By samzenpus from
Slashdot's moving-on department:
wiredmikey (1824622) writes
"Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO. Bennett, who also resigned from Symantec's board of directors, took the top position at Symantec in July 2012, after former president and CEO Enrique Salem was pushed out by the Board of Directors. In April 2013, Bennett, told attendees at its own Vision Conference, that the company was changing, and acknowledged that Symantec 'lacked strategy' when it came to dealing with acquisitions. His plan was to move the company forward slowly, but consistently and make Symantec easier to do business with. That strategy, or at least the execution of it, hasn't impressed the board of directors, it seems."Read Replies (0)
By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's face-meltingly-fast department:
MojoKid (1002251) writes
"Intel used the backdrop of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to make a handful of interesting announcements that run the gamut from low-power technologies to ultra-high-end desktop chips. In addition to outing a number of upcoming processors—from an Anniversary Edition Pentium to a monster 8-core Haswell-E — Intel also announced a new technology dubbed Ready Mode. Intel's Ready Mode essentially allows a 4th Gen Core processor to enter a low C7 power state, while the OS and other system components remain connected and ready for action. Intel demoed the technology, and along with compatible third party applications and utilities, showed how Ready Mode can allow a mobile device to automatically sync to a PC to download and store photos. The PC could also remain in a low power state and stream media, server up files remotely, or receive VOIP calls. Also, in a move that's sure to get enthusiasts excited, Intel revealed details regarding Haswell-E. Similar to Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E, Haswell-E is the 'extreme' variant of the company's Haswell microarchitecture. Haswell-E Core i7-based processors will be outfitted with up to eight processor cores, which will remain largely unchanged from current Haswell-based chips. However, the new CPU will connect to high-speed DDR4 memory and will be paired to the upcoming Intel X99 chipset. Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell. Broadwell will be the first Intel desktop processor to feature integrated Iris Pro Graphics and will also be compatible with Intel Series 9 chipsets."Read Replies (0)
By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's var()-considered-awesome department:
An anonymous reader writes
"Following the release of Firefox 28 just two days ago, Mozilla today updated its Firefox Beta channel to version 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This is a massive release: Firefox Sync has been revamped and is now powered by Firefox Accounts, there's a new customization mode, and the major user interface overhaul Australis has finally arrived. Release notes are here: Desktop and Android."Of interest to developers: Firefox 29 will feature the
first implementation of CSS3 variables. Yes,
variables for CSS (
15 years later).
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By Roblimo from
Slashdot's knowledge-you-might-need-someday-even-if-you-don't-need-it-now department:
This is wide-ranging interview with
Dev Patel and Poulomi Damany of
BitYota, an Analytics as a Service startup that works specifically with
MongoDB. Open Source? Not yet. But hopefully soon, they say. And why should an IT person or programmer care about marketing-oriented analytics? Because the more you know about functions in your company besides IT (such as finance, investor relations, and -- yes -- marketing), the more valuable you are as an employee. Dev also mentions the two main things he looks for when recruiting for BitYota: "One is intellect, and the other is attitude." He points out that this is not true merely of BitYota, but of any strong startup.
This is all good information for any job-seeker hoping to land a spot with a startup -- and for anyone who is happy with where he or she works but hopes to earn promotions and raises, too.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's sml-and-php-fall-in-love department:
alokmenghrajani (2602135) writes with news of Facebook's new Open Source language, Hack. Quoting:
"Today we're releasing Hack, a programming language we developed for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages. ... Traditionally, dynamically typed languages allow for rapid development but sacrifice the ability to catch errors early and introspect code quickly, particularly on larger codebases. Conversely, statically typed languages provide more of a safety net, but often at the cost of quick iteration. We believed there had to be a sweet spot. ... Hack has deep roots in PHP. In fact, most PHP files are already valid Hack files. ... Our principal addition is static typing. We have developed a system to annotate function signatures and class members with type information; our type checking algorithm infers the rest. Type checking is incremental, such that even within a single file some code can be converted to Hack while the rest remains dynamically typed. ... If a function parameter or class member does not have an explicit type annotation, the type checker considers its type to be dynamic, and it does not check the type of that value."<
article continued at Slashdot >
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's he-said-she-said department:
Related to
yesterday's story about the NSA,
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with this excerpt from
The Guardian:
"Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called 'upstream' collection of communications moving across the Internet. ... nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had
'never heard' the term Prism. De explained: 'Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,' De said. 'Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.'"Read Replies (0)
By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's thank-gnu department:
Via Bits from Debian, comes news that the
security team is considering adding a Long Term Support suite for Squeeze (Debian 6) after Jessie (Debian 8) is released sometime next year. From the mailing list post:
"At the moment it seems likely that an extended security support
timespan for squeeze is possible. The plan is to go ahead, sort out
the details as as it happens, and see how this works out and whether
it is going to be continued with wheezy.
The rough draft is that updates will be delivered via a separate
suite (e.g. squeeze-lts), where everyone in the Debian keyring can
upload in order to minimise bottlenecks and allow contributions by
all interested parties. Some packages will be exempted upfront due
to their volatile nature (e.g. some web applications) and others
might be expected to see important changes. The LTS suite will be
limited to amd64 and i386. The exact procedures will be sorted out
soon and announced in a separate mail. ... It needs to be pointed out that for this effort to be sustainable
actual contributions by interested parties are required. squeeze-lts
is not something that will magically fall from the sky. If you're
dependent/interested in extended security support you should make an
effort to contribute."If successful, the LTS idea would possibly be carried over to Wheezy. With all of the changes coming in Jessie and its aggressive release schedule, this sysadmin really likes the idea of having a bit more breathing room for updating infrastructure between releases. The
email also contains a bunch of other info on changes coming to the security process.
<
article continued at Slashdot >
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's sudden-outbreak-of-sane-copyright-law department:
An anonymous reader writes
"Changes to the Russian Civil Code, which include the recognition of open licenses, the right for libraries to generate digital copies of certain works, were now signed by the Russian President and come into force on October 1st. According to Wikimedia-RU member Linar Khalitov, 'these changes are a result of a lot of hard work on behalf of Wikimedia-RU ... proposing, discussing and defending amendments to the Code.'"The changes are pretty major: licenses no longer require a written contract to be enforced, and published works can no longer be retracted. The two combine to give Wikipedia RU authors stronger author rights. Pictures of architectural objects
can be used freely without the permission of the architect, which will allow many images that were
pulled from the Wikimedia Commons to return, and new projects to
add pictures of monuments to go forward.
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By samzenpus from
Slashdot's ask-me-anything department:
J. Michael Straczynski has written
Thor,
World War Z, and
Changeling among many other films. He created
Babylon 5 and has worked on numerous comic book titles including
Superman and
The Amazing Spider-Man. Most recently, he has teamed up with the Wachowskis for an original Netflix sci-fi series,
Sense8 . He's agreed to take a break from his busy schedule in order to answer any questions you may have. As usual,
ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's pry-glibc-from-my-cold-dead-ld.so department:
New submitter
dalias (1978986) writes
"The musl libc project has released version 1.0, the result of three years of development and testing. Musl is a lightweight, fast, simple, MIT-licensed, correctness-oriented alternative to the GNU C library (glibc), uClibc, or Android's Bionic. At this point musl provides all mandatory C99 and POSIX interfaces (plus a lot of widely-used extensions), and well over 5000 packages are known to build successfully against musl.
Several options are available for trying musl. Compiler toolchains are available from the musl-cross project, and several new musl-based Linux distributions are already available (Sabotage and Snowflake, among others). Some well-established distributions including OpenWRT and Gentoo are in the process of adding musl-based variants, and others (Aboriginal, Alpine, Bedrock, Dragora) are adopting musl as their default libc."The
What's New file contains release notes (you have to scroll to the bottom). There's also a handy comparison chart with other libc implementations: it looks like musl is a better bet than dietlibc and uclibc for embedded use.
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