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Submission + - Clap for the Wolfram: Language Demo is Insanely Great

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The devil will be in the details, but if you were stoked about last November's announcement of the Wolfram programming language, you'll be pleased to know that a just-released dry-but-insanely-great demo delivered by Stephen Wolfram does not disappoint. Even if you're not in love with the syntax or are a FOSS devotee, you'll find it hard not to be impressed by Wolfram's 4-line solution to a traveling salesman tour of the capitals of Western Europe, 6-line camera-capture-to-image-manipulation demo, or 2-line web crawling and data visualization example. And that's just for starters. So, start your Raspberry Pi engines, kids — there is a lot more to programming than dragging-and-dropping Flappy Bird puzzle pieces!

Submission + - Maryland wants Cell Phone Data in Serious Car Accidents

Submitted by PeeAitchPee
PeeAitchPee writes: Two new bills filed in Annapolis would force drivers "suspected of causing serious accidents in Maryland while distracted by a cellphone" to give police certain information from that phone. The bills also would make distracted driving resulting in a death or serious injury a misdemeanor in Maryland, punishable by up to 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000, and a separate Senate version of one of the bills would require drivers to let officers immediately "inspect" their cellphones. Maryland has a controversial history of collecting data from folks against their will, and this latest effort seems a bit hypocritical given the State's police officers' past and current objections with videotaping police on the job.

Comment Re: It's just a tool I guess (Score 4, Informative) 294

by jonnythan (#46356791) Attached to: Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening"

The control group in a drug study would not place someone currently on strong medication onto no medication. That would violate the ethical principle of equipoise. The subjects in the control group wouldn't be given a placebo; that would be horrendously unethical. They would be given either the current gold standard of care or the new drug/procedure being tested. The researchers and subjects would both be blinded to which they were receiving. For instance, an RCT comparing hydrocodone to a new med would have both arms take a new pill, but both pills look identical. One would contain the medication they've been taking and the other would contain the new drug. That's not what the OP is talking about though.

I'm not super experienced in clincal trials, but the study the OP was a part of doesn't sound like a double-blinded RCT; it sounds more like a limited-rollout experimental kind of clinical trial, where certain people are allowed to elect to try out the drug. This is not really a scientific experiment that would have a control group, but a limited opt-in rollout of the drug.

Submission + - Refurbished Hardware 1

Submitted by RudyHartmann
RudyHartmann writes: My New (Refurbished) HP Monster with Mint 16 KDE

Here is how I bought a great refurbished computer to run Linux. I would also like to make it clear that I have no interest in any of these companies.

I had a Pentium 4 computer for a few years that I had built for myself with an Intel D915GAG motherboard. It proved to be a faithful workhorse but was getting a little old. The motherboard cannot access more than 4G of DRAM and the single core 3 Ghz CPU also needed help. So I decided to upgrade to a newer computer.

But being on a limited budget, I needed to try to get the most bang for the buck as possible. So I noticed on eBay that there were a bunch of used and refurbished Hewlett Packard (HP) xw8600 workstations. These computers have 2 sockets for Intel Xeon processors. So I bought one of them from a company in Minnesota called Server Worlds. They had some refurbished ones at a great price listed on eBay, but they were willing to negotiate with me for a lower price when I called them.

Serverworlds Inc.
17100 Medina Rd. Suite 500
Plymouth, MN 55447 U.S.A.
(763) 557-1181
http://www.serverworlds.com/

I bought an xw8600 with a single quad core 3Ghz Xeon for $290. It came with 4G of DDR2 memory, an ATI Radeon Card and a 250 GB SATA drive. They also shipped it with a keyboard and mouse, but no operating system. I called them and asked if they had another Xeon CPU they could install. That CPU with the HP fan cost an extra $75. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

When it came in, I pulled the nVidia card out of my old PC and put it in my xw8600. The card has an nVidia GT520 chip with 2G of video memory. I also took the 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive out of the old PC and put it in the xw8600.

The xw8600 is refurbished by Server Worlds. It is clean and looks practically new. Then I bought 32GB of DDR2-667, PC2-5300, Fully Buffered, ECC, 1.8V, 240-pin, memory modules. There are 8 memory slots in the xw8600, so they are in 4GB modules. These are not the regular commodity modules most PC's com with because they have error checking built in. The xw8600 can be expanded to a monstrous 128GB of DRAM memory with special riser cards too. In order to get the proper specifications for memory, you can go to the Micron website. Micron is a US maker of memory chips. After you get a part number and exact specifications you can shop eBay for lots a cheap memory. Here is the website for memory specifications:

http://www.crucial.com/

Then I installed Mint 16 KDE 64-bit and did all the updates. My PC now can directly access 32G of DRAM with 8 Xeon cores running! I actually only use Windows for work. I much prefer Linux.

I used the entire 2TB drive. Then I booted with a Linux Mint 16 KDE 64-bit DVD. I then downloaded and installed all the latest Linux patches. After this I installed the latest nVidia driver that came with the Mint DVD.

Once I had my computer running properly, I added the Edgers PPA and the latest KDE release from the Kubuntu website. By upgrading Mint Linux 16, you will get a recent modern Linux kernel and nVidia driver 331.38. Go into a terminal and type these commands in to upgrade your drivers and kernel:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After you have done these steps, reboot and enter another terminal session. We will now upgrade KDE:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After having done all this, I also installed Windows XP Pro and Windows 7 each in separate virtual machines using VirtualBox. I assigned 4G of RAM to Windows 7 and 2G of RAM to the XP VM.

This is the fastest and most solid computer I have ever had. I could not be happier. For all the specs on my refurbished xw8600, you can get all that from HP's website at:

http://h71016.www7.hp.com/html...

Comment Re:Why gouv pay for it in the first place? (Score 1) 113

by RobertM1968 (#46229963) Attached to: Oil Companies Secretly Got Paid Twice For Cleaning Up Toxic Fuel Leaks

Its not their mess, its tanks owned by third parties:

Often built for gas stations during the 1950s and '60s highway construction boom, the tanks corroded over time, spilling gas and diesel with potentially cancer-causing chemicals under properties and into aquifers.

The oil companies are paid to clean up the pollution caused by these tanks constructed for, operated and owned by third parties. The oil companies are chosen because they already have extensive inhouse expertise on the subject, so they are ideal for doing it wholesale.

Chances are, most of these tanks have been abandoned and their original owners do not exist, which is why local government step in.

Nonsense! They each outright own a large portion of such stations, either directly, or through secondary companies they set up. Not all of them are franchises.

Comment Holy god the beta (Score 5, Insightful) 180

by jonnythan (#46173701) Attached to: How Edward Snowden's Actions Have Impacted Defense Contractors

The beta is bad. It's so bad. The comments are reduced in screen width about 50%. Subject lines are deemphasized, scores are minimized, etc.

The discussions are the reason to come to Slashdot, and the beta trivializes them entirely. It looks like the comment section on a generic news site.

The comments now look like an afterthought, whereas they used to be the primary focus of the site.

Submission + - Will Microsoft IIS overtake Apache web server ?

Submitted by jcdr
jcdr writes: February 2014 Web Server Survey by Netcraft show a massive increase of Microsoft web server since 2013. Microsoft's market share is now only 5.4 percentage points lower than Apache's, which is the closest it has ever been. If recent trends continue, Microsoft could overtake Apache within the next few months, ending Apache's 17+ year reign as the most common web server.

Submission + - Detroit wants its own high-tech visa (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Detroit, a city in bankruptcy and dealing with a shrinking population, hopes to turn itself around with the help of 50,000 employment-based green cards. In exchange for the visa, an immigrant would be required to "live and work" in Detroit for an undetermined length of time. The visas would be made available under the EB-2 visa category, a visa for advanced degree professionals or those deemed with "exceptional ability" in the sciences, arts and business. The proposal was made by Michigan's governor, Rick Snyder. Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at Economic Policy Institute, said Snyder would have more credibility on the issue if he were doing more to help workers in Detroit. In 2011, the state cut jobless benefits by six weeks to 20. "I also think the federal government should be offering people in the U.S. some money and land in Detroit if they'll move there," said Costa, or "just offer it to people across the country who have advanced degrees."

Submission + - Connected TVs will not break the Internet, but may be illegal in your country (oecdinsights.org)

Submitted by Raindeer
Raindeer writes: The OECD, an organisation working on better policies for better lives in 34 countries, released a new report last week showing that combining the Internet and television will not break the Internet. Most networks will be able to handle it. Some networks, such as Swisscom, are even encouraging Over-The-Top television. Other networks however are considering charging content providers. This reports evaluates those proposals and also shows why content providers do not sign up for many proposals. Furthermore it shows that for-example Cablevision's Cloud DVR would be illegal in France and Australia. (btw I'm the author)

Submission + - ChipSiP Smart Glass specs better than Google Glass? (chipsip.com) 1

Submitted by SugarManner
SugarManner writes: Google Glass is in for a fight even before they hit the market. The Taiwanese company Chipsip has just released plans for a competing product that beats Google Glass on all specifications. (Seen on the Swedish Elektronik Tidningen — warning: written in Swedish)
Nine sensors on the Taiwanese product “Smart Glass” can detect speed, altitude, temperature, light and position. It has built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and a microphone. The processor is based on Rock Chips Cortex A9 system RK3168 running at 1.5 GHz.
While Google Glass supports 802.11g communication, Chipsip Smart Glass supports 802.11n. The camera and screen resolution also top Google Glass by a notch, and with stereo sound on the Smart Glass compared to Google’s mono sound, it seems that the Taiwanese company has hit all the right spots to make Google goggle.

Or not. Google Glass is still in Beta, so specs on the final product may change.

Submission + - Netflix Threatens To Rally User Base To Rise Up And Save Net Neutrality (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the past few weeks, net neutrality has seen serious challenges from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Verizon won a court case in which the FCC's rules on net neutrality were effectively gutted, while AT&T introduced a new pricing plan for content providers called Sponsored Data, which pushes companies like Netflix to pay an additional per-user fee to have video streams not count against that users' bandwidth. Everyone has been curious about how Netflix might respond to this, and now the company's CEO has tendered his answer in a letter to shareholders. Reed Hastings has challenged the decision to strike down net neutrality in strong terms, writing: "In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISPs, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver."

Submission + - Making rare metal by mixing the two metals on both sides of the periodic table (google.com) 1

Submitted by wingwatcher
wingwatcher writes: Prof. Hiroshi Kitagawa in Kyoto Univ made artificial Rhodium (45) by mixing Ruthenium (44) and Palladium (46). The price of artificial Rhodium is US $4-14 per gram, and the price of natural Rhodium is US $40 per gram. Kitagawa said "It was a simple idea. We want to make other rare metals by the same way". This is alchemy.

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