egede - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Guess I got out of new gear just in time. (Score 1) 125

by egede on Thursday August 15, 2024 @08:30PM (#64710158) Attached to: Researchers Hack Electronic Shifters With a Few Hundred Dollars of Hardware

It has the benefit of maintenance as well. When maintaining the headset I prefer to only fight with the hydraulic lines without at the same time having to worry about potentially pinching two flimsy wires. Batteries in the shifters last for years and give you a warning when going low. No need to carry spares for them ever. As for the main battery in Shaimano, you can ride for several hundred km after receiving a low battery warning.

Comment Virtual environment in all cases (Score 1) 385

by egede on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:30AM (#49290163) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Laptop To Support Physics Research?

As a senior academic in particle physics I run linux on a Lenovo laptop at the moment. However, this is mainly out of habit as I have been running linux on my desktop/laptops for the last 18 years. If you have linux on your laptop, it is highly unlikely that you will anyway install a version that is compatible with the software used in particle physics (the standard platform will stay as a RHEL 6 at CERN until the end of RUN II at the LHC, so another 4 years or so). For this reason I anyway run the particle physics code inside a virtual machine.

Running code locally can have many advantages. You are not for running big simulations, but lots of the data analysis takes place with datasets that have been reduced to 1 GB or less in size. To not rely on a shared file system and not waiting for X-windows to show up from the other side of the globe is a big advantage.

All papers and reports are written in LaTeX which is supported everywhere. Presentations are written in many different ways (Latex, PowerPoint, LibreOffice, ...). and converted into PDF. In this area you can just do what you are most comfortable with. For communication, skype is used a lot (working fine on all platforms) and CERN is a partner in the Vidyo conference call system that again is supported everywhere.

Conclusion from this is that the system on the machine is not an important choice. For developing and running code you will anyway use a virtualised linux environment, and for the rest, it is a matter of taste.

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 08, 2009 @06:48PM from the hot-bits dept.

supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3. Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."

New Bill Proposes Open Source Requirement for Publicly Funded Books 317

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 01, 2009 @02:08PM from the return-to-the-commonwealth dept.

fsufitch writes "On September 30th, the 'Open College Textbook Act of 2009' was introduced to the Senate and referred to committee. The bill proposes that all educational materials published or produced using federal funds need to be published under open licenses. The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US. Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"

Google Wants to Map Indoors, Too 174

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @04:55PM from the where's-the-good-silverware dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google maps are getting extended indoors next month with a new app called Micello that takes over where conventional navigators leave off — mapping your route inside of buildings, malls, convention centers and other points of interest. You don't get a 'you are here' blinking dot yet — but they do promise to add one next year using WiFi triangulation. At the introduction next month, Micello will only work in California, but they plan to expand to other major US cities during 2010."

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