enz - Slashdot User

Comment No reputation (Score 3) 247

by enz on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @05:35AM (#39641831) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: At What Point Has a Kickstarter Project Failed?

Crowdfunding works only together with reputation. If you simply give money to any unknown person who starts a project, then it's your own fault if they run away with it. Reputation means that creators seeking funding need to do their first few projects for free until there are enough fans who believe that the creator will really deliver and who like the quality of the previous products.

Comment Re:Big Empty Space (Score 1) 608

by enz on Friday December 17, 2010 @03:35AM (#34584746) Attached to: Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already?

If you have a user account at Wikipedia, you can disable the fundraiser ads in My Preferences -> Gadgets -> Suppress display of the fundraiser banner.

Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 29, 2010 @05:25AM from the sunlight-is-free dept.

js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."

Doubled Yield For Bio-Fuel From Waste 97

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @02:51PM from the what-about-the-oil-from-anything-guy? dept.

hankwang writes "Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor of two compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains."

Comment Flattr (Score 1) 321

by enz on Monday June 21, 2010 @09:27AM (#32639892) Attached to: Made-For-Torrents Sci-Fi Drama "Pioneer One" Debuts

Great pilot episode. I will definitely continue watching. I just wish they had a Flattr button. I like to set myself a limit on my monthly donations to free culture projects. I would donate to them this way.

Submission + - The facebook exodus (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by

Death Metal

on Saturday August 29, 2009 @12:12AM

Death Metal writes: "Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you'll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

The exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously."

Submission + - Computer wins game of 9x9 Go against 9-Dan

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, 2009 @02:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: For the first time, a computer program won an official game of 9x9 Go against a top-ranked human player. The game against Zhou Junxun, a professional Go player with the highest possible Go rank of 9 Dan, took place at the Human vs. Computer Competition of the FUZZ-IEEE 2009 conference. This is a milestone in Computer Go and a big success for the new Monte-Carlo tree search algorithms, which revived the Computer Go scene after a decade of stagnation. Computer Go expert Olivier Teytaud says: "Everybody considers the win of Fuego [the name of the program] in 9x9 as very good. No error from the pro, just a perfect play by the computer." The second game was won by the human. Oh, and did I mention it? Fuego is an open source program, so you can sudy the code yourself. Although you might not have an 80-core cluster, as was used in the competition. Now the question is: how long will it take, before the computer beats a human 9-Dan on the 19x19 board?

Submission + - Linux installfests maturing? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

christian.einfeldt

on Monday August 10, 2009 @08:03AM

christian.einfeldt writes: "Linux installfests apparently are expanding from an emphasis on serving individual users to mass network installs serving non-profits and schools. In the past, installfests have often been held as part of Linux User Group meetings, and involved individual new computer users bringing their computers to a small meeting to have Linux installed on their machines. But now there is an apparent trend visible in Linux installfests toward mass network installs supported by greater corporate or municipal involvement in Linux installfests. In many cases, the newly-installed Linux computers are being given to end user institutions such as schools. For example, a recent installfest in Austin, Texas, was put on by two non-profits and was supported by the personal participation of upper management at AMD and nFusion. The majority of the eighty-three machines were PXE-booted and mass-installed at that event over an ad hoc network. Likewise, at last year's LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, 350 Linux computers were mass-installed over a similar PXE network in a mass installfest put on in a partnership between the non-profit Alameda County Computer Resource Center and the for-profit Untangle and IDG firms. The machines were donated to San Francisco Bay Area schools. Similar installfests have been held in Chile and India, to name just a few."

The State of Munich's Ongoing Linux Migration 203

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 28, 2009 @04:56AM from the es-geht-immer-noch dept.

christian.einfeldt writes "The Munich decision to move its 14,000 desktops to Free Open Source Software created a big splash back in 2003 as news circulated of the third-largest German city's defection from Microsoft. When it was announced in 2003, the story garnered coverage even in the US, such as an extensive article in USA Today on-line. Currently, about 60% of desktops are using OpenOffice, with the remaining 40% to be completed by the end of 2009. Firefox and Thunderbird are being used in all of the city's desktop machines. Ten percent of desktops are running the LiMux Debian-based distro, and 80% will be running LiMux by 2012 at the latest. Autonomy was generally considered more important than cost savings, although the LiMux initiative is increasing competition in the IT industry in Munich already. The program has succeeded because the city administration has been careful to reach out to all stakeholders, from managers down to simple end users."

Comment WakeUpManager (Score 1) 348

by enz on Thursday March 26, 2009 @10:28AM (#27341819) Attached to: Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs

There was a talk at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage by a guy who developed a software called WakeUpManager as part of his bachelor thesis. It manages the booting and shutdown of computers by a central server that allows users to define timetables of required uptime via a web interface and also checks if nobody is using the computer before it shuts it down. Users can boot shut-down machines from remote via the same web interface (by Wake on LAN). There is an audio recording of the talk, but it is in German. The software is already used at the University of Paderborn with 150 clients. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to collect any data on the savings that were achieved in this installation.

Submission + - Wiimote 3D widget desktop (redmonk.com)

Submitted by Captain Arr Morgan on Friday December 14, 2007 @06:30PM

Captain Arr Morgan writes: Cool article I found on RedMonkTV, really nice hack on the Wiimote.
While at SAP TechEd '07 in Las Vegas, James and I had the chance to get an exciting demo from Dan McWeeney and Eddie Herrmann. Having won the SAP TechEd '06 DemoJam, Dan and Eddie couldn't compete this year, so they cooked up the Wiimote driven 3D desktop we see in the demo. It's sort of like Minority Report with two Wiimotes. Built on a collection of open source project and Flex, Dan and Eddie's Majority Desktop is quite the site to see.

Submission + - Solar clls for daily use

Submitted by

cptdondo

on Monday December 10, 2007 @05:41PM

cptdondo writes: "My brother-in-law asked me about the latest in solar cells. He's got a good-size sailboat and wants to put in a solar charger. As the resident family geek I should have the answers, but I had to admin total ignorance. So what's the latest consumer technology in solar cells? Any cool mobile solar installations out there? Any power management schemes people are using to power stuff on boats and in RVs?"

Submission + - Citizendium, the non-free encyclopedia (citizendium.org) 4

Submitted by on Wednesday November 21, 2007 @11:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: Citizendium, the erstwhile competitor to Wikipedia, is about to adopt a non-free license — a CC-NC license, with the Citizendium Foundation being able to sell the content commercially. Larry Sanger claims he hasn't decided, but the question, his arguments in favor and him comparing people who disagree to Hitler make it pretty clear. There is a Wikipedia blog post that says this means Citizendium is conceding the whole Third World to Wikipedia — and Wikipedia's already won the First World.

Submission + - The Energy Drink Market (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by cravedrink on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @01:43PM

cravedrink writes: It is an interesting fact that energy drinks make you fat. The energy drink market is looking to change that fact and as a result through the genius of science, a new fat burn energy drink has just been born.! This also has a cool business opportunity attached to it. ENERGY DRINK MARKET

Submission + - Nokia looking at alternative energy sources

Submitted by on Thursday October 25, 2007 @08:01AM

An anonymous reader writes: Recently CNET went to Oulu in Finland to visit Nokia's R&D facility and see what it's planning for the future. Among a variety of cool ideas, there's a slide which shows alternative sources for energy storage and charging. Among the possible sources are solar power and body heat. It will be interesting to see a solar powered phone soon but unlikely the technology could make it mobile enough yet.

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