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Software

Interclue and What Going Proprietary Can Do 149

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the don't-get-greedy dept.
Linux.com (which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has an interesting look at what going proprietary can mean for your overall effectiveness. Using Firefox extension "Interclue" as the object lesson, the piece looks at both the engineering and social difficulties surrounding the project. "Even more significantly, the efforts to commercialize only detract from the software itself. The basic idea behind Interclue would make for a handy Web utility, but seems too slight to build a business around. The effort to do so only leads to complications that do nothing to enhance the basic utility, and to pleas for donations that can only annoy. The result is that, if your position on free software doesn't lead you to avoid Interclue, the efforts to monetize it almost certainly will."

Comment Deaths at base camp? (Score 1) 417

by ryry (#26116209) Attached to: Why Climbers Die On Mount Everest

The article says:

"Of a total of reported 212 deaths on Everest from 1921 to 2006, 192 occurred above Base Camp, the last encampment before technical (roped) climbing begins."

Does this mean that 10% of climbers die at (or below) base camp? That's a little scary, because in early October this year, I spent a night at a tent hotel near base camp on the Tibetan side. The altitude is 5200m. I had pretty bad headaches and stomach weirdness from the air pressure differences. Two of the three people I was with had trouble breathing; one even vomited after waking up in the morning. Now I'm glad we didn't go up any higher.

I got some amazing photos though and, well it's Mount Frickin' Everest!
Networking

Net Neutrality Opponent Calls Google a "Bandwidth Hog" 320

Posted by Soulskill from the oh-yeah-well-stop-hogging-all-the-ugly dept.
Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, an analyst with ties to the telecom industry — in a baseless attack on the concept of Net Neutrality — has accused Google Inc. of being a bandwidth hog. Quoting: '"Internet connections could be more affordable for everyone, if Google paid its fair share of the Internet's cost," wrote Cleland in the report. "It is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity pays the least relatively to fund the Internet's cost; it is even more ironic that the company poised to profit more than any other from more broadband deployment, expects the American taxpayer to pick up its skyrocketing bandwidth tab."' Google responded on their public policy blog, citing 'significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions.' Ars Technica highlighted some of Cleland's faulty reasoning as well."
Microsoft

Obama's "ZuneGate" 608

Posted by kdawson from the et-tu-barack dept.
theodp writes "Barack Obama supporters were left shaking their heads after a report surfaced that the president-elect was using a Zune at the gym instead of an iPod. So why would Mac-user Obama be Zune-ing out? Could be one of those special-edition preloaded Zunes that Microsoft bestowed on Democratic National Convention attendees, suggests TechFlash, nixing the idea that the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World would waste time loading Parallels or Boot Camp in OS X just to use a Zune."

Comment Re:Perhaps (Score 1) 268

by ryry (#25956565) Attached to: Avoiding Mistakes Can Be a Huge Mistake

Do you make him write docs, or attach a junior programmer to him for that purpose?... somewhere up the ladder a software engineer's job becomes mostly writing docs (regardless of whether you go management or architect)

Really? Have you never heard of a technical writer? We write great documentation so developers don't have to :-)
Math

Florence Nightingale, Statistical Graphics Pioneer 204

Posted by kdawson from the graphical-display-of-quantitative-information dept.
Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightingale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightingale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers' lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. "As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change."
Medicine

Diet of Fast Food and Candy May Cause Alzheimer's 224

Posted by kdawson from the you-are-what-you-eat dept.
lurking_giant sends along a Reuters report on research out of Sweden indicating that a diet rich in fat, sugar, and cholesterol could increase the risk of Alzheimer's, at least in mice. "'On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain,' [said] Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center... 'We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's.' ... These mice showed chemical changes in their brains, indicating an abnormal build-up of the protein tau as well as signs that cholesterol in food reduced levels of another protein called Arc involved in memory storage."
Movies

75 Comics That Are Being Made Into Films 256

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ruining-your-childhood dept.
brumgrunt writes "The comic book is the new spec script in Hollywood, if this list is anything to go by. Den Of Geek has uncovered 75 comics that are in the process of being turned into films, along with their estimated year of arrival. It's scary, brilliant and bizarre in roughly equal measure."
Biotech

Scientists Discover Proteins Controlling Evolution 436

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-flamewar-begin dept.
Khemisty writes "Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection. But a team of Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works. In fact, their discovery could revolutionize the way we understand evolutionary processes. They have evidence that organisms actually have the ability to control their own evolution."
Education

Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited 204

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the philosophy-goes-nicely-with-many-things dept.
Soren Kierkegaard writes "While reading the two-and-a-half-year-old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"
Unix

(Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? 2362

Posted by timothy from the sed-is-underrated dept.

So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old 'write' command (as I've been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn't know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there's probably lots of things like that, and likely things I've never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?
Input Devices

The Gym Arcade 143

Posted by kdawson from the exertainment dept.
theodp writes "Cross Halo with an exercise bike, and you get Expresso Fitness' S3, which lets you blow away dragons by squeezing handlebar-mounted triggers as you pedal hard through the Chinese countryside. Portfolio notes that a new generation of Wii-like workouts is hitting gyms and homes, with companies like GameRunner incorporating treadmills into First Person Shooters and Kickstart offering mini steppers and cycles for popular game systems."
Microsoft

Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS 419

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the do-you-feel-azure-after-use dept.
snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."

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