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Education

Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
Virtualization

Linus Thinks Virtualization Is 'Evil' 330

Front page first-timer crdotson writes "Linus said in an interview that he thinks virtualization is 'evil' because he prefers to deal with the real hardware. Hardware virtualization allows for better barriers between systems by running multiple OSes on the same hardware, but OS-level virtualization allows similar barriers without a hypervisor between the kernel and the hardware. Should we expect more focus on OS-level virtualization such as Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, and LXC?"

Comment NaCl is an anti-web abomination (Score 1) 209

NaCl is not so much about executing C/C++ code as it is about executing native compiled binaries. This has issues:

  • If I compile my C++ code for x86, I can run it on x86 browsers (well, specifically only Chrome on x86).
  • Ok now I have a cell phone, which is ARM. Guess I have to compile for ARM.
  • Now I have to compile everything for both x86 and ARM.
  • Ok now some other architecture is popular, but it won't run x86 or ARM.

It's incredible Google is even pushing this. It's so anti-portable and in concept anti-web.

There is a "portable" version of this, called "Portable Native Client". This means, of course, that NaCl is actually "Non-Portable Native Client" and that should itself be a clue. The "portable" version uses LLVM bitcode and a virtual machine. So more than a decade later, we've basically reinvented Java virtual machine applets minus the gigantic runtime (and language of your choice).

The only people who could possibly benefit from NaCl are Google. There's no general case use for this, and pushing it as standard into Chrome is a nasty move. Mozilla also reject the idea of NaCl. I believe Opera rejects it too (lacking a link). So, why is this being pushed?

Google

Google Adds Games To Google+ 161

derGoldstein writes with this quote from the official Google blog: "Today we're adding games to Google+. ... We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life ... When you're ready to play, the Games page is waiting — click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you've received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score — your circles will only see the updates when they're interested in playing games too."
Medicine

Cancer Cured By HIV 521

bluefoxlucid writes "Apparently cancer has been cured, by injecting people with HIV. From the article: 'As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.' Nifty. Poorly edited run-on sentence, but nifty."
Math

The Mathematics of Lawn Mowing 514

Hugh Pickens writes "I enjoy mowing my six-acre lawn with my John Deere 757 zero-turn every week, and over the course of the last five years of mowing I have come up with my own most efficient method of getting the job done which takes me about three hours. While completing my task this morning, I decided after I finished to research the subject to discover if there is a method for determining the most efficient path for mowing, and found that Australians Bunkard Polster and Marty Ross wrote last summer about an elegant mathematical presentation of the problem of mowing an irregularly shaped area as efficiently as possible. First we simplify our golf course mowing problem by covering the course with an array of circles with each circle radius equal to the width of the mower disc. Connecting the centers of the circles produces an equilateral triangular grid, with vertices at the circle centers. Following a path consisting of grid edges, there will necessarily be a fair amount of overlap so the statement of the problem is to minimize the overlap by minimizing the number of vertices that are visited more than once which Polster and Ross say is easily achieved by well-known computer search algorithms. Any other tips from Slashdot readers?"
Google

Is Google+ a Cathedral Or a Bazaar? 200

An anonymous reader writes "With its recent mass suspension of accounts, Google has highlighted its desire to create a social network that is very different to the way many (including those whose accounts were suspended) would want to see it. The metaphor of the Cathedral and the Bazaar used for software development can be applied to the two types of social networks being proposed by Google on the one hand and the pseudonym supporters on the other. Google's Cathedral model emphasizes order and control whilst the bazaar model supports users who can be anonymous, have multiple identities, interact with anyone they please, and remain unobserved."
Graphics

Making Graphics In Games '100,000 Times' Better? 291

trawg writes "A small Australian software company — backed by almost AUD$2 million in government assistance — is claiming they've developed a new technology which is '100,000 times better' for computer game graphics. It's not clear what exactly is getting multiplied, but they apparently 'make everything out of tiny little atoms instead of flat panels.' They've posted a video to YouTube which shows their new tech, which is apparently running at 20 FPS in software. It's (very) light on the technical details, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they say an SDK is due in a few months — so stay tuned for more." John Carmack had this to say about the company's claims: "No chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging."
Android

Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market 191

TyFoN writes "Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. ...the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'"
Hardware

NAND Flash Better Than DRAM For PC Performance 205

Lucas123 writes "Adding NAND flash memory to a PC does more for performance than DRAM and costs less, according to a new study. As the price difference between the two memory types widens, NAND flash will become the memory of choice in the PC. The effects of NAND flash adoption are already being felt in the DRAM market, as revenue in 2011 is expected to decline 11.8%."

Comment Re:Tired of this flaimbait... Apps are NOT the OS (Score 1) 107

The same is true of Ubuntu and the Multiverse. You can CHOOSE to run pay software, the same as Android. I can run a commercial server daemon on pure, fully open Linux. Does that cease to be Linux? No.

It's a matter of what's meant by "Linux". Everyone used to mean "GNU/Linux" when they said simply "Linux". Android isn't GNU/Linux. There's no GNU in it - they stripped out what they could and rewrote from scratch what they couldn't. It's Apache/BSD/Linux.

So no, Android is not "Linux" by the definition of what everyone - before Android came along - would call Linux.

Comment Except it's not GNU/Linux (Score 1) 107

He didn't call it a linux desktop; he called it "the linux desktop dream come true"

It's not "Linux" as most people know it. There's a reason Richard Stallman was always bothered by people referring to the OS underlying Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu and the countless other distributions as "Linux"; it ignores the fact that the vast majority of what makes it tick is the GNU userland.

Android does not have a GNU userland. In fact, they rewrote nearly all of it precisely to avoid it.

Android is an Apache/Linux desktop. It's only vaguely related to what everyone used to refer to as "Linux" or properly GNU/Linux.

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