Comment Winter is coming (Score 0) 195
I guess Game of Thrones had it right all along.
Comment Re:It depends (Score 0) 486
If they had bothered to learn anything about the language they would have discovered that the python wiki explicitly states they're doing it wrong:
Avoid this:
s = ""
for substring in list:
s += substring
Use s = "".join(list) instead. The former is a very common and catastrophic mistake when building large strings.
Comment Re:In advance of possible cyber attacks, (Score 0) 413
The US is not a democracy, it is a republic. We vote for people to represent us and our needs so we can go about our merry little lives without having to spend every day deciding on laws, bills, etc.
The problem comes that the people we, the people, voted to represent us are actually more interested in representing themselves. We, the uninformed electorate, need to vote out those we put in power and replace them with representatives who actually care about the citizens of the United States and our constitution, or we, the uninformed electorate, need to accept representatives like Diane Feinstein are in congress for 20+ years because the majority of our nation believe destroying the constitution is the best thing for our nation.
Submission + - Students hijack $80 million superyacht with GPS spoofing (scmagazine.com.au)
mask.of.sanity writes: A team of university students have hijacked an $80 million superyacht using GPS spoofing without tripping alarms. The experiment (run with permission) saw the White Rose sail from Monaco to the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean. Faint GPS signals broadcast from a spoofing device slowly overpowered authentic signals allowing the students control over the yacht's navigational system.
Submission + - Siri's Creator Challenges Texting-While-Driving Study (xconomy.com)
waderoush writes: A rash of media reports last week, reporting on a study released by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, implied that using voice-to-text apps like Siri or Vlingo while driving is no safer than manual texting. But Adam Cheyer, the co-inventor of Siri, says journalists took the wrong message from the study, which didn’t test Siri or Vlingo in the recommended hands-free, eyes-free mode. In the study, researchers asked subjects to drive a closed course while they held an iPhone or Android phone in one hand, spoke messages into Siri or Vlingo, proofread the messages visually, and pressed buttons to send the messages. Under these conditions, driver response times were delayed by nearly a factor of two, the researchers found. ‘Of course your driving performance is going to be degraded if you’re reading screens and pushing buttons,’ says Cheyer, who joined Apple in 2010 as part of the Siri acquisition and left the company two years later. To study whether voice-to-text apps are really safer than manual texting, he says, the Texas researchers should have tested Siri and Vlingo in car mode, where a Bluetooth headset or speakers are used to minimize visual and manual interaction. ‘The study seems to have misunderstood how Siri was designed to be used,’ Cheyer says. ‘I don’t think that there is any evidence that shows that if Siri and other systems are used properly in eyes-free mode, they are ‘just as risky as texting.’’
Submission + - BlackBerry CEO Heins: Tablet Market is Kaput (slashdot.org)
Nerval's Lobster writes: BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that tablets will be dead by 2018. “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” he told an interviewer at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg. “Maybe a big screen in your workplace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.” That may come as a surprise to Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, all of which have built significant tablet businesses over the past few years. Research firm Strategy Analytics suggested in a research note earlier this month that the global tablet market hit 40.6 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2013, a significant rise from the 18.7 million shipped in the same quarter last year. So why would Heins offer such a pessimistic prediction when everyone else—from the research firms to the tablet-makers themselves—seems so full-speed-ahead? It’s easy to forget sometimes that BlackBerry has its own tablet in the mix: the PlayBook, which was released to quite a bit of fanfare in early 2011 but failed to earn iPad-caliber sales. Despite that usefulness to developers, however, the PlayBook has become a weak contender in the actual tablet market. If Heins is predicting that market’s eventual demise, it could be a coded signal that he intends to pull BlackBerry out of the tablet game, focusing instead on smartphones. It wouldn’t be the first radical move the company’s made in the past year.
CERN Celebrates 20 Years of an Open Web (and Rebuilds 1st Web Page) 82
An anonymous reader writes "Twenty years ago CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web ('W3,' or simply 'the web') technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish."
Reader Rambo Tribble adds that CERN "is recreating the very first web page to ever exist. Included in the effort are plans to use the original hardware, as well as software, that gave birth to our beloved WWW."
New OpenWRT Drops Support For Linux 2.4, Low-Mem Devices 194
hypnosec writes with word that the OpenWRT team a few days ago released the final version of the project's newest iteration, version 12.09 (codenamed "Attitude Adjustment"). "The final version doesn't support Linux 2.4, because of which the distribution wouldn't run on old router models, for example the Linksys WRT54G models, which have 16MB of RAM and CPUs clocked at 200MHz. The distribution is now based on Linux 3.3 and there is good news for the Raspberry Pi fans as the distribution now supports the credit card-sized computer, along with Ramips routers."
Comment Same old argument... (Score 1) 365
I'm still relatively new/young in the world of software development - late 20's, 5 years of experience, but I've seen this argument come up regularly and the simple fact of the matter is that there is no difference between older/experience software developers and any other career. You have to: migrate, mutate, adapt or die in any career. If you get set in your ways in any profession and don't adapt with what comes your way you're going to fall behind and become useless or dead weight. I talk to the older/more experienced developers I know all the time because they've had experiences and insights that I haven't.
Comment Flatten it (Score 0) 4
If they just need to copy the look of the final image and they have all the instructions in the book then flatten the image, or save it without the layers. They can see what the end result looks like and if they turn in a file that doesn't show their work with layers they don't get credit.
Comment Romney wins! (Score 0) 67
Romney out performs Obama yet again
Man Protests TSA With Nudity 434
New submitter blindbat writes "John E. Brennon 'said he was fed up with being harassed by airport security stripped to his birthday suit while in an airport screening lane Tuesday evening and was arrested.'"
Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
New Assassin's Creed Next Year, Will Have Multiplayer 56
Ubisoft has announced that the next stand-alone Assassin's Creed title will come out next year, and it will be the first in the series to come with an online multiplayer mode. The company also said it will be "shoring up its focus on competitive AAA core titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3" in the coming year, making mention of upcoming releases for the Tom Clancy game series and a new Prince of Persia title.
New WoW Patch Brings Cross-Server Instances 342
ajs writes "World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion was staggered into 4 phases. The fourth and final phase, patch 3.3, was released on Tuesday. This patch is significant in that it will be the first introduction of one of the most anticipated new features in the game since PvP arenas: the cross-realm random dungeon, as well as the release of new end-game dungeons for 5, 10 and 25-player groups. The patch notes have been posted, and so has a trailer. The ultimate fight against the expansion's antagonist, the Lich King a.k.a. Arthas, will be gated as each of the four wings of the final dungeon are opened in turn — a process that may take several months. The next major patch after 3.3 (presumably 4.0) will be the release of Cataclysm, the next expansion."
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. -- Alan Perlis
