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Comment Future Proffession : Data Archeologist (Score 1) 358

I was wondering what professions I should keep tags on, just in case we have that talk about careers with my son-to-be... Being an expert on long-gone and "lost" data formats and collecting their respective tools just seems like a future relic (Oh, and we already keep terabytes of all those myriads of one-time-use programs and utilities we downloaded from 5 years ago, right?)

Comment We built this at a hackathon using droid phones! (Score 1) 273

Wow, these guys are employing chaps across the world to do the job, when we built our autonomous android-based solution at a hackathon last year? Only sad fact, the community for whom we built the concept (schools here in Uganda mostly), never understood the idea... or we were not entrepreneurial enough to push it beyond the initial hacks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg4t3u8psQU&feature=share&list=PL9nqA7nxEPgsuV4Rfs0B-oN_O2pk_ddm4

(this was in 2012, at the Sanitation Hackathon, Kampala, Uganda).

Comment Windows OpenSUSE No turning back! (Score 1) 867

Not been around a long time, but my journey goes something like:

WinXP > Mint 7 > Mint 9 > OpenSUSE 11.4 > Ubuntu (unity) > OpenSUSE 11.4 (personal) + OpenSUSE 12.1 (work) + No turning back!

I've noted how so many nerds here don't seem to show SuSe love, but as for me, SuSe is the only way I know I really got to fall heads-over-heels in love with the Tux + KDE rocks - I love waking up every morning to another experience of messing with High-Energy Distros involving plasma -- SO HOT!
Google

Submission + - India fails, Russia leads at Google Code Jam (go-hero.net)

Migala77 writes: Now that the third round for Google Code Jam is finished and only 25 contestants are left, we can look at which nationalities performed well and which didn't. Code Jam contestant foxlit has the stats, and some interesting things can be seen. Although there were over 3000 contestants from India in the qualification round (17% of the total) , only 3 of those managed to reach the third round (0.7% of the round 3 contestants) . This in contrast to Russia with 77 out of 747, and Belarus with 13 out of 114 reaching the third round. The US performed somewhat below average too, with only 25 out of 2166 contestants making it to the third round.
Are Indian and, to a lesser extent, US programmers just not good enough, or is there another explanation?

Privacy

Submission + - Hunting for child porn, FBI stymied by Tor undernet (muckrock.com)

v3rgEz writes: "Documents released by the FBI provide an unusual inside look at how the agency is struggling to penetrate "darknet" Onion sites routed through Tor, the online privacy tool funded in part by government grants to help global activists. In this case, agents were unable to persue specific leads about an easily available child pornography site, while files withheld indicate that the FBI has ongoing investigations tied to the Silk Road marketplace, a popular, anonymous Tor site for buying and selling drugs and other illegal materials.

Gawker also has coverage:

http://gawker.com/5916994/dark-net-kiddie-porn-website-stymies-fbi-investigation"

Comment Free to Steal, but remember, It's "Copyleft" (Score 1) 386

As RMS's stuff is all GPL'ed, the thief has to obey the "copyleft" requirement, and as such, must be ready and willing to give out those same stolen items + any further contributions (e.g. any goodies placed in RMS's bag!) to anyone (including the authorities / RMS himself!). What a good sense of security GPL grants ;-)

Comment Music on Code and Design, Silence when Learning (Score 1) 405

I generally find myself achieving more when I just play ambient or psychedelic music (think psydub) when coding or designing (actually, I can design with more engaging and lively music like trance / melodic hardstyle). But when I have to pick a book from my O'reilly collection or work my way through a technical blog, I prefer to just have the music either off, or just so low I hardly recognize it. But true, keeping the headphones on (whether with music or not), does help me. Gosh! I even put the phone's on when on commuter vehicles, just to keep other's rumblings out of my personal think-space.

Comment Diana introduced me to Python at Work! (Score 1) 697

At my current workplace (where I've been since early 2011), on my very first assignment which required knowledge of Python, my overseer and guide on the project was a girl called Diana, whose Python and use of Linux was so impressive at first I almost got shocked! I went on to learn a couple of things from her, though sooner than later, she had to start learn lots of things from me. Point is, there are some girls who've really picked the love for this craft, but in my opinion, they just don't get as obsessed with the machines, languages, shells etc as we boys do. Eventually (and sadly), I saw this girl get retired from her job as a programmer here, because of issues related to failure to meet the expected load! Girls, please push on... we need an Ada Lovelace every once in a while.

Comment "Soap Film" or "Soap Film"? (Score 1) 37

Didn't mind much whether this was so important a noble distraction in my lunch-time interval on /., but the ad that I was served? "New York Film Academy...Learn Filmmaking and Acting for Film..." Something just bit me in the...in regard to some crapy ai-engine behind serving these ads! Was it brute-force or not? An xxx-recipe would've sounded preferable...

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