Comment Re: THE LAW OF THE OBVIOUS (Score 1) 51
But then, in the 400+ years since the play was first performed (1606), nobody did that. You didnâ(TM)t do that. Why didnâ(TM)t you do that, if it was so easy?
Comment Throwing Shade at Tony Fadell (Score 1) 67
Nest Labs was acquired by Google in January 2014 for $3.2B. Not a bad payoff.
Comment #LearnToThink (Score 1) 201
If you can think, you can do fundamental coding. Should everyone learn to think? #LearnToThink.
Program Uses GPS To Track Sex Offenders 338
43 sex offenders in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County are wearing GPS monitoring devices as part of a pilot program designed to keep track of their movements. If the offender moves into an "exclusion zone," police are called. “Exclusion zones for example [are] schools, daycares, playgrounds, facilities where children congregate for those sex offenders,” John Hudson, a security consultant, said. “We’ve identified in their red zones. If an offender with a device goes into one of the red zones, an exclusion zone, we’ll be notified immediately.”
Microsoft Research Takes On Go 175
mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story."
Thief Posts His Photo To Facebook Victim's Account 222
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher discovered his house had been burgled; money, a winter coat, an iPod and his son's laptop were stolen. Imagine his surprise when Facebook friends of his 15-year-old son reported that a photo of the apparent thief, wearing Fisher's coat and holding a wad of notes, had been uploaded to his son's Facebook account. How addicted do you have to be to a social network to post a status update and upload your photo *while* you're burgling someone's house?"
4chan Declares War On Snow 201
With all the recent hacktivism in the news, Anonymous has decided to take on a new and powerful enemy: snow. On Sunday the group announced that it will "do everything in its power to shut snow down by attacking the Weather Channel and North Face websites, boycotting outerwear, and voting for the sun as Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year." I'm sure there are a lot of people in Minneapolis right now that would wish them luck.
RIP, SunSolve 100
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Comment From parity to ECC to ... crap (Score 1) 277
Back in the day (~1992), we sold Intel 486 desktops with parity memory. When PC's went to a 64-bit data path (not to be confused with a 64-bit OS), we sold Intel desktops with ECC memory. (I remember seeing an IBM white paper that claimed that ECC memory is more reliable than non-ECC memory by a factor of ~2000.) Then Intel pulled the memory controller inside the CPU, and didn't bother to implement ECC on their line of desktop processors, apparently having decided that nobody on a workstation gives a damn about data integrity. Thanks Intel!.
Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology 165
MojoKid writes "Hard drive capacities are sometimes broken down by the number of platters and the size of each. The first 1TB drives, for example, used five 200GB platters; current-generation 1TB drives use two 500GB platters. These values, however, only refer to the accessible storage capacity, not the total size of the platter itself. Invisible to the end-user, additional capacity is used to store positional information and for ECC. The latest Advanced Format hard drive technology changes a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes. This allows the ECC data to be stored more efficiently. Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem and HotHardware offers some insight into the technology and how it performs."
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... when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. -- Fred Brooks
