boa13 - Slashdot User

Debian Switching From Glibc To Eglibc 565

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 06, 2009 @05:13PM from the dismissed-with-cause dept.

ceswiedler writes "Aurelien Jarno has just uploaded a fork of glibc called eglibc, which is targeted at embedded systems and is source- and binary-compatible with glibc. It has a few nice improvements over glibc, but the primary motivation seems to be that it's a 'more friendly upstream project' than glibc. Glibc's maintainer, Ulrich Drepper, has had a contentious relationship with Debian's project leadership; in 2007 the Debian Project Leader sent an email criticizing Drepper for refusing to fix a bug on glibc on the ARM architecture because in Drepper's words it was 'for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.'"

A Look At the Wolfram Alpha "Search Engine" 216

Posted by kdawson on Monday April 27, 2009 @01:59AM from the computational-knowledge-engine dept.

An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram|Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."

Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 1) 515

by boa13 on Thursday April 23, 2009 @01:44AM (#27683557) Attached to: "Good Enough" Computers Are the Future

> Computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response.

No. It all depends on what you run on the computer. Maybe you used to run programs that were (relatively) more demanding than what you run now, maybe most programs are now relatively less demanding than most programs were, but it is not the general case that computers have gotten MUCH faster at user response. They've mostly stagnated, barely improved.

> these days the printer has it's own processor and RAM

They've always had that. Actually in the mid-90s my printer was more powerful than my computer. It's just that the printers processors and RAM have vastly improved, too.

Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax 858

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @02:04PM from the get-what-you-pay-for dept.

Harry writes "Microsoft's new Windows ad, with shopper Lauren buying a cheap 17-inch HP laptop instead of a $2,800 MacBook Pro, has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again. I'm diving in with a pretty exhaustive comparison of the MacBook Pro against machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony that were as comparably configured as I could manage. The conclusion: High-end laptops tend to carry high-end prices, whether their operating system hails from Cupertino or Redmond. And the MacBook Pro wasn't the priciest of the systems I compared." We looked at this question, not in as much depth, a couple of years back.

UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic 204

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @03:20PM from the posted-before-curfew dept.

Jack Spine writes "The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo. This supposedly anti-terrorist measure may be proposed as part of the Intercept Modernisation Programme according to minister Vernon Coaker, and is exactly the sort of deep packet inspection web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned about last week. The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic."

Asus Reveals the Eee Keyboard 312

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 08, 2009 @03:40PM from the want-it-already dept.

El Lobo writes "Asus' success with its Eee line of netbooks might have come as a surprise, but the company is now determined to expand the Eee brand into every possible niche and form factor. Case in point: the insanely cool Eee Keyboard, which will surely bring a smile on the faces of those who remember the glory days of the home computer. Described as a fully functional PC with inset Qwerty key arrangement, the keyboard has a 5in touch screen that displays a suite of bespoke media controls or a Windows desktop."

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 01, 2008 @07:19PM from the it's-a-little-dry dept.

jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."

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