CaptainMunchies - Slashdot User

Submission + - Edutainment in the CS department?

Submitted by

rustcycle

on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @02:02PM

rustcycle writes: "In a recent ArsTechnica article it was discussed that universities may be trying to make CS more sexy with hands-on experiences including robotics projects in order to maintain enrollment levels. A while back slashdot touched on the GMI (Games and Media Integration) degree my university will be offering that may bring in a more diverse (perhaps more artistic?) CS student base. Along these lines of helping students to explore creative and engaging applications for their CS theory, I've been itching to do some mixed lecture / performance events in which I would describe the 3D geometry generation, image processing, genetic algorithms, and other mechanisms behind the animated music-driven visuals created for my MS CS thesis "Aesthetic Emergence in Synesthetic Sculptures" — then "demo" the software by playing a set with my band, displaying the evolved visual ambiance on twin 42" 1080p HD LCDs. Where we once had "edutainment" games in grade school, is it now appropriate to have edutainment lectures at the university in order to keep students excited about CS?"

Submission + - Microsoft announces CLR will be cross-platform

Submitted by

axlrosen

on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @12:05AM

axlrosen writes: "The biggest Mix '07 announcement made on opening day of this week's show was one that Microsoft didn't call out in any of its own press releases: Microsoft is making a version of its Common Language Runtime (CLR) available cross-platform. The CLR is the heart of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. So, by association, the .Net Framework isn't just for Windows any more.

More here."

Submission + - Dell will pre-install Ubuntu Linux

Submitted by

atamyrat

on Monday April 30, 2007 @11:49PM

atamyrat writes: "http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/archives/2007/ 04/30/its-d-day/ It's now official. That's it, the embargo is over. We can talk. Many people have been involved in this and I can only say I am excited to be a tiny small part of it: Ubuntu will be officially supported on Dell computers. Any other details will come on www.ubuntu.com, check it for the official press release, but we can now all put the matter to rest and go about our normal lives — or can we ? :) This from your humble servant at Canonical Global Support Services. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8661763902.html http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/30/dell_will_pre install.html"

Submission + - SF fire proves official WTC collapse explanation?

Submitted by sn00ker on Monday April 30, 2007 @09:04PM

sn00ker writes: As was widely reported by numerous agencies, a petrol tanker crashed into a freeway bridge in San Francisco and the subsequent fire caused a section to collapse within 25 minutes.

One of the core tenets of WTC conspiracy theory is that a simple petroleum-products fire could not cause sufficient structural weakness to have caused the towers to collapse. However, this incident seems to prove otherwise. Another nail in the conspiracy coffin, or more grist for the mill?

Submission + - Wikipedia and Wikia - Conflict of Interest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30, 2007 @05:41PM

An anonymous reader writes: Does Jimmy Wales' for-profit Wikia receive special treatment from Wikipedia? Wikia, the for-profit site that donates heavily to the WikiMedia Foundation, is one of the few sites allowed to receive PageRank from Wikipedia. All regular external links on Wikipedia are tagged with "nofollow." Wikia, which runs Google Adsense, receives hundreds of PageRank 8 links from Wikipedia because of its preferred status on the InterWiki Map. TechCrunch calls this a conflict of interest. Some Wikipedia bloggers are calling for an internal review. In February 2005 Wikipedians voted 61% to 39% to abolish the "nofollow" tags altogether, but the ruling was overturned by Jimmy Wales.

Submission + - Is donated computing power tax deductible?

Submitted by janneH on Sunday April 08, 2007 @04:48PM

janneH writes: With the Folding@home now on Playstation 3 and talk about Rosetta@home on Xbox, I was wondering if this donated computing power was tax deductable? I am not a lawyer, but assuming that it is the Universities that house the projects that are the recipients, it would seem that something of value given to them would be tax deductible (cash certainly is). There is a commercial market for network based computing power, and it does not seem it would be too difficult for someone to determine a fair market value. It would seem likely that this value might be enough to pay for the machine before it was too old. For that matter, this would be true for any computing power provided to a non-profit.

Submission + - Gaim is being renamed to "Pidgin IM"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:12AM

An anonymous reader writes: After some legal threats from AOL, the GAIM project is undergoing a name change in preperation for the 2.0 release. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM, and libgaim will now be known as libpurple, according to discussions on the GAIM project mailing lists

The new site will be located at http://www.pidgin.im/ , and the developers site is at http://developer.pidgin.im/

Submission + - How MP3 Was Born

Submitted by Actual Reality on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @12:37PM

Actual Reality writes: Karlheinz Brandenburg often is cited as the inventor of the music format. But he credits many for a discovery that has upended the music business http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2 007/gb20070305_707122.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStori es

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