Comment Re:Resurrecting Technocrat.net (Score 1) 2219
I fondly remember technocrat.net. I promise to submit interesting articles if it is resurrected. :)
Opera Picks Up Webkit Engine 314
New submitter nthitz writes "Opera has announced that they will be dropping their rendering engine Presto, in favor of Webkit. This knocks the number of major rendering engines down to three. Opera will also be adopting the Chromium V8 Javascript engine. The news coincides with their announcement of 300 million users. '300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on,' says Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. 'On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.'"
They've already submitted patches to improve multi-column layouts even.
COBOL Will Outlive Us All 318
jfruh writes "Here's an old computer science joke: What's the difference between hardware and software? If you use hardware long enough, it breaks. If you use software long enough, it works. The truth behind that is the reason that so much decades-old COBOL code is out there still driving crucial applications at banks and other huge companies. Many attempts to replace COBOL applications flopped in the 1980s and '90s, and we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — but the Baby Boomers who wrote all that code are now retiring en masse."
Comment Re:Dear Dice.com (Score 1) 223
Perhaps screwing the pooch would be a better term.
Stop having sexual relations with my dog, damnit.
Tesla Motors Battles the New York Times 700
redletterdave writes "Days after the New York Times released a brutal review of Tesla's electric Model S sedan, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired back, claiming the Times article was completely bogus and misleading. In the article in question, Times writer John Broder took the Tesla Model S on a test drive from Washington to Boston, stopping at various service plazas in Delaware and Connecticut well within the projected 265-mile range of the car, as rated by the EPA. However, Broder's Tesla Model S, despite a heftier 85 kilowatt-hour battery for an extra 100 miles of range in 'ideal conditions,' died shortly before reaching its final destination. Broder blames the cold weather and heating issues for his abridged trip; Musk, however, claims the driver did not follow Tesla's instructions, which is why his trip was cut so short. 'We've taken great pains to ensure that the car works very well in the cold, which is why we're so incensed by this ridiculous article,' Musk said."
Comment Re:Stay classy ./ (Score 3, Funny) 223
I was looking for a way to mark "Slashdot Staff" as a foe...
Comment Dear Dice.com (Score 5, Interesting) 223
Have you ever read the story of the goose that laid the golden egg?
What EMC Looks For When It's Hiring 223
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com, writes
"Because EMC has expanded through more than 70 acquisitions in eight years — it was hiring even during the recession — and because many of the acquired companies were startups, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative. People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run,' Thus, a key to getting the company's attention is to prove you can do what you say you can. In other words, when Murray asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can."
Comment Re:Better than Vancouver's party (Score 2) 47
St. Petersburg is the second largest city in the metro area, which is called Tampa Bay
From Wikipedia: "The Census Bureau currently estimates the population for the CMSA at 4,228,855 as of 2010 during consolidation.[3] as of July 1, 2008, making it the second most populous metropolitan area in Florida and fourth in the Southeast."
Comment Re:Meetup? (Score 1) 47
You should come to one of the SLUG meetings or hacking sessions.
We have talks ranging from programming languages (especially new/interesting ones), robotics, war stories, etc. We have had some guest speakers in the past,
including the first person to setup a webserver in North America.
Disclosure: I've been a member for the last decade; and I'm also the president and meeting coordinator for the Pinellas meetings.
Comment Re:St. Petersburg (Score 3, Informative) 47
The city was named St. Petersburg by a Russian immigrant and railroad tycoon, Peter Demens (Pyotr Alexeyevitch Dementyev, cyrillic: slashdot won't display)
Comment Re:Yes, there will be food! (Score 1) 5
I was also at that party, and I realize that I had been in a job interview (a successful one) two months prior with the parent poster. But I don't believe we talked at all during the /. party. Or even ran into each other. Or we did and I forgot.
I'm pretty sure I spent most of the evening envying my friend Tak's N700 "internet tablet".
Comment Re:Now add PHP. (Score 1) 66
If all you want to do is run an existing app in "the cloud", EC2 is a better choice for you. App Engine is designed around the philosophy that "We'll make scaling magically happen; but you need to obey our rules." These rules, for the large part, are designed to make scaling easier - all the seemingly-weird limitations in the datastore are there because they implicitly force you to shard your data early on. Since you'll be customizing your database layer for app engine, the logic goes, providing all kinds of programming languages isn't as important (since you might as well customize the rest of your app, right?)
The other concern Google might have is sandboxing - they've done some fairly extensive modifications to Python, Java, and Go to get the kind of sandboxing that they need, and given PHP's not-so-stellar security history, they might not be as interested in supporting it. Heck, even if sandboxing worked well enough, I could see them saying "No, we don't want to support PHP because it's harder to write secure apps in PHP, and our entire philosophy in App Engine is to make the easy thing the right thing to do."
Comment Re:This is very bad design (Score 1) 215
On a serial link, just use the right arrow key. Or possibly ESC (although you'll have to deal with clearing the ESC chord afterward if it happened to be in vi or something)
Comment Re:Fukushima! (Score 1) 117
Alas, while the Fukushima facility has plenty of gamma, alpha, and beta radiation to go around, not to mention a glut of thermal energy, they're a bit scarce on the neutrons at the moment.
