ayers - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Reader shares private data, ruins Christmas (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Felipe Hoffa on Sunday December 23, 2007 @08:49PM

Felipe Hoffa writes: One week ago Google Reader's team decided showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family that won't be able to enjoy this Christmas due to this "feature". Will this start happening with all Google products?

You can check a summary of complaints or the whole thread.

One SimCity Per Child 253

Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 08, 2007 @05:30PM from the now-that's-edumacation dept.

SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."

Submission + - Lenovo Drops Thinkpad 2yrs ahead of schedule

Submitted by Crash McBang on Thursday November 01, 2007 @12:08PM

Crash McBang writes: According to the Register, Lenovo will be dropping the Thinkpad brand two years ahead of schedule. No word on what will happen to the brand. What should Thinkpad users have as a Plan B? What would you suggest as an alternative to Thinkpad?

Submission + - Leonard Nimoy to play Spock in next Star Trek movi 1

Submitted by

mcgrew

on Friday July 27, 2007 @09:19AM

mcgrew writes: "The AP (via the Chicago Tribune) is reporting that Leonard Nimoy will 'don his famous pointy ears again' in the next Star Trek movie, due out Christmas of next year.

"This is really going to be a great movie. And I don't say things like that lightly," Nimoy told a gathering of 6,500 fans Thursday at Comic-Con, the nation's largest pop-culture convention.

He greeted the crowd with a Vulcan salute.

Nimoy was joined by the newly named young Spock, "Heroes" star Zachary Quinto, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nimoy.

Both Spocks were introduced by the film's director and co-producer, J.J. Abrams.
I've lost track, is this an even numbered Trek movie or an odd numbered one?"

Submission + - Richard Stallman talks on Copyright V. The People 5

Submitted by

holden

on Thursday July 19, 2007 @07:41PM

holden writes: "Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved overtime from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them. In keeping with his wishes to use open formats, the talk and qa are available in ogg theora only."

Submission + - Multi-gigabit wireless "within three years" (pressesc.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Howard

on Thursday July 19, 2007 @11:29AM

Anonymous Howard writes: "Multi-gigabit wireless technology using of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances will be ready within three years making wired computers and peripherals obsolete, a team of Georgia Tech scientists announced today. These wireless data connections will able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds. I wonder what MAFIAA will say about that."

Submission + - Cheap Solar Cells that can be Painted on Plastic (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Thursday July 19, 2007 @08:58AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. According to the lead researcher, "Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations." The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. The article abstract is available through the Journal of Materials Chemistry, with an illustration of the technology."

Submission + - Magnetic avalanches cause hard drive failure

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @11:55AM

An anonymous reader writes: According to this report by IT PRO, scientists working at the University of California have discovered the main reason of hard drive failure. According to researchers, some materials used in hard drives are better at damping spin precession than others. Spin precession of magnetic material effects its neighbors' polarity and this can spread and cause sections of hard drives to spontaneously change polarity and lose data. This is known as a magnetic avalanche. So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!

Submission + - IPhones flooding Wireless LAN at Duke University (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday July 16, 2007 @05:24PM

coondoggie writes: "The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University. The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school's pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a held desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown. "Because of the time of year for us, it's not a severe problem," says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology. "But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It's a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they're down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating." http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/071607-duke- iphone.html"

Submission + - MIT team designs a new, sleek, skintight spacesuit (mit.edu)

Submitted by

iamdrscience

on Monday July 16, 2007 @03:27PM

iamdrscience writes: "MIT aeronatuics professor Dava Newman has designed a new spacesuit along with her colleague, Jeff Hoffman and a group of students. This is far sleeker and lighter weight than the suits used by astronauts today, promising greater mobility than the traditional bulky suits of today which can weigh 300lbs or more. Instead of gas pressurization, the new prototype BioSuit employs "mechanical counter-pressure" in the form of skin-tight layers wrapped around the body."

Submission + - The Pixo Secret: iPods Run OS X and Always Have.

Submitted by Redrum on Saturday July 14, 2007 @11:17PM

Redrum writes: Everyone thinks that Apple's iPod runs an OS called Pixo, and that the iPhone ushered in a brand epoch based on OS X. That myth has been busted: the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel, and Pixo is only used as a graphics layer. Daniel Eran outlines the story behind Pixo and what OS X means for Apple. It's no joke; the story was confirmed by Tim Monroe, a member of Apple's QuickTime engineering team as is easy to verify yourself: Those OS X iPods? They're Already Here! Pixo, ARM, and the Mac OS.

Journal Journal: Ask Slashdot: Any good OpenGL primer for the novice? 11

Journal by Marxist Hacker 42 on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @03:55PM

It occurs to me that the one thing missing is a good kid's programming language- no good sound & graphics generating language like we had on early 1980s microcomputers. While I could teach my kid TI Basic using the Classic 99 TI/99-4A emulator, I'd much rather teach him something good. Anybody know of any good OpenGL For Dummies (type, not actual title) books?

Submission + - The history of videogame genres

Submitted by TobyToadstool on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @11:30AM

TobyToadstool writes: Over the last few months, CNET have been quietly running a series of free video documentaries that take a look back at the history of different videogame genres. The Space Bubble show has covered everything from the history of Platformers to the origins of the Beat em up. There's loads of footage from ancient arcade machines, and bizarre trivia, like the fact that some schools are using the Dance Dance Revolution videogame in place of traditional physical education. It's presented by an eccentric British guy floating in a little bubbleship in Space — odd but good.

Submission + - FCC head wants to unlock wireless devices

Submitted by

[TheBORG]

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @11:08AM

[TheBORG] writes: "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services. The Apple iPhone is a prime example: Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone is, in industry parlance, "locked." It allows only features and applications that Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices "hamper innovations" dreamed up by outside developers. One example: Mobile devices that also can use Wi-Fi, such as a home network or airport "hot spot," for Internet access. "Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time," Martin noted. "But they are just beginning to roll out here.""

Submission + - Are 80 columns enough? 1

Submitted by ThinkGeek on Friday July 06, 2007 @05:36PM

ThinkGeek writes: Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?

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