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Submission + - US gives Raytheon $10.5M for "serious games" (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "These aren’t your basic video gaming systems here. The US government gave Raytheon BBN Technologies a $10.5 million today to develop what it called “serious games” that feature an international detective theme developed by game designers, cognitive psychologists and experts in intelligence analysis and in measuring game-player engagement."
Apple

Submission + - Consumer Tech: An IT Nightmare (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Advice Line's Bob Lewis discusses the difficulties IT faces in embracing the kinds of consumer technologies business users are demanding they support. 'Let's assume the consumerization of IT is the big trend many think it is. But using consumer tech in a business environment is a very different matter from being satisfied with consumer tech in a business environment. One of IT's legitimate gripes is that we're often asked to turn consumer-grade technology into business-grade technology with a wave of our magic wands. On top of the intrinsic technical challenges, there's this: IT doesn't have anything that even resembles a methodology for performing the business analysis we need to figure out what it means to put consumer tech to productive day-to-day use.'"
Windows

Submission + - No Windows 8 plot to lock out Linux (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Bucky24
Bucky24 writes: ZDNet's Ed Bott decided to contact major PC makers to find out the truth about Windows 8 SecureBoot. The responses are encouraging for those of us who run third party operating systems. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/leading-pc-makers-confirm-no-windows-8-plot-to-lock-out-linux/4185?tag=nl.e539

Dell plans to have a BIOS switch to allow SecureBoot to be disabled, and HP assures us that they will allow consumers to make their own choice as to what operating system to run, though they have not given details as to how.
Privacy

Submission + - Carbonite privacy breach leads to spam (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
richi
richi writes: "It looks like Carbonite, Inc. has been giving out customers' personal information. The company's admitted giving customer email address to a third party, in direct contravention of its privacy policy.

Lest we forget, this is the same online backup company that lost the backups of thousands of its customers, while denying any data were lost, despite reports from customers who said they had (ahem) lost data. It's also the company whose VP of marketing was caught red-handed astroturfing on Amazon, along with other Carbonite employees. When the news broke, the company denied it had sanctioned the phony reviews.

So I guess this is Strike Three, right?"
Unix

Submission + - Fedora Aims To Simplify Linux Filesystem (itworld.com) 3

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users. The developers at the Fedora project want to cut the Gordian know and consolidate all executables into /usr/bin and all libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64. One downside: this system would conflict with the standards developed by the Linux Standard Base, or the (rarely used) Filesystem Hierarchy Standard."
Education

Submission + - Bill Gates on What Business Can Teach Schools

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Bill and Melinda Gates write in the WSJ that in most workplaces employers build a system to evaluate workers performance, provide evaluations that yield information that employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results but that in the field of education we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. "We have all known terrific teachers," write the Gates. "But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding." For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. "Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.""
Hardware

Submission + - Open Source CPUs Coming to a Club Near You? (milkymist.org) 1

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: The Milkymist project have started shipping their so-called "video synthesizer", a device used by concert and other event organizers to create live visual effects. Most interestingly, the device is based on their fully open source system-on-chip design, including both a CPU and graphics accelerators — the latter being a significant part of what Open Graphics is still struggling with.
Books

Submission + - Top Ten Most Influential Programming Books (internetsecuritydb.com)

Submitted by AlexDomo
AlexDomo writes: If you could go back in time and tell yourself to read a specific book at the beginning of your career as a developer, which book would it be?

Since it was first posed back in 2008, this question has now become the second most popular question of all time on StackOverflow.

Top 5 results: "Code Complete (2nd Edition)", "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master", "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", "The C Programming Language", "Introduction to Algorithms".

Full Details Here
Transportation

Submission + - Cryogenic truck services remote telescopes (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Moving a 115-ton telescope down a mountain and 40 miles on the back of a humongous truck to a servicing facility is no task for the timid. It's a job the caretakers of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility , no longer have to worry about thanks to a new custom designed truck that can transport and service ALMA's temperature-sensitive astronomical equipment without removing a telescope from the working array at 16,500 feet in the Chilean mountains."
Google

Submission + - Google Patents Glove for 'Seeing With Your Hand'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Is Google Couch Search about to go Beta? GeekWire reports that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is among the inventors listed on a patent issued to the search giant this week for 'Seeing With Your Hand', using a glove with sensors for viewing a room or controlling a computer with gestures. From the patent: 'When a small object is lost, for example, underneath a couch, humans naturally put their hands under the couch to locate the lost object by touch. While gathering information by touch is in some cases an acceptable substitute for seeing, in many situations it may be desirable to 'see' the inaccessible environment to better gather information.'

Submission + - Is open source software ready for e-publishing? (antropologi.info)

Submitted by
johanneswilm
johanneswilm writes: "Over more than 3 years I have been writing on my anthropology PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua. Being the most professional system for PDF-generation, I went with LaTeX. To make the text accessible for the editors, I used the LyX editor. Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub as none of the available tools were quite ready to do it automatically. Is LaTeX only good for writers in the natural sciences? Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats, as Richard Stallman has proposed? Are there better tools to do the same?"
NASA

Submission + - NASA to Launch $96mill Cleanup of Shuttle Program (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Elliot Chang
Elliot Chang writes: NASA reports that the pollution caused by Space Shuttle launches at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will cost the government $96 million and will take 30 years to properly clean up. NASA officially ended the Space Shuttle Program on July 21st as the Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time at the Kennedy Space Center. It seems that the plumes of smoke resulting from the 135 shuttle launches caused toxic chemicals to seep into the sandy soil around the space center.
KDE

Submission + - KDE software compilation 4.7.0 released (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "KDE 4.7 releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance. Lots of visual polishing took place with an update to the Oxygen icons, and improved consistency between panel items such as clock and notification areas. The window manager KWin brings a new shadow system and can now run on OpenGL ES supporting hardware, making it better suited for mobile devices. Network management widget is much improved. Navigating through applications and recent files is easier with the addition of breadcrumbs to the Kickoff application launcher. Kontact groupware solution rejoins the rest of the KDE software, with increased stability, better connection to new services and sharing of communication information between more applications. Dolphin file manager has a cleaner default appearance. The menu bar is hidden, but easy to reach and restore. The file searching interface has been improved. Marble the virtual globe now has voice navigation support and a map creation wizard. Gwenview image viewer now offers the ability to compare two or more pictures side by side. Digikam photo management app brings face detection and recognition."

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