Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - 'MYTHBUSTERS' Experiment Goes Wrong Cannonball RIP (youtube.com)

Submitted by
clinko
clinko writes: "Two California families are lucky to be alive — after a "Mythbusters" experiment went horribly awry yesterday ... sending a cannonball careening through their homes, leaving MASSIVE holes in its wake.

Sgt. JD Nelson from the Alameda County Sheriff's Department tells ABC, hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were trying to figure out how effective a cannon is at firing non-cannonball objects ... but first, they had to test the cannonball itself.

The cannonball was supposed to land harmlessly in a nearby hill — but something went wrong ... and the ball, traveling at about 1000 ft/s, went over the hill bordering Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation, and into the neighboring town of Dublin, crashing through two separate houses before finally coming to rest ... inside someone's minivan.

The Discovery Channel show has been put on hold after the mishap, pending a full investigation. Luckily, no one was injured."

Submission + - Was a giant planet kicked out, Saving Earth? (msn.com)

Submitted by
clinko
clinko writes: "MSNBC Cosmic Log has an interesting story wherein Computer simulations suggest that a giant planet was kicked out of our solar system billions of years ago, saving Earth in the process.

The concept appears in a paper written by David Nesvorny, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute, and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. His findings aren't based on the discovery of an actual Planet X, but instead are the result of thousands of simulations re-enacting the dynamical development of our planetary system."

Comment Answering your question (Score 1) 516

by clinko (#38005828) Attached to: How Do I Get Back a Passion For Programming?

"..how do I get back the enjoyment I used to have writing code?"

What do you like? Code something to do more of that.

I used to like music, so I wrote a music DB similar to scrobbler.
I like tech news now, so I wrote a "better" site to get it to me faster.
I watch a lot of tv, and I got annoyed when the daily show was a repeat. .
Are you a Sneakerhead? Write a db for your shoes.

Find anything, and write something to make that thing better.

Comment Novices and Experts? (Score 1) 112

by clinko (#38005662) Attached to: IT's Next Hot Job: Hadoop Guru

Quoting the article: "The company (JP Morgan) has been working with Hadoop for more than three years"

Then the article quotes the experts:

"The good news is that Hadoop experts aren't born, they're trained. "I'm sure companies that train their workforces on Hadoop will derive lots of benefits," said Jeremy Lizt, VP of engineering at Rapleaf, in a recent interview. A data provider that has been using Hadoop for nearly four years, Rapleaf was among the earliest adopters."

What a difference a few months makes...
Microsoft

Submission + - OOXML - where is it today?

Submitted by Raul654
Raul654 writes: Back in 2007/2008, Microsoft used a boatload of dirty tricks to ram its nascent OOXML document standard through the ISO. The ISO approved the standard in two forms — strict (which was to be a clean, fully-open standard), and transitional (which included more than 1,400 pages of legacy support, effectively rendering it unimplementable). At the time it was approved, Microsoft made a series of promises, including a promise that future versions off Microsoft Office would fully support OOXML strict, not create OOXML transitional documents, and that Microsoft would work with ISO the committee to fix more than 3,000 known errors in the standard. In April 2010, Alex Brown, who supervised OOXML's ISO approval process, posted in his blog that Microsoft had broken all of its promises — it was no longer working to refine the standard and had decided to continue the use of OOXML transitional in the next version of its Office Suite. That was more than a year ago. What's the status of OOXML today?

Comment Your Own (Score 3) 329

by clinko (#37341108) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Programs To Learn From?

A tip I always give:
1. Start writing something you want. (It'll keep you interested)
2. Google the SMALLER hard parts (String Parsing, data models, misc functions, etc)
3. Use that code. (No one is going to blame you for copypasta on your own project.)

Eventually you'll understand how the copied code works. After a few projects you end up writing your own version because you're better than "that guy you copied from".

Comment Rephrased. (Score 1) 209

by clinko (#37130050) Attached to: New Twitter-Based Hedge Fund Beats the Stock Market

"A change in emotions expressed online would be followed between two and six days later by a move in the index, the researchers said, and this information let them predict its movements with 87.6 percent accuracy"

Say What?:
- "A change in emotions expressed online" (50/50)
- "would be followed between two and six days later" (2-6 attempts)
- " by a move in the index" (50/50)

Rephrased:
- Flip 2 coins, you'll get the same face 87.6 percent of the time, if you keep trying up to 6 times.

I know i'm stepping into the Gambler's fallacy here, but does anyone want to expand on the coin analogy, i'd love to see it.

Comment Don't cater (Score 2) 527

by clinko (#36542074) Attached to: Why Johnny Can't Code and How That Can Change

I Think the problem is that "Johnny" doesn't like programming. Why fix that?

The worst employee is a specialist that hates his specialty. He's only going to fight his way out of his job and defer to others. Why do you think there's usually more IT managers than Developers? :)

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker

Close