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Education

Submission + - Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids in Khan Academy 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.' Gates, whose foundation spends $700MM a year on U.S. education, plans to talk to Khan soon.
Windows

Submission + - Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable

Submitted by KwahAG
KwahAG writes: Colin Watson one of the Ubuntu developers published in his blog information about Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable. Users of dual-boot Windows/Linux installations may face the problem, which boils down to particular Windows applications (Colin does not name them, but users point at least to HP ProtectTools, PC Angel, Adobe Flexnet) blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there, in this particular case — the "core image" of GRUB 2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) making the system unbootable.

"This seems like a fine example of an antifeature, especially given its destructive consequences for free software, and is in general a poor piece of engineering; what happens if multiple such programs want to use the same sector, I wonder? They clearly aren't doing much checking that the sector is unused, not that that's really possible anyway. While I do not normally think that GRUB should go to any great lengths to accommodate proprietary software, this is a case where we need to defend ourselves against the predatory practices of some companies making us look bad: a relatively small number of people do enough detective work to realise that it's the fault of a particular Windows application, but many more simply blame our operating system because it won't start any more." — points Colin and asks for users input to implement a workaround. Want you problem to be solved? Visit the link above and follow the instruction there to provide necessary information.

Submission + - Scientists Unveil Structure of Adenovirus

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After more than a decade of research, Scripps Research Institute scientists have pieced together the structure of a human adenovirus—the largest complex ever determined at atomic resolution. The new findings about the virus, which causes respiratory, eye, and gastrointestinal infections, may lead to more effective gene therapy and to new anti-viral drugs.
Robotics

Submission + - Stickybot, gecko inspired robot climbs walls. (stanford.edu)

Submitted by telomerewhythere
telomerewhythere writes: Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the biology of a gecko's sticky foot to create a robot that climbs. In the same way the small reptile can scale a wall of slick glass, the Stickybot can climb smooth surfaces with feet modeled on the intricate design of gecko toes.

The team's new project involves scaling up the material for humans. A technology called Z-Man, which would allow humans to climb with gecko adhesive, is in the works.
Robotics

Submission + - MIT unveils nanotech/robot swarm to skim ocean oil (mit.edu)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Today MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil "like paper towels soak up water," absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly "digesting" the oil by burning it off. Powered by 21.5 square feet of solar panels, the "Seaswarm" robots run on the power of a lightbulb, and with just 100 watts "could potentially clean continuously for weeks" without human intervention, MIT announced. ("They require little to no maintenance and can work around the clock cleaning up spills," notes one technology blog.) The swarm uses GPS data and communicates wirelessly to move as a coordinated group to "corral, absorb and process" oil spills, and MIT researchers estimate that a fleet of 5,000 could clean up a gulf-sized spill within one month. They were directed by Senseable City Lab, where an associate director notes that "Small oil leaks happen constantly in off shore drilling," adding that their goal was to design "a simple, inexpensive cleaning system to address this problem."

Comment AutoHotKey (Score 1) 799

by aaycumi (#30575406) Attached to: How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?
When I started a while ago before actually starting python and raking my brain out on project euler, I started with a simple scripting language called AutoHotKey for Windows (any). It is extremely easy and took next to no time to learn. It helped me get my head around programming rather than throwing someone in the deep end.

Comment This ain't the first nor the last time (Score 1) 524

by aaycumi (#28389463) Attached to: Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign
This is just as bad as the comparision they had for ubuntu vs. windows, saying that windows cost less; while deliberately choosing the most expensive options for ubuntu. But this one is more to do with configurably for the sys admin I think. Still a festering pile of crap; main example being that in all standised tests I've run for chrome, IE8 and firefox IE8 was always last, no matter what the test. Chrome was the fastest for rending most webpages, especially JavaScript and firefox was a close second. So this just doesn't make any sense at all.

Comment Mmm...? (Score 1) 739

by aaycumi (#27801223) Attached to: What Did You Do First With Linux?
Just started with Ubuntu 7.10 when 8.04 was a few months into beta and loved the whole build you're own operating system thing. But it was hell getting everything to work with nothing but google and some outdated blogging websites to help. In the end I've been using Ubuntu since then even managed to make an ubuntu server that worked inside the college WIndows XP servers, with the help the techs their. Everyone was booting either DSL or ubuntu off USB for the hell of it for a while; mainly to play quake lol. Well that was a while ago and now I'm back to using XP because of the current build of my comp won't work with any linux. Mobile Broadband ain't the hell I'd thought it would be and looking to get back to linux whenever possible and update this thing.

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