Comment First rule of government contracting (Score 1) 292
Why build one, when you can build two at twice the price?
Comment Eclipse (Score 2) 386
Eclipse (eclipse.org) is no-install, just drop it into a directory and run it.
Java is a reasonably widespread run-time environment, though as a language, it may not fit the bill for "tinkering." Eclipse supports other languages, too.
If you're looking for a lightweight web container, try Jetty. No installation required, and you can run your own J2EE application (again, if that's "tinkering").
But yes, on your own dime is probably good advice. Look for ways to improve your value to the company. Start with the traditional: learn to do your boss's job (with her/his knowledge, of course).
Comment We use CorCell (Score 1) 321
$269/yr, though that may have gone up for newer subscribers. (http://www.corcell.com/)
Comment For a "development desktop replacement" (Score 1) 262
I've found two screens invaluable at work -- try opening an IDE, browser(s), database, code repository, etc. on one screen... no. If you're willing to lug the weight, it sounds great. I wouldn't want to travel with it (and my wife REALLY wouldn't want to travel with it), but I would consider it for "limited mobility" use.
With that many cores, it sounds powerful enough to usefully run a database & web server; and connectivity these days is such that you could well have those available on your wireless network anyway.
Comment Re:I had only one thought when I read this. (Score 1) 316
Dilbert's Garbage Man. "Who would throw away a perfectly good robot, when all it needs is a neuro-spectrum field calibration?" "You can borrow my __X__ [time machine, ...]." But yes, Asok and Alice are up there.
Comment Try Again (Score 1) 323
Maybe the FBI would be more interested...
Comment Re:Another unfunded mandate (Score 2) 247
Why not send the data to "law enforcement" in real-time, and let them worry about storing it?
Comment Re:It's the connectivity (Score 1) 450
... Without that connectivity, it's a doorstop (and a light-weight one at that, so it doesn't even do very good at blocking a door open).
You're thinking Douglas Adams here. "Paperweight" is the traditional term, though you don't see as many these days.
Comment For a while, until the interest wears off (Score 1) 148
Might work for a while, but probably not longer term. "Available" doesn't mean "looked at," so anyone who might get caught will probably be OK until they irk someone who knows about the program.
Comment Is there a point? (Score 1) 175
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a hard time believing that anyone (that reads /.) spends THAT much time "coding" HTML, that dealing with a compressed format... which will surely go over well with one's colleagues... and is a good candidate for a code-obfuscation contest... would be useful?
Comment There may be hope (Score 1) 496
"Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?"
Don't forget: Lt. Barclay (the one who was always in some sorry circumstance -- turned into a giant spider, or whatever) eventually managed to pull himself out of that trap. If he can do it, so can Humanity!
Russia Doubles Price For Launching US Astronauts 370
Third Position writes "NASA on Tuesday signed a contract to pay $55.8 million per astronaut for six Americans to fly into space on Russian Soyuz capsules in 2013 and 2014. NASA needs to get rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station because it plans to retire the space shuttle fleet later this year. NASA now pays half as much, about $26.3 million per astronaut, when it uses Russian ships."
HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."
Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
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