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Comment Too much "fair" coverage (Score 1) 1601

by steltho (#25703497) Attached to: Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign
I think the news media doesn't really understand what fair coverage means. In the presidential election, anytime either candidate did something dumb, the news media was afraid to cover it because people would say Oh, there is another bad story about candidate X, that channel must be biased. So instead, the news networks would just put one automaton from each party on the air and have them recite their lines and call it fair coverage. I think the news media tried too hard to make coverage "fair," and never did any real analysis of the stories.
PC Games (Games)

Video Games Linked To Child Aggression 500

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-this-makes-hulk-smash dept.
the4thdimension writes "CNN is running a story this morning that explains new research showing a correlation between video games and aggression in children. The study monitored groups of US and Japanese children, asking them to rate their violent behavior over a period of several months while they played video games in their free time. The study concludes that it has 'pretty good evidence' that there is a link between video games and childhood aggression." Stories like this make me want to smash things.
Software

Submission + - Dillo 2.0 released

Submitted by steltho
steltho writes: The long awaited Dillo-2.0 is out. This version is based on fltk2, and the developers claim a 50% reduction in Dillo's memory footprint. You can get it here: http://www.dillo.org/download.html
Google

Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search 145

Posted by timothy from the go-thank-a-griefer dept.
narramissic writes "Google began running a live test last year that lets people rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. Testers were presented with different variations of the experiment, which the company first publicly detailed about two weeks ago in an official blog posting. For example, in one version of the test, people can only remove results, while in another they can append comments that only they can see, said Google software engineer Matt Cutts. But while implementing these features permanently would be a major step for Google in giving more participation to its users, the company remains undecided. 'It's a really fun experiment. I can't say for sure whether it will go live for everybody because we're always running a ton of experiments. Only some of those, the ones that are being very successful, are launched live for everybody,' said Cutts. In the meantime, Google is collecting data that offers some interesting search quality insights."
Portables

Submission + - Smallest x86 board ever? (linuxdevices.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: What if your PC was the size of an iPod? Probably the smallest x86 board ever built, the Lippert CoreExpress-ECO measures 2.6 x 2.3 inches (58 x 65mm), and has a 1.6GHz x86 processor and 2GB of soldered-on DDR2 SDRAM. Roughly half the size of a PicoITX board, it draws 5 Watts, making it suitable for mobile, battery powered devices like wearable PCs, the company says. I wonder how far away are we from having good translucent nano-displays embedded in eyeglasses, and input devices that let you wink to right-click, and so on...
IBM

Submission + - IBM exec on open source: 'I'm tired of waiting' (thestandard.com) 1

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, used his keynote appearance at LinuxWorld to complain about the lack of industry-specific open source apps. Despite some encouraging signs in the educational field with Sakai, Sutor said that he was 'tired of waiting' for specialized applications to appear in other sectors, adding that the proliferation of different licenses — and changing legal requirements for using the same software over time — is holding some businesses back from using open source applications."
Space

Submission + - SpaceX launch fails to reach space! (nytimes.com)

Submitted by azuredrake
azuredrake writes: The New York Times reports that the third SpaceX launch has failed following the second-stage ignition of the Falcon 1 rocket. The SpaceX launch had three satellites on board, all of which were presumably destroyed in the incident. This marks the third failed launch for SpaceX — twice they failed to reach orbit, and once the Falcon 1 rocket was lost 5 minutes after launch. While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry.
Space

Submission + - SpaceX Confirms Falcon 1 Vehicle Lost 1

Submitted by Stormwave0
Stormwave0 writes: Diane Murphy, VP of Marketing and Communications, confirmed in a teleconference that the Falcon 1 launch 3 vehicle was lost during launch Saturday. Just after 2 minutes into launch, a problem occurred with the stage separation, causing the stages to be stuck together. Company founder Elon Musk stated that the failure will not have a major impact on the company's finances. SpaceX is still investigating the problem but does not anticipate any delays in the rocket's launch schedule. Launch 4 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year.
Unix

Submission + - Dedicated compute box: Persistent terminals?

Submitted by Theovon
Theovon writes: I just built an expensive high-end quad-core Linux PC, dedicated for number-crunching. Its job is to sit in the corner with no keyboard, mouse, or monitor and do nothing but compute (genetic algorithms, neural nets, and other research). My issue is that I would like to have something like persistent terminal sessions.

I've considered using Xvnc in a completely headless configuration (some useful documentation here, here, here, and here). However, for most of my uses, this is overkill. Total waste of memory and compute time. However, if I decided to run FPGA synthesis software under WINE, this will become necessary. Unfortunately, I can't quite figure out how to get persistent X11 session where I'm automatically logged in (or can stay logged in), while maintaining enough security that I don't mind opening the VNC port on my firewall (with a changed port number, of course). I'm also going to check out Xpra, but I've only just heard about it and have no idea how to use it.

For the short term, the main need is just terminals. I'd like to be able to connect and see how something is going. One option is to just run things with nohup and then login and "tail -f" to watch the log file. I've also heard of screen, but I'm also unfamiliar with that.

Have other slashdot users encountered this situation? What did you use? What's hard, what's easy, and what works well?
Portables

Submission + - What to do with old laptops? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've recently acquired a few old p2/p3 laptops. Most either work properly but are slow or have various problems with power supplies and/or batteries. Attempting to sell them would probably earn less than the cost of shipping so that's out of the question. I was hoping the Slashdot crowd could give me some ideas on what to do with these old computers. As somebody who already has ~10 computers lying around the house there is certainly no need for an additional computer to "experiment" with, so I was hoping for some more creative suggestions.
Programming

Submission + - Open and closed source kernels go head to head (spinellis.gr)

Submitted by
Diomidis Spinellis
Diomidis Spinellis writes: "Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines), and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or looser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Synchronize the publication of Linux distributions (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
voodoosws
voodoosws writes: "Mark Shuttleworth calls on your blog synchronize the publication of Linux distributions "There's one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu's short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I'll write more about this idea in due course, for now let's just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity." Read on the blog of Mark Shuttleworth http://www.markshuttleworth.com/"
Businesses

Submission + - Craigslist sues eBay, alleges corporate spy plan (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by cheezitmike
cheezitmike writes: From today's Washington Post, Craigslist is Suing eBay for stealing trade secrets: "Online classifieds leader Craigslist.com filed a countersuit on Tuesday against business rival eBay Inc, alleging eBay used its minority stake in Craigslist to steal its corporate trade secrets. [...] Craigslist's complaint alleges a plot by San Jose, California-based eBay to use its position as a minority shareholder and its position on the board to pressure Craigslist into a full-scale acquisition deal by eBay. Barring that, Craigslist argues eBay used its position to gather competitive information that led to the launch of eBay's rival classifieds business. It charges eBay code-named this its 'Craigslist killer' in internal strategy discussions. 'In the months leading up to the launch of its competing Kijiji site ... eBay used its shareholder status to plant on Craigslist's board of directors the individual responsible for launching and/or operating Kijiji,' the latest suit alleges."

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