Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Facebook

Submission + - The day Leo Traynor confronted his troll (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Dublin-based writer Leo Traynor (traynorseye.com) has written a piece about confronting the troll who drove him off Twitter, hacked his Facebook, and abused and terrified his family. The piece is posted on his own site (http://www.traynorseye.com/) and at the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/26/day-confronted-troll)

Submission + - Chinese Hospital Offers Handsfree Sperm Extraction Device (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by
markass530
markass530 writes: "The Zhengzhou Central Hospital in Nanjing, China, announced a new and rather unique therapeutic device that is designed to treat infertility in patients.

Zoom
The hands-free "sperm extractor" is a stand up device with a height-adjustable "massage pipe" that moves inward and outward from the main body of the sperm extractor. According to the manufacturer, the speed, amplitude and frequency can be adjusted by the user, which aims to provide a "warm" and "comfortable" feeling for users who find difficult to retrieve their sperm the traditional, manual way. There is even a screen to play movie content to help with the extraction process."
Education

Submission + - Teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon (blogspot.fi)

Submitted by
linjaaho
linjaaho writes: "A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish.

The result — LaTeX source code and the pdf — is published with open CC-BY-license.

As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software.

The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at Github or the project Facebook page."
HP

Submission + - HP Unveils Open webOS 1.0 (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: HP has lifted the curtains off its open source initiative and released the version 1.0 of its Open webOS as per schedule. HP has added core applications like email and browser in this version and has also continued the support for “desktop build environment.” HP unveiled the Beta version of Open webOS earlier this month. The source code is available through Open webOS GitHub repositories. The version 1.0 of the platform can now be ported to new devices claims HP.

Submission + - Computer History Museum gets the attention it deserves (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
mcpublic
mcpublic writes: "For years the Computer History Museum has been quietly collecting and displaying the computational relics of yesteryear. Now, finally the New York Times Arts Section shines the spotlight on this most nerdy of museums. Speak Steampunk? You can find a working replica of Babbages Difference Engine in the lobby of the Museum's Mountain View, California home. Of course the vast majority of the collection is electronic, and though 'big iron' is king, that hasn't stopped dedicated volunteers from bringing back to life pioneering 'mini' computers like the 1960 PDP-1 and the first video game software ever: Spacewar!"
Space

Submission + - Nazi Buddha Came From Outer Space

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "BBC reports that scientists say a 1,000-year old ancient Buddhist statue with a swastika on its stomach that was recovered by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s was originally carved from a highly valuable meteorite that crashed about 15,000 years ago in the border region of eastern Siberia and Mongolia. And although it may seem that the story of this priceless object owes more perhaps to an Indiana Jones film script than sober scientific research, the "Iron Man" was discovered in Tibet in 1938 by German scientist Ernst Schafer whose expedition was supported by the Nazis, in particular by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS who believed the Aryan race originated in Tibet and was keen to recover objects from the area. The German and Austrian scientists who worked on the Iron Man were surprised to be able to trace the statue to a specific event in meteorite history. "I was absolutely sure it was a meteorite when I saw it first, even at 10 meters" says Geologist Elmar Buchner . "It is rich in nickel, it is rich in cobalt. Less than 0.1% of all meteorites and less than 1% of iron meteorites are ataxites, so it is the rarest type of meteorites you can find." Chemistry tests show the 23-pound statue's iron matches fragments of the "Chinga" meteorite field found near the Tibetan-Mongolian border in 1913 by gold prospectors. The material's hardness comes from its high iron content in addition to containing some 16 percent nickel."
Microsoft

Submission + - EU set to charge Microsoft over ruling breach (reuters.com)

Submitted by
quippe
quippe writes: "Microsoft Corp will be charged for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said on Thursday, which could mean a hefty fine for the company

U.S.-based Microsoft's more than decade-long battle with the European Commission has already landed it with fines totaling more than a billion euros ($1.28 billion).

The Commission, which opened an investigation into the issue in July, is now preparing formal charges against the company, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said."
Earth

Submission + - New comet might blaze brighter than the full Moon (astronomynow.com)

Submitted by UnresolvedExternal
UnresolvedExternal writes: A new comet has been discovered that is predicted to blaze incredibly brilliantly in the skies during late 2013. With a perihelion passage of less than two million kilometres from the Sun on 28 November 2013, current predictions are of an object that will dazzle the eye at up to magnitude —16. That's far brighter than the full Moon. If predictions hold true then C/2012 S1 will certainly be one of the greatest comets in human history, far outshining the memorable Comet Hale-Bopp of 1997 and very likely to outdo the long-awaited Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) which is set to stun in March 2013.
NASA

Submission + - Flexible, high-strength polymer aerogels deliver "super-insulation" properties (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Often called "frozen smoke", aerogels are among the amazing materials of our time, with fifteen Guinness Book of World Records entries to their name. However, despite their list of extreme properties, traditional aerogels are brittle, crumbling and fracturing easily enough to keep them out of many practical applications. A new class of mechanically robust polymer aerogels discovered at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio may soon enable engineering applications such as super-insulated clothing, unique filters, refrigerators with thinner walls, and super-insulation for buildings.

Comment redhat/fedora for years, but about to move away (Score 1) 867

by quippe (#41475487) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order?
All started with Slackware .
Then from Redhat 4.1 down to Fedora 16. Still haven't gone to Fedora 17; because it doesn't like my /usr on a separate partition (madness). And my 100 megs boot partition on raid. And I don't like systemd nor gnome 3. Professionally, rhel and centos but that's just a terminal. Never fallen in love with debian-derived.
All will probably finish with Slackware

Comment Re:Amazing! (Score 4, Insightful) 230

by quippe (#41475439) Attached to: GNOME 3.6 Released
Modal dialogs are indeed "forced on people"; anytime an eclipse modal dialog pops up (popped as I am on lxde now), I couldn't move it away to see what I needed to see on the main window, it was "glued", cut&paste out of question. I could fix the missing focus-on-hover installing a tweak plugin; but to fix this one, it was not enough you need to launch gconftool, which obviously is something I could cope with, but it's out of question for the average user. It's indeed one of most broken design decisions I have ever seen in my life.
Science

Submission + - Smartphones Have Banished Boredom (and Why That's Bad) 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Doug Gross writes that thanks to technology, there's been a recent sea change in how people today kill time. "Those dog-eared magazines in your doctor's office are going unread. Your fellow customers in line at the deli counter are being ignored. And simply gazing around at one's surroundings? Forget about it." With their games, music, videos, social media and texting, smartphones "superstimulate," a desire humans have to play when things get dull, says anthropologist Christopher Lynn and he believes that modern society may be making that desire even stronger. "When you're habituated to constant stimulation, when you lack it, you sort of don't know what to do with yourself ...," says Lynn. "When we aren't used to having down time, it results in anxiety. 'Oh my god, I should be doing something.' And we reach for the smartphone. It's our omnipresent relief from that." Researchers say this all makes sense. Fiddling with our phones, they say, addresses a basic human need to cure boredom by any means necessary. But they also fear that by filling almost every second of down time by peering at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially rewarding ways we've dealt with boredom in days past. "Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning out,'" researchers write. "With a mobile (phone) that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way.""
Moon

Submission + - NASA to Build Manned Space Station Beyond the Moon? (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: After forty years of venturing no farther than low Earth orbit, NASA may have decided to establish a manned outpost at a greater distance than humanity has ever traveled before. According to documents seen by the Orlando Sentinel, NASA has chosen a proposal to build a space station beyond the Moon that will act as a “gateway spacecraft” to explore the Moon, the asteroids and eventually as a staging post to launch a manned mission to Mars.

Slashdot Top Deals

There is no distinction between any AI program and some existent game.

Close