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Comment Rails ecosystem, Vim user (Score 1) 359

I work for a small-to-medium-sized Rails shop (~12 developers capable in Rails, although many are full-stack, including myself) and many/most of us use Vim on a daily basis (should be noted, with heavy extension use). Those that don't mostly use Sublime Text, and our single emacs user is in the process of transitioning to Vim. Even one of our Objective-C colleagues managed to get Vim running hosted in Xcode somehow as an experiment. The support in the Vim community for Ruby and Rails-ecosystem languages and patterns (Coffeescript, Sass, Slim, Haml, and the like) is fairly good, and there's a number of IDE-ish features available as extensions. I've been pretty satisfied with it since moving to the Rails community, although I'll admit my background wasn't heavily into IDEs at all, and the only full Ruby-focused IDE I've seen, Rubymine, seemed intolerably slow and unusable.
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-to-blame dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"

Comment Professional-level creative software (Score 1) 951

by johncalvinyoung (#42043651) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Video Games Keep You From Using Linux?
Creative Suite and Lightroom. Specifically, the A/V side of Adobe CS. I love linux, have used it on the desktop and use it daily on the server as a sysadmin, but there are no competitive alternatives to Premiere/After Effects/Photoshop/Lightroom on the Linux stack. I wish there were, but there is nothing I've been able to find in years of looking that supplies the featureset with any degree of daily usability/stability. In several situations, there is nothing that supplies the features period. So for now this triplebooter will be stuck with OSX or Windows as daily driver, and Linux solely as an experimental/occasional OS on the desktop.

Comment Congratulations! (Score 3) 117

by johncalvinyoung (#41879591) Attached to: Climbing 103 Floors On a 'Bionic' Leg
Saw an article about your planned attempt yesterday, happy to see it went well. Congratulations on a serious dose of grit and perseverance. Sorry to hear that it's not yet marketable--any clue how long? Not an amputee myself, but immense respect and sympathy for you guys...
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Paypal suspends domestic transactions in Argentina (bbc.com)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Paypal is to prevent users in Argentina from transferring money between their own accounts.

The online payment service said that from 9 October: "Argentina resident Paypal-users may only send and receive international payments".

Last year the Argentine government announced restrictions on the purchase of US dollars.

It has led to an increase in currency sales on the black market — but Paypal's exchange rates are better.

Locals were setting up two accounts under different email addresses and transferring money between the two, exchanging local currency pesos for dollars in the process.

Submission + - Huge diamond deposits found in Russia (csmonitor.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: csmonitor.com reports that "'Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing "trillions of carats," enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years. The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market."
Apple

Submission + - Apple iPad 2 As Fast As The Cray-2 Super Computer (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Presenting at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, a researcher from the University of Tennessee presented that the iPad 2 is as fast as the original Cray-2 super computer. Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python for generating and testing various Assembly routines. The researcher also found that the ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft announces Surface tablet, with kickstand and fold-out keyboard (extremetech.com) 7

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "At its much-discussed “big unveil” this evening, Microsoft did indeed launch a tablet — but rumors that the device would showcase a Barnes & Noble partnership were misplaced. Instead, Microsoft showed a vision for a next-gen PC that combines the portability of a tablet with a minimalistic fold-out keyboard and integrated kickstand. Microsoft’s idea for the tablet (confusingly called Surface) is a device that integrates a better keyboard option than typing on the screen without adding size or weight. That’s where the new keyboard — which doubles as a screen cover — kicks in. At 3mm thick, it adds virtually nothing to the device’s size, but it opens up a world of inputs. There are two covers available — the Touch Cover (very thin) and the Type Cover (with proper, tactile keys). Microsoft is touting the device’s magnesium body, vapor-deposited construction, full PC functionality, and additional features like being the first tablet to showcase a 2×2 MIMO wireless antenna. Windows RT (ARM) and x86 versions are both in the works, with the x86 version apparently having a higher quality screen. No word on hardware specs yet; Microsoft is claiming it “rivals the best ultrabooks” and uses less power than the Core i5. I'm a little bit dubious on that front — and also dubious about how Microsoft's hardware partners will receive this new, rather competitive offering..."
China

Submission + - China to Build World's Tallest Tower in 90 Days (broad.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Even since the current world’s tallest builing – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – was completed, there has been a constant battle to build the world’s next tallest building. The current record holder stands tall at 828 meters and took five years to build, but a Chinese company called Broad Sustainable Building (BSB) aims to smash that record by building the 838 meter Sky City tower, in Changsa, China in a mere 90 days. BSB plans to use prefab building techniques to construct the tower in record time.

Comment Re:Wait a second.... (Score 1) 162

by johncalvinyoung (#35361850) Attached to: High-Bandwidth Users Are Just Early Adopters
Same here. Massive bandwidth user, because I stream music (subscription), watch Netflix streaming, buy most of my media online, and download massive amounts of open-source software, such as Linux ISOs. Oh, and incessant browsing and casual videochat with family and friends abroad. All legal. All heavy on data usage.

Submission + - Almost '11 Whats the oldest file you can restore? 2

Submitted by turtleshadow
turtleshadow writes: Now that Its almost '11 who kept backups since before the Y2K non-event: Have you personally/professionally had to recover something from 10+ years ago?

If so share the interesting "hows" especially if you had to do multiple media transfers and file formats to get it "usable file format" on a modern hardware platform of your choice?
Native solutions are rated higher than Emulation. Also whats your plans for recovering in 2021?

Street cred goes to the oldest, most technical and complex restores... that are of course successful.

I'm working the night shift Christmas/NewYears, I ask everybody still stirring and hardcore SysOPs
Programming

Submission + - Does Typing Speed Matter?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'I can't take slow typists seriously as programmers,' wrote Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood last fall. 'When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?' Atwood's rant prompted John Cook to investigate just how important it is to be able to type quickly. 'Learning to type well is a good investment for those who are physically able to do so,' concludes Cook, 'but it's not that important. Once you reach moderate proficiency, improving your speed will not improve your productivity much. If a novelist writing 1000 words per day were able to type infinitely fast, he or she could save maybe an hour per day.' At 150 WPM, notes Cook, the world's fastest typist was still only 10x faster than Stephen Hawking.
The Military

US Army Develops Tooth Cleaning Gum 160

Posted by samzenpus from the forget-the-brush dept.
pryoplasm writes "To help deal with some of the hygiene issues on the battlefield, the US Army worked on a gum to take the place of brushing your teeth. This might be eventually released and marketed to the public. While there are many gums out there that aren't so detrimental to your teeth, this one promises actually to help them out."

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