Comment Re:Get rid of all these stupid useless keys (Score 1) 391
If you turn it on in MS Excel you can scroll the sheet with the arrow keys in stead of moving the cell pointer.
Comment Brain Workshop (Score 1) 151
Brain Workshop is a Dual N-Back game which may actually improve your brain.
Comment OpenAtrium (Score 1) 20
There is a Drupal distribution built specifically for that purpose: http://openatrium.com/ There's a lengthy article about it in the December issue of Linux magazine: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/nov/09/open-atrium-featured-linux-magazine which should help you get started.
It features groups, calenders, blogs, documentation and an issue/task tracker right out of the box.
Comment Re:Goodbye Lenovo (Score 1) 400
If you want a Linux compatible machine a good place to start is http://webapps.ubuntu.com/certification/. Buying the certified machines gives the vendors a sign that there is interest and might motivate other vendors to certify hardware or offer Linux directly.
Goldman Sachs Tries To Shut Down Dissident Blogger 161
The Narrative Fallacy sends along a piece from the Telegraph on efforts by Goldman Sachs to silence a blogger who is posting commentary critical of the bank. "Goldman Sachs has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website goldmansachs666.com. According to the C&D letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site 'violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights' and also 'implies a relationship' with the bank itself. Morgan claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank. In a post entitled Goldman Sachs vs Mike Morgan, the blogger predicts that the fight will probably end up in court. He went through a similar battle with US home builder Lennar a few years ago after he set up a website to collect information on what he alleged was shoddy workmanship in its homes. 'Since I went through this with Lennar, I've had advice from some of the best intellectual property lawyers, and I know exactly what I can and can't do. We're not going to back down from this.'"
Comment Easiest solution (Score 1) 108
The easiest solution for setting up your own jabber server is to sign up for Google Apps with your domain (http://www.google.com/a/) activate talk and then you can connect with any Jabber client to the google servers, eg. with Kopete: http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57557
You even have the option to limit communications within your own domain or to allow users to chat with other users outside of your domain.
Git Adoption Soaring; Are There Good Migration Strategies? 346
Got To Get Me A Git writes "Distributed version control systems (DVCS) seem to be the next big thing for open source software development. Many projects have already adopted a DVCS and many others are in the process of migrating. There are a lot of major advantages to using a DVCS, but the task of migrating from one system to another appears to be a formidable challenge. The Perl Foundation's recent switch to Git took over a year to execute. The GNOME project is planning its own migration strategy right now after discovering that a significant majority of the project's developers favor Git. Perhaps some of the projects that are working on transitions from other mainstream version control systems can pool their resources and collaborate to make some standardized tools and migration best practices documentation. Does such a thing already exist? Are any folks out there in the Slashsphere working on migrating their own project or company to a DVCS? I'd appreciate some feedback from other readers about what works and what doesn't."
The Best Keyboards For Every Occasion 523
ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has written an article on the best keyboards in every category, such as gaming keyboards (macro and hybrid), media center keyboards, keyboard gamepads, and so forth. Of course, the big companies like Microsoft and Logitech dominate these lists, while smaller companies like Razer, Ideazon, and others play an important role as well."
Comment Christmas detector (Score 1) 254
I only know of one christmas detector.
Choosing a Replacement Email System For a University? 485
SmarkWoW writes "The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We're looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?"
Getting Paid To Abandon an Open Source Project? 654
darkeye writes "I'm facing a difficult dilemma and looking for opinions. I've been contributing heavily to an open source project, making considerable changes to code organization and quality, but the work is unfinished at the moment. Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."
Reducing Boot Time On a General Linux Distro 354
Linzer writes "In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."
IBM Pushing Microsoft-Free Desktops 417
walterbyrd and other readers are sending along the news that IBM is partnering worldwide with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, and Red Hat to offer Windows-free desktop PCs pre-loaded with Lotus software and ready for customizing by local ISVs for particular markets. The head of IBM's Lotus division is quoted: "The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux." One example of the cooperation: "Canonical, which sells subscription support for Ubuntu, a Linux operating system that scores high marks on usability and 'the cool factor,' will re-distribute Lotus Symphony via their repositories. Symphony 1.1 will be available through the Ubuntu repositories by the end of August."
Modern LaTeX Replacement? 918
javierzinho writes "For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere, you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class. I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages — consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. — but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology. An application with visual interface and so on. I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF production. Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?"
Google To Host Ajax Libraries 285
ruphus13 writes "So, hosting and managing a ton of Ajax calls, even when working with mootools, dojo or scriptaculous, can be quite cumbersome, especially as they get updated, along with your code. In addition, several sites now use these libraries, and the end-user has to download the library each time. Google now will provide hosted versions of these libraries, so users can simply reference Google's hosted version. From the article, 'The thing is, what if multiple sites are using Prototype 1.6? Because browsers cache files according to their URL, there is no way for your browser to realize that it is downloading the same file multiple times. And thus, if you visit 30 sites that use Prototype, then your browser will download prototype.js 30 times.
Today, Google announced a partial solution to this problem that seems obvious in retrospect: Google is now offering the "Google Ajax Libraries API," which allows sites to download five well-known Ajax libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools, and jQuery) from Google. This will only work if many sites decide to use Google's copies of the JavaScript libraries; if only one site does so, then there will be no real speed improvement.
There is, of course, something of a privacy violation here, in that Google will now be able to keep track of which users are entering various non-Google Web pages.' Will users adopt this, or is it easy enough to simply host an additional file?"
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