Comment Re:Aero (Score 1) 514
maybe bartPE, it replaces the Windows Preinstallation Environment, and my friend was using it with portable apps
Comment Re:Aero (Score 1) 514
and Konqueror as the default/only web browser, and itunes installed, which replaces apt as well for package installation. see, they're uniting everyone.
Kindle Allowing Chinese Unfettered Access To Web 138
jcl-xen0n writes "Apparently, some Chinese Kindle owners have discovered that they are able to access banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook without a problem. The article speculates that Amazon may be operating a local equivalent to Amazon Whispernet with a Chinese 3G provider. Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget (perhaps because they consider it solely a tool to purchase books). How long before Kindle traffic is locked down?"
Submission + - Building Roads With Sand And Bacteria (designboom.com)
riverat1 writes: Sand mixed with a solution containing Bacillus Pasteurii could be used to create engineered sandstone roads replacing asphalt with a cheaper, lighter colored surface that reflects more solar radiation and requires less nighttime lighting than asphalt. Bacillus Pasteurii cements sand grains together with calcium carbonate. It currently takes 320 barrels of oil to make the asphalt for a kilometer of roadway. Thomas Kosbau and Andrew Wetzler won the iida 2010 prize for their idea. Requested attribution: The iida awards are organized by designboom in collaboration with Incheon Metropolitan City.
Submission + - Breakthrough in DIY eye tracking (gazegroup.org)
mtall writes: Utilizing off-the-shelf components from microscopy imaging and CCTV video surveillance a group of researchers have constructed an eye tracker capable of estimating binocular gaze position at +170 frames per second with an accuracy of 0.3-0.7 degrees of visual angle. When tracking a single eye it is possible to increase the sample rate even higher, over 500 frames per second has been observed. Estimated DIY cost is ~$500, dramatically lowering the point of entry to eye tracking. The software framework is released as open source and available today.
Submission + - Nokia does good in India (nytimes.com)
tkdpanda writes: Nokia is providing real-time produce prices to rural villagers in India via SMS. This is a real commodities data feed in real time using SMS and targeted to the poorest of India. Isn't it nice when big companies do something nice for mankind?
Submission + - US Says Genes Should Not Be Patentable (nytimes.com)
some_guy_88 writes: Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.
Submission + - 'Cellphone Effect' Could Skew Election Results
Ponca City writes: "A good deal of polling data suggest that Republicans may win the House of Representatives in Tuesday's mid-term elections. However Nate Silver writes in the NY Times that there are several factors that could skew the election allowing Democrats to outperform their polls and beat consensus expectations. Most prominent is the "cellphone effect." In 2003, just 3.2% of households were cell-only while in the 2010 election one-quarter of American adults have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don’t call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied. Another factor that could skew results is the Robopoll effect where there are significant differences between the results shown by automated surveys and those which use live human interviewers — the ‘robopolls’ being 3 or 4 points more favorable to Republicans over all. It may be that only adults who are extremely engaged by politics (who are more likely to be Republican, especially this year) bother to respond to robocalls. Still when all is said and done "more likely than not, Republicans will indeed win the House, and will do so by a significant margin," writes Silver. "But just as Republicans could beat the consensus, Democrats could too, and nobody should be particularly shocked if they do.""
Submission + - DragonFly BSD 2.8.2 Released 1
An anonymous reader writes: The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.
OpenBSD 4.8 Released 176
Mortimer.CA writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.8 has been announced. Highlights include ACPI suspend/resume, better hardware support, OpenBGPD/OpenOSPFD/routing daemon improvements, inclusion of OpenSSH 5.5, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just the usual steady improving of the system. A detailed ChangeLog is available, as usual. Work, of course, has already started on the next release, which should be ready in May, according to the steady six-month release cycle."
Comment Re:Does your car run on shit? (Score 1) 835
damn FreeBSD trolls
Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 1) 681
I wonder if that was available when last I tried in ubuntu. I bet I sat there trying to do it from the command line when all I had to do was click it! Sorry for posting bad info.
Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 1) 681
I wish I'd been following this better. Around Fedora 8 I disabled kpackagekit and haven't re-enabled it. Good to hear it's effective, I swear I'm re-enabling it now and trying it right away! Thanks for testing it.
Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 1) 681
I haven't tried it in a while as I'm on Fedora right now and otherwise use Arch, but I think deb is as bad as rpm/yum for local files. I occasionally download a rpm and do
$ su -c 'yum localinstall some.rpm'
I would like that built into a gui package manager. If not for me than for people I recommend linux to. How do you locally install a deb file that isn't in a repo?
I do have to say that yum uninstalls rpms better and more consistently than windows does for msi's
Comment Re:Biggest point of them all (Score 1) 681
That's what I'd expect as a winxp sysadmin. Worst I have to do is delete a profile. But I can't resist since one of my laptops is the same hardware:
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
(ok, I obviously haven't had my T60 since 2005 but the point is that Arch doesn't have releases just continuous upgrades. That's a smooth upgrade experience.)
