aglider - Slashdot User

Submission + - Razor-Qt: A New Qt-Based Desktop Environment? (razor-qt.org)

Submitted by aglider on Monday December 19, 2011 @03:39AM

aglider writes: Phoronix has an interesting piece of news about a new emerging desktop environment. And it's Qt based!
From the project home page:

Razor-qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-Qt also works fine with weak machines.
Someone has already tagged Razor-Qt as
a KDE ripoff

What we have so far is version 0.4 as announced on a blog and, very important, a number of easy ways to install and test it on a few main Linux distributions. Maybe time has come for something really new in the desktop environment arena almost completely occupied by GNOME and KDE.

Submission + - Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On (wired.com)

Submitted by aglider on Monday October 17, 2011 @11:04AM

aglider writes: A few days ago Wired put some focus on the two deaths that plagued the world, not just the IT one.
The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won't match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.
Again from the article:

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX, Pike tells Wired. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel, that pretty much the entire Internet runs on, is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.
And later:
Jobs genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don't necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.

And before the flame war starts, I'd suggest to go for a complete read of this article. Even if the words "Unix" and "C language" don't make much sense to you.

Submission + - Hubble shots the movie of star births

Submitted by

aglider

on Thursday September 01, 2011 @05:57AM

aglider writes: "A number of different scientific sources is giving big echo to one of the latest announce made by the NASA and the Hubblesite.ORG. Quoting from Hubblesite.ORG:

A team of scientists [headed by Rice astronomer Patrick Hartigan] has collected enough high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of powerful jets ejected from three young stars. The jets, a byproduct of gas accretion around newly forming stars, shoot off at supersonic speeds in opposite directions through space.

The report is also accompanied by a number of photos and, of course, astounding small movies.
The complete scientific study, that dates back to 2011.07.20, has been published on the Astrophysical Journal (subscription needed) but also on European Space Agency's Space Telescope and Cornell University Library's arXiv."

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