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Submission + - Don Knuth announces iTex (twitter.com)

yowlanku writes: Christoper Adams tweeted live from TUG 2010 Conference that "Donald Knuth's TeX successor will be named iTeX." Sir Donald Knuth stated that he will make ``An Earthshaking Announcement'' at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration on 30 June, apparently which turned out to be a joke. Satirically he also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound.

Submission + - SPAM: Telepathic typing? 1

destinyland writes: "Why bother to type a document using a keyboard when you can write it by simply thinking about the letters?" asks this article. A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can "type"... using just their minds. The study involved electrocorticography — a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of the brain after a surgical incision into the skull. ("We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy," explains one Mayo clinic neurologist.) And besides typing, there's new brain wave applications that can now turn brain waves into music and even Twitter status updates — by thought alone.
Link to Original Source

Comment Practice what you do not preach ? (Score 1) 103

Lets be honest. How many more advertisement, apps, data mining opportunities would Facebook earn by making its privacy options really ensure privacy? Facebook would be out of business that way. But what is ridiculous is the owner of the company writing an open letter (with apology) stating that he will work to ensure greater privacy, while disabling even the existing measures that controlled several information (esp activity) of users. This is outright dishonesty and needs to be challenged. I prefer the honesty of some other companies that don't falsely claim to be respective of user's freedom and privacy rather than those whose rhetoric is high on values and action reminds of thugs. If they have to sell products with the aid of values, they'd better choose more 'practical' values. Practice what you do not preach ?

Comment Re:Trac + SVN (Score 1) 428

We use Trac+SVN too. But apart from that, we use a pastebin (for temporary text), an IRC server (ircd-hybrid) with a bot (gozerbot) for logging and other tasks. We use Trac with a lot of useful plugins like Calendar, blog, autocomplete, etc. Apart from that, I've worked (just tested and got a feel of) with OpenExchange, Open Atrium etc and think that they might prove to be useful tools in increasing productivity. I've been reading a lot about Redmine, and want to test it sometime soon. Same with Scrum techniques.

Comment What has happened to Slashdot? (Score 0, Redundant) 496

C'mon how is this some "stuffs for nerds, news that matter?" I think next post on ./ will read, "Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu Linux desktops may look alike, but they've got some important distinctions, like the fact that Fedora is a Redhat derivative and Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, while openSUSE is a Suse derivative from Novell. Not only that, Fedora and Ubuntu use GNOME, which is a desktop environment. Opensuse uses KDE, which is yet another Desktop environment, short for K Desktop Environment. On the other hand, though Debian also uses GNOME, the version it ships is rather older than that in Ubuntu or Fedora. The designers of Debian have assumed that its users are less caring of latest softwares, and might even be older than general run of users."

Comment Re:Ask China (Score 1) 151

I'd love to read/see/listen any evidences to prove that. Otherwise that's a totally false statement. The popular opinion in Nepal is that the string-puller is India and eventually Uncle Sam. I don't buy popular opinion, but your take on China story is untrue. It's largely been a non-interfering neighbor except in cases of Free-Tibet activists.
Government

Submission + - How should a constitution protect digital rights ?

Bibek Paudel writes: "Nepal's Constituent Assembly is drafting a new constitution for the country. We (FOSS Nepal [0]) are interacting with various committees of the Assembly regarding the issues to be included in the new constitution. Especially, the "Fundamental Rights Determination Committee" is seeking our suggestions in the form of a written document so that they can discuss it in their meeting next week. We have informed them informally of our concerns for addressing digital liberties and ensuring them as fundamental rights in the constitution. We'd also like to see the right to privacy, anonymity and access public information regardless of the technology (platforms/softwares). Whether or not our suggestions will be incorporated depends on public hearings and voting in the assembly later, but the document we submit will be archived for use as reference material in the future when amendments in the constitution will be discussed or new laws will be prepared.

Below is the mail[1] I wrote to FOSS Nepal mailing list. I wanted to post a similar message to some international mailing list (like FSF, EFF) but I know only of announcement mailing lists of that kind. If you have something to suggest, please do. We're committed to doing everything we can to make sure that in the future Nepal becomes a country where digital liberties are fully respected. It's my personal dream to make our constitution a model for all other developing (or otherwise) countries as far as digital liberties are concerned.

There are many issues on which your suggestions would be valuable. How's it in your country? How would you want to change it? If you've interesting examples from history, they'd help too. If you're a legal expert, please mention the legal hassles our issues could generate. If you're from the FSF, the EFF etc, please provide your insights. If you're just another citizen like me, how'd you like your government to address filesharing, privacy, anonymity, platform neutrality, open standards etc? This slashdot discussion itself would serve as a reference to our document.

[0] http://fossnepal.org/
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal/browse_thread/thread/10cb7162bc5c3998"
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Plug-in Architecture On the Way for GCC (sdtimes.com)

VonGuard writes: "This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU Operating System. A major part of that system has always been the GNU Compiler Collection. This year, some of the earliest bits of GCC also turn 25, and yet some of the collection's most interesting years of growth may still be ahead. The GCC team announced today that the long-standing discussion over how to allow plug-ins to be written for GCC has been settled. The FSF and the GCC team have decided to apply the GPL to plug-ins. That means all that's left is to build a framework for plug-ins; no small task to be sure. But building this framework should make it easier for people to contribute to the GCC project, and some universities are already working on building windows into the compilation process, with the intent of releasing plug-ins."
Displays

Submission + - Open-Source, Multitouch Display (technologyreview.com)

shankar writes: "Engineers at Eyebeam, an art and technology center based in New York, have created a scaled-down open-source version of Surface, called Cubit. By sharing the Cubit's hardware schematics and software source code, the engineers are significantly reducing the cost of owning a multitouch table. But they're also fostering innovation by giving engineers an open platform on which to develop novel multitouch applications — something that they've previously lacked."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Why IT Development is slow-paced in developing nations ?

Mass adoption of Information Technology through Free and Open Source softwares would provide a huge benefit to the people and governments of third world countries, both in terms of cost and benefit. But things don't seem to be happening the way they should.

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