Comment Karma is a bitch (Score 1, Informative) 427
Remember Explorer vs. Nautilus and the rest?
Comment Profession (Asimov) (Score 5, Insightful) 128
Asimov's "Profession" is one of my favorites. I teach Computer Science at a 4 year university, and my goal is to teach skills that transcend a particular technology/language/API, while at the same time being relevant to current developments. As a student, you are pretty much out of luck, but as an instructor it takes a lot of effort to resolve the tension between timely and timeless content.
Comment No (Score 4, Insightful) 982
It hosed my Win7 machine. YMMV
Comment Winners have a femtosecond to claim the prize (Score 1) 71
How long between being awarded the prize and it decaying?
Comment Support Global Warming (Score 4, Insightful) 1136
Since a shortage of fresh water is our next big crisis, doesn't that mean that global warming is a good thing?
Comment Re:New to open GL (Score 2, Informative) 46
OpenGL: A Primer by Edward Angel is very readable and a thin little book that is also inexpensive. I use in my class where I teach OpenGL. The Red Book and others are great references, but Angel is the best way to get your feet wet.
Comment What to learn first (Score 1) 794
For a scientist, FORTRAN is still a valuable skill since there are so many libraries and applications that represent many years worth of development to draw from. Plus it is efficient, etc.
The question here is what is the best way to introduce students as a first exposure to programming. FORTRAN has many quirks so it is debatable whether it is really the best language to learn first. You can write truly horrible code in FORTRAN, but that is true to some extent of all languages, although Python does make it harder.
On balance, if students are taught a modern dialect of FORTRAN and the instructor stresses good programming practices, it remains a good way to introduce students to solving a problem numerically and of getting the job done for people who may not code for a living.
Comment Is this all it takes? (Score 1) 359
If a few clowns with $500 worth of equipment can essentially deny the military the use of the system, it is not going to be of any use in a conflict when the opposing force has a lot more sophisticated equipment.
Submission + - How Water Forms in Interstellar Space at 10K (arxivblog.com)
KentuckyFC writes: "Water is the most abundant solid material in space. But although astronomers see it on planets, moons, in comets and in interstellar clouds, nobody has been able to show how it forms. In theory, it should form easily when oxygen and atomic hydrogen meet. The problem is that there is not enough of it floating around as gas in interstellar dust clouds. So instead, the thinking is that water must form when atomic hydrogen interacts with frozen solid oxygen on the surface of dust grains in these clouds. Now Japanese astronomers have demonstrated this process for the first time in the lab in conditions that simulate interstellar space. That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud (abstract)."
Submission + - World Series ticket sales overwhelms servers
vlakkies writes: "The Colorado Rockies Major League Baseball team decided to only sell tickets for the World Series games at Coors Field online. As a result of overwhelming interest, the ticket vendor Paciolan experienced a system meltdown resulting in a suspension of all ticket sales."
Comment Another Attack Vector (Score 2, Insightful) 189
FTA: With IP, SWN can upgrade radio software over the network and provide mobile data support.
The state of software security being what it is, I wonder if the next major attack would not be accompanied by a day zero exploit of a bug in the radio software that renders all the radios useless because the bad guys uploads some bad software. Vendor diversity in radios may be beneficial just as it is in operating systems.
The state of software security being what it is, I wonder if the next major attack would not be accompanied by a day zero exploit of a bug in the radio software that renders all the radios useless because the bad guys uploads some bad software. Vendor diversity in radios may be beneficial just as it is in operating systems.
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