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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 10 declined, 2 accepted (12 total, 16.67% accepted)

Education

+ - Laptops in the classroom don't increase grades->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Classrooms all around the country are being fitted with one to one laptop programs, networking hardware, digital projectors, and other technology in order to stay competitive in the 21st century. Kyrene school district spent $3 million modernizing their classrooms. The problem? The increase in spending doesn't lead to an increase in test scores. Policy makers calling for high tech classrooms, including former execs from HP, Apple, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, want to increase technology investment despite the results. Others are not so sure, or think it is an outright waste of money."
Link to Original Source

+ - New XO Laptop for Teenagers in Paraguay->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Plan Ceibal is providing 90,000 laptops for Paraguayan High School students to use. The XO-HS will provide 2x the processing power, 4x the memory, and 4x the persistent storage (flash). Though based on the currently shipping XO 1.5, it will have a larger keyboard, and will dual boot Gnome along with the more educational focused Sugar. Unfortunately there are no pictures. The BBC has a more thorough writeup."
Link to Original Source

+ - Wikileaks video depects 2 journalists killed-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes "The video that was getting wikileaks into trouble with the US State department and CIA has finally been released. The video shows a helicopter pilot misidentify a camera as a rocket propelled grenade, and then open fire on a group of Iraqi civilians and 2 Reuters journalists. The pilot then requests and receives permission to open fire on a van picking up one of the wounded journalists. In the van were two young children, who were also seriously wounded."
Link to Original Source

+ - iPad and the Cloud Increase Your Carbon Footprint->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "A common advatage advantage cited for cloud computing is energy savings, through the use of technologies like geothermal energy, sea water cooling, virtualization, and smart stretch clusters. Then why is Greenpeace, on the eve of the iPad release, worried about energy consumption in the cloud? They report that datacenters will account for 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020, a 3 fold increase. And a lot of this energy will come from coal, such as the new datacenter Facebook is building in Prineville, Oregon."
Link to Original Source

+ - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction -> 1

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Dick Brass, a former Microsoft Vice President, penned a scathing critique of the corporate culture at Microsoft in a New York Times Op-Ed today. Internal power struggles kept technologies like ClearType and the Windows tablet from becoming revolutionary products. He writes:

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.

"
Link to Original Source
The Internet

+ - In 2010 the World Runs Out Of IPv4 Addresses-> 1

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Ars has an excellent writeup of the coming end of the IPv4 Address space, as well as in depth technical reasoning behind it. From the article:

Either by choice or otherwise, the big ISPs will soon have to stop giving each customer an IPv4 address of his or her own. Giving those customers just IPv6 is not an option, as the majority of the services are still IPv4-only and many IP-capable devices that don't run a full operating system (smartphones, VoIP phones, webcams) don't support IPv6. So that means stretching the existing IPv4 addresses in some way through "carrier grade NAT" (CGN).

Assuming the ISPs don't strip people of their current IPv4 address, Apple users may be in the best shape."
Link to Original Source

Security

+ - Sears.com Squelches Web Programming Blunder->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Earlier today someone made public a trivial exploit on the Sears.com website. Sears was storing page paramaters from the client editable url into the catagory of the page, leading to some pretty funny results. Once the catagories were loaded into the cache, every subsequent hit would pull up the same user submitted catagories, even without any page paramaters. TMZ and Fox News have their own reports. Reddit has since been forced to take the post off of their front page by their parent Conde Nast, but the page can still be accessed via permalink."
Link to Original Source
X

+ - "Nothing Left to Prove" on The Linux Deskt->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Matt Asay likes the latest Fedora release, especially when it comes to the desktop. From the article:

This is the state of "desktop" Linux today: it really has nothing left to prove. It took years to become user friendly, but it has arrived, helped along by the world's move to browser-based computing. At this point, the only thing that Fedora and the other Linux distributions can do is embrace and extend the Windows or Mac computing experience, because they've largely matched them (especially Windows).

I'm impressed with the work on xrandr and HAL, particularly with regard to input properties. Devices can now be hotplugged without major issues, and most new distros are having users delete their xorg.conf."
Link to Original Source

Music

+ - Danger Mouse Releases Album as Blank CD-R

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "The DJ's much anticipated album, "Dark Night of the Soul", may never see the light of day, do to a dispute with EMI It is a colaboration between artists Danger Mouse, Sparkle Horse, and David Lynch, among others. In an effort to promote the record, Danger Mouse is set to release the book of photos by David Lynch, along with a blank CD-R, presumably with the cover art. From the article:

An unnamed spokesperson for Danger Mouse says that "due to an ongoing dispute with EMI" the book of photographs will "now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'"

NPR Music is also streaming the entire record, completly for free. Danger Mouse has previously entered questionable legal teritory with The Grey Album, a mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles White Album. EMI also blocked the release of that album."

Linux Business

+ - All OEMs Now Ship Desktop Linux->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Computer World has an article about how all major original equipment manufacturers are now shipping desktop Linux. This after HP decided to put Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on their Compaq dx2390 desktop. From the article:

With this move, HP finally followed Dell, which was the first major OEM to make desktop Linux available as a pre-load, Lenovo and Asus into the desktop Linux revolution. In fact, with HP coming aboard, the first stage of the Linux rebellion is done.

The Register has a more detailed writeup here"
Link to Original Source

Transportation

+ - General Motors Snubs Battery Exchange Model->

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "Better Place, the electric vehicle company that partnered with Israel, Denmark, San Fransisco, Austraila, and recently Hawaii to install electric vehicle grids, is also working with automakers Renault and Nissan to produce electric vehicles that will accept their standardized batteries. General Motors was also asked to participate, but declined. Thomas L. Friedman argues it's because of such short-signed decisions and general lack of innovation that the big three are having to ask Congress for $15 billion. The business model that Better Place is pioneering has the potential to revolutionize the auto industry as we know it, possibly killing the gasoline car in the process. Did GM make a mistake by not becoming a partner?"
Link to Original Source
Linux Business

+ - NYSE Moves to Linux 1

Submitted by blitzkrieg3
blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how Linux is "mature enough" for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow:

We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris
Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost."

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"

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