Comment Debugger (Score 1) 110
I am generally fascinated though also terrified by this sort of thing based on the following thought pattern:
https://xkcd.com/1163/
Submission + - Computing Teachers Concerned That Pupils Know More Than Them (i-programmer.info)
mikejuk writes: A survey of UK schools carried out by Microsoft and Computing at School reveals some worrying statistics that are probably more widely applicable.
The survey revealed that (68%) of primary and secondary teachers are concerned that their pupils have a better understanding of computing than they do. Moreover the pupils reinforced this finding with 47% claiming that their teachers need more training. Again to push the point home, 41% of pupils admitted to regularly helping their teachers with technology.
This isn't all due to the teachers being new at the task — 76% had taught computing before the new curriculum was introduced. It seems that switching from an approach that emphasised computer literacy to one that actually wants students to do more difficult things is the reason for the problem.
The survey revealed that (68%) of primary and secondary teachers are concerned that their pupils have a better understanding of computing than they do. Moreover the pupils reinforced this finding with 47% claiming that their teachers need more training. Again to push the point home, 41% of pupils admitted to regularly helping their teachers with technology.
This isn't all due to the teachers being new at the task — 76% had taught computing before the new curriculum was introduced. It seems that switching from an approach that emphasised computer literacy to one that actually wants students to do more difficult things is the reason for the problem.
Comment Re:Doomsday device! (Score 1) 232
Large antennas strategically placed around the country? Hmm perhaps it's something designed by this man?
http://i.imgur.com/hgcMJAv.jpg
Toshiba Begins Selling MacBook Air SSD 162
Lucas123 writes "Toshiba has made the solid state drive used in the new MacBook Air generally available for use by equipment manufacturers. At just 2.2mm thick, the company said the drive represents a new form factor that is about one-third the thickness of a thin hard disk drive and that is 42% smaller than even a mini-SATA SSD module. The new Blade X-gale SSD series has a maximum throughput of 220MB/sec. and can store up to 256GB of data."
E Ink Unveils Color E-Reader Display 164
Kensai7 writes with news that E Ink, the company who builds the displays used in Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and Sony's Reader, has launched a color version of their e-reader screens. It will first be used by a Chinese company called Hanvon Technology. Other companies will be watching and evaluating how well it works before integrating it into their own designs. Quoting:
"Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations. These are reasons Amazon, Sony and the other major e-reader makers are not yet embracing it. Amazon says it will offer color E Ink when it is ready; the company sees color as useful in cookbooks and children’s books, and it offers these books in color through its Kindle application for LCD devices. Sony is also taking a wait-and-see approach."
Factory To Make Biodiesel From Chicken Fat 207
telekon writes "Tyson foods has finally found a use for chicken fat and leftover food grease that isn't McNuggets — they've partnered with Syntroleum to produce biodiesel from the stuff. Their first plant in Louisiana will be able to churn out 75 million gallons a year. The question is, will the exhaust smell like fried chicken?"
Not Transparent Aluminum, But Conductive Plastic 96
michaelmalak writes "Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have fabricated transparent, thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of Materials (subscription required), could be used to develop transparent solar panels or even windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity. The material consists of a semiconducting polymer doped with carbon-rich fullerenes."
$2,000 Bounty For Open Source Xbox Kinect Drivers 274
ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload driver code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released yesterday. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox."
The bounty was originally $1,000, but Microsoft's dour response induced Adafruit to double it. ("With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.") In addition, the Xbox 360 dashboard update that preceded Kinect's launch contains upgraded anti-piracy restrictions.
Selling Incandescent Light Bulbs As Heating Devices 557
Csiko writes "The European Union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology (most of the energy is transformed into heat). A company is now trying to bypass this restriction by offering their incandescent light bulb products as a heating device (article in German) instead of a light device. Still, their 'heat balls' give light as well as heating. So — every law can be bypassed if you have some creativity!"
DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP) 370
gr8_phk writes "As reported over at Phoronix, the Direct X 11 API now has an open source implementation on top of Gallium3d which should ease porting of games to Linux with or without Wine. While still in its infancy, you can see where this is heading. All this while Microsoft hasn't offered DX11 for their own aging WindowsXP. Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"
Canonical Designer Demos Ubuntu Context-Aware UI 237
Blacklaw writes "Canonical's Christian Giordano has posted details of what he believes could be the future of user interface design in Ubuntu — a system that detects physical context. Designed to be paired with a webcam or other sensor system, the concept is that the computer is able to detect where a user is in proximity to the display along with an idea of roughly what he or she might be doing. Using this information, the operating system — in this case, Ubuntu Linux — can automatically make changes to the screen layout. For example, when the system detects that the user has leaned back in his or her chair, the system automatically makes the currently playing video full-screen. Lean forward again, and the video returns to its previous windowed mode."
Comment Re:Um..no (Score 1) 865
It's interesting that you link to the "Climategate" Wikipedia entry with the words "suspect at best" when the article seems to indicate that most reviews of the "climategate" situation indicate that the "massaging" was required to get sets of disparate data to use the same scale of units
What you think the words he uses to link the page represent a reasoned analysis and a sincere attempt to understand what he linked to? Ha! Not a chance. It's "Climategate" and the name alone proves it's all a fraud, that's all he needs to know, contrary facts need not apply.
It's why he says that the last decade showed cooling when that's patently false, and only appears to be true if you just compare 1998 (a record year) with 2008 (a cool year compared to recent trends though still one of the hotter years ever). If you instead compared 1999 (a much cooler year than 1998) and 2009 (the 2nd hottest year recorded) you could say ZOMG Epic Warming! But climatologists don't do that, because that's disingenuous. Yet he's the one who supposedly knows what's up. See the trend here?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
Yes it does, if you're the kind of person who thinks "Global Warming? Ha! We had record snow here in New England!" and "Climate Change - Ha! The climate has always been changing!" are reasonable arguments. Of course they had already decided global warming science was false from the get-go, and thus only seek out the arguments that confirm that bias and never attempt to discover if the argument has any merit.
Aaaaand of course always accuses climatologists of having the faults they themselves exhibit with every sentence. Wait for it, no really.
I've got to be honest it's very hard to take any scandal seriously that puts the word 'gate' at the end of it as a post-fix. Considering the length of time that has passed between the actual Watergate scandal and the present day you would think us clever humans would have thought of a new one by now.
I digress, and observe that the average person on the street does not seem to comprehend the difference between 'weather' and 'climate.' Educating the public on the difference in time scale between the two (short for weather, long for climate) might go a long way in avoiding substantial shifts in the perception of climate studies, and avoid the 'we had a record snow fall' argument.
Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer 392
rubycodez writes "Oracle, having acquired Sun Microsystems, including its Unix, will no longer give away free Solaris licenses. Oracle also states that some features of its Oracle Solaris will not appear in OpenSolaris, which means OpenSolaris may start to die."
New Litigation Targets 20,000 BitTorrent-Using Downloaders 949
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington, DC, federal court for copyright infringement, and another lawsuit targeting 30,000 more torrent downloaders on five more films is forthcoming in what could be a test run that opens up the floodgates to massive litigation against the millions of individuals who use BitTorrent to download movies. The US Copyright Group, a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, is using a new proprietary technology by German-based Guardaley IT that allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents. According to Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm, the program captures IP addresses based on the time stamp that a download has occurred and then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer. 'We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,' says Jeffrey Weaver, another lawyer at the firm."
Comment Weapons to maximum (Score 0) 169
It is certainly an exciting time to be alive, what we are witnessing here will probably be considered one of those points in our history in which we make a huge leap in our collective knowledge.
I can't wait for the day where a small portion of our population's work day will consist of sitting in a leather chair in a ship and saying "Weapons to maximum"
