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Comment Misleading headline (Score 5, Informative) 40

Original HL of the article https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Software_upgrade_for_19-year-old_martian_water-spotter:
Software upgrade for 19-year-old martian water-spotter
Read on... then:
"Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"
Turns out it is not the MARSIS software running on Windows 98 but its development system.
Most likely it is a compiler upgrade plus a migration to modern development system on a modern OS.

Comment An AIM-65 (Score 1) 857

by ilotgov (#54243155) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?
It was built by Rockwell, the same company which built the space shuttle ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-65 It was the advance model with a whopping 4kB of RAM vs the entry level mode with only 1kB. In terms of software: A macro assembler, a BASIC and a Forth interpreter. To switch from one to the other ROM chips had to be swapped out, none of this modern floppy disk stuff. All signals where slow and easy to probe with an oscilloscope and it was easy to make simple mods with 74xx or 4xxx series logic ICs. And it still works when I switch it on in a nostalgic moment.

Submission + - SurveyMonkey's CEO dies while vacationing with wife Susan Sanberg (nytimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com) and spouse of Facebook COO Sheryl K. Sandberg, died on Friday night. He was 47.

“We are heartbroken by this news,” Facebook said in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, a friend of the family, said that Mr. Goldberg died while on vacation abroad with Ms. Sandberg.

Goldberg built Surveymonkey into a provider of web surveys on almost every topic imaginable, with 500 employees and 25 million surveys created. News reports said it was valued at nearly $2 billion when it raised a round of funding last year.

Submission + - Microsoft's AI Insults People By Telling Them How Old They Are (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates their age and gender has attracted more attention than expected — not all of it complimentary.
The How-Old.net site demonstrates of some of the capabilities of the Face API included in Microsoft's Project Oxford that was announced at Build.
It may have been expected to be a source of amusement but instead it backfired when people started to upload their own photos and discovered just how wrong its estimates could be. It demonstrates not only that machine learning has a long way to go before it's good at estimating age, but also that machine learning may not be the most politically correct way to go about answering the question "How Old Do I look". It might be better to employ and algorithm that built in all the rules of how to make a polite answer to that request — such as always knock a decade off the age of anyone over 28.
Perhaps this particular neural network needs to learn some social skills before pronouncing how old people look.
However it is capable of telling some truths — a photo of Barak Obama in 2005 gives an estimated age of 46, close to his real age of 44, but just 9 years later in 2014 the age guessing robot places him at 65. It seems that Mr President aged 20 years in less than 10 years of office.
Any one want to be President?

Submission + - Statues of Assange, Snowden And Manning Go Up in Berlin

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: RT Times reports that Alexanderplatz square in Berlin has become the stage for a provocative art piece which celebrates whistleblowers and encourages ordinary citizens to speak out. "They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth,” says sculptor Davide Dormino. The life-sized statues of the three whistleblowers stand upon three chairs, as if speaking in an impromptu public meeting. Next to them is a fourth, empty chair. "The fourth chair is open to anyone here in Berlin who wants to get up and say anything they want," says the artist. Dormino, who came up with the idea together with the US journalist Charles Glass, specifically chose a classical bronze statue for his depiction – and not an installation or abstract piece – since statues are usually made of establishment figures. According to Domino while men who order others to their deaths get immortalized, those who resist are often forgotten, so “the statue pays homage to three who said no to war, to the lies that lead to war and to the intrusion into private life that helps to perpetuate war.” Activists and members of Germany’s Green party unveiled the life-size bronze statues on May Day.

Submission + - Student torches computer lab after he is unable to hack into grading system (cbs46.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: A 15 year-old Douglas County, Georgia high school student has been charged with five felonies, including burglary and arson, after sheriff's deputies caught him while responding to a 1 AM fire at Alexander High School.

The boy admitted to investigators that he set fire to a computer after trying, unsuccessfully, to hack into the school computer system to change his grade on a failed test.

“It's very sad and tragic. He could have very easily come to one of his counselors and asked for help,” said Lt. Glenn Daniel with the Douglas County Sheriff's Department. “From what we can tell, (the student) was mad and frustrated because he could not hack into the system.” Lt. Daniel said the charges could land the young man in prison for several years.

The computer lab was cleaned up and re-opened in time for the start of that day's classes.

Comment Ask the Linux distributors to change (Score 1) 755

by ilotgov (#49062175) Attached to: Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System
I can't understand why people are asking developers to stop working on systemd or even abusing them. Anybody can develop software, useful or not, system-d or system-that. Why not putting some effort into convincing distributors, especially server distributors, to use more administrator friendly init-frameworks.

Submission + - What Do You Do When Your Mind-Numing IT Job Should Be Automated? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Not everyone in tech has a job like Homer Simpson, who's been replaced at various times by a brick tied to a lever and a chicken named Queenie. But many IT workers have come up against mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that probably could be automated. So: what to do about it? Well, the answer depends on how much power you have in an organization and how much your bosses respect your opinion.

Submission + - UK Police Won't Admit They're Tracking People's Phone Calls (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: You've maybe heard a bit about Stingray. Over the past couple of years, it has emerged that police forces in the US have been using the powerful surveillance tool, which tricks phones into connecting to a dragnet, to track mobile devices, and intercept calls and text messages.

Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) continue to remain tight lipped about their use of the technology, leaving citizens in the dark on what privacy protections, if any, are in place for those who may get swept up by the broad surveillance techniques.

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