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Comment This is not builder vs developer, it's contractor (Score 1) 716

by pizzutz (#46223787) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Should Developers Fix Bugs They Cause On Their Own Time?
This is comparing apples to oranges. The builder in question is obviously the contractor, while the developer is an employee. The builder would eat the cost of the repairs while HIS employees would be paid their wage to fix it and at risk for termination for incompetence were they responsible for the initial defect.

If the developer was an independent contractor or freelancer, he would be required to fix his bugs on his own time (trust me, I've done it). If he is an employee, he would be paid his normal wage, and be at risk for termination should his employer feel it warranted.

Your boss can't make you fix bugs on your own time because you are an employee. If he takes issue with the quantity/severity of the bugs you produce, his his remedy is to fire you and replace you with someone more competent.
Data Storage

Entry-Level NAS Storage Servers Compared 182

Posted by samzenpus from the line-them-up dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Desmond Fuller provides an in-depth comparison of five entry-level NAS storage servers, including cabinets from Iomega, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, and Thecus. 'With so many use cases and potential buyers, the vendors too often try to be everything to everyone. The result is a class of products that suffers from an identity crisis — so-called business storage solutions that are overloaded with consumer features and missing the ease and simplicity that business users require,' Fuller writes. 'Filled with 10TB or 12TB of raw storage, my test systems ranged in price from $1,699 to $3,799. Despite that gap, they all had a great deal in common, from core storage services to performance. However, I found the richest sets of business features — straightforward setup, easy remote access, plentiful backup options — at the higher end of the scale.'"
Transportation

Austria's 'Bionic Man' Dies In Car Crash 200

Posted by timothy from the sad-to-hear dept.
euphemistic writes "An Austrian man who became the first person outside the US to wear thought-powered 'bionic' arms has died from injuries sustained in a car crash ... Kandlbauer, who would have turned 23 next month, sustained severe head injuries when the specially modified car he was driving swerved off the road in the south east of Austria and crashed into a tree on October 19. The cause of the accident is not yet known, particularly whether the neurally-controlled arm-prostheses he had been fitted with might have played a role."
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3.5RC2 Windows vs Linux Performance (andrewmlawrence.com)

Submitted by
pizzutz
pizzutz writes: "Andy Lawrence has posted a javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux(Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."
Space

Submission + - Students call space station with home-built radio (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by
Pizzutz
Pizzutz writes: "Four Toronto college students have accomplished a technological feat that their teachers are calling a first. The Humber College seniors made contact with the International Space Station Monday with a radio system they designed and built themselves. School officials say that, to their knowledge, that's never been accomplished by students at the college level."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds (softpedia.com)

Submitted by
Pizzutz
Pizzutz writes: "Softpedia reports that Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds using the current daily build and the newly supported EXT4 file system. From the article:

There are only two days left until the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be available (for testing), and... we couldn't resist the temptation to take the current daily build for a test drive, before our usual screenshot tour, and taste the "sweetness" of that evolutionary EXT4 Linux filesystem. Announced on Christmas Eve, the EXT4 filesystem is now declared stable and it is distributed with version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and later. However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.

I guess it's finally time to reformat my /home partition..."
It's funny. Laugh.

XKCD Improving the Internet ... Yet Again 204

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-oh-monroe dept.
netbuzz writes "Comic creator Randall Monroe suggested in a recent xkcd strip that YouTube comments would be better — or, more precisely, less idiotic — if only those posting them were forced to hear their words read aloud first. Well, YouTube has gone and made this "audio preview" a reality, albeit an optional one. And, it's not the first time that xkcd has contributed to the betterment of the Internet, as those who are familiar with last year's "Internet census" and its use of a Hilbert curve may remember."
The Almighty Buck

Game Devs Using One-Time Bonuses to Fight Used Game Sales 229

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-so-much dept.
ShackNews reports on an emerging trend which sees game publishers offer one-time bonus codes to unlock extra content for certain titles. Rock Band 2, for example, comes with a code which will allow free 20-song download, but is only usable once. NBA Live '09 has functionality to update team rosters on a daily basis, but will only do so for the original owner. "'This information and data is very valuable and it wasn't free for us,' an EA representative explained on Operation Sports. 'T-Mobile is paying for it this year for all users who buy the game new. This is a very expensive tool to use, and if you don't buy it new, then you'll have to pay for this. It isn't greed at all.'"

Feed Techdirt: Professors Learning To Embrace, Not Hate, Wikipedia (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
There are plenty of Wikipedia haters out there -- but they often seem to miss the point of the site. We've certainly heard of plenty of students who are told that they're not allowed to cite Wikipedia, which seems silly. As long as people recognize what the source is and how it's written, there's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as one source among many. It appears that at least a few professors are figuring this out -- and one has taken the typical Wikipedian response to charges of incorrect data (that response being: well, if it's wrong, fix it!) to the next level. Rather than having students just research something using Wikipedia, University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom has them write up a totally new Wikipedia article or substantially improve an old one. In other words, if you think that Wikipedia isn't very good, why not improve it? Not only is it probably a valuable exercise in learning how to present certain types of information, it helps the students have a better understanding of how Wikipedia content comes to be.

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