Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Choosing an IDE That's Right for You (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Today’s software development often requires working with multiple tools in a variety of languages. The complexity can give even the most skilled developer a nasty headache, which is why many try to rely on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to accomplish most of the work; in addition to source-code editors and automation, some even feature intelligent code completion. With so much choice out there, it’s hard to settle on an IDE, so Dice interviewed several developers, who collectively offered up a list of useful questions to ask when evaluating a particular IDE for use. But do developers even need an IDE at all? When you go to smaller, newer developer shops, you’re seeing a lot more standalone editors and command-line tools; depending on what you do, you might just need a good editor, and to master the command-line tools for the languages you use.

Comment Re:Let gay men donate (Score 1) 172

by xemit (#47223187) Attached to: Human Blood Substitute Could Help Meet Donor Blood Shortfall
Same boat, I actually enjoyed giving blood, didn't hurt and I was like this is something I could do regularly and it's going to help someone. That letter was real fun to get "Thanks for the donating at such and such jail (I donated at a University), you have tested positive for Hepatitis C and can no longer donate blood. That is a terrible feeling to have! Called the lab up got a person who really couldn't give a rat's butt to tell me "oh it's just a false positive, we tested again to be sure", you're blacklisted from ever donating again as we place you on our super secret secure list and we'll send you proof (never received it), have a nice day! "

Submission + - myOpenID to shut down in February (myopenid.com) 1

Submitted by kriston
kriston writes: This is an email sent to myOpenID.com users this afternoon.

Hello,

I wanted to reach out personally to let you know that we have made the decision to end of life the myOpenID service. myOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014.

In 2006 Janrain created myOpenID to fulfill our vision to make registration and login easier on the web for people. Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards. And now, billions of people who have created accounts with these services can use their identities to easily register and login to sites across the web in the way myOpenID was intended.

By 2009 it had become obvious that the vast majority of consumers would prefer to utilize an existing identity from a recognized provider rather than create their own myOpenID account. As a result, our business focus changed to address this desire, and we introduced social login technology. While the technology is slightly different from where we were in 2006, I’m confident that we are still delivering on our initial promise – that people should take control of their online identity and are empowered to carry those identities with them as they navigate the web.

For those of you who still actively use myOpenID, I can understand your disappointment to hear this news and apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. To reduce this inconvenience, we are delaying the end of life of the service until February 1, 2014 to give you time to begin using other identities on those sites where you use myOpenID today.

Speaking on behalf of Janrain, I truly appreciate your past support of myOpenID.

Sincerely,
Larry

—
Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain, Inc.

Submission + - New Smartphone Tech to Alert Pedestrians: 'You Are About to be Hit by a Car' (thecarconnection.com)

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Usually, smartphones are a problem for humans transporting themselves — a massive distraction. But Honda is working on a way to use smartphones to protect pedestrians from bad drivers. The 'V2P' (Vehicle-to-Pedestrian) tech uses a smartphone’s GPS and dedicated short range communications (DSRC) to warn drivers when a pedestrian say, steps out from behind a parked car. So the driver sees a dashboard message warning of an approaching pedestrian (which also notes whether said walker is using phone, texting or listening to music — which sort of shouldn't matter as you, uhm, *brake.*) The lucky pedestrian gets an alert on their phone telling them there's a DSRC-equipped car coming – that's if, say, actually looking at the road isn't telling you that already.
Mars

NASA: Curiosity Has Found Plastic On Mars 293

Posted by samzenpus from the mars-needs-organic-polymers dept.
dsinc writes "Last week Curiosity was able to use its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) device to confirm the discovery. A robotic arm with a complex system of Spectral Analysis devices was able to vaporize and identify gasses from the sample, concluding that it is in fact plastic. How plastic formed or ended up on the Martian surface is quite an exciting mystery that sparks many questions. The type of plastic sampled as we know so far can only be formed using petrochemicals, meaning not only that there could possibly be a source of oil on the Red Planet, but that somehow it got turned into plastic. Even more interesting is that oil or petrochemicals used to create this type of plastic are only known to come from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae, which geochemical processes convert into oil pointing to the earthshaking evidence that there was once life on mars. 'Right now we have multiple working hypotheses, and each hypothesis makes certain predictions about things like what the spherules are made of and how they are distributed,' said Curiosity's principal investigator, Steve Squyres, of Cornell University. 'Our job as we explore Matijevic Hill in the months ahead will be to make the observations that will let us test all the hypotheses carefully, and find the one that best fits the observations.'" Update: Yes, it's a hoax
AT&T

Ask Slashdot: AT&T's Data Usage Definition Proprietary? 562

Posted by Soulskill from the patented-arithmetic dept.
stox writes "As many of you know, AT&T has implemented caps on DSL usage. When this was implemented, I started getting emails letting me know my usage as likely to exceed the cap. After consulting their Internet Usage web page, I felt the numbers just weren't right. With the help of Tomato on my router, I started measuring my usage, and ended up with numbers substantially below what AT&T was reporting on a day-to-day basis. Typically around 20-30% less. By the way, this usage is the sum of inbound and outbound. At this point, I decided to contact AT&T support to determine what exactly they were defining as usage, as their web pages never really define it. Boy, did I get a surprise. After several calls, they finally told me they consider the methodology by which they calculate bandwidth usage to be proprietary. Yes, you read that right; it's a secret. They left me with the option to contact their executive offices via snail mail. Email was not an option. So, I bring my questions to you, all-knowing Slashdotters: are there any laws that require AT&T to divulge how they are calculating data usage? Should I contact my state's commerce commission or the FCC to attempt to get an answer to this?"

Comment Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi (Score 1) 376

by xemit (#41668537) Attached to: FCC To Allow Cable Companies To Encrypt Over-the-Air Channels
The only problem with that is that on the Internet side, the ISPs are trying to make customers pay if they are "power users". It's not much of a problem right now, but when more and more people start streaming video, sooner or later more people will fall into this category, which ends up in overrage like fees.
Biotech

Scientists Store Entire Textbook In DNA 160

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-where-are-the-tiny-spectacles? dept.
sciencehabit writes with this mind-boggling bit from Science Magazine: "When it comes to storing information, hard drives don't hold a candle to DNA. Our genetic code packs billions of gigabytes into a single gram. A mere milligram of the molecule could encode the complete text of every book in the Library of Congress and have plenty of room to spare. All of this has been mostly theoretical—until now. In a new study, researchers stored an entire genetics textbook in less than a picogram of DNA — one trillionth of a gram — an advance that could revolutionize our ability to save data."

Comment Re:Long time WoW player here (Score 1) 247

by xemit (#40766401) Attached to: <em>World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria</em> Launches On September 25
Long time player as well. To me without a thriving community no matter what new shinies that get thrown about, you'll eventually hit level cap and be bored. What made WOW fun was interacting with different people not just the guys that stay up for days to get to level cap, but also people like the single mother that works as a bartender, the retired vietnam vet, the guy that's just starting his career in IT, or people that are just graduating from high school trying to figure out what they were going to do in life. The beginning of Cataclysm ran off a lot of people; because, although they were fun to be around, some of the mechanics were brutal which led to people getting left out of dungeon/raid runs. It would be nice if there was something to do at the "end" of the expansions. The last time I logged on a couple of weeks ago, it was mostly people leveling alts and running content from the expansion before. There's nothing else really to do. Doing the same dailies that you did months ago is not fun and doing Looking for Raid is kind of boring as there's little effort that you need to put into it.
Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25 247

Posted by Soulskill from the getting-in-touch-with-your-fuzzy dept.
New submitter JestersGrind writes "Blizzard has announced that Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion of the popular World of Warcraft MMO, will be launched on September 25, 2012 and can be pre-ordered now." The game page has a good deal of information about the new expansion. The level cap is increased to 90, there is a new race (Pandaren) and a new class (Monk), and the talent system has been completely redesigned. They've added Challenge Modes for dungeons, which normalizes player gear and lets them compete to see who can clear it the fastest. The MMO-Champion website keeps track of all the minor details, if you're interested.
Bug

Avira Premium Anti-Virus Bug Disables Windows Machines 151

Posted by timothy from the malware-writers-have-won dept.
New submitter Adesso writes "Anti-virus vendor Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of Windows to block almost all critical applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."
Biotech

Norway Brings DNA Sequencing To National Healthcare 91

Posted by samzenpus from the giant-book-tha's-hidden-inside-you dept.
ananyo writes "Norway is set to become the first country to incorporate genome sequencing into its national health-care system. The Scandinavian nation, which has a population of 4.8 million, will use 'next-generation' DNA sequencers to trawl for mutations in tumors that might reveal which cancer treatments would be most effective. In its three-year pilot phase, the Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium will sequence the tumor genomes of 1,000 patients in the hope of influencing their treatments. It will also look at another 3,000 previously obtained tumor biopsies to get a better idea of the mutations in different cancers, and how they influence a patient's response to a drug. In a second phase, the project will build the laboratory, clinical and computing infrastructure needed to bring such care to the 25,000 Norwegians who are diagnosed with cancer each year. Similar projects are under way in the United Kingdom and at research hospitals in the United States, France and elsewhere. But Norway's will be among the first to look for tumor mutations using next-generation DNA sequencing rather than conventional genetic testing."
Privacy

Researchers Debut Proxy-Less Anonymity Service 116

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can't-see-me dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "As state-level censorship continues to grow in various countries around the globe in response to political dissent and social change, researchers have begun looking for news ways to help Web users get around these restrictions. Now, a group of university researchers has developed an experimental system called Telex that replaces the typical proxy architecture with a scheme that hides the fact that the users are even trying to communicate at all."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Our reruns are better than theirs." -- Nick at Nite

Close