Weird_one - Slashdot User

Offset Bad Code, With Bad Code Offsets 279

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 03, 2009 @03:47PM from the don't-blame-me-I-voted-foss dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profits are donated to Free Software projects which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today." Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually.

Google Launches Public DNS Resolver 540

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 03, 2009 @03:04PM from the their-interest-is-understandable dept.

AdmiralXyz writes "Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service, called Google Public DNS. According to their blog post, Google Public DNS uses continuous record prefetching to avoid cache misses — hopefully making the service faster — and implements a variety of techniques to block spoofing attempts. They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard, and will not redirect you to advertising in the event of a failed lookup. Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google's true motivations behind knowing every site you visit."

Google Tries Not To Be a Black Hole of Brilliance 322

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 03, 2009 @01:34PM from the so-that's-why-they-won't-hire-me dept.

theodp writes "Google says it's declined to pursue awesome job prospects to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance at the search giant. Speaking at the Supernova conference, Google VP Bradley Horowitz said the company intentionally leaves some brainpower outside its walls: 'I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people,' said Horowitz. 'But [the engineer] stopped me and said: "These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google."'"

Submission + - Practical Terahertz Amplifier (ieee.org)

Submitted by richardkelleher on Thursday December 03, 2009 @12:32PM

richardkelleher writes: ieee Spectrum reports on a terahertz amplifier developed in France. This may be the first step to a camera that sees through clothes!

"Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is a tantalizing technique for scientists wanting to characterize materials and for those charged with securing airports and other sensitive locations. Unlike X-rays, terahertz radiation—which lies above microwave wavelengths and below the infrared band, in the 30 micrometer to 1 millimeter range—doesn’t damage biological tissue and provides good resolution."/p?

Man "Beats" World of Warcraft 655

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 03, 2009 @12:05PM from the and-you-thought-your-life-was-empty dept.

Precision pointed out that a Taiwanese man has been named the first ever person to successfully beat World of Warcraft, getting all 986 achievements, completing 5906 quests and /hugging 11 players. Insert joke here. There are many.

Comment Re:Idiots are everywhere (Score 1) 442

by Weird_one on Monday January 05, 2009 @02:31PM (#26332735) Attached to: How Do You Stay Upbeat Amidst the Idiocy?

Just some simple math.... (numbers completely fictitious) your hourly rate $100.00 IT guy rate $50.00

you spending 5 min doing basic troubleshooting $8.34

30 min it takes IT guy to fix it with info from troubleshooting $25.00

-------

total $33.34

1hr it takes IT guy to fix it
(due to lack of an adequate prob. desc.) $50.00

first method cost to customer $33.34
your method cost to customer $50.00
------
you saved the customer -$16.67

Wonderful way to add value to your customers.

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