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Comment Working 9-5 does not equal Burnout (Score 1) 275

Working 9-5 does not necessarily mean a developer is a burnout. As other posters indicated, they may have other priorities in their lives. A technical manager to be a good manager needs to have some working knowledge of newer technologies and methodologies. More importantly the manager needs to have the wisdom on when and when not to use it.

Submission + - DirectX 12 promises lower-level hardware access on multiple platforms

crookedvulture writes: Microsoft formally introduced its DirectX 12 API at the Game Developers Conference this morning. This next-gen programming interface will extend across multiple platforms, from PCs to consoles to mobile devices. Like AMD's Mantle API, it promises reduced CPU overhead and lower-level access to graphics hardware. But DirectX 12 won't be limited to one vendor's hardware. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm have all pledged to support the API, which will apparently work on a lot of existing systems. Intel's Haswell CPUs are compatible with DirectX 12, as are multiple generations of existing AMD and Nvidia GPUs. A DirectX 12 update is also coming to the Xbox One. The first games to support the API won't arrive until the holiday season of 2015, though. A preview release is scheduled for this year.

Comment Re:Physics. (Score 1) 237

Quoting from the Wikipedia article, "Ford spoke and voted at the February 7 meeting: "[A]nd if it wasn't for this foundation, these kids would not have a chance. And then to ask for me to pay it out of my own pocket personally, there is just, there is no sense to this. The money is gone, the money has been spent on football equipment ..."[120] City Council voted on a motion "[t]hat City Council rescind the previous decision made under Item CC52.1[122] and direct that no further action be taken on this matter", which carried by majority, 22 voting Yes, 12 No, with 11 absent." The conflict of interest was he spoke and voted on a matter before city council that affected him directly, whether he had to pay back $3500 to the contributors to the "Rob Ford Foundation".

Paul Magner that brought forth the court case is not a millionaire, although there may be a millionaire named Paul Magner living in Toronto.

"Ontario Superior Court Judge Hackland's ruling was released on November 26, 2012. Hackland found that Ford had violated the MCIA and declared his seat vacant, the decision to take effect in 14 days.[118] In his decision, Hackland disagreed with all of Ford's legal arguments. In his disposition, Hackland stated: "Ford's actions were not done by reason of inadvertence or of a good faith error in judgment. I am, therefore, required by s. 10(1)(a) of the MCIA to declare the respondent's seat vacant. In view of the significant mitigating circumstances surrounding the respondent's actions ... I decline to impose any further disqualification from holding office beyond the current term."[120] Opinions differed on whether the ruling allowed Ford to run in a by-election should Council order one to fill the vacancy. According to the City Solicitor, the ruling disallowed Ford from holding office again until 2014, the next term of office.[128] However, on November 30, Judge Hackland clarified his order, and did not bar Ford from running in a by-election, should one be held before 2014."

Then Ford appealed the decision, and won his appeal on what some view as a technicality, the "financial judgment was not under the City of Toronto Act or the Council Code of Conduct. Further, the sanction was beyond the authority of the City Council to enact."
Although he won the appeal, he was not awarded court costs.

Submission + - How to best determine if a video has been faked.

BStorm writes: The Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been making a headlines around the world, for allegedly smoking crack. This story was first broken by gawker.com, which is now crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question. What do you look for to determine if a video has been faked? Of course I am only interested in only the technical details and not the tawdry details related to this case ;) I live in Toronto, so the video still frame posted on Gawker certainly does look like Rob Ford.
Games

Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming 768

dartttt writes "In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support."

Comment Re:The real story... (Score 1) 73

Thanks for that comment. No go back into your troll-hole and read the book Knuckle Dragging for Cretins.

Politics being what it is, a politician will try to wrap themselves with the glory coming from a successful project. As with anyone they want to minimize the risk. Being a politician has nothing to do with their gender, only the glad-handing opportunism. To simplify it for your less developed neocortex:

  1. - Politicians want to look good
  2. - They will support projects with little risk
  3. - A politician can be a man or wormen

Being political is not for everyone, but having a politician who supports a large scale project, will ensure funding and support. If you tell your boss that a project will be successful and it will work and it doesn't. I would not be surprised if you do get a strip torn off since you made your boss look bad!

Comment Telidon aka videotex (Score 1) 326

Another example of prior art exists, and I quote from the IEEE article

One of the major improvements of Telidon over first generation videotex systems is its high-quality graphic capability. High resolution colour drawings, intricate shapes, even photographs are all possible through Telidon technology.

This was in 1981. In 1985 I did some work for a small Toronto based company, where they were developing both Telidon content and technology. I wrote a NAPLSP decoder/encoder written using C, lex and yacc. Everything was coded using a machine readable instruction set. Since everything was done using dialup modems, and 2400 baud was considered fast.

I also did a standalone NAPLSP server and browser that would display content. This was delivered to Xerox when they had their own retail stores in Toronto. It was commercialized to a certain degree.

There were several dozen public terminals in malls and other public areas in the city. It was a prime example of a technology that was a solution looking for a problem. Lack of bandwidth, and a lack of critical mass in terms of a wide spread adoption doomed it to failure. It was fun while it lasted.

It is regrettable that Michael Doyle had Microsoft settle with him. By settling with him, it gave him the war chest to proceed with further litigation. The concepts that he is claiming as his own, written up by Ted Nelson in Computer Lib (1974), and then became reality with Telidon (1981). Michaels patent is dated 1993. It is the interest of everyone to refute the patent by presenting prior art. Perhaps a Telidon terminal demonstration would be in order.

Handhelds

Why Amazon Can't Manufacture a Kindle In the US 598

theodp writes "Ever wonder why all those job listings for Amazon subsidiary Lab126 — the internal group behind the Kindle and, by all accounts, an upcoming Android tablet — have travel requirements? Over at Forbes, Steve Denning explains why Amazon can't make a Kindle in the U.S., and why that really does matter. 'The idea that there is a lot of outsourcing going on is hardly news', writes Denning. 'The idea that it is irreversible and destructive of the economy's ability to grow is less well known. Even so, it's not exactly new news: the HBR article that I cite is two years old. What is really new news is that (1) these fairly obvious truths haven't yet dawned on economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, CEOs, accountants, politicians, among others and (2) the way to manage in a radically different way to deal with these issues is now more fully articulated than it has been before.' Denning concludes his trilogy-of-management-terror by noting that the decline is also occurring in software."
Programming

Submission + - Lava Lamps are for Pussies! (papercut.com)

cdance writes: "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don't really fit into the culture of many modern development teams. There is now a solution. Retaliation is a new Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey. Development, unit testing and build scripts just got a little more fun and "productive"!"
Science

Submission + - Earth Ejecta Could Seed Life on Europa (technologyreview.com)

KentuckyFC writes: "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus. But very little would get to Mars because it would have to overcome both the Sun and the Earth's gravity. Now the biggest ever simulation of Earth ejecta confirms this result with a twist. The simulation shows that Jupiter is a much more likely destination than Mars. So bits of Earth could have ended up on Jovian satellites such as Europa. Astrobiologists estimate that Earth's hardiest organisms can survive up to 30,000 years in space, which means that if conditions are just right, Earth ejecta could seed life there."
Network

Submission + - Exabit Transmission Speeds Maybe Possible

adeelarshad82 writes: Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: "I graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits."

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