Comment indomitable banana spirit (Score 1) 105
for the amount of times they have counted the banana out, it's indomitable spirit continues to amaze.
Comment investment vehicles (Score 2) 229
my university (Bournemouth) and many like it spent all their money on buying land and buildings that hold 0 value to the students and the majority of which stand barely used and mothballed in order to boost their investment portfolios and show fancy numbers on the balance sheet whilst offering a substantially declining standard of education.
Comment a series of tubes (Score 1) 250
brightly coloured, thin metal/plastic pipes. Cheap & effective.
Smell Camera Snapshots Scents For the Future 117
An anonymous reader writes "Designer Amy Radcliffe has created an 'analog odor camera' that can be used to recreate a smell. From the article: 'When a smell source is placed under the device's glass cone, a pump extracts the smell via a plastic tube. After being drawn to Madeleine's main unit, the smell goes through a resin trap which absorbs the particles so molecular information can be recorded. That data is expressed in a graph-like formula, which essentially contains a fingerprint of the smell. In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell. The smell can also be recreated in small vials.'"
Comment goodbye development tools (Score 1) 191
As a long time opera user who works in web development I am mostly going to miss the dragonfly development tools. They were much cleaner and easier to use than firebug and the development tools built into chrome. Not really sure Opera serves any purpose at all other than being another option any more. Long gone are the times they would implement new features and other browsers would copy them months later.
Can't even figure out how to use mouse gestures now.
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Programmers Who Have Not Stayed Current? 509
skaffen42 writes "The recent Ask Slashdot about becoming a programmer later in life got me thinking about a related question. How do you deal with programmers who have not stayed current with new technologies? In the hiring process, this is easy; you simply don't hire them. However, at most companies where I've worked, there are usually a few programmers who have been employed long enough that the skill-set they were originally hired for has become irrelevant. At the same time, they have not bothered to stay current with newer technologies. They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly-increasing liability. As an example: I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code and cannot be trusted to use a revision control system without causing a mess that somebody else will have to clean up. On top of that, he is really resistant to the idea of code reviews; I suspect he dislikes people he considers junior to him making suggestions about how to improve his code. So, how do my fellow Slashdotters handle situations like this? How do you help somebody like this to improve their skill-sets? And, most importantly, how do you do so without stepping on anybody's feelings?"
