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Power

US Dept. of Energy Wants Bigger Wind Energy Ideas 252

coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy wants to kick up the research and development of offshore wind projects as it looks to achieve its goal of producing 20% of the country's electricity from wind farms by 2030. The DOE Wind Program is looking to focus on what it calls specific advanced technology, gigawatt-scale demonstration projects that can be carried out by partnerships with a wide range of eligible organizations and stimulate cost-effective offshore wind energy deployment in coastal and Great Lakes regions of the country. The agency is also looking for more research that can help address market barriers in order to facilitate deployment and reduce technical challenges facing the entire industry, as well as technology that will reduce cost of offshore wind energy through innovation and testing."
Math

First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life 241

Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"

Comment Re:The competition is OSX (Score 1) 792

I think that it's a mostly bad idea from a general purpose perspective, but I've worked with a number of POSIX compliant COTS embedded OS's, all have which have bash like shells, but only as an option with the purposed tasks being called directly.

I'd think that it'd be a bad idea to rely on the existence of a shell for an application...but I really don't have any experience here. In my experience, sometimes you want a shell for maintenance purposes, butmore often than not, you leave it out to save space.

Comment Re:The competition is OSX (Score 1) 792

I'm probably showing my Linux (Unix) ignorance here, but why "If you remove /bin/sh, the system will not even boot."?

Doesn't, towards the end of boot, the OS create an initial task? This currently being a shell which then goes off and spawns additional tasks? Why couldn't all of those be linked and spawned with the kernel instead?

I'm just asking the technicalities, not the merets.

GNOME

Matching Up Hotkeys for OS X and Linux GUIs? 83

I use a MacBook Pro for my main machine, but also have a Ubuntu desktop. I get irritated about switching between command-oriented hotkeys and ctrl-oriented hotkeys (cmd-a on OSX = ctrl-a on Linux/windows). I've looked over a lot of forums and have found that Gnome doesn't seem capable of changing hotkeys, while xfce and fluxbox can. The ideal solution would be a way to change system keys in X, or at the system level — that way I can keep compiz. Does anyone have any ideas or know a trick to change system hot keys?

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