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Education

Ask Slashdot: What Essays and Short Stories Should Be In a Course On Futurism? 293

Posted by Soulskill from the i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream dept.
Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"

Submission + - Alternatives to Slashdot post beta? 8

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Like many Slashdotters, I intend to stop visiting Slashdot after the beta changeover. After years of steady decline in the quality of discussions here, the beta will be the last straw. What sites alternative to Slashdot have others found? The best I have found has been arstechnica.com, but it has been a while since I've looked for tech discussion sites.

Submission + - Video of Britain's Taranis supersonic drone (abc.net.au)

Submitted by chrism238
chrism238 writes: ABC News (Australia) is presenting vision of the of a state-of-the-art drone touted as the future of British warfare, showing it soaring over what is thought to be Woomera in remote South Australia — "'Australia's Area 51". The Taranis drone is a joint project between UK defence and BAE Systems. The test drone cost 185 million pounds ($AUD336.5 million). It is designed to carry a payload of guided bombs and missiles, travel at supersonic speeds, and fly undetected by radar. The UK military says the Taranis will be operable via satellite from anywhere in the world.

The first test flight is being hailed as a "major landmark for UK aviation". The vision shows the sleek Taranis, named after the Celtic god of thunder, making a seamless take-off and conducting a number of manoeuvres over red desert during its first test flight. The British Military of Defence (MoD) will not confirm where the footage was shot, but in a submission last year to a UK parliamentary hearing, revealed that the Taranis Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) demonstrator had indeed conducted initial test flights at the Woomera test range.

Submission + - Gates returns to Windows 7 after being unable to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade 3

Submitted by Artem Tashkinov
Artem Tashkinov writes: According to rumors Bill Gate's first day at his office in Redmond turned out to be a complete disaster mixed with ostensibly curse words no one had expected from him. He tried to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade but the updater failed continuously asking to reboot the PC. Microsoft's new C.E.O. Satya Nadella who came to help resolve the situation couldn't sort it out. In the end Gates said he would be returning to Windows 7 for the foreseeable future.

Submission + - Induction stove not compatible with Iphone

Submitted by dovgr
dovgr writes: There is a story in the Swedish news paper Dagens Nyheter, Google translation at http://translate.google.com/tr... , telling the story of a woman who bought an induction stove, that caused a noise in her phone whenever using the phone. When complaining to stove service company, she was told that the stove is only compatible with Samsung, and recommended her to switch phones.

Submission + - Slashdot forces a beta site by default

Submitted by kelk1
kelk1 writes: As a poor submitter found out (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/02/05/2328224/html5-app-for-panasonic-tvs-rejected---jquery-is-a-hack), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org) suddenly forced a preview of its beta site without any warning on all its viewers.

Judging by the comments, the feedback was immediate and clearly negative.

I cannot speak for the forum moderation side, but my reaction to the front page was an knee jerk: "Oh no!, not another portal full of noise I cannot speed-read through." Text and hyperlinks are what we need, please, and as little graphics as possible. Think lynx, thank you.
Software

Does Anyone Make a Photo De-Duplicator For Linux? Something That Reads EXIF? 243

Posted by timothy from the which-ones-are-not-like-the-others? dept.
postbigbang writes "Imagine having thousands of images on disparate machines. many are dupes, even among the disparate machines. It's impossible to delete all the dupes manually and create a singular, accurate photo image base? Is there an app out there that can scan a file system, perhaps a target sub-folder system, and suck in the images-- WITHOUT creating duplicates? Perhaps by reading EXIF info or hashes? I have eleven file systems saved, and the task of eliminating dupes seems impossible."
Education

Ask Slashdot: It's 2014 -- Which New Technologies Should I Learn? 387

Posted by Soulskill from the integrated-abacus-solutions dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I've been a software engineer for about 15 years, most of which I spent working on embedded systems (small custom systems running Linux), developing in C. However, web and mobile technologies seem to be taking over the world, and while I acknowledge that C isn't going away anytime soon, many job offers (at least those that seem interesting and in small companies) are asking for knowledge on these new technologies (web/mobile). Plus, I'm interested in them anyway. Unfortunately, there are so many of those new technologies that it's difficult to figure out what would be the best use of my time. Which ones would you recommend? What would be the smallest set of 'new technologies' one should know to be employable in web/mobile these days?"

Submission + - CERN antimatter experiment produces first beam of antihydrogen (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Matter and antimatter annihilate immediately when they meet, so aside from creating antihydrogen, one of the key challenges for physicists is to keep antiatoms away from ordinary matter. To do so, experiments take advantage of antihydrogen’s magnetic properties (which are similar to hydrogen’s) and use very strong non-uniform magnetic fields to trap antiatoms long enough to study them. However, the strong magnetic field gradients degrade the spectroscopic properties of the (anti)atoms. To allow for clean high-resolution spectroscopy, the ASACUSA collaboration developed an innovative set-up to transfer antihydrogen atoms to a region where they can be studied in flight, far from the strong magnetic field."

Submission + - Physicists explain 'gravity-defying' chain trick (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Leaping up out of a jar in an arc before falling to the floor, the fountain-like motion of a chain of beads has puzzled millions around the world with its apparently gravity-defying behaviour. Now physicists think they have an explanation.
British science presenter Steve Mould, who made the experiment famous, explained the phenomenon as simply one of inertia: the falling chain has downward momentum, causing an upward momentum in beads leaving the pot. This, in turn, makes them leap before gravity can slowly reverse their momentum.
Mould’s explanation was clever, but wrong, says physicist John Biggins of the University of Cambridge, UK. The only way to account for the rise is for the chain to receive a 'kick' from the pot from which it is being pulled. This challenges not only the explanation given by Mould, but the conventional mathematics of chains, Biggins says.

Submission + - Request for Funding OpenBSD HQ's Electricity

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The OpenBSD Project started a Request for Funding our Electricity. As Undeadly.org writes:

OpenBSD supports a wide range of hardware architectures, and for practical and logistical reasons there are few places in the world that have them all in one place except OpenBSD headquarters [...] But keeping all this hardware running involves a considerable electricity bill, and Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) is asking for help, preferably in the form of a company willing to specifically sponsor the project's electricity bill.

Donations are greatly appreciated and bigger donations can go to the OpenBSD Foundation which will help with details and can provide receipts.

Sun Microsystems

James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech 223

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the a+-for-killing-solaris dept.
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
China

Panoramic Picture Taken By China's Moon Lander 125

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-where's-the-starbucks? dept.
Taco Cowboy writes "Perhaps it's not much, but China has released a panoramic view of the moonscape where their lander has landed. They 'stitched' up some 60 photos taken by 3 cameras on the Chang'e 3 lander, taken from 3 different angles — Vertical, 15 degrees up, and 15 degrees down. From the picture, there is a significant sized crater is seen, several meters wide, off to the left of Yutu, the (jade rabbit) moon rover, and located only about 10 meters away from the Chang'e-3 lander."

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