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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do I stay employable? 2

Submitted by illcar
illcar writes: Hi, I am 40 year old working as a senior developer for one of the biggest investment banks. I have always worked as full time employee in my career. However the the last 5-6 years had been very tough for me because of office politics, outsourcing, and economic conditions. The financial industry is not doing well, and we maybe at the brink of another round of layoffs. My family is growing, my spouse does not work, and I still do not own a house yet. I am worried regarding my job security & career growth. Considering medicare does not kick in till 65, I am still looking at 25 long years of career. I am wondering what would be the best way for me to stay employable in the coming years?

1. Should I stay technical, and be ready to work as consultant/contractor? How does medical insurance work in that case?
2. Should I capitalize on the domain knowledge, and move onto business/managerial side?
3. Will the MBA degree or alternate career help?
4. Any other suggestions?

Thanks.
Science

Submission + - Graphene Makes Saltwater Drinkable (fellowgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Graphene once again proves that it is quite possibly the most miraculous material known to man, this time by making saltwater drinkable.

The process was developed by a group of MIT researchers who realized that graphene allowed for the creation of an incredibly precise sieve. Basically, the regular atomic structure of graphene means that you can create holes of any size, for example the size of a single molecule of water.

Using this process scientist can desalinate saltwater 1,000 times faster than the Reverse Osmosis technique.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Flashback attack began with Wordpress blogs (eweek.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Alexander Gostev, head of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky, says that “tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using a vulnerable version of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plug-in.”
Science

Submission + - Eating meat helped early humans reproduce (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. "Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened," said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. "This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution."

She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat.
IBM

Submission + - IBM Chief: All CEOs Reluctant to Invest in R&D

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In his Centennial Conversation at the Computer History Museum, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano emphasized the importance of investing in R&D, even in a down economy. 'Shareholder expectations for higher returns don't diminish when the economy stutters,' said Sam. 'And yet, Tom Watson Sr. actually increased research investment during the Great Depression.' Palmisano added, 'I will tell you that my own instinctive reflex isn't to continue investing $6 billion a year during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In that regard, I'm like all CEOs.' Yes, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, Sam Palmisano is no Tom Watson. And while he didn't mention it in his speech, just days earlier, Palmisano exercised an option for 300,000 IBM shares at $97.59, which were immediately unloaded for more than $50 million at prices ranging from $178.72-$183.63 (IBM closed Friday at $157.54). Watson, by the way, famously refused to grant stock options to himself and other execs.
Cloud

Submission + - Changing Landscape of IT 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago, it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services requirements to keep up with the times. Now, we are entering a consolidation phase. The cloud makes it easier for companies to host e-mail, so now instead of organizations having their own exchange guy they will outsource it to the cloud, instead of having a bunch of network engineers they will deploy wireless and no longer need cabling and as much network engineering services. What do you think the long trend of this will be? What skills do you think will be useful in 10 years? Is IT going to put it's own out of work like we did with the post office and libraries?
Education

Submission + - Teacher Cannot Be Sued For Denying Creationism (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a public high school teacher in Mission Viejo, California may not be sued for making hostile remarks about religion in his classroom. The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by a student charging that the teacher’s hostile remarks about creationism and religious faith violated a First Amendment mandate that the government remain neutral in matters of religion. A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the lawsuit against an advanced placement history teacher must be thrown out of court because the teacher was entitled to immunity.
Microsoft

Submission + - Tablets: Jean Girard Jobs vs. Ricky Bobby Ballmer 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In NASCAR, you can finish a race in the Top 3 by leading the whole way or by having spectacular crashes take out those ahead of you. The same may hold true for the tablet race, where Apple has led the whole way, but Microsoft could advance into 2nd or 3rd place as those once ahead of it crash and burn ($99 TouchPad, anyone?). 'Microsoft tablets based on Windows 8 won't be ready until next year,' notes SplatF's Dan Frommer. 'Unexpectedly, that might not be too late to matter.' In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the big race ends with all cars being wrecked and Formula I racer Girard and NASCAR driver Bobby running on foot to the finish line. Could we see something similar in 2012 between 'Jean Girard' Jobs and 'Ricky Bobby' Ballmer? Far-fetched as it may seem, Ars Technica's Peter Bright explains why the Windows 8 tablet invasion might work.
Education

Submission + - Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for," says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how how search for stuff. "At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'" Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing says Alexis Madrigal. "I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all," writes Madrigal. "We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.""
The Internet

Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill from the inter-arma-enim-silent-tubulis dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The H-Root server, operated by the US Army Research Lab, spent 18 hours out of the last 48 being a void. Both the RIPE's DNSMON and the h.root-servers.org site show this. How, in this day and age of network engineering, can we even entertain one of the thirteen root servers being unavailable for so long? I mean, the US army doesn't even seem to make the effort to deploy more sites. Look at the other root operators who don't have the backing of the US government money machine. Many of them seem to be able to deploy redundant instances. Even the much-maligned ICANN seems to have managed deploying 11 sites. All these root operators that have only one site need a good swift kick, or maybe they should pass the responsibility to others who are more committed to ensuring the Internet's stability."
Idle

Growing A House From Meat 133

Posted by samzenpus from the delicious-future dept.
baosol writes "From the boundary-pushing team of archi-visionaries who brought us the fabulous Fab Tree Hab comes a new (and somewhat disgusting) way to grow a structure — using animal flesh! The In Vitro Meat Habitat is a futuristic concept home composed of meat cells grown in a lab. The creator of the concept, Mitchell Joachim, is a futurist with a twist– he says he is actually developing the concept in a lab."
Microsoft

Submission + - Office Guardian Angel More Intrusive Than Clippy? (seattleweekly.com) 1

Submitted by ZWilder
ZWilder writes: Remember "Clippy", the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well according to tech blog GigaOm, Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and "turned the dial up to 11" with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as "Guardian Angel." Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is "an intelligent personalized agent" that "monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user." Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from "2001: A Space Oddysey."

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