broothal - Slashdot User

Submission + - WiFi in planes

Submitted by

Firmafest

on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @03:25AM

Firmafest writes: "In USA Today there's a scoop that American Delta Airlines offers WiFi on domestic flights . Price is approx. $10 to get connected. Being a frequent international flyer I hope this will catch on. LA times reports that the cost is about $100.000 to equip a plane . While that number seems high, it will probably be worth it. If I had a choice between two flights both equally good, I'd pick the WiFi enabled one."

Submission + - Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English?

Submitted by

Pickens

on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @12:44AM

Pickens writes: "Jeff Atwood has an interesting post where he says that with the internet whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language but that the rules are different for programmers. "So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?" Atwood argues that "great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It's a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages." Eric Raymond in his essay "How to be a Hacker" says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that "Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following." Although it may sound like "The Ugly American" and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, "advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits," writes Atwood. "If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.""

Submission + - Gmail down worldwide

Submitted by

Firmafest

on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @07:02AM

Firmafest writes: "For the past hour, Gmail has been down as reported by number of users . Google has issued a small statement claiming that it only affects small subset of their users. I've become used to the stability of Gmail, but what happens when you urgently need a piece of your data and the service is down? Is this the price you pay for free, good email?"

Comment My favorite part (Score 4, Interesting) 132

by broothal on Sunday January 25, 2009 @05:59AM (#26596839) Attached to: What, Me Worry? MAD Magazine Going Quarterly

One of the things I always enjoyed from MAD was the fold-in images (they have a name, but that escapes me right now).

I found this overview - very interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/28/arts/20080330_FOLD_IN_FEATURE.html

Submission + - Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!

Submitted by

Underholdning

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @08:03AM

Underholdning writes: "As part of an experiment security researcher Didier Stevens bought a Google ad six months ago that said, "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" 409 people clicked on the ad. Didier writes that during those six months, the ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times. 98% of the machines ran Windows. Now that's a pretty cheap way of acquiring zombies."

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