78621493
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
While this month’s lists of the top programming languages uniformly list Java in the top spot, that’s not the only detail of interest to developers. Which language has gained the most users over the past five years? And which are tottering on the edge of obsolescence? According to PYPL, which pulls its raw data for analysis from Google Trends, Python has grown the most over the past five years—up 5 percent since roughly 2010. Over the same period, PHP also declined by 5 percent. Since PYPL looks at how often language tutorials are searched on Google, its data is a good indicator of how many developers are (or aren’t) learning a language, presumably because they see it as valuable to their careers. Just because PYPL shows PHP losing market-share over the long term doesn’t mean that language is in danger of imminent collapse; over the past year or so, the PHP community has concentrated on making the language more pleasant to use, whether by improving features such as package management, or boosting overall performance. Plus, PHP is still used on hundreds of millions of Websites, according to data from Netcraft. Indeed, if there’s any language on these analysts’ lists that risks doom, it’s Objective-C, Apple’s longtime language for programming iOS and Mac OS X apps, and its growing obsolescence is by design.
78012725
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
The technology industry’s unemployment rate crept up to 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Although that represents an increase from the second quarter, when tech unemployment stood at 2.0 percent, it’s nonetheless lower than the 5.2 percent unemployment rate for the U.S. labor market as a whole. Despite that relatively low rate, however, many technology segments saw an accompanying rise in joblessness. (Dice link) Web developers, for example, saw their collective unemployment rate hit 5.10 percent, up from 3.70 percent in the same quarter last year. Computer systems analysts, programmers, network and systems administrators, software developers, and computer & information systems managers likewise experienced a slight rise in unemployment on a year-over-year basis. While layoffs for tech overall declined in the quarter, the rising joblessness in supposedly "hot" categories such as software development is certainly something to watch as time goes on.
56923415
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
Dropbox has renewed access to the Chinese market for the first time in four years. But why? The Chinese government first blocked access to Dropbox in 2010, most likely to prevent people within China from sharing data via the cloud. Now Dropbox is back online in China, albeit at slower speeds. Despite repeated queries from Slashdot, however, Dropbox has declined to comment on why China may have dropped the in-country restrictions to its services. “We still have nothing to share,” the company responded after the third email. Dropbox isn’t the only foreign cloud service available on the Chinese market (although Google Drive remains blocked): in late 2013, Amazon announced it would open an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in the country; at the time, the Amazon Web Services Blog alluded to the “legal and regulatory requirements” that this new AWS region will obey. So questions remain: Did Dropbox know it would regain entry to the Chinese market? If so, did it need to agree to certain conditions before the Chinese government would “flip the switch,” as it were?
52511501
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
Government whistleblower Edward Snowden, exiled in Russia after releasing top-secret documents about the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities to the press, has a new job: tech support. Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told the Associated Press that his client starts work Nov. 1 for a “major” Russian Website, which he declined to name. In June, Snowden—a former CIA employee who worked as a contractor for the NSA—began feeding an enormous pile of classified charts and documents about federal surveillance programs to The Guardian and other newspapers. Many of those documents suggested that the NSA, ordinarily tasked with intercepting communications from terrorists and foreign governments, collects massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, which in turn ignited a firestorm of controversy. The Snowden revelations have continued into this week, with The Washington Post reporting that the NSA has aggressively targeted Google and Yahoo servers. Snowden’s documents suggest that the agency has figured out how to tap the links connecting the two tech giants’ datacenters to the broader Web. Google told the Post that it was “troubled” by the report. A Yahoo spokesperson insisted that the company had “strict controls in place to protect the security of our datacenters” and that “we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”
49773257
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
A new research paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute, titled “Sentiment in New York City” (PDF), attempts to pull off something that would have been impossible—or at least mind-bogglingly difficult and time-consuming—before the invention of online social networks: figure out the block-by-block happiness level of the biggest metropolis in the United States. In order to generate their “sentiment map” of New York City, the researchers analyzed data from 603,954 Tweets (collected via Twitter’s API) organized by census block. “This method, combined with geotagging provided by users, enables us to gauge public sentiment on extremely fine-grained spatial and temporal scales,” read the paper’s abstract. The study took emoticons and word choice into account when deciding whether particular Tweets were positive or negative in sentiment. According to that flood of geotagged Tweets, people are happiest near New York City’s public parks, and unhappiest near transportation hubs. Happiness increased closer to Times Square, the declined around Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. People were in a better mood at night and on weekends, and more negative about the world between the hours of 9 A.M. and 12 P.M. None of this is surprising: who wouldn’t be happy amidst the greenery of a public park, or borderline-suicidal while stuck in traffic or waiting for a late train? The correlation between happiness and Times Square is almost certainly due to that neighborhood’s massive influx of tourists, all of them Tweeting about their vacation. But as with previous public-sentiment studies, using Twitter as a primary data source also introduces some methodology issues: for example, a flood of happy Tweets from tourists could disguise a more subdued and longstanding misery among a neighborhood’s residents, many of whom probably aren’t tweeting every thirty seconds about a Broadway show or the quality of Guy Fieri’s food.
49484797
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks that Apple will collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm. In a televised interview with CBS News, scheduled to air August 13, Ellison called the deceased Jobs “brilliant” and compared him to iconic creators such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked about Apple’s future now that Jobs is dead, Ellison didn’t hold back: “We already know, we saw—we conducted the experiment, it’s been done.” Raising his hand above his head, presumably to indicate the rise of Apple’s fortunes during Jobs’ initial reign, Ellison said: “We saw Apple with Steve Jobs.” Then he lowered his hand: “We saw Apple without Steve Jobs.” In other words, the period following Jobs’ ouster, when the company’s revenues declined and it launched whole portfolios of consumer products that failed. “We saw Apple with Steve Jobs,” Ellison continued, raising his hand above his head again—this time, to suggest that incandescent period following Jobs’ return to the company, when it released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and a variety of bestselling PCs. “And now, we’re going to see Apple without Steve Jobs,” he finished, and his hand fell.
