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Submission + - Best open source asset tracking solution?

Submitted by Waynelson
Waynelson writes: I've been dealing with terrible commercial closed source asset tracking systems within the military for a while now and just recently i've been given permission to migrate to a new system if we can find something that works. We're looking for an asset tracking program that support taking regular inventories using unique asset ids that are scanned via a hand held device into a flat .csv file. What have you used and would you recommend it?
Google

Submission + - How Google Uses Linux (lwn.net)

Submitted by postfail
postfail writes: lwn.net coverage of the 2009 Linux Kernel Summit (http://lwn.net/Articles/KernelSummit2009/) includes a recap of a presentation by Google engineers and how they use Linux. According to the article, a team of 30 Google engineers is rebasing to the mainline kernel every 17 months, presently carrying 1208 patches to 2.6.26 and inserting almost 300,000 lines of code; roughly 25% of those patches are backports of newer features.

Comment Re:Hmmm - strategies and counter-strategies. (Score 1) 252

by ErikPeterson (#29947658) Attached to: Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K
A whole month to devise these strategies and counter-strategies aswell! Its obvious to me that there will be at least SOME fake sites in the country. Even in DARPA announced a last minute color change on the balloons or announced an image that would be painted on them it would be feasible for people to try and make them just as a prank if nothing else.

Comment Possible strategy (Score 3, Interesting) 252

by ErikPeterson (#29947568) Attached to: Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K
I think the best way to attack this problem would be to agree to donate the profits from the award to some worthy cause, letting people with the capability volunteer some time to a solution. Its a fairly complicated problem to solve for the amount of money given to solve it. Lets say a group of capable programmers united for lets say an open source project develop a website that takes in the coordinates in the format required for the contest. The trick is going to be figuring out who is telling the truth when it comes to submitted data... You may be able to assume that if a number set is entered often that it is a candidate to be the real location. The task obviously requires coordination of many life humans as I doubt anyone that can compete has access to satellite time to do an automated search. I am wondering how many people will attempt to put up fake balloon sites to either trick their competition or just get some publicity of tech people to come visit the site and take a GPS reading.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Crysis 2 Confirmed For Multiple Platforms 61

Posted by Soulskill from the specifically,-roadrunner-and-blue-gene dept.
EA and Crytek teamed up for an announcement at E3, confirming that Crysis 2 was under development for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Details are scarce (and the trailer is no help), but the game will use CryENGINE 3, which will be able to scale performance such that it will look good on consoles while still pushing the limits of PC graphics. Quoting: "When asked if that sounded like a contradiction, [Crytek's Cevat Yerli] responded that you have to think of technology as a tool that can scale. He said the game's content scales to the platform it's on. 'The PC version will look better, because of the fact that the PC can do more. It will be scaling up. But on the consoles, you're competing with console games,' he said. 'The goal is to be the best looking game on PS3 [and] the best looking game on 360 in the entire market.' On the PC front, Crysis 2 will compete with the original Crysis, which still sets the bar for PC graphics."

Comment Keeping PC safe (Score 2, Informative) 695

by ErikPeterson (#28178343) Attached to: Keeping a PC Personal At School?
You could let them play inside a virtual machine: http://www.virtualbox.org/ If you cant say no to people using your system having them trapped in a virtual machine may keep you from reloading windows on your box. If you use windows lock down Internet Explorer to unusual with an admin kit and force them to use Google Chrome, preventing some of the common nasties from eating your computer. The real question is why not just be rude, a laptop is a tool that you use for education most students I know don't have unlimited resources to replace laptops that are damaged by people who are borrowing them.
Hardware Hacking

Making a Child Locating System 1092

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-contact-a-local-fish-and-wildlife-officer-for-radio-tagging dept.
celtic_hackr writes "Well, I never thought I'd be an advocate for placing GPS devices on people. However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it has a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district. Therefore, I would like input on a way to be able to keep track of my child. I know there are personal tracking devices out there. I have nothing against these systems. But I want more than this. My specification are: 1) a small unobtrusive device I can place on my daughter, 2) an application to pull up on any computer, a map with a dot indicating the real-time position of my child, 3) a handheld device with the equivalent information, 4) [optional] a secure web application/plug-in I can install on my own domain allowing me to track her from anyplace in the world, 5) a means of turning it all off, 6) a Linux based solution of the above. I believe all the pieces for making such a system are out there. Has anyone built anything like this? Is there an open source solution? How would I go about building my own? Has anyone hacked any of these personal trackers before, to serve their own purposes? How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too? Can these devices be locked down so only certain devices can pick up the GPS location of an individual locator? What other recommendations do you have?"
The Media

Submission + - RIAA Proposes Taxing Radio Stations (noperformancetax.org)

Submitted by jfreaksho
jfreaksho writes: Local radio stations in my area have been playing advertisements for http://www.noperformancetax.org/, a website dedicated to preventing the passage of http://www.noperformancetax.org/clips/Leahy_S379.pdf and http://www.noperformancetax.org/clips/CONYER_bill.pdf which will levy a tax on radio performances. This is ostensibly being done for the artists, but we all know how that goes. The ads are presented as the "foreign-owned" recording companies asking for a bailout from U.S. taxpayers.
Math

Submission + - A Math Geek's Plan to Save Wall Street's Soul 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"
Google

Submission + - Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
jeevesbond
jeevesbond writes: "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"
Operating Systems

Submission + - Intel Unveils Whopping 16-Thread "Nehalem" (thecoffeedesk.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Intel today unveiled their new Nehalem-EX CPU Architecture in a press conference. The new CPU design has 8 cores, 24MB cache, and 16 threads (2 threads per core). However, as operating system vendors continue to fall behind adequate support of these new multicore advancements, IBM seems to be on board and has acheived 128 concurrent threads using the chips with a mainframe in a YouTube demonstration video.

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