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Submission + - Replacing Your Cell Plan w/ G-Voice & a 4G Hot (sebetich.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I recently replaced my family's cellular service plan with a WiFi based solution that uses an iPhone w/o a service contract, Goolge Voice, a Verizon 4G LTE MiFi Hotspot and a free application called Talkatone, saving us over $100 per month in cell phone charges. In an article on my blog I describe how I did it.

Submission + - US to become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas? (failuremag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For those opposed to natural gas drilling in the United States, fracking is a dirty word. But the public needs to have a serious discussion about whether the costs and risks (like methane contamination) outweigh the considerable benefit of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and turning the US into an energy exporter. In “The End of Country” Seamus McGraw aims to jump start the debate by examining the issues at ground level, describing what happens when Big Energy comes to small town USA.

Comment Re:The problem: the event-driven model (Score 3, Interesting) 631

by thesuperbigfrog (#31568862) Attached to: Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says

Most languages still handle concurrency very badly. C and C++ are clueless about concurrency. Java and C# know a little about it. Erlang and Go take it more seriously, but are intended for server-side processing. So GUI programmers don't get much help from the language.

In particular, in C and C++, there's locking, but there's no way within the language to even talk about which locks protect which data. Thus, concurrency can't be analyzed automatically. This has become a huge mess in C/C++, as more attributes ("mutable", "volatile", per-thread storage, etc.) have been bolted on to give some hints to the compiler. There's still race condition trouble between compilers and CPUs with long look-ahead and programs with heavy concurrency.

We need better hard-compiled languages that don't punt on concurrency issues. C++ could potentially have been fixed, but the C++ committee is in denial about the problem; they're still in template la-la land, adding features few need and fewer will use correctly, rather than trying to do something about reliability issues. C# is only slightly better; Microsoft Research did some work on "Polyphonic C#", but nobody seems to use that. Yes, there are lots of obscure academic languages that address concurrency. Few are used in the real world.

Ada 2005's task model is a real world, production quality approach to include concurrency in a hard-compiled language. Ada isn't exactly known for its GUI libraries (there is GtkAda), but it could be used as a foundation for an improved concurrent GUI paradigm.

This book covers the subject quite well.

Comment Re:!sales (Score 1) 111

by thesuperbigfrog (#30563516) Attached to: Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books

Kindle books are almost always cheaper than the new print equivalent (used print books are cheaper).

There are many good books available on Kindle offered for free on a promotional basis. Usually these books are the first in a series. I grabbed a copy of Manifold: Time for free during a promotion and ended up buying the other two books in the series, Manifold: Space and Manifold: Origin for $6.99 each.

There are also sample chapters available for most books so you can read the book before deciding to purchase or not.
Movies

Submission + - Flight Of The Navigator: When CGI was HARD! (denofgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Kleiser brought cinema its first photo-real, reflection-mapped CGI in 1986. A full five years before James Cameron's apparently ground-breaking 'metallic' visual effects in Terminator 2, Kleiser was trying to make a silver spaceship out of pixels for Walt Disney's Flight Of The Navigator.

Kleiser tells Den Of Geek just how hard it was to render CGI back when the 'jumping lamp' seemed like a landmark:

"To render the spaceship and get it onto film (along with a matte for the optical printing department), they had their own rendering software running on a prototype supercomputer called the Foonly F-1, which had formerly been used by Information International, Inc to drive their film recorders. The Foonly had very little disk space, so we had to render on the fly and send the data directly to the film recorder as it was being computed. That meant we had no way of reshooting a scene other than re-rendering it from scratch each time..."
Microsoft

Submission + - Linux Vendor Pays Off Microsoft

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A vendor of Linux-based networking products has "settled" patent claims by Microsoft, Infoweek reports. Melco Group, which markets the Buffalo brand NAS devices and routers, will pay an undisclosed fee to Redmond. In return (reading between the lines), Microsoft won't sue Melco or its customers for using Linux code that supposedly contains Microsft IP. The problem, of course, is that Microsoft won't publicly state which parts of Linux allegedly infringe its patents. With vendors like Melco apparently willing to settle, Microsoft is undoubtedly motivated to chase down other so-called "offenders." A while back, Steve Ballmer said the company was even ready to go after Red Hat users.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Apple Asks Microsoft to Stop New Ad Campaign (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Hyppy
Hyppy writes: Microsoft COO Kevin Turner has received multiple correspondences from Apple requesting that Microsoft cease their new ad campaign. From the article: "Turner said Apple's legal eagles tried to depict the ads as inaccurate. 'Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices,' Turner quoted Apple's attorneys as saying. 'They took like $100 off or something,' said Turner. 'It was the single greatest phone call in history that I've ever taken in business.'"
Enlightenment

Submission + - 32 Reasons Why Geeks are Severly Underpaid

Submitted by
GeekinOz
GeekinOz writes: "IT vs. Sales in the salary earning stakes.
Why are geeks losing out? Here's our in-depth answer:
32 Reasons Nearly All Geeks are Severely Underpaid
"Why are sales professionals still rewarded with the biggest pay packets? Are sales professionals better qualified or smarter than IT professionals? No, there's no such thing as a sales degree. Do they work longer or harder? Of course not. So why then is IT not the best paid profession?""
Patents

Submission + - Patenting Life

Submitted by Archangel_Azazel
Archangel_Azazel writes: The New York Times is running a story here : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/opinion/13cricht on.html?_r=1&oref=slogin about an opinion that Michael Crichton wrote about patenting genes and the harm to innovation and lives that gene patents cause.

There's also information about a bill being sponsered that may offer a solution, from TFA:

"Fortunately, two congressmen want to make the full benefit of the decoded genome available to us all. Last Friday, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat of California, and Dave Weldon, a Republican of Florida, sponsored the Genomic Research and Accessibility Act, to ban the practice of patenting genes found in nature."

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