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Software

Submission + - Language Tools

Submitted by creolophus
creolophus writes: I am a college student and I am looking for language tools which will help me with my writing, by giving me useful feedback (on my grammar, usage, etc). I will be writing mostly English prose with very little technical content.

So far, I have been using only Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checkers, and they don't provide any feedback.

Do you know (or) have you been using any such tools?
Math

Submission + - Your web browser, now a graphing calculator

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Taking advantage of the vector graphics features offered by the latest browsers, a recently created website called FooPlot turns your web browser into a function plotter (in 2-D and 3-D), offering a few basic graphing calculator features with a promise for further developments and integration with popular online spreadsheet applications. Gaining popularity in an educational context both in high schools and universities, this is another great example of the potential of the Internet to become the application platform of the future.

As an added extra, FooPlot also permits functions to be tacked onto the URL: http://fooplot.com/x^2+2x+1.
KDE

Submission + - KDE on Windows

Submitted by
AlanS2002
AlanS2002 writes: "This week's KDE Commit Digest tells about an installer for KDE on Windows and the problems the developers encountered setting up a working environment for KDE to run on. Many screenshots included, showing the first applications (such as Konqueror) running natively."
Data Storage

Submission + - ODF or Office OpenXML?

Submitted by frdmfghtr
frdmfghtr writes: After getting frusterated for the last time with MS Word corrupting documents with embedded objects (pictures, tables, equations, etc.) I started using NeoOffice and saving everything in the OpenDocument format. With the upcoming release of Office 2007 (and later, 2008 for Mac) and support for Office OpenXML, which format does the community see as better from a technical and licensing perspective? I've read some Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDo cument_and_Microsoft_Office_Open_XML_formats#_note -0) and Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125 144611543) articles on the topic, but I'm really not sure what to make of most of it, yet. Please try to put pro- and anti-MS biases to the side; think of it as a VHS vs. Betamax question. The goal is some reassurance that whatever format I use, it's not going to become useless should I choose to stick with NeoOffice, use MS Office 2008 for Mac, or even both and swap back and forth.
Space

Submission + - Mars probe may have spotted lost Sojourner rover

Submitted by
Maggie McKee
Maggie McKee writes: "NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have spotted the tiny, toaster oven-sized Sojourner rover just a few meters away from its companion, the Mars Pathfinder lander. It appears to have crawled there in an attempt to re-establish contact with the lander after the lander had already died. But the pictures aren't clear enough to definitively ID the rover, and it's possible Sojourner simply took off on its own. If it were miraculously still alive after 10 years, it could be 3 kilometers away from Pathfinder — and probably impossible to find, even with MRO."
Google

Submission + - Google Tops 100 Best Places to Work For

Submitted by
inetsee
inetsee writes: "Forbes Magazine reports that Fortune Magazine has released their 10th annual "100 Best Companies to Work For" list and Google is at number 1. Some highlights of the benefits of working for Goolge that caught my eye were the free gourmet meals and the massages. The chance to spend 20% of your time working on your own personal projects also sounds very appealing. Of course, with resumes rolling in at the rate of 1300 a day, the competition is fierce. Maybe I should look at some of the other companies on the list."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Men who love Linux are Sexier

Submitted by
caluml
caluml writes: "A female's tongue-in-cheek look at men who love Linux finds some interesting results. Among them are: We're passionate (and that rubs off in the bedroom too), not shy about spending our earnings, are problem-solvers, and are deep thinkers.

We need to make sure sites that lots of women read know about this!"
Unix

Submission + - The birth of vi

Submitted by
lanc
lanc writes: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, contributor to BSD Unix, the UltraSparc technology, NFS and even Java, tells the story in an article at TheRegister about how he wrote vi and what the motives were. In the interview he says:

"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow."

...and so my son begun The Holy Editor War."
Announcements

Submission + - Top 10 Torrents for 2006!

Submitted by
Andre
Andre writes: "Wondering what was the Top torrent for 2006. Not only will this come as a surprise, but might also come as a surprise to the RIAA. Was the most downloaded file of 2006 an MP3, a movie, software or a game? Let me give you a hint. This file was downloaded more than one billion times in 2006! What was it? http://freelimewire.info/2007/what-was-the-top-10- torrents-for-2006/"
Media

Submission + - Tux Magazine RIP

Submitted by
colinmc151
colinmc151 writes: "Word is that Tux Magazine, which has always aimed itself at new users is no more, word from publisher Phil Hughes is that issue 20 (currently out) is the last issue. A shame because it seemed to be the one place you could point the newbie user (ok, I am biased, I have written some items for Tux Magazine, I will miss it as a place to write for ... anyone interested in buying some unpublished articles aimed at new users...)."
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Problem with Driver-Loaded Firmware

Journal by Kadin2048

(Submitted as a story on 12/31/2006)

If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes gua

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