Recent Comments

They're like armpits!!!

Good comment! Different strokes for different folks, though. I actually prefer programs that astound you from the start with all the options. It impresses me with how much the thing can already do, and I make an effort to learn what those options are and how to use them.

I use Adobe Acrobat XI at work now (not Reader) and they just went through this philosophical shift from the last version. In the last version there were tons of tricks and functions, and that's how I learned that it was even possible to deskew slanted images, reduce the DPI resolution and/or the file size, downsample bitmaps, and the like. XI does all those things too but looking at the menu you'd be hardpressed to guess it's possible. Instead you have to enable "toolsets" and that makes different tools exposed. Point is: the old version showed you everything it could do, while the new version you have to suspect it's possible and then hunt for the place to make it happen. I prefer the former.

That said, I recognize I'm in the minority. It seems most "modern" computer users are trying as hard as possible to not have to think, and expect software to be simplified down/dumbed down to where its interface meets their lighter cognitive load (so to speak). Maybe it's a generational thing.

Also interesting blog on upcoming wayland support in KDE.

So is KDE5 available in the default package sources of Ubuntu based distros? Or do you have to wait until October? Or go through some exotic manual installation? Or maybe a PPA?

I guess you can tell I'm a vim user, not an emacs one. :)

I'll have you know, I was born without a nose and find this deeply offensive!

Fo' real though, I actually kind of dislike how cluttered most KDE apps are. I don't consider it a good thing to include everything and the kitchen sink into a program. I'd rather be given options for realistic use cases. So that's why I tend to prefer the Gnome stuff (that and the fact that they pull less libraries; have they fixed that?). If a piece of software doesn't do enough for me, I'll look XFCE's way or try to find a GTK non-gnome app that has what I need. So for example, they made nautilius pretty useless, so I'm running thunar. But when it comes to music players, I really just want a play button and a slider.... So the gnome player is fine by me.

I'd prefer if KDE programes were more extendable, rather than being cluttered by default.

OCaml, My Caml!!!

These ones float around in space, so might not work as well on earth (unless you wanted to roll them down a hill or something)

unless you consider "indefinite further research studies for interested scientists" a public good

Considering that's pretty much how science has always worked, well, yes, it is. There will never come a time when science does not raise more questions than it answers, and given the results of that process so far, it's hard to see how it could be anything else.

I agree it's not good to put all of your eggs in one basket. Look at the huge target society has developed that is Windows. No matter who the hackers may be, if we focus on using one single OS or software bundle, we are making their lives easier, and the target larger. There needs to be competing or at least different, friendly, options in OS and software. For a distribution that touts security and anonymity, they really dropped the ball. Zero-days are no joke. Diversity here will help by offering other, possibly more secure alternatives.

This also reminds me of a change they made in Android not too long ago where they randomized the place in memory where running applications were stored. Prior to that I think it was some standard location that allowed for easier exploitation.

Swift apparently will replace objective C. Given the timeframe stated it is possible that Swift will be replaced or on a downwards trend in a decade. Only time will tell, but for now Swift isn't a good bet.

Good observation. Look at COBOL: still in use after all of this time and highly likely to still be in use a decade from now as we still don't have anything to truly replace it. SAP comes close but is not mature enough. Not Java. Not C or any derivative.

MicroXwin is a non-free kernel module. Here is the LICENSE file:

Following files :
libX11.so.6.3.0
libXcursor.so.1.0.2
libXext.so.6.4.0
libXrender.so.1.3.0
x11.ko
are the intellectual property of VolksPC LLC, CA, USA (http://www.volkspc.org).
These are made available for evaluation purpose or non-commercial use.
For commercial use please contact info@volkspc.org.

Cripes, just saw this was posted at at least two other sites. It's a big story with important consequences - get the word out!

because I think plug-in free development -- that is effective -- would be a great advance. How does one determine if arm.js is going to be a solution with legs though, if one doesn't really have time to play around with new APIs anymore?

The promise of a computer is that it is a device to do anything you want (with a certain amount of effort). The promise of applications is they do specific things you want done (with minimal effort). Basically, we all want a computer that can run all old, current, and new applications as they are developed. What contiually amazes me is how fragmented the computing landscape is and continues to be given these basic wants that seem pretty obvious. I applaud the MicroXWin project for merging Debian and Android, but I suspect it is almost like p***ing into the wind in the combat against fragmentation. At the moment, I figure I need access to about 5 or 10 computers/tablets/phones just to be able to use all of the different applications I find rewarding. Pretty crazy really.

well, I think it is an aspect of Cartesian philosphy that to know anything about one thing you have to know everything about its context (i.e., all of the boundary conditions). This idea strongly influences how our scientific culture tends to evaluate scientific results (since we owe a lot to Descartes). Basically, this idea makes incomplete results (almost always the case in science) "difficult to apply" to any practical decision making. In my opinion, it is one of the more subtle reasons why people can justify ignoring scientific results while claiming to respect the scientific method. As you say, this is all great for scientists who want to do more studies, but is pretty poor for students of life who want to know whether they should grow big plants or not :). I suggest we grow a lot of plants that grow large and see if we can effect the global contribution of primary productivity :).

I feel there's a war on Tor/TAILS.

When it ends and Tor is thrown to the wind, they will continue their attacks against any sort of privacy service which doesn't pay nice with TPTB.

That's spooky and weird. Having something like Tor benefits everyone, even the military. Wonder if it was CMU's - I mean CMU's lawyers' - own choice, or what? Were they asked to keep it down while someone knuckles down and deals with the zero days vulns?

So, while the Japanese are working on freakily-realistic anamatronic toys in short, leather skirts and knee high socks, these guys are building the stuff of nightmares. That's it, I'm moving to Japan while the rest of you guys get munched on by the honking, metallic freaks.

Talk on cracking Internet anonymity service Tor withdrawn from conference

By Joseph Menn | SAN FRANCISCO, July 21

"A heavily anticipated talk on how to identify users of the Tor Internet privacy service has been withdrawn from the upcoming Black Hat security conference.

A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/cybercrime-conference-talk-idUSL2N0PW14320140721
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456700/black-hat-presentation-on-tor-suddenly-cancelled.html
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/22/is-tor-truly-anonymising-conference-cancelled

Perhaps this is/was beyond the scope of the given study.

... and if so, it's yet another maddening example of a study only barely answering some questions while opening up so many other lines of inquiry that it fails to do much good at all, unless you consider "indefinite further research studies for interested scientists" a public good.

I would pay on the order of a $100 to $10,000 dollars to have the ability to produce a detailed map, digital elevation model, and vegetation map of my property using a flying camera/sensor/mapper -- would be absolutely fantastic for planning purposes from building houses, outbuildings, to planting gardens and so on. I wonder what the cost is to buy or rent this technology at a consumer level.

S.P.H.E.R.E.S., eh? I've started to think we should just come up with nice words or names to label our cool new devices or projects and forget about trying to come up with the Acronym connection... sometimes -- as in this case -- it just seems we are trying way too hard...

...while the basic conclusion is clear and presumably backed up by the analysis, the abstract leaves open the question of how climate indirectly influences the size and age of the plants... Perhaps this is/was beyond the scope of the given study.

Much as a I dislike it, I have been seeing a lot of C#/ASP jobs over the last year or two.

How the hell is it subjective? What are you going on about? Businesses HAVE summarily rejected Win8 and it IS a big question as to whether Win9 will win them back.

No bias at all. You're being an ass. Phil is that you again?

And this is coming from me who answered No! in the very first post. The question was easy and a little lazy, but not even in the neighborhood of biased. You're just being a dick.

BigDog is old news. BD has made even more terrifying robots now.

I think Bryan's right - there might be a market for the military stuff, but at the moment the casual consumer has neither need nor desire for a home robot of any type. That's what makes the BigDog robot so interesting and so scary at the same time: the military potential for that beast is pretty darned obvious. I'd hate to see one bearing down on me and gaining speed.

Another important thing is being able to recognize the right tool to be using. You cannot do this properly without being familiar with a variety of languages. By not making the right choice, you only make your and your coworkers' jobs more difficult.

Think of the guy who writes full "applications" in VBA though Excel. Don't be that guy.

iRobot went where the money is: defense robots. They've repurposed those same bots into hazmat, security, and disaster response as well. Home user sales aren't worth enough for them to put the resources into.

There are a lot of companies doing cool things with robots, but the publicity isn't there because they aren't trying to sell to the average person.

With all the emphasis they get in sci-fi movies and tv shows, I really thought we'd have more robots by now. But as a marketable product, there just aren't that many things that they can actually do today.

Robotic maid? Not quite there yet - unless you count Roomba. Unfortunately, the Roomba products haven't progressed at all. They are the same designs from 15 years ago with hardly any computational or mechanical advances. If they followed the same Moore's Law curve as the rest of the computer industry, they should have been bipedal androids that can walk and talk by now. Instead, they are the same dumb "Drive forward until you hit something, then backup, take a slight turn, and try again" that they have always been. Although the company claims to have sold over 10 million of the devices, they have almost nothing to show for it.

Maybe Intel can shake things up a little with their Jimmy robot.

Install an air shower, maybe. I wonder if in a few years time we will see people being turned down from jobs for smoking.

When a coworker that works in the same room as you comes in reeking of smoke, you suffer because of their habit.

Unfortunately, speaking from experience.

Seems like both Objective C and Swift are missing from the poll.

I picked all of 'em. 'Cause if you're any good at all in whatever you choose, you'll find work.

There are several possible paths. For example OS development (C/C++) do not use the same languages as web development (Python / PHP). Then we have many companies running apps made in Java internally.

If I would want to maximize my chance for getting employed as a programmer I would do the following things:
1. Learn myself functional programming because:

• Functional programming is appearing in almost any programming language nowadays. Even C++ has been adding lambda functions.
• With functional programming you get often shorter and more easy to read code. You simply become a better programmer by knowing it.
• Less bugs.

2. Pick a non-functional programming language according to the field I hope to work in.

My personal choice would be to learn Clojure and Java. Clojure is running on the Java platform, so it works well together with pure Java. This would allow you to write part of you programs in Java and parts in Clojure.

Regardless if one likes Java or not, it is not going to disappear that fast as many business apps are written in Java. Then we have the whole Android system running Java. Many enterprise websites are served from Java servers.

That's interesting. I've always preferred flat looks for computers. For instance, I like the scrollbar on Firefox much better than those in Qt or Gtk. I don't mind the fake 3d shadows, lighting gradients etc. but when I see a heavily decorated application, it reminds of cheap plastic toys. Default theme for Java Swing is one example, it looks so "fake".

Sadly, I will back this as being true. Even if you don't code it yourself lots of useful tools are written in PHP and it pays to be able to fix it if need be.
For example, piwik

OCaml. OCaml? I thought we were voting on languages

Editors, please don't fall into the trap of adding questions to articles. The questions always show a bias, this "But is this enough to woo people off of Windows 7 and get them to move to Windows 9?" is definitely a bias. Comments would have gone there anyway. If they didn't go there then the question would have been irrelevant.

Please keep the articles objective and leave the bias to the comments.

Make him work in the garage/outside? Kidding - in this society, there's almost no way around it. Americans smoke way less than Europeans though. There were times in Paris that everyone on every side of me - including young women way too young to smoke - were puffing away like smokestacks. I felt like I was slipping out of the zone of 'second hand smoke" and rapidly approaching "first hand smoke."

Not every company uses the same language. Pick up *any* language, learn it, then understand the techniques involved in writing software so you can switch to any language. In the enterprise, being able to pull data from an embedded module through a serial channel into a nearby computer running windows so it can be logged to a back-end system running linux isn't uncommon. Make sure you understand how data is moved from A to B to C, and be able to at least read the three or four languages involved so you can help troubleshoot it when things inevitably break. Being a programmer is also about problem solving, not just banging out code. Understanding and applying root cause analysis is critical to your success.

I've got a coworker that routinely takes smoke breaks outside at least twice a day, and every time he enters our lab he reeks of smoke. So, not only does he smell like an ash tray, but we are subjected to breathing in the harmful residual particles...great. They already make them smoke outside under a car port type shelter at least 100ft away from the office building entrance. How can you remove the residue from a smoker before they enter the building? I think we are all just subject to some degree of health degradation due to their unhealthy habit.

Go exposes you to (maybe) unfamiliar paradigms and is inherently concurrent, even if you don't use it, it is good if you know it. It also encourages you to think more about structure of your program and not how it executes. There's a talk by Rob Pike called concurrency is not parallelism or something like that, every software engineer should know the difference and golang shows you the way. As a bonus you can use it for general purpose, for writing system programs and even web apps. Since I started with go, I find myself using less and less python.

My unscientific estimate: 85% of the WWW is running PHP. Like that language or hate it, it's going to get you employed if you know it. Even if you're just doing freelance gigs templating Wordpress sites, or some horrible job like that where you're competing with half the 3rd world. PHP sells.

Seriously. I got my start doing computer aided drafting in about 1988. And we were using absolutely primiitive PC hardware by today's standards: I didn't like computers at the time so didn't pay any attention to specs, but I know those PCs or XTs or whatever were using Hercules cards and maybe CGA graphics [?] to run graphics on one monitor and the text interface on a second. And we were designing bridges etc. Fast forward a couple of years to where I'm doing 3D renders of amorphously-shaped structures (solid waste landfills, if you must). Was using AutoCAD 12 or 13 on a 386 and 486 (big difference between those two machines, I remember well). Perfectly usable, perfectly functional: I could easily imagine using the same kit today to do serious engineering work.

Tell me why my modern laptop with 2GB of RAM isn't really adequate to run even the operating system alone? Holy crap - it's nothing more than hardware interface, file manager and desktop metaphor, memory and peripheral control, and the sending of bits to a screen. What the hell happened?

Okay: 4 GB of RAM is enough for anyone, especially the way that Metro and iOS and Android practically force everyone to be a single tasker, and especially with the obnoxiousness of browser centric "cloud" computing and web services.

There's nearly nothing that won't run adequately in 4 GB of RAM in 2014.

Batteries last longer if they are charged slowly. I used to be a fan of radio controlled cars (the enthusiast kind, not the ones you find at Toys'r'Us.) You realize, quite early, that battery packs that you charge with the "quick 15 minute" charger loose potency much faster than the packs that you charge with the "slow overnight" charger. The same applies to the full scale electric vehicle batteries. In fact, the manual even warns that frequently using the extra quick charge ports that you find at 3^rd party charging stations will degrade your battery.

Lithium Ion batteries also last longer if you do not constantly bring them to 100% and 0%. Ideally, just like in your cellphone or your laptop, you keep the charge in the nice middle area. The Leaf has a convenient "80%" button that stops the charge before the battery gets too full. The first low range warning beeps occur at around 16 miles remaining mark. Keeping the battery within the 20-70 mile zone limits the range a bit, but increases the life expectancy of the battery.

Slash and burn! No sense keeping options that aren't currently adding any value. I haven't seen anyone posting any code, really. If it becomes necessary later we can find another way.