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Linux

Submission + - The state of linux IO scheduling for desktop? 2

Submitted by pinkeen
pinkeen writes: I am using linux as my work & play OS for 5+ years. The one thing that constantly drives me mad is its IO scheduling. When I'm copying a large amount of data in the background, everything else slows down to a crawl while the cpu utilization stays at 1-2%. The process which does the actual copying is highly prioritized in terms of I/O. This is completely inacceptable for a desktop OS. I've heard about the efforts of Con Kolivas and his Brainfuck Scheduler, but it's unsupported now and probably incompatible with latest kernels. Is there any way to fix this? How do you deal with this? I have a feeling that if this issue was to be fixed, the whole desktop would become way more snappier, even if you're not doing any heavy IO in the background.
Patents

Submission + - Who invented the Linux based wireless router? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by mtaht
mtaht writes: I've just had the interesting experience of being deposed to talk about one of the first embedded Linux based wireless routers. Our (free!) 1998 publication of howto to make one predates patent #7035281, filed September 13, 2000, (by someone else!). Their patent was recently granted and is now being disputed in court, in part, using our howto as an example of prior art (yea!). The lawsuit continues on... the case goes before a judge shortly, and a jury trial is tentatively scheduled for the spring. I find myself plagued with the question:

So... who invented the embedded Linux based wireless router? What relevance does "who" have, when there is such an enormous confluence of ideas from thousands of people? What constitutes invention, anyway?
Earth

Submission + - Boeing 747 Recycled into a Private Residence

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "Nicholas Jackson writes in the Atlantic about a woman who requested only curvilinear/feminine shapes for her new home and has purchased an an entire Boeing 747-200, transported it by helicopter to her 55-acre property in the remote hills of Malibu and after deconstructing it, is having all 4,500,000 pieces put back together to form a main house and six ancillary structures including a meditation pavilion, an animal barn, and an art studio building. "The scale of a 747 aircraft is enormous — over 230 feet long, 195 feet wide and 63 feet tall with over 17,000 cubic feet of cargo area alone and represents a tremendous amount of material for a very economical price of less than $50,000 dollars," writes Architect David Hertz. "In researching airplane wings and superimposing different airplane wing types on the site to scale, the wing of a 747, at over 2,500 sq. ft., became an ideal configuration to maximize the views and provide a self supporting roof with minimal additional structural support needed." Called the "Wing House," as a structure and engineering achievement, the aircraft encloses an enormous amount of space using the least amount of materials in a very resourceful and efficient manner and the recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this “big aluminum can” is seen as an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. Interestingly enough the architects had to register the roof of the house with the FAA so pilots flying overhead would not mistake it as a downed aircraft."
Power

Submission + - Degraded electrodes observed in aging batteries (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Scientists have identified nanoscale changes in aging lithium-ion batteries that could be responsible for their degradation over time. By dissecting and examining dead batteries, they found that some lithium was irreversibly lost from the positive to negative electrode of dead batteries, and no longer participated in charging and discharging. They discovered that finely-structured nanomaterials on dead batteries' electrodes had coarsened in size, and theorise that the coarsening of the cathode may be responsible for the loss of lithium.
Hardware

Submission + - Someone cooked with their USB ports, Awesome (tekgoblin.com) 4

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: Wow, I would have never have thought to try and cook food with the power that a standard USB port provides well someone did. A standard port provides around 5V of power give or take a little. I am not even sure what it takes to heat a small hotplate but I am sure it is more than 5V. It looks like the guy tied together around 30 USB cables powered by his PC to power this small hotplate. But believe it or not it seems to have cooked the meat perfectly.

Submission + - Ease of publishing an ebook (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by ISoldat53
ISoldat53 writes: This article describes how easy it is to publish an ebook. The author details the costs to the writer for a major publishing house to publish a book and the savings to the writer by self-publishing. He looks to make the same profit selling the book at $2.99 on amazon.com as he does going though a publisher. The book is Kindle specific for now but the author describes how it can be purchased though amazon.com and converted for other readers. No DRM.

Submission + - Benoit Mandelbrot Rumored to have Passed Away (fooledbyrandomness.com)

Submitted by
Beetle B.
Beetle B. writes: "According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's home page, Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at the age of 85. At the moment, no news site has reported it officially, though. I first learned of the Mandelbort set while reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From The Grand Banks. Soon after, I got hold of the best fractal generation software of the day: Fractint, and ran it for long periods of time on my XT, exploring the beautiful world that Mandelbrot, among others, had opened up for me. That it was only on a 4 color CGA did not deter me!"

Comment Why not go out and buy a ready made SAN? (Score 1) 158

by ClaytonianG (#33912902) Attached to: AOL Spends $1M On Solid State Memory SAN

Although I'm certain the person designing the SAN had a blast doing so and did an excellent job, it still seems it would have been faster/easier to go with a pre-existing SAN/DB system such as Oracle's exadata2

I've personally witnessed the exadata2 process close to the advertised 1,000,000 iops(well it was in a controlled demo environment done by oracle, but still, it was impressive).

I'd also be curious in how much the second SAN would cost. If the first one costs $1, will the second one be cheaper and thus justifying developing the system in house?
Image

College To Save Money By Switching Email Font 306

Posted by samzenpus from the smallest-things dept.
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."

Comment Re:University cartography or geography department (Score 1) 235

by ClaytonianG (#31431740) Attached to: Digitizing and Geocoding Old Maps?

In addition to the cartography/geography department, some universities do this in a GIS department. GIS departments will likely be great sources for information on digitizing. Just read the bios of the professors in the departments and email the ones that sound like they would be interested. If the university is not interested in helping you, chances are you'll be able to find some cheap and high quality slave^H^H^H^H^H grad student labor to do this for you. Also check if your local university has a population/demographics center; they also tend to be interested in this type of data.. Old maps are of high value for historians as well.

Now if you are not wanting to share the contents of the maps, that might put a hiccup in this strategy.
Biotech

Printing Replacement Body Parts 101

Posted by kdawson from the portrait-mode dept.
Deep Penguin sends in a piece that appeared in The Economist a couple of weeks back about a developing technology to "print" body parts for transplant. "A US and an Australian company have developed the $200,000 machine, which works by depositing stem cells and a 'sugar-based hydrogel' scaffolding material. (The stem cells are harvested from a transplant patient's own fat and bone marrow, to avoid rejection down the line.) The companies are Organovo, from San Diego, specializing in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. The initial targets are skin, muscle, and 'short stretches of blood vessels,' which they hope to have available for human implantation within five years. Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process."
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

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