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Comment Re:What is this thing called Boxee? (Score 1) 335

by Flooded77 (#26814055) Attached to: Build a BoxeeBox and Wean Yourself From Cable
I've been using Boxee for a few months and as far as I can tell, registering with site allows you to add friends and rss audio and video feeds that are then populated in the boxee menu. The forums don't require an account unless you want to post.

I don't really utilize the social aspect of it, but it's nice to manage my feeds in one location rather than on each box in the house.

You don't need to register to add the repositories or download binaries (you can find links to them on the internets) and I haven't received any email from boxee, so I think the registration is purely for managing rss feeds and friends.
Education

Walter Bender — Taking Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop 84

Posted by timothy from the everything-on-a-stick-meat-on-a-stick dept.
waderoush writes "While the One Laptop Per Child Foundation tries to reboot after drastic staff cuts, Sugar, the original open-source graphical interface for OLPC's XO Laptop, is rapidly evolving into a stand-alone learning platform that can run on any PC. Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year to start the non-profit Sugar Labs, has given a detailed interview about 'Sugar on a Stick' — the USB drive that allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment. Bender also describes the Sugar upgrades coming in March — including better tools for file management, portfolio presentations, and Python code hacking — and talks about his hopes for expanding Sugar Labs and getting Sugar into more classrooms than OLPC can reach through its hardware."

Comment Re:Just Like When He Led Microsoft (Score 1) 841

by Flooded77 (#26739247) Attached to: Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes

This is a beautiful illustration if the Liberal mindset. Rather than trying to raise the poor by eliminating mosquitoes he's trying to equalize everyone by lowering the wealthy.

Liberal mindset? How was he 'lowering the wealthy' by reminding them that when it comes to mosquito-borne illness, they are just as susceptible as the poor? When it comes to malaria, everyone is equal - mosquitoes couldn't care less about your politics or taxable income. As long as you've got blood in your veins, you're susceptible. Bill was just reminding them of that fact.
GNOME

Ubuntu Mobile Looks At Qt As GNOME Alternative 262

Posted by kdawson from the friendly-competition dept.
Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: "The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year... 'I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,' Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. 'The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'"
Government

Barack Obama Sworn In As 44th President of the US 1656

Posted by timothy from the worst-job-in-the-whole-world-but-the-best-perks dept.
Just before noon today, Eastern time, Barack Obama was sworn in before the US Capitol building as the 44th President of the United States (Whitehouse.gov has already been updated to reflect the new President), and offered an inaugural address which outlined some of the challenges that the country currently faces, both within the country's borders and abroad. Obama's election has been called "a civil rights triumph," and his candidacy has inspired perhaps the most visible political involvement of young voters of any candidate since John Kennedy. Here's your chance to discuss the newest occupant of the White House and what you'd like to see happen over the course of his presidency.
Image

Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes Screenshot-sm 1654

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-is-hard dept.
stonedcat writes "A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn't install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers."
The Internet

Doubts Multiply About the "Long Tail" 194

Posted by kdawson from the to-him-who-hath-shall-be-given dept.
fruey sends in a New Scientist analysis of the many second thoughts about the Long Tail theory. It summarizes four studies that show, in different markets, that the tail is both flatter and thinner than originally supposed, and that blockbusters are not going away in those markets — they are getting bigger. It's theorized that widely used collaborative filtering software is magnifying the winners' share of the various pies, and peer influence is a large contributor to consumer behavior.
GUI

Shuttleworth Proposes Overhaul of Desktop Notifications 306

Posted by timothy from the activated-but-not-in-use dept.
Thelasko writes "Mark Shuttleworth is considering a controversial overhaul to the way Ubuntu manages notifications." I'm not thrilled with all of the changes proposed, which would mostly value simplicity over confusion at the expense of flexibility and permanence. But anything that would make more people read over and specifically approve the wording of error messages and other notifications is a good thing.
Censorship

Argentine Judges Disappear Celebrities From Internet 81

Posted by timothy from the unsearchterms dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona. Try it yourself — compare the results for a Yahoo! Argentina search for Diego Maradona (0 results) to a search at Yahoo! Mexico and Google Argentina (both with millions of results)."
PC Games (Games)

Video Games Linked To Child Aggression 500

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-this-makes-hulk-smash dept.
the4thdimension writes "CNN is running a story this morning that explains new research showing a correlation between video games and aggression in children. The study monitored groups of US and Japanese children, asking them to rate their violent behavior over a period of several months while they played video games in their free time. The study concludes that it has 'pretty good evidence' that there is a link between video games and childhood aggression." Stories like this make me want to smash things.
The Military

Researchers To Build Underwater Airplane 263

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the journey-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea dept.
coondoggie writes to tell us that DARPA seems to still be having fun with their funding and continues to aim for the "far out." The latest program, a submersible airplane, seems to have been pulled directly from science fiction. Hopefully this voyage to the bottom of the sea is of the non-permanent variety. "According to DARPA: 'The difficulty with developing such a craft come from the diametrically opposed requirements that exist for an airplane and a submarine. While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater. In addition, the flow conditions and the systems designed to control a submarine and an airplane are radically different, due to the order of magnitude difference in the densities of air and water.'"
The Courts

Judge Suppresses Report On Voting Systems 192

Posted by kdawson from the tell-me-but-don't-tell-them dept.
Irvu writes "A New Jersey Superior Court Judge has prohibited the release of an analysis conducted on the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting system. This report arose out of a lawsuit challenging on constitutional grounds the use of these systems. The study was conducted by Andrew Appel on behalf of the plaintiffs, after the judge in the case ordered the company to permit it. That same judge has now withheld it indefinitely from the public record on a verbal order."
Mars

Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow 118

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-a-bad-signal dept.
Riding with Robots writes "NASA reports that the Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. According to the Canadian team running a weather experiment, a laser instrument designed to study how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers above the landing site. Data shows the snow vaporizing before reaching the surface, but one of the mission scientists said, 'We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.' Spacecraft soil experiments have also provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water."

Good Email For Kids? 489

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the think-of-the-children dept.
mgessner writes "My kids are starting to want email accounts of their own. Even though gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, it's not perfect. Searching the web the other day for kid-safe email, I found a few sites that say they can do the job. What do others do for their kids' email? Pay for it? Just use a free service like gmail or yahoo? I don't pay for email accounts out of my own pocket, so I don't really see the need, but if the cost was a few bucks a month, I'd do it."
Television

XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released, Now Cross-Platform 169

Posted by timothy from the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a welcome followup to last year's promise of XBMC being made available for Linux: "The first cross-platform Beta version[s] of XBMC Media Center for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox have now been released in preparation for an upcoming stable release, code named 'Atlantis.'" Now, though, there are binaries available for download through the XBMC Media Center site, though only for the non-Xbox versions.

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