DancesWithBlowTorch - Slashdot User

Comment Re:WritingPad (Score 1) 150

by DancesWithBlowTorch on Wednesday December 31, 2008 @05:49AM (#26278011) Attached to: Next Generation T9 Keyboard Technology

Seconded. Shapewriting was invented by Per Ola Kristensson before 2004 (pdf warning), not by Kliff Kushler in 2008. WritingPad has been available on the iPhone for almost a year now. It has even been praised by Time magazine. These guys are jumping on the bandwagon. They only get more press since they are "the people who invented T9".

Comment Re: Dogfood (Score 1) 366

by DancesWithBlowTorch on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @05:07AM (#26209753) Attached to: As Christmas Bonus, Google Hands Out "Dogfood"

I don't have any idea about the history of the term "eating our own dogfood", but since this is slashdot, pure conjecture might be okay.

I could imagine that the term evolved from both the sources you mention, and that it always was a self-deprecating joke. It doesn't make employees look like dogs. It acknowledges that the product they are alpha-testing is not quite up to scratch yet, but that they are willing to use it anyway, since it's "one of ours".

Submission + - Absolute Hot (pbs.org)

Submitted by

AlpineR

on Monday December 24, 2007 @10:02AM

AlpineR writes: "Is there an opposite to absolute zero? An article from PBS's NOVA online explains several theories of the maximum possible temperature. Maybe it's the Planck temperature, 10^32 K, beyond which the known laws of physics break down. Or maybe just 10^30 K, the limit of some versions of string theory. If space is actually 11-dimensional then the maximum temperature could even be as low as 10^17 K, attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. Or maybe infinite temperature wraps around to negative temperature and absolute hot is the same as absolute cold."

Submission + - Google Reader shares private data, ruins Christmas (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Felipe Hoffa on Sunday December 23, 2007 @08:49PM

Felipe Hoffa writes: One week ago Google Reader's team decided showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family that won't be able to enjoy this Christmas due to this "feature". Will this start happening with all Google products?

You can check a summary of complaints or the whole thread.

Submission + - OLPC a hit in remote Peruvian village (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by

mrcgran

on Sunday December 23, 2007 @08:20PM

mrcgran writes: "Chicago Tribune is running a story about the effects of OLPC on a remote village in Peru: "Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them — if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines. Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed." A detailed log has been kept and a youtube video is also available."

Submission + - Mystery Company recruiting puzzle solved! 1

Submitted by

srealm

on Sunday December 23, 2007 @02:46PM

srealm writes: "Less than 24 hours from posting, the Mystery Company job posting has been cracked! With the collaboration of people at the Google Group setup specifically for cracking this puzzle, the three 'challenges' have been solved, and the company un-masked as N-Brain, Inc in Boulder, CO. The date in question is the release date for their flagship UNA product, meant to promote collaborative development."

Submission + - 5 Best Environmental Tech Inventions of 2007

Submitted by

kitzilla

on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @03:28PM

kitzilla writes: "Nanotech batteries. LED lighting. Super-efficient MOCVD solar panel technology. It may seem early to be compiling a retrospective of this year's best environmental tech inventions, but 2007 is shaping up as a watershed for eco-tech. Practical wave-generated power, anyone? With social and political attention turning toward the environment, there's finally market-driven pressure to move sustainability solutions out of the lab and into people's homes and driveways. Here's a quick look at the immediate future."

Feed Rants: Revive, Rename, Renew (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @03:12PM

Readers remark on Positions on Pluto, Planting and Planning, Playing Preferences, Planet Earth and Panic over Payments . Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.

Submission + - Sport has nothing to do with obesity in children

Submitted by

xiox

on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @03:12PM

xiox writes: "The UK government is planning to stop funding a study to understand obesity in children. The study fits children with accelerometers to measure how much energy each child uses in a day by moving. The results are very surprising. Those children who do sports at school do not burn more calories than those who don't. Furthermore there is no correlation between body mass index and the number of calories used! The results are very interesting, suggesting that genetics and diet are the main reasons for childhood obesity, not sport. The UK government is trying to increase the amount of sport in schools."

Submission + - Seven wonders revamp= seven million arguements

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @01:40PM

coondoggie writes: "There is an ongoing vote/movement going on to recast the 7 wonders of the world — you know the Great Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — into something more modern and realistic for that matter — only the Great Pyramids exist today. The results of this change are going to create an international quagmire of epic proportions. Just watch. The new 7 Wonders of the World contest has actually been going on since 2001 when the New 7 Wonders of theWorld Foundation came into being. And since then over 28 million votes have been cast for all manner of new sites which have now been funneled into the top 21 semifinalists including: the Great Wall of China... http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1241 3"

Submission + - No more re-codeing the wheel

Submitted by TaseyCheese on Saturday February 03, 2007 @05:04AM

TaseyCheese writes: It's always been a dream of programmers: stop reinventing the wheel. So much time is wasted re-implementing things that have already been solved, because it is too difficult to find the previous module. While previous source code search engines have promised to solve this problem, the quality of the results has traditionally been lower than necessary to make them time efficient. News forge has an atrcile on a solution thats still in the alpha stage (and presently only for Java), namely the fledgling source-code search engine Allthecode. Unlike previous generations of code search engines (such as google codesearch and koders), it actually considers how often code is used and the context in which it used, often leading to better results. This seems like just what we need to unify the open-source community, allowing projects to avoid unnecessarily duplicating work.

Submission + - The Search for Jim Gray

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03, 2007 @04:36AM

An anonymous reader writes: A group effort, including engineers from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and NASA is continuing the search for Turing award winner Jim Gray. Using satellite imagery and high-altitude photographs they are searching for a sign of the 40 foot sailboat that disappeared last Sunday. You can help! Amazon's Mechanical Turk service is hosting DigitalGlobe satellite pictures and they are encouraging the public to help search them for signs of Jim.

Submission + - Internet to help in search and rescue for Jim Gray

Submitted by

Reverse Gear

on Saturday February 03, 2007 @04:09AM

Reverse Gear writes: "A lot of effort is being put into trying to help finding Turing award winner Jim Gray who went missing on the ocean some days ago, the search by the coast guard might very well have stopped by now.
One effort being made is analyzing more than 40.000 satellite images for anything that might resemble Jim Gray's sailboat, human eyes are needed to do this efficiently.
So this is the chance for everyone in the "global village" to do their little part in a search and rescue."

Submission + - E. coli bacteria are built to swim upstream

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Saturday February 03, 2007 @03:44AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "A paper to be published Monday in the journal Physical Review Letters reports that the mechanical structure of the bacteria E. coli causes the microbes to swim upstream in rapidly flowing liquids. The Yale University researchers who discovered the behavior believe it might be the cause of infections in patients fitted with catheters and could explain the origin of biofilms that form inside some piping. They even suggest that leaving a running hose in contact with the ground could allow bacteria to swim up out of the dirt and into indoor tanks and water heaters. A video that the group recorded shows a microscopic view of bacteria in the fluid flowing inside a microchannel as they paddle to one side, flip around, and swim back up against the current."

Submission + - A Soldier of Concience

Submitted by i_frame on Saturday February 03, 2007 @03:00AM

i_frame writes: "On Feb. 5, U.S. Army 1st. Lieutananr Ehren K. Watada, will face Court Matial for publicly refuse deployment to the Iraq war and occupation. He faces court martial and up to four years imprisionment (reduced from an original 6 years maximum) for refusing to deploy and for speaking out against a war he belives is illegal". To read more about this story visit, Than You Lt. Until now the media have been silent in this respect. If you are interested you can visit the above mentioned site and learn more about Lt. Wtada, join the campaign and sign a petition.

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