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Comment Re:Dunning-Kruger effect (Score 4, Insightful) 224

by robocord (#57276284) Attached to: Study Finds 58% of Tech Employees Feel Like Frauds

It's exactly this. Anybody above the level of "unconscious incompetence" will sometimes feel like a fraud.

Conscious incompetent: "I don't know what I'm doing. Why did they hire me?"
Conscious competent: "I sometimes know what I'm doing, but there's so much I don't know. Why haven't they fired me yet?"
Unconscious competent: "All this shit is so easy. Why are they paying me so much to do this high school stuff?"

Unconscious incompetent: "I'm fantastic! I'm the best ever! Why aren't they paying me more?"

Submission + - A Mysterious Flash From a Faraway Galaxy (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: It was a spark in the night. A flash of X-rays from a galaxy hovering nearly invisibly on the edge of infinity.

Astronomers say they do not know what caused it.

The orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, was in the midst of a 75-day survey of a patch of sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South, when it recorded the burst from a formerly quiescent spot in the cosmos.

For a few brief hours on Oct 1, 2014, the X-rays were a thousand times brighter than all the light from its home galaxy, a dwarf unremarkable speck almost 11 billion light years from here, in the constellation Fornax. Then whatever had gone bump in the night was over and the X-rays died.

The event as observed does not fit any known phenomena, according to Franz Bauer, an astronomer at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and lead author of a report to be published in Science.

The most likely explanation, Dr. Bauer said in the paper and in an interview, is that the X-rays are the afterglow from a gamma ray burst seen sideways. These are caused by the collapse of a massive star into a black hole or the collision of a pair of the dense stellar remnants called neutron stars, and squirt gamma rays but only in one direction. If Earth is out of the beam then all astronomers will see is an “orphan afterglow.”

Submission + - NASA Designs 'Ice Dome' For Astronauts On Mars (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The "Mars Ice Home" is a large inflatable dome that is surrounded by a shell of water ice. NASA said the design is just one of many potential concepts for creating a sustainable home for future Martian explorers. The idea came from a team at NASA's Langley Research Center that started with the concept of using resources on Mars to help build a habitat that could effectively protect humans from the elements on the Red Planet's surface, including high-energy radiation. The advantages of the Mars Ice Home is that the shell is lightweight and can be transported and deployed with simple robotics, then filled with water before the crew arrives. The ice will protect astronauts from radiation and will provide a safe place to call home, NASA says. But the structure also serves as a storage tank for water, to be used either by the explorers or it could potentially be converted to rocket fuel for the proposed Mars Ascent Vehicle. Then the structure could be refilled for the next crew. Other concepts had astronauts living in caves, or underground, or in dark, heavily shielded habitats. The team said the Ice Home concept balances the need to provide protection from radiation, without the drawbacks of an underground habitat. The design maximizes the thickness of ice above the crew quarters to reduce radiation exposure while also still allowing light to pass through ice and surrounding materials.

Submission + - Smart Electricity Meters Can Be Dangerously Insecure, Warns Expert (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Smart electricity meters, of which there are more than 100 million installed around the world, are frequently “dangerously insecure," a security expert has said. The lack of security in the smart utilities raises the prospect of a single line of malicious code cutting power to a home or even causing a catastrophic overload leading to exploding meters or house fires, according to Netanel Rubin, co-founder of the security firm Vaultra. If a hacker took control of a smart meter they would be able to know “exactly when and how much electricity you’re using”, Rubin told the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. An attacker could also see whether a home had any expensive electronics. “He can do billing fraud, setting your bill to whatever he likes [...] The scary thing is if you think about the power they have over your electricity. He will have power over all of your smart devices connected to the electricity. This will have more severe consequences: imagine you woke up to find you’d been robbed by a burglar who didn’t have to break in. “But even if you don’t have smart devices, you are still at risk. An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter’s software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode.” The problems at the heart of the insecurity stem from outdated protocols, half-hearted implementations and weak design principles. To communicate with the utility company, most smart meters use GSM, the 2G mobile standard. That has a fairly well-known weakness whereby an attacker with a fake mobile tower can cause devices to “hand over” to the fake version from the real tower, simply by providing a strong signal. In GSM, devices have to authenticate with towers, but not the other way round, allowing the fake mast to send its own commands to the meter. Worse still, said Rubin, all the meters from one utility used the same hardcoded credentials. “If an attacker gains access to one meter, it gains access to them all. It is the one key to rule them all.”

Submission + - Microsoft Is No Longer Selling Any Lumia Windows Phones On Its US Store (neowin.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that Lumia has reached the end of the line, as the Microsoft Store is no longer selling any of the company's Windows Phone 8.1 or Windows 10 Mobile handsets in the U.S. The first signs that the end was approaching for Lumia came back in February, when Microsoft launched the Lumia 650, which was said to be the last in the company's Lumia line. In August, Microsoft removed all mention of Windows handsets from its US store homepage, relegating 'Windows phone' to a dropdown menu instead. This week, just one Lumia handset remained on sale: the AT&T-locked Lumia 950, available only in white. Now, that model has sold out too, leaving none of the company's Lumia handsets available to buy on its store. The Windows phones page on the Microsoft Store lists thirteen products, but eight of these are out of stock. When more stock is expected on a temporarily sold-out product, Microsoft typically replaces the 'Add to cart' button with one that says 'Email me when available'. Instead, each of these products now has a grayed-out button, stating "Out of stock."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Are Some Great Games Panned And Some Inferior Games Praised? (soldnersecretwars.de) 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A few years ago I bought a multiplayer war game called Soldner that I had never heard of before. (The game is entirely community maintained now and free to download and play at www.soldnersecretwars.de) The professional reviews completely and utterly destroyed Soldner — buggy, bad gameplay, no singleplayer mode, disappointing graphics, server problems and so on. For me and many other players who did give it a chance beyond the first 30 minutes, Soldner turned out to be THE most fun, addictive, varied, sattisfying and multi-featured multiplayer war game ever. It had innovative features that AAA titles like Battlefield and COD did not have at all at the time — fully destructible terrain, walls and buildings, cool physics on everything from jeeps flying off mountaintops to Apache helicopters crashing into Hercules transport aircraft, to dozens of trees being blown down by explosions and then blocking an incoming tank's way. Soldner took a patch or three to become fully stable, but then was just fun, fun, fun to play. So much freedom, so much cool stuff you can do in-game, so many options and gadgets you can play with. By contrast, the far, far simpler — but better looking — Battlefield, COD, Medal Of Honor, CounterStrike war games got all the critical praise, made the tens of millions in profit per release, became longstanding franchises and are, to this day, not half the fun to play that Soldner is. How does this happen? How does a title like Soldner that tried to do more new stuff than the other war games combined get trashed by every reviewer, and then far less innovative and fun to play war games like BF, COD, CS sell tens of millions of copies per release and get rave reviews all around?

Submission + - How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: 'For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia’s criminal underworld for potential talent.' Important read.

Submission + - New browser fingerprinting site launched

Submitted by AnonymousCube
AnonymousCube writes: The University of Adelaide and ACEMS has launched a new browser fingerprinting test suite.
On the site you can see what data can be used to track you and how unique your fingerprint is.
The site includes new tests such as detecting software such as Privacy Badger via how social media buttons are disabled and CSS only (no JavaScript or flash) tests to get screen size and installed fonts.

Submission + - Military Needs Your Help Finding Lost Drone (go.com)

Submitted by slipped_bit
slipped_bit writes: An MQ-9 Reaper drone has gone down over Lake Ontario during a practice mission. The flight, being operated by the New York Air National Guard's 174th Attack Wing in Syracuse, NY, was going well for about three hours before contact with the aircraft was lost. A search was started but had to be postponed due to weather.

Comment Re:What is it about the Nook? (Score 3, Informative) 132

by robocord (#44664921) Attached to: Barnes & Noble Won't Give Up On the Nook

I have both the Nook Simple Touch Glow and the Kindle Paperwhite. As far as I can tell they are exactly equivalent in terms of the competitive niche. I much prefer reading on the Kindle. It's smaller, litter, slimmer, and the lighting is more agreeable. The nook is oddly thick and the buttons are all much too hard to push, at least when it's new (as mine is).

The nook's lighting is more uniform but the light sources are too close to the edge of the screen, which means the glare from the source bugs me while reading. The brightness controls on the kindle allow for finer adjustment and the minimum light level is lower.

The kindle's almost complete lack of buttons appeals to me, since I'm already used to reading on tablet and phone touch screens. Nook's two different power/home buttons make no real sense to me, and the page turn buttons go ignored in favor of swiping or tapping on the touch screen.

Both screens are very pleasant to look at when the light is enabled, but kind of oddly colored when it's off. The kindle's higher pixel count is noticeable, but not so much better that I'd ignore the nook. Neither screen is very quick to respond to touches or page turns. The kindle is a bit faster than the nook, most of the time.

Shopping, buying, downloading, etc is a bit easier on the nook, in my opinion. Both interfaces are more than good enough though.

The really big differences show up in the infrastructure surrounding the gadgets.

B&N's web site is, in my opinion, horrifically bad. I hate everything about it. Buying items fails frequently, for no apparent reason. I never even look at their site anymore. If I want to buy a B&N ebook, I find it via http://www.goodreads.com/, http://inkmesh.com/, or by showrooming on Amazon's site, then buy it on the nook itself.

Amazon's site is better. Searching is limited and imprecise, compared to real search engines like Google. The number of items on screen is fixed and too few, but I can live with that.

The deciding factor, for me, is how many restriction Amazon puts on the kindle. Their format is a proprietary version of the old Mobipocket "standard" with their own layer of DRM. Nook uses ePub with Adobe DRM. Both DRM schemes are easily removed, but after removal, Nook books leave you with a wonderfully useful ePub, where kindle books are still in a (somewhat) proprietary format. If I want to load an ePub on my kindle, I have to convert it first. If I want to load a kindle book on almost any other reader, I have to convert it first. Conversion isn't hard, using Calibre, but I have noticed that layout and formatting is never quite right after conversion.

I'd love to read more in the Kindle Paperwhite, but Amazon has crippled it too much to be of use to me. I don't like the physical experience of reading on the Nook Simple Touch Glow... it's just too chunky and clunky. Ultimately, I choose to keep reading mostly on my Android tablets. I buy my ebooks from places that sell them in ePub and read them on devices that support ePub.

Comment A CS degree is a waste of time at any age. (Score 1) 918

by robocord (#27358145) Attached to: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

Speaking as somebody who does a lot of interviewing and recommending for or against hiring, a CS degree is completely unimpressive to me, at least at the bachelor's level. If you don't have experience, I won't hire you for anything but the most menial technical position. At 35, experience is even more important. If you want a degree that matters, pick something more specialized. Health Informatics is pretty hot right now, for instance.

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