gadfium - Slashdot User

Submission + - Mars probe may have spotted lost Sojourner rover

Submitted by

Maggie McKee

on Thursday January 11, 2007 @09:30PM

Maggie McKee writes: "NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have spotted the tiny, toaster oven-sized Sojourner rover just a few meters away from its companion, the Mars Pathfinder lander. It appears to have crawled there in an attempt to re-establish contact with the lander after the lander had already died. But the pictures aren't clear enough to definitively ID the rover, and it's possible Sojourner simply took off on its own. If it were miraculously still alive after 10 years, it could be 3 kilometers away from Pathfinder — and probably impossible to find, even with MRO."

Submission + - Project aims to put 3D printer on every desktop

Submitted by holy_calamity on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @02:36PM

holy_calamity writes: Two Carnegie Mellon researchers have designed an open source 3D printer that costs just $2,400. The self-assembly kit is part of what they call the Fab@Home project — they hope it will spark development of 3D printing technology for the consumer market in the same way the Altair 8800 did for personal computing in seventies.

Submission + - Google Tops 100 Best Places to Work For

Submitted by

inetsee

on Monday January 08, 2007 @04:32PM

inetsee writes: "Forbes Magazine reports that Fortune Magazine has released their 10th annual "100 Best Companies to Work For" list and Google is at number 1. Some highlights of the benefits of working for Goolge that caught my eye were the free gourmet meals and the massages. The chance to spend 20% of your time working on your own personal projects also sounds very appealing. Of course, with resumes rolling in at the rate of 1300 a day, the competition is fierce. Maybe I should look at some of the other companies on the list."

Submission + - A look at the newest Python Metaprogramming

Submitted by

BlueVoodoo

on Monday January 08, 2007 @03:18PM

BlueVoodoo writes: "Python made metaprogramming possible, but each Python version has added slightly different — and not quite compatible — wrinkles to the way you accomplish metaprogramming tricks. Python has recently grown "decorator," which are the newest — and by far the most user-friendly way, so far — to perform most metaprogramming."

Submission + - Men who love Linux are Sexier

Submitted by

caluml

on Sunday January 07, 2007 @01:16PM

caluml writes: "A female's tongue-in-cheek look at men who love Linux finds some interesting results. Among them are: We're passionate (and that rubs off in the bedroom too), not shy about spending our earnings, are problem-solvers, and are deep thinkers.

We need to make sure sites that lots of women read know about this!"

Submission + - The birth of vi

Submitted by

lanc

on Friday January 05, 2007 @06:00PM

lanc writes: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, contributor to BSD Unix, the UltraSparc technology, NFS and even Java, tells the story in an article at TheRegister about how he wrote vi and what the motives were. In the interview he says:

"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow."

...and so my son begun The Holy Editor War."

Submission + - Top 10 Torrents for 2006!

Submitted by

Andre

on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:57PM

Andre writes: "Wondering what was the Top torrent for 2006. Not only will this come as a surprise, but might also come as a surprise to the RIAA. Was the most downloaded file of 2006 an MP3, a movie, software or a game? Let me give you a hint. This file was downloaded more than one billion times in 2006! What was it? http://freelimewire.info/2007/what-was-the-top-10- torrents-for-2006/"

Submission + - 160 Reasons for Optimism in 2007

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @01:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: Edge magazine presents 160 different reasons to be optimistic in 2007. Authors include Daniel Dennett discussing "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", Geoffrey Carr writing about why "Malthus was Wrong" and Alun Anderson on "The Sunlight-Powered Future".

Submission + - Tux Magazine RIP

Submitted by

colinmc151

on Monday January 01, 2007 @10:17PM

colinmc151 writes: "Word is that Tux Magazine, which has always aimed itself at new users is no more, word from publisher Phil Hughes is that issue 20 (currently out) is the last issue. A shame because it seemed to be the one place you could point the newbie user (ok, I am biased, I have written some items for Tux Magazine, I will miss it as a place to write for ... anyone interested in buying some unpublished articles aimed at new users...)."

Journal Journal: The Problem with Driver-Loaded Firmware

Journal by Kadin2048 on Sunday December 31, 2006 @11:01PM

(Submitted as a story on 12/31/2006)

If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes gua

Submission + - The Problem With Driver-Loaded Firmware

Submitted by

Kadin2048

on Sunday December 31, 2006 @10:59PM

Kadin2048 writes: "If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes guarantee no out-of-the-box compatibility. Jem Matzan has produced a detailed article, "The battle for wireless network drivers," on the subject, including interviews with manufacturers' representatives and OS developers, including Theo de Raadt. The bottom line? In general, Asian hardware manufacturers were far more responsive and liberal about firmware than U.S. manufacturers (Intel included). Look for more firmware issues in the future, as not only wireless hardware, but regular wired Ethernet cards, take the driver-loaded firmware approach."

Submission + - Printers that don't use toner level chips?

Submitted by

xymog

on Saturday December 30, 2006 @03:56PM

xymog writes: "I'm increasingly seeing people with printers that stop working and provide a "toner out" message, even though the end user swears they are using a new cartridge. Though they are not using Lexmark printers, I am pretty sure they are using a printer and cartridge combination that uses so-called toner level chips. These are discussed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Stat ic_Control_Components. The chips allow manufacturers to lock users into using their cartridges, rather than using OEM or toner refill programs. Good for the manufacturer, bad for consumers and consumer choice. In my bumbling way I've tried locating more information, or even a list, of personal or small workgroup printers that use these manufacturer lock-in techniques, but wasn't able to find such a list. Any Slashdot readers have anecdotal suggestions or even a pretty-darn-sure list I could refer to?"

Can Games Fly On Google Earth? 30

Posted by Zonk on Thursday December 28, 2006 @02:32PM from the goog-games-not-far-away dept.

simoniker writes "A team at Intel have built a game prototype that works entirely within Google Earth, in which: 'Martian robotic spacecraft are invading... Your mission is to decipher the messages, and blast these Martians before they can suck people off the planet.' The engineers explain: 'Existing games we found all require switching back and forth between a web browser window and Google Earth. Our goal was to develop a game with all the action inside a single window, similar to a traditional video game, leading to a more immersive and responsive experience.' The gameplay is fairly simple as of yet — but could this be the start of a host of fully integrated Google Earth games?"

Submission + - Where are the C++ frameworks?

Submitted by wandazulu on Monday December 25, 2006 @02:31PM

wandazulu writes: Objective C has Cocoa, C# has .NET, Java has its packages, and every scripting language has an extensive library of functionality for handling things like XML, HTTP, encryption, regular expressions, etc. So why is there no likewise unified library of functionality for C++? At this point I can pretty much count on having a standard template library for any C++ compiler I use on any platform, but that provides basic functionality, like containers and strings. Why is it that I have to write my own socket-based routines for getting a web page, or hashing a string, etc.? So why is there no unified framework for C++? Is it because it's not "owned" by a particular organization or person? Has anyone even attempted to create a library to rival Java's or Ruby's or Perl's or Python's....

Comment Isn't it time Slashdot had a Wiki icon? (Score 5, Interesting) 204

by gadfium on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @03:03PM (#17021314) Attached to: Experts Rate Wikipedia Higher Than Non-Experts

There are regular stories on Wikipedia on Slashdot, and occasional stories on other wikis. Shouldn't there be either a Wikipedia icon or a Wiki icon to distinguish these stories? The Wikipedia "multilingual globe being built" is copyright (one of the very few things in Wikipedia which is) so you can't use that, but the Wikipedia "W" is fairly well known. Looking through Wikimedia Commons, this puzzle piece looked good to me. I don't know if the GFDL licence would be a problem for Slashdot.

The MediaWiki sunflower would only be suitable as an icon for Wikis powered by that piece of software. I don't have an idea for an icon to represent all wikis.

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