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Businesses

Submission + - Creating a successful new online product - 13 tips (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by
KDan
KDan writes: "There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the "new wave", so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10'000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions. Here are thirteen tips on how to achieve that."
The Internet

Submission + - Creating a successful new online product - 13 tips (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by
KDan
KDan writes: "There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the "new wave", so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10'000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions. Here are thirteen tips for how to do so."
Math

Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90 104

Posted by timothy from the what-are-the-odds-his-middle-name-was-norton dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very large differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the father of chaos theory, who coined the term 'the butterfly effect' and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are best summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory 'profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.'"
The Internet

AT&T Claims Internet to Reach Capacity in 2010 239

Posted by timothy from the calls-for-even-more-paper-towels dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNET News has a piece in which AT&T claims that the Internet's bandwidth will be saturated by video-on-demand and such by 2010. Says the AT&T VP: 'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.' Similarly: 'He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.'"
The Internet

Darwin's Private Papers Get Released To The Internet 237

Posted by Zonk from the uncle-charles-is-one-of-my-heroes dept.
bibekpaudel writes "ScienceDaily reports that a wealth of papers belonging to Charles Darwin have been published on the internet, some for the first time. Some 20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today to http://darwin-online.org.uk/. The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history, according to organizers from Cambridge University Library 'This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,' said John van Wyhe, director of the project. The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species."
Moon

Growing Plants on the Moon May Be Feasible 254

Posted by Zonk from the we-carry-a-harpoon dept.
Smivs writes "European scientists say that growing plants on the moon should be possible. Scientists in the Netherlands believe growing plants on our sister satellite would be useful as a tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions. It would also aid in understanding the challenges that might be faced by manned bases. 'The new step, taken in the experiments reported at the EGU, is to remove the need for bringing nutrients and soil from Earth. A team led by Natasha Kozyrovska and Iryna Zaetz from the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev planted marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a type of rock found on Earth which is very similar to much of the lunar surface. In neat anorthosite, the plants fared very badly. But adding different types of bacteria made them thrive; the bacteria appeared to draw elements from the rock that the plants needed, such as potassium.'"
Privacy

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626

Posted by Zonk from the kind-of-strains-the-mind-to-think-about-huh dept.
mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."
Space

Two Totally Unique Star Systems Discovered 141

Posted by Zonk from the two-of-a-kind-beats-ace-high dept.
esocid writes "Astronomers have spied a faraway star system that is so unusual, it was one of a kind — until its discovery helped them pinpoint a second one that was much closer to home. In a paper published in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Ohio State University astronomers and their colleagues suggest that these star systems are the progenitors of a rare type of supernova. In research funded by the National Science Foundation, they found a star system that is unusual, because it's what the astronomers have called a 'yellow supergiant eclipsing binary' — it contains two very bright, massive yellow stars that are very closely orbiting each other. In fact, the stars are so close together that a large amount of stellar material is shared between them, so that the shape of the system resembles a peanut."
Programming

Submission + - Fundamental Mistakes (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by KDan
KDan writes: When building something new, mistakes are unavoidable. To paraphrase the common saying, "if you're not making any mistakes, you're not trying hard enough". There's another saying which says that the difference between a good carpenter and a bad carpenter is not that the good carpenter doesn't make any mistakes, but that he's better at turning them into masterstrokes. You can, and should, try to prevent mistakes from happening, but it's a fact of project life that things go wrong. Many books can be filled on the subject of how to deal with the huge variety of project mishaps. This article focuses on one specific type of mistake: the big, fundamental mistake.
Businesses

Submission + - Look like your boss (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by
KDan
KDan writes: "Do you want to get promoted? This article presents one of the key things that you must do to increase your chances of being promoted. It's not difficult, all it takes is awareness and observation, but it can make a big difference to your career. The key advice is that in order to be promoted to a certain job, you must adopt the behaviour patterns of that job — the dress code, body language, tone of voice, and speech patterns."
Businesses

Submission + - How to recognise a good programmer (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by KDan
KDan writes: How do you recognise good programmer? It's not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don't always have the "official" experience to demonstrate that they're great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone's a great programmer. This article presents those cues in a way that non-programmers should be able to understand and use.
Programming

Submission + - Rails sucks? (inter-sections.net)

Submitted by KDan
KDan writes: With astonishing regularity, articles or posts come out claiming that the popular Ruby on Rails framework sucks in some way or another. People complain that Rails isn't as easy to deploy as PHP, that Rails just didn't do it for project XYZ. They range from the articulate and well thought out to the frankly inane and stupid (and wrong). Recently, there's also of course been the spectacular nuclear rant by Zed Shaw, which was more a rant against random elements of the community than against Rails, but was still presented as a rant against Rails.
Here's an article that tries to put some perspective on why these opinions are irrelevant to whether or not Rails suck.
Government

Submission + - Help me fight the swiss dmca. (no-dmca.ch)

Submitted by
pyalot
pyalot writes: "The swiss goverment has passed a law that would make it impossible to cirvumvent effective copy protection measures. I have created a page to inform and organize a resistance against this law. If we collect 50'000 signatures until the 24th of January however, we can force a national vote on this law. Help me in any way that you can fight this law. I was first made aware of this two days ago by this article on slashdot."

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