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Comment Re:KDE summary: usable but not great. I'll pass. (Score 1) 744

by JacobSteelsmith (#29919011) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released
I have been using kubuntu since the days of 3.5. I love KDE 4. In my opinion, it will be the desktop of the future. In fact, after using Windows 7 all this week, I'm pretty sure it's what Microsoft was aiming for. I use Kubuntu 40 hours a day in a Microsoft environment, joined to the domain, and I have yet to run into a show stopper, or a bug that wasn't easily fixed. KDE 4 has made tremendous strides and has laid the framework to do great things in the future, while being stable and feature-full enough to be my daily driver. And it is as aesthetically pleasing productivity enhancing as desktop environments get.
Science

Submission + - What Keeps Scientists Up at Night? (q2cfestival.com)

Submitted by modernphysics
modernphysics writes: 9 physicists discuss what keeps them up — and thinking — at night. The scientists include Katherine Freese, Leo Kadanoff, Lawrence Krauss, Neil Turok, Sean M. Carroll, Anton Zeilinger, Gino Segrè, Andrew White and David Tong. The panel discussion, held at Quantum to Cosmos Festival, is hosted by Wilson da Silva, Editor of Cosmos Magazine. The discussion starts 13 minutes into the presentation at http://www.q2cfestival.com/play.php?lecture_id=7976"
Microsoft

Submission + - M$ yanked its sponsorship of Family Guy Presents (variety.com)

Submitted by Centurion5
Centurion5 writes: After viewing an early version of "Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show" Microsoft executives pull its sponsorship saying "We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humor of 'Family Guy,' but after reviewing an early version of the variety show, it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand,"

The show contains "typical "Family Guy"-style jokes, including riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest." I supposed that does not fit with the cute Windows 7 commercials containing little kids, but what were they expecting?
Programming

Submission + - Development Hardware Requirements

Submitted by Monkeedude1212
Monkeedude1212 writes: So after a handful of successful flash games our game development team has decided to kick it up a notch and produce something "Real" and "Possibly Profitable". We've settled on Valve's Source Engine not only because its free and open source, but it already has a distrubution method tied to it (Steam). The problem is that we are all running on some pretty old hardware, myself being on a laptop thats approaching 4 years old. If Any of you have ever tried to Recomplile Half Life 2 with 2 Gigs on Vista you'll know that it can take the better part of a day to finish. So its time for an upgrade.

Sadly, I am not a hardware junkie, nor do I know any, so I'm not 100% on exactly what's best to suit my needs for development. I will be running windows (Either XP or 7) and Visual Studio 2008. I had once worked on a Mac Pro, the 2x Quad Core with 32 gigs of Ram, and I found it to be a dream. So I want something comparable to that, but I want it cheaper. If I order parts from Tiger Direct I'm sure I could get a good rig going at a fraction of the price of buying one setup.

So I am opening it up to /. — Can it be done? The Price Range is anything below $3,300. Minor preference towards NVidia (but not necessary). Any suggestions on where else to order are also welcome.
Intel

Submission + - 5 ways to overclock your netbook (really!) (computerworld.com)

Submitted by ericatcw
ericatcw writes: Real men only eat bloody steaks, and they only overclock water-cooled gaming rigs, right? Wrong. Computerworld has a roundup of 5 easy(ish) ways to crank your netbook up to eleven, from safely fiddling with the motherboard voltage, boosting a 'Hackintoshed' netbook's graphics, to sawing off your HP Mini's anti-overclock hardware lock.

Submission + - EFF launches "Takedown Hall of Shame" (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: Recognizing that public shame is a potent weapon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation today launched a new Web site — its "Takedown Hall of Shame" — that will shine an unflattering spotlight on those corporations and individuals who abuse copyright claims to stifle free speech. Among the early inductees are NPR, NBC, CBS and Diebold.
Movies

Submission + - DVD Manufacturers May Block Rentals for One Month 1

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The LA Times reports that in an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. "The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing," says Reed Hastings chief executive of DVD-by-mail company Netflix. "If we can agree on low-enough pricing, delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone." 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. have already tried to impose a no-rental period of about a month on Redbox, the operator of kiosks that rent movies for $1 per night believing that Redbox's steeply discounted price undercuts DVD sales. Redbox has responded by suing the studios, seeking to force them to sell it DVDs simultaneously with competitors. Meanwhile, the company is stocking its kiosks with DVDs it can't otherwise obtain by buying them from retailers. "We must have a level playing field and the right to buy movies at the same time as any of our competitors," says a company spokesman for Redbox."
Government

Submission + - Flu Pandemic may lead to websites being blocked (reuters.com)

Submitted by mikael
mikael writes: While corporations and businesses have been advised on how to allow employees to work remotely from home, there is still some uncertainty on how ISP's would be able to handle the extra flow of traffic. The Department of Homeland Security is suggesting that ISP's be prepared to block popular websites in order to prioritize bandwidth for commercial use.
IBM

Submission + - SPAM: Will high-tech trucks save Big Rig industry?

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Big Rigs have a problem: Big trucks use more than 20% of transportation energy, they produce 40 % of the nitrous oxide emissions but they represent only 8 % of the vehicle market. So as fuel prices rise and the push for more efficient, less polluting vehicles rises, the trucking industry is under pressure change drastically.

And changing it must do with major help from the high-tech world, according to a study released today from IBM. The Truck 2020: Transcending turbulence study says that the truck of 2020 will function in ways vastly different than today's vehicle — and telematics and hybridization will be at the heart of these new functions.

[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Sci-Fi Reading for an E-Commerce College Course?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My friend will be teaching an e-commerce class at a four-year college starting in the spring. He wants to present not just existing business models (Amazon, eBay, iTunes), but also help students to think about the future — what might be hot in ten, twenty, thirty years. To that end, he's looking to draw from science fiction literature — today's fiction could be the inspiration for tomorrow's billion-dollar idea. Any suggestions for books that he should assign? What sci-fi works have the most intriguing (put plausible) technology and consumer products? The more variety, the better; some kind of anthology would be ideal.
Security

Submission + - Gizmodo serves malware and blames Linux and OS X (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by JacobSteelsmith
JacobSteelsmith writes: The very popular, technology focused blog Gizmodo was apparently duped into serving advertisements offering 'scareware.' These advertisements notified users that their PC was infected with malware, and offered up 'antivirus' software. It's not clear whether this was a drive by installation or if it required user interaction.

In an apology, the author claims the staff would have noticed sooner 'except everyone on staff is on OS X or Linux for production machines.' They did not say whether AdBlock prevented them from seeing the advertisements, or they did not notice any installation prompts. The author says the advertisements only ran 'for a little while' and only 'a few people' should have been affected. The blog post warns to look for qegasysguard.exe if you are experiencing random popups.

Submission + - Discovery of 'cancer-proof' rodent cells (physorg.com)

Submitted by anglico
anglico writes: PhysOrg.com — Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind—and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

Submission + - AbiWord 2.8 and AbiCollab.net released (abisource.com)

Submitted by uwog
uwog writes: The AbiSource community has released version 2.8 of the well-known AbiWord word processor. In addition to support for annotations (comments) and native SVGs, it comes with powerful, real-time collaboration capabilities that were originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. With this release, users can now collaborate with multiple people on the same document at the same time, using all of the rich-text features that AbiWord brings to the table. These features are tightly integrated with a new online web service called AbiCollab.net, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.

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