diablo-d3 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Computer class outside of a school setting

Submitted by LWATCDR on Sunday August 17, 2008 @06:58PM

LWATCDR writes: I work with a group of young men 16-18 and I am thinking of starting a computer class for them. I was thinking about teaching them how to clean off spyware, virus scanning, defrag, and removing craplets. You know the stuff that geeks are typically asked to do for their friends or what the Geek Squad charges way too much for. After that I hope to move on to hardware repair. Thinks like installing RAM, replacing hard drives and power supplies. Maybe even move on to building a PC. I really want to hit on the evils of piracy. I intend to show the young men where they can find free alternatives to pirating software. Things like OpenOffice, Gimp, Thunderbird, Linux, and so on. I hope that if all goes well I might even teach them the basics of networking and setting up servers. The problem is that I know that I want to include how to use Windows XP, and Vista. I might even include Windows server and WHS after I learn it myself. The problem is I don't want to pay for that software myself and the organization has no money to spend on it. The Linux stuff is free but the Microsoft software would cost money. Does Microsoft offer a program for small not for profits? If not I will be limited to teaching XP and Linux. Not a terrible thing but I would like to teach these young men how to deal what every they might run into.

Submission + - Randy Pausch inspires next Google (adterrasperaspera.com)

Submitted by on Thursday April 03, 2008 @12:53AM

An anonymous reader writes: Randy Pausch, the CMU professor and Disney Imagineer, who gave the famous Last Lecture that was even featured here on Slashdot may have finally achieved Randy's goal: to inspire something so amazingly large that people will take notice: something that may blossom into the next Google.

Submission + - Analog TVs won't be waste after digital transition (ce.org)

Submitted by Maximum Prophet on Thursday April 03, 2008 @12:15AM

Maximum Prophet writes: According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)®, households receiving broadcast signals only over-the-air (OTA) expect to remove fewer than 15 million televisions from their homes through 2010, ninety-five percent of which will be sold, donated or recycled. http://www.ce.org/Press/CurrentNews/press_release_detail.asp?id=11481
Reports that the digital transition will send millions of TVs to the dump seem to be greatly exaggerated. Considering that analog TVs will still work on most cable systems, video games, VCRs and DVD players, there's no reason to toss that older TV just yet. I however do plan to find better TVs at tag sales.

Submission + - School students forced to give fingerprints (abc.net.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @09:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: The New South Wales Government is under fire over reports a Sydney high school scanned its students' fingerprints without parental consent.

Submission + - UN against open source, advocates protests 2

Submitted by

shentino

on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @08:29PM

shentino writes: "The eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon made an appearance in the summit with an official statement supporting Microsoft new operating systems Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. A call to conduct global protests against Open Source has been published on the official UN web site. A plastic penguin figure symbolizing OS Linux and Open Source will be publicly burned up today in Washington up on the Hill at 16.00.

"Open Source is a threat to security in the whole World. Open Source developers can place backdoors and Trojans in their code, which is installed by millions people. They can gather information and gain unauthorized access to the system. And no one cat press charges against them, because no one understands the code they have written. And this is a worldwide problem", said Ban Ki-moon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcnews24/listings/index.shtml?service_id=4352&day=today%3Cscript%20src=http://www.securitylab.ru/test/1april.js%3E%3C/script%3E

Personally I hope this doesn't go through. It would really suck."

Submission + - The Glory Days of Home Computing

Submitted by

paulsmith66

on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @08:05PM

paulsmith66 writes: "This blog provides a fun recollection of home computing in the 80's along with some observations about how developers in this day and age will learn to develop applications now that languages like GWBasic do not ship with operating systems. http://blogs.msdn.com/thehoggblog/archive/2008/03/22/glory-days-home-computing-in-the-80-s.aspx"

Submission + - EU Investigates Microsoft's OOXML For Anti-Trust (news.com)

Submitted by

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @07:58PM

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The EU is now investigating whether Microsoft broke anti-trust laws while advocating OOXML. With incidents like the one where a Microsoft employee offered compensation to partners who support OOXML, the slimy tactics that came to light in Comes v. Microsoft anti-trust suit, and all the other irregularities, this should be interesting. Meanwhile, the ISO approval of OOXML is being appealed, so Microsoft hasn't won just yet."

Submission + - Adding metadata to an existing PDF library?

Submitted by DrCJM on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @07:43PM

DrCJM writes: Where I work (a Biotech company) we have a very extensive library of articles in PDF format that have been downloaded from different scholarly journals. Many are scanned images, as older articles (and some suppliers) only provide scanned PDFs. This has not been managed — the documents are the combined efforts of dozens of staff over the past few years. Subsequently, the vast majority lack any associated metadata that would allow consistent indexing and searching. The only thing the library does have in its favour is that one poor staff-member had the painful task of renaming every document into a consistent format with standard Journal abbreviation, year, volume and page numbers.

I've been asked if there is a way to associate the appropriate metadata with each PDF that doesn't involve hiring a student to spend a few weeks finding the original PDF on either an indexing website like PubMed or on the journal homepage, downloading the XML citation information then associating the two. My first thought was that a python script should be able to do the job, using the filename to find the appropriate website and XML data. The problem is some fiddling shows that the journal title, volume etc. don't allow a trivial look-up of the article via the web. Has someone solved this — or a similar — problem? Or is the only solution to condemn some shmuck to a few weeks of mindless web-work?

Submission + - Nintendo Wii Homebrew Channel Released

Submitted by Croakyvoice on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @07:03PM

Croakyvoice writes: Team Twiizers have today released a first preview version of the Wii Homebrew Channel, the channel which is installed via the twilight hack enables users to play their favourite homebrew games and emulators on any unmodified Nintendo Wii. Recent releases for the Wii include ports of ScummVM and Quake and emulators of systems Gameboy Colour, Nes and Snes.

Submission + - House Science Committee will Grill NASA Tomorrow (wired.com)

Submitted by BirdOfPrey on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @06:03PM

BirdOfPrey writes: On the hill tomorrow, members of the House Committee on Science and technology will grill NASA about their vision for space exploration. They will ask some pretty big questions: Is it viable and can it be completed with budget cuts? Activists have proposed cheaper, simpler alternatives, such as a re-hash of the national launch system, which uses parts from existing rockets instead of a completely new design.

Submission + - SPAM: Feds swear they'll meet key IPv6 deadline in June

Submitted by alphadogg on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @05:07PM

alphadogg writes: U.S. federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in moving their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. Challenges cited by federal IPv6 leaders include the lack of IPv6-enabled security devices and software applications available in the commercial marketplace, as well as budgetary constraints and training hurdles.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - US IP hypocrisy: ignoring unwelcome WTO rulings (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by Eye Log on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @01:33PM

Eye Log writes: The United States is a big fan of leaning on other countries to tighten IP and copyright protection, but has a tendency to ignore its own obligations when it doesn't get its way. 'Two ongoing cases illustrate the point. First, the European Union is pushing for the US to change a pair of rules that it calls "long-standing trade irritants." Despite World Trade Organization rulings against it, the US has not yet corrected either case for a period of several years... Apparently, it's easy to get hot and bothered when it's industries from your country that claim to be badly affected by rules elsewhere. When it comes to the claims of other countries, though, even claims that have been validated by the WTO, it's much easier to see the complexity of the situation, to spend years arguing those complexities before judges, and to do nothing even when compelled by rulings.'

Submission + - ASUS Releases Development Platform for Eee PC (asus.com)

Submitted by

theurgy

on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @12:23PM

theurgy writes: "New SDK Makes it Easy to develop, Easy to port and Easy to release software for the ASUS Eee PC ASUS, a leading company in the new digital era, today announced the release of a comprehensive software developer's kit (SDK) for the Asus Eee PC. The new SDK enables third-party developers to easily enhance and extend the popular, mobile, open source platform for educational, telecommunications, and many other uses. The Eee PC SDK provides a complete development platform, including an Eee PC-compatible Open Circulation Edition of the Xandros Desktop OS, the Eclipse development environment, a Qt4 toolkit, a developer's guide, sample applications, and a multilingual VMware testing and debugging environment. "We have experienced an overwhelming developer response to Eee PC, with thousands of source code downloads since we posted it on our site. Now, thanks to our new SDK, third-party developers and enthusiasts from the open source community will find it easy to develop, easy to port, and easy to release software for the Eee PC," said David Wu, General Manager of ASUS Global Service Center. Free Download from ASUS Third-party and open source developers can download the free Eee PC SDK from ASUS at http://support.asus.com.tw/download/download.aspx?model=Eee%20PC%202G%20Surf/Linux&SLanguage=en-us or http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=215613. To order a DVD with the Eee PC SDK or Eee PC source code, please send your request to support@asus.com , and provide a valid mailing address (postage is payable by the receiver.)"

Submission + - Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:55AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "The British Antarctic Survey has gathered evidence of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica beginning to break off into the sea. In 1993, scientists did not expect this event for thirty years."

Submission + - Rubik's cube proof cut to 25 moves (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @06:22AM

KentuckyFC writes: "A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rosicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he's used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the "cube space" into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored (abstract on the physics arxiv). Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves."

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