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Space

Inside the World's Most Advanced Planetarium 133

Posted by samzenpus from the laser-floyd-will-never-be-the-same dept.
notthatwillsmith writes "Earlier this month, the most technologically-advanced digital planetarium in the world opened in San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. The new Morrison Planetarium's 75-foot screen replaces the traditional Zeiss projector with an array of 6 high-resolution DLP projectors arrayed around the edge of the theater, which are powered by three very different, but interesting computing clusters. The three clusters allow for projection of traditional planetarium shows, playback of ultra-high resolution movies, and display of anything from current atmospheric conditions on Earth to a (greatly accelerated) trip to the farthest reaches of the universe, all rendered in real-time on an 8800 sq. ft. dome. Maximum PC went on a behind the scenes tour with the engineers who built the systems that do everything from run the planetarium lights to the sound systems to the tech behind the screen to show you how it works and what it's like to drive, well ... the universe."
The Media

Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science 419

Posted by kdawson from the i'm-your-doctor-dammit dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We all know that false or misleading science headlines are all too common these days and that misleading media combined with an apathetic and undereducated public lead to widespread ignorance. But the real question is, how can this trend be reversed? At a session at the recent AAAS meeting, a study was discussed indicating that what matters most is how the information is portrayed. While people are willing to defer to experts on matters of low concern, for things that affect them directly, such as breast cancer or childhood diseases, expertise only counts for as much as giving off a 'sense of honesty and openness,' and that it matters far less than creating a sense of empathy in deciding who people will listen to. In other words, it's not enough to merely report on it as an expert. You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."

Comment Re:What the hell... (Score 3, Interesting) 164

by Fyre2012 (#22455808) Attached to: Patent Troll Attacks Cable, Digital TV Standards
I think you touch on an interesting point...
The underlying theme it seems would be greed. If a small inventor was concerned only with servicing a particular need, than they shouldn't have much issue. Thier motivation to be a basement company one night, and something the size of Google the next seems to cloud their judgement.

Many people these days just want to 'get rich and quick'. This mentality is in direct conflict with the mindset of small business. Small business is all about community and the network of clientele and respect you build up by servicing your clients with respect and expectation. (do what you say, it goes farther than most people think!)

When you hold the 'rights' to your idea too high, they inflate in proportion with one's ego and the rise / fall of the almighty ruler (the dollar).

Didn't the dot com bust teach people about the devaluation of an idea?
The Courts

First Amendment Ruling Protects Internet Trolls 305

Posted by Soulskill from the reinforced-bridges dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A recent ruling by the Court of Appeal of the State of California (PDF) in Krinsky v. Doe H030767 overturned a lower court ruling and decided that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech protects internet trolls, too. Specifically, the ruling said that 'this juvenile name-calling cannot reasonably be read as stating actual facts.' And, even though some of the statements were crudely sexual and accused Ms. Krinsky of being among 'boobs, liars and crooks,' the statements were held to 'fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.'"
Cellphones

iPhone Application Key Leaked 247

Posted by kdawson from the sign-early-and-often dept.
HighWizard writes with word from Engadget that the iPhone SDK Key has been leaked early. "We're not exactly sure how this all went down, but we trust Erica Sadun over at TUAW when she says that it appears that the iPhone's SDK key — which will probably be required by all 'official' third-party apps — has been leaked. Two different sites currently have the key posted, but it's all just for show until next month, when the SDK hits for real — and the code is undoubtedly changed."
Bug

Submission + - digg is down

Submitted by kace
kace writes: digg is down. At 8:45 p.m. ET? They have a nice "Out of Service" page with some other interesting links and the message, "Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes." Why would they plan a change for this time of day? I suppose this must be an emergency failure page that they've designed to make it look like everything's under control. P.s., not such a great advertisement for LAMP is it? (It's mentioned/plugged at the bottom.)
Software

Submission + - Gaim rename

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_name=20070407135734.GB2776%40pidgin.im&forum_nam e=gaim-i18n

[...] Getting a settlement with AOL has taken FAR FAR longer than we would
have ever guessed. On legal advise, we have refrained from any non-beta
release during this process as a show of good faith, and to keep AOL
from giving up on it. Again, on legal advise, we have also kept this
information closely embargoed.

At long last, I am pleased to announce, that we have a signed
settlement, and can again release. There is one catch however, we have
had to change the project's name.

After long, and unfortunately secret (as we could not say why we were
looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves),
debate, we settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for
libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "finch" for gaim-text.
Yes, the spelling of "Pidgin" is intentional.

Since between the name, and the nature of the 2.0.0 release itself, so
much is changing, we decided to go ahead with something we have talked
about doing for a while now anyway. We have gotten our own server,
kindly donated by DVLabs. As a result our new home will be
http://www.pidgin.im/ and developer.pidgin.im We, at least for now, will still
be using SF's mirroring system for releases. However, the bug tracking
will no longer be on SF, and we will be migrating the mailing lists at
some point soon. Also, we have chosen to go with monotone for our
revision control, rather than the SF cvs or svn. [...]

Database Bigwigs Lead Stealthy Open Source Startup 187

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hope-it-isn't-vaporcorp dept.
BobB writes "Michael Stonebraker, who cooked up the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, is back with a stealthy startup called Vertica. And not just him, he has recruited former Oracle bigwigs Ray Lane and Jerry Held to give the company a boost before its software leaves beta testing. The promise — a Linux-based system that handles queries 100 times faster than traditional relational database management systems."
Operating Systems

Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful 372

Posted by kdawson from the not-a-desktop dept.
Siker writes in to point out his blog post — Why Gentoo Shouldn't Be On Your Server — which seems to have stirred up a lot of discussion, including a thread on the Gentoo forums. From the post: "I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will undoubtedly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process... This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Might as well..

Journal by Fyre2012
start using this thing
Things have been going strange for me. Always feeling like i am failing at what it is i'm doing.
and just what is it i'm doing?

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