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Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Submission + - WebKit introduces new tracking prevention policy (webkit.org)

AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions.

While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.

Education

Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.

The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.

"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

Comment Re:Is the bacteria the cause or symptom? (Score 1) 208

I heard that the alzheimers brains were preserved in a solution containing aluminum. The healthy brains were not. But this is a bit different. They claim that their model has been used to reverse some of the symptoms of Alzheimers. That's a stronger claim. It's still a small study. There will be at least a few cases that don't fit the model. But it seems well designed and worth taking note of.

Submission + - AmigaOS 3.1.4 released for classic Amiga (hyperion-entertainment.com)

Mike Bouma writes:

The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9.

Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favourite classic AmigaOS — from bootmenu to datatypes.


Comment Re:Totally different model of behavior (Score 2) 215

The Shinkansen typically runs every 15-20 minutes or so. On the busiest lines (Tokyo-Osaka) at peak times there's a new train every five minutes. You just show up, get a ticket atthe vending machine and step on to the next train.

Flying may be cheaper, but the trains are just so much faster and more convenient. I love them.

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 1) 288

Even if you could create a version of Windows that would run well in a cluster environment, the applications aren't there. One reason Linux is so dominant is that the kind of code you want to run on a big cluster is all written for Linux.

With that said, some HPC apps are hybrid; you run a client on your local machine (Windows app, or a web app) that dispatches the work on to the cluster in the background. With those you can treat the cluster as a big accelerator for your local app.

Comment Re:wrong problem... (Score 2) 59

I agree low birthrates is a problem (although the reasons are principally economical rather than social). I live in Japan and see this first hand.

Low birth rates is not the cause of the rural depopulation, though. That has been an ongoing trend since long before the population stopped growing; and it's a trend in countries whose populations are stable or still growing at present.

Comment Re:wrong problem... (Score 4, Insightful) 59

This is really about urbanization, not population changes, and it's not limited to Japan.

The issue is that young people leave rural areas - for school, higher education, jobs - and don't return. Cities grow while rural areas shrink, and eventually the population becomes too small and too sparse to support a good range of public services. Similar things are happening in Europe and in north America as well.

Comment Re:PEP 394: /usr/bin/python should not be python3 (Score 4, Informative) 94

Apart from having to rewrite existing code, one issue is that in some fields (HPC and supercomputing) the facilities can be very conservative about what they install. In many places, they install whatever is the conservative, safe default when the system is built, then they never update it. If you do offer newer versions of something, you add it alongside the existing software, not replacing it. When the system us upgraded or replaced, you make very sure to add (or backport) the old versions for the new system.

A major reason is that research projects - that can go on for 5-10 years - don't want to switch software versions mid-stream. If you are comparing an analysis of your current data with data from five years ago, you want to be sure any differences is due to the data, not because you changed software versions somewhere along the line.

This means that many systems may not offer Python 3 at all; or if they do, they still point to Python 2.7 as "the" python, and they will until the system is decommissioned years and years from now. And that means a lot of scientific software still primarily (and sometimes only, though that's becoming rare) target Python 2, since that's where a lot of their users are.

Python 2 will in practice live on for at least another decade, and quite likely for longer than that. I do agree that new projects probably should seriously consider using Python 3, but Python 2 disappearing will not happen.

Comment Re:Core Competency (Score 1) 107

No, more than half of the machines this year were using Infiniband. I get the impression (note: not hard data) that IB is pushing out 10G Ethernet on the lower end of the HPC field. The latency wins are worth it for a lot of applications.

Comment Re:Core Competency (Score 1) 107

Infiniband is the most common interconnect in the HPC space today though. Doesn't seem right to say it's a failure when it dominates the segment it was designed to handle. Or do you mean specifically the Intel implementation of it?

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