Kumba - Slashdot User

Ask Slashdot: Assembling a desktop environment 1

Submitted by paxcoder on Tuesday December 20, @01:46PM

paxcoder writes "Gnome Shell... is different. Very much so. The fallback was inadequate. I suspect that many people, like me, turned to the alternatives. My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use. Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use? Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces? Anything cool we might not know about?"

A new kind of metal theorized to be in the earth's-> 0

Submitted by slew on Tuesday December 20, @05:49PM

slew writes "This article talks about a study accepted to Physical Review Letters that theorizes that Iron oxide goes through an insulator/metal phase change with high temperature and pressure. Originally it was thought to be a crystalline structure change, but now apparently it is theorized to be a new type of metallic state. This discovery might offer new insight on how the earth's magnetic field operates."
Link to Original Source

Bioluminescent Bacteria Used to Combat Pollution-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20, @06:47PM

An anonymous reader writes "Many animals use bioluminescence to find food, attract mates, and defend against predators. Now a marine biologist is harnessing bioluminescent bacteria to save one of Florida'(TM)s most precious and threatened ecosystems — theIndian River Lagoon. By mixing bioluminescent bacteria with sediment from the 156-mile estuary, renowned scientist Dr. Edith Widder is able to determine how many toxic chemicals are present in the water."
Link to Original Source

Suppressed Report Shows Cancer Link to GM Potatoes 325

Posted by Zonk on Sunday February 18 2007, @12:38AM
from the politics-and-potatoes-and-science-mix-poorly dept.

Doc Ruby writes "After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year."

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability 267

Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 17 2007, @11:18PM
from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.

oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"

EverQuest II embeds Mozilla browser

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2007, @08:58PM

An anonymous reader writes "EverQuest II's next release will include an embedding of the Mozilla browser. It's currently live on the test server and has a few issues that will hopefully be resolved before release.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?st art=15&topic_id=347230

Some interesting uses of the browser such as automatically searching for quest hints are being discussed on the interface board:

http://www.eq2interface.com/forums/showthread.php? t=7846"

Creating Power From Wasted Heat 186

Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 17 2007, @07:31PM
from the that's-borg-technology dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy."

Asteroid Highlighted as Impact Threat 297

Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 17 2007, @06:49PM
from the please-bring-your-seatbacks-and-traytables dept.

Maggie McKee writes "The asteroid Apophis has been traversing the void of space for untold years; in just a few decades time it will make a very close pass to Earth, and could make an unwelcome stop on our planet's surface. Even still, it's nothing to get too worked up about. The 20-million-tonne object has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting the Pacific Ocean in early April of 2036. If it did hit, it could trigger a tsunami that would do an untold amount of damage to the California coastline and many other places on Earth. Despite the low level of the threat, it's still a real enough danger to prompt the United Nations to develop a protocol about the scenario. We'll get a closeup look at the object in 2029, and at that point we should have a better idea of what 2036 will bring us."

Non-Proft Web Site Uses Pyramid Scheme for Good

Submitted by

jsburke

on Saturday February 17 2007, @06:43PM

jsburke writes "The Darfur Wall is a web site that raises money for Darfur, Sudan, where 400,000 people have been killed and over 2 million displaced since 2003. The site recently introduced a referral program called 'Advocates,' which it describes as a 'pyramid scheme for good.' From their blog: 'The program works by providing a participant — an Advocate — with a personalized web-link. An Advocate shares this link with friends and asks them to click on it, visit darfurwall.org, and donate. The Darfur Wall recognizes the link and awards points to the Advocate ... Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the program creates a network effect. But Advocates is no Amway. One hundred percent of the money it generates supports peace in Darfur.'"

MPAA Steals Code, Violates Linkware License

Submitted by stedo on Saturday February 17 2007, @06:43PM

stedo writes "A blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog recently noticed that none other than the MPAA was using his work, and had completely violated his linkware license by removing all links back to the Forest Blog site, and had not credited him in any way."