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Wednesday, February 08, 2012

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Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy?

DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"...

DailyDirt: Sneaky Little Spiders

Spiders exhibit a wide variety of fascinating behaviors that are intriguingly complex. They don't just build nice webs and trap unsuspecting insects. Spiders have bizarre mating rituals that seem to suggest a surprising amount of intelligence for their size. Here are just a few examples.

Some crafty male spiders court attractive females by giving them gifts wrapped in silk -- but sometimes the gifts turn out to be inedible seeds or empty insect exoskeletons. Female spiders prefer edible gifts (chocolates, not flowers, guys), but in the end, they lay the same number of fertilized eggs regardless of whether or not the gift is appreciated. [ url ]
What can a male spider do when the females of its species are known to eat their mates? In at least two spider species, the males snap off their genitals inside their mates. Evolutionary pressures can be painful... ouch. [ url ]
Male...

Should Next-Gen Game Consoles Be Upgradeable?

MojoKid writes "Historically, console add-ons that boosted the performance of the primary unit haven't done well. Any attempt to upgrade a system's core performance risks bifurcating the user base and increases work developers must do to ensure that a game runs smoothly on both original and upgraded systems. The other reason is that a number of games rely on very specific hardware characteristics to ensure proper operation. In a PC, swapping a CPU with 256K of L2 for a chip with 512K of L2 is a non-issue assuming proper platform support. Existing software will automatically take advantage of the additional cache. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, allows programmers to lock specific cache blocks and use them for storing data from particular threads. In that case, expanding the amount of L2 cache risks breaking previous games because it changes the range of available cache addresses. The other side of...

USPTO Says Copies Of Academic Articles Submitted As Prior Art Are Covered By Fair Use

With all the heat that publishers are starting to feel from the academic community, you might have thought that they'd avoid upsetting anyone else. But it seems that some publishers have decided to go after lawyers who make patent applications that include copies of academic articles as prior art. As the PatentlyO blog explains : A number of scientific journals have begun to threaten law firms and their clients for submitting copies of journal articles to the USPTO. The typical cease & desist letter that I've seen says something like the following: "We've been trolling through USPTO records and found that you submitted a copy of one of our articles articles to the USPTO and we suspect that you maintained other copies in your files and distributed additional copies within your organization. These actions constitute copyright infringement and are not fair use. We will sue you unless you...

History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com's 'Payback For Playback'

New submitter brennanw writes "Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000's will find Amazon.com's KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone 'borrows' one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, 600K for February) based on how many of their books were checked out vs. how many other author's books were checked out. This is almost identical to the 'Payback for Playback' service MP3.com provided musicians a little over a decade ago. Payback for Playback effectively destroyed the original MP3.com artist community, and I don't think KDP Select is going to be much different for the self-publishing community that is growing on Amazon."...

Higgs Signal Gains Strength

ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."...

MIT Crowdsources and Gamifies Brain Analysis

MrSeb writes "There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. Starting small and working its way up, MIT today launched Eyewire, a crowdsourced 'game' that tasks users with wiring up the neurons in a mouse's retina. A future stage of the game will get users to find the synapses, too."...