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Still though. I expect at least a couple more zeros on that.
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The NASA Technology Transfer Portal contains data from all 10 NASA field centers and headquarters, enabling industry and the general public to find information about technology opportunities, licensing opportunities, and past success stories. "Pulsed ultrasonic stir welding system" At last! I've been looking for one of these.
Previously announced, now live.
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We’d like you to meet Carousel: a gallery for all the photos and videos from your life. It combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. "All I've got is a photograph, but it's not enough"
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Because the internet as a market place does not much prefer the first entrants (or originators) the only way to prevent a race to the bottom based off price is to ruthlessly buy every company that pops its head over the parapet.
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There hasn't been such a build-up of pointless excitement since the Year 2000 bug threatened to destroy civilisation as we know it. Of course, Microsoft ending support for its aged and insecure Windows XP operating system never threatened anything like that, regardless of the XPocalypse-style billing. The real risks are in the longer term, and will probably affect large enterprises and governments. Or at least, those are the ones that will be reported.
RIP Windows XP
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It's the end of the world as we know it...but I feel fine.
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Well, to know what "XP" in "Windows XP" really means, we need a bit of a history lesson.
Way back in the 70's, Xerox came up with the idea of a mouse and graphical user interface (GUI).
Apple's Steve Jobs saw this GUI & mouse and stole hired engineers away from Xerox to create the Mac.
Clickity Proof[^]
Well, a few years later ol' Bill (of the Gates variety) saw the mousey & GUI and wanted his own rendition of it. But, alas, patents and prior art (first use) stood in the way. So, he struck a deal with Jobs on using some of the Mac interface in Windows 1.0.
Well, a few years later, Apple decided to sue both H.P. and Microsoft for copyright infringements. But, that $5 Billion lawsuit was awash for Apple. More Clickity Proof[^]
Well, a few years later, Xerox decides to sue Apple for copyright infringements. Suffice to say, the suit eventually got tossed. Even More Clickity Proof[^]
Well, we now get to jump 11 years ahead to 2001.
Apple intro's Mac OS X on March 24, 2001.
Not wanting to feel left behind, Microsoft intros Windows XP on October 25, 2001.
Now, most tech-heads will denote that the "X" in Mac OS X is a moniker for "Unix"; e.g., HP/UX, IBM A/IX, etc.
However, being a 10-year Apple veteran during that 80's & 90's era, my conclusion is to the contrary.
That "X" in Mac OS X really means "Xerox". For, Apple couldn't go on hiding what they really did ~ that being taking the idea from Xerox in the first place.
Low, and behold, Bill[ionaire] Gates wanted to set the record perfectly straight, which is why he had Microsoft use "XP", which stands for:
Xerox Plagiarized
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With Dart SDK 1.3, we’ve improved performance of async code running in the Dart VM and made substantial improvements to dart:io. This results in some of our experimental HTTP benchmarks now running at more than twice the speed of the previous release. Assuming better performance is something of interest
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As much as I like the idea of Dart, I wish for once they would use benchmarks that are not completely biased.
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You do realize they were comparing the performance with a previous version of Dart?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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And that previous performance was measured by in-house Google benchmarks. Not disputing them, simply stating the Dart team would do well to allow some independent third-party benchmarking.
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Why? It may make sense when comparing between languages, but they're simply measuring the improvement in their own VM - its not in their interest to deceive themselves (or us).
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Microsoft has lowered the bar for development and made it easier to create custom apps in Azure, but that simplicity may come at the expense of security. Just imagine all the people that wrote the last code you fixed: now they could be writing them on Azure
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After three years of development, Famo.us is today officially launching a public beta test of its Javascript framework, which lets developers create HTML5-powered mobile apps that are just as fast and fluid as native apps. To varying degrees of 'just as speedy'
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Our goal is to keep track of Roslyn as it is being developed, and when it is officially released, to bundle Roslyn's compilers with Mono. "Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony"
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Project Harmony lets Dropbox users see when other people are viewing and editing shared documents, and have discussions about them. "We were half a million strong and everywhere was a song"
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Kent Sharkey wrote: "We were half a million strong and everywhere was a song"
Those were a very special three days of peace, love and music. I doubt we'll ever see something like that again. A time of innocence past.
/ravi
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Why are we so woefully poor at estimating software projects? "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."
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The funny thing is that it is only really in IT that non-experts feel they can have any say in the estimation.
I recently had a dry stone wall rebuilt - the expert said it would take a week and it took a week. I didn't say to him "A week - really? it looks like a couple of days max. How long would it take if I get three 18 month old children to lend you a hand?"
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You did not change the specs during that week? That's not very agile, is it?
Estimations are easy when the basic building blocks are known. If there is an unknown you're not estimating but merely speculating. If your worker had to start without you knowing whether or not the foundation could hold the wall, how trustworthy would the estimate be?
We're good at estimating - we're just not allowed to be realistic.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Estimations are easy when the basic building blocks are known.
Bingo. 
/ravi
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The bad news: There's not a lot you can do about it now. It's the responsibility of Internet companies to update their servers to deal with Heartbleed, and once they do, you can take action (see below). Do you have protection?
Updated April 10: After a couple of reports that Mashable page was infected with malware, we've updated the URL from the news item with one from another site. Apologies to everyone (it wasn't triggered by my antivirus, so I'm hoping it's just 'luck of the draw' with their advertisements).
modified 10-Apr-14 17:11pm.
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The genetic similarities between certain human populations and Neanderthals are striking. Indeed, many researchers think the Europeans and Asians inherited between 1 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, yet scientists have struggled to demonstrate with a high degree of certainty that these genetic similarities are the result of interbreeding between these two species. I think that explains a few people at the last team meeting
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In other news, the sky is blue! 
.-.
|o,o|
,| _\=/_ .-""-.
||/_/_\_\ /[] _ _\
|_/|(_)|\\ _|_o_LII|_
\._. |\_/|"` |_| ==== |_|
|_|_| ||" || ||
|-|-| ||LI o ||
|_|_| ||'----'||
/_/ \_\ /__| |__\
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