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Power

Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US 452

Posted by Soulskill from the let's-celebrate-with-a-ride-in-the-suv dept.
mdsolar writes "Renewable energy production has surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. according to the latest issue of Monthly Energy Review (PDF) published by the Energy Information Administration. ... During the first three months of 2011, energy produced from renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind) generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy equating to 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear energy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production."
Editorial

Are Fake Geeks Dooming Real Ones? 492

Posted by Soulskill from the nerds-and-dorks-still-secure dept.
mattnyc99 writes "In the wake of the Best Buy 'geek' trademarking and Miss USA calling herself 'a huge history geek,' writer (and self-proclaimed geek) Eryn Green has an interesting piece for Esquire on how so-called 'geek chic' is pervading the culture so much that no one appreciates an actual geek anymore. From the article: 'The difference between brains and beauty is that you're more or less born into good looks — entitled, if you will. Intelligence? That takes work. If the hallmark of real geekiness — of America — is determination, then we seem too determined to have an entitlement problem.'"
Facebook

Winklevoss Twins Finally Give Up Fighting Facebook 160

Posted by samzenpus from the keep-on-rowing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who accuse him of stealing their idea for the social network, have decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. In a filing today with the federal court in San Francisco, the duo said that after 'careful consideration,' they decided not to seek Supreme Court review of the $65 million settlement."
Science

Are 'Nudging Technologies' Ethical? 227

Posted by Soulskill from the directing-your-thoughts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers are debating the ethics of so-called 'nudging technologies' — ambient technology systems designed to shape or influence human behavior, such as an installation which encourages people to take the stairs rather than the lift by using hanging colored balls to represent stairs vs lift usage. A researcher on the project said: 'Most people, when we asked them, "Do you think this has changed your behavior," they said no. But the data showed that it had actually done that.'"

Comment Re:good. (Score 1) 365

by mehtajr (#32818444) Attached to: Working Toward a Universal Power Brick For Laptops

DisplayPort has much higher bandwidth than DVI or HDMI (over four times single-link DVI and 1.7 times HDMI). DVI already can only drive a 30 inch display with a dual-link connection. DisplayPort doesn't have that problem. I imagine now that there's been a big push to get mobile screens up toward 300ppi resolution, there will be a push to do the same on laptop and desktop displays. Eventually, you'll need the bandwidth to deal with the extra pixels on large screens.

Pushing for higher bandwidth connectors is a good thing. Otherwise, we'll trade VGA for DVI as the obsolete technology that won't ever die.
GNU is Not Unix

Would You Die To Respect a Software License? 233

Posted by timothy from the visit-from-the-compliance-department dept.
Julie188 writes "Some 2,000 licenses cover the 230,000+ projects in Black Duck's open source knowledge base. While 10 licenses comprise 93% of the software, that leaves 1,980-odd licenses for the other 3% — and some of them have really crazy conditions. The Death and Repudiation License, for instance, requires the user to be dead."
Data Storage

Best Solutions For Massive Home Hard Drive Storage? 609

Posted by timothy from the watch-and-release dept.
i_ate_god writes "I download a lot of 720/1080p videos, and I also produce a lot of raw uncompressed video. I have run out of slots to put in hard drives across two computers. I need (read: want) access to my files at all times (over a network is fine), especially since I maintain a library of what I've got on the TV computer. I don't want to have swappable USB drives, I want all hard drives available all the time on my network. I'm assuming that, since it's on a network, I won't need 16,000 RPM drives and thus I'm hoping a solution exists that can be moderately quiet and/or hidden away somewhere and still keep somewhat cool. So Slashdot, what have you done?"
Apple

The Apple Two 643

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ain't-that-the-truth dept.
theodp writes "Over at Slate, Tim Wu argues that the iPad is Steve Jobs' final victory over Steve Wozniak. Apple's origins were pure Woz, but the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are the products of the company's other Steve. Jobs' ideas have always been in tension with Woz's brand of idealism and openness. Crazy as it seems, Apple Inc. — the creator of the personal computer — is leading the effort to exterminate it. And somewhere, deep inside, Woz must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
Google

Android and the Linux Kernel Community 354

Posted by timothy from the cathedral-in-the-bazaar dept.
An anonymous reader links to Greg Kroah-Hartman's explanation of a rift (hopefully mendable) in the development culture of Google's Linux-based Android OS and the Linux kernel itself. "As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter ..."
Earth

The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook 752

Posted by Soulskill from the efficiency-is-overrated dept.
Kensai7 writes "Recently, Facebook provided us with some information on their server park. They use about 30,000 servers, and not surprisingly, most of them are running PHP code to generate pages full of social info for their users. As they only say that 'the bulk' is running PHP, let's assume this to be 25,000 of the 30,000. If C++ would have been used instead of PHP, then 22,500 servers could be powered down (assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code), or a reduction of 49,000 tons of CO2 per year. Of course, it is a bit unfair to isolate Facebook here. Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code."
GNOME

WebKit For Metacity/Mutter CSS Theming? 124

Posted by kdawson from the future-proofing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As Metacity (the GNOME window manager) evolves into Mutter, the question of CSS themes and how to implement them has come up. One of the proposals was WebKit, which the author asked more specifically about on his blog. It seems that WebKit, being a very fast rendering engine, would allow Mutter to have unprecedented power, not to mention being nearly future-proofed. As a major bonus, going this way could allow GNOME to share themes with KDE, which is apparently already headed towards a dependency on WebKit. Many people will reflexively recoil at the idea of a browser being mixed with a window manager. But it's important to remember that WebKit is not a browser — it's just a rendering engine, and it's not where all the security issues come from. So, what are the real technical issues at stake here? What are the pros and cons of using WebKit underneath GNOME rendering?"

Comment Re:Bad summary (Score 2, Interesting) 260

by mehtajr (#28375311) Attached to: Opera Unite is a Hail Mary

Opera's made a very good living on their Mobile version, but I think they're in major trouble there now, thanks to WebKit. WebKit is a very good browser core, and it's free and open source (plus, it doesn't hurt that it lets mobile phone makers imitate Safari on the iPhone, since they're all based on the same core).

Look at the players that have adopted WebKit-- Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Google for Android. In two years, it's taken somewhere between 50%-60% of the mobile browser marketâ" about half of that appears to be iPhone/iPod Touch.

Opera's problem is that, even if a "new smartphone takes over," if it comes from Palm, Nokia, or runs Android, it's going to have a WebKit-based browser on it, not Opera.

Comment How does this bolster anything? (Score 1) 76

by mehtajr (#28322455) Attached to: Dell Makes $3 Million From Twitter Sales
$3 million in revenue from Twitter in the last two years, versus what I count as roughly $100 billion in revenue over the past two years for Dell. That's not enough to qualify as a drop in the bucket. If I were Dell, I would laugh in Twitter's face if they demanded money-- they'd probably generate just as many sales by slipping fliers under people's windshields in parking lots.

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