Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Data Storage

How Do You Manage the Information In Your Life? 366

An anonymous reader writes "How do you manage the multitude of information sources in your lives? How do you keep track of the electronics or programming projects you're working on, or the collection of photos you took from your last holiday, or the notes and reading you're doing to learn a new language? Do you have a personal wiki, a blog, or maybe a series of tablet based notes, or voice recordings? Or is it pen and paper, and a blank book for each different hobby? I'm a student, and like most of you, have a few different interests to keep track of (as well as work). But I realise I also have a little OCD, and struggle a bit to keep on top of information (whether hobbies or personal life) in a way that I feel I have complete control over. So how do you all do it?"
Linux

The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? 472

pinkeen writes "I've used Linux as my work & play OS for 5+ years. The one thing that constantly drives me mad is its IO scheduling. When I'm copying a large amount of data in the background, everything else slows down to a crawl while the CPU utilization stays at 1-2%. The process which does the actual copying is highly prioritized in terms of I/O. This is completely unacceptable for a desktop OS. I've heard about the efforts of Con Kolivas and his Brainfuck Scheduler, but it's unsupported now and probably incompatible with latest kernels. Is there any way to fix this? How do you deal with this? I have a feeling that if this issue was to be fixed, the whole desktop would become way more snappier, even if you're not doing any heavy IO in the background." Update: 10/23 22:06 GMT by T : As reader ehntoo points out in the discussion below, contrary to the submitter's impression, "Con Kolivas is still actively working on BFS, it's not unsupported. He's even got a patch for 2.6.36, which was only released on the 20th. He's also got a patchset out that I use on all my desktops which includes a bunch of tweaks for desktop use." Thanks to ehntoo, and hat tip to Bill Huey.
Idle

Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779

Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.

Comment Re:Upcoming tablets (Score 1) 189

I'm confused. What precisely do you mean when you imply he is "forcing" something on us all. Are you implying that we are all weak minded readers. Are you referring to some sort of Jedi mind trick here???

Did I miss something. When did expressing opinion become forced brainwashing on a public opinion based web site?

Submission + - Writing Code on Handhelds (blogspot.com)

ansible writes: This is a kind of long post about writing code on handheld devices. More specifically, it describes my current development setup on my G1 phone.
Technology

Submission + - FAA mixing drones with commercial aviation (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu – an independent subsidiary of Boeing and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft.

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg: In It to Change the World? (time.com)

schmidt349 writes: Award-winning New York Times journalist David Kirkpatrick's new book, "The Facebook Effect," presents readers with a complex view of Facebook's founder and CEO. Primed by hours of conversation and research deep into the history of the social network, Kirkpatrick reaches the conclusion that money isn't a primary motivation for Zuckerberg, "a coder more than a CEO, a philosopher more than a businessman, a 26-year-old who has consistently avoided selling out because he sees Facebook as his way to change the world." Kirkpatrick deftly handles the controversy surrounding Facebook's sometimes cavalier attitude toward user privacy, and the result is a much more balanced and less sensationalist account of Facebook's past, present, and future.
Movies

Mass Effect To Invade the Big Screen 142

UgLyPuNk writes "This could be a good thing or a bad thing: EA has just confirmed that it's making Mass Effect into a movie. The franchise has been acquired by Legendary Pictures, which is best known for its co-productions of The Dark Knight, Clash of the Titans, 300, Watchmen, and, um, The Hangover, as part of a co-financing agreement with Warner Bros."
Media

Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source 312

SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.

Slashdot Top Deals

From Sharp minds come... pointed heads. -- Bryan Sparrowhawk

Working...