Julie188 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Torvalds helped teach Dries Buytaert how to make money on Drupal (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Saturday March 24, 2012 @06:14PM

Julie188 writes: "The story of Drupal is like the movie The Social Network in reverse. Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert is such a nice guy he used to do personal tech support for big Drupal users at night for free. Drupal was his college project that turned into his life — but it took him a long time (8 years) to figure out how to make a living from it. Linus Torvalds was one of the people that helped him figure out how."

Submission + - FCC wants ISPs to start killing Zombies (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Thursday March 22, 2012 @06:32PM

Julie188 writes: "Millions of PCs on the Internet are zombies. On Thursday the FCC officially asked ISPs to adopt a list of cyber-security practices to start knocking these things out. The list is obvious stuff you would think ISPs are doing anyway, like watching for botnet behavior and warning users if their PCs seem infected. But some action is better than no action and if ISPs agree, it will contribute to an effort to start collecting stats on botnets, too."

Submission + - Scientists Discover Link Between Trees and Electricity (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22, 2012 @03:14PM

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone knows that trees give us all oxygen so we can breathe, but according to an Australian scientists they also affect the concentration of positive and negative ions in the air. A team from the Queensland University of Technology's International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) ran experiments in six locations all over Brisbane and found that positive and negative ion concentrations in the air were two times higher in heavily wooded areas than in open grassy areas, such as parks.

Submission + - How 'Corporate Antibodies' Can Kill Your Best Ideas (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Monday March 19, 2012 @08:19PM

Julie188 writes: "If you have a great idea for a new product or service would you try to launch it at your current job? Or would you try and do a startup? My experience is that a big corporate culture makes it impossible for an average employee to do an in-house project. Suggest an idea and politics will squash it. So it's funny that one of the most stodgy tech companies, HP, had an internal "innovation program." The guy that ran it recently left (was the PC group's CTO Phil McKinney) and now he's offering tips on how employees can navigate corporate politics and get their ideas taken seriously."

Submission + - Guy gets his old CCIE job back after stealing $2M from Cisco (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Thursday March 15, 2012 @03:26PM

Julie188 writes: "Imagine you are a Cisco CCIE working for a Cisco Gold reseller. You get convicted for stealing nearly $2 million worth of gear from Cisco through SMARTnet fraud. You are sentenced to 33 months in jail. You leave jail and your old company — a reseller that manages SMARTnet contracts — hires you right back. Tell me ... are honest CCIEs THAT hard to find?"

Submission + - Why New Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Thursday March 15, 2012 @02:30PM

snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the proliferation of programming languages and what separates the successful ones from obscurity. 'Some people say we don't need any more programming languages at all. I disagree. But it seems clear that the mainstream won't accept just any language. To be successful, a new language has to be both familiar and innovative — and it shouldn't try to bite off more than it can chew. ... At least part of the formula for success seems to be pure luck, like a band getting its big break. But it also seems much easier for a language to shoot itself in the foot than to skyrocket to stardom.'"

Submission + - CIA director yucks it up with computer engineering joke (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Thursday March 15, 2012 @12:45PM

coondoggie writes: "Had to pass this one along. Seems CIA Director David Petraeus made a computer engineering joke to start of his speech at the recent In-Q-Tel CEO Summit. It goes like this:
“I recalled the story of the four engineers driving home from one of our partner startups in Silicon Valley—a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a computer engineer...."

Submission + - Bill Gates Makes Progress On Reinvented Toilets (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @03:56PM

Julie188 writes: "Last summer the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spread $3 million in grants among eight research teams in North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, reports the Scientific American. This challenge is part of Gates' pledge last summer to spend $42 million to reinvent the toilet. The teams delivered a bunch of ways to turn human waste into energy."

Submission + - Did Microsoft secretly buy Parallels? (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @03:57PM

Julie188 writes: "If you think that Stephen Elop was a Trojan plant from Microsoft into Nokia, you should see what Microsoft is doing with Parallels. Looks like the reason for Microsoft minions to take over Parallels has to do with its hosting software — as a way to squeeze Office 365 onto people already using cloud versions of Exchange. BUT Microsoft probably doesn't mind getting its fingers on Parallels popular desktop virtualization app, unbeknownst to all those Linux users of it."

Submission + - Paul Allen to Build Spaceships (reuters.com)

Submitted by smitty777 on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:43PM

smitty777 writes: "Where do you want to go today?" takes on a whole new meaning as Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and the world's 57th richest man in the world, looks to create a new spaceship company. Stratolaunch Systems plans to bring "airport like operations" to the world of private space travel. Partnering with Burt Rutan, the plan is to field a test within 5 years and commercially available flights within 10. Spacecraft will be air-launched from a giant six engined aircraft. There is more information available on the Stratolaunch homepage.

Submission + - Cap for 2012 H-1B visas already hit (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @07:07PM

Julie188 writes: "The jobless numbers don't reflect it, but there's a shortage of skilled workers available to fill high paying tech jobs. So it would seem by the rush to hire H-1B talent from overseas. It only took six months for U.S. companies to hit the 65,000 cap for visas (and this doesn't include 20,000 additional petitions for those who are exempt from the cap — or anyone already in the U.S. on a visa). And guess who leads the pack in overseas hiring?"

Submission + - US military pays SETI to check Kepler-22b for alie (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by

iComp

on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @06:20PM

iComp writes: "The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilisations. The cash needed to restart SETI's efforts has come in part from the US Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organisation's detection instruments for "space situational awareness"."

Submission + - Quantum Effects Fueling Photosynthesis (wired.com)

Submitted by boley1 on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @06:02PM

boley1 writes: "Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fueling photosynthesis.

Multiple experiments in recent years have suggested as much, but it’s been hard to be sure. Quantum effects were clearly present in the light-harvesting antenna proteins of plant cells, but their precise role in processing incoming photons remained unclear."

The idea of photosynthesis being straightforward chemistry is pretty much dashed.

Submission + - How much of your mobile data is yours? (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @03:55PM

An anonymous reader writes: Concerned about the security of your mobile data? It's being logged, processed, and possibly sold. This article explains how it works with Android devices and what you can do abou it. From the article, "Data is sent, stored, and used by these companies at every level of your user experience. The carriers, manufacturers, ad companies, law enforcement, all have access to this information. You do not have the ability to turn it off, and once they have the information they store it for as long as they determine it is relevant, which is likely forever."

Submission + - Top 10 Supercomputers: U.S. Still Dominates (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @02:28PM

gManZboy writes: "Four supercomputers run by the Department of Energy (DOE) and one by NASA helped the U.S. federal government maintain its leadership in supercomputing--with five of the top 10 of the world's most powerful machines under its management, according to a biannual list of the top supercomputers.

However, a Japanese supercomputer called K computer--run by the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science and developed by Fujitsu--remained No. 1 on the list for the second straight time, a position the feds are vying for with the development of a new supercomputer called Titan."

Slashdot Top Deals