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Education

Children Using Technology Have Better Literacy Skills 146

Posted by timothy from the exactly-as-useful-as-other-self-assessments dept.
eldavojohn writes "A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?' the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills."
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."
Image

Musical Tesla Coils Perform Zelda Screenshot-sm 82

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nerds-with-time dept.
heychris writes "You've gotta love the Chicago Tribune's story on Tesla Coil hobbyists from the first sentence. 'Under a starry Saturday sky behind a Lake Zurich warehouse, three men unload a small flamethrower, electric cabling, neon-tube "light sabers," about 80 pounds of chain mail and two 7-foot devices that look like monster-movie props.' So what does one do with 1.6 million volts and a Tesla coil or two? Play 110dB music, of course."
Hardware Hacking

Wearable Computer With Lightweight HUD 150

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bring-back-weable-computing dept.
zeazzz writes to mention that the folks over at UMPC have a very cool little writeup and pictorial of a user's latest wearable PC. With the surge in smart phone adoption it seems that enthusiasm for wearable computers has dropped off a bit, which is too bad. I certainly look forward to my augmented reality HUD instead of depending on my iPhone for everything. "Essentially he took the MyVu headset, removed one of the eye pieces, and mounted the other to his glasses to that he could see his surroundings and the UX's screen at the same time. The MyVu is attached to the UX through the A/V output port on the UX's port replicator dongle. With some additional addons he provided his UX with extra battery life via an external battery, and several input methods to communicate with the UX while the rest of the kit resides within the backpack."
Hardware Hacking

A Wiki For Cable and Connector Pin-Outs 107

Posted by kdawson from the admit-it-you-read-pin-ups dept.
Nicola Asuni writes to let us know about a new resource for hardware hackers: a wiki about pinouts — hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware. "Created with the same MediaWiki software that was developed for the Wikipedia project, AllPinouts.org is a wiki that allows users to get and share information about hardware interfaces, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different electronic devices (i.e. cellular phones, GPS, PDA, game consoles, etc.). All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be distributed or linked accordingly. The 'pinout' (or 'pin-out') of a connector identifies each individual pin, which is critical when creating, repairing or hacking cable assemblies and adapters."

Comment Perhaps it will BE ZFS just not BE CALLED ZFS (Score 2, Insightful) 361

by KenCrandall (#28276019) Attached to: Apple Removes Nearly All Reference To ZFS

WIth the impending purchase of Sun by Oracle, I'm thinking it could be one of 2 things:

1) ZFS will be killed and/or de-emphasized and/or re-licensed in such a way that Apple is not comfortable/happy with putting it into Mac OS

2) It will still be ZFS just not called ZFS anymore (either re-branded or forked by Apple or re-named by Oracle/Sun)

Comment Patience! (Score 5, Insightful) 902

by KenCrandall (#28275121) Attached to: How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs?

Unfortunately, IT is viewed a lot like the phones by most users. It's "invisible" when it does work, and is only a priority to them when it doesn't work (or they need something!)

I've found that the best way to make people happy is to effectively communicate with them -- especially when it comes to deadlines. Now I'm not saying to sandbag :-) but if you can over-deliver some things and/or get them done earlier than promised, then you set an expectation of success and partnership with your user base. As difficult as it is, sometimes, you MUST remain non-cranky or bitchy, or you will get stereotyped as the "grumpy IT guy" faster than you can think.

If it's really burning you out after only 1 1/2 years, then you should really look at (a) your workload (b) your choice of career and (c) your work/life balance.
Databases

Cisco Introduces Rackmount Servers 93

Posted by samzenpus from the rack-'em-up dept.
1sockchuck writes "After shaking up the market for blade servers, Cisco Systems is launching a line of rackmount servers. But the company says its ambitions are more targeted than a full-scale 'all your racks are belong to us' assault on the volume server market. Cisco says it sees its 1U and 2U C-Series rackmount servers as offering an entry point to its Unified Computing System vision for companies who've built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades. But it thinks many customers will like the expanded memory capacity Cisco has built into the Xeon 5500/Nehalem EP processor."
Programming

Splash, Splatter, Sploosh, and Bloop! 100

Posted by samzenpus from the wouold-you-like-some-ottamottapia-with-that dept.
Acoustic Bubble writes "Researchers at Cornell University have developed the first algorithm for synthesizing familiar bubble-based fluid sounds automatically from 3D fluid simulations, e.g, for future virtual environments. The research (entitled 'Harmonic Fluids') will appear at ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans in August 2009. Check out some videos of falling, pouring, splashing and babbling water simulations (computed on a Linux cluster)."
Handhelds

AvantGo Shutting Down, Changing Markets 36

Posted by timothy from the oh-fickle-fate dept.
codebudo writes "AvantGo, the once ubiquitous application for all PDAs, is shutting down its web sync service. Users of the service have just begun to see banners stating, 'Starting June 30, Avantgo will no longer offer mobile web content.' According to parent company Sybase, AvantGo will transition from a mobile web service, to an SMS advertising and content delivery system."
Security

Man Arrested For Taking Photo of Open ATM 1232

Posted by kdawson from the i-will-tackle-you dept.
net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."

Comment It depends on the company (and maybe the product) (Score 1) 693

by KenCrandall (#25391539) Attached to: Do Software Versions Really Matter?

It is really going to depend on the track record of your company (and, eventually of your new product itself.)

For some companies, people won't deploy ANY .0 product until there's a .1 or SP1 release. For others, they want the latest-greatest stuff regardless of the release number.

Since you're in the position of having a new product, now is the time to set the track record for it and make your 1.0 release work as perfectly as possible. If it is slow/buggy/crashy/bad, then being versioned 6.2 isn't going to help it at all.

Why Apple Should Acquire AMD 340

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-else-do-you-do-with-mad-ipod-money dept.
slashdotLIKES writes "CoolTechZone.com columnist Gundeep Hora has a new column up that discusses why Apple should acquire AMD and how both companies would be a good fit for each other. From the article, "After private equity groups, let's look at a more strategic acquisition. For that, Apple is the best bet. Yes, I know it sounds way too radical to be taken seriously. However, Apple could drop Intel altogether and adopt AMD for its Macintosh PCs. Sure, the transition is going to take sometime, and it would probably make Apple announce a brand new line of PCs. However, it will be well worth it. We know Steve Jobs is ruthless when it comes to making interesting deals with powerful companies. This makes AMD a perfect match. Obviously Intel isn't going to be too delighted, but other companies don't bother Jobs. We all know he's the type of executive who crafts deals on his own terms. If Intel wants to be associated with Apple, then they won't really have much of a choice."

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