cedarhillbilly - Slashdot User

Comment approach3 works for me (Score 1) 521

by cedarhillbilly on Saturday August 04, 2012 @06:46AM (#40876677) Attached to: UEFI Secure Boot and Linux: Where Things Stand

I'm using a System 76 laptop for about 4 months now. I like the choices of hardware options. Here's the downsides. I had a rocky ordering experience: Billing address and shipping addresses were different and 'broke' their system so it took a phone call to fix the problem. Then I had to reinstall the operating system to fine tune Ubuntu; Not a biggie since I normally make my own install on any new box. Since then it runs like a clock. Laptop (Lemur is the model) is light, fast, has a nice touch...everything I wanted and no MS TAX. check them out at https://www.system76.com/ Maybe if there's more demand for open hardware...more people will build it.

Submission + - Geeks in the Public Forum? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by cedarhillbilly on Friday May 18, 2012 @06:34AM

cedarhillbilly writes: New Scientist reviews the Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson. In the book, Henderson pleads for citizens who value science to force it onto the mainstream political agenda and other main walks of life. Questions for real life are "Do you have to give up tech practice to undertake a public role (MIT inventor to tea party favorite)?" also "Is political life (compromise, working by consensus, irrationality) antithetical to the 'geek' values?"

Submission + - Elgin Gas Leak: who's paying attention? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

cedarhillbilly

on Friday April 06, 2012 @06:06AM

cedarhillbilly writes: "New Scientist has been doing a bang up job of covering a major drilling 'accident' in the North Sea where a drilling rig operated by France's Total has released a pool of natural gas into the atmosphere. Because it's not on CNN's doorstep and no one's been killed so far, the Elgin leak has received scant attention in US media. Still it's huge and raises some interesting questions about drilling safety. In today's installment of the coverage, New Scientist shows the 'purple haze' (great graffix) hovering over the site of the leak. Look at the photo, then drill down (ouch) thru the links to get the rest of the story!"

Submission + - Gas leak in North Sea (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

cedarhillbilly

on Thursday March 29, 2012 @07:29AM

cedarhillbilly writes: "North Sea oil drilling seems to have opened up a previously unknown gas formation. Gas is seeping into the drilling columns and flowing uncontrolled into the ocean and atmosphere. New Scientist reports: "Many questions remain. Total (the well operator) says that until it works out the capacity of the source and the rate at which methane and gas condensate are leaking into the environment, it is impossible to say either how much gas will be released or how long it will take to block it, despite some reports putting it at six months.

Scary reprise of Deepwater Horizon"

Submission + - Amazing! Google's self-driving car allows blind man to drive (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1 on Wednesday March 28, 2012 @03:33PM

Velcroman1 writes: This is some of the best driving I've ever done," Steve Mahan said the other day. Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack. He also happens to be 95 percent blind.

Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, “drove” along a specially programmed route thanks to Google’s autonomous driving technology. Look, ma! No hands. And no feet!” Mahan jokes at one point in the video. “I love it,” he added. Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient — and clearly more accessible. In a Wednesday afternoon post on Google+, the company noted that it has hundreds of thousands of miles of testing under the belt, letting the company feel confident enough in the system to put Mahan behind the wheel.

Submission + - Mapping Deceptive Systems (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by cedarhillbilly on Saturday June 04, 2011 @06:10AM

cedarhillbilly writes: CMI researchers have mapped the networks of email contacts in 6 Enron projects to show that projects that were based on deception were hub-spoke networks and legitimate projects were more cloudlike 'webs'. Probably a bigger breakthru for network science than for social scientists who work with groups and organizations, but a nice mathematical 'indicator' of when a system is behaving badly. Predictive? Still need to develop markers to give an early warning rather than a post mortem.

Submission + - Microsoft in DC, lessons learned (politico.com)

Submitted by

cedarhillbilly

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @08:49PM

cedarhillbilly writes: "Michael Kinsley writes in Politico about Microsoft's introduction to the wacky world of DC. Lessons to be learned. Kinsley writes: "As the Microsoft example suggests, the Washington culture of influence peddling is not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of the corporations that hire the lobbyists and pay the bills. It’s a vast protection racket, practiced by politicians and political operatives of both parties. Nice little software company you’ve got here. Too bad if we have to regulate it or if Big Government programs force us to raise its taxes. Your archrival just wrote a big check to the Washington Bureaucrats Benevolent Society. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to do the same?""

Submission + - Linux development to get high availability push (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @08:36PM

alphadogg writes: The Linux Foundation has formed a new working group to speed development within the Linux ecosystem that would make the operating system kernel more suitable for building high-availability (HA) systems, the Foundation announced Wednesday. The High Availability Working Group will define a software stack for running Linux in clustered, mission-critical environments. It will also prioritize development work that still needs to be done, based on feedback from developers, vendors and customers. Engineers from Novell, Oracle and Red Hat, among other companies, will participate in the working group, as well as leaders from Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu.

Submission + - Nokia Confirms Symbian is No Longer Open Source (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by theweatherelectric on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @07:47PM

theweatherelectric writes: The H reports that Nokia has confirmed that Symbian will no longer be open source. They write, 'Nokia has confirmed that it has closed the source code for the Symbian smartphone operating system. It says that despite it describing its new model for Symbian smartphone operating system development as "open and direct" the "open" part did not refer to "open source" but to being "open for business". The "open and direct" model is designed, according to Nokia, to "enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with".'

Submission + - Canonical commits to netbooks over tablets (techworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @07:31PM

angry tapir writes: "Canonical has not yet built an Ubuntu Linux distribution for tablets and will continue development of the OS for PCs and netbooks, company executives have said. Fast growth in tablet shipments has not affected Canonical's focus on netbooks and the company wants to push Ubuntu into more low-cost laptops."

Submission + - Elderly Georgian woman cuts Armenian internet (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

welcher

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @07:18PM

welcher writes: "An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper with a spade when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to nearly all of neighbouring Armenia.

The fibre-optic cable near Tiblisi, Georgia, supplies about 90% of Armenia's internet so the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected.

Dubbed "the spade-hacker" by local media, the woman is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted."

Submission + - Anonymous Launches Attack On Sony (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by RedEaredSlider on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @05:24PM

RedEaredSlider writes: The hacker collective Anonymous has made good on its threat to attack Sony, having launched a distributed denial-of-service attack on Wednesday afternoon.

The attack is revenge for the legal action taken against another hacker who modified a PlayStation 3. Sony Computer Entertainment America filed suit against George Hotz, also known as Geohot. Hotz had released a firmware modification that allowed a Sony PlayStation 3 to run other operating systems. Sony had removed that functionality some months before. The suit is still pending.

Submission + - Can The U.S. Government Keep Up With Google? (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @11:57AM

jfruhlinger writes: "It's safe to say that Google has achieved a place of dominance in the tech industry that Microsoft held in the late 1990s — and, like Microsoft, may soon face investigation on anti-trust charges from the U.S. government. The rumors have been swirling for a while, but investors seem to be giving them new credence, with shares plummeting yesterday — although the Obama administration may be holding off because it fears being tarred as anti-business. Meanwhile, newly anointed CEO Larry Page wants to move faster and make big things happen."

Submission + - The Next Wave? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by cedarhillbilly on Saturday August 21, 2010 @07:12AM

cedarhillbilly writes: From my perspective as a non-developer, Matt Asay consistently delivers way more insight into the emerging digital culture than anyone I customarily read. Today's essay in the Register takes on Google Wave from the perspective of visionary change versus incremental change and suggests that visionaries should be transforming the todayness of our lives rather than leapfrogging. Wondering if Google sensed this when they famously said they were worried about having too many geniuses http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/02/google_hiring_practrices/ Asay re-makes the point that the open source development model necessarily builds on a community of contributors and users and not the mad scientist in an ivory tower.

Submission + - it's there but you can't see it

Submitted by cedarhillbilly on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @06:16AM

cedarhillbilly writes: Wikipedia is featuring a story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_henge_at_Stonehenge on a new neolithic wooden henge identified by ground scanning radar and magnetometers adjacent to the more obvious (big stones in the ground) Stonehenge. Scientists are reporting this find in July 2010. Wikipedia cites a press release, a BBC article and an article in the Guardian. Wait, is Wikipedia almost breaking news?

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