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Comment Re:Does anyone actually run this anymore? (Score 2) 66

I dumped Fedora for the same reason, but returned when Red Hat relaxed its lifecycle: my desktop is on Fedora 24, which still receives updates. I will probably upgrade to Fedora 26.

RHEL/CentOS is great for servers, but its upgrade cycle is too slow for the desktop.

Fedora is often mis-characterised as the testing branch for RHEL, but in fact its release engineering and updates are at least as good as those of any other desktop distro.

Comment The reality is rather different (Score 4, Interesting) 685

Dr Piper Harron, writing on the AMS "Inclusion/Exclusion" blog, informs us:

"If you are a white cis man you almost certainly should resign from your position of power."

A reply from an anonymous University mathematician serves equally well as a reply to Dr Heather Metcalf.

"We are all painfully aware of the inequalities in faculty composition and trying hard to fix it. *Every* math department I know of is trying really hard to hire every qualified minority and female applicant out there (and by qualified I mean: a *very* generous ballpark within the hiring range of each department). The real problem is that there are not enough such candidates, and most departments end up making offers to the same few that are available in the market each year. By the way, our departments are aware of the problem, and so are our Deans and higher administration. In my experience, they are all very supportive of us hiring under-represented minorities, even offering additional positions when such opportunities occur, *as long as we conform with the laws*, and as long as the hire is within the 'generous ballpark'."

In other words, departments are willing to lower the standards for minority and female candidates, by a "*very* generous ballpark", with the consent of the University administration; but they are still unable to find sufficient candidates.

It is no wonder that there is "pushback" from white men; or that women and minorities are treated with suspicion as having benefitted from "affirmative action".

Comment Battery Structure and Capacity (Score 1) 145

How thick is the initial anode foil of Li or Na? This determines the capacity of the battery. All quantities in the paper are expressed per gram of lithium.

The cathode has particles of glass electrolyte, carbon, and sulphur, with a copper collector. When the lithium is plated onto the cathode, upon which of these components is it plated, and how thick is the plating?

Comment Re:Risk Averse CEOs are holding us back (Score 3, Informative) 474

The chip manufacturers are funding research on these and other technologies, but they are all a long way from viability. It is easy to forget that silicon CPUs with a billion transistors are the outcome of 60 years' research, development, and investment.

Silicon processing is made easier because silicon's oxide is an extremely good insulator. For diamond and graphene, the oxide is a gas, and so insulating areas cannot be created by oxidising the material: another substance must be deposited.

Comment Multi-process operation is a bad idea (Score 1) 225

I tend to browse with a lot of windows and tabs open. In this use case, Firefox typically consumes 100% of CPU for one core. If it becomes multi-process, it would end up consuming 100% of CPU of every core.

If the long-term plan for Firefox is to dump XUL and migrate to WebKit or one of its forks, then I have to wonder what would be the point of the resulting product. Users might as well migrate to Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

Comment Why do it? (Score 1) 98

American individuals who play this game, and do not have Mafia lawyers, will eventually receive long prison sentences for multiple counts of extortion.

The upside is the rush of power, and revenues in the thousands of dollars. These are poor compensation for a decade or more in the slammer.

Comment Re:so is there a good theory? (Score 1) 470

Unless the thrust is 1/c newtons per watt - then the same problem arises - the exploitation simply gets harder.
Some of the earlier Chinese tests reported thrusts in the exploitable range - 1N/2000W comes to mind.

I cannot find the thrust per watt of this latest claimed chinese verification.

Yes, last time I looked they were putting kilowatts of power into a small device. It would be surprising if differential heating did not produce a small force from convection or even radiation pressure.

My hunch is that the devil is in the experimental details, and the laws of physics will not need to be rewritten.

Comment Misleading and dramatic (Score 1) 186

What the article's title means by "Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake" is simply that the growth rate over the last 14 years is constant, i.e. the rate itself is not increasing (as it had been for the previous 44 years). The growth rate is not zero. Its derivative, the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 with time, is zero.

The use of the word "pause" makes the result seem more dramatic than it really is, and is wide open to misinterpretation by climate change deniers. It is a pity that the journal and its reviewers did not pick up on this - but then dramatic headlines improve circulation, just as they improve researchers' careers. A paper with a less dramatic title might not have been accepted by such a prestigious journal.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Managing a distributed software team in a matrix organization

An anonymous reader writes: I work as a software developer in a company which builds industrial and automotive computers. I've recently been offered a position as line manager for a new, distributed team of software developers. All embedded software engineers from multiple offices in different countries are now being reorganized into this new distributed team, as opposed to belonging to any specific office. An advantage would be that this new team has better control of its own development practices, processes and tools since everyone are working in the same field; embedded software. However, since we operate like a matrix organization, I would be allocating the resources in my team to various projects managed by independent project managers, where a typical project spans both hardware, embedded software and mechanics to complete the product. Every project is different and they can operate very independently.

While there's extensive material throughout the Internet on best practices for managing distributed teams, it seems to either take an agile perspective, the project manager's perspective or be otherwise based on the assumption that everyone in the team are working in the same project. In my case, I'd be managing a distributed team of developers all assigned to different projects. Therefore it's very unclear to me which parts of the available online advice about managing distributed software teams are applicable to my situation. How can I build cohesion, alignment and trust for my team of embedded software developers in this new three-dimensional distributed matrix organization?

Submission + - Microsoft Open-Sources Checked C, a Safer Version of C (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues. As its name hints, Checked C will add checking to C, and more specifically pointer bounds checking. The company hopes to curb the high-number of security bugs such as buffer overruns, out-of-bounds memory accesses, and incorrect type casts, all which would be easier to catch in Checked C. Despite tangible benefits to security, the problem of porting code to Checked C still exists, just like it did when C# or Rust came out, both C alternatives.

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