Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

+ - Banned Developer Turns from Civil War to Drug War with NarcoGuerra->

Submitted by arclightfire
arclightfire writes "If you recall the game looking at Syrian civil war got rejected by Apple — the same developer has managed to get one about the War on Drugs called 'NarcoGuerra' past and onto the App Store. Here's the offical developer line on the new game, "Newsgame developer GameTheNews.net, today released it’s latest offering; a game about the War on Drugs in Mexico entitled NarcoGuerra. GameTheNews.net caused a huge debate following Apple’s controversial decision to reject Endgame:Syria from the App Store. This new game examines the ongoing conflict from the perspective of the Mexican authorities trying to stamp out the drug trade within their borders. In NarcoGuerra the player must attempt to retake Mexico’s regions from cartels while also dealing with corruption within the police force itself." There is a trailer here and more info here."
Link to Original Source

+ - FiOS User Finds Limit of 'Unlimited' Data Plan: 77TB/mo->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A California user of Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic internet service decided to put his unlimited data plan to the test. Over the month of March, he managed to total over 77 terabytes of internet traffic, which finally prompted a call from a Verizon employee to see what he was doing. The user had switched to a 300Mbps/65Mbps plan in January, and averaged 50 terabytes of traffic per month afterward. 'An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, [the user] has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.' The Verizon employee who contacted him said he was violating the service agreement. "Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer)," houkouonchi said. '[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers, and then he said, "Well, that's against our ToS." And he said I would need to switch to the business service or I would be disconnected in July. It wasn't a super long call.'"
Link to Original Source

+ - Possible collision between cube-satellite and old space junk

Submitted by photonic
photonic writes "The BBC is reporting about a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russain rocket. If confirmed, this might be the 3rd case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Irridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris of a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."

+ - BeagleBone Black Ships With New Linux 3.8 Kernel->

Submitted by DeviceGuru
DeviceGuru writes "BeagleBoard.org has begun shipping its faster, cheaper BeagleBone Black SBC with a new Linux 3.8 kernel, supporting Device Tree technology for more streamlined ARM development. The $45 BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 SOC, doubles the RAM to 512MB of its predecessor, and adds a micro-HDMI port. The updated kernel gives the BeagleBone Black access to a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced to streamline ARM development in Linux 3.7. The project was hesitant to move up to such a recent kernel, but decided it was time to bite the bullet and support the Device Tree. By doing the hard work of switching to Device Tree now, BeagleBoard.org and its developer community can save a lot of configuration and maintenance headaches down the line, says BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner. Fortunately, a modified 3.2 kernel 'coming soon' should provide the necessary bridge from the old cape driver architecture to the new one."
Link to Original Source

+ - Ask Slashdot: When Is the User Experience Too Good? 1

Submitted by gadzook33
gadzook33 writes "I had an interesting experience at work recently wherein a colleague suggested during a meeting that we were building something that would make it far too easy for the customer to perform a certain task; a task that my colleague felt was deleterious. Without going into specifics, I believe an apt analogy would be giving everyone in the country a flying car. While this would no doubt be enjoyable, without proper training and regulation it would also be tremendously dangerous (also assume training and regulating is not practical in this case). I retorted that ours is not to reason why and that we had the responsibility to develop the best possible solution, end of story. However, in the following days I have begun to doubt my position and wonder if we don't have some responsibility to artificially "cripple" the solution and in doing so protect the user from themselves (build a car that stays on the ground). I do not for a second imagine that I am playing the part of Oppenheimer; this is a much more practical issue and less of an ethical one. But is there something to this?"

+ - AT&T Quietly Adds Charges to All Contract Cell Plans->

Submitted by guttentag
guttentag writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T Mobility, the second-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., has added a new monthly administrative fee of 61 cents to the bills of all of its contract wireless lines as of May 1, a move that could bring in more than a half-billion dollars in annual revenue to the telecom giant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the fee covers "certain expenses, such as interconnection and cell-site rents and maintenance." The increased cost to consumers comes even though AT&T's growth in wireless revenue last year outpaced the costs to operate and support its wireless business. The company has talked of continuing to improve wireless profitability. Citigroup analyst Michael Rollins noted that the new administrative fee is a key component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year. He said the fee should add 0.30 of a percentage point to AT&T's 2013 revenue growth; he predicts total top-line growth of about 1.5%.

Normally, consumers could vote with their wallets by taking their business elsewhere. AT&T would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by simply calling the increase a "surcharge," effectively forcing millions of people to either pay more money per month or pay the ETF."
Link to Original Source

+ - 3D printers for peace contest 1

Submitted by Bas_Wijnen
Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest.

Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure?

Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost to enter."

+ - Rough Roving: Curiosity's Wheels Show Damage->

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes "In a recent batch of images beamed back to Earth from Mars rover Curiosity's MAHLI camera, obvious signs of wear and tear could be seen in the "skin" of the robot's wheels. Considering Curiosity is only 281 sols (Mars days) into its mission and roved less than a kilometer after landing, surely this doesn't bode well? Fortunately, there's good news. “The wear in the wheels is expected,” Matt Heverly, lead rover driver for the MSL mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. “We will continue to characterize the wheels both on Mars and in the Marsyard, but we don’t expect the wear to impact our ability to get to Mt. Sharp.”"
Link to Original Source

+ - German IT Firm seeks Autistic Workers-> 1

Submitted by Aguazul2
Aguazul2 writes "The German software giant SAP has announced it plans to recruit hundreds of people with autism within the next few years. The project has already started in India and Ireland where a total of 11 people with autism are employed by the company. The programme to take on software testers, programmers and data management workers will spread across Germany, Canada and the US this year. People with autism have a neural development disorder that often undermines their ability to communicate and interact socially [...] but in the world of computers the tendencies they often display such as an obsession for detail and an ability to analyse long sets of data very accurately can translate into highly useful and marketable skills."
Link to Original Source

+ - How do we move from using contract developers to hiring some in house?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I run a small software consulting company who outsources most of it's work to contractors. I market myself as being able to handle any technical project but only really take the fun ones, then shop it around to developers who are interested.

I write excellent product specs, provide bug tracking & source control and in general am a programming project manager with empathy for developers. I don't ask them to work weekends and I provide detailed, reproducible bug reports and I pay on time. The only 'rule' (if you can call it that) is: I do not pay for bugs. Developers can make more work for themselves by causing bugs and with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code.

Developers are always fine with it until we get toward the end of a project and the customer is complaining about bugs. Then all of a sudden I am asking my contractors to work for 'free' and they can make more money elsewhere. Ugh.

Every project ends up being a pissing match, so, I think the solution is to finally hire someone fulltime and pay for everything (bugs or not) and just keep them busy. But how can I make that transition? The guy I'd need to hire would have to know a LOT of languages and be proficient in all of them and I can't afford to pay someone $100K/year right now.

Ideas?"

+ - Google converts links sent via Google Chat to referral links 1

Submitted by MotorMachineMercenar
MotorMachineMercenar writes "Google has apparently introduced a new feature to track user behavior in the revamped Google Chat, called Hangouts.

A friend of mine sent me a link, incidentally about an MIT study about the futility of folio hats in blocking the thought police. I use Chrome for Gmail, but being the folio-hat -wearing type, I do all my other browsing in a tightly locked down FF. I copy-pasted the link to FF, and noticed that there was flash of a Google URL before it went to the right URL.

After pasting the link to a note, I noticed it's a Google referral link, similar to the ones most (all?) links on Google search are — in case you weren't aware. So now Google knows who sent what link to whom. The only way around that is to select the entire link, and copy the text.

Now, I'm aware that by definition of me being on a Google platform they implicitly know our conversations. But the fact that they bother to make a referral link means there is even more datamining going on behind the scenes than what we already knew of."

+ - Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome."

+ - Aurora Attackers Were Looking for Google's Surveillance Database

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "When in early 2010 Google shared with the public that they had been breached in what became known as the Aurora attacks, they said that the attackers got their hands on some source code and were looking to access Gmail accounts of Tibetan activists. What they didn't make public is that the hackers have also accessed a database containing information about court-issued surveillance orders that enabled law enforcement agencies to monitor email accounts belonging to diplomats, suspected spies and terrorists. Whether this was the primary goal of the attacks as well as how much information was exfiltrated is unknown. current and former U.S. government officials interviewed by the Washington Post say that the database in question was possibly accessed in order to discover which Chinese intelligence operatives located in the U.S. were under surveillance."

+ - Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart "When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. ""

+ - Obama's EPA Makes A Rad Decision-> 1

Submitted by QuantumPion
QuantumPion writes "The Environmental Protection Agency released draft guidelines last month that could significantly relax radiation hazard standards in the case of a radiological event in the United States by using risk-based decisions.

“Think of it this way. The situations covered by these new guidelines are similar to someone dying of thirst who has the chance to drink fresh water having 2,000 pCi per gallon of radium in it. While the safe drinking water levels are 20 pCi/gal for Ra, 2,000 pCi/gal is of no threat, especially if you’re going to die from imminent dehydration. Of course, a bag of potato chips has 3,500 picocuries, so go figure.”"
Link to Original Source

APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming; ...and is best for educational purposes. -- A. Perlis

Close