Free Republic

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

An Oprah-inspired program in public schools described by critics as an intrusive, emotionally manipulative effort with the laudable goal of ending bullying, cliques, gossip and other such behaviors, has been presented to a million students in 400 cities in 47 states. Challenge Day, the subject of the 2010 MTV series, “If You Really Knew Me,” promises to provide schools and communities with “experiential programs that demonstrate the possibility of love and connection through the celebration of diversity, truth, and full expression.” But critics contend Challenge Day, an independent, nonprofit program, can do more harm than good and pose a danger...

Apple's new programming language Swift promises to be easier and faster to code with and more secure. Swift promises to blaze past Objective-C and Python, with complex object sort 3.9 times faster and RC4 encryption 220 times faster than Python. Federighi promised that developers simply won't be able to make entire classes of errors that currently plague them, even though code written in Swift will be able to run alongside current Objective-C code.

Snip What You Can Do It is important that people give Mozilla pushback--and a lot of it--because the less people suffer the consequences of this kind of behavior, the more it will be invited in the future. You want Christians to experience a new and even worse persecution than what they're facing now? Do nothing. You want to fight back? Here's what you can do . . .   1) Mozilla has a web page where you can leave feedback on its Firefox browser. THAT WEB PAGE IS HERE. At the time of this writing, the feedback in the last...

Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback. Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback.CodeEval has named its top coding languages for 2014, and we see a couple of interesting surprises. Year-over-year, C# was the second-fastest growing language. And Internet powerhouse PHP was the biggest loser, down 55 percent from 2012.We took a look at the trends from 2011 through 2013, and here’s what we found:By volume, Python and Java reigned supreme. But Java, as you can see, is something of an ailing giant despite the popularity of Android with consumers.When you look at...

Members of the University of Michigan Black Student Union said they would have to resort to “physical action” if a list of seven demands issued on Martin Luther King Day are not met within seven days, The Ann Arbor News reported. “If negotiations are not complete we will be forced to do more, beginning to increase valiantly our activism for social progress and take physical actions on the University of Michigan’s campus,” said senior Shayla Scales to a group of students gathered on campus, according to the Ann Arbor News. The seven demands, read aloud by an activist associated with...

"Some clowns and jokers over at 4chan thought it would be a funny idea to put together a web page for a programming language named 'C Plus Equality' as a parody of feminism, dismissing OOP as 'objectifying' and inheritance as "a tool of the patriarchy". But this parody was apparently too hot to host at Github, which took down the original Github repository after receiving criticism on Twitter, prompting a backlash and inquiry into the role of free speech and censorship on Github's platform. The project has since found a new home on BitBucket, at least for the time being."...

One of the givens of working in IT is that the pace of technology changes rapidly, and so too, do the skills that are needed to stay current. Here are 10 that John Hales, a VMware instructor at Global Knowledge says are going away:1. Windows XP/2003 and earlier. Why? Mainly because the operating systems are reaching their end of life and won’t be supported/updated by Microsoft any longer. Also, new applications no longer support them.2. Silverlight. This was Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash and it can’t be used with the new Windows Store (metro) apps or on a Windows phone.3....

More than ever, companies need coders. And while tech firms do the bulk of the hiring, the demand for programmers spans industries and only seems to be growing.  From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have. (See also: Why This Guy Quit His Sports-Radio Dream Job... To Write Software)So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for...

The Internet, and many forms of online commerce and communication that depend on it, may be on the brink of a "cryptopalypse" resulting from the collapse of decades-old methods of shared encryption. The result would be "almost total failure of trust in the Internet," said four researchers who gave a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. "We need to move to stronger cryptosystems that leverage more-difficult mathematical problems," the presenters said.

"Learn to write software in 9 weeks? New coding boot camps promise to launch tech careers" _______________________________________________ SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science. Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more...

As it stands, building artificially intelligent machines that can teach themselves is not only really difficult, it’s a painfully slow process. Looking to accelerate things, next month DARPA will begin to crack the whip with a program called Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning (PPAML). Besides seeking to dramatically increase the number of people who can successfully build machine-learning applications, the program wants to radically increase the effectiveness of machine learning experts so they can create new applications beyond the limits of technology that’s currently available. “Our goal is that future machine learning projects won’t require people to know everything...

An interesting article caught my eye at jobstractor.com — the programming language trends review. The company analyzed more than 60,000 job vacancies during 2012 to produce a chart of the most sought-after technologies: Language Jobs PHP 12,664 Java 12,558 Objective C 8,925 SQL 5,165 Android (Java) 4,981 Ruby 3,859 JavaScript 3,742 C# 3,549 C++ 1,908 ActionScript 1,821 Python 1,649 C 1,087 ASP.NET 818 Despite developer complaints, demand for PHP and Java (server/Android) remains strong. You would also expect those jobs to require some SQL knowledge although that has a strong showing in its own right. ActionScript is a dying art...

Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read Back in 1983, approximately 0 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who...

The old man turned back at his coffee, took a sip, and then looked back at me.... “In fact, I’ve done lots of things ....Oh really? Like what types of things?, ...All the while, half-thinking he was going to make up something fairly non-impressive....I invented the first computer.....Um, Excuse me? ..... I created the world’s first internally programmable computer.... It used to take up a space about as big as this whole room and my wife and I used to walk into it to program it.... What’s your name?”. I asked, thinking that this guy is either another crazy homeless...

From WeWork Labs to General Assembly, there are a lot of incubators that give entrepreneurs a place to code during the day. There aren't many that offer sleeping arrangements as well. Three "hacker hostels" have cropped up in Silicon Valley, The New York Times reports. Coders, designers and scientists can spend the night packed like sardines in rows of bunk beds for $40. The hostels are all run by the same management company, Chez JJ, with accommodations in Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Chez JJ was founded by 28-year-old neuroscientist Jade Wang and Jocelyn Berl. Wang had used...

Somebody has an ordinary MFC program which uses one or more separate threads to handle disk-intensive activities (AfxBeginThread ( additems, pstr , THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL ) or something like that), and he goes out and buys one of the new computers with an I7 chip in it which are now under a thousand dollars USD..... Assuming he is also using VisualStudio 2010, what exactly happens? is Win 7 bright enough to assign separate processors to separate threads when possible, or do you need to set some build parameter differently from past ages, or do you need a copy of Intel's rich-only-need-apply C++...

The knowledge of a handful of programming languages could come to be a lifesaver to many a programmer, especially since most languages that were popular 10 years ago are not as viable as they are now. But there are many developers who have earned their worth simply by knowing the right programming language at the right time, simply because they had solid skills that were profitable while the language was popular. Here are some languages though, which stayed popular through the years, and prove to give young developers a jumpstart to their careers, and always are a bonus to add...

Parlez-vous Python? What about Rails or JavaScript? Foreign languages tend to wax and wane in popularity, but the language du jour is computer code. The market for night classes and online instruction in programming and Web construction, as well as for iPhone apps that teach, is booming. Those jumping on board say they are preparing for a future in which the Internet is the foundation for entertainment, education and nearly everything else. Knowing how the digital pieces fit together, they say, will be crucial to ensuring that they are not left in the dark ages. Some in this crowd foster...