Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Displays

Linux Is a Lemon On the Retina MacBook Pro 780

Posted by timothy from the but-it-might-soon-be-awesome dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It turns out that Linux doesn't work too well on the Apple Retina MacBook Pro. Among the problems are needing special boot parameters to simply boot the Linux kernel, graphics drivers not working, no hybrid graphics support, WiFi requiring special firmware, Thunderbolt troubles, GNOME/Unity/KDE not being optimized for retina displays, and other snafus, including 20% greater power consumption with Linux over OS X. According to Michael Larabel, it will likely not be until early next year when most of the problems are ironed out for a clean 'out of the box' Linux experience on the Retina MacBook Pro."
Math

Ask Slashdot: How Many of You Actually Use Math? 1086

Posted by timothy from the let-me-inaccurately-count-the-ways dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a question that makes a good follow-on to the claim that mathematics requirements in U.S. schools unnecessarily limit students' educational choices: "I'm a high school student who is interested in a career in a computer science or game development related position. I've been told by teachers and parents that math classes are a must for any technology related career. I've been dabbling around Unity3D and OGRE for about two years now and have been programming for longer than that, but I've never had to use any math beyond trigonometry (which I took as a Freshman). This makes me wonder: will I actually use calculus and above, or is it just a popular idea that you need to be a mathematician in order to program? What are your experiences?"

Comment Re:But ... (Score 1) 846

by nyet (#40786279) Attached to: The World's First 3D-Printed Gun

He was wearing full body armor

No, he wasn't. Check your facts.

He also indiscriminately sprayed fire from high powered automatic weapons

The .223 round isn't high powered, nor was the AR patterned rifle fully automatic.

Comment Re:Not Dead Yet? (Score 5, Informative) 152

by nyet (#37259470) Attached to: Novell Wins Against SCO Again

Answer: BS&F are still hoping for brazillions back, even though SCOG is broke.

A better question is, where did all the money go anyway? Novell never got paid the money that SCOG owed them.

Answer: Delaware bankruptcy court (specifically Judge Gross in this case) is utterly corrupt and broken. They siphon money away from creditors and towards lawyers, making sure that ALL creditors get stiffed, until there is no money left.

Why do you think incorporating in Delaware is so popular?
Science

Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead 577

Posted by samzenpus from the silent-spring dept.
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."

Comment Re:Someone help me out here (Score 2, Insightful) 282

by nyet (#33937538) Attached to: NRO Warns They Are On Final IPv4 Address Blocks

> Well, NAT saved us from a certain doom, and also provides extra security

NAT is a horrible hack. It might be a good solution for some things, but to fix the addressable space option, it is a disaster.

Talk about an almost entirely useless "broadcast" only Internet. Is that what you want?

> (might act as a firewall).

Even worse. I don't even want to begin to explain to you why you are wrong about this. The broad adoption of UPNP makes the idea that NAT provides you with a useful firewall complete idiocy....

If you want a firewall, make a firewall. Do not rely on NAT. Ever.
NASA

The Sun Unleashes Coronal Mass Ejection At Earth 220

Posted by Soulskill from the return-fire dept.
astroengine writes "Yesterday morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a 'filament') erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae — a solar storm is coming."
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours). Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.
America Online

VLC 1.1 Forced To Drop Shoutcast Due To AOL Anti-OSS Provision 315

Posted by Soulskill from the more-shouting-imminent dept.
The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.
Science

Copernicus Reburied As Hero 369

Posted by timothy from the late-to-the-party dept.
CasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, a.k.a. Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."
Education

Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels 663

Posted by samzenpus from the who-needs-them dept.
VitaminB52 writes "A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close