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Submission + - "I Just Need a Programmer"

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's 'Like This' button is tracking you (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou
Stoobalou writes: A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook's 'Like This' button is watching your every move.

Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not.

Roosendaal says that Facebook's tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the 'Like This' button and Facebook Connect.

Submission + - Linus on branching practices (blogspot.com)

Submitted by rocket22
rocket22 writes: Not long ago Linus Torvalds made some comments about issues the kernel maintainers were facing while applying the "feature branch" pattern. They are using Git (which is very strong with branching and merging) but still need to take care of the branching basics to avoid ending up with unstable branches due to unstable starting points. While most likely your team doesn't face the same issues the kernel development does, and even if you're using a different DVCS like Mercurial, is worth to take a look at the description of the problem and the clear solution to be followed in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. The same basics can be applied to every version control system with good merge tracking, so let's avoid religious wars and focus on the technical details.

Submission + - WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal (forbes.com)

Submitted by Atmanman
Atmanman writes: When wikileaks anounced it was releasing 251,287 US diplomatic cables we all thought we knew what was meant by its earlier ominous words that, "The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined." It now appears the organisation is sitting on a huge treasure trove of information so big that it has stopped taking submissions.

Among data to be released are tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. banking firm, material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms and energy companies.
Programming

Programmer Buys Original Ada Lovelace Painting On eBay 86

Posted by kdawson from the mother-of-us-all dept.
An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world's first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction.
Security

Cubicle Security For Laptops, Electronics? 532

Posted by kdawson from the down-sizing-needn't-mean-down-securing dept.
kamikasee writes "I recently found out that I'm going to be moved from an office to a cubicle. The cubicle area is not very secure, and I'm worried about things wandering off. My boss has offered to buy some equipment to help me secure things, but so far I haven't found anything that fits my requirements. Google and Amazon searches are overwhelmed by lockable key cabinets and larger pieces of furniture. Here are some of the requirements: The main issue with traditional solutions (e.g. locking things in a drawer) is convenience. I use a laptop with a second LCD monitor. There's also an external keyboard and mouse and a USB hard drive. I leave my laptop on at night so I can remote-desktop into it, so I'm not really happy about putting it in a drawer (no ventilation), plus I don't like the idea of having to 'unharness' everything every time I want to put it away. I don't trust cable locks. Besides, cable locks won't help me secure my the USB drive and other electronics that might wander off. The solution I imagine is a lockable, ventilated metal box that would sit under the monitor and house most of the electronics. If it was big enough, I could stick my laptop into it at night (while leaving it running) and feel confident that it would still be there in the morning. I'd be open to other types of solutions. Surely someone else must have dealt with this problem."

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