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Comment I have to laugh.. (Score 1) 335

by bduncan (#57375236) Attached to: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You.

In the early nineties I was contracting for a large financial institution that were re-training COBOL programmers to be C programmers. I was called in to fix the most awful C code that I've ever seen, before or since. e.g. Functions that would span for 25 pages and blow up compilers.. Later of course, they needed all those COBOL programmers back for Y2K. Now they need 'em back for the boomers retiring. Such foresight.

Here's a thought.. What about building a modern language preprocesser that spit out COBOL? Something like RATFOR did for Fortran?

Comment HP-41C 40 years later, still works! (Score 1) 560

I bought an HP-41C about 40 years ago. The software (and hardware) was brilliant. Still use it and it still works. It was so well designed that even the infamous Y2K problem didn't impact it. Brilliant!

Hopefully the bar is a tad higher for developers creating heart monitors and aviation electronics is higher than the usual software (and hardware) today..

Submission + - What are the FLOSS community's answers to Siri and AI? (upon2020.com)

Submitted by jernst
jernst writes: A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did. Publishing, collaboration, commerce, you name it. Some apps were worse, some were better than closed alternatives, but much of it was clearly good enough to use every day.

But is this still true? For example, voice control is clearly going to be a primary way we interact with our gadgets in the future. Speaking to an Amazon Echo-like device while sitting on my couch makes a lot more sense than using a web browser. Will we ever be able to do that without going through somebody’s proprietary silo like Amazon’s or Apple’s? Where are the free and/or open-source versions of Siri, Alexa and so forth?

The trouble, of course, is not so much the code, but in the training. The best speech recognition code isn’t going to be competitive unless it has been trained with about as many millions of hours of example speech as the closed engines from Apple, Google and so forth have been. How can we do that?

The same problem exists with AI. There’s plenty of open-source AI code, but how good is it unless it gets training and retraining with gigantic data sets? We don’t have those in the FLOSS world, and even if we did, would we have the money to run gigantic graphics card farms 24×7? Will we ever see truly open AI that is not black-box machinery guarded closely by some overlord company, but something that “we can study how it works, change it so it does our computing as we wish” and all the other values embodied in the Free Software Definition?

Who has a plan, and where can I sign up to it?

Submission + - Moving Beyond Flash: The Yahoo HTML5 Video Player (streamingmedia.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Over on Streaming Media, Amit Jain from Yahoo has written a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Yahoo's HTML5 video player. He writes, "Adobe Flash, once the de-facto standard for media playback on the web, has lost favor in the industry due to increasing concerns over security and performance. At the same time, requiring a plugin for video playback in browsers is losing favor among users as well. As a result, the industry is moving toward HTML5 for video playback. [...] At Yahoo, our video player uses HTML5 across all modern browsers for video playback. In this post we will describe our journey to providing an industry-leading playback experience using HTML5, lay out some of the challenges we faced, and discuss opportunities we see going forward."

Submission + - Boot Linux (or OpenBSD or Oberon or FreeDOS) in your browser (copy.sh)

Submitted by DeQueue
DeQueue writes: Back in 2011 Fabrice Bellard, the initiator of the QEMU emulator, wrote a PC emulator in JavaScript that let you boot Linux in your browser.

https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...

But he didn't stop there. On his website he now has images that let you boot Oberon, Arch Linux, FreeDOS, OpenBSD, Solar OS and more recent versions of Linux such as 2.6 or 3.18 (the 3.18 image includes internet access). You can also boot to a CD image, or a floppy image, or a hard drive disk image on your local machine.

And, if you don't need yet another operating system on your computer, you can even boot to Bootchess and play chess.

http://copy.sh/v86/
Software

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Posted by timothy from the people-of-earth-you're-on-your-own dept.
Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."

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