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Submission + - FTTH coming to Lincoln, Nebraska

Submitted by andyring
andyring writes: Lincoln, Neb., in the heart of silicon prairie is getting gigabit fiber to every home and business in the next four years. It's a wet dream for anyone in the tech world. No install fees, no contracts, no modem rentals, guaranteed minimum of 100 mbit, no throttling, etc. It'll provide phone and TV as well. I've read the entire franchise agreement and it's a very good arrangement for the city. Interestingly enough, it's largely possible because back in the 1970s, a public works guy had the brilliant idea to install conduit to all the city's traffic signals. So there's more than 300 miles of conduit already installed and leasable.

A local company, Nelnet, bought a western Nebraska company, Allo Communications apparently because the top Nelnet guy couldn't get fiber to his home very easily. So he figured, heck, I'll just buy the company and get fiber to the whole city.

Comment Do what works for each class (Score 1) 364

by dougoxley (#40872825) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom?

I faced a similar question in 2005 when I went back to school for a PhD. I ended up using an HP Tablet PC with OneNote, and it worked well at times. As others have said, the search ability (including OCR) is the key to making those notes quickly useful. Sometimes I would take notes on paper and other times I would take notes directly in OneNote. Either way, they were transcribed into OneNote eventually (usually using Windows Speech Recognition to help with transcription). I still search my notes from my graduate seminars and from the notes I made for the courses I've taught.

I am now a professor, and I believe that different courses and different faculty require different approaches to study. For example, the recent trend of the "flipped" classroom where the content of the course is delivered between course settings and the problems / case studies are discussed in class might lead to a different technology set for working in the classroom. I also found that my statistics notes were quite different than notes from my seminar courses. Seminars were more for discussion of which schools of thought were more and less reasonable, and thus less amenable to note-taking.

Therefore, if I were to start again, I think I would prepare for multiple types of courses. One would be where note-taking would be necessary in class. Another would be where I use notes in class for contributing to the discussion / case study / problem sets.

Also, good luck. My advice to any graduate student is to read everything that is assigned, always go to class, and work harder than you ever have in your life. You've chosen to do this rather than earn real money... you might as well do it well.

Comment IBM is staying in hardware (Score 1) 120

by dougoxley (#39725435) Attached to: IBM Sells Point-Of-Sale Business To Toshiba
To suggest that IBM is dumping all hardware business lines is inaccurate. IBM is staying in hardware, they just aren't staying in commodity hardware. IBM's Watson and its derivatives are examples of the type of business they are keeping and trying to develop. They will leave most of the low-margin commodity business to others while they research and develop new technology to exploit. This strategy assumes that they can develop something that will be commercially viable, of course. Will that happen? It appears to be a risk they are willing to take.
Medicine

Cutting Umbilical Cord Early Eliminates Stem Cells 139

Posted by timothy from the just-leave-it-on-a-few-years dept.
GeneralSoh writes "Delaying clamping the umbilical cord at birth may have far-reaching benefits for your baby, according to researchers at the University of South Florida's Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair — and should be delayed for at least a few minutes longer after birth. This new recommendation published in the most recent Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (14:3) notes that delaying clamping the umbilical cord allows more umbilical cord blood and crucial stem cells to transfer from mama to baby."
Privacy

Facebook, Others Giving User Private Data To Advertisers 154

Posted by kdawson from the naked-we-stand dept.
superapecommando sends along a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Facebook's privacy troubles may be just beginning. "Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. ... Several large advertising companies ... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it. ... The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. ... Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation."
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
Games

Correlation Found Between Brain Structure and Video Game Success 110

Posted by Soulskill from the correlation-does-not-equal-yadda-yadda dept.
kghapa writes "Still want to argue that video games shrink your brain? While video games have been previously shown to stimulate brain activity and improve coordination skills, a recently published study has directly linked structures in the human brain with video game aptitude. And yes, apparently size does matter in this case. Quoting: '... each subject received 20 hours of training to play a video game specifically created for research purposes, called Space Fortress. It's basically an Asteroids-type arcade game, in which the object is to knock down and destroy an enemy fortress while dodging space mines. However, the game has lots of extra twists that require close attention. Some of the players were told to focus exclusively on running up a high score, while others were told to shift their priorities between several goals. The result? The subjects who had more volume in an area called the nucleus accumbens did significantly better in the early stages of training. Meanwhile, those who were well-endowed in different areas of the striatum, known as the caudate nucleus and putamen, handled the shifting strategies better.'"
Security

Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes 396

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-believe-it-took-this-long dept.
suraj.sun writes "A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week's CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player."

Comment Re:Decadence (Score 1) 400

by dougoxley (#24117805) Attached to: Nasa Details Shuttle's Retirement

When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. [...]

Ultimately, what will define how technology will evolve is not the day-to-day improvement but the grand vision. [...]

I think the implication of a decline in technology in the U.S. that is implied by "decadence" is a little unfair. My view is that the U.S. has shifted the focus of its technological development. This shift has been away from technologies involving travel, and towards technologies involving communications (electronics, internet, etc.) and our biological / physiological existence (the human genome and such).

Why Aren't More Linux Users Gamers? 693

Posted by Zonk from the all-about-the-games dept.
tops writes "MadPenguin.org wonders why more Linux users aren't gamers and attempts to answer that question. The article suggests, 'As far as I'm concerned, it all comes down to a choice. Expect the gaming industry to follow the Linux doctrine or instead, build up a viable, cross platform gaming market that includes us, the Linux users.' The article urges publishers to consider Linux users as a viable market, and requests that game developers target Linux as a platform during the pre-production phase." What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
Government

State Lawmaker Wants To Ban Anonymous Posting Online 471

Posted by Zonk from the didn't-know-kentucky-was-so-powerful dept.
bfwebster writes "According to a local news article from last week, Kentucky state lawmaker Tim Couch wants to ban anonymous posting on the internet in order to 'cut down on online bullying', which he says has been 'a particular problem in eastern Kentucky.' His bill would require posters to register with their real names and e-mail addresses under threat of fines. Looks like another battle in the right for anonymous free speech."
The Media

IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth 619

Posted by CmdrTaco from the also-roswell-and-jfk-and-high-fructose-corn-syrup dept.
buzzardsbay writes "For the past few years, we've heard a number of analysts and high-profile IT industry executives, Bill Gates and Craig Barrett among them, promoting the idea that there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand. But now there's growing evidence suggesting the "shortage" is simply a self-serving myth. "It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to come to an end there is going to be a shortage and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering Management Program and a former technology CEO himself. "This whole concept of shortages is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA.""
The Internet

The Next Big Thing — Why Web 2.0 Isn't Enough 286

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the long-way-to-go dept.
An anonymous reader writes "TechConsumer has an interesting discussion about what it will take for the next big thing, and why Web 2.0 is only just the beginning. 'Realtors have been giving us the answer for years, although they didn't know it. The next big thing is..."location, location, location". Think of how we access all the information of the Internet. We do it at a desk, where wires keep us attached to a specific location. Laptops help us branch out a bit, but even then we are tied to a wireless connection. Go to far and you no longer have access to information.'"

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