Education

Online vs. Traditional Degrees? 467

Posted by Cliff from the prestige-and-perception dept.
Justin Rainbow asks: "As a computer science student, avid internet user and full-time programmer I find it very appealing to finish my CS degree online. Finishing at least a year early and studying whenever I want are just a couple of the draws to the online campus. However, are these internet degrees even worth the paper their printed on? Is an online degree just a waste of money? Can an online degree give you just as many opportunities as a traditional university? Has anyone in the Slashdot community graduated from one of these online schools? Did it help or hurt your career? What about graduate school admissions? Does an online degree hurt your chances to get into a great graduate school?"
Media

Searching for a Realistic MPEG-4 Solution? 40

Posted by Cliff from the media-player-independence dept.
gmezero asks: "Over the last year I have been listening to the trumpet of MPEG-4 being sounded, and I am eager to take up the charge and implement it within my company for our corporate communications. In the past we have used MPEG-1 because to it's commonality. However, due primarily to size limitations (among many other issues that have evolved over the last year), I am getting pressure to move us to WMV for it's perceived 'compatibility' as all of our staff have Media Player on their systems. Unfortunately, nobody seems to realize the fact that WMVs may be Media Player version dependent as well and lock us into future upgrade issues. I can not demand for our GIS group to roll out a stand alone player (eg: DIVX), and I am getting down to a deadline of next week to finalize this platform selection. My pitch to sell MPEG-4 within my company boils down to one major issue, and that brings me to my question. How do I create a MPEG-4 file that will be player independent, short of the player pulling down a new codec for their existing installed media player (QT, WMP, Real)?"

Preview Of The $100 Laptop 304

Posted by Zonk from the penguins-in-little-hands dept.
cynical writes "Harvard's Ethan Zuckerman, founder of GeekCorps and Global Voices, got a chance last week to drop in on Nicholas Negroponte and get a preview of the $100 laptop Negroponte has designed for students in the developing world. Zuckerman talks about both its hardware and the One Laptop Per Child project, and asks the readers for suggestions for innovative ways the $100 laptop can be used." From the article: "The mockup I saw was about the size of a large paperback book. There's a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the mockup was detachable, but will probably fold out on a hinge ... Two trackballs, surrounded by four way buttons, on each side of the screen act as controls, and function keys on the back act as additional buttons.)" We've previously reported on this device here on Slashdot.

FreeBSD 6.0 Released 289

Posted by Zonk from the friday-downloading dept.
Reyad Attiyat writes FreeBSD 6.0 is ready for release! New features, and there are lots, can be reviewed at the official site. One of the biggest and most anticipated features (mentioned before on Slashdot) is wireless support, which has been greatly improved upon. This includes support for a lot more cards, WAP support, and integration into the dhcpd client. This release comes only mere days off NetBSD's release and an OpenBSD release. Version 6.0 was intended to be released way back in August but due to a number of factors it had to be delayed till now. Aside from this major release the FreeBSD project has also had some major changes, including most recently a new logo and also a brand new website."
Movies

A Workable Downloadable Movies Business Model? 365

Posted by Zonk from the money-for-nothing dept.
sane? writes "Following on from the music industry attempting to push up the cost of iTunes music downloads comes word that Sony is looking take robust control of the pricing for legal movie downloads - to the tune of $8 a movie. What is the maximum acceptable price that slashdot readers would give to different types of downloadable product, taking into account their perception of its true value to them? How can sensible pricing and workable business models be reconciled?"
Programming

How Would You Improve SQL? 271

Posted by Cliff from the select-*-except-column99-from-table dept.
theodp asks: "It was the best of languages, it was the worst of languages. SQL's handy, but it can also drive you nuts. For example, if you want all 100 columns from a table, 'SELECT *' works quite nicely. However, if you want all but 1 of the 100 columns, be prepared to spell out 99 column names. Wouldn't it not make sense to provide a Google-like shorthand notation like 'SELECT * -ColumnName' (or DROP=syntax like SAS)? So how would you improve SQL?"
The Media

How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online? 21

Posted by Cliff from the fora-is-plural-for-'forum' dept.
uctpjac asks: "A friend of mine, a deputy editor of a 1/2 million plus circulation serious news magazine, is responsible for determining what they should be doing online. They already do the usual - selected free articles, subscriber only articles, archive search, some online-only material that is regularly updated. She asked me to think about what more they should do. My first simple suggestion would be to improve their RSS feeds (longer, better article summaries): I imagine the newsreader is the application through which most of us will be reading bitty things like weblogs and news stories, and competing for attention there needs a nice juicy inducement to click-through. I actually think that a traditional news magazine like this should also be using its reader-community more extensively. Again, Slashdot is my model for this: the readers, as long as their comments are well organized, are often at least as interesting as the writers. Are there any examples of old-fashioned papers/magazines making good reader fora? What else will the magazine be doing online? What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?"

Starcraft Ghost Off The Cube 97

Posted by Zonk from the console-officially-dead dept.
Gamespot has the news that Blizzard's upcoming action/stealth title Starcraft: Ghost is officially no longer in production for the Gamecube. From the article: "Speaking to GameSpot, a Blizzard staffer confirmed that the game is now only being released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, meaning the previously announced GameCube edition has been canceled ... Unfortunately the GameCube has no online service and since so much work is going in to the online portion, it would be additional work to release only part of the intended game."
Programming

Programming and Dieting? 130

Posted by Cliff from the it's-all-about-the-brain-fuel dept.
duncan bayne asks: "I've been using the Hacker's Diet to lose weight. What's interesting to me is how hard it is to focus on a complicated task when my body is busy running out of energy. I'm having to pay careful attention to snacking - eating enough that I don't 'fade out' in the afternoon, yet not so much that I exceed my daily kilojoule allowance. This got me to thinking about energy levels of those who aren't dieting. Do you find yourself correcting 'fade' by snacking (careful or otherwise) as you work?"
GNU is Not Unix

What Does Open Source Need for Mainstream Desktop? 204

Posted by Cliff from the so-your-grandma-can-use-it dept.
HesAnIndieRocker asks: "So what will it take to make open source technology a mainstream alternative on the PC desktop? It feels like we've been on the cusp for many years now and the applications available for most common tasks are certainly competitive, but we still hover around a 5% market share by most accounts. I've recently written an article in my weblog about some possibilities, but I'd love to hear what others think."
Education

Learning Game Consoles for Young Children? 101

Posted by Cliff from the entertainment-and-education-rolled-into-one dept.
revco_38 asks: "My wife and I are looking into purchasing a game based learning console for our 4 year old boy this Christmas. The two front runners are the VSmile from VTech and the Leapster from Leapfrog. Does the Slashdot community have any experience with either of these products? Are there any other products similar that should be considered? We also have a 2 year old boy so something that lasts would be nice."
Media

Best Science News Podcasts? 136

Posted by Cliff from the internet-broadcasts-for-the-brain dept.
scienceListener asks: "As an avid radio listener with an interest in science and technology communication, I'm really excited about podcasts. I've found many that I like, and many more that are just terrible. One of the areas I find very lacking is science news podcasting. Aside from some very good podcasts that are really repackaged radio shows (NPR's Science Friday and their aggregated Health and Science, Canada's Quirks and Quarks, Australia's The Science Show, and a few others), and a couple produced by science centers (the Current Science & Technology Podcast from Boston's Museum of Science and the Redshift Report from the Ontario Science Centre -- which is good but isn't really about science news), I haven't found any independently-produced science podcasts worth listening to. Is anyone doing science news without the help of a major organization and doing it well?"

GUBA makes Usenet search easy as Google 253

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bandwidth-hogs dept.
ChipGuy writes "Despite the growing popularity of p2p networks,Usenet is the real treasure trove of multimedia content including vintage cartoons, westerns and popular television shows. Nearly two terabytes of data is added everyday to Usenet. GUBA, a seven year old San Francisco company is making it easier to find the information on Usenet through the browser. Its like " Google for Usenet," says this report."
Privacy

Identity Theft-What Can Really be Done w/o a SSN? 533

Posted by Cliff from the protecting-your-data dept.
TheItalianGuy asks: "Many of us that work in the financial sector are bombarded with daily security threats. One of the biggest these days is Identity Theft. My fellow comrades and I have been really grilling each other on differing scenarios on what could be done with what information. However, it all seems to come back the the Social Security Number. Financial companies have other controls in place (customer service verification checking, account passwords, etc) to ensure identification. But in order to be of any use, a bad guy would really need someone's SSN. Absent of that, other information would be useless. Right? That's what I would like to ask Slashdot folks. What could be realistically done with customer information without a SSN? Account numbers, address, maybe a phone or payment amount. Is that really dangerous to the customer if only those get compromised?"
Data Storage

Film to X-rays? 71

Posted by Cliff from the media-conversion dept.
erikred_at_csua asks: "A friend has his film X-rays on loan from the lab but needs to transfer them to digital format so he can take them for a second opinion. What's a reliable (and inexpensive) method of doing this without sacrificing image quality (and thereby rendering the exercise worthless)? Would the old lamp and scanner trick work here, or would there be too many flaws to make it worthwhile? Where could one find a list of places that would do this on the cheap? Since this is to document the progress of arthritis in his back, the level of detail must remain high."

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