Aggregator

A seven-year-old's answer to a question on his maths homework has left hundreds scratching their heads. The teacher marked the boy's answer wrong however his dad thinks he's in the right.

Drunk passengers are putting designated drivers at huge risk, Direct Line has found. A third of designated drivers had an issue with drunk passengers in the last year.

The only way Ukraine has been able to keep taking the fight to Russia is because of billions of dollars' worth of military aid from the West flowing into Ukrainian coffers.

Pope Francis's final testament has tonight been revealed just hours after his death by a stroke and heart failure at the age of 88. The pontiff 'passed away peacefully' at the Saint Martha residence.

Which is one reason US regulators just sued the rideshare and delivery giant

The USA’s Federal Trade Commission on Monday launched a lawsuit against Uber, alleging the rideshare giant ripped off customers by enrolling them in its “Uber One” membership scheme without permission, failing to deliver promised savings, and making it devilishly difficult to opt out.…

When Steve's employer went hunting for a new customer relationship management system (CRM), they had some requirements. A lot of them were around the kind of vendor support they'd get. Their sales team weren't the most technical people, and the company wanted to push as much routine support off to the vendor as possible.

But they also needed a system that was extensible. Steve's company had many custom workflows they wanted to be able to execute, and automated marketing messages they wanted to construct, and so wanted a CRM that had an easy to use API.

"No worries," the vendor sales rep said, "we've had a RESTful API in our system for years. It's well tested and reliable. It's JSON based."

The purchasing department ground their way through the purchase order and eventually they started migrating to the new CRM system. And it fell to Steve to start learning the JSON-based, RESTful API.

"JSON"-based was a more accurate description.

For example, an API endpoint might have a schema like:

DeliveryId: int // the ID of the created delivery Errors: xml // Collection of errors encountered

This example schema is representative. Many "JSON" documents contained strings of XML inside of them.

Often, this is done when an existing XML-based API is "modernized", but in this case, the root cause is a little dumber than that. The system uses SQL Server as its back end, and XML is one of the native types. They just have a stored procedure build an XML object and then return it as an output parameter.

You'll be surprised to learn that the vendor's support team had a similar level of care: they officially did what you asked, but sometimes it felt like malicious compliance.

[Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

If you're looking to stand out this summer, this is perfect!

Police are searching for this man

DAVID COVERDALE IN MADRID: The US superstar gymnast picked up the prestigious prize at the Laureus World Sports Awards following her success at last year's Paris Olympics.

We speak to King Charles' goddaughter India Hicks about her first swimwear collaboration with Sea Level Australia.

John Travolta reassured his fans after sharing a sweet Easter photo featuring his dog Peanut and a chocolate Easter bunny.

It was the ultimate betrayal, a reality that anyone would struggle to believe. But for recently married Michelle there was no denying the sickening truth playing out in front of her eyes.

Rebel Wilson dropped 70lbs back in 2021, and she's committed to keeping the weight off.

TikTok user KJ, whose mom was a flight attendant, is an avid traveler who often shares her tips and tricks to her platform.

Loneliness is an epidemic across age groups, but none more so than seniors. Yet in the US, it's not the elderly who experience the highest rates of loneliness.

NEW figures have revealed that Braintree District Council have issued zero fines, despite receiving over 30 dog fouling complaints.

A POPULAR wedding venue which was ‘left with no other choice’ to close last month is now on the market for millions of pounds.

Queen Margrethe II concluded her 85th birthday celebrations with a lavish banquet dinner at Fredensborg Palace. But glaringly absent was her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary.

Katie Piper has opened up about being verbally insulted by prisoners as she filmed her latest TV documentary series. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place. Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena. The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation. In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area," Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.