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Cloud

A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud 201

Posted by timothy from the nice-to-meet-you-goodbye dept.
New submitter cloudozer writes "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. Radically lower startup latency means that the computing infrastructure may be woven strictly on demand, during the processing window allotted for a given request. Currently cloud providers round an instance uptime to the full hour when calculating charges. They might need to switch to per-second billing if OS-less instances get traction. The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."
Space

Meteor Streaks Over American East Coast 111

Posted by timothy from the missed-the-memo-re-flyover-country dept.
California doesn't get all the action; The Washington Post is one of many news outlets reporting that the east coast of North America got a good view of a meteor, with more than 300 sightings from Canada to Florida. Did you see it? If so, did you have your dashcam on? Update: 03/23 13:43 GMT by T : The meteor was captured at least by some security cameras, as reported by The Guardian.
Books

Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Doctrine 648

Posted by timothy from the stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day dept.
langelgjm writes "In a closely-watched case, the U.S. Supreme Court today vindicated the first-sale doctrine, declaring that it "applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad." The case involved a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher's permission. The 6-3 decision has important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion (PDF) that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad."
Education

Educational Linux Distro Provides Tech-Bundle For Kids and Educators 55

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-linus dept.
First time accepted submitter Jason Hibbets writes "Ubermix is a version of Linux designed for kids and educators. In this interview with Jim Klein, founder of Ubermix, we discover a Linux distribution designed with kids, education, and educators in mind. This could change the way our the next generation learns about Linux and open source software like Celestia, Stellarium, Scratch, VirtualLab Microscope, iGNUit, and more."
Earth

Florida Sinkhole Highlights State's Geologic Instability 206

Posted by Soulskill from the this-planet-will-not-hesitate-to-attack-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last Thursday night, a sinkhole took the life of a man (TV news video, with ad) while he slept in his home in Seffner FL, near Tampa. While human fatalies are rare, sinkholes are so common in Florida that the insurance industry successfully lobbied the state lawmakers to pass legislation in 2011 making it more difficult for homeowners to claim sinkhole damages. The bedrock in Florida is limestone, a weakly soluble mineral formed from calcified deposits of sea creatures tens of millions of years ago. Above the limestone is a clay layer called the Hawthorn Formation which shields the limestone from ground water; and above the clay is sand. However, the protective clay layer is thin or nonexistent in some areas of Florida, particularly in the middle part of the state near the Gulf coast, where caves and sinkholes are common. Geologists say that human activity, particularly construction and irrigation, can trigger sinkholes by destabilizing the landscape above caverns by drawing down water tables and massing structures above them."
Education

The Raspberry Pi Turns One 81

Posted by timothy from the leap-year-birth-means-it's-only-point-two-five dept.
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday. Raspberry Pi was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year, with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; a 512 MB RAM upgrade; the launch of a Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of the Minecraft Pocket Edition."
Education

Play Wii, Become a Better Surgeon 55

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the at-least-on-virtual-patients dept.
drew30319 writes "NPR reports that a team of researchers at the University of Rome required a group of surgical residents to play video games on a Nintendo Wii for an hour a day, five days a week, for four weeks resulting in 'statistically better' performance than a control group for laparoscopic skills. The study includes some interesting stats (e.g. while the control group showed a 10% improvement in accuracy, the Wii-playing group's accuracy improved by 83%). The study's authors add that '[t]he Nintendo Wii may be adopted in lower-budget Institutions or at home by younger surgeons to optimize their training on simulators before performing real procedures.'"
Open Source

Hardware Hacker Proposes Patent and Education Reform To Obama 134

Posted by samzenpus from the listen-up dept.
ptorrone writes "In a welcome turn of events, President Barack Obama spoke directly to the patent troll problem and the need for more comprehensive patent reform yesterday in a 'Fireside Hangout' — a live question and answer session (video) hosted in a Google+ hangout. The President was responding to a question by the prominent electrical engineer and entrepreneur Limor 'Ladyada' Fried of Adafruit Industries, who in 2009 won an EFF Pioneer Award for her work with free software and open-source hardware."

Comment It's probably patented (Score 3, Funny) 736

by Punto (#42879273) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Is It So Hard To Make An Accurate Progress Bar?

There's probably a pantent for a "method or apparatus for an accurate display of progress", nobody wants to mess with that (but seriously most of my innacurate progress bars deal with unpredictable things like I/O, or non-uniform sets like loading textures and meshes and animations all together, so who knows how much time it will actually take to process the same ammount of data?)

Comment I usually avoid the localized UI (Score 1) 330

by Punto (#42838963) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do Most Programmers Understand the English Language?

I usually avoid the localized UI, especially for technical stuff. I honestly understand better a program in the original english than in my native language, simply because most of the words from the "internet era" don't really have a standard translation (and if they do, I've never heard of it, because the english word is everywhere). I usually end up having to think about what they hell they were trying to translate to understand a text. Especially for programmers, stick with english.

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