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Comment Re:Not good enough (Score 1) 663

Just have to add my $.02 to the thread. I've been typing on a Dvorak keyboard for about 10 years and greatly prefer it to QWERTY. I can still go back when I have to on others' computers, but like the above have mentioned, I'm not nearly as fast and my error rate goes way up. Above all else, Dvorak just feels a heck of a lot more comfortable to type on. Every time I go back to QWERTY it feels like I'm doing complicated gymnastics just to type a simple sentence.

Comment Idiotic (Score 1) 516

It's time to wake up and realize that energy utilization isn't going away and we need to find (read 'use') methods of generating energy that have a lower carbon footprint. Limiting google searches to reduce greenhouse gasses is about the most idiotic thing I've heard in awhile. I wonder then how much each slashdot post adds to the marginal CO2 emission.

Besides, these numbers don't seem to add up...

Red Hat Software

Fedora 10 Released 211

ekimd writes "Fedora 10, aka 'Cambridge,' was released today. Some of the major features include: 'wireless connection sharing enables ad hoc network sharing, better setup and use of printers through improved management tools, virtualization storage provisioning for local and remote connections now simplified, SecTool is a new security audit and intrusion detection system.' Versions of major software include: Gnome 2.24, Eclipse 3.4 and RPM 4.6. A features list can be found here." Reader Nate2 suggests LinuxFormat's detailed look at the new release, and adds a few more details about the software it contains: the release includes "a new graphical boot-up sequence, OpenOffice.org 3, many improvements to sound support via PulseAudio and other updates."
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"Stayin Alive" Helps You Stay Alive 31

In a small study conducted at the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the Bee Gees hit, "Stayin' Alive." At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help keep accurate time while doing chest compressions. The study showed the song helped people who already know how to do CPR, and the results were promising enough to warrant larger, more definitive studies with real patients or untrained people. I wonder what intrinsic power is contained in "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?"
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Slashdot's Disagree Mail 100

Ernest Hemingway's micro-story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," is one of my favorite examples of how less is sometimes more. Sometimes a few sentences say it all; you don't always need a hundred pages to convey an idea. Most of the mail I get is brief and to the point. Others are just brief. To be honest, I appreciate the short, crazy email more than the long rants, and they can be just as funny. Read below for this week's mail snippets.
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Researchers Claim To Be Able To Determine Political Leaning By How Messy You Are 592

According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone's political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says these room cues are "behavioral residue." The findings are just the latest in a series of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman's right to clean.
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Slashdot's Disagree Mail 206

Being in a relationship is not easy, more than half of all first marriages fail in this country. That statistic doesn't improve if you spend most of your time reading your favorite website and not tending to the needs of your family. Instead of asking me to help fix your relationship maybe you should try playing with your kids, talking to your wife, and not staring at a computer screen all day. You should realize that the help link doesn't provide help with your life. It's mostly for getting passwords and stuff. Below you'll find a collection of people that should have reached out to Dr. Phil and not Dr. Sam.
Software

An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292

jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."
Education

How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT? 531

Tsunayoshi writes "My son volunteered me to give a presentation on what I do for a living for career day at his elementary school. I need to come up with a roughly 20-minute presentation to be given to 4-5 different classrooms. I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company. I was thinking something along the lines of explaining how some everyday things they experience (websites, telephone systems, etc.) all depend on servers, and those servers are maintained by systems administrators. I was also going to talk about what I do specifically, which is maintain the computer systems that allow the really smart rocket scientists to get things into space. Am I on the right track? Can anyone suggest some good (and cheap/easy to make) visual aids?"
Space

Submission + - A Star That Bursts, Blinks and Disappears (spacefellowship.com)

Matt_dk writes: "Astronomers are reporting on a strange case where one of the littlest of stars "twinkled" with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished.

The story began on June 6, 2007. That's when a spike of gamma-rays lasting less than five seconds washed over NASA's Swift satellite. But this high-energy flash wasn't a gamma-ray burst — the birth cry of a black hole far across the universe. It was something much closer to home."

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