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Science

Submission + - The Shifting Tides of International Science (economist.com)

Submitted by
explosivejared
explosivejared writes: "The Economist has a story on the increasing scientific productivity countries like China, India, and Brazil relative to the field's old guards in America, Europe, and Japan. Scientific productivity in this sense includes percent of GDP spent on R&D and the overall numbers of researchers, scholarly articles, and patents that a country produces. The article sees this as a natural side effect of the buoying economic prospects of these countries. Perhaps the most positive piece of the story is the fact that a full 35% of scholarly scientific articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. From the article: "[M]ore than 35% of articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. That is up from 25% 15 years ago—something the old regime and the new alike can celebrate.""
Linux

Submission + - Kernel Tracing with LTTng on Ubuntu Maverick (blogspot.com)

Submitted by francis-giraldeau
francis-giraldeau writes: Linux Tracing Toolkit (LTTng) provides high performance kernel tracing for Linux. This is the killer app for system level debugging and performance tuning. It's now easier to install than ever with packages released for Ubuntu Maverick. The short introduction to kernel tracing shows how to interpret a simple kernel trace and relate it to strace. I would like to ask slashdot readers about what they would expect as features for kernel tracing analysis tool, because I'm starting my PhD on this topic and looking for ideas. Also, I wonder why LTTng is not mainline yet, despite the fact that it's highly valuable. Will Linus Torvalds see the light for 2011?
Censorship

Submission + - UK Twitter Users Declare "I'm Spartacus" (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tweeters have joined forces to support Paul Chambers, the man convicted and fined for a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport. A so-called "I'm Spartacus" campaign encouraging users to "re-tweet" his words has also become a huge hit. The hashtag #IAmSpartacus is currently the number one trending topic on Twitter in the UK, with #twitterjoketrial in second place. Chambers is believed to be the first person convicted in the UK for posting an offensive tweet. After the hearing, actor and Twitter fan Stephen Fry tweeted that he would pay Chambers' fine. Comedian Dara O'Briain tweeted that the verdict was "ludicrous" while Peep Show actor David Mitchell said it was "punishment for flippancy".
Google

Submission + - 80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now in WebM (osnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project — and it's doing great.'
The Courts

Submission + - Dismissal of Malicious Prosecution Claim Upheld (cgstock.com) 1

Submitted by Christoph
Christoph writes: I'm the Slashdot user who was sued for defamation (and six other claims) by a corporation over negative statements on my website. I prevailed (pro-se) in 2008. The court found the other side forged evidence and lied. In 2009, I sued the other party's lawyers for malicious prosecution/abuse of process (the corporation itself is dissolved/broke). One defendant had stated in writing their client was lying, but the trial court dismissed my claim for lack of evidence. I appealed, and this Tuesday the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal, completely ignoring the defendant's written admission (and other evidence). They further found it was not an abuse of process to sue to "stop the publication of negative information and opinion".
Linux

Submission + - cde: Making Linux Portability Easy (stanford.edu)

Submitted by ihaque
ihaque writes: A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called cde to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo,

CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.
Education

Submission + - Fight Begins To Secure Turing Papers For UK Museum (justgiving.com)

Submitted by Blacklaw
Blacklaw writes: Auction house Christie's is planning to sell offprints of Alan Turing's early work for an estimated £500,000 — and the fight has begun to raise the money so UK codebreaking museum and charity Bletchley Park can house the documents in the building where Turing performed his war-winning work and birthed the concept of a modern 'universal computer.'
If the money isn't raised, the papers could disappear into a private archive, never to be seen again.
Microsoft

ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows 269

Posted by Zonk from the cropping-up-everywhere dept.
Tookis writes "Another setback for Microsoft has cropped up in the space of document formats in government organizations. The state of California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement in the software used by state agencies. Similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota has added further to the pressure on Microsoft, which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. The bill doesn't specify ODF by name, but instead requires the use of an open XML-based format."
Education

Submission + - Museum IDs New Species of Dinosaur

Submitted by Uryugen
Uryugen writes: A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur's horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops — which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes
Space

Cassini Returns Amazing New Imagery from Saturn 118

Posted by Zonk from the extremely-attractive-planet dept.
SeaDour writes "The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet's ring system as seen from above and below the planet. 'Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before. It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.' The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June."
OS X

Submission + - Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: RDM asks Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?, a comparison of recent sales and profits and the future outlook for Macs and PCs. From the article: "Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win, it only needs to take the most valuable segments of the market. Once that happens, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales. If it doesn't make a choice, the company will face difficult battles on two fronts."

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