Jackalo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do I stay employable? 2

Submitted by illcar on Sunday July 01, 2012 @04:16AM

illcar writes: Hi, I am 40 year old working as a senior developer for one of the biggest investment banks. I have always worked as full time employee in my career. However the the last 5-6 years had been very tough for me because of office politics, outsourcing, and economic conditions. The financial industry is not doing well, and we maybe at the brink of another round of layoffs. My family is growing, my spouse does not work, and I still do not own a house yet. I am worried regarding my job security & career growth. Considering medicare does not kick in till 65, I am still looking at 25 long years of career. I am wondering what would be the best way for me to stay employable in the coming years?

1. Should I stay technical, and be ready to work as consultant/contractor? How does medical insurance work in that case?
2. Should I capitalize on the domain knowledge, and move onto business/managerial side?
3. Will the MBA degree or alternate career help?
4. Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

Submission + - Graphene Makes Saltwater Drinkable (fellowgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01, 2012 @04:12AM

An anonymous reader writes: Graphene once again proves that it is quite possibly the most miraculous material known to man, this time by making saltwater drinkable.

The process was developed by a group of MIT researchers who realized that graphene allowed for the creation of an incredibly precise sieve. Basically, the regular atomic structure of graphene means that you can create holes of any size, for example the size of a single molecule of water.

Using this process scientist can desalinate saltwater 1,000 times faster than the Reverse Osmosis technique.

Submission + - 'Wearable Computing Will Be the Norm,' Says Google Glass Team (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01, 2012 @01:51AM

An anonymous reader writes: In an interview with Wired, Google's Steve Lee and Babak Parviz spoke about how they've come to use Project Glass in their lives, and where the expect the mobile computing industry to go in the near future. 'We’ve long thought the camera’s important, but since we’ve started using this in public and with our family and friends and in real situations, not just hidden in the Google lab, that we’ve truly seen the power of being hands free. ... It’s my expectation that in three to five years it will actually look unusual and awkward when we view someone holding an object in their hand and looking down at it. Wearable computing will become the norm.'

Submission + - GLIBC 2.16 Brings x32 Support, ISO C11 Compliance, Better Performance (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30, 2012 @09:46PM

An anonymous reader writes: The GNU C Library version 2.16 was released with many new features over the weekend. The announcement cites support for the Linux x32 ABI, ISO C11 compliance, performance improvements for math functions and some architectures, and more than 230 bug fixes.

Submission + - Quake 3 Source Code Review (fabiensanglard.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30, 2012 @09:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: id Software has a history of releasing the source code for their older games under the GPL. Coder Fabien Sanglard has been taking it upon himself to go through each of these releases, analyze the source code, and post a detailed write-up about it. He's now completed a review of the Quake 3 source code, diving into the details of idTech3. It's an interesting read — he says he was impressed in particular by the 'virtual machines system and the associated toolchain that altogether account for 30% of the code released. Under this perspective idTech3 is a mini operating system providing system calls to three processes.'

Submission + - Leapsecond is here! Are your systems ready or going to crash? (redhat.com) 1

Submitted by Tmack on Saturday June 30, 2012 @02:41PM

Tmack writes: The last time we had a leapsecond, sysadmins were taken a bit by surprise when a random smattering of systems locked up (including Slashdot itself) due to a kernel bug causing a race condition specific to the way leapseconds are handled/notified by ntp. The vulnerable kernel versions (prior to 2.6.29) are still common amongst older versions of popular distributions (Debian Lenny, RHEL/Centos 5) and embeded/black-box style appliances (Switches, load balancers, spam filters/email gateways, NAS devices, etc). Several vendors have released patches and bulletins about the possibility of a repeat of last time. Are you/your team/company ready? Are you upgraded or are you going to bypass this by simply turning off NTP for the weekend?

Submission + - Serious Web Vulnerabilities Dropped in 2011 (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Saturday June 30, 2012 @02:32PM

wiredmikey writes: It's refreshing to see a security report from a security vendor that isn't all doom-and-gloom and loaded with FUD. Web Application Security gurus, WhiteHat Security, released a report this week showing that the number of major vulnerabilities has fallen dramatically. Based on the raw data gathered from scans of over 7,000 sites, there were only 79 substantial vulnerabilities discovered on average in 2011. To compare, there were 230 vulnerabilities on average discovered in 2010, 480 in 2009, 795 in 2008, and 1,111 in 2007.

As for the types of flaws discovered, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) remained the number one problem, followed by Information Leakage, Content Spoofing, Insufficient Authorization, and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) flaws. SQL Injection, an often mentioned attack vector online – was eighth on the top ten.

Submission + - More Uptime Problems for Amazon Cloud (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck on Saturday June 30, 2012 @07:20AM

1sockchuck writes: An Amazon Web Services data center in northern Virginia lost power Friday night during an electrical storm, causing downtime for numerous customers — including Netflix, which uses an architecture designed to route around problems at a single availability zone. The same data center suffered a power outage two weeks ago and had connectivity problems earlier on Friday.

Submission + - The "Everyone gets the source code, Donations get you binaries" Software Model. (lunduke.com)

Submitted by TroysBucket on Friday June 29, 2012 @09:36PM

TroysBucket writes: One developer who is trying to fund his development work via donations has taken on an "Everyone gets the source code, Donations get you binaries" business model, where he provides installers and binaries directly only to donating users. Anyone seen this work well before with other projects?

Submission + - Judge Bans Sale of Galaxy Nexus (latimes.com)

Submitted by busyqth on Friday June 29, 2012 @08:59PM

busyqth writes: After the injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 earlier in the week, A US district court judge has now also granted an injunction against the sale of Google's flagship ICS phone, the Galaxy Nexus. Is Steve Jobs laughing in the great beyond? Is this the beginning of the end for Android?

Submission + - I/O Delivers PDK: Has Google Done Enough to Keep Android Phones Up-to-Date? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Friday June 29, 2012 @08:30PM

CWmike writes: "Google announced a new version of Android this week with some impressive new features, but it's unclear if it's done enough to solve a problem that has dogged its mobile OS: fragmentation. Even as it announced the imminent launch of Android 4.1, or Jelly Bean, the majority of users are still running Gingerbread, which is three major releases behind. According to Google's own figures, just 7 percent are running the current version, Ice Cream Sandwich, which launched last October. That means apps that tap into the latest innovations in the OS aren't available to most Android users. It also means developers, the lifeblood of the platform, are forced to test their apps across multiple devices and multiple versions of the OS. So when Google's Hugo Barra announced a Platform Developer Kit during the opening keynote at I/O this week, the news was greeted with applause. The PDK will provide Android phone makers with a preview version of upcoming Android releases, making it easier for them to get the latest software in their new phones. But is the PDK enough to secure for developers the single user experience for big numbers of Android users that developers crave? In a 'fireside chat' with the Android team, the packed house of developers had more questions about OS fragmentation than Google had answers."

Submission + - Hands-On Insights Into Google Compute Engine (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Friday June 29, 2012 @08:09PM

snydeq writes: "Yesterday's Compute Engine announcement at Google I/O made it clear that Google intends to take Amazon EC2 head on. Michael Crandell, who has been testing out Compute Engine for some time now, divulges deeper insights into the nascent IaaS, which, although enticing, will have a long road ahead of it in eclipsing Amazon EC2. 'Even in this early stage, three major factors about Google Cloud stood out for Crandell. First was the way Google leveraged the use of its own private network to make its cloud resources uniformly accessible across the globe. ... Another key difference was boot times, which are both fast and consistent in Google's cloud. ... Third is encryption. Google offers at-rest encryption for all storage, whether it's local or attached over a network. "Everything's automatically encrypted," says Crandell, "and it's encrypted outside the processing of the VM so there's no degradation of performance to get that feature."'"

Submission + - Don't Forget: "Six Strikes" Starts this Weekend (dslreports.com)

Submitted by Dr. Eggman on Friday June 29, 2012 @07:15PM

Dr. Eggman writes: If don't recall, then Broadband/DSL Reports is here to remind us that ISPs around the US will begin adhering to the RIAA/MPAA-fueled "Six Strikes" agreement on July 1st. Or is July 12th? Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Cablevision are all counted among the participants. They will each introduce "mitigation measures" against suspected pirates, including: throttling down connection speeds and suspending Web access.

Submission + - Is being in the same BitTorrent "swarm" equal to "interacting"? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Friday June 29, 2012 @05:41PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In the new wave of bittorrent downloading cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers like to lump a number of "John Does" together in the same case in order to avoid filing fees ($350 a pop). Their excuse for 'joinder' is the allegation that the defendants 'interacted' with each other by reason of the fact that their torrents may have eminated from the same "swarm". In Malibu Media v. Does 1-5, when John Doe #4 indicated his intention to move for severance, the Court asked the lawyers to address the "swarm" issue in their papers. So when John Doe #4 filed his or her motion to quash, sever, and dismiss, he filed a detailed memorandum of law (PDF) analyzing the "swarm" theory in detail. What do you think?"

Submission + - Gmail Becomes World's Largest Email Service (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by

redletterdave

on Friday June 29, 2012 @03:51PM

redletterdave writes: "After several years of dominance, Microsoft's Web-based email service, Hotmail, has been unseated by Google's significantly younger webmail service, Gmail. Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January; since then, that number has ballooned to 425 million."

Slashdot Top Deals