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Comment Re:Listen up newbie... (Score 2) 360

Of course :-)

more webapp-focussed - http://blog.moonfruit.com/post/2012/08/08/Perl-Application-Developer

or more systems focussed (scaling, soa etc ) - http://blog.moonfruit.com/post/2012/08/08/Perl-Platform-Developer

Bizarrely no-one put contact details on those blog posts, but email jobs@moonfruit.com if you are interested. 61 would not be our oldest programmer :-)

Comment Re:Listen up newbie... (Score 1) 360

You're not too old for a permanent job at 61! Srsly, how many permanent staff stay more than 3-6 years anyway?

{spam}btw we are hiring perl programmers in london (w12/oxford circus) and tbh I'd love to hire someone who is keeping up and interested in new things - nosql, scalability, soa etc{/spam} - seems like lovefilm slurped up every perl programmer left in london :-)

Comment Re:I'm an ICT teacher.... (Score 1) 273

IMO the cool thing about the raspi is that you can just give one each to your kids. The laptop is still sufficiently expensive to be shared, and fixing it so the others can get to wikipedia for homework research is sufficiently annoying and time consuming to discourage too much messing about.

I gave my 6-year-old his own account on my macbook; within a week he had magically managed to change some font anti-aliasing option that affected all users. Took me hours to fix, he now has a completely locked-down account. I can give him a raspi of his own and if it breaks everyone can still use the family computer while he uses his sister's raspi to automatically reimage the OS on his SD card.

Comment Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score 2) 273

Given that they have been required to produce 'posters' since primary school and the first thing they want to do is change the font to comic sans, *yes*, they all know how to open a document and change a font.

At least since year 2 (6 year olds), anyway. TFA is about secondary ICT, which is incredibly *still* about powerpoint/word up to GCSE level.

When I asked one teacher if they taught any programming in ICT responded 'There's no point, because any language we teach them will be obsolete by the time they leave' (he didn't see the irony that he was teaching kids to use office 2003 in 2011). Would love to see the look on his face today :-)

Comment Shoddy journalism and misleading statistics. (Score 2) 184

The source says 'children as young as four' have mobiles, meaning that 55% of all 4-9 year olds must have a mobile in order for the "33% of under tens" to be true

One-third of 8-10 year olds I can believe (most people I know are getting their kids phones when they start secondary school at 10-11), but 55% of 4-9 less so.

Comment Re:You're Talking Points Are Two Years Old (Score 1) 86

"The consoles are close enough in raw power that the talents of the developer and style of the artists is far more important than the console."

360 Theoretical performance: 1TFLOP

PS3 Theoretical performance: 2 TFLOPs

There is a nice gap, there, in raw power.

There's a nice gap there in *theoretical* raw power. As the OP pointed out, in reality there's pretty much nothing in it. And the point is moot, as the wii is running them both ragged in terms of sales.

As a wise man once said: 'in theory there's no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is.'

Data Storage

Submission + - Solid State Drives tested with TRIM support (pcper.com)

Vigile writes: Despite the rising excitement over SSDs, some of it has been tempered by performance degradation issues. The promised land is supposed to be the mighty TRIM command — a way for the OS to indicate to the SSD a range of blocks that are no longer needed because of deleted files. Apparently Windows 7 will implement TRIM of some kind but for now you can use a proprietary TRIM tool on a few select SSDs using Indilinx controllers. A new article at PC Perspective evaluates performance on a pair of Indilinx drives as well as the TRIM utility and its efficacy.

Comment Great idea (Score 2, Interesting) 345

Seriously, this sounds like Good News for the industry. An API for set top boxes that is more open than OpenTV, and has a sensible desktop client which can preview what it will look like on deployed machines?

Flash can scale for 4:3 and 16:9 machines instead of having a single bitmap font (cf: opentv, mheg, liberate). It antialiases fonts properly (cf: liberate, or 'at all' wrt opentv/mheg). It renders predictably (cf: ce-html). It allows you to use your own display fonts (cf: liberate, mheg), and predict how much content will display per page programatically (scrolling bad, paging good).

It allows for compression of content using zlib, for vector, resolution-independent graphics (smaller than the equivalent, SD-res jpeg).

I'm just hoping it gets deployed widely and that they find a sensible way to have a hardware player.

Comment Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score 3, Informative) 183

Which is why fusion-io is different from normal SSDs. The devices have 20% or more spare capacity and use a log-based FS with block mapping, so your writes don't go through the read/erase/rewrite cycle.

Obviously there is a little slowdown once the 20% has been used up and it goes into garbace-collection mode, but there are plenty of white papers around about steady-state usage (ie once it has started GC) and you can opt to use even less of the physical capacity in order to get more performance. See http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/OracleFlash15.pdf for example.

Patents

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."

Comment Re:FF 3 in portage (Score 1) 138

a 65kb html page is going to be a problem in any browser. I've just tried this in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari. Only the Webkit browsers seem not to hang.

Not hanging in Opera 7.62/win here, nor chrome . FF 3.0.3 confirmed hanging on inline search. The page itself doesn't seem to be a problem, but searching it does.

Science

Scientists Turn Tequila Into Diamonds 249

MaxwellEdison writes "Researchers, oddly enough from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, have found a way to make diamond films using tequila. They were originally testing methods of creating the films with organic solutions like acetone when it was noticed the ideal ratios of water and ethanol turned out to be about 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. '"To dissipate any doubts, one morning on the way to the lab I bought a pocket-size bottle of cheap white tequila and we did some tests," Apátiga said. "We were in doubt over whether the great amount of chemicals present in tequila, other than water and ethanol, would contaminate or obstruct the process, it turned out to be not so. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds."'"
Unix

NYT Ponders the Future of Solaris In a Linux/Windows World 340

JerkBoB links to a story at the New York Times about the future prospects of Sun's Solaris, excerpting: "Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?"

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