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Submission + - Spain's Link Tax Taxes My Patience (computerworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Spain's new tax on linking to Spanish newspaper articles is ill defined and short sighted and ends up protecting a dying industry, while undermining a vibrant one. In another case of disrupted industries turning to lawmakers to solve their problems, this one makes no sense at all, especially given the state of the Spanish economy and the fact that it comes 15 years too late to even matter.

Submission + - How to Tell Your Client That His "Expert" is an Idiot

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: It’s a danger for any consultant, and for most inter-departmental internal project staff: To get the work done, you need to work with someone else who supplies expertise you lack. But when the “expert” turns out to be the wrong person how do you tell the client (or boss) that you just can’t work with that individual? It’s possible to do so, but it does take a deft hand. Here's one set of instructions, but surely there are plenty more you could add.

Submission + - The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory 1

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren’t any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It’s all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard.

As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: "Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn’t until 2009 that the standard became official."

Submission + - A Short History of Computers in the Movies

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: The big screen has always tried to keep step with technology usually unsuccessfully. Peter Salus looks at how the film industry has treated computing.

For a long time, the "product placement" of big iron was limited to a few brands, primarily Burroughs. For instance:

Batman: The Movie and Fantastic Voyage (both 1966) revert to the archaic Burroughs B205, though Fantastic Voyage also shows an IBM AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central. At 250 tons for each installation (there were about two dozen) the AN/FSQ-7 was the largest computer ever built, with 60,000 vacuum tubes and a requirement of 3 megawatts of power to perform 75,000 ips for regional radar centers. The last IBM AN/FSQ-7, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, was demolished in February 1984.

Fun reading, I think.

Submission + - Stop listening to your users (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: It would seem on its face that simply asking your users what they need in an app would be the easiest way to build one, but it turns out it's not quite that simple. People often don't know what they want or need or they can't articulate it in a way that's useful to you. They may say I want Google or Dropbox for the enterprise, but they don't get that developers can be so much more creative than that. And the best way to understand those users' needs is to watch what they do, then use your own skills to build apps to make their working lives better or easier.

Submission + - Computers and Doctor Who: The First 20 Years (smartbear.com)

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: We all know that the arts reflect the technology of their times. So let’s look at the Doctor (“the definite article,” as Tom Baker said in December 1974) and his use of computers.

Actually, for a show so closely associated with the slashdot-techie lifestyle, Doctor Who didn't have much to do with computers early on. This article by Peter Salus traces the formative years, e.g. "In January 1970, Jon Pertwee (Doctor #3) acquired a Cambridge scientist (Caroline John as Liz Shaw) as his companion, which might lead the unsuspecting viewer to think that a firmer computer science basis might ensue. But only in April did Liz exhibit her technical knowledge (by recognizing a Geiger counter reading)." And then we get to K-9.....

Submission + - Fighting the number-one killer in the U.S. with data (citeworld.com) 1

Submitted by mattydread23
mattydread23 writes: Often, the signs of eventual heart failure are there, but they consist of a lot of weak signals over a long period of time, and doctors are not trained to look for these patterns. IBM and a couple heathcare providers, Sutter Health and Geisinger Health System, just got a $2 million grant from NIH to figure out how better data analysis can help prevent heart attack. But the trick is that doctors will have to use electronic records — it also means a lot more tests. Andy Patrizio writes, "What this means is doctors are going to have to expand the tests they do and the amount of data they keep. Otherwise, the data isn't so Big."

Submission + - The RFP and IT Logistics for Washington's "Pot Czar" (citeworld.com)

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Last fall, the state of Washington passed a marijuana legalization referendum, and needed to acquire an outside consultant to run the program. "As it normally does, the state put out a request for proposal for a consultant to run the new legal marijuana program," writes Ron Miller in How Washington State handled a flood of applications to be its "pot czar". "As word leaked out that there was an RFP open for what essentially was a 'pot czar,' the floodgates opened. It would be the most popular RFP in the state's history. The Liquor Control Board needed a way to process these requests quickly and cheaply." In a typical RFP scenario, they would get maybe half a dozen responses. This one got close to 100.

But this is an IT and business process story, not a marijuana legalization story. Ron Miller writes about the cloud workflow required to solve the task:

He chose these particular tools because they all had open APIs, which allowed him to mash them together easily into the solution. They were easy to use, so reviewers could learn the system with little or no training, and they were mobile, so users could access the system from any device. In particular he wanted reviewers to be able to use the system on a tablet.

I suppose this could have been written about more mundane RFPs, but I bet you'll find this more interesting than most.
Facebook

Submission + - Wolfram Alpha Updates Facebook Analytics Features (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Wolfram Alpha has upgraded its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, giving users the ability to dissect their own social-networking data in new ways. Wolfram Alpha’s creators first launched its Facebook data-mining module in August 2012. Users could leverage the platform’s computational abilities to analyze and visualize their weekly distribution of Facebook posts, types of posts (photos, links, status updates), weekly app activity, frequency of particular words in posts, and more. This latest update isn’t radical, but it does offer some interesting new features, including added color coding for “interesting” friend properties, including relationship status, age, sex, and so on; users can also slice their network data by metrics such as location and age."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Sony fined in UK for PlayStation Network hack (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: The UK's information protection authority, the ICO, has fined Sony for failing to adequately secure the information of PlayStation Network users. The investigation was triggered by a 2011 security breach, during which personally identifying information (including password hashes) was recovered from a Sony database where it had been stored without encryption. In the ICO's view Sony's security measures were inadequate, and the attack could have been prevented. The £250,000 (ca. $400,000) fine, the largest the ICO has ever imposed, is equivalent to a few pennies per affected user. Sony disagrees with the ICO's decision and intends to appeal.
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 as 'Puzzling, Confusing' (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday — strangely titled in the third person as, 'Paul's take on Windows 8,' Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."
Programming

Submission + - Will the Next Web Platform Please Hold Still? (softwarequalityconnection.com)

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Feeling a little overwhelmed by changing web standards and new browser choices? You aren't the only one. Mozilla is launching development tracks for the next two editions of its Firefox Web browser — versions 5 and 6 — immediately, with hopes to push both into general release before the end of the year. This while Microsoft previews Internet Explorer 10 on the heels of its IE9 release, and Google projects Chrome 13 just one year after Chrome 7. Meanwhile, HTML5, the next version of the Web’s primary language, appears to have entered a permanent gestation phase. Writes Scott Fulton: All the confusion has prompted Web developers to ask this question: What do we develop our sites against now?

Fulton doesn't just write a general rant: He gets input from several of the people who are creating browsers and standards. And they don't just spout a company line. My favorite quote is from Bruce Lawson, a Web evangelist for Opera Software as well as a long-time contributor to the Accessibility Task Force of the Web Standards Project: “You wouldn’t believe how many e-mails I get saying, ‘Bruce, would you give me some feedback on my HTML5 page,’ and I look at it, and it’s no more HTML5 than my vacuum cleaner. Because it looks snazzy and it’s got a rounded corner and a drop-shadow, people are calling it HTML5.”"
Programming

Submission + - Is Process Killing the Software Industry? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative?

A piece on O'Reilly Radar is arguing that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. TFA:"The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to 'make' their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on."
IT

Submission + - I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid (softwarequalityconnection.com)

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Who has money to train these guys nowadays? They should be lucky they're still employed, right? Keep thinking that way, writes Lisa Vaas. The competition applauds your choice to glue your wallet shut. Or, to put this another way: This is why the boss won't pay for developer training. Vaas explains how those still training manage to get their training budgets funded."

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We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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