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+ - Slashdot Is Hiring Software Developers->

Submitted by blair1q
blair1q writes "LinkedIn has a job listing from Slashdot. The position is "Principal Software Engineer", which is a level of experience and expectation above Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer, but below the fusty Senior Principal Software Engineer and the mawkish Master Engineer. Bring your shiniest Perl skills to the interview. My favorite quote: "Slashdot is written in Perl and developed using the Agile methodology." I'll wait for you to wipe beverage off your monitor/keyboard/shirt. Yes, I too was surprised to find out that not only is /. "developed," but that this development is adding features on a rapid cyclic basis. Or maybe not, since one of the tenets of Agile development is that any feature not demonstrable at the end of the timebox gets cut from deployment for that cycle. Must be a lot of that selection getting checked off."
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+ - The WNBR book published - using open source tools - 160 pages 250 photographs ->

Submitted by
richinud writes ""The WNBR book is officially published! We used open-source tools on SuSe Linux; gvim for the text, firefox, the gimp and imageMagick for the images, and Scribus for the DTP, to produce a mainstream compact publication with full colour images. This is a clear demonstration of how much open-source tools can contribute to the traditional and paper-based publishing world.


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Comment: If that's what they think, they're wrong. (Score 1) 215

by blair1q (#38794819) Attached to: Intel Relying On Ice Cream Sandwich For Tablet Push

They do understand that if Apple wanted to, Apple could run iOS on Intel chips, right?

It sounds like Apple has told them they won't do that, and Intel is trying to change their minds by mounting a seemingly concerted competitive effort.

At the least, Intel's new chips, which have surprised even ARM's CEO with their speed and economy, are going to make Intel rich yet again.

The question is whether Apple wants to be in full-frontal competition with them, or do what it did with the PowerPC/x86 decision and go with the one that has taken the technological lead.

Comment: Re:Solar Energy Storage (Score 1) 556

by blair1q (#38717916) Attached to: Is E85 Dead Now?

It probably takes as much energy to distill petroleum as it does to distill alcohol.

When you distill alcohol, you get a little alcohol in one tank and a lot of of water in another.

You can sell the alcohol for the price of gasoline, but you're dumping the water in most places.

But when you distill petroleum, you get gasoline in one tank and jet fuel in another tank and motor oil in another tank and axle grease in another tank and road tar in another tank and candle wax in another tank...

And you can sell all of those, some for more than the price of gasoline.

Comment: Re:California Secede? Unlikely (Score 4, Interesting) 552

by blair1q (#38716822) Attached to: Predicting Life 100 Years From Now

Texas isn't going anywhere, either.

People who want to get elected in Texas use that to cadge votes, because it works, but once they find out you can't defend a nation with a posse carrying six-guns any more and the amount it will raise their taxes to become a real military power with a full Army, Air Force, Coast Guard (370 miles of coastline in the smugglingest water in America), and Border Patrol (1250 miles of border with Mexico, over 60% of the whole border; plus 1400 miles with New Mexico, Okalahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana). Duplicating the rest of the functions of the federal government won't be a cakewalk, either, and don't pretend they'll just let that all fall flat. Economies of scale mean that being a part of the entire nation is cheaper than going it alone. And Texas' physical scale makes it more expensive to administer, not less. Throw in the added expense of commerce across borders, and no protections against tarriffs from the commerce clause, and businesses in the state doing any business out of state will be crippled.

And Texas is hardly monolithic. Split it off from the U.S. and the next thing that happens is that West Texas will insist on separating entirely from East Texas, and East Texas would be just fine with that. So there's only so far the political fixers in the state are willing to take the issue beyond claptrap at campaign rallies.

It's theater, nothing more.

Comment: Re:have these people ever seen a raw medical recor (Score 1) 211

by blair1q (#38716506) Attached to: Putting Medical Records Into Patients' Hands

Ever read your tab at a restaurant? Same deal, but you probably know more about food than you do about medicine, so it just seems less cryptic. Still, you know that you didn't order the clafoutie, so you can tell them to take that off the bill and bring you a fresh one.

Comment: Re:I hate the current procedure (Score 1) 211

by blair1q (#38716474) Attached to: Putting Medical Records Into Patients' Hands

An X-ray is a picture taken with photons in a certain range of energies.

It is a medical record when it is made to gain medical information.

Chiropractors are not doctors, and the services they sell are not medical, even though they gussy themselves up in white coats and hang diplomas and charts of body parts on the walls and hand out pills with dead-language-sounding names just like the people at your doctor's office do.

So an X-ray taking by a chiropractor is not, then, part of medical records. At least, not unless your actual doctor asks for them to help him fix what your chiropractor broke.

Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.