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Siamese Cat Coat Color Genetics—Also Found in Humans?
Siamese cats have a unique coat pattern. The gradual shading of the extremities is caused by a recessive gene with temperature-sensitive expression. The resulting pattern is essentially a heat-map of the cat's body.
Siamese Cats Are Albinos
Siamese cats are renowned for their peculiar coat pattern. A cream or white underbelly shades gradually to a medium color on the back, while the ears, face, legs, and tail are very dark. This pattern is called "pointed" or "colorpoints," and it affects not only the coat, but also the eyes, which are always blue. -
The Dirt on Clean Eating | Wannabebig
Everyone knows the difference between dirty and clean foods, so I don’t have to explain the obvious…or do I? My favorite response to questions about how to eat clean is, “Wash your food.” The biggest problem with discussing foods in these terms is that there’s no clear definition of clean or dirty. The difference might seem obvious, but a closer look shows that it’s far from clear-cut. The confusion is compounded when clean eating is preached as the best way to optimal health and body composition. In this article, I’ll use research and field experience to shed some light on these muddy issues.
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Timothy Ferriss, Silicon Valley’s Self-Help Guru : The New Yorker
few months ago, Timothy Ferriss, a self-help author, threw himself a party in San Francisco, where he lives. Officially, it was not a celebration for his most recent book, “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” which came out in December and is already in its eleventh printing. In the book, Ferriss tells his readers, “Hack yourself,” and presents them with hundreds of “scientific rules for redesigning the human body”: bathing in ice to lose weight, eating organic almond butter on celery sticks to treat insomnia. Nor was the party meant to mark
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
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Monday, August 29, 2011
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Matasano Security - Matasano Web Security Assessments for Enterprises
Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, "JAVASCRIPT CRYPTOGRAPHY"?
We mean attempts to implement security features in browsers using cryptographic algoritms implemented in whole or in part in Javascript.
You may now be asking yourself, "What about Node.js? What about non-browser Javascript?". Non-browser Javascript cryptography is perilous, but not doomed. For the rest of this document, we're referring to browser Javascript when we discuss Javascript cryptography.
WHY DOES BROWSER CRYPTOGRAPHY MATTER?
The web hosts most of the world's new crypto functionality. A significant portion of that crypto has been implemented in Javascript, and is thus doomed. This is an issue worth discussing. -
All Together Now - NYTimes.com
HOLD onto your hats and your wallets. Since the end of the cold war, the global system has been held together to a large degree by four critical ruling bargains. Today all four are coming unstuck at once and will need to be rebuilt. Whether and how that rebuilding happens — beginning in the U.S. — will determine a lot about what’s in your wallet and whether your hat flies off.
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Drugs Posing as Supplementals May Contain Dangerous Ingredients - NYTimes.com
DR. PIETER COHEN is scanning the shelves inside a shop in Chinatown here when something familiar — and potentially dangerous — catches his eye.
“What’s that yellow box, behind the other one?” Dr. Cohen asks the clerk.
It is Pai You Guo, a supposedly natural weight-loss supplement from China that, according to federal authorities, has tested positive in the past for containing two hazardous drugs, including a suspected carcinogen. The product was recalled in 2009. One of Dr. Cohen’s patients in the Boston area ended up in the hospital last year with a range of ailments after taking Pai You Guo, a brand-name that, loosely translated from Chinese, means “the fruit that eliminates fat.” -
Does America Need Manufacturing? - NYTimes.com
You can drive almost anywhere in the state of Michigan — pick a point at random and start moving — and you will soon come upon the wreckage of American industry. If you happen to be driving on the outer edge of Midland, you’ll also come upon a cavern of steel beams and ductwork, 400,000 square feet in all. When this plant, which is being constructed by Dow Kokam, a new venture partly owned by Dow Chemical, is up and running early next year, it will produce hundreds of thousands of advanced lithium-ion battery cells for hybrid and electric cars. Just as important, it will provide about 350 jobs in a state with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.
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Reply All - The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy - NYTimes.com
I can’t help worrying that such a public bemoaning of what should be a private decision serves only to give ammunition to those who would take away a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
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Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes - NYTimes.com
Earlier this year, I wrote a column about the publishing industry’s resistance to the terms Apple was imposing for subscriptions on the iPad. Soon after, an e-mail was followed by a phone call and Steve Jobs was on the line to straighten me out.
Related
Unboxed: Reaping the Rewards 0f Risk-Taking (August 28, 2011)
At the time, publishers were profoundly unhappy. Apple was not only proposing to take a third of the revenues, but was also requiring that the transaction go through Apple, meaning publishers would get none of the consumer data that had such high value to advertisers. -
China plan for secret detentions alarms rights activists - latimes.com
Reporting from Beijing— A proposed change in the Chinese criminal code that would allow authorities to detain suspects for up to six months in a secret location is a dangerous step backward for the country, activists charged Saturday.
The change would effectively enshrine what has become a common practice for silencing dissidents, many of whom have disappeared for months without formal charges being filed. Under the change, the suspects can be held without notice to their family members or lawyers. -
Mr. Bernanke’s Warning - NYTimes.com
It’s what journalists call burying the lead. More than halfway through his speech on Friday to central bankers meeting in Jackson Hole, Ben Bernanke said the recession would not cause lasting damage to the economy “if — and I stress if — our country takes the necessary steps to secure that outcome.”
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Sometimes I push back on my heels, look at this country and wonder aloud: “What on earth are we doing?”
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Damon Winter/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow
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The States of Child Hunger
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We have a growing crisis among the nation’s children, yet our policies ignore that reality at best and exacerbate it at worst. -
What Makes Steve Jobs Great - NYTimes.com
“I think I have five more great products in me,” Steve Jobs said a very long time ago.
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Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Joe Nocera
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Times Topic: Steve Jobs
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He was 31 at the time and barreling up Route 101 in Silicon Valley, en route to a meeting in San Francisco. Having been kicked out of Apple, which he’d co-founded a decade before, Jobs was wholly engaged in the act of starting up a new company, which he had named — of course! — NeXT. -
China TV Deletes Video That Led to Hacking Fears - NYTimes.com
BEIJING — The main Chinese state television network has deleted from the Internet a video that some foreign military and Internet security analysts say implies China has engaged in hacking attacks on Web sites in the West.
The video was the July 16 episode of a program on China Central Television 7 called “Military Science and Technology.” The episode, called “The Internet Storm is Coming,” was about cyberwarfare.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
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Vance Gilbert : Racial Profiling First Hand
Racial Profiling First Hand...FWB&RAAB...
You have to read through the letter below, sent to the ACLU, United/Continental Airlines, and/or a willing private lawyer (anybody?) to get to the meaning of the acronym.
What price Freedom, indeed. If the below is democracy and freedom, you can friggin' have it. Maybe Paul Robeson was right: -
Introducing Debugger Canvas - Kael Rowan - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Over the past several months I’ve been working on a new Power Tool for Visual Studio with Andrew Bragdon and Brown University. The purpose of the power tool is to get feedback from users (that means you!) about using a Code Bubbles like experience for debugging through code inside Visual Studio. The Power Tool will be called Debugger Canvas and will be available for download on Microsoft DevLabs early next month. It will require Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate SP1 (or the trial version), and there will be a DevLabs forum for public feedback, discussion, questions and answers, etc. In the mean time you can find out more information on http://research.microsoft.com/debuggercanvas and also watch the demo video below.
Friday, August 26, 2011
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Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals, study finds - latimes.com
As recently as 2008, scientists thought that Neanderthals and modern humans had never mated.
Then, last year, they said that the two species had, but that the few Neanderthal genes that survived in modern human DNA were not functional. -
Military suicides linked to low Omega-3 levels - latimes.com
In a finding suggesting powerful psychiatric benefits for a component of fish oil, a study published Wednesday has linked military suicides to low levels of docosahexaenoic acid and found that service personnel with higher levels of DHA in their blood were less likely to take their own lives.
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There is a technique known as the ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule'' which enables any C programmer to parse in their head any C declaration!
There are three simple steps to follow:
Thursday, August 25, 2011
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Certain foods may be the best medicine for lowering 'bad' cholesterol - latimes.com
For patients with high levels of so-called bad cholesterol, doctors routinely reach for two remedies: cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and a diet that cuts out foods high in saturated fat, such as ice cream, red meat and butter.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
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Breakthrough could lead to effective treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease - latimes.com
Reporting from Chicago— Researchers say they have found a common cause behind amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, that could lead to an effective treatment.
Monday, August 22, 2011
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This is what I think of every time Facebook makes a change to their site. (i.imgur.com)submitted 10 hours ago by Sil_E79 commentssharesavehidereport
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A nice writeup on evolution
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Convert Web/HTML to PDF Free Online — PDF Download by Nitro PDF Software
PDF Download's Web-to-PDF feature lets you quickly and accurately convert any (unsecured) Web page into a high-quality PDF file. The Web-to-PDF capabilities in PDF Download can be used with all popular browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer) via our bookmarklet, or if you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can install the more powerful browser add-on, which adds extra features like automatically emailing your PDF files and viewing PDF files as HTML (instead of opening them in your PDF viewer).
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Sword of Truth for iPad(epub)-Tristan › isoHunt › the BitTorrent & P2P search engine
Sunday, August 21, 2011
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HP's Carly Fiorina era is finally over...good riddance | Business Tech - CNET News
commentary Walter Hewlett was right.
Walter Hewlett, you may remember, was the low-key, cello-playing scion of the Hewlett family who fought HP's then-CEO, Carly Fiorina, over her planned $25 billion merger with Compaq, which was announced 10 years ago next month.
Hewlett's point was simple: Just maybe it's a really bad idea to double down on a low-margin business like PCs.
Of course, we all know what happened. Hewlett's opposition was no match for the publicity-savvy Fiorina and her team of brass-knuckled marketers, who seemed a better fit for politics than the high-tech industry. (Which explains Carly's second career as the Republican loser in the race for one of California's seats in the U.S. Senate.) Hewlett folded his cards, went back to his quiet life, and Fiorina got fired three years after the merger because she was better at selling an idea than running a really, really big company.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
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Cutting Costs the Montana Way - NYTimes.com
WITH the debt crisis and the weakening economy fresh on their minds, most Americans have probably concluded that government, as a rule, cannot manage money responsibly. But it can. Just look at Montana.
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36 Hours in Downtown Manhattan - NYTimes.com
ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER is rising, and the 9/11 Memorial will open right below it next month on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Although progress on the World Trade Center site has been slow, the surrounding neighborhoods did not wait to revive (and in some cases reinvent themselves) after all the emotional and economic devastation. The financial district is bustling, Chinatown is as quirky and enticing as ever, and TriBeCa is bursting with new restaurants, bars and hotels. With the exception of those seeking a night of relentless club-hopping, travelers hardly need venture north of Canal Street for a complete New York weekend.
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Handy flowchart helps you decide which science fiction series to watch next on Netflix
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“One of my swale church members believes in a God who has commanded against sexual activity outside of marriage. It just isn’t right for larger swales to force smaller ones to have sex. I appeal to you as the first and greatest of the swales: Command your people against coerced sexual activity.”
Seconds of silence ticked away.
“Come to me,” she said. “You and your swale church member.”
The call disconnected. -
EP296: For Want Of A NailBy Mary Robinette Kowal—4—Book Review: DeathlessBy Sarah Frost—18—EP297: AmaryllisBy Carrie Vaughn—19—Book Review: EmbassytownBy Josh Roseman —29—EP298: The ThingsBy Peter Watts —31—EP299: Plus Or MinusBy James Patrick Kelly —43 -
Archive: LDS, Page 2 | BenCrowder.net
Also, I finally got around to reading Eric James Stone’s story “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” which had been sitting around in my Instapaper queue for a few weeks. And I really liked it. Fascinating stuff. (It’s about a Mormon branch president and plasma-based beings in the heart of the sun.)
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The purported hacker who infiltrated the BART's Police Officers Association website today claims to be a French girl ("Humiliating, huh?") who executed her first hack, SF Weekly has learned. SF Weekly chatted online with someone who claimed to be the mind behind today's attack. She provided us with the security hole she used, saying the whole thing was incredibly simple.
Lamaline_5mg -- her online handle -- doesn't claim to be part of Anonymous, the Internet-based movement that masterminded Monday's BART protest. She even took issue with referring to the attack as a hack: "They had zero security," she wrote. "Listen, don't ask questions. I'll tell you what's important to know first." -
Cramming For College At Beijing's Second High | Fast Company
Here is an existential question of high-school philosophy: If everyone is equally nerdy, does that mean no one is a nerd? In The People's Republic of China, you might add the following corollary: Is collective nerdiness the way forward?
As twilight descends in Beijing on a Saturday in March, an informal meeting of nerds commences outside the Second High School Attached to Beijing Normal University. Class has ended for the day, and the streetside air is noxious and smothering--Beijingers sometimes euphemistically call it "big fog," when in fact it's actually unrelenting, overwhelming smog. The bespectacled quartet of teens--Bob, Daniel, Julia, and Janice (whose glasses don't have lenses in them)--hurriedly try to figure out what they're going to do next.
Friday, August 19, 2011
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(need to fix readability...)
Being assigned to The Head for eight hours was the worst security shift you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons & Airships to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe. -
My story should have ended on the day I died. Instead, it began there.
Sun pounded on my back as I rode through the Mountains where the Sun Rests. My horse’s hooves beat in syncopation with those of the donkey that trotted in our shadow. The queen’s midget Kyan turned his head toward me, sweat dripping down the red-and-blue protections painted across his malformed brow. -
The Official James Patrick Kelly Web Site - Plus or Minus
Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova. Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner. She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it. He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.
Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
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2011 Hugo Award Nominees
1006 valid nominating ballots were counted, 992 electronic and 14 paper.
Best Novel
Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Best Novella -
http://www.asimovs.com/2011_04-05/images/511Nebula10_sultan.pdf
When Leah Hamakawa and I arrived at Riemann orbital, there was a surprisewaiting for Leah: a message. Not an electronic message on a link-pad, but an actualphysical envelope, with Doctor Leah Hamakawa lettered on the outside in f lowinghandwriting.Leah slid the note from the envelope. The message was etched on a stiff sheet ofsome hard crystal that gleamed a brilliant translucent crimson. She looked at it,f lexed it, ran a f ingernail over it, and then held it to the light, turning it slightly. Theedges caught the light and scattered it across the room in droplets of f ire. “Diamond,” she said. “Chromium impurities give it the red color; probably nitrogen forthe blue. Charming.” She handed it to me. “Careful of the edges, Tinkerman; I don’tdoubt it might cut.”
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"...if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride."
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Schneier on Security: New, Undeletable, Web Cookie
A couple of weeks ago Wired reported the discovery of a new, undeletable, web cookie:
Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded -- even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.
The Wired article was very short on specifics, so I waited until one of the researchers -- Ashkan Soltani -- wrote up more details. He finally did, in a quite technical essay:
What differentiates KISSmetrics apart from Hulu with regards to respawning is, in addition to Flash and HTML5 LocalStorage, KISSmetrics was exploiting the browser cache to store persistent identifiers via stored Javascript and ETags. ETags are tokens presented by a user’s browser to a remote webserver in order to determine whether a given resource (such as an image) has changed since the last time it was fetched. Rather than simply using it for version control, we found KISSmetrics returning ETag values that reliably matched the unique values in their 'km_ai' user cookies.
Posted on August -
Pastebin.com - FAQ [Frequently Asked Questions]
What is Pastebin.com all about?
Pastebin.com is a website where you can store text for a certain period of time. The website is mainly used by programmers to store pieces of sources code or configuration information, but anyone is more than welcome to paste any type of text. The idea behind the site is to make it more convenient for people to share large amounts of text online. -
You can list a directory containing 8 million files! But not with ls.. | Something People Want
I needed to list all files in a directory, but ls, find, and os.listdir all hung. This is my story.
NOTE: there is no good reason that you should ever have 8 million files in the same directory, but if you do, this is your solution .
TLDR: Write a C program that calls the syscall getdents directly, with a large buffer size, ignore entries with inode == 0. -
SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers | Smylers [blogs.perl.org]
SSH has many features which are helpful when working regularly with files on remote servers; together they can give a vast increase in productivity over the bare use of SSH. If you regularly use SSH, it’s worth spending a little time learning about these and configuring your environment to make your life easier.
This was presented at Yapc Europe 2011 in Riga. If you’d like me to come and talk about this at your user group or workplace, please get in touch.
Multiple Connections
Often it’s useful to have multiple connections to the same server, for example to edit a file, run some file-system commands, and view a log file all in different terminal windows. Except sometimes that can seem too much hassle, so we compromise and end up repeatedly cycling through quitting and restarting a few different commands in one window. -
Zynga targeted in patent infringement lawsuit | Media Maverick - CNET News
Agincourt Gaming, a new entrant into the social-gaming sector, filed a lawsuit today accusing Zynga of violating two of its patents.
The company, whose Web site touts a Facebook game called Pantheon, seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction against Zynga, one of the Web's social-network game developers. Zynga representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Agincourt, which focuses on the social-gaming space, said it "owns foundational patents that claim priority back to 1996 and cover the processes for credits-based online gaming and a prize redemption system based on the outcome of game play."
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
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As a carrier's partner, Google may shine - Computerworld
IDG News Service - Google's planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility will force the search giant into a whole new set of relationships with mobile operators, which could benefit the carriers but also create tension.
The dramatic success of Google's Android OS has further eroded the power of carriers, which had already seen their influence over phone software diminished by Apple's iPhone. Google has seized mobile advertising revenue and, along with Apple, mastered the sale of mobile applications where carriers have often struggled. -
Really? The Claim: To Prevent Migraines, Drink More Water - NYTimes.com
THE FACTS
For migraine sufferers, summer can be a perilous time of year.
Oppressive heat and spikes in temperature have long been thought to precipitate attacks in people prone to chronic headaches. One large study in the journal Neurology even showed that the risk of migraines jumps nearly 8 percent for every nine-degree rise in temperature.
But a simple step that may lower the risk, especially in warm weather, is to stay properly hydrated. Dehydration causes blood volume to drop, researchers say, resulting in less blood and oxygen flow to the brain and dilated blood vessels. Some experts suspect that a loss of electrolytes causes nerves in the brain to produce pain signals. -
Ghost in the Wires - By Kevin Mitnick - Book Review - NYTimes.com
Considering the fact that Windows 95 hadn’t even been released when federal agents finally caught up with the computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, one might assume his new memoir would be full of stale old tech-and-techniques that no one in 2011 could possibly care about. But as Mitnick makes clear here, don’t jump to conclusions.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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Google plan to buy Motorola Mobility an explosive development in tech world - The Washington Post
Just a few hours ago, Google announced that it would be buying the entirety of Motorola’s Mobility business for $12.5 billion. As far as explosive developments in the world of technology go, that’s tantamount to detonating a nuclear bomb . . . a big one.
Ownership of that company will hand Google substantial businesses that it has previously flirted with but never committed to. Notably, the business of producing and selling its own hardware for smartphones and tablets, and the not-insignificant side business of manufacturing and designing TV set-top boxes used by cable providers. -
The Top 30 “WTF?!” Moments in LOST History : Apropos of Something
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If this blog has a recurring motif, it is how history and strategy games are uneasy partners. Despite our tendency to look to the past for analogies and lessons, history is a mess that refuses to conform to rule sets and is constantly under reinterpretation and understanding. Even if “making history come alive” is a goal for many history themed game designers, it is a goal that must always take a seat behind the goals of balance and entertainment.
But designers and gamers bring their own knowledge and expectations about the past with them to any gaming experience. There is a growing understanding between the two groups that no grievous harm will come to history and that things look like they are supposed to.
Monday, August 15, 2011
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Invaluable command line tools for web developers | Coderholic
Life as a web developer can be hard when things start going wrong. The problem could be in any number of places. Is there a problem with the request your sending, is the problem with the response, is there a problem with a request in a third party library you’re using, is an external API failing? There are lots of different tools that can make our life a little bit easier. Here are some command line tools that I’ve found to be invaluable.
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History Of The Stack Exchange API, Mistakes « Kevin Montrose
Posted: 2011/08/14 | Author: kevinmontrose | Filed under: pontification | 8 Comments »
In an earlier post, I wrote about some of the philosophy and “cool bits” in the 1.0 release of the Stack Exchange API. That’s all well and good, but of course I’m going to tout the good parts of our API; I wrote a lot of it after all. More interesting are the things that have turned out to be mistakes, we learn more from failure than success after all. -
BART website hacked, passenger info leaked
(08-14) 16:34 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A group of international hackers launched a cyber attack against BART today, defacing an agency website and releasing user information taken from the site.
The move came a day after the group known as Anonymous promised retaliation for BART's decision to cut cellular telephone service to prevent a protest in downtown San Francisco on Thursday afternoon. -
Time Warner to buy Insight for $3 billion: source | Reuters
(Reuters) - Time Warner Cable has reached a deal to buy The Carlyle Group's cable operator Insight Communications Co for around $3 billion in cash, a source familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
Time Warner could announce the deal as soon as Monday morning, the source said.
Insight is the 10th-largest cable operator in the United States, Carlyle's website says. It sells cable television, high-speed Internet and telephone services, serving around 750,000 customers in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
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Financial Aftershocks With Precedent in History - NYTimes.com
Like earthquakes, financial crises seem to be accompanied by aftershocks, like the one we’ve been living through this week. They can feel every bit as bad as the crisis itself. But economic history and academic research suggest they can set the stage for a sustainable recovery — and eventual sharp stock market gains.
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Facebook Wins “Worst API” in Developer Survey | TechCrunch
A survey of over 100 developers, previously posted here on Hacker News, aimed to determine which external APIs were the most difficult to integrate into developers’ projects. The winner…or rather, the loser? Facebook. Developers mentioned the Facebook API the most in terms having bugs, poor documentation, never-ending API changes, slow response times, and other headaches.
Friday, August 12, 2011
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State's high school dropout rate almost 20 percent
-- Nearly 1 out of every 5 students in California's projected class of 2010 - 18.2 percent - dropped out of high school before graduation day, meaning 94,000 teenagers hit the streets without diplomas, according to data released Thursday.
Perhaps more alarming are the 17,000 eighth-grade students who quit before attending a single day of high school, about 3 percent of their class.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
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Counting the Ways to Cook an Eggplant — A Good Appetite - NYTimes.com
FOR the last few summers, I’ve been in an eggplant rut. No matter how many times I stand over the pile of the multi-hued beauties at the farmers’ market, swearing I’ll try something new, I always fall back on my standby recipe: toss eggplant cubes with good olive oil and roast until they turn golden at the edges and meltingly soft inside.
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:jasonrudolph => :blog >> Programming Achievements: How to Level Up as a Developer
How does a good developer become a great developer?
Forget greatness for a moment: How does a decent developer become a good developer?
There is no definitive path from Step 1 to Step n. Heck, it's not even clear what Step n is. And as logically-minded developer types, the lack of a well-defined route can make for a daunting journey from novice to master.
I've spent a fair bit of time over the last few years bumping up against this conundrum. What's next? How do I go from being a good developer to a being really good developer? -
Only two groups of people seem to be getting a kick out of the rioting in England.
Firstly the rioters themselves, the nihilistic urban youth who are getting cheap thrills from looting shops, bashing bus stops, and burning down houses. And secondly middle-class radicals, trustafarians who live off daddy's cash, who get a rush of political adrenalin whenever they see blacks burning stuff because it shows that "the oppressed are fighting back!"
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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Scenes From Hacker Gatherings in Las Vegas - NYTimes.com
WHY are federal agents hobnobbing with hackers?
Defcon, a convention of computer hackers here, was crawling with them on Friday. They smiled, shook hands, handed out business cards, spoke on a panel called “Meet the Federal Agent 2.0” and were really, really nice. -
Cardiovascular Risk in Middle Age May Hasten Mental Decline - NYTimes.com
Cardiovascular risk factors in middle age are associated with brain deterioration and a decline in mental function later in life, a new report has found.
Related
Health Guide: Alzheimer's Disease
More Vital Signs Columns
In a study published online last week in Neurology, scientists at the University of California, Davis, examined 1,352 men and women, ages 45 to 63, and recorded the group’s rates of hypertension, diabetes, smoking, high cholesterol, obesity and other risks. -
What Happened to Obama’s Passion? - NYTimes.com
Atlanta
IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
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The demise of the low level Programmer. « #AltDevBlogADay
When I started programming many of the elements we take for granted now, did not exist. There was no DirectX and not many compatible libs were available for the free compilers of the day. So I had to write my own code for most basic programs, keyboard handlers, mouse handlers, video memory accessors, rasterizers, texture mappers, blitters… the programs I wrote then were 100% my own code and I had to be able to handle anything and everything.
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Ben Northrop - A Room Full of Techies
Imagine this scenario...
You and three friends stumble upon a great idea for a tech start-up. Because you're all talented developers and there are no "business" people to constrain you, the only thing that separates you from monumental success is just building the darn application. (seriously, it's a great idea). So you decide to all sit in a room to brainstorm the initial architecture, then you'll divvy up the pieces and get started.
I've lived this scenario a handful times, and have seen it too many to count.
Monday, August 8, 2011
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AntiSec hackers dump data after hacking police websites - Computerworld
IDG News Service - The war between law enforcement and the Anonymous hacking collective continued this weekend as hackers dumped a 10 gigabyte database that included private e-mails and information sent by confidential informants. Hackers say they stole information during an attack on more than 70 small-town law enforcement agencies.
The hackers, an Anonymous-affiliated group known as AntiSec, say that they hope to "embarrass, discredit and incriminate police officers across the US," in retaliation for ongoing arrests of Anonymous members.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
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QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote - YouTube
As tradition goes, id's co-founder and technical director, John Carmack, kicks things off with his keynote address.
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Five (And Then Some) Tech Tips for Travel - NYTimes.com
In the big airports, you sometimes see three different lanes for the X-ray machines. They’re marked by a black diamond (expert travelers who know the routine and have their laptops out and shoes off), blue square (casual travelers) and green circle (families and people who need extra help).
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The Tea Party, Take Two - NYTimes.com
In the four months since I began writing an Op-Ed column, the thing that has most surprised me is how darned liberal I sound sometimes. I know that seems like a strange thing to say, so let me explain.
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Joe Nocera
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Growing up in heavily Democratic Providence, R.I., in the 1950s, it was hard not to absorb the values of the Democratic Party — the party of Roosevelt, as my parents often reminded me, who had gotten the country through the Great Depression. My parents and their friends believed in a progressive income tax, in the importance of unions (my parents were public schoolteachers), and in a government that helped those who couldn’t help themselves. It wasn’t until I moved to Washington after college that I got to know any Republicans. Not until I was nearing 30, and living in Texas, did I see how conservative most of the country truly is.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
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Space travel: U.S. military wants to build spaceship within 100 years - latimes.com
What will it take to build a spaceship capable of traveling to the stars? And what if you wanted it to be ready to launch in just 100 years?
Such space travel may sound like the premise of a science-fiction show or reality-TV series. But these are serious questions being asked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. military. -
"...DRESS MY CAT IN PEOPLE CLOTHES"
Friday, August 5, 2011
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Microsoft retaliates against Google's blog post with smoking gun email
Google's Chief Legal Counsel, David Drummond, expressed the company's position on software patents and the endless litigation that surrounds them in a post on the company's official blog yesterday, and he called out Microsoft and Apple for what Google feels are anti-competitive practices when purchasing patent suites. Microsoft is having none of it, though, as the company has produced proof that it approached Google to see if it would like to join Microsoft in a bid on the Novell patents, but was turned down.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
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When I get a call from a number I don't recognize... - Imgur
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The Tea Party’s War on America - NYTimes.com
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
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Joe Nocera
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Related
News Analysis: That Monolithic Tea Party Just Wasn’t There (August 2, 2011)
News Analysis: Jefferson’s Tea Party Moment (July 31, 2011)
Times Topics: Tea Party Movement | Federal Debt Ceiling
Related in Opinion
Room For Debate: Did the Tea Party Win?
Maureen Dowd: Tempest in a Tea Party (July 31, 2011)
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These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
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jimcofer.com » Blog Archive » Righting The Wrongs: Van Halen and M&Ms
« SONGS I LOVE: “Melody of a Fallen Tree”Hotel Babylon (Series 3, Episode 2) »
Righting The Wrongs: Van Halen and M&Ms
The 1980s was a heady and decadent time for rock stars. Stories of bad behavior by some of rock’s finest - be it trashing hotel rooms or simple prima donna demands - were splashed all over the headlines. And few of those stories were as famous as the “Van Halen and M&Ms” story.
In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed”. Once the “M&Ms” story leaked to the press, social commentators jumped all over it as an egregious example of the pampered and spoiled behavior that rock artists demanded. It was yet another sign of the decline of Western Civilization. And to this very day, any time a story about a celebrity acting like a diva surfaces, my mother rolls her eyes, clucks her tongue, and says “well… did she want the brown M&Ms taken out of the bowl, too??” -
Hacker News | When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it thei...
ChuckMcM 13 hours ago | link | parent
When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it.
True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the XYZ system to work on (sadly I'm prevented from disclosing the actual system). They remarked how they spent a couple of days looking over the system which was complicated and creaky, they couldn't figure it out so they wrote a new system. Yup, and they committed that. This person is a coding God are they not? (sarcasm) I asked what happened to the old system (I knew but was interested on their perspective) and they said it was still around because a few things still used it, but (quite proudly) nearly everything else had moved to their new system.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
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Data Centers Using Less Power Than Forecast, Report Says - NYTimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — Data centers’ unquenchable thirst for electricity has been slaked by the global recession and by a combination of new power-saving technologies, according to an independent report on data center power use from 2005 to 2010.
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Ahikam Seri/Bloomberg News
A study shows that, partly because of the 2008 recession, power consumption by data centers hasn't grown at expected rates.
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Craig Mitchelldyer/Getty Images
The study suggests that Google's centers are more efficient than most.
The report, by Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at Stanford University, found that the actual number of computer servers declined significantly compared to 2010 forecasts because of this lowered demand for computing and because of the financial crisis of 2008 and the emergence of technologies like more efficient computer chips and computer server virtualization, which allows fewer servers to run more programs. -
Central Falls, Rhode Island: A Bankrupt Crystal Ball For Future America
It’s the end of the solvency road for Central Falls, Rhode Island.
Bloomberg reports today “Central Falls, Rhode Island’s poorest city, sought Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection as it struggles to meet pension obligations.” -
Adobe Edge: What You Need to Know | PCWorld
Adobe released a preview of its upcoming Adobe Edge software Monday morning. But what exactly is this new program, and why are web developers so excited about it? Here's what you need to know.
What is Adobe Edge?
Edge is a new web development tool from Adobe that makes it easy to create animations and interactive websites with HTML5, the latest revision of HTML. HTML5 tries to add the interaction and multimedia we've come to expect from the web without forcing users to download plug-ins such as Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash. -
With the Bing Search Engine, Microsoft Plays the Underdog - NYTimes.com
MIKE NICHOLS has a poster on his office wall. It shows the young Muhammad Ali glaring down at a fallen Sonny Liston, the bruising heavyweight who had seemed invincible — until Ali beat him, in 1964, in one of the biggest upsets in sports history, and then beat him again a year later.
Monday, August 1, 2011
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Your Career: Using Google+ to find work - Business - Personal finance - Careers - msnbc.com
Do job seekers need yet another social networking site? Maybe.
It’s probably the last thing you want to hear since many of you already have enough to deal with figuring out what you should and shouldn’t post on Facebook, whom to linkup with on LinkedIn and whether tweeting is really going to land you a dream job.
In comes Google with its own social networking site Google+ to make your life even more complicated. But it may be worth considering, especially if you’re in technology, marketing, social media or anything to do with the Internet. That is, if you can score an invite. -
How and Why Wall Street Programmers Earn Top Salaries - Slashdot
I'll be posting anonymously, but I think many here have a very poor understanding of what we do. Most of that is because we do tend to be a very secretive group, but if you were to sit down with some of us, you would see that we really do very normal (and useful!) things in the market.
I work on the algo and core infrastructure. I wrote price feeds that take 1/5th of a microsecond in C++ and (a little slower) in Java. I understand in fine detail how cache and the the PCI-e bus works. I have a very good understanding of algorithms and the constant-time tradeoffs. I know when to make something simple, when to use and avoid threads, and I can debug in minutes and push out a new version in the seconds before market open (not many people can handle that level of stress well). I read the C++ and Hotspot assembly, and know how to program for superscaler architectures specifically. If you really need me to, I can even crank out some VHDL code. -
O'Reilly OSCON Java 2011, Raffi Krikorian, "Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM" - YouTube
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O'Reilly OSCON Java 2011, Raffi Krikorian, "Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM" -
Feds may be muzzling scientist over Arctic research « Summit County Citizens Voice
Battle over Alaska offshore oil drilling heats up
By Bob Berwyn
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SUMMIT COUNTY — Last summer’s Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico clearly showed the conflict between science, energy policy and politics, and the looming battle over drilling in Arctic waters will be no different, as a watchdog group claims that federal scientists are being muzzled and harassed over their efforts to disclose potential impacts of energy development in the fragile Arctic marine environment.