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Education

Submission + - Math: Making it fun, again

Submitted by macaday
macaday writes: The desire to learn math and science in school is about as popular as eating Brussels sprouts. Students do not understand the need to learn it and the focus has shifted to standardized test-prep in the classroom. The folks at Shodor are making available free on-line software that makes learning math and science interesting and interactive.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - "Child porn" legal in Belgium

Submitted by stimpie
stimpie writes: The Belgium minister of justice Laurette Onkelinx has said in response to raised questions that "child porn" in second life wont be prosecuted.

According to to Belgium law virtual actions with children are not illegal.

A recent conviction in the UK for 'pseudo' child sex pics makes me wonder where this will go.
Portables

Submission + - Sugar-fuelled battery to replace Lithium-ion?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Fuel cell technology that is currently in development boasts the ability of extracting energy from virtually any sugar source to power portable electronics like cellular phones, laptops, and sensors. The new technology is expected to be biodegradable, environmentally friendly and more energy efficient than current options, providing a green alternative to current Lithium-ion batteries. http://pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1458597410
Software

Submission + - Debian at the crossroads

Submitted by Tookis
Tookis writes: The Debian GNU/Linux project has come to some kind of crossroads — due to many factors, some of them artificial — and the man who takes over leadership next month will have to make some crucial decisions on the future direction of the project. At the moment strong leadership appears to be lacking — or so founder Ian Murdock believes. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10788/1090/
Books

Submission + - Is someone selling 5 Star book reviews?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Is someone selling 5 Star book reviews?

I noticed a book reviewer named "Midwest Book Review" had several 5 Star book reviews, each of which looked liked book blurbs, not reviews. I then checked out the reviewer at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A14OJS0VWMOSW O/ref=cm_cr_auth/102-4466102-9848954

I wrote Amazon.com the following:

Comments:Dear Amazon,
>
> I love the customer review feature of Amazon.com.
>
> I think a reviewer named "Midwest Book Review" may be abusing the
review process.
>
> It appears they have 31,106 book reviews on your site. The first
200 reviews I looked at all had Five Star ratings. (I only looked
at the first 200 book reviews.)
>
> I have no idea what's going on here, but the sample of reviews I
read seem more like book promotion blurbs than reviews. I'm
wondering if they are selling Five Star reviews to authors.
>
> See http://www.midwestbookreview.com/get_rev.htm
>
> Any abuse of the Amazon.com review process severly weakens my
faith in the review process, which I rely on to make good choices.
>
> I hope you will investigate this matter and find out if the review
process is being abused.
>
> Thanks.
>

Amazon responded:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

We appreciate that you took the time to write to us about this
issue. I have looked into this situation and found that the reviews
posted by Midwest Book Reviewer do not fall outside of our review
guidelines. While we do not condone selling positive book reviews,
we have no way of showing that this is what is happening in this
case and cannot take any action.

We thank you for your interest in our customer reviews. Comments
such as yours help us improve our service and are always
appreciated. Let us know if you have any other concerns.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

************************************************

I am not claiming Midwest Book Review (http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm)
is doing anything wrong. I could not look through all 31,000+ reviews to see if they are all 5 star reviews. The reviews may be honest appraisals. It does, however, look suspicious to me.
Data Storage

Submission + - What do you do when you can't afford a SAN?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What's the next best solution to having a full SAN setup for central data storage? Setting up an enterprise level SAN is so expensive that the company I work for wants to know what other solutions there are to this situation. NAS is cool for at home, but would it work for a high trafficked website? I don't know of any self contained NAS solutions that offer data redundancy. The only way I can think of to get that would be to have an actual server with RAID set up on the disks. I have searched the web, reading white papers and other material, but I would like to hear from the horse's mouth what works best and is easiest to set up. One thing to keep in mind, and I know many /. readers will not like this but, we are in a Windows environment, and the gears that turn will not be able to change this.
User Journal

Submission + - Court Clerks To be Extempted from Privacy Laws

Submitted by Krishna Dagli
Krishna Dagli writes: The Texas House of Representatives last week passed an emergency bill that exempts courthouse clerks in Texas from state and federal laws requiring that Social Security numbers be kept confidential. The bill is not yet voted at Texas Senate.

If not the Court Clerks then who will be responsible for ensuring that exposing SSN's in public documents does
not occur and who will be held accountable?

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=285672
Power

Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It? 652

Posted by Hemos from the questioning-the-wisdom dept.
Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Java DST Patch Breaks DST

Submitted by
Christopher_G_Lewis
Christopher_G_Lewis writes: "This is just coming out, but Sun's DST patch "may break backward compatibility for the Eastern, Hawaiian, and Mountain time zones, under certain circumstances." DST: Daylight Saving Time Changes (2007) There's a Sun alert, but only for subscribed members: Sun Alert 102836 for Java. The introduction of Olson Timezone (TZ) data, version 2005r or greater, may break backward compatibility for the Eastern, Hawaiian, and Mountain time zones, under certain circumstances. This issue is also outlined in Sun BugIDs 6466476 and 6530336, listed at: 6466476 6530336"
Communications

Submission + - An Entire Country without Internet for a Week!

Submitted by Jennifer Bloom
Jennifer Bloom writes: It seems that the most of the country of Jordan was without internet for an entire week. The business week in Jordan is from Sunday to Thursday, and the Jordan Telecom company did not inform its millions of subscribers of the scheduled one-week-long "maintenance," nor did the Government-sponsored news agencies report this failure. Jordan Telecom has a monopoly over the ADSL market — the only form of broadband internet available — and as such, the majority of the businesses and organizations suffered a severe set-back.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Virtual Machine for PowerPC architecture

Submitted by EricB
EricB writes: The x86 instruction set is relatively complex/abstract and does not meet the Polpek and Goldberg virtualization requirements. Despite this, there are many commercial virtualization products on the market for this architecture. With the PowerPC instruction set being compact and simple, why aren't there any PowerPC-based virtualization solutions out there?
Microsoft

Submission + - Evidence that MS violated 2002 judgement surfaces

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: In the Comes Vs. Microsoft case, the plaintiffs believe they have found evidence that Microsoft has failed to fully disclose APIs to competitors. If true, this would mean that Microsoft has violated the 2002 judgement. Once again, Groklaw has the scoop. This information has become avaialble since the plaintiffs have obtained an order allowing them to disclose Microsoft's alleged mis-behavior to the DOJ ("appropriate enforcement and compliance authorities").
Windows

Submission + - Windows based installer for Linux

Submitted by Verunks
Verunks writes: The guys at ubuntu are working on a easier way to install linux for windows users:
"The aim of this installer is to provide an easier way for a Windows user to install Ubuntu without having to know how to burn a cd iso, set the bios to boot from cd, repartition the disks, set up a multiboot system, etc. It will not replace any of the current Ubuntu installation options, and will not require that windows is installed prior to the installation of Ubuntu."

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