Elivs - Slashdot User

Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 16, 2010 @01:58PM from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.

A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!

4chan Declares War On Snow 201

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 13, 2010 @03:16PM from the common-enemy dept.

With all the recent hacktivism in the news, Anonymous has decided to take on a new and powerful enemy: snow. On Sunday the group announced that it will "do everything in its power to shut snow down by attacking the Weather Channel and North Face websites, boycotting outerwear, and voting for the sun as Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year." I'm sure there are a lot of people in Minneapolis right now that would wish them luck.

Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus" 65

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday September 11, 2010 @11:43PM from the time-to-upgrade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update to the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"

Anti-Product Placement For Negative Branding 130

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @06:12PM from the touch-of-death dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Product placement to promote your brand just isn't enough any more. These days, apparently, some companies are resorting to anti-product placement in order to get competitors' products in the hands of 'anti-stars.' The key example being Snooki from Jersey Shore, who supposedly is being sent handbags by companies... but the bags being sent are of competitors' handbags as a way to avoid Snooki carrying their own handbag, and thus potentially damaging their brand."

How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion 228

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 02, 2010 @01:09AM from the they-can't-all-be-portal dept.

The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting: "The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."

Best Format For OS X and Linux HDD? 253

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 01, 2010 @04:51PM from the cross-the-beams dept.

dogmatixpsych writes "I work in a neuroimaging laboratory. We mainly use OS X but we have computers running Linux and we have colleagues using Linux. Some of the work we do with Magnetic Resonance Images produces files that are upwards of 80GB. Due to HIPAA constraints, IT differences between departments, and the size of files we create, storage on local and portable media is the best option for transporting images between laboratories. What disk file system do Slashdot readers recommend for our external HDDs so that we can readily read and write to them using OS X and Linux? My default is to use HFS+ without journaling but I'm looking to see if there are better suggestions that are reliable, fast, and allow read/write access in OS X and Linux."

36-Hour Lemmings Port Gets Sony Cease and Desist 268

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @03:33AM from the found-a-cliff-real-quick dept.

Zerocool3001 writes "The recently featured 36-hour port of the original Palm version of Lemmings to the iPhone and Palm Pre has received a cease and desist letter from Sony. Only one day after submitting the app for approval on the two app stores, the developer has put up a post stating that he 'did this as a tribute to the game — we can only hope that Sony actually does a conversion for platforms like iPhone and Palm Pre in the near future.' The text of the cease and desist letter is available from the developer's website."

The "King of All Computer Mice" Finally Ships 207

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @09:41AM from the there's-a-button-for-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The much-anticipated, much-mocked 18-button joystick mouse from WarMouse is now shipping. The press release features an impressive set of user quotes from game designer Chris Taylor, new SFWA president John Scalzi, and a doctor who runs a medical software company. Crazy or not, it's obviously more than just a gaming mouse."

Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell 361

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:37PM from the such-pretty-pictures dept.

climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."

3rd-Grader Busted For Jolly Rancher Possession 804

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 10, 2010 @11:10AM from the step-away-from-the-candy dept.

theodp writes "A third-grader in a small Texas school district received a week's detention for merely possessing a Jolly Rancher. Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch Monday when a teacher confiscated the candy. Her parents said she was in tears when she arrived home later that afternoon and handed them the detention notice. But school officials are defending the sentence, saying the school was abiding by a state guideline that banned 'minimal nutrition' foods. 'Whether or not I agree with the guidelines, we have to follow the rules,' said school superintendent Jack Ellis."

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 11, 2010 @05:30PM from the applied-psychology dept.

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 23, 2010 @04:03AM from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

Electron Strobe Makes Movies of Atoms 33

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 22, 2008 @03:08AM from the first-steps-toward-a-nanodisco dept.

holy_calamity writes "Some grainy black and white movies are receiving rave reviews from scientists. They are taken by a new microscope which, thanks to a 'strobing' electron gun, can image movement at sub-nanometer scales. Until now, only still images that smeared out movement were possible at such scales. The press release notes, 'The researchers first blasted the sample with a pulse of heat. The heated carbon atoms began to vibrate in a random, nonsynchronized fashion. Over time, however, the oscillations of the individual atoms became synchronized as different modes of the material locked in phase, emerging to become a heartbeat-like "drumming."' Further details and a few animations are available at Caltech's site."

Comment Latex, Bibtex, Subversion (Score 1) 464

by Elivs on Monday October 15, 2007 @06:23AM (#20980321) Attached to: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook

When writing large documents, eg. greater >100 pages, I prefer to use Latex, Bibtex, Subversion, and Kile.

Latex is brilliant for large documents. As it says, it lets you separate content from how its displayed. It produces beutiful results, especially for technical documents with maths etc. With the addition of PSfrag you can even put Latex formatting into your eps graphs and diagrams.

Bibtex is still my preferred reference manager. Most journal have style files for their preferred bibliography.

When I started using subversion with my documents it was great. With a networked subversion server I could get the latest version of my document anywhere. You could track changes, and see when you last worked on a section.Being able to find out what you changed in a particular chapter last month is handy. I now have a subversion repository that I has sub-directories for all my latex documents. I started using subversion while writing up my PhD and have used it to keep track of all my latex documents since. If your unfamiliar with subversion then kdesvn is a great GUI tool that integrates into KDE file management.

Kile is a good kde frontend to latex. I used emacs for 10+ years and loved it, but Kile's integration with the KDE desktop and its specialisation for latex make it a good choice of editor. Of course can use any text editor you want with latex, but choosing one designed for latex mark up and lots of shortcuts makes life easier.

WYSWYG editors like OOO and MSO are really only good for short documents. I've had to deal with these programs for documents >50 pages and they really become a pain.

Elivs

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