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Comment Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Score 2) 157

I celebrate the new year by attending Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.

This isn't really "Good-old Gregorian January 1st". When Gregory XIII introduced the new calendar in the 16th century, new year's day was the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, and that's the way the calendar was until the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council restored the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God to the 1st, which is when it had been celebrated in ancient times since the early councils established the dogma of Theotokos.

So, I think I'd rather say I celebrate the New-Fangled Gregorian January 1st.

Comment My e-reader killed its own market (Score 1) 333

I have an iPad2, which I use for all indoor reading with the Kindle and Bluefire apps. I also had, before the iPad2, a Sony PRS-300 and I still use it for outdoor reading. The iPad2 is already bordering obsolete, but the Sony still does what I want. It's only function is e-reading, and I just don't see how, except the battery being too expensive to replace, I would justify replacing it in the next couple years. When we get something like a piece of paper (a killer form factor) for e-readers, I will replace it.

I guess what I'm saying is that the market is declining because people already have them.

Comment Andi Graph (Score 1) 254

For that TI-8x look and feel...

I use Andi Graph. http://dougmelton.com/android/andie-graph/ . It's free if you already own a TI calculator. If you don't, you are morally obligated to purchase a TI calculator so that you can say you've paid for the software. It is exactly like using a real TI-8x calculator except the buttons are not tactile.

It runs faster than a real TI-8x on an HTC One V phone, which is a low-end ICS phone. If you want to run it on a PC, get the Android emulator from Google.

If you don't have your cable to rip the ROM from your calculator, you can find the ROM using Google. I don't think there is a version for iOS.

Comment Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score 1) 170

There are TI-83/83+/85/86 emulators for Android. You just load a TI ROM into them and you're done. Having tried it, here are the biggest problems:

1. Battery life sucks.
2. The touchscreen is a lousy keypad for a calc with that many buttons.

I know that many profs won't allow these devices during tests because of the potential for communicating with other people using them during the tests.

Apple will never allow these emulators on iDevices. They don't like people running arbitrary code in the walled garden. zShell anyone?

Moon

A Supercomputer On the Moon To Direct Deep Space Traffic 166

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of 13 giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) but the network is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data from deep space missions. That's why Ouliang Chang has proposed building a massive supercomputer in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would accept signals from space, store them, process them if needed and then relay the data back to Earth as time and bandwidth allows. The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth. As well as boosting humanity's space-borne communication abilities, Chang's presentation at a space conference (PDF) in Pasadena, California also suggests that the moon-based dishes could work in unison with those on Earth to perform very-long-baseline interferometry, which allows multiple telescopes to be combined to emulate one huge telescope. Best of all the project has the potential to excite the imagination of future spacegoers and get men back on the moon."
Technology

Video Plantronics Helps Make Remote Workers' Lives Easier (Video) 233

If you're working at home or from a coffee shop or, really, anyplace outside your company's offices, they need to hear you when you talk, and you need to hear them. The same goes for dealing with clients via VOIP or video, the two communications techologies that seem to be driving POTS into obsolescence faster than we thought possible just a few years ago. In this video, Plantronics PR person Karen Auby -- who works remotely most of the time herself -- explains how Plantronics products help make work easier in a world of "unified communications."

Comment problems with LaTeX and e-books (Score 4, Insightful) 470

Disclaimer: I am a technical writer, and have a lot of experience with publishing workflows.

I love the ease of obtaining books for my e-book reader. I also love the space savings I get from e-books and not having to choose which physical book to dispose of when I get a new one.

Given good content to work with, any programmer could figure out how to make it beautiful using LaTeX. There are even several excellent packages for typesetting novels out there on CTAN. However, there isn't a mature, standardized workflow to get from LaTeX to epub. I sort of expected this by now. It'd be nice if XeLaTeX had an output driver for epub. Everything on planet LaTeX revolves around PDF output, and it doesn't do tagged PDF output, which means that paragraphs cannot be reflowed. So, you can generate a beautiful document for your e-book reader, as long as you don't plan to zoom, and you have to generate a different PDF file for every size of device out there.

That's not to say that LaTeX and friends haven't come a long way. Synctex and TeXworks make editing a joy. XeTeX and fontspec make font selection easy-cheesy.

However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.

Submission + - Faced with a breach, Hypercom screws merchants (hypercom.com)

infernalC writes: "Hypercom, faced with a recently discovered security vulnerability in their Savannah payment software, decided to drop support and terminate the product immediately rather than fix the problem. Credit card processing servers are very mission critical to merchants. Interestingly enough, this comes as their acquisition by VeriFone is held up on anti-trust grounds. VeriFone makes a very similar competing payment platform, PC Charge.

According to the notification, with zero advance notice, the only support they will offer merchants is to uninstall. No refunds if you bought the software before April. How's that for a mission-critical application?"

Wikipedia

Submission + - Release of 33GiB of scientific publications (thepiratebay.org)

An anonymous reader writes: A Wikipedian, Greg Maxwell, has released 33GiB of scientific publications from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in response to the arrest of Aaron Swartz for, effectively, downloading too many articles from JSTOR. The release consists of 18,592 scientific articles previously released at $8-$19 each and all published prior to 1923 and so public domain.
NASA

Submission + - Meet: NASA's Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover Curiosity (techtribune.com)

techtribune writes: While we know that the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is already developed, it's still years away from completion. In the meantime, all eyes can be on the next Mars mission with NASA's new Mars Science Laboratory rover called 'Curiosity'. Curiosity is about the size of a mini cooper and is four times more heavy than the Spirit and Opportunity which were launched in 2004. The Curiosity also comes with a larger robot arm, a laser that can split rocks, a weather station, and a percussive drill for drilling rocks. Unlike the Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity also has on board 10.5 pounds of plutonium-238! Yes, Curiosity is nuclear-powered instead of solar powered like the previous rovers. No sun is required to power the systems on board.

Comment This already exists: US-CERT (Score 4, Informative) 160

http://www.us-cert.gov/

From the US-CERT "About Us" page:

US-CERT's mission is to improve the nation's cybersecurity posture, coordinate cyber information sharing and proactively manage cyber risks to the nation while protecting the constitutional rights of Americans. US-CERT vision is to be a trusted global leader in cybersecurity - collaborative, agile, and responsive in a complex environment.

Information is available from the US-CERT web site, mailing lists, and RSS channels.

US-CERT also provides a way for citizens, businesses, and other institutions to communicate and coordinate directly with the United States government about cyber security.

Who runs US-CERT?
US-CERT is the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Where is US-CERT located?
US-CERT is located in the Washington DC Metropolitan area.

What is US-CERT's relationship to NCSD and DHS?
US-CERT is the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The NCSD was established by DHS to serve as the federal government's cornerstone for cyber security coordination and preparedness, including implementation of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace .

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