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Comment Get things done - or get software done? (Score 1) 573

by Rastloser (#42120821) Attached to: Ask Richard Stallman Anything

I volunteer at a club that runs a technical museum, providing an open laboratory for school children. It offers them the chance to repeat some fundamental physics experiments that are crucial to our world view. We're using mostly Free Software, but there are some niches where we have to rely on non-free stuff. I have noticed that using some proprietary commercial tools, we are able to work far better and easier than when using their free counterparts.

What would you suggest to do in such a case? Do you think it's better to compromise on freedom and work more efficiently, thus providing a more interesting experience to our visitors, or to divert our (very, very limited) funds and manpower to improving the Free Software tools out there, thus neglecting our core mission but ultimately benefiting a different community?

Comment Link tip: Helga Velroyen (Score 4, Informative) 183

by Rastloser (#41396557) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Hearing Aids That Directly Connect To Smart Phones?

At the last Chaos Communication Congress, Helga Velroyen discussed this and other topics around hearing aid evolution. You can find her talk at ftp://ftp.ccc.de/congress/2011/mp4-h264-HQ/28c3-4669-en-bionic_ears_h264.mp4 and a corresponding blog project at http://blog.hackandhear.com/ . While I do not have to rely on hearing aids and thus have not looked very deeply into her activities, I get the impression that she is one of the most knowledgeable persons regarding this topic in the European hacker scene.

Comment Local technical museums, hackerspaces or similar (Score 3, Informative) 263

by Rastloser (#41384323) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Should a Geek's Charitable Donations Go?

As a volunteer for the club that restored Germany's first radio telescope (see http://astropeiler.de/ ), I am certainly quite biased, but I think that technical, hands-on museums would also be a good target. Check your area for volunteer-run astronomical observatories, open electronics labs, private physics labs... essentially places that are open to everyone interested in science, give people a hands-on experience with old (or current) technology and where everyone can repeat important experiments that shape our world-view. For example, we offer everyone the chance to repeat the measurements by Oort et al. from 1958 that show that the Milky Way has a spiral structure, and hope to support and promote an evidence-based world view by doing so. (And, besides, it's just great fun to operate your own radio telescope!)

Submission + - Merry merry copyright king of the bush is he... (abc.net.au) 2

Submitted by neonsignal
neonsignal writes: Iconic Australian band Men at Work have been ordered to pay royalties for an instrumental riff in their song "Down Under". The notes were sampled from a well-known children's song "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree", written in 1934 for a Girl Guide's Jamboree. The Justice found the claims of the copyright owner Larrikin to be excessive, but ordered the payment of royalties and a percentage of future profits. Let's hope the primary schools are up to date with their ARIA license fees!
Science

Submission + - UK to repeal Laws of Thermodynamics? (hmg.gov.uk)

Submitted by mostxlnt
mostxlnt writes: The new Tory UK government has launched a website asking its subjects which laws they'd most like repealed. There are three discussion threads up for repeal of the Second, Third and even all Laws of Dynamics. "Without the Third Law of Thermodynamics, it would be possible to build machines that would last forever and provide an endless source of cheap eneregy. thus solving both potential crises in energy supply as well as solving the greenhouse gas problem in one stepp.. simples...eh?" says one commenter.

Feed Engadget: 1&1's 7-inch SmartPad is the most unlikely Android tablet you'll ever see (engadget.com)

From feed by feedfeeder
We knew at Computex that tablets were on track to completely take over the world, but now it's official: a German internet provider has just revealed that it'll soon be offering a branded tablet PC of its own. You heard right -- a German ISP is making a tablet. The delightfully named SmartPad is a 7-inch, touchscreen-based slate that'll eventually support Android 2.2 (v1.6 will be pre-installed), and there's also inbuilt WiFi and an optional 3G module for those looking to "stay connected." It seems as if the company is still hammering out the final specifications, but we are told to expect an SD card reader (2GB will be included), a USB socket, a 500MHz ARM11 processor, 256MB of RAM and a proprietary app store that'll undoubtedly enrage you. According to the promotional video hosted just past the break, it should ship later this month for precisely nothing so long as you pick up a data plan to go alongside of it. 'Course, getting one outside of Deutschland is another challenge entirely...

Continue reading 1&1's 7-inch SmartPad is the most unlikely Android tablet you'll ever see

1&1's 7-inch SmartPad is the most unlikely Android tablet you'll ever see originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cellphones

Submission + - 4G: is it worth the hype? (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing: 4G access. The first 4G phone, Spring Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the difference between 4G and 3G technology.

Submission + - Bangladesh blocks Facebook over Mohammed cartoons 1

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country's leaders were uploaded. One man has been arrested and charged with "spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders" with the images. Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed. It comes after Pakistan invoked a similar ban over "blasphemous content".
Link to original source
NASA

Submission + - Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee’s ranking Republican have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency’s moon program and to “examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives” to President Obama’s proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has not yet agreed to the president’s proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies, and inserted into this year’s budget legislation a clause that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, and other NASA officials, but he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA’s human spaceflight endeavors. “It’s enough for us to be extraordinarily concerned,” said a Congressional staff member, who was authorized to speak only anonymously. “We just want the inspector general to follow the path and report back to us what he’s finding.”"
Programming

Submission + - Hope for multi-language programming?

Submitted by
chthonicdaemon
chthonicdaemon writes: "I have been using Linux as my primary environment for more than ten years. In this time, I have absorbed all the lore surrounding the Unix Way — small programs doing one thing well, communicating via text and all that. I have found the commandline a productive environment for doing many of the things I often do, and I find myself writing lots of small scripts that do one thing, then piping them together to do other things.

While I was spending the time learning grep, sed, awk, python and many other more esoteric languages, the world moved on to application-based programming, where the paradigm seems to be to add features to one program written in one language. I have traditionally associated this with Windows or MacOS, but it is happening with Linux as well. Environments have little or no support for multi-language projects — you choose a language, open a project and get done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependancy generation and cross-platform support, unfortunately making it more difficult to grow a custom build process for a multi-language project organically.

All this is a bit painful for me as I know how much is gained by using a targetted language for a particular problem. Now the question: Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java (insert other well-supported, popular language here) and unlearn ten years of philosophy or is there hope for the multi-language development process?"
Space

Submission + - First solar eclipse recorded from moon

Submitted by
dazza101
dazza101 writes: "For the first time ever, we have witnessed a solar eclipse from the moon. On 10 February 2009 Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter captured the sight of the Earth eclipsing the sun. The spacecraft also recorded this video showing the Earth surrounded by a glowing ring and briefly forming the classic diamond ring that often occurs during a solar eclipse, as seen from down here on Earth."

Comment TV, but not video (Score 1) 42

by Rastloser (#25366569) Attached to: DIY Live Photos From ISS
For all the non-hams reading this, it should be pointed out that SSTV transmits images based on the same technical principles as television, but that it's not video. The transmission of a single "frame" takes several dozen seconds. This has several advantages, however. The greatest is probably that the requirements for signal quality and receiving equipment are much lower than for TV, meaning that anyone interested will be able to pick up those images with relatively little tech on the ground.
Operating Systems

How Kernel Hackers Boosted the Speed of Desktop Linux 380

Posted by timothy from the mild-claims dept.
chromatic writes "Kernel hackers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok showed off Linux booting in five seconds at last month's Linux Plumbers Conference. Arjan and other hackers have already improved the Linux user experience by reducing power consumption and latency. O'Reilly News interviewed him about his work on improving the Linux experience with PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot."
Security

Submission + - Security flaw in Yahoo mail exposes plaintext auth

Submitted by
holdenkarau
holdenkarau writes: "Yahoo!'s acquisition of opensource mail client Zimbra has apparently brought some baggage to the mail team. The new Yahoo! desktop program transmits the authentication information in plain text. Ironically enough, the flaw was discovered during a Yahoo "hacku" day at the University of Waterloo (the only Canadian school part of the trip). Compared to the recent hoopla about gmail exposing the names associated with accounts, this seems down right scary. So if you have friends or relatives who might have installed Yahoo! desktop and value their e-mail accounts, now would be a good time to get them to change the password and switch back to the oh so retro web interface."

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