Comment Green House effect (Score 1) 405
If I understand correctly, we'll then be able to determine the White House effect on the green house effect?
Comment Re:Join! (Score 1) 279
God forbid! The only thing putting my mind at ease here is that he'd probably never be able to achieve the code-quality standards that would allow him to contribute to PostgreSQL.
Comment PC Engine Alix 2d3 (Score 1) 697
I can recommend the Alix boards. They are very well designed and draw 3 Watt on average, 5 Watt peak at 100% CPU. I've used them with Voyage, which works very well, and I'm in the process of releasing an alix-customised Debian distribution which will provide a richer environment than Voyage, yet still provides facilities as fall-back flash and network boot.
Comment Re:You don't work in construction... (Score 1) 146
Have you tried the Samsung B2100? I just got one last week. It's waterproof up to one meter deep for 30 minutes, and you can drop it (a lot; tried that already). The casing looks sturdy enough.
Comment Tried Pike? (Re:This story was a surprise to me) (Score 1) 277
Defining classes in Perl is not easy, and I always have to go back to the manpage to make sure I've got all the incantations. Many times, I simply use object oriented structures and forgo the object definitions.
Why o' why does Python use "pop" for arrays, but not "push"? What were the designers on when they decided "exists" is not a member function of hashes -- excuse me -- dictionaries and arrays? Why this syntactic distortion of over 50 years of computer programming overturned?
I never liked Perl or Python, but graduated from sh to awk to Pike. It's not for everyone, but for people used to C syntax, it's a script language from heaven.
Comment Re:it depends on the size, I think (Score 2, Informative) 277
There are several reasons why, even in smaller groups, using git is advantageous (even if you have only yourself, no other contributors). I'm not going to name them all, but in my experience (I've used RCS, CVS, SVN and now git), some of the more compelling advantages are that you can:
- Actually permanently erase/fix bad commits from the repository without a painful full dump/tricky edit/restore cycle on the repository. I suppose everyone has some of those occasional moments sometime: "Aaargh, I meant to commit only this one file, not this tar.gz file that happened to be in the wrong place at the right time." Git allows you to correct the mistake without bloat in the repository.
- Patch management (instead of keeping around a bunch of patch files, simply create branches for every patch file you'd normally keep) made easy and trackable.
- And related to patch management: commit early, commit often, then cleanup/merge commits before actually committing them "for real" to the bleeding edge version.
For small groups it means that you simply setup a central git repository everyone pushes to. You get all the benefits of DVCS and classic central management, i.e. it allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
Submission + - Is code art? (deviantart.com)
Kroc writes: "Code can be art, although doesn't have to be all the time, just as much as asking for a cup of sugar, isn't poetry.
Discuss."
Submission + - Procedural Programming: The Secret behind Spore (bonafidereviews.com) 1
imashoe writes: "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming. Read on to learn what exactly it is and how it differs from the traditional way games are made."
Submission + - Untapped Energy Below Us (yahoo.com) 1
EskimoJoe writes: "BASEL, Switzerland — When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, the engineers knew they had a problem.
"The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building."
But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for new sources of energy.
On paper, the Basel project looks fairly straightforward: Drill down, shoot cold water into the shaft and bring it up again superheated and capable of generating enough power through a steam turbine to meet the electricity needs of 10,000 households, and heat 2,700 homes.
Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment.
A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S."
Submission + - Ready for a virtual beer?
Roland Piquepaille writes: "If you're attending SIGGRAPH 2007 next week in San Diego, don't miss a demonstration done by Australian and South Korean researchers. They will pour virtual beer during the conference. They say that 'the physics of bubble creation in carbonated drinks like beer is complex,' but add that their fluid special effects software was able to capture this complexity. Moreover, through what they call smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), their software 'uses less computer power and takes less time to get better results than other special effects software it has been benchmarked against.' Now the researchers want to sell their approach to Hollywood studios. But read more for many additional references and images showing a simulation of pouring of ale and stout into a beer mug."
Submission + - Climate Change Displaces Millions in India (blogspot.com)
Mike Kuykendall writes: "The reality of the climate crisis affects millions in India as monsoon rains flood the country this season- how can anyone deny global warming now?"
Submission + - Not just nintendo that can cause epilepsy
Timberwolf0122 writes: "A study by doctors in Hong Kong has concluded that epilepsy can be induced by the Chinese tile game of mahjong. The game, which is intensely social and sometimes played in crowded mahjong parlours, involves the rapid movement of tiles in marathon sessions where epileptic attacks can occure between 1 and 11 hours of play.
Lets hope this game gets banned eh? think of the children!"
Lets hope this game gets banned eh? think of the children!"
Submission + - Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha
theodp writes: "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."
Submission + - Magnetic fields related to Alzheimer's disease
Via_Patrino writes: A study on California pacients show people exposed to magnetic fields (MF) are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease (AD). 'Elevated occupational MF exposure was associated with an increased risk of AD'. The study focused on low frequency magnetic fields, like the ones of transmission lines, CRT monitors and TV tubes, but high frequency fields of cell phones and wireless devices have a similar nature and could have the same effects.
Submission + - Microsoft and Kittens join forces to stop spam (infoworld.com) 1
Onlyodin writes: An executive at Microsoft has an unusual idea for beating spammers. Powerful software tools and supercomputers aren't involved, but kittens are. Or rather, photos of kittens.
Kevin Larson, a researcher at Microsoft's advanced reading technologies group, has found that asking a user to identify the subject of a photo, like a kitten, could help block spam programs.
Services like Microsoft's free e-mail service Hotmail commonly require new users to type in a string of distorted letters as proof that it's a human signing up for the account and not a computer. The trouble is, computers are getting smart enough to recognize the characters and it's a race for Microsoft to continue to alter its HIP (Human Interactive Proofs) system to fool the computers before they catch on.
With 90 billion pieces of e-mail spam sent every day, according to Larson, companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft that offer free online mail services have an incentive to try to block spam. Otherwise they pay for the resources that help send the spam.
Kevin Larson, a researcher at Microsoft's advanced reading technologies group, has found that asking a user to identify the subject of a photo, like a kitten, could help block spam programs.
Services like Microsoft's free e-mail service Hotmail commonly require new users to type in a string of distorted letters as proof that it's a human signing up for the account and not a computer. The trouble is, computers are getting smart enough to recognize the characters and it's a race for Microsoft to continue to alter its HIP (Human Interactive Proofs) system to fool the computers before they catch on.
With 90 billion pieces of e-mail spam sent every day, according to Larson, companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft that offer free online mail services have an incentive to try to block spam. Otherwise they pay for the resources that help send the spam.
