Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment The kids these days! (Score 2) 532

by Jedimstr397 (#34552394) Attached to: Why Special Effects No Longer Impress
Moreover, the youth of this generation is completely desensitized to it, likened to a forensic investigator at a gory crime scene. Star Wars is saved due to it's 'cool' factor, but Toy Story 1 is shrugged off. Story and originality are very important, and it's great to see films that aren't remakes or sequels. But I will be at the Tron premiere tomorrow night, and that's because I connected with the original. The fact that it's in 3D is meaningless. The film makers of today are being forced to lure audiences in. It's a bit sad because who knows what's next? Holographic projection? It all boils down to the elusive "block-buster", and content is the unfortunate victim.
Communications

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tremble-in-something-something dept.
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
Graphics

Adobe Releases New 64-Bit Flash Plugin For Linux 240

Posted by samzenpus from the flash-in-the-pan dept.
TheDarkener writes "Adobe seems to have made an about face regarding their support for native 64-bit Linux support for Flash today, and released a new preview Flash plugin named 'Square.' This includes a native 64-bit version for Linux, which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins — with sound (which I was never able to figure out with running the 32-bit version with nspluginwrapper and pulseaudio)."
Medicine

Radiation Therapy Mistakes Cost Lives 215

Posted by kdawson from the feel-the-burn dept.
jmtpi recommends a long NY Times investigative report about how powerful medical linear accelerators have contributed to at least two deaths in the New York area. Although the mistakes were largely due to human error, buggy software also played a role. "...the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008... most were minor... The Times found that on 133 occasions, devices used to shape or modulate radiation beams... were left out, wrongly positioned, or otherwise misused. On 284 occasions, radiation missed all or part of its intended target or treated the wrong body part entirely. ... Another patient with stomach cancer was treated for prostate cancer. Fifty patients received radiation intended for someone else, including one brain cancer patient who received radiation intended for breast cancer."
Power

Submission + - Centrifuge Problems Slow Iran Nuke Development

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that international nuclear inspectors say that at Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems while others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure. These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon. “For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran’s enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz — down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June. Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and that the Iranians have made a series of manufacturing errors in their centrifuges. R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Kemp says. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”"
Biotech

How Norway Fought Staph Infections 595

Posted by timothy from the they-fired-adrian-monk dept.
eldavojohn writes "Studies are showing that Norway's dirtiest hospitals are actually cleaner than most other countries', and the reason for this is that Norwegians stopped taking antibiotics. A number of factors like paid sick leave and now restrictions on advertising for drugs make Norway an anomaly when it comes to diseases like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). A Norwegian doctor explains, 'We don't throw antibiotics at every person with a fever. We tell them to hang on, wait and see, and we give them a Tylenol to feel better.' Norway is the most MRSA free country in the world. In a country like Japan, where 17,000 die from MRSA every year, 'doctors overprescribe antibiotics because they are given financial incentives to push drugs on patients.'"
Education

Submission + - Early Childhood Education Defying Moore's Law?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Four decades ago, the NSF-sponsored PLATO Elementary Reading Curriculum Project (pdf) provided Illinois schoolchildren with reading lessons and e-versions of beloved children's books that exploited networked, touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens, color images, and audio. Last week, the Today Show promoted the TeacherMate — a $100 gadget that's teaching Illinois schoolchildren to read and do math using its 2.5" screen and old-school U-D-L-R cursor keys — as a revolution in education. Has early childhood education managed to defy Moore's Law?
Digital

Submission + - Tyler Cowen on Autism creating a Digital Society (wrongplanet.net)

Submitted by brokencomputer
brokencomputer writes: I recently had the opportunity to sit down for an interview with economist Tyler Cowen, author of Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World, an economics book that argues that the Internet is making our society more "autistic" and autistic individuals have a leg up in this new digital economy. Tyler talks to me about Economcis, the way in which autistic individuals approach concepts differently than non-autistics, and how the autistic mode of thought can be more beneficial in certain web 2.0 situations.

Comment Nintendo love? (Score 1) 313

by Jedimstr397 (#30605512) Attached to: Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade
Lame list if I do say so myself. I would think that a gaming console, namely the Nintendo Wii, would be seen as a gadget that defined the decade. Yeah the graphics aren't high-end, but I'll bet that most people reading this post own one. The Wii innovated and brought families and friends closer together. They defied their critics in a time that demanded faster, better, prettier looking games. Instead they thought outside of the box (pun intended) and did something new that their competitors would eventually copy and try to improve upon. Also, Apple products seem to be ubiquitous in TFA along with the word ubiquitous. WTF?
Linux

Why Top Linux Distros Are For Different Users 496

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-nubs dept.
Lucas123 writes "Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu Linux desktops may look alike, but they've got some important distinctions, like the fact that Fedora and Ubuntu use GNOME 2.28 (the latest version) for their default desktop, while openSUSE uses KDE 4.3.1. And, Fedora's designers have assumed that its users are wiser than the general run of users. 'For example, in earlier versions, ordinary (non-admin) users could install software on Fedora without access to the root password. As of this version, however, local users will need to enter the root password before they can install software (as they do on almost all other Linux distributions).'"

Comment Relatively smooth (Score 1) 1231

by Jedimstr397 (#29977366) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Seems to be doing fine on my Vaio laptop. I was an early adopter of Jaunty as well, and Karmic doesn't even come close to the problems I had with the Jackalope. I know that there were a lot of problems with audio, brightness settings, battery life, and a slew of others. Karmic seems to have everything under control. The ONLY issue that's slightly annoying is the boot time. No ten second boot time here. Jaunty was faster at approx. 25 seconds from Grub to the log in prompt. The shut down sequence kicks ass though, by the time I reach over to close the lid its already done and off at approx 6 seconds! At least the new startup screens are pretty.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Running Old Desktops Headless? (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by CajunArson
CajunArson writes: I have recently dug up an old P4 that is in fine working order and done what any self respecting Slashdotter would do... I slapped Linux on it to experiment making an NFSv4 server. One other thing I did was to remove the old AGP video card to save on power since this is a headless machine. Now... I removed the video card after the installation, and I'm doing just fine as long as the machine will boot to a state where networking works and I can SSH to it.

My question for the Slashdot audience is: Is there a good solution to allow me to login to this box if it cannot get on the network? I'm looking for solutions other than slapping a video card back in. In my case, I will have physical access to the machine.

A few caveats to make it interesting: This question is for plain old desktop/laptop systems, not network servers designed to run headless. Also, I am aware of the serial console, but even "old" machines may only have USB, and I have not seen any good documentation on how and if USB works as a substitute. Finally, if there is any way to access the BIOS settings without needing a video card that would be an extra bonus, but I'm satisfied with just local OS access starting from the GRUB prompt. I'm all ears for advice from any Slashdotters with these setups running.
Linux Business

Submission + - Push updates for Linux clients?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I'm trying to push for Linux at my company where all of our desktops are windows. On windows servers, I can "push-out" new revisions of software. For example, if I wanted to, I could force all client desktops to upgrade to the newest version of Opera or Firefox (or more likely a program I wrote, or an AntiVirus software...). I can make one change on the server and all clients are forced into the new version of the software. The question: how can I do this on a Linux OS? This can become vitally important in the future, as I don't want to have to run around to 40 computers everytime I want to update my program...

Slashdot Top Deals

No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.

Close