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Advice on software for running a small library

Submitted by
yahyamf
yahyamf writes "I've been asked to help setup software for managing a small library at a non-profit school in the middle-east for under-privileged children. The library has about 5000 books and will be run mostly by student workers. The requirements are low cost, ease of use and maintenance, and support for Arabic and English. Barcode printing and scanning capabilities would be great as well. I've looked briefly at koha, but is there anything else out there (both hardware and software) slashdotters can recommend?"

Comment: No need to block everyone (Score 1) 107

by yahyamf (#33502296) Attached to: The Gaping Holes In the UAE's Net Firewall
The UAE authorities know very well that they cannot block everyone. Even with the "gaping holes" in their firewalls, I won't be surprised if they block more that 90% of the local population from accessing restricted sites. That's probably good enough for them. The effort required to block the remaining 10% would be too high and not worth it.

Giant buses in China that cars can drive under->

Submitted by yahyamf
yahyamf writes "One Chinese company has proposed new buses that are so big they straddle the road, while cars drive beneath them. Designers at Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co., Ltd say that these behemoth buses solve a number of issues in one fell swoop, and would result in fewer traffic jams, less emissions, and faster travel.

These buses are actually being put into pilot use shortly. They should make their debut in Beijingâ½âsÂâs Mentougou district, where work is to commence on the first 186km of track at yearâ½âsÂâs end.

Each of the jumbo buses will measure 4 to 4.5 meters high, with passengers aboard the upper level and other vehicles lower than 2 meters going under. Powered by electricity and solar energy, the bus can carry 1,200 to 1,400 passengers at a time."
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PHP

SolarPHP 1.0 Released 125

Posted by timothy
from the something-new-under-the-sun dept.
HvitRavn writes "SolarPHP 1.0 stable was released by Paul M. Jones today. SolarPHP is an application framework and library, and is a serious contender alongside Zend Framework, Symphony, and similar frameworks. SolarPHP has in the recent years been the cause of heated debate in the PHP community due to provocative benchmark results posted on Paul M. Jones' blog."
Graphics

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Posted by Soulskill
from the new-and-shiny dept.
Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."
Open Source

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.
diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment: Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score 1) 720

by yahyamf (#30071328) Attached to: Whistleblower Claims IEA Is Downplaying Peak Oil
In many cases it makes sense to spend more energy in extracting oil than the energy available in the oil itself. This is because oil is mobile energy. It can be easily transported and stored. Also, much of modern infrastructure depends on energy in liquid form, eg. cars, airplanes, farming equirpment etc. There may be plentiful nuclear, solar, coal, or natural gas energy, but it's useless in many cases because the current infrastructure can not use it. So it does make sense for example to use a certain amount of nuclear energy to get a lesser amount of energy in the form of oil.
Social Networks

Crowd-Source Translation Software For Free Content? 62

Posted by timothy
from the just-transcode-to-esperanto dept.
yahyamf writes "I have a lot of free educational content in the form of audio lectures and text, which I'd like to translate into as many languages as possible. I would also want to transcribe the audio and create audiobooks from the text. There are already several volunteers willing to contribute, but I need some web based software to manage all the work. Facebook is already doing something like this, but it is only for their content. I've also looked at Damned Lies, which is part of the Gnome project, but it doesn't seem to handle audio. Are there any other open source translation projects out there that I can customize and build upon?"

"Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion." -- Harlan Ellison