stsp - Slashdot User

Comment FU-Berlin (Score 1) 386

by stsp on Sunday December 28, 2008 @01:04PM (#26250031) Attached to: Study Abroad For Computer Science Majors?

I studied CS at FU-Berlin, the program can be quite demanding, but it's very good. Some courses are taught in English, and in those courses you can write the exams in either German or English. If you're just going to spend a semester abroad, you may be able to get away with taking all your courses in English. You'll inevitably need to learn some German though, if only for social life (even though many people are fluent in English), but the effort may well be worth it. There is also a welcoming Linux geek society at the faculty. Oh, and Berlin is a very nice city. There's the typical tourist attractions, but also a large and very active hacking community which naturally provides lots of entertainment for CS students (projects such as the CCC, freifunk, C-base, bootlab). Beware -- many students have been known to end up stranded in these communities. Check here for information about application procedures for students from abroad.

Comment Some tech books I enjoyed a lot (Score 3, Informative) 517

by stsp on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @05:27PM (#26216275) Attached to: Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books?

Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel http://mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html
Computer Networks by Andrew Tanenbaum http://www.prenhall.com/tanenbaum/details2.html
Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0131485210,00%2Ben-USS_01DBC.html
Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel http://producingoss.com/
Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick and George V. Neville-Neil http://www.mckusick.com/books.html
Code Quality by Diomidis Spinellis http://www.spinellis.gr/codequality/

NVIDIA Releases New Video API For Linux 176

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday November 14, 2008 @07:29PM from the finally-starting-to-play-ball dept.

Ashmash writes "Phoronix is reporting on a new Linux driver nVidia is about to release that brings PureVideo features to Linux. This video API will reportedly be in nVidia's 180 series driver for Linux, Solaris, and *BSD. PureVideo has been around for several nVidia product generations, but it's the first time they're bringing this feature to these non-Windows operating systems to provide an improved multimedia experience. This new API is named VDPAU, and is described as: 'The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) provides a complete solution for decoding, post-processing, compositing, and displaying compressed or uncompressed video streams. These video streams may be combined (composited) with bitmap content, to implement OSDs and other application user interfaces.'"

Google Is Taking Spoken Questions 94

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday November 14, 2008 @05:18PM from the a-sentence-is-worth-a-thousand-search-results dept.

The New York Times is reporting that Google has added a voice interface to their iPhone search software. Expected to make its debut as early as Friday, users will be able to speak into their phone and ask any question they could type into Google's search engine. The audio will be digitized and results will be returned via the normal search interface. "Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries."

Comment Re:Context (Score 1) 598

by stsp on Friday August 15, 2008 @01:45PM (#24618299) Attached to: "War On Terror" Board Game Confiscated In UK

Did anybody spot that most of the article was dedicated to describing the game and its distribution hopes, as if it were a game review, while the confiscation itself got just a single sentence in the article? This is a fucking advert.

Yep, and it sure worked:

The server at www.waronterrortheboardgame.com is taking too long to respond.

Submission + - Comparing web development platforms empirically (plat-forms.org)

Submitted by

whrde

on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @11:59AM

whrde writes: "How do you compare Java to Python to Ruby to .NET? Very little empirical research has been done into web development platforms, mostly because it's a particularly difficult thing to do.

A research group at the Free University of Berlin is conducting a survey as part of the Plat_Forms effort. Results will be compiled and can be emailed to anyone who completes the survey.

If you have experience with two or more web development languages, you can contribute to this research by completing the survey."

Submission + - Microsoft Gives Xandros Linux Users Patent Protect

Submitted by DigDuality on Monday June 04, 2007 @11:28AM

DigDuality writes: Microsoft, shrugging off licensing moves to prevent it from repeating its controversial patent deal with Novell, has signed a set of broad collaboration agreements with Linux provider Xandros that include an intellectual property assurance under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers.

Will the response to Xandros be similar to that of Novell? We can only hope.

Submission + - Which Embedded Linux Distribution?

Submitted by Abhikhurana on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @07:03AM

Abhikhurana writes: I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietory OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite sceptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature Networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded linux based distributions out there. There are commerical ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos, but which is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?

Submission + - NTFS-3G Version 1.0 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @04:28AM

An anonymous reader writes: NTFS-3G is a free open source NTFS read/write driver. It's already available for over 60 Linux distributions and systems like FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku and Mac OS X, to big-endian and 64-bit computer architectures, and to new CPU's like AMD64, ARM and MIPS.

Feed $82 For E-Voting Secrets (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday February 16, 2007 @07:12AM

Five Sequoia electronic voting machines sold at on online auction? $82. A chance for a researcher to dissect the embedded software that the company refused to make public? Priceless. By Kim Zetter.

Submission + - X.Org 7.2 Ready for Primetime

Submitted by

F-3582

on Friday February 16, 2007 @05:53AM

F-3582 writes: "After three months of getting behind the schedule the X.Org Foundation has announced the release of a new X.
From the Press Release: "X11R7.2 [...] incorporates significant stability and correctness fixes, including improved autoconfiguration heuristics, enhanced support for GL-based compositing managers such as Compiz and Beryl, and improved support for PCI systems with multiple domains. It also incorporates the new, more extensible XACE security policy framework.""

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