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Comment Re:Apple needs to think a bit more... (Score 1) 266

But the newest and chinest MacBook always have some killer feature that nobody else have. For a long time, the instant hybernate (that would always work, and not crash the machine once every other lid closure) was a killer.

At my last job I was given a Mac and one of the several annoyances coming from several years of Debian was the time it took it to suspend (in the order of 1-2 minutes, versus about 4 seconds in my Debian laptop). I wonder whether they had removed this "instant hybernate" feature or whether it was some software problem specific to my machine. Or maybe the Mac played tricks on me, detecting my lack of love ;-)

Comment Red Hat then Debian (Score 1) 867

In my very first attempt in '96, I tried Debian but some process in crontab would trash my disk (the locate update, IIRC), so not knowing any better I moved at once to Red Hat. After using it for a while (a couple of years) I gave Debian another try, fell in love with it and to this day it's my distro of choice.

Comment Re:Proof use a lot of brute force (Score 1) 121

A really good proof would be able to show a solution for n dimensions, where n > 2, but all we have as a proof is an exhaustive enumeration of the possible networks in 2 dimensions.

The four color theorem only makes sense in 2 dimensions, since for 3 and more no number of colors is enough. To visualize this, just take any number n of spheres in 3D, add appendices to them so that each sphere touches all the other ones, without intersection, fill-in the voids with whatever you want (by thickening the appendices or with a new region) and you end up needing at least n different colors.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Cell phone and PC interaction for te

abell writes: Last year a young man I know had an accident which left him without the use of the four limbs. He only has very limited movement of one arm (but not of his hands).
In order for him to have some social interaction, not limited to visitors who drop by during visit hours, I was thinking of a way for him to use a cell phone: something along the ways of speakers and a mic and possibly a way to start and reply calls with voice commands or at most by pushing a single button, which would need to be installed in his bed by his side and not be so obtrusive as to hinder the nurses' job.
If he were also able in a near future to use a PC with internet connection I think his life quality would improve considerably.
Do you fellow slashdotters have any experience on such setups and any advice to share?
How could one avoid the audio feedback between the speakers and the mic, which would probably need to be in a fixed position at some distance?
Would the cell phone setup be possible to build with cheap off-the-shelf components?
How about a PC interface he might be able to use?
For any location-specific advice, I should specify that my friend is in Poland.

Comment Re:It's not a bad thing (Score 1) 219

I agree, but in such cases, isn't the solution to make current "fun" languages more "enterprisey" by improving the back-end toolchain?

I have found a very good mix of fun and "enterprisey" in Scala. Runs on the JVM, excellent Java interoperability, statically type-checked with some level of type inference and a very dynamic feel.

Comment Re:Where's the "idiots" tag? (Score 1) 848

I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france [...] and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.

Even if I understand your point of view, you should admit that the risk/benefit estimate for someone NOT living close to the French border will have been very different from yours (take Sicily as an extreme example).

Comment I voted against nuclear (Score 1) 848

...and so did all my friends, including quite a few with a degree in Phyisics and an open mind. Apart from the universal issues on nuclear power and the soundness of a decades long investment starting from scratch, consider that:

  • Italy is densely populated (much more so than the United States). A worst case scenario would be much worse than in a semi-desertic area;
  • there is a widespread involvement of various mafias with politics and business (including construction and waste treatment);
  • in some places (see Naples and thereabouts) we are not even able to regularly process domestic garbage, so that it accumulates in urban streets, due to lack of organization and the interests of said mafias;
  • the current government, in favour of a move towards nuclear, and actively pushing for it out of the blue in the recent months, has a very negative track record and its choices are usually dictated by a private interest of the Prime Minister and his associates, with great expense for the Country;
  • the minister who was to be in charge of the contracts for new nuclear plants, Claudio Scajola, resigned some time ago because it was found he had received a bribe in the form of partial payment for a flat in central Rome. He had the courage to declare that "if he would find that someone had partially paid for the apartment without him knowing, he would give up the property". That's the kind of people who would be managing the nuclear future of Italy, weren't it for the results from yesterday.

Comment Re:Physicists (Score 1) 309

there is no continuous mapping from R to RxR or RxRxR

Apart from the obvious examples of continuous mappings (just map the whole line to a single point or embed it any way in the plane or space), you might be interested in this article on space-filling curves, describing continuous surjective mappings from the segment to the square. Variations of those can be used to construct continuous surjective mappings from the segment to R^n for any n, i.e. curves filling the n-dimensional space (no point left out). A very interesting and counterintuitive fact of Mathematics, yet easy enough to grasp with only a limited background.

Comment Re:Groovy (Score 1) 667

I have recently started working on my first project in Scala and I think the situation is quite similar to the Python/C one. Scala is a much more pleasant language to write in, having type inference and a much more dynamic feeling, and in cases when there is no specific library for a task at hand you can just tap into the gazillion Java packages.
Government

Bill To Ban All Salt In Restaurant Cooking 794

lord_rotorooter writes "Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese."
Government

Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency 164

An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support release of the actual text, but that other countries do not. Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners, the text simply can't be released until everyone is in agreement. A new leak from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem countries."
X

After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out 79

The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."
Graphics

How To Play HD Video On a Netbook 205

Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."

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