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Comment bash not perl (Score 1) 187

by highacnumber (#36130606) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released
I don't like Perl so I wish the catchy put-down of the summary title was accurate, but its not quite right. I think shell scripts are the COBOL of scripting. Perl might be more like B, although I'm not sure there is a great analogy there.
Cellphones

John Carmack Not Enthused About Android Marketplace 163

Posted by Soulskill from the hit-with-a-fragmentation-grenade dept.
An anonymous reader writes "During an in-depth and informative interview, Doom creator and id Software co-founder John Carmack opines on iOS game development, the economics of mobile development vs. console development, why mobile games lend themselves to more risk-taking and greater creativity, and finally, why he's not too keen on the Android Marketplace as a money-making machine. '...I'm honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it's going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.'"
Image

Aquarium Uses Eel Powered Christmas Lights Screenshot-sm 96

Posted by samzenpus from the slippery-tinsel dept.
A Japanese aquarium is using the greenest energy possible to power the lights on its Christmas tree, an electric eel. From the article: "Each time the eel moves, two aluminum panels gather enough electricity to light up the 2-meter (6 ft 6 in) tall tree, decked out in white, in glowing intermittent flashes."

Comment Check out Sage (Score 1) 283

by highacnumber (#33867826) Attached to: Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source
Sage is an open source platform for mathematics and computation that ties together many C and C++ libraries with Python code. You could browse the project bug and enhancement tracker or the sage-devel google group for some ideas of where to contribute and the project culture. There are a very wide range of things to do. With Sage, and probably most other projects, a very good way to get started is to help improve the documentation. This is not glamorous, but it is effective. It involves you with other people in the project, and gets you familiar with their development practices. Its usually well appreciated since documentation quickly gets out of date on an active project. Writing documentation will suggest some coding projects naturally - to adequately describe a current bug to users, for example, you will have to understand it somewhat, and that might suggest a solution.
United Kingdom

Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves 130

Posted by samzenpus from the card-catalog-of-the-gods dept.
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
Robotics

Willow Garage Robot Fetches Beer, Engineers Rejoice 114

Posted by samzenpus from the the-perfect-robot dept.
kkleiner writes "Willow Garage has pulled off the ultimate engineering feat: teaching a PR2 robot to fetch you a beer from the fridge. Not only can the PR2 select the correct brew from the fridge, it can deliver, and even open the beer as needed. That's right, all the humans have to do is drink and relax. Prepare yourself for some major robot-envy as you check out the PR2 delivering much-needed refreshment in the video."

Comment Re:Why not R? (Score 1) 131

by highacnumber (#32702736) Attached to: Finance, Scientific Users Get ActivePython Updates
You should check out sage (http://www.sagemath.org), its a python-based computational platform that includes R. Besides including rpy with a slightly improved interface, you can also run a sage worksheet in native R mode. Not many sage users are using this interface, so it would be great to have more feedback on it.
Space

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-look-directly-into-the-quasar dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
PC Games (Games)

Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps 142

Posted by Soulskill from the backward-compatibility dept.
bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"

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