2003, a Slashdot post noted that Linksys had 'caved to community pressure' after speculation that it was violating the GPL free software license, and it released open source code for the WRT54G. The router received a cult following and today the model number of the refreshed model will be WRT1900AC. The radio is updated to support 802.11ac (with four antennas), the CPU is a more powerful 1.2GHz dual core, and there are ports for eSATA and USB mass storage devices. Linksys is also providing early hardware along with SDKs and APIs to the developers of OpenWRT, with plans to have support available when the router becomes commercially available. The WRT1900AC is also the first Linksys router to include a Network Map feature designed to provide a simpler way of managing settings of each device connected to the network. Announced at Consumer Electronics Show, the device is planned to be available this spring for an MSRP of $299.99.

Submission + - Programming Language 'Clinical Trials'?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: High school junior Charles Dawson's New Year resolution is to write a new program in different language each week. It's an ambitious project for someone of any age, and while it won't give him an in-depth appreciation of programming language differences, it'll certainly give him greater insight into the strengths of certain languages than would perusing the Hello World Wikipedia article. Lots of claims are made about the comparative productivity of programming languages, but have there been any landmark studies that measure the efficacy of a programming language's productivity claims in a 'clinical trial' of sorts? Would head-to-head tests against other languages be a better way of sorting out Popularity vs Productivity vs Performance claims, or is relying on more nebulous claims of superiority (e.g., "It's not a single aspect of Go that makes it a compelling choice, but rather the careful organization of well-crafted small pieces.") the best we can do?

Submission + - OpenSSL.org site defaced - subverted hypervisor suspected

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday morning (GMT) www.openssl.org was defaced. The current theory is that the hosting provider's hypervisor was subverted and not that the OpenSSL team had misconfigured their own system. The OpenSSL software itself appears to remain unaffected and the team is still investigating the incident.

Submission + - Criminal breaks prison because of toothache (goweirdfacts.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Will you break the prison when the sentence will complete in one month? A 51-year-old Swedish prisoner escaped from prison because of unbearable toothache. The man was only sentenced to one month in prison before, but he got a serious toothache when he was serving his sentence in prison, he reported to prison officers but did not get any response, so he decided to escape from prison and went to see a dentist. After he finished, he phoned the police and turned him back into prison. Finally, prison only warned him and extended his sentence one day for the escape.

Submission + - I am a mentally ill out of work programmer down on his luck (blastar.in)

Submitted by Orion Blastar
Orion Blastar writes: I've been out of work since 2002, cannot think anything but negative thoughts. I've been trying to be positive, develop people skills and social skills. There hasn't been much help just "either kill yourself or stop whining" when I ask on the Internet. I take responsibility for my failures, mistakes, and bad decisions. I want to improve and become better.

I tried doing things.

http://blastar.in/linux/ my own version of GNU/Linux based on Ubuntu.

http://blastar.in/orion/sings/ My own free songs.

http://blastar.org/ my own software organization.

http://blastar.in/ my own foreign website I work with others who are unemployed.

I could never get the funding to make these websites into startups. I have failed at everything I tried to do.

I don't know what else to do, I have run out of ideas.

Submission + - Fedora 20 upgrade broken (itwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Upgrading to Fedora 20, the version of Red Hat's community Linux distribution released this week, from version 19, at least, is broken. The problem lies with the version of FedUp (Fedora Upgrader) that is in version 19 — version 0.7. When one issues the necessary upgrade command using this version, the packages get downloaded but after reboot, when the upgrade is supposed to take place, the process terminates. Fortunately, one's existing installation is not gutted and one can get back into that and try again. One needs to update to FedUp 0.8 and the re-run the upgrade command.

Submission + - Exponential Algorithm in Windows Update Slowing XP Machines (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: An interesting bug regarding update dependency calculation has been found in Windows XP. By design, machines using Windows Update retrieve patch information from Microsoft's update servers (or possibly WSUS in a company setting). That patch information contains information about each patch: what software it applies to and, critically, what historic patch or patches the current patch supersedes. Unfortunately, the Windows Update client components used an algorithm with exponential scaling when processing these lists. Each additional superseded patch would double the time taken to process the list. With the operating system now very old, those lists have grown long, sometimes to 40 or more items. On a new machine, that processing appeared to be almost instantaneous. It is now very slow. After starting the system, svchost.exe is chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. Microsoft thought that it had this problem fixed in November's Patch Tuesday update after it culled the supersedence lists. That update didn't appear to fix the problem. The company thought that its December update would also provide a solution, with even more aggressive culling. That didn't seem to help either. For one reason or another, Microsoft's test scenarios for the patches didn't reflect the experience of real Windows XP machines.

Submission + - Docker Set for Inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: It was just a few short weeks ago that Docker 0.7 was released. While there are some people that don't see Docker as the future of virtualization, Red Hat isn't one of them. In fact, in a video interview, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens reveals that Docker is likely to be a key part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Stevens also confirms what many have suspected for some time — namely that RHEL 7 will be released by April of 2013.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do I convince management to hire more IT staff?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work at a manufacturing company. We have roughly 150 employees, 130 Desktops, 8 physical servers, 20 virtual servers + a commercial SAN. We're a Windows shop with Exchange 2013. That's the first part.

The second part is we have an ERP system that controls every aspect of our business processes. It is heavily customized with over 100 customizations (VB but transitioning over to C#). We also have 20 or so custom-made support applications that integrate with the ERP to provide a more streamlined interface to the factory workers in some cases, and in other cases to provide a functionality that is not present in the ERP at all.

Our IT department consists of:
1 Network Administrator (me)
4 Programmers (one of which is also the IT Manager)

I finally convinced our immediate boss that we need another network support person to back me up (but he must now convince the CEO who thinks we have a large IT department already). I would like them to also hire dedicated help desk people. As it stands, we all share help desk duties, but that leads to projects being seriously delayed or put on hold while we work on more mundane problems. It also leads to a good amount of stress, as I can't really create the solid infrastructure I want us to have, and the developers are always getting pressure from other departments for projects they don't have the manpower to even start.

I'm not really sure how to convince them we need more people. I need something rather concrete, but there are widely varying ratios of IT/user ratios in different companies, and I'm sure their research turned up with some generic rule of thumb that leads them to believe we have too many already.

What can we do?

Submission + - Where can I see a rocket launch? 1

Submitted by __aajqwr7439
__aajqwr7439 writes: I'm willing to do some travelling. Some standard comforts would be appreciated, but aren't required. More effort for more result is entirely fair.

Submission + - Volunteer Fire Brigade Member Since 2001 - Australian PM Helps Subdue Brushfires

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Source code? Maybe not. Fire code? You bet. The Australian reports, "FOR 14 long hours over the weekend, Tony Abbott was just one of 1392 anonymous, sooty-faced firefighters battling to keep the relentless NSW bushfires at bay. ... Australia's 28th prime minister joined his Davidson RFS brigade on a back-burning operation in Bilpin, near the Blue Mountains, for a night shift that began at 6pm Saturday and finished at 8am yesterday. If not for a couple of photos circulating on Twitter, it's a fair chance that Mr Abbott's weekend exploits would have gone unnoticed. His office did not issue a statement until the blurry image of the PM giving the thumbs-up from behind the wheel of a fire truck appeared on the social media site. ... for Mr Abbott, it was just another day as a volunteer firey with his local brigade, something he has been doing since 2001. Prior to the election, Mr Abbott, a keen cyclist, runner, surf lifesaver and firefighting volunteer, vowed to continue his community activities should he assume the prime ministership."

Submission + - Don't Call It a Comeback: 12 Reasons Java Still Rules

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Haters and hipsters beware: Java — that cross-platform curly-bracket relic — never lost its app-dev mojo, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. 'The book sales are a distant memory. And Java's middle-age utility is no longer sexy enough for the magazine cover spreads. Nearly 19 years since Java's launch, the application development cognoscenti are wandering around the luring bazaar of Node.js, Objective-C, Dart, Go, and the like, wondering, "Java? Is that Web 1.0 era artifact still here?" ... Before we forget Java's many vital contributions to computing and its role today, here are 12 definitive reasons why Java is not only surviving but actively thriving in its post-buzz existence.'

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