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Comment Re:Developers hate Agile too (Score 1) 597

by 5plicer (#43921311) Attached to: Why Your Users Hate Agile

If you truly couldn't care less about what your team is doing, then they aren't your team and/or you're not a team player.

Or your company's definition of "team" is simply a collection of people working under the same manager, where each person might be working on completely unrelated systems. For instance, although I'm very social at work, I am the sole developer of one particular system. My system interacts with dozen of other systems, but no one working on those other systems in on my team. Do I think my team is "agile"? Hell no! But upper management seems to throw that word around a lot.
Programming

Sorting Algorithms — Boring Until You Add Sound 118

Posted by Soulskill from the bloop-bleep-bloop dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Anyone who's ever taken a programming course or tried to learn how to code out of a book will have come across sorting algorithms. Bubble, heap, merge — there's a long list of methods for sorting data. The subject matter is fairly dry. Thankfully, someone has found a way to not only make sorting more interesting, but easier to remember and understand, too."
Java

Introducing JITB — a Flash Player Built On the JVM 126

Posted by Soulskill from the stay-as-long-as-you-like dept.
MBCook writes "Joa Ebert has started working on a new program called JITB. Announced in a talk at FITC San Fran, it's a Flash player written to use the Java JVM to run ActionScript, and in a simple graphics test case (making 1 million calls to flash.geom.Point) was 30x faster than Adobe's Flash player. There is an impressive demo video on YouTube showing the point test."
Biotech

Scientists Develop Brain-Microchip Bridge 118

Posted by samzenpus from the man-and-machine dept.
dreampod writes "Canadian scientists have developed a microchip capable of monitoring the electrical and chemical communication channels between individual neurons. This is the first time scientists have been able to monitor the interaction between brain cells on such a precise and subtle level. In addition to providing the ability to see more easily the impact of drugs on various mental disorders during testing, this provides one of the first fundamental steps towards real mind-machine interface."
Earth

X Prize To Offer Millions For Gulf Oil Cleanup Solution 171

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-pull-the-drain-plug-and-refill dept.
Jamie noted that X Prize is offering prizes for a solution to the Gulf Coast oil clean up. This is in addition to categories for mapping genomes, making an incredibly fuel efficient car, and exploring the moon's surface with a robotic vehicle.
Image

School District Drops 'D' Grades 617

Posted by samzenpus from the pass-fail-education dept.
Students in one New Jersey school district will no longer be able to squeak by in class after the Morris County School Board approved dropping the D grade. Beginning in the fall students who don't get a C or higher will get an F on their report card. "I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
Science

Possible Room Temperature Superconductor Achieved 264

Posted by kdawson from the beware-of-puppeteer-breeding-experiments dept.
TechkNighT_1337 sends news that surfaced on the Next Big Future blog, concerning research out of the University of Bengal, in India. The report is of a possible superconducting effect at ambient room temperatures. Here is the paper on the ArXiv. (Note that this research has not been peer-reviewed or published yet.) "We report the observation of an exceptionally large room-temperature electrical conductivity in silver and aluminum layers deposited on a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) substrate. The surface resistance of the silver-coated samples also shows a sharp change near 313 K. The results are strongly suggestive of a superconductive interfacial layer, and have been interpreted in the framework of Bose-Einstein condensation of bipolarons as the suggested mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. ... The fact that the results described above have been obtained from very simply-fabricated systems, without the use of any sophisticated set-up and any special attention being given to crystal purity, atomic perfection, lattice matching, etc. suggests that the physical process is a universal one, involving only an interface between a metal and an insulator with a large low-frequency dielectric constant. We note in passing that PZT and the cuprates have similar (perovskite or perovskite-based) crystal structures. This resemblance may provide an added insight into the basic mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity."
Java

Java IO Faster Than NIO 270

Posted by kdawson from the question-conventional-wisdom dept.
rsk writes "Paul Tyma, the man behind Mailinator, has put together an excellent performance analysis comparing old-school synchronous programming (java.io.*) to Java's asynchronous programming (java.nio.*) — showing a consistent 25% performance deficiency with the asynchronous code. As it turns out, old-style blocking I/O with modern threading libraries like Linux NPTL and multi-core machines gives you idle-thread and non-contending thread management for an extremely low cost; less than it takes to switch-and-restore connection state constantly with a selector approach."
Censorship

China Censors HIV/AIDS Awareness Documentary 120

Posted by Soulskill from the learn-it-the-hard-way dept.
eldavojohn writes "Amnesty International is reporting an unusual case of censorship in which Chinese police questioned HIV/AIDS workers in China and instructed them to cancel an airing of a documentary made by Aizhixing Institute of Health Education on the disease. The director of that NGO recently left China after constant police harassment. The canceled documentary was about Tian Xi, a patient who contracted HIV by blood transfusion at age 9."
Communications

When Telemarketers Harass Telecoms Companies 234

Posted by timothy from the listen-through-the-glitches dept.
farnz writes "Andrews & Arnold, a small telecoms company in the UK, have recently been hit with an outbreak of illegal junk calls. Unlike larger firms, they've come up with an innovative response — assign 4 million numbers to play recordings to the telemarketers, put them on the UK's Do-Not-Call list and see what happens. Thus far, the record is over 3 minutes before a telemarketer works out what's going on." The sound quality (and the satisfying humor) of the recording gets better as it goes on.
Space

Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble 145

Posted by Soulskill from the reminds-me-of-a-buddy-of-mine dept.
PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."

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