Comment No COBOL? (Score 1) 360
Curious how you managed to avoid COBOL, did you believe all the "COBOL is dead" propaganda? There are still plenty of well-paid COBOL contracts out there, your Assembler experience may be relevant.
NASA Finds Interstellar Matter From Beyond Our Solar System 75
An anonymous reader writes "For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy. This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth. 'This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of — it's really important to be measuring it,' said David McComas, IBEX principal investigator."
Comment no debug under Win7 for older IDE's (Score 1) 879
We support products written in a couple of older versions of Delphi, which cannot run debug under Windows 7. There are no plans that I know about to transfer these products to a later version of Delphi, and the released products run under Windows 7. So we will need to keep XP installations around for the foreseeable future to support these products.
Comment keep your stinking abstractions... (Score 1) 369
away from my data!
Comment Re:Duh. (Score 1) 821
price of a incandescent bulb: 50c
price of a neon replacement: $5
Are you lucky enough to have never had less than five bucks in your pocket?
price of a neon replacement: $5
Are you lucky enough to have never had less than five bucks in your pocket?
US Gov't Lobbied EU To Approve Oracle-Sun Merger 169
littlekorea writes "Cables leaked by Wikileaks have revealed that the U.S. Government actively pressured the EU Competition Commissioner to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The cable reveals that the U.S. went to great lengths to discover how the competition commissioner felt about the 'pro-competitive' nature of open source software and whether this would represent a threat to the US$7.4 billion deal."
Is Twitter Rendered Obsolete By Google+? 456
suraj.sun writes with a ComputerWorld piece predicting the end of Twitter, at least in its current form. From the article: "It's only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a ghost town. While Google+ will soon do all the things Twitter does, Twitter can't support a long list of the things Google+ supports. Also on Google+, you can post pictures and videos directly in posts, launch immediately into a video chat, send your posts to nonmembers and even present all your posts marked 'Public' as a blog available to anyone with an Internet."
Comment Re:Notepad (Score 1) 545
Web-designers will throw their hand up in horror, but good old HTML2 frames still work just fine, just be careful about escaping the frame when linking out of the site. See sig for example.
HTML2 is also readable by mere mortals, a feature which later versions have endevoured to remove.
Apple Rips Off Rejected App, Says Wireless Sync Developer 549
Haedrian writes "Apple is famous for going to absurd lengths to enforce its patents and trademarks. It recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. And it has publicly lectured competitors to 'create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Last year, UK developer Greg Hughes submitted an app for wirelessly syncing iPhones with iTunes libraries, which was rejected from the official App Store. Fast forward to Monday, when Apple unveiled a set of new features for the upcoming iOS 5, including the same wireless-syncing functionality. Cupertino wasn't even subtle about the appropriation, using the precise name and a near-identical logo to market the technology."
Apple Camera Patent Lets External Transmitters Disable Features 268
sticks_us writes with news of an Apple patent application, recently published by the USPTO, for an on-board camera system that would include circuitry for processing external infrared signals. The data received from these signals could then be used to present information to the user of the device, or even to modify the device's operation.
"For example, an infrared emitter could be located in areas where picture or video capture is prohibited, and the emitter could generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands to disable the recording functions of devices. An electronic device could then receive the infrared signals, decode the data and temporarily disable the device's recording function based on the command. ... In some embodiments, a device may apply a watermark to detected images as an alternative to completely disabling a recording function."
Comment the French... (Score 1) 85
did they leave them out just to annoy them?
US Students Suffering From Internet Addiction 314
PsiCTO writes "American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study.
This probably falls under the no-big-surprise category. CBC Radio 1 played a couple of interviews with students that took part in the study. I especially liked the quote in which the student felt like he had a phantom limb experience with his cell phone."
UK ID Card Scheme Data Deleted For £400K 149
DaveNJ1987 writes "It will cost the British government only £400,000 to destroy the data for its failed ID card initiative. The data compiled by the National Identity Register, which was scrapped last year by the coalition government, will be disposed of for the relatively small sum — in government figures — Home Office minister Damian Green confirmed."
IT Management Always Blames the Worker Bees 266
An anonymous reader writes "A refreshing dose of sanity, It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees counters Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad, which advocates the usual reactive and punitive Big Brother measures for keeping those icky, untrustworthy IT staffers in line. Management really needs to look in the mirror when IT screws up."
The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn 1073
eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."
