theodp writes "Back in 2010, Bill Gates Sr. made the case for I-1098, an initiative for a WA state income tax that Gates argued was needed to address K-12 funding inequity, which he claimed was forcing businesses "to import technically-trained employees, while our own people are shut out of highly paid careers." Opposed by the deep-pocketed, high-tech studded Defeat 1098, the initiative was defeated. Four years later, some of the same high-tech leaders who records show funded Defeat 1098 — including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ($425K), Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith ($10K), Code.org founder Hadi Partovi ($10K), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ($100K), Microsoft Corporation ($75K) — have gotten behind groups like Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and Code.org, which are singing a similar Chicken Little tune, telling lawmakers that U.S. students will continue to be shut out of highly paid computer science careers without additional K-12 funding, and the U.S. will lose its competitive edge unless tech is permitted to import even more technically-trained employees. In a departure from Gates' income-tax based solution, Microsoft and Code.org argue that the-problem-is-the-solution, proposing that tech visa fees be used to fund K-12 CS programs. To 'accept that computer science classes are only available to the privileged few,' writes Code.org, 'seems un-American'. So, as some of the nation's biggest K-12 school systems turn to Code.org for CS education programs, should they expect the funding to come from taxes, H-1B tech visa fees, or the-kindness-of-wealthy-strangers philanthropy?"

An anonymous reader writes "An unconventional article on the development of the WebKit project was just posted to the arXiv. Those guys data-mined the WebKit source-code change-log with Social Network Analysis. They claim that even if Apple and Samsung fight each other with patent wars in the courts, they still collaborate in the WebKit community. The report provides a different perspective from the Bitergia WebKit analytics. Some interesting polemics regarding Apple, Google and Nokia participation in the WebKit project are also highlighted in the paper. There are some nice figures capturing collaboration and rivalry in the WebKit community."

sandbagger writes "The CBC (it's like PBS only without the begging) is broadcasting a documentary about the open plan office this evening. You can hear a radio interview about the documentary here. In this documentary, the history of the open office is looked at, how it has evolved, and how the justifications for it being best for everyone else are used by those with offices. Advocates say fewer doors and walls means more collaboration. Critics say it's all driven by bottom line economics--crowding more people into smaller spaces saves money. Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?"

fiannaFailMan writes "Wired reports one mathematician's mission to find love online by data mining from OK Cupid and applying mathematical modeling to optimize his profile(s). His methods included using 'Python scripts to riffle through hundreds of OkCupid survey questions. He then sorted female daters into seven clusters, like "Diverse" and "Mindful," each with distinct characteristics.' But the real work began when he started going on dates."

An anonymous reader writes "Hacker and author Peter Seibel has done a lot of work to adopt one of the most widely-accepted practices toward becoming a better programmer: reading high quality code. He's set up code-reading groups and interviewed other programmers to see what code they read. But he's come to learn that the overwhelming majority of programmers don't practice what they preach. Why? He says, 'We don't read code, we decode it. We examine it. A piece of code is not literature; it is a specimen.' He relates an anecdote from Donald Knuth about figuring out a Fortran compiler, and indeed, it reads more like a 'scientific investigation' than the process we refer to as 'reading.' Seibel is now changing his code-reading group to account for this: 'So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found.'"

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 10.0 has been released. A few highlights include: pkg is now the default package management utility. Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve, virtio, and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V. Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS and TRIM support for SSD has been added to ZFS. clang is the default compiler. This release has official Raspberry Pi support. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and a quick FreeBSD installation video is here. FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE may be downloaded via ftp or via a torrent client that supports web seeding."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell writes: 'When I set out to review how different compilers generate possibly different assembly code (specifically for vectorized and multicore code), I noticed a possible anomaly when comparing two recent versions of the g++ compiler, 4.7 and 4.8. When I mentioned my concerns, at least one user commented that he also had a codebase that ran fine after compiling with 4.6 and 4.7, but not with 4.8.' So he decided to explore the difference and see if there was a problem between 4.7 and 4.8.1, and found a number of issues, most related to optimization. Does this mean 4.8 is flawed, or that you shouldn't use it? 'Not at all,' he concluded. 'You can certainly use 4.8,' provided you keep in mind the occasional bug in the system."

Nemo the Magnificent writes "Ever been asked a question in a job interview that's just so abysmally stupid, you're tempted to give in to the snark and blow the whole thing up? Here are suggested interview-ending answers to 16 of the stupidest questions candidates actually got asked in interviews at tech companies in 2013, according to employment site Glassdoor. Oil to pour on the burning bridges."

First time accepted submitter xyourfacekillerx writes "After a long hiatus of developing (ASP.NET), I decided to pick it up again. I need to learn .NET and SQL for my new job (GIS tech using ESRI software). Down the road they need a PHP website, tons of automation tasks, some serious data consolidation, they want mobile apps in theory. This is not my job description, but I'm sure I can do it. Long story short, I need to setup a development environment on my home desktop, so I can do all this in my spare time. Trouble is, I share the machine (Win 8.1, 2.7 dual core pentium something or other, with virtualization support.) I want to avoid affecting the other users profiles. I currently use my profile for music production (Reason) and photography (Photoshop, et al) so it's already resource intensive with RAM, CPU and VMM. I'll be needing to install all of your basic Microsoft developer suites, IIS, SQl Server, ANdroid SDK, Java SDK, device emulators, etc. etc. Plus AMP and finally GIS software. There will obviously be a lot of services running, long build times, and so on. To wit, I wouldn't be able to use my desktop for my other purposes like the music editing. So I need some advice. Would it help to set up all these tools under a different account on the same Win 8.1 install? Or should I virtualize my development environment (and how?), and run the virtual machine side by side? Or should I add a HDD or secondary partition and boot to that when I intend to develop? I am poor ATM, but is there a cheap very mini PC I can place next to my desktop and run all my development software off that, remote desktop into it? I've done a lot of googling the last week and haven't turned up anything, so I turn to Slashdot. Please help me get organized so I can start coding again."

Hugo Villeneuve writes "What piece of code, in a non-assembler format, has been run the most often, ever, on this planet? By 'most often,' I mean the highest number of executions, regardless of CPU type. For the code in question, let's set a lower limit of 3 consecutive lines. For example, is it:

• A UNIX kernel context switch?
• A SHA2 algorithm for Bitcoin mining on an ASIC?
• A scientific calculation running on a supercomputer?
• A 'for-loop' inside on an obscure microcontroller that runs on all GE appliance since the '60s?"

jones_supa writes "OpenGL debugging has always lagged behind DirectX, mainly because of the excellent DX graphics debugging tools shipping with Visual Studio and GL being left with APITrace. Valve's Linux initiatives are making game companies to think about OpenGL, and the video game company wants to create a good open source OpenGL debugger to improve the ecosystem. AMD and Nvidia have already expressed interest in helping them out. Valve has been developing VOGL mostly on Ubuntu-based distributions under Qt Creator. The software currently supports tracing OpenGL 1.0 through 3.3 (core and compatibility), and is expected to eventually support OpenGL 4.x. Many more details on VOGL can be found at Valve's Rich Geldreich's blog." This looks much nicer than BuGLe. Valve is using Mercurial for version control and they plan to throw it up on bitbucket under an unspecified open source license soon. It works with clang and gcc, but debugging with gcc is currently very slow (hopefully something that can be fixed once the source is available and the gcc hackers can see what's going on). The tracer's internal binary log format can be converted into JSON for use with other tools as well.

rjmarvin writes "Google released version 1.1 of its Dart open-source web programming language today, with new features and improved tools. The Dart Editor is updated with improved debugging, code implementation and more descriptive toolkits, and new UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and documentation support command-line and server-side Dart applications. Google also highlighted benchmarks such as the Richards benchmark, where Dart 1.1 is running 25% faster than JavaScript, as part of the larger competition between Dart and JavaScript in creating more complex applications in the web development space."

Freshly Exhumed writes "Phoronix has an article about how Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has stirred the hornet's nest with a talk at Australia's Linux.Conf.Au (MP4 file) about what he views as the biggest problem with the GTK: he finds dealing with upstream GTK/GNOME developers to be tough, with frequent abuse and flame-wars, with accusations from the developers that "you're doing it wrong." Conversely, he found the Qt development community to be quite the opposite: willing to engage and help, with plenty of application developer documentation and fewer communication problems than with their GTK counterparts."

An anonymous reader writes "Philip Guo, an Asst. Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, has written a thoughtful article on his education in programming. Guo explains that he was no particular coding wizard while growing up, but when he jumped into a CS major when he went to college at MIT, he received all sorts of passive and active encouragement — simply because he 'looked the part.' He says, 'Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype threat, I had the privilege of implicit endorsement. For instance, whenever I attended technical meetings, people would assume that I knew what I was doing (regardless of whether I did or not) and treat me accordingly. If I stared at someone in silence and nodded as they were talking, they would usually assume that I understood, not that I was clueless. Nobody ever talked down to me, and I always got the benefit of the doubt in technical settings.' Guo compares this to the struggles faced by other minority groups and women to succeed in a field that is often more skeptical of their abilities. 'I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to have gotten in college and beyond – unimpeded opportunities to develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and fulfilling.'"

In late November, Andy Wingo pushed a new register VM to Guile's (the GNU implementation of the Scheme language) master branch. It brought a number of performance improvements, but led to a bit of a conceptual mismatch between the compiler's direct-style intermediate language and the virtual machine. Earlier this week Andy Wingo announced a new continuation-passing style intermediate language for Guile. From the article: "To recap, we switched from a stack machine to a register machine because, among other reasons, register machines can consume and produce named intermediate results in fewer instructions than stack machines, and that makes things faster. To take full advantage of this new capability, it is appropriate to switch at the same time from the direct-style intermediate language (IL) that we had to an IL that names all intermediate values. ... In Guile I chose a continuation-passing style language. ... Guile's CPS language is composed of terms, expressions, and continuations. It was heavily inspired by Andrew Kennedy's 'Compiling with Continuations, Continued' paper. ... The optimizations I have currently implemented for CPS are fairly basic. Contification was tricky. One thing I did recently was to make all non-tail $call nodes require $kreceive continuations; if, as in the common case, extra values were unused, that was reflected in an unused rest argument. This required a number of optimizations to clean up and remove the extra rest arguments for other kinds of source expressions: dead-code elimination, the typical beta/eta reduction, and some code generation changes." The article describes the CPS language provided by Guile and explains the reasons behind choosing CPS over SSA or A-Normal Form. The Guile manual contains draft documentation. The new VM and Intermediate Language will be released with Guile 2.2, which should be out later this year.

An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from Info Q: "Oracle is seeking feedback from the Java community about what it should work on for the next version of Java EE, the popular and widely used enterprise framework. As well as standardizing APIs for PaaS and SaaS the vendor is looking at removing some legacy baggage including EJB 2.x remote and local client view (EJBObject, EJBLocalObject, EJBHome, and EJBLocalHome interfaces) and CORBA."

theodp writes "Fresh off their wildly-hyped Hour of Code, Code.org headed to Washington last Thursday where H-1B visas were prescribed as the cure for U.S. kids' STEM ills. 'The availability of computer science to all kids is an issue that warrants immediate and aggressive action,' Code.org told Congress. "Comprehensive immigration reform efforts that tie H-1B visa fees to a new STEM education fund,' suggested Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi, is 'among the policies that we feel can be changed to support the teaching and learning of more computer science in K-12 schools. We hope you can be allies in our endeavors on Capitol Hill.' Also testifying with Partovi was inventor and US FIRST founder Dean Kamen, who also pitched the benefits of H-1B visas (PDF). 'We strongly encourage Congress to pass legislation that directs H-1B visa fees to enable underserved inner-city and rural schools to participate in FIRST,' Kamen testified. 'Specifically, these fees should support efforts to enable underserved inner-city and rural schools to participate in FIRST.'"

jfruh writes "Recently Business Insider caused a minor stir among developers with dreams of riches with a story about a nameless Google engineer who's making $3 million a year. Who is this person, and how unusual are pay scales like this inside the Googleplex? Phil Johnson uses public information to try to figure out the answer. His conclusion: the $3 million engineer may exist, but is a rare bird indeed if so."

Qedward writes with this except from CIO. "Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015. Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically. Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods. The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning."

rjmarvin writes "Someone is finally pausing TV shows and movies to figure out if the code shown on screen is accurate or not. British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming started taking screenshots of source code from movies such as Elysium, Swordfish and Doctor Who, and when it became popular turned the concept into a blog. Source Code in TV and Films posts a new screenshot daily, proving that, for example, Tony Stark's first Iron Man suit was running code from a 1998 programmable Lego brick."