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Comment Lucky you (Score 1) 360

You are lucky enough to have users that actually report problems, rather than just complaining that "the new version is crap" at the coffee machine. Setup a bug triage task, assign it to a different developer each day (because it's boring). Precisely mark the bugs that are not submitted with enough information. Every Monday, Identify the top 5 users based on the number of bug reports they send, and the ratio of their bug reports that miss information. Set up a meeting with each one of these users. Sit next to each one of your top 5 users, and write the mails describing the issues with them (mark the previous one as duplicate of the new issue). These users are willing to give you information, educate them on the information you need. Then do it again the following Monday; your previous week's top 5 users shouldn't be in the top 5 again, since you wrote their bug reports with them. Be transparent to your management on this new task you are setting up, and its cost. They may be willing to help you.
Space

Submission + - Earth's water didn't come from outer space (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth supplied its own water, leaching it from the rocks that formed the planet. The finding may help explain why life on Earth appeared so early, and it may indicate that other rocky worlds are also awash in vast seas.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Final Windows Phone 7 Dev Tools (crn.com)

cgriffin21 writes: Microsoft on Thursday released the final Windows Phone 7 developer tools to manufacturing, giving coders a couple of weeks' lead time to get their apps ready for the launch of the Windows Phone Marketplace in early October. Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 OS to manufacturing on Sept. 1, and its OEM partners are in the process of testing it on handsets. The Windows Phone 7 developer tools are the final piece of the puzzle for Microsoft, which is now ready to march back into a mobile market where it has fallen alarmingly behind the leaders.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Exec: Open Means Incompetent (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software claimed that declaring something open is how you "mask incompetence." That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used "closed" to mask incompetence for years. I thought "open" meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence.
Science

Submission + - Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing (physicsworld.com)

$RANDOMLUSER writes: A new study described at physicsworld.com claims that a small percentage of shoddy or self-interested referees can have a drastic effect on published article quality. The research shows that article quality can drop as much as one standard deviation when just 10% of referees do not behave "correctly". At high levels of rational or random behavior, "the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased) coin". The model also includes calculations for "friendship networks" (nepotism) between authors and reviewers.
The original paper, by a pair of complex systems researchers, is at arXiv.org. No word on when we can expect it to be peer reviewed.

Unix

Submission + - SCO Puts Unix Assets On the Block (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: SCO Group announced Thursday that it plans to auction off most of its Unix assets, including 'certain UNIX system V software products and related services,' ITworld reports. 'This asset sale is an important step forward in ensuring business continuity for our customers around the world,' said Ken Nielsen, SCO chief financial officer, in a statement. 'Our goal is to ensure continued viability for SCO, its customers, employees and the Unix technology.' Interested parties must submit a bid for the assets by Oct. 5.
Firefox

Submission + - IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Benchmark (lucidchart.com) 2

An anonymous reader writes: Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications.

To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application.

The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last.

Comment Don't trust that (Score 4, Interesting) 201

Well, I do live in Paris, and I can tell you this law is not really enforced unless you explicitly ask for it. Several times, photographers (*professional* ones I mean) tried to take a photograph of my baby girl (a cute and smiling one, but I'm not neutral on that topic! ;-), without asking for authorization, of course. I had to ask them to stop that, which usually led to a verbal argument. Google has been caught red-handed. Good. Next time they will hide their cameras and nobody will notice, except for the few usual whistleblowers.

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