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Education

US School Curriculum to Include Online Safety? 137

Stony Stevenson writes to mention that the US National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) is pushing for school's to include cyber-security, online safety, and ethics lessons in their normal curriculum. "The National School Boards Association reported that 96 per cent of school districts claim that at least some of their teachers assign homework requiring internet use. But there is still no formal education on how to stay safe, secure and ethical online, despite the fact that the internet, like the real world, has threats and dangers which students may come across in the normal course of a day. These include communications from identity thieves, online predators and cyber-bullies."
Linux Business

Ubuntu Dell Now In UK, France, and Germany 183

mrcgran writes "Dell announced the availability of Ubuntu in Europe and future plans for China. 'I hinted at this before, but today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed... In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China.'"

Details of Microsoft's New Analytics Tool Leaked 68

hhavensteincw writes "Details of Microsoft's answer to Google's Analytics have leaked online. Screenshots have been posted on the Net of the new "Gatineau" Web analytics tool that Microsoft now says will be available in beta this summer. In a blog post, Microsoft's Ian Thomas also reveals that Microsoft will use Live ID (formerly Microsoft Passport) profiles to get its demographic data."
Wireless Networking

Duke Wireless Problem Caused by Cisco, not iPhone 195

jpallas writes "Following up to a previous Slashdot story, it now turns out that the widely reported problems with Duke University's wireless network were not caused by Apple's iPhone. The problem was actually with their Cisco network. Duke's Chief Information Officer praises the work of their technical staff. Does that include the assistant director for communications infrastructure who was quoted as saying, "I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form?""
Linux Business

Linux Creator Calls GPLv3 Authors 'Hypocrites' 920

AlexGr writes "We've heard conflicting tales regarding Linus Torvalds' acceptance of GPLv3. InformationWeek reports on comments by Mr. Torvalds that would seem to decide the issue: 'Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites ... For Torvalds' part, it appears unlikely he'll ever adopt GPLv3 for the Linux kernel. He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3. "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality," Torvalds wrote.'"
Databases

First "Real" Benchmark for PostgreSQL 275

anticlimate writes "A new benchmark published on SPEC shows PostgreSQL's performance approaching that of Oracle's and surpassing or on par with MySQL (however the test-hardwares of the other DB systems are somewhat different). The test was put together by PostgreSQL's core developers working at Sun. They certainly are not unbiased, but this is the first 'real' benchmark with PostgreSQL — according to Josh Berkus's blog. The main difference compared to earlier benchmarks (and anecdotes) seems to be the tuning of PostgreSQL."
Windows

Review of Stardock's TweakVista 191

mikemuch writes "The new TweakVista utility from Stardock surfaces some of Vista's more obscure settings, giving access to diagnostics and making suggestions for services that you should be running. ExtremeTech's review of TweakVista generally likes the software, and though it's called version 0.9, it is for sale — $19.95 — and feels feature-complete. More suggestions on system optimization, however, would be helpful. From the review: 'According to TweakVista, on July 1st, the "Windows Shell Services DLL service took 651ms longer to shut down than usual." That's nice. Other than this stark presentation, there's no digestible information as to why the shell services DLL took over half a second longer to shut down. And there's no hint as to what to do about it.'"
Politics

Is Scientific Consensus a Threat to Democracy? 836

chance_encounter writes "President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus has published an article in the Financial Times in which he seems to equate the current global warming debate with totalitarian thought control: 'The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced ... The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.' At the end of the article he proposes several suggestions to improve the global climate debate, including this point: 'Let us resist the politicization of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus," which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.'"
Supercomputing

Submission + - Parallel computing in Python

Krishna Dagli writes: "Is it really possible to write high performance/parallel code without knowing C/Fortran and MPI? This link about Star P product suggests that existing Python code will not require reprogramming and Python users don't have to become parallel programming experts to take advantage of parallel processing architectures."
OS X

Submission + - Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0 Pre Order (parallels.com)

Boris_javert writes: "Many Parallels customers received an email today stating 'After months of intensive development, Parallels is just weeks away from releasing its latest version of the hottest Mac software. Voted Reader's Choice by MacWorld and ranked #6 on PC World's Top 100 List, Parallels Desktop for Mac continues to drive innovation and take the Mac community by storm, now with 50+ brand new features.' This release includes ne features like SmartSelect, 3d and OpenGL graphic support for games and cad applications, and with the promise of Vista Aero support shortly behind. Its interesting to note the close timing this has with Apples WWDC. Could Parallels be trying make preemptive strike move? More on this from http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/2007/0 5/yes-you-heard-rightparallels-desktop-30.html"
Math

Six-Dimensional Space-Time Theory 330

eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is covering an interesting year-old paper that proposes an alternative six-dimensional theory of space and time. George Sparling's proposition, based on Einstein's general relativity and Elie Cartan's triality, is a twistor space (which I've only read of in Roger Penrose's latest work). The gist is that space-time is modeled not by four dimensions but by six, and that the extra two dimensions are time-like. Sparling is hoping that tests from the Large Hadron Collider will help prove his theory. The paper is heavy but the PhysOrg article summarizes it nicely."

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