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Submission + - FOSS School Management to Augment Education (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Kagetsuki
Kagetsuki writes: Many schools pay over $100k a year on proprietary, inflexible, closed source School Management Systems. Some systems come bundled with full curriculum packages or integrated learning systems which cost schools millions in tablet computers and student licenses. Schools need a full featured, standards compliant system that is flexible, extendable, free of vendor lock-in, can be integrated with any curriculum or integrating learning system, and is free to use without a license.

GAKU Engine [meaning “Learning Engine” in Japanese] is a full featured, customizable and extendable Free Open Source School Management system. But the objective of GAKU Engine isn’t just to to run a standardized education; it aims to let schools break free of the standard by enhancing their educational offerings with external content and services, and augment student records with badges and achievements. With your help the base system could be completed and running in schools within the year.

Submission + - B-52 gets first full IT upgrade since '60s

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US Air Force’s 10th Flight Test Squadron recently took delivery of the first B-52H Stratofortress to complete a refit through the Combat Network Communications Technology (CONECT) program. It's an effort to bring the Cold War era heavy bomber into the 21st century way of warfare—or at least up to the 1990s, technology-wise. While the aircraft received piecemeal upgrades over the past 50 years of flying, CONECT is the first major information technology overhaul for the Air Force’s B-52H fleet since the airplanes started entering service in 1961.

Submission + - Report: Apple to unveil 'smart home' system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a reports Apple will be unveiling a new smart home system at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. The system will allow users to control security systems, appliances and lighting with their iPhones. A "select number" of device makers will be certified to offer products that work with Apple's upcoming system, according to the report, which didn't name any of the manufacturers.

Submission + - Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident (npr.org)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "In February, a 55-gallon drum of radioactive waste burst open inside America's only nuclear dump, in New Mexico.

Now investigators believe the cause may have been a pet store purchase gone bad.

"It was the wrong kitty litter," says , a geochemist in Richland, Wash., who has spent decades in the nuclear waste business.

It turns out there's more to cat litter than you think. It can soak up urine, but it's just as good at absorbing radioactive material.

"It actually works well both in the home litter box as well as the radiochemistry laboratory," says Conca, who is not directly involved in the current investigation.

Cat litter has been used for years to dispose of nuclear waste. Dump it into a drum of sludge and it will stabilize volatile radioactive chemicals. The litter prevents it from reacting with the environment.

And this is what contractors at were doing as they packed Cold War-era waste for shipment to the dump. But at some point, they decided to make a switch, from clay to organic.

"Now that might sound nice, you're trying to be green and all that, but the organic kitty litters are organic," says Conca. Organic litter is made of plant material, which is full of chemical compounds that can react with the nuclear waste.

"They actually are just fuel, and so they're the wrong thing to add," he says. Investigators now believe the litter and waste caused the drum to slowly heat up "sort of like a slow burn charcoal briquette instead of an actual bomb."

After it arrived at the dump, it burst."

Submission + - Kleargear.com found in Europe, will fight default judgement

Submitted by portforward
portforward writes: Remember Kleargear.com, that company who bills unhappy customers $3,500 for publicly expressing they are unhappy? Kleargear.com claimed they were owed a substantial amount of money after a couple posted their negative experience on RipoffReport.com and then attempted to collect, severly damaging the the family's credit rating. The unlucky couple sued, and got a default judgement against Kleargear in part because no one could actually find the owners of the company. Apparently now the owners have surfaced in Paris — vowing to fight and saying:

"Our sales contract is enforceable under the laws of the United States because business transactions are exempt from First Amendment rights ... If a customer disagrees with any merchant of policies, they are free to shop elsewhere."

Especially, of course, when the company adds conditions to the bill of sale after the sale is complete.

Submission + - FOSS School Management to Augment Education (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Kagetsuki
Kagetsuki writes: It’s ironic you’ll often find a poster of Einstein in schools as, after being flunked out and declared an idiot by his instructors, he had a disdain for formal education. Standardized education has become the result of countless committees deciding what they believe it is important for students to know and generalizing when and how they should learn it. This complete disregard for neurodiversity and ignorance of students who excel outside of the standard curriculum has failed Einstein and many other alternative and revolutionary thinkers. Now, programs like the US Common Core are going to very quickly make this situation worse.

GAKU Engine [“Learning Engine” in Japanese] is an FOSS School Management System that wants to change that. It’s built to support all the needs of a school providing a standardized education, but also comes equipped with tools to augment it. The core system comes with badge system integration, tools to record awards / achievements / licenses, and a system to integrate information from external educational services and other schools. It’s open source so anyone can modify it and has an extension system and an API so anyone can extend or integrate with it.

Submission + - Open Source School Management aims to augment education (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many schools pay over $100k a year on proprietary, inflexible, closed source School Management Systems. Some systems come bundled with full curriculum packages or integrated learning systems which cost schools millions in tablet computers and student licenses. Schools need a full featured, standards compliant system that is flexible, extendable, free of vendor lock-in, can be integrated with any curriculum or integrating learning system, and is free to use without a license.

GAKU Engine [meaning “Learning Engine” in Japanese] is a full featured, customizable and extendable Free Open Source School Management system. But the objective of GAKU Engine isn’t just to to run a standardized education; it aims to let schools break free of the standard by enhancing their educational offerings with external content and services, and augment student records with badges and achievements. With your help the base system could be completed and running in schools within the year.

Submission + - Open Source School Management aims to augment education (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many schools pay over $100k a year on proprietary, inflexible, closed source School Management Systems. Some systems come bundled with full curriculum packages or integrated learning systems which cost schools millions in tablet computers and student licenses. Schools need a full featured, standards compliant system that is flexible, extendable, free of vendor lock-in, can be integrated with any curriculum or integrating learning system, and is free to use without a license.

GAKU Engine [meaning “Learning Engine” in Japanese] is a full featured, customizable and extendable Free Open Source School Management system. But the objective of GAKU Engine isn’t just to to run a standardized education, it's to let schools break free of the standard. GAKU Engine wll come with tools to let schools enhance their educational offerings with external content and services, and augment student records by integrating with badge systems and provide accreditation for extra-curricular achievements. With your help the base system could be completed and running in schools within the year.

Submission + - OTTO - The Hackable Raspberry Pi GIF Camera (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Otto is the first product to make use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module and it is open, hackable and takes animated GIFs which are automatically uploaded to your phone.
Otto is the brainchild of Next Thing Computing. It is currently on Kickstarter and at the time of writing well on its way to making its $60,000 goal. It doesn't look like a top notch semi-pro digital camera and that's by design. It looks like an old fashioned low-end film camera of the type you might give to kids. What is novel about this camera is that it may look like a cheapo plastic snapper but it can do some really interesting things.
The "film winder" on the top takes a sequence of stills as you rotate it to "advance the film" and when you "rewind the film" these are combined to create an animated GIF. Of course there might be some users who don't remember what film cameras were like and so might not get the reference to the older tech.
The animated GIF mode is enough to make Otto novel, but the fact that it uses a Raspberry Pi means it can be used in other modes and can be customized. "Using the OTTO SDK, you can modify every bit of OTTO’s software. Recompile the kernel, load it up with additional Linux packages, or just peek under the hood and see how it all works."
There is even a very weird hardware expansion option called Flashyflashy that looks like an old flash bulb attachment. How many users are going to remember those?
Perhaps the most exciting thing about Otto is that it is clearly going to be fun as soon as you take it out of the box but with some software and perhaps hardware skills you can have so much more fun with it.
I can't help but think that they might do even better with a cool futuristic design rather than something retro.

Submission + - Questionable Patents From MakerBot (openbeamusa.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OpenBeam USA is a Kickstarted company that builds open source aluminum construction systems (think erector sets). One of the main uses for the system is building 3D printers, and creator Terence Tam is heavily involved in the 3D-printing community. He's now put up a blog post about some disturbing patents filed by MakerBot. In particular, he notes a patent for auto-levelling on a 3D printer. Not only is this an important upcoming technology for 3D printers, the restriction of which would be a huge blow to progress, it seems the patent was filed just a few short weeks after Steve Graber posted a video demonstrating such auto-levelling. There had also been a Kickstarter campaign for similar tech a few months earlier. Tam gives this warning: 'Considering the Stratasys — Afinia lawsuit, and the fact that Makerbot is now a subsidiary of Stratasys, it's not a stretch to imagine Makerbot coming after other open source 3D manufacturers that threaten their sales. After all, nobody acquires a patent warchest just to invite their competitors to sit around the campfire to sing Kumbaya. It is therefore vitally important that community developed improvements do not fall under Makerbot's (or any other company's) patent portfolio to be used at a later date to clobber the little guys.'

Submission + - Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just weeks after the retailing giant began pressuring the publisher on pricing by delaying shipping and cutting discounts, it is now refusing orders for coming books. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.” In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher.

Submission + - Fiat Chrysler CEO: Please don't buy Fiat 500e electric car (dailycaller.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The CEO of Fiat Chrysler said he hopes that people don’t buy his company’s electric car, the Fiat 500e, which he is forced to sell at a loss because of state and federal mandates.

“I hope you don’t buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000,” Sergio Marchionne told the audience at the Brookings Institute during a discussion of the auto bailout.

“I’m honest enough to tell you that I will make the car, I’ll make it available which is my requirement but I will sell the limit of what I need to sell and not one more,” said Marchionne.

Fiat Chrysler produces two Fiat 500s. The gas-powered Fiat 500 has a base price of $17,300. The electric Fiat 500e runs $32,650. In his candid remarks, Marchionne blamed regulations set in place in California and by President Obama.

Submission + - Gigabyte Brix Projector Combines Mini PC With DLP Projector In A 4.5-Inch Cube (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The PC market is changing rapidly as tablets supplant some laptops, new players such as the Chromebook disrupt the old WIntel model, and innovations in processors and graphics allow for ever-smaller PCs such as Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) PC. Gigabyte recently introduced a rather unique product that combines the tiny 4.5-inch square form factor of Intel's NUC PC platform together with a mini DLP projector. The Gigabyte Brix Projector measures 4.24 x 4.5 x 1.93 inches (WxLxD) but manages to fit in an Intel Core i3-4010U (1.7GHz) processor with built-in Intel HD 4400 graphics and support for up to 16GB of 1600MHz RAM. Finally, an mSATA slot inside the chassis also supports up to a 256GB SSD. The system's DLP (LED backlight) projector itself offers a resolution of 864x480 with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and a purported image size of 7 to 85 inches. It promises 75 ANSI lumen brightness, a contrast ratio of around 900:1, and 3LED (RGB) technology. It's not an HD setup but the potential use cases are interesting. A follow-on version capable of 1080p output would be even more useful for gaming and HD video.

Comment Offsite data backup + insure your hardware (Score 2) 408

Data. Use an offsite backup service or do like me and set up an offsite backup with rsync over ssh to a remote location under your control. All my drives or home folders are encrypted so even if the boxes do get stolen I won't have to worry as much. As long as my data is safe who cares about hardware that insurance will pay to replace?

This strategy also protects you from floods, fires, etc. Not just theft.

Comment Re:Journalistic Style (Score 3, Interesting) 234

by Kagetsuki (#46794883) Attached to: Russia Writes Off 90 Percent of North Korea Debt

[Unfortunately?] No. Though I can't think of any post soviet ally that has actually benefitted or gotten ahead from having debt written off. It also occurs to me that many of those states with debt were basically given the debt - Russia gave them things like gas and lumber at particularly low rates but didn't take payment or only took partial payment. So once the debt built up they'd use it as sort of a threat to not go against them. Case in point: Ukraine just got a huge gas bill from Russia http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c211... .

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