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Comment I'm impressed (Score 1) 1148

Three or four explosions, some rods on fire, everything possible going wrong, one after the other, and still only a small amount of radioactivity beyond the actual site. I voted much safer. These are really old reactors and they are standing up to unbelievable punishment.
Just as long as they don't build any near where I live.

Comment Re:Infomagic CDs. (Score 1) 539

For me it was magazine cover discs. I got my first two or three versions of Mandrake that way. That was my introduction to Linux, and I gave up dual booting soon after, and haven't looked back since. I agree about the excitement - you never knew what was going to be on those discs, and installing the stuff on them was like opening presents.

Comment comments better than article (Score 1) 539

I found the actual article quite dull - nothing to reminisce on there, really (except linuxconf - that what where I couldn't get anything configured properly). However, the comments here have made an interesting read. Perhaps we could do this now and then without having to wait for an actual story?

Privacy

Submission + - Beijing to track citizen's cell phones (www.gov.cn)

wan9xu writes: "This is a real Orwellian development. Purportedly to help alleviate Beijing's traffic congestion, the new initiative, literally translated as "Platform for Citizen Movement Information" proposes to track individual citizen's movement in real time via cell phone signals. Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on. The rest is just like the phone tracking you see every week on CSI."
Games

Submission + - Futureproofing artifacts-Spacewar! 1962 in HTML5 (oversigma.com)

trebonian writes: "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early 60s.

We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java.

We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday.

It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms.

As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5.

It's posted at http://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday.

Expect another update around 2025."

Comment Re:fingers in my ears *lalalalala* (Score 2) 901

You're not reading between the lines. The reasons given are extremely vague and obviously bogus. How many years have they been using FOSS - do you seriously believe they can remember the old system after all that time of using FOSS all day every working day? The reason is much more likely to be, as others have pointed out, that new politicians have been lobbied/ had their campaign funded/ etc. After all its embarassing for MS to not have a monopoly in government ministries, isn't it?
There have been big deployments of FOSS in schools in Germany recently. MS needs to stop the rot.
There is surely no major difference between a linux desktop and windows xp, other than that the linux desktop has a sensibly organised menu and other improved usability. There is no criticism to take to heart here. There is only vague nonsense that doesn't ring true.

Space

Submission + - Japan Successfully Deploys First Solar Sail Space (inhabitat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: This morning Japanese space agency, JAXA, successfully unfurled a solar sail in space for the first time. Solar sails offer the best hope for deep space exploration because they eliminate the need to carry fuel. The Japanese spacecraft IKAROS created centrifugal force by spinning, allowing it to launch the .0003-inch-thick sail. While deployment is a challenge in a zero gravity environment, spacecraft — unlike airplanes — don’t have to contend with drag, so with each photon of light that hits the sail, the spacecraft could gather speed.

Comment use the computer for paperwork, not chemistry (Score 1) 154

I teach high school chemistry. Lab reports and other hwk are done on OOo writer, using the excellent (math) formula editor, then submitted to me through Moodle. I overlay my comments with text boxes and upload the response. Kids enjoy the paperless experience, and I never lose their work. Unlike LaTeX, you can teach OOo formula editor in about 10 minutes. We do real experiments. We do a bit of data logging and graphing, but not that much. There are some online java apps for things like gas laws and molelcular models that I use occasionally, but mostly real experiments. When teaching theory, I use my laptop and type notes directly into a wiki on Moodle. Kids are then assigned to clean it up a bit later, and to upload any sketches I do in Kolourpaint. (They also maintain a glossary there and contribue their own notes to the wiki.) I often jump into Google images to find something that will illustrate what we are talking about. We have some chem draw type software (linux stuff), but I don't use it much at all. Its faster for me to use kolourpaint (just a kids' paint program for the couple of you who don't know linux)

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