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Comment Will it also debug the code... (Score 1) 338

by schleprock63 (#53917639) Attached to: Microsoft Research Developing An AI To Put Coders Out of a Job
in my 30+ years of experience in "coding" 80 - 90% of my time is spent debugging/maintaining code. any idiot can string lines of code together to complete a narrow well defined task. as soon as you give it to a real user, they try to use it in ways you never thought of and voila, bugs... in addition, i have yet to work on a project where the requirements were even close to correct the first time (or the second, third...). schleprock

Submission + - Neil deGrasse Tyson urges America to challenge China to a space race (examiner.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Tuesday story in the UK edition of the International Business Times, Neil degrease Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, advocated a space race between the United States and China. The idea is that such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow. The Apollo race to the moon caused a similar explosive period of scientific research and engineering development.

Comment understanding of OO, not just the syntax of C++ (Score 1) 336

by schleprock63 (#49784641) Attached to: How Much C++ Should You Know For an Entry-Level C++ Job?
when i interview for developers (we are a C++ shop, mostly), i certainly expect people to understand the syntax of the language, but more importantly to me, to understand what the language is providing. what is OO, what does OO provide over functional... in addition what is class hierarchy? what does it provide to the developer? what are templates? when are templates useful, and when should templates not be used, for example they should not be used to provide hierarchy (which i have seen done). what is overloading (other than syntactic sugar!), these questions can be answered for any OO type language. another huge concept that most interviewees do NOT understand is exceptions. even the basic "throw and get out of the way" concept is lost on them. and they truly don't understand that exceptions decouple normal program flow from error recovery. i'll have them write a method that generates an error and they'll start by returning an error code!! that will pretty much end the interview at that point. another area is order of construction of objects that contain members that also have constructors, as well as order of destruction of objects and what happens when a base class's destructor is not virtual. and lastly, how do they hold up when trying to design an algorithm for a difficult problem. i don't even expect the interviewee to complete the algorithm, what i'm looking for is how they attack the problem, do they ask me questions to help themselves out, do they use the whiteboard to get an understanding of the problem... the individuals in our group do not work in a bubble and if you're not willing to ask for help when you're stuck, then i have no use for you...

Submission + - Gene Testing Often Gets It Wrong 1

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: From the you-pay-your-money-and-you-take-your-changes dept

ABC is reporting that gene test for risk of specific diseases are not as accurate as were thought, with different labs giving different interpretations.



At least 415 gene variants now have different interpretations that could sway a medical decision, such as whether to have healthy breasts or ovaries removed to lower the risk of cancer, or to get a medical device such as an implanted defibrillator to cut the risk of sudden cardiac death.

"The magnitude of this problem is bigger than most people thought," said Michael Watson, executive director of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, one of the study's authors and a partner in the data pooling project.

And it can harm patients. Rehm described a woman who had genetic testing and wrongly was told she did not have elevated risks for breast cancer. She later developed the disease but could have had preventive surgery had the right gene analyses been done.

Submission + - Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we avoided severe ozone depletion (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Concentrations of ozone depleting chemicals was at its peak in 1993, but over the years they have declined and a new research points out that the Montreal Protocol, which came into force in 1987, has played a major role in not only ensuring that use of these chemicals is reduced, but has also helped us avoid a severe ozone depletion.

Submission + - Prospects and limits for the LHC's capabilities to test string theory

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The Large Hadron Collider has just been upgraded, and is now making the highest energy collisions of any human-made machine ever. But even at 13 TeV, what are the prospects for testing String Theory, considering that the string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so? Surprisingly, there are a number of phenomenological consequences that should emerge, and looking at what we've seen so far, they may disfavor String Theory after all.

Submission + - Global business leaders say they don't know enough about technology to succeed

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: New Harvard Business Review research finds that only 45% of business leaders surveyed say they personally have the technology knowledge they need to succeed in their jobs. What's more, the survey of 436 global business leaders finds that only 23% are confident their organizations have the knowledge and skills to succeed in the digital aspects of their business. The report says that given the low levels of digital knowledge and skills outside of IT "it's troubling that close to half of all respondents (49%) said their department occasionally or frequently initiaties IT projects with little or no direct involvement of IT."

Submission + - Computer chips made of wood promise greener electronics

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: U.S. and Chinese researchers have developed semiconductor chips that are nearly entirely made out of wood-derived material. Aside from being biodegradable, the chips could be produced for only a fraction of the cost of conventional semiconductors, according to the group of 17 researchers, mostly from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with others from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Comment Re:How about speed arrestors, instead? (Score 1) 294

by schleprock63 (#49779307) Attached to: Amtrak Installing Cameras To Watch Train Engineers
exactly my thought. so the webcam is going to slow the train down????? no, but we can watch the train run off the tracks and if we're REALLY lucky, the lead car will be thrown 180 degrees around and we can watch all the passengers be ripped apart as the rest of the cars are thrown from the track.. as long as they get those youtube hits.... schleprock
United States

Snowden Reportedly In Talks To Return To US To Face Trial 671

Posted by Soulskill from the bold-strategy dept.
HughPickens.com writes: The Globe and Mail reports that Edward Snowden's Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, says the fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor is working with American and German lawyers to return home. "I won't keep it secret that he wants to return back home. And we are doing everything possible now to solve this issue. There is a group of U.S. lawyers, there is also a group of German lawyers and I'm dealing with it on the Russian side." Kucherena added that Snowden is ready to return to the States, but on the condition that he is given a guarantee of a legal and impartial trial. The lawyer said Snowden had so far only received a guarantee from the U.S. Attorney General that he will not face the death penalty. Kucherena says Snowden is able to travel outside Russia since he has a three-year Russian residency permit, but "I suspect that as soon as he leaves Russia, he will be taken to the U.S. embassy."

Comment adblock, flashblock, ghostery and noscript (Score 1) 353

by schleprock63 (#49079975) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Most Useful Browser Extensions?
i very much agree with GroeFaz, when the ads completely drown out everything else on my machine (whether it's a pc, tablet or phone) they have to be blocked. this is especially true of ads with annoying audio. on my pc if it's just a visual ad i can switch to another desktop and not be bothered, but when the ad contains audio, game over. someday enough people will be using ad blocking technology to where the the people paying for the ads will not see any return on their money. at that point, advertisers will begin to go away (or at least in my dreams they'll go away!)

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