mikejuk writes "The Raspberry Pi might be a cheap and reasonably powerful but it has a tough learning curve due to the Linux OS it uses. Adafruit, better known for their hardware, are working on a WebIDE which you can use to program the Pi without having to set things up. You write the code in a browser and run it on the Pi using a web server hosted by the Pi. It sounds crazy but if it can make the Pi more approachable then perhaps it could turn out to be an educational powerhouse."
jfruh writes "Software firm FreeCause made a bit of a splash with a policy that requires all its employees — including marketers, finance, etc. — to write JavaScript code. And not just "code to learn basics of what JavaScript can do," but "write code that will be used in production." Phil Johnson, a tech writer and editor who himself once coded for a living, thinks this is nuts, a recipie for miserable workers and substandard code."
RocketAcademy writes "Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two is in the final stages of preparation for powered flight. The suborbital spacecraft, built by Scaled Composites, has successfully completed airspeed, angle-of-attack, center-of-gravity, and structural tests during unpowered glide flights. It is now on track for powered glide flights by the end of this year. Meanwhile, in the hangar next door, XCOR Aerospace continues to work on the Lynx spacecraft, expected to begin powered flight tests early next year. Some exclusive photos provide a sneak peak at things to come." Also to watch for in the world of private space launches, next month (possibly as early as the 8th), SpaceX has another launch scheduled to reach the ISS.
An anonymous reader writes "'If you are one of the six million Virgin subscribers, you are at the whim of anyone who doesn't like you.' The Hacker News describes how the username and password system used by Virgin Mobile to let users access their account information is inherently weak and open to abuse." Computerworld also describes the problem: essentially, hard-coded, brute-force guessable passwords, coupled with an inadequate mechanism for reacting to failed attempts to log on.
Reader Presto Vivace blesses us with news that the state of New Jersey "has banned motorists from making big smiles [for their license pictures] because such expressions don't work with facial recognition software." Now that passports are by decree grim and glasses-free, I'm expecting the next phase to involve the banning of facial hair, lips, and any hair that blocks the ears.
New submitter tavi.g writes "Working for an ISP, along with my main job (networking) I get to create some useful code (Bash and Python) that's running on various internal machines. Among them: glue scripts, Cisco interaction / automatization tools, backup tools, alerting tools, IP-to-Serial OOB stuff, even a couple of web applications (LAMPython and CherryPy). Code has piled up — maybe over 20,000 lines — and I need a way to reliably work on it and deploy it. So far I used headers at the beginning of the scripts, but now I'm migrating the code over to Bazaar with TracBzr, because it seems best for my situation. My question for the Slashdot community is: in the case of single developer (for now), multiple machines, and a small-ish user base, what would be your suggestions for code versioning and deployment, considering that there are no real test environments and most code just goes into production ? This is relevant because lacking a test environment, I got used to immediate feedback from the scripts, since they were in production, and now a versioning system would mean going through proper deployment/rollback in order to get real feedback."
First time accepted submitter David Off writes "In 2008 a Skype user looking for cheap rate gateway numbers found himself connected to the Bank of France where he was asked for a password. He typed 1 2 3 4 5 6 and found himself connected to their computer system. The intrusion was rapidly detected but led to the system being frozen for 48 hours as a security measure. Two years of extensive international police inquiries eventually traced the 37-year-old unemployed Breton despite the fact he'd used his real address when he registered with Skype. The man was found not guilty in court today (Original, in French) of maliciously breaking into the bank."
Nerval's Lobster writes "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is unapologetic about his love for Facebook. 'I think all software is going to look like Facebook,' he told media and analysts at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. 'Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.' If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem. Even as Benioff touted his Facebook love, however, Salesforce is veering away from the Facebook model in one key way: whereas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt his company focused too much on HTML5 for its mobile apps, choosing to focus instead on native-app development, Salesforce is embracing HTML5 for its Salesforce Touch app, which delivers Salesforce data such as Chatter feeds and contacts to a variety of mobile devices."
Hugh Pickens writes "Kia Makarechi reports that Neil Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists but is more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality. 'It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,' says Young. 'I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.' Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and is pushing a new format called Pono that would be 'high-resolution' digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording. Young wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that and hopes that 'some rich guy' will solve the problem of creating and distributing '100 percent' of the sound in music. 'Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.'"
First time accepted submitter jaymz666 writes "Can a court really order you to delete a Facebook account? When Asher initially appeared in court after the July 20 accident, the judge told her to delete her Facebook account, Kittinger said. Asher did not take it seriously, and was charged with contempt of court when the judge learned her Facebook page was still active. Seems like a big overreach."
McGruber writes "Arthur Firstenberg, the Santa Fe, New Mexico man who sued his neighbors, claiming their Wi-Fi made him sick, has lost what might have been his final round in court. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, state District Judge Sarah Singleton ruled that no scientific study has yet proved that electromagnetic stimulus adversely impacts personal health. While he lost the lawsuit, he did score a victory: the neighbors he sued have moved out of Santa Fe."
An anonymous reader writes with an item from The Next Web: "Security researchers participating in the Mobile Pwn2Own contest at the EuSecWest Conference in Amsterdam [Wednesday] demonstrated how to hack Android through a Near Field Communication (NFC) vulnerability. The 0day exploit was developed by four MWR Labs employees (two in South Africa and two in the UK) for a Samsung Galaxy S 3 phone running Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Two separate security holes were leveraged to completely take over the device, and download all the data from it."
jones_supa writes "The current long-term support version of Ubuntu (12.04) has been experiencing a remarkably tough-to-crack and widely affecting bug related to laptops using an Intel graphics solution. When the lid is closed, every now and then the desktop freezes and only the mouse cursor can be moved. Compiz is usually found hung in the process, switching to a VT afterwards works. The Freedesktop guys are also informed. Have Slashdotters been bitten by this bug and possibly could offer some detective work to help the OSS community find and apply the correct fix?"
cripkd writes "The 3rd pillar from the ELI program was given the go ahead Tuesday: 'In Romania, Magurele, the ELI pillar will focus on laser-based nuclear physics. For this purpose, an intense gamma-ray source is foreseen by coupling a high-energy particle accelerator to a high-power laser.' Here are some specs and details about why this is not your regular key-chain laser."
A California judge refused Thursday to order YouTube to remove controversial footage from "Innocence of Muslims," the inflammatory film that sparked a U.S. backlash in the Middle East.
After years of studying how cats get their color, researchers have pinpointed an elusive gene underlying spots on cheetahs, stripes in house cats and patterns across the feline world. "It's something we've been curious about for a long time," said geneticist Stephen O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute. "We've known just three genes were involved, but nobody knew what the genes were."
Amazon has been kicked out of Wal-Mart. Who will dump the company next?
The battle to monetize user-generated content took another step forward Wednesday with the launch by Vimeo of . Available to anyone with a paid Vimeo account, it allows content creators to activate a button that will appear next to every video and allow viewers to donate anywhere from $1 to $500 by credit card or PayPal.
Following the official launch of iOS 6 Wednesday, disgruntled users across the globe flocked to share their collective displeasure with Apple's new Maps app. The seemingly premature launch of this error prone app seems an unusual move for Apple, as relying on a quality maps service has become such an integral part of our smartphone experience.
The new iOS 6 Maps app lacks public transportation directions. For all you bus and subway riders who depended on iOS Maps, here are some great alternatives to get around.
Apple has purchased more than 200 acres of land not far from its Maiden, North Carolina, data center, in what appears to be a build-out of its solar power capacity in the region.Maiden's local paper, the Hickory Record reports that Apple recently paid $3 million to secure 219 acres in the region. Apple's parcel is ...
Beginning today, The USC Libraries are displaying an origami model of the Mosely Snowflake Sponge, a newly discovered three-dimensional fractal object designed by MIT-trained engineer Dr. Jeannine Mosely. The six-foot-tall structure consists of nothing but tens of thousands of business cards folded into paper cubes paneled with the school?s red and gold colors
HTML5 is a spec with a plan. Namely, to reach the W3C's recommendation stage by the end of 2014. To do that the W3C is speeding up its process, which will not only help HTML5, but HTML5.1, HTML5.2 and HTML.next.
The Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup plans to promote an open source software approach to car technology, and topple traditional automotive infotainment silos.
Paleoartist Tyler Keillor has long specialized in sculpting realistic clay dinosaur heads for museums and universities, but for his next project ? a life-size replica of Dryptosaurs ? Kiellor needed a little help from the crowd. His Kickstarter campaign for a 3-D digital dinosaur hit its $6,000 goal on Monday, and continues to rise.
Kanye West may have taken some "poetic license" with a reference on his latest record to former CIA director George Tenet, but Tenet's camp confirms to Danger Room that the rap star did in fact meet with the one-time U.S. spy chief.
Can a radically reduced diet extend lifespans? The science is conflicted. Sometimes caloric restriction does improve longevity -- and sometimes it doesn't. Join a live chat with leading scientists as they talk about this tantalizing field of research.
A Senate committee on Thursday delayed until after the November elections whether to approve sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
NASA scientists now think that the famous warp drive concept is a realistic possibility, and that in the far future humans could regularly travel faster than the speed of light.
Ending a romantic affair by faking your own death is usually a bad idea for -- I don't know -- everyone. What's an even worse idea? Faking your own death weeks before taking command of the Navy's nuclear submarine U.S.S. Pittsburgh. Now you can read the Navy's internal report which tells the sordid story.
Tokyo Game Show might be a shadow of its former self, but Japan's gamemakers are whistling past the graveyard. An optimistic view of the future of the Japanese game business was the overarching message of the keynote sessions that opened Japan's biggest gaming expo on Thursday.
Opera has updated its speedy Opera Mini web browser for Android devices. This release adds a new "Smart Page" that gathers up your friends' updates on Twitter and Facebook, along with news from your favorite websites, and displays it all in one place.
Many media reports like to talk about the potential supervolcano that could blow up underneath Yellowstone National Park. Our geology blogger Erik Klemetti takes a look at the research that suggests future eruptions are likely to be a bit more low key, though still geologically interesting.
Thanks to a change in U.S. patent law, citizens can now help challenge patents before they are issued -- and a collaboration between the Patent Office, Stack Exchange and Google hope to turn the power of crowdsourcing on unworthy applicants.
Understanding cooperation?under what conditions it occurs, how we can incentivize more of it, and so forth?is important business. Now researchers have found that reflection and deliberation may lead to selfishness, subverting our naturally sharing instincts.
10 things parents should know about , staring Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby and Lena Headey
This week on : tales of intrigue, mariticide, and flatulence.
Payment processing company Stripe has a growing base of U.S. fans, and it's about to get some love in the Great White North. The company is launching its beloved online credit card processing service in Canada. If you don't accept credit cards online, that may not sound revolutionary, but the move is one small step in Stripe's plan to take easy payment processing global.
What would you take with you if your house caught fire? That's the burning question Foster Huntington came up with to filter potential dates, a provocative query that eventually turned into a wildly successful blog and book.
Nine months of algebra homework doesn't feel so bad when you're studying in style. And now that school is back in swing, it's time for one of our favorite activities: personalizing our stationery and supplies. These seven DIYs give classic study gear a new twist, from making a glass globe desk lamp to creating a map-shaped cork board.
A gallery proving Silicon Valley CEOs can never be Hollywood stars.
Beautiful to look at, strangely hypnotic and utterly original, examines cult dynamics through the '50s-era misadventures of a violent ex-sailor with horrible posture and zero impulse control. Filmmaking artistry aside, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's picture hits home as a period-perfect examination of a perpetually recurring truth: When people hanker for a know-it-all authority figure who will tell them what to think, self-appointed "masters" will be more than happy to oblige.
Asked if Intel customizes microprocessors for its biggest customers, Diane Bryant said: "Yes." She didn't go into details, but her words shine a light on another part of the big-time chip business that's rarely discussed. There are cases where chip makers such as Intel and AMD will provide certain customers with chips that other may not have access to -- and this could become a key battleground as web giants such as Google and Facebook extend their efforts to redesign the hardware underpinning their massive web services.
Charles Godfrey of the Carolina Panthers anticipated the play perfectly. As New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees rolled to his right and threw the ball to tight end David Thomas, Godfrey sliced in front of Thomas, snatched the ball out of the air and strolled nine yards for a touchdown. The Panthers bench erupted. The ...