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I mostly use Ubuntu for personal use (occasionally Fedora)... RedHat for work...
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Instead of relying on an FTDI chip or otherwise sending serial data down a USB pipe, Ben's project is meant to be the hardware compliment to his book on programming USB devices. His hardware board is exceedingly simple, just an ATtiny 2313, a USB port, and a handful of other components, but allows Ben to receive data on eight pins on a breadboard and send them over USB to a computer. There's still a one-in-three chance you'll plug it in correctly.
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Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications. It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas. We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon. It's getting rediculously easy to build your very own cloud services.
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Hadoop (MapReduce where code is turned into map and reduce jobs, and Hadoop runs the jobs) is great at crunching data yet inefficient for analyzing data because each time you add, change or manipulate data you must stream over the entire dataset. In most organizations, data is always growing, changing, and manipulated and therefore time to analyze data significantly increases. As a result, to process large and diverse data sets, ad-hoc analytics or graph data structures, there must be better alternatives to Hadoop / MapReduce. Here are a few of them. Google MapReduced all of their MapReducers because they needed a better MapReduce for their MapReduce.
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While LISP never really delivered on its promise of artificial intelligence and the whole field has started turning in a probabilistic rather than descriptive approach, this paper is a good read for anyone whose interests in computer science and engineering go beyond comparing Ruby to PHP on a syntactical basis. The Paper is 34 pages long and took me roughly 6 hours to grok, here’s the gist in ~1300 words. Now if only there weren’t so many darn parentheses...
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You helped build Twitter into the global platform it is today. You were the ones who saw something meaningful in what others considered stupid and superfluous. You gave Twitter “at” replies and short links and hashtags and everything else that made the 140 character limit just a little easier to deal with. You were the true innovators - not them. But your services are no longer required. Please pack your things and go. Twitter has devolved into just another place for commercials and we’re partly to blame.
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If you’re just starting out or you’ve been programming for 20+ years it can be scary to share your code with others. I hope I can encourage some of you to share your code. Share ideas. Make friends. Take that step. You never know where it might lead but it will lead nowhere if you don’t take a chance. Don't underestimate sharing the source.
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One of the most fun and challenging parts of my job is setting bitly’s research agenda. We’re a startup, so this means prioritizing the set of questions we look into in the context of what will be most beneficial for the rest of the business. We work on a wide variety of projects, from pure research to press collaborations to infrastructure and experimental products. We always have a list of research questions way longer than we have time and resources to pursue, so we developed a process for evaluating whether a given question is worth pursuing at a particular time. ...And that's when you came up with the idea for the flux capacitor!
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The next version, dubbed “Watson 2.0,” would be energy- efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets. The challenge for IBM is overcoming the technical obstacles to making Watson a handheld product, and figuring out how to price and deliver it. Watson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today. Chess. Jeopardy... and now dinner reservations?
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A new browser-based exploit for a Java vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on client systems has been spotted in the wild – and because of Oracle's Java patch schedule, it may be some time before a fix becomes widely available. In the form in which it was discovered, the exploit only works on Windows machines, because, well...
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The U.S. aviation agency is seeking comment on in-flight use of phones, tablets, laptops and other devices [ITworld
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Oh no truely not.
Just kidding Gals.
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What's funny is that there is no way to check that the passengers have actually switched off their mobile phones. Therefore, you can safely assume that on every flight about 30% of all people leave their phones on (by mistake, or otherwise).
If the interface really did cause problems we would already be dead by now.
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If electronics really was that dangerous, then terrorists would have had an easy time bringing down airplanes. Hell, a cell phone has to put out many times as much em as a computer with WIFI off, probably even with WIFI on since WIFI is only good for a short distance anyway.
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While women still represent only a fraction of IT workers today, some experts believe that cloud computing will offer the wedge in the door that women need to equalize staffing numbers. ITworld
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Why do people act like this is a real problem? If women don't want the jobs, then they don't have to take them, we don't need equal amounts of men and women in any industry. It's not like we hang a "no girls allowed" sign on the doors to our offices, women just tend to choose different careers. I've never seen anyone worry about there not being enough men in something like nursing (I don't have numbers to back it up, but I'm fairly certain women outnumber men in that career).
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There is an actual problem of sexism in IT, as there is in any profession that is male dominated (military, police, firefighters, etc). Any time you have such a stark predominance of one gender in a profession, you end up with a de facto culture that, at the very least, makes the other gender feel unwelcome. Sometimes it's even actively hostile (google up some stories from women who've attended DefCon, for example).
And, for the record, I'm guessing that the reason you don't hear about the shortage of men in nursing is that you don't read the publications or hang out in the forums of that profession. Yes, nursing is very much a female-dominated profession, but it's also one that regularly requires heavy lifting, which women are simply not as well suited for as men, as a general rule. There are other issues as well, but the lack of men in the profession is considered a problem.
You are correct, though, that it's fundamentally a question of self-selection and a broader cultural bias that funnels each gender toward certain professions and away from others. I see it in action with my own daughter. When she was little, she had a definite interest in the stuff I did. As she's grown older (she's now 12), that's changed. It was around age 7 when computers and math started to become "boy stuff" in her mind, despite my best efforts. IMO, her elementary school teachers were absolutely complicit. When a young girl is spending 5-6 hours a day with an adult woman who freely -- even proudly -- proclaims that she's no good at math or computers, that's absolutely going to have an affect. If there's a place we should be looking for the solution to this problem, that's where we need to start.
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But I still don't see where it becomes an actual problem. Is a program going to be any better if it's made by a mixed gender team? Is a network going to become more reliable because both men and women were involved in setting it up?
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If all you're looking at is setting up the physical components of a network, then no, gender doesn't matter. However, that's a VERY small part of everything that falls under the umbrella of "IT", and is in fact basically useless on its own. That network exists to serve a larger system which allows people to accomplish useful things. Some of those people are women, and they think and work differently than men. Do you honestly not see how a female perspective might alter the design of that system? I'm not just talking about the color scheme of the UI, but it can reach down into even the basic functionality the network needs to support. Women tend to be more socially oriented, and more inclined towards collaboration, for example, so perhaps a system designed by a woman would emphasize those features, where a man might not consider them to be important. Or, they might both want those features, but have very different ideas about how they should work. What are the consequences of those decisions in terms of, say, the load your network needs to support?
There are other differences in the work environment that change as you alter the gender mix as well. For example, I've noticed that all-male departments/companies tend to not celebrate birthdays. Add a woman or two, though, and suddenly cards start getting passed around for everyone to sign, along with a collection envelope to buy cake and ice cream. You can dismiss that as just a distraction, but I think there's a strong argument to be made that it's really a team-building experience, which has a positive effect on morale and camaraderie, and there are numerous studies out there which show those generally increase important things like productivity and employee retention.
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RASPeter wrote: Women tend to be more socially oriented, and more inclined towards collaboration, for example, so perhaps a system designed by a woman would emphasize those features, where a man might not consider them to be important. Or, they might both want those features, but have very different ideas about how they should work. What are the consequences of those decisions in terms of, say, the load your network needs to support?
That's not necessarily better or worse, just different. (However, I would imagine socially oriented features would increase network load, which may be viewed as a negative.)
As for the point, I personally don't like those kinds of things, but I can see the value. It doesn't require them to be in IT though, we have someone in our office who does those sort of things and I believe she's part of human resources.
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There have been all sorts of new technologies that have come along in the last decade. Has not helped women much, why should Cloud be any different!!!!! Especially true since companies have been working hard to make the cloud appear transparent.
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When I started computing, women out numbered the men. Not just as data entry clerks, job control supervisors, mainframe operators (which used to be considered 'women's work') but also as managers, programmers, business analysts and other technical roles (which were not considered to be gender specific). In fact, the first significant OS I used (GEORGE III) was written in a large part by women (they were colloquially known as the 'pregnant programmers' as they were able to do the work from home whilst on maternity leave and whilst nursing their new-borns); and (in those days) were cheaper to employ than men.
In many shops, the prevalence of men is due not to discrimination but due to the longevity of service and the lack of recruitment. Despite equality, men stay in a role longer than women (it is rarer for men to leave to raise children and less common for them to leave to go with their partner when their partner's job changes) and they usually retire later. I work in a 100% male office simply because we have had no new starters in the last 18 years and all of the women (who outnumbered us 18 years ago) have left.
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jsc42 wrote: I work in a 100% male office simply because we have had no new starters in the
last 18 years and all of the women (who outnumbered us 18 years ago) have left.
I am sure that is true for some software shops (COBOL, maybe?) but nowdays both men and women tend to change their jobs much more frequently. It is pretty hard to find someone who stays on a same job for 10 years. Big companies (Microsoft, etc) tend to keep people longer, but even there they change groups quite a lot.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: Big companies (Microsoft, etc) tend to keep people longer
I don't know if that's necessarily true... but I do agree, everyone seems to change jobs more often nowadays. People just don't work in the same place for that long anymore.
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As jsc42 says, the computer staff was almost exclusively women at that time.
I became interested in computers in the mid-late 60's. Two of my girl friend's sisters worked for AT&T in the computer department, one as an systems analysist and one as a programmer.
Both had started as operators, they were promoted & trained from within, one of them eventually left to raise a family, the other one retired early. Both were replaced by men even though the company actively looked for women.
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