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Caldera

Novell Wins vs. SCO 380

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-wait-a-minute dept.
Aim Here writes "According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO v. Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing ..." No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.
Programming

PayPal To Open App Store For Developers 63

Posted by samzenpus from the if-you-build-it-they-will-pay dept.
angry tapir writes "PayPal will open an applications store this year where developers can offer their wares, the latest step in the company's multi-pronged strategy to deepen its relationship with external programmers. Developers have a big opportunity to offer applications for merchants and consumers that PayPal doesn't have the interest or resources to build itself, according to a PayPal official."

Comment Re:Better Than First Edition? (Score 2, Interesting) 163

by mindcorrosive (#31236854) Attached to: Learning Python, 4th Edition

Endless bits about immutability, without hints as to why I ought to care. I can appreciate the use of the interactive prompt now, but to start with it seems ... strange.

The thing about mutability in Python is that it can bite you in the neck if you assume the variable passing and assignment work as in some other popular languages. I can appreciate the author's tirades about this, as he brought his point around, even with simple examples. And how do you propose to start with a language that doesn't have one-IDE-to-rule-them-all, like Visual Studio or Eclipse? You know how sparse is IDLE by today's standards.

Little discussion of how you might have accomplished tasks in other languages and wish to do the Pythonic equivalent.

That's why there's this other book, "Programming Python", again by Lutz, where he discusses the practical aspects of Python programming, and using the standard library modules. There are examples of the "Pythonic" way to do this or that, instead of masking C/C++ syntax with Python expressions. The discussions of modules, packages and classes is extensive, and down to the details of how they work and are used.

I understand your frustration, and can't comment on the first edition that you've seen. I've preordered the fourth edition - this one - (the whole 1000 or so pages), and I found it a very good self-educational tool - I managed to learn most of the ins-and-outs of the language in just one week, without having prior exposure to Python (I've got experience with 3-4 other programming languages, admittedly). I'd recommend it highly for anyone that wants to learn Python (the language) quickly.

Of course, this is my opinion, so take it as you may.

Comment Re:How is it made? (Score 1) 367

by mindcorrosive (#30986796) Attached to: Super Strong Metal Foam Discovered
TFA doesn't even mention the what the base metal is (I'd guess aluminium -- most foams I've seen are Al-based). I'm not too impressed by this, as no details on either the method or the composition are mentioned - sounds like slashvertisment to me.
A common method to produce Al foams is similar to the way bread is made - add some "soda" to the base alloy, invoke a chemical reaction that releases a gas (CO2 or similar), then quickly cast and solidify. You get mostly spherical voids, which have relatively low influence as a stress concentrator. That being said, it's rather complicated to get uniform void distribution along the volume, especially avoiding large gas entrapments in critical places that can weaken significantly the material.
Businesses

Best Buy $39.95 "Optimization" At Best a Waste of Money 504

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hooray-for-corporate-scams dept.
DCFC writes "The Consumerist deconstructs the appalling 'optimization service' that Best Buy has been pushing on consumers in recent weeks. The retailer charges 40 bucks to give you a slower PC, and make bizarre claims that it makes it go 200% faster. 'We ran the 3DMark 2003 graphics benchmark on each laptop, comparing optimized and non-optimized settings. For two of our samples, the Gateway and Toshiba, performance changes were negligible. On the Asus laptop, however, optimized tests actually scored about 32% worse than the non-optimized setup. We have been unable to isolate the source of this performance change. On none of the three tested laptops did the optimized settings give a performance boost in our test.'"
Image

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-feed dept.
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Microsoft

Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing 181

Posted by timothy from the exfat-is-not-skinny dept.
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Thursday announced a broadening of its licensing program around its exFAT file system, which is designed to handle large multimedia files. Microsoft hopes companies making devices such as cameras and smartphones will adopt the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology to support the sharing of audio and video files. The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE."
IT

Saying No To Promotions Away From Tech? 410

Posted by timothy from the and-none-of-my-ties-fit dept.
lunchlady55 writes "I have been happily working for my current employer for five years. After moving up the ranks within my department from Intern to Technical Lead, a new manager essentially told me that I have to move into a different role, oriented toward 'administrative duties and management.' We are a 24x7 shop, and will now be required to work five 8-hour days rather than four 10-hour days and be on call during the other two days of the week. Every week. Including holidays. My question is: have any Slashdotters been forced into a non-technical role, and how did it work out? Has anyone said 'No thanks' to this kind of promotion and managed to keep their jobs?"
The Internet

Geocities Shutting Down Today 396

Posted by kdawson from the goodbye-and-thanks-for-all-the-blinkies dept.
Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.
Google

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers 169

Posted by kdawson from the up-scale dept.
miller60 writes "Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. At this month's ACM conference on large-scale computing, Google's Jeff Dean said he's working on a storage and computation system called Spanner, which will automatically allocate resources across data centers, and be designed for a scale of 1 million to 10 million machines. One goal: to dynamically shift workloads to capture cheaper bandwidth and power. Dean's presentation (PDF) is online."
Security

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be? 229

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-for-one-welcome-DELETED dept.
alphadogg writes "Researchers at the University of Washington think it's finally time to start paying some serious attention to the question of robot security. Not because they think robots are about to go all Terminator on us, but because the robots can already be used to spy on us and vandalize our homes. In a paper published Thursday the researchers took a close look at three test robots: the Erector Spykee, and WowWee's RoboSapien and Rovio. They found that security is pretty much an afterthought in the current crop of robotic devices. 'We were shocked at how easy it was to actually compromise some of these robots,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, a University of Washington assistant professor, who co-authored the paper."

Comment Fixed since Office 2003 at least (Score 0, Redundant) 123

by mindcorrosive (#29462591) Attached to: Microsoft Rushes Out Office Web Apps Preview

- loose indentation for some unclear reason. The bullet will start at the middle of the screen. And how to go back to the correct indentation is some voodoo magic

That's why you can quick indent with Tab and Shift+Tab, although I'm not sure what's this "voodoo" behaviour you seem to imply. You can control tab stops and indentations from the ruler - it's not the best, but works good most of the time.

- won't be able to create a bullet point on the same level of indentation than the previous one, after I made some multi-line text under the bullet or went back from correcting some text at another place in the doc

Oh, you mean, like, when you are writing the list, and you want to include some paragraphs under a bullet, and you press Shift+Enter to break inside the longer text, and then when you press Enter again it reverts back to bulleted list? That has been around for as long as I remember, although I cannot verify since which version exactly.

If I had to complain about Word, I'd more likely mention the lack of a proper citation/bibliography mechanism, or missing font kerning and ligatures, or the confusing ordeal of customizing styles vs. manually specifying section formatting. Word is one of the Microsoft's products I hate with passion - and do not use.

Seriously, when a person gets *that* pissed with a rich text editor, then you should try LaTeX - it's little more than HTML+CSS in principle. An eye opener, no less.

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