Comment Computer Science (Score 4, Insightful) 203
Stop asking software engineer candidates about computer science, unless you have a good reason. Ask them about software engineering.
The Science Credibility Bubble 1747
eldavojohn writes "The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses, 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on in that vein, saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. In doing so, it will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of all sciences without fully seeing proof of it, but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"
Comment So start selling femtocell extenders (Score 1) 551
As a customer, I would *love* to buy AT&T Femtocell devices to have in my home and my office. The value proposition here seems excellent for all parties. AT&T gets load off their cell network so they can save much of that $18 billion upgrade cost they're facing. As a customer, I spend a small one-time cost (the price of a month or two of cell phone service, say), and in return, my cell phone can actually make calls reliably, for a change. When are they going to get these out of beta and let people start really using them?
Lala Invents Network DRM 212
An anonymous reader writes in with a CNet story about the record label-backed music company Lala, which claims to have invented "Network DRM." Lala has filed for a patent on moving DRM from a file wrapper, like Windows Media and FairPlay, to the server. Digital music veteran Michael Robertson has quotes from the patent application on his blog. (Here is the application.) Lala describes an invention that monitors every access, allows only authorized devices (so far there are none), blocks downloads, and can revoke content at the labels' request.
Google Native Client Puts x86 On the Web 367
t3rmin4t0r writes "Google has announced its Google native client, which enables x86 native code to be run securely inside a browser. With Java applets already dead and buried, this could mean the end of the new war between browsers and the various JavaScript engines (V8, Squirrelfish, Tracemonkey). The only question remains whether it can be secured (ala ActiveX) and whether the advantages carry over onto non-x86 platforms. The package is available for download from its Google code site. Hopefully, I can finally write my web apps in asm." Note: the Google code page description points out that this is not ready for production use: "We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities." Reader eldavojohn links to a technical paper linked from that Google code page [PDF] titled "Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code," and suggests this in-browser Quake demo, which requires the Native Code plug-in.
Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel 114
KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"
"Iron Man" Release Brings Down Paramount's Servers 283
secmartin writes "Shortly after the release of Iron Man on Blu-ray on October 1, people started complaining of defective discs; the problem turned out to be that all the Blu-ray players downloading additional content brought down Paramount's BD-Live servers, causing delays while loading the disc. Which really makes you wonder what will happen when they decide to shut down this service in a couple of years."
Comment I pity the fool who doesn't use this Python page (Score 1) 538
This Python page is the best language reference page I've ever seen. And it's not just a quick reference. Once you have a vague familiarity with Python, or possibly even just a familiarity with scripting languages, this page is the fastest way to learn the bulk of the language and its libraries.
The only other language reference I've seen that comes close is the VisiBone JavaScript+DOM reference cards. It defines Javascript and its browser environment (DOM) in well-thought-out JavaScript snippets. But as far as I'm aware, you have to buy them in glossy spiral-bound cards; you can't just view them for free on the web.
Feed Engadget: iPhone's first sketchy battery replacement kit appears (engadget.com)
Filed under: Cellphones
When the time came and your battery died, you were probably thinking you'd have to send your iPhone off to Apple as part of their expensive and complicated battery replacement program -- but now you've got a sketchy DIY option instead. Once again, a mysterious Chinese company has stepped in and "created" a "solution" to your problem with its iPhone battery replacement kit. For just $20, which is cheap enough to elicit genuine concern, you get a 1400mAh, 3.7V iPhone battery, some type of screwdriver-like tool, a strange plastic shiv, and an instruction manual (presumably in English, but you never know). All you have to do is crack open your $600 phone, de-solder your old battery and solder in the new one... and probably some other, more complicated stuff too. At this price, it seems unlikely that this battery won't explode, so buy at your own risk, and definitely try at your own risk.[Via I4U, thanks Luigi]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Comment From "The UNIX Programming Environment" (Score 5, Informative) 548
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, chapter 2.6 -- "The Directory Hierarchy":
"/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as /etc/getty, which initializes a terminal connection for /bin/login. /etc/rc is a file of shell commands that is executed after the system is bootstrapped. /etc/group list the members of each group."
I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of /etc, so that's the best I could do from my own bookshelf.
"/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as
I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of
Reverse Multithreading CPUs 263
microbee writes "The register is reporting that AMD is researching a new CPU technology called 'reverse multithreading', which essentially does the opposite of hyperthreading in that it presents multiple cores to the OS as a single-core processor." From the article: "The technology is aimed at the next architecture after K8, according to a purported company mole cited by French-language site x86 Secret. It's well known that two CPUs - whether two separate processors or two cores on the same die - don't generate, clock for clock, double the performance of a single CPU. However, by making the CPU once again appear as a single logical processor, AMD is claimed to believe it may be able to double the single-chip performance with a two-core chip or provide quadruple the performance with a quad-core processor."
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. Seek simplicity and distrust it. -- Whitehead.
