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Red Hat Software

Submission + - Red Hat rejecting Microsft's offer

Submitted by
jayd56
jayd56 writes: "In a recent Turn of events, Red Hat has rejected Microsoft's offer that was Novell accepted earlier this week: "We do not believe there is a need for or basis for the type of relationship defined in the Microsoft-Novell announcement," said Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel, in an e-mail. "[But] Red Hat has and will continue to work with Microsoft on true interoperability and open standards in the way we did in advising them in the development of their Open Specification Promise.""
Censorship

Submission + - The pirate land of Australia

Submitted by
ccozan
ccozan writes: "The Internet Industry Association of Australia is rushing to pass a law that would incriminate allmost everybody. From the release:'a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings 'Happy Birthday' in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song.'. Anyone knows an alternative to "Happy Birthday" song?"
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Fedora On PS3 Video

Submitted by
klippoth
klippoth writes: "I just thought I would let you guys know, not only do I have Fedora Core 5 for PPC installed on my Playstation 3, but I actually ran through the boot loader and demonstrated how it works, whilst simultaneously video capturing the results. I edited it a little bit to reduce redundant frames (frames of just watching a cursor flash) so the whole thing comes in just over 3 minutes. I have posted a low-rez version at Youtube if you would like to check it out, and if you believe it to be newsworthy, you can use the high-rez footage I took. Just let me know, I'll be happy to contribute! (I could also give you my ever-so humble opinion on the whole Linux-on-PS3 concept, after I have given it a bit more of a thorough inspection.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnAn3h7kTM4 And yes, I am selling it on Ebay, although that was not my original intention. But hearing about people making ten grand...well, let's just say my love for my PS3 is NOT unconditional. Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't come out for another year anyway! (Although it seems that sales for PS3 are starting to slow down...oh well, I can think of worse things to be stuck with!!)"
Programming

Submission + - Where is 'AI For Dummies'?

Submitted by
StonyCreekBare
StonyCreekBare writes: "I've had a casual interest in Artificial Intelligence for a while. I've read a lot, both online and not, about the topic, but really haven't absorbed much. It's a complex topic. I've poked around CPAN for Perl Modules to play with, but haven't found much of anything particularly useful at my current stage of ignorance.

In the past I have seen basic starter kits for all sorts of things from radios to robotics, "Dummies" books for those just learning almost any topic. Every complex field has it's beginner's kits. But I'll be darned if I find anything equivalent for AI.

I envision something like a 'Black Box' of callable code modules with enough instructions (simplified for beginners) to do something more-or-less useful, and pointers to documentation to help the beginner grow. There are a few perl modules on CPAN, but they seem to assume a level of knowledge way over my head. How does a curious layman get a leg up? I'm not looking to build a massive AI application, just play around and learn some the concepts. But getting over that initial learning curb seems awfully tough.

Is there such a thing as an AI Tool-kit? I mean, where's 'AI For Dummies'? I know it's a complex science. But hasn't someone built a basic instructional beginners system?

Stony"

Software Dev Cycle As Part of CS Curriculum? 431

Posted by Cliff from the from-start-to-finish dept.
tcolvinMI wonders: "I graduated from a small private college a few years ago with a degree in Computer Science. The main focus of the program, at this particular college, was to give you the tools necessary to be able to learn any programming language based on conceptual information, while having been introduced to several popular languages such as VB, C, C++, and Java. However, there was no 'final project' course that introduced a student programmer to the process of software development as a whole. Today, I was talking with a professor and pitched the idea of introducing such a course that would allow students to essentially go through the entire process from design to deployment. Is there any need for such a course? If so, what lessons would you place an emphasis on? So far, my idea is to allow a student to design an application that can be completed within the alloted time frame, develop in an approved language (one they've had and one the professor also knows), go through the QA process and then finally deploy the app to be evaluated by the other students in the class, who have not participated in the project." If you went CS, how well did your lessons prepare you for real project work? If you had a chance to prepare other college students for a career in development, what things would you teach them, and why?
Announcements

Submission + - Just Awakening - Assistance for Students and Profs

Submitted by
owndao
owndao writes: "www.JustAwakening.com

This site's purpose and goals:

This site is aimed at an audience of professionals (practicing and student) in medicine, science, and technology.
The goals of Just Awakening are to:
1. provide access to the latest research and news
2. provide forums for professional debate and discussion
3. assist ongoing research by providing access to search tools

All of this is in the hope of keeping professionals up-to-date with a minimal amount of time and effort spent so that they can better pursue their individual disciplines thus facilitating scientific advance. Granted, this is a tall order, however, at this point in time the internet, software tools, and hardware can readily support all of our goals with a bit of effort on our part.

The element lacking is, of course, funding. We will attempt to provide services for free as long as content can be obtained in that manner. One common means of funding is affiliate advertisements. The intention here will be to keep ads to a minimum except in the case where specific interests/disciplines can be targeted in a way that facilitates the goals mentioned above. Pop-up ads will not ever be allowed on this site. Another means of funding is requiring subscription access to at least some areas. We are currently in discussion with content providers and professional societies in the hope of minimizing this cost as well.

As will always be the case, any helpful suggestions or comments are welcome. Please participate in our ongoing survey below. Thanks.

* News
o Engineering
o Medicine
o Science
* Search Engines
* Classifieds
* Advertisements
* Chat
* Reference
* Forums
* Knowledge base
* Shopping Cart
* Favorite Links

Please visit and click on some ads and visit the forums. Currently everything is free!! Help shape the way this site evolves.

Thanks,

Joe E. Hodge, III "
Slashback

Submission + - Thomas Edison, World's Greatest...Product Marketer

Submitted by
Tatsuya Nakagawa
Tatsuya Nakagawa writes: "http://www.americaninventorspot.com/thomas_edison Did you think Thomas Edison was a great inventor? He wasn't. Our Guest Bloggers, Peter P. Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa, are the co-founders of Atomica Creative. Atomica Creative is a strategic product marketing company that has been involved in many successful product launches in North America and Asia in several industries. Roosen and Nakagawa have recently released a book titled "Overcoming Inventoritis — Lessons from Thomas Edison, the world's greatest product marketer". They have some valuable advice that they wanted to share with readers of AmericanInventorSpot.com. Here's their article: * * * * * There are many stories of inventors who ended up broke, even if their inventions were first class world-beaters. Perhaps the best known one is Nikola Tesla who invented AC (Alternating Current) electrical systems and technology which is widely used throughout the world today. He was in direct competition with Thomas Edison's DC (Direct Current) technology. Tesla had the apparently superior technology for most electrical power applications but Edison's technology held the market for some time even after George Westinghouse, inventor of the railway air brake system still in use today, backed Tesla. Edison actively resisted changing from his established DC to the superior AC technology but eventually did make the wholesale change as the market dictated. Unlike Edison, Tesla died in relative obscurity as a broke, lonely and unhappy man. When Edison died, the President asked everyone in the country to dim their lights for a minute of remembrance, a practice that was widely observed. What led to these two prominent individuals to such vastly different outcomes? Tesla is the poster boy for inventoritis, arguably being a greater inventor and scientist than Edison while self-educated Edison was free of it and still has the reputation as being the World's Greatest Inventor. Almost everything ever written about Edison and Menlo Park over the past hundred years centers around the idea that he was a great inventor, the greatest in world history and that Menlo Park was in effect a factory producing an endless series of great inventions. This has been commonly associated with producing excellent products. The light bulb is the most popular example of the successful Edison products from among his thousand issued patents. Much has also been made of his claim that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and of how he and his staff sometimes toiled through thousands of repetitive experiments in the process of developing his ideas into useful commercial products. Although he did make some great inventions, most of his patents were for refinements and improvements of existing ideas and products. What these writers missed was that Edison was not so much an inventor as a great product marketer. His image as an inventor was part of his carefully cultivated and controlled public relations and media strategy. He was opportunistic and extremely media savvy. He had a special office set up at Menlo Park and carefully designed the entire operation from a media perspective such that he was able to brand himself as the world's greatest inventor. He did not invent the light bulb. He improved upon existing technology after having bought out other patent rights and where competing patent rights were not so easily obtained, stole technology by directly infringing upon those claims. Edison used Menlo Park as a means to his marketing ends. Maintaining Menlo Park was an expensive undertaking and it took in work from various companies, not only Edison's, to justify its existence and to cover the costs. For larger projects with a high Research &Development component such as developing cement manufacturing technologies and operations, Edison moved out into the plant locations and scaled down his Menlo Park operation. Development and testing activities have been modeled on Edison's Menlo Park example and on the premise that by establishing systems and processes toward the objective of coming up with winning products through technical research and development activities, the company would gain a competitive advantage. Vast amounts of money are spent in this area and many companies still pride themselves on the money they spend each year on these activities, usually expressed as a percentage of sales, typically in the 1 to 15% range. An endless series of winning products is not the normal result. A 2005 Booz Allen Hamilton study of the global top 1000 R&D spenders found no direct correlation between R&D spending and sales growth, operating profit or shareholder return. Many of the world's scientists and engineers are currently employed in these numerous industrial R&D centers, with the larger ones employing thousands. These modern invention factories often reside far away from where the sales and marketing people are located or where the manufacturing operations churn out the product lines. The facilities are usually located in quiet, secluded places with spacious parking lots, plenty of green spaces, vegetation and aesthetically pleasing water features. The people who work in them often take comfort in the idea they are working in a temple of ideas, away from the marketing and sales bustle, manufacturing smokestacks and general "business" end of the company. Few of the R&D people truly understand or even care about the marketing strategy of the company, and you would have a hard time finding any of them actively engaged in developing or deploying the strategy. Company upper managements generally assume these centers which form a standard part of the industrial landscape are serving the corporate best interests and accept their high costs as one of the required costs of doing business,. These comfortable techie friendly places might look like a natural outgrowth of Edison's Menlo Park but upon closer examination have little resemblance to what his facility was really about; to serve his clearly defined marketing objectives. Edison knew enough to close his Menlo Park shop when it no longer served his corporate purposes. While Edison was still very much active and alive, his protégé Henry Ford carefully dismantled and moved the Menlo Park complex, including a trainload of the New Jersey soil upon which it originally stood, to Dearborn Michigan where it stands today. It was made part of Henry Ford's historical Greenfield Village and is currently open for public viewing at the cost of admission. A century later, it still serves the original marketing purpose of developing and protecting Edison's brand as the World's Greatest Inventor. "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration. As a result, a genius is often a talented person who has simply done all of his homework." This is Edison's most famous quote. Historians and journalists have almost invariably held this in the context of his laboratory work but that is a misguided approach. A large part of his efforts were outside of the scientific areas in doing the product marketing work. He never lost his focus on doing his homework to understand the market, and the players within it including the customers, suppliers, competitors, the financial and business aspects, and certainly the sales and marketing requirements. He worked out effective strategies and executed them. He branded himself by making his name synonymous with the term "inventor" to the exclusion of others so effectively that today, a hundred years later, the connection still holds firmly. His work ethic is legendary but one should remember he almost always had several people helping him in the work. When it was likely to take numerous, sometimes thousands of attempts to get to a satisfactory result on one of his objectives, he would employ an efficient assembly line approach to the task. Tesla while working for Edison once described Edison's lab methodology as an "empirical dragnet." The perspiration was not only Edison's but shared among a number of dedicated workers including Tesla. Tesla got himself in some difficulties as he aged. After some breathtaking early successes, he alienated himself from the marketplace and all the people in it. He died a broke, paranoid, miserable, lonely man who in his last years was holed up in the Hotel New Yorker having dialogues with a flock of pigeons he had enticed into his room. Just prior to that, he was finding his way onto America's newspapers, not with reports of new commercial successes, but with his ideas and designs for communication with other planets, wireless global electrical energy and to support his black philosophy of war including death rays and a machine that could literally split the earth. Edison died surrounded by family and friends as a member of "The Millionaires Club" along with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (founder of the Firestone tire & Rubber Co.). He leaves behind a legacy of large utility "Edison" companies and was a founder of modern General Electric currently the world's 7th largest company. He had a very satisfying life and is remembered as the World's Greatest Inventor. So what was the main difference? Edison was the World's Greatest Marketer!"

Intel Experimenting With Nanotubes 85

Posted by Zonk from the tuuuubes dept.
illeism writes "C|Net is reporting on Intel's experimentation with nanotubes in processors. From the article: 'The chip giant has managed to create prototype interconnects — microscopic metallic wires inside of chips that link transistors ... Carbon nanotubes ... conduct electricity far better than metals. In fact, nanotubes exhibit what's called ballistic conductivity, which means that electrons are not scattered or impeded by obstacles.'"
Education

Submission + - OLPC Wins Popular Science Award

Submitted by
paulmac84
paulmac84 writes: "Popular Science have released their "Best of What's New 2006" awards. In the computing section One Laptop Per Child took home the Grand Award. From the article: "The goal of the XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece. But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn't just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs — by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things — it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine's energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages."

The Innovation of The Year Award went to "the alpha nail that makes your home twice as tough". Sometimes the simple ideas really are the best."
Microsoft

Submission + - Time for Anti-trust 2.0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PC Manufacturer Acer is complaining that Microsoft has jacked up the price of Vista, and that the basic versions are so basic no one will ship them. Since the collapse of the Microsoft Anti-trust Case under the Bush Administration in 2001, Manufacturers have no choice but to accede, adding hundreds of dollars to the cost of each PC. With Gates now proclaiming victory over European Regulators, Microsoft once again seems unstoppable.

But Microsoft had drawn itself close to the Republican Party. With the Republicans now evicted from the House and Senate, is it time to look at the Microsoft Anti-trust Suit? Could Microsoft be compelled to lower its inflating Vista prices, or to open their tech or even supply funding to Linux-flavored Windows such as Wine?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Best equipment dusting solution?

Submitted by redcrate
redcrate writes: Other than those with the luxury of having all their computer and electronic equipment located in a ISO 14644-1 class 1 cleanroom, most of us have to deal with dust and the periodic removal of it from our equipment. Add a fan and your problem is now ten times as large. So what do you ingenious slashdot readers use to satisfy your dust destroying urges in both a powerful and economical fashion?

At one point in time I had a beautiful 80 gallon air compressor which I could use to dust out the entire garage in less than 2.3 seconds simply by opening the garage door and releasing the main valve with a specially designed quick connect attached. It was an awesome sight and could easily be toned down for more delicate electronic air dusting with regulators and the proper fittings. Unfortunately my current living situation make the 80 gallon or even the puny pancake compressor approach infeasible. I've dabbled with pellet gun CO2 style cartridges but found their power to be fleeting and commercial dust-off "air" in a can solutions are far too expensive. Perhaps a paintball style canister... any ideas?
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Micheal Dell Gets Presidential Product Placement

Submitted by electricpineapple
electricpineapple writes: How much does it cost to have the President of the United States of America plug your product during a televised newsconference? While answering a reporter's question about the recent senate elections, Bush speaks of people watching the news from Iraq "on their Dell televisions". A slip of the tongue? If you watch the video you can see him clearly and distinctly say "Dell televisions", not "dellevisions" or any other mixup. A quick search shows $7000 in political donations to the Bush election campaigns in 2000 and 2004 and tens of thousands more to other republicans.
Censorship

Submission + - The Digg Fraud Campaign Behind Zune

Submitted by DECS
DECS writes: The problem with the anonymous Internet is that services like Digg fail to exercise any of the accountability of traditional news sources, and are happy to be used to spread false information if it results in ad clicks.The Digg Fraud Campaign Behind Zune

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