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Music

Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57

Posted by kdawson from the music-of-the-exploding-spheres dept.
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
Image

Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? 735

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
Linux

Submission + - Gov't pushing Linux in rural China (moblinzone.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: The Chinese government's "Go Rural" program offers subsidies up to 13 percent for rural residents who purchase approved nettops or netbooks. The systems come with a version of Red Flag Linux built on the Moblin stack. Along with Internet access, the software is said to provide apps for crop and livestock management, farm production marketing, remote office access/automation, and even online tour and hotel booking systems. Of course, Windows dominates the China market, and if traditional patterns hold, about 30 percent of these subsidized systems could ultimately wind up re-installed with Windows.
Portables

Submission + - Decoding Adobe's big device push (moblinzone.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface. Is Adobe positioning itself to monopolize the future's main means of media production and delivery, much as its control over Postscript licensing enabled it to dominate desktop publishing so successfully?
Portables

Submission + - First Moblin v2 netbook launches (moblinzone.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will launch next week, possibly at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, or else the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon in Portland. Then, within the next couple of weeks, the Moblin Project will release the first stable release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May. Will Linux prove a viable alternative to Windows 7 on the low-powered, low-cost computing devices released for this holiday season?
Security

Submission + - Linux's big security blooper finally fixed? (moblinzone.com) 1

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: An architect of the Moblin Project has announced that Moblin 2.0 for netbooks and nettops is the first Linux distribution to run the X server as the logged-in user, rather than SUID'd to root. The fix to this decades-old security liability comes thanks to "NRX" (No-root X) technology reportedly developed by Intel, Red Hat, and others in the X community, and the Moblin-sponsored "Secure X" project. Besides making Linux netbooks a lot more snoop-proof, it seems like this could lead to an xhosting renaissance of sorts, since you wouldn't be risking the whole system just to open up a specific user's account to remote X servers.
Operating Systems

Submission + - PCLinuxOS 2009 goes gold (desktoplinux.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: After nearly two years, the PCLinuxOS project has achieved a major new release, PCLinuxOS 2009. The project is notable for maintaining a Linux hardware compatibility database, publishing a freely downloadable monthly Linux magazine, and selling hardware preinstalled with Linux. It boasts a pretty vibrant community, too, and is used by 3.2 percent of DesktopLinux readers, according to an ongoing reader survey there.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - $100 Linux wall-wart launches (linuxdevices.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: A $100 Linux wall wart could do to servers what netbooks did to notebooks. With the Marvell ShevaPlug, you get a completely open (hardware and software) Linux server resembling a typical wall-wart power adapter, but running Linux on a 1.2GHz CPU, with 512MB of RAM, and 512MB of Flash. I/O includes USB 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, while expansion is provided via an SDIO slot. The power draw is a nighlight-like 5 Watts. Marvell says it plans to give Linux developers everything they need to deliver "disruptive" services on the device. Thus the grid becomes the 'Net.
Portables

Submission + - Second netbook wave begins (windowsfordevices.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: Asus is taking pre-orders for a netbook based on Intel's second-generation platform, the secret-shrouded N280/GN40 chipset. Early product specs confirm that the second wave of netbooks are likely to offer faster graphics and lower power use, along with room for much, much larger batteries. The N280 apparently integrates the northbridge and CPU, meaning that the GPU moves to 45nm process technology, the FSB gets replaced by an on-chip interconnect, and overall board real-estate drops to a third of what it was previously (hence the ability to stuff an 8,700mAh battery into a 3-lbs. device). The right shift key is slightly bigger, too, though still no trackpoint pointer (guess I'll keep waiting).
Operating Systems

Submission + - Moblin 2 first impressions -- wow, boots fast! (desktoplinux.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. But two OSes on a PC is like a car with two steering wheels-- awkward. So, boot time is clearly something Linux and Windows will compete on in netbooks and computerized systems of all kinds. Well, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's release this week of Moblin 2, it definitely looks like "Advantage, Linux." The tools and test images are easy to download and try out for yourself, too. I mean, if booting your older laptop in a couple of seconds is of any interest...
Operating Systems

Submission + - Linux's role in Microsoft's decline (linuxdevices.com) 1

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Today, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux's role in Microsoft's misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: "Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too."
Businesses

Roku Box Adds HD, Grows Beyond Netflix 95

Posted by kdawson from the watch-anything-anywhere dept.
DeviceGuru writes "Roku has announced two free updates to its Internet-enabled Netflix movie-streaming set-top box. The initial update adds advanced compression capable of streaming HD video over average consumer broadband connections, while the second (expected during the first quarter of 2009) will add A/V streaming from sources other than Netflix (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, MSNBC, etc.). Roku faces growing competition from other providers of Internet-based video-on-demand STBs, such as Blockbuster's STB, Syabas's Popcorn Hour (aka NMT), AppleTV, and others. Roku hasn't said anything specific, but perhaps it'll partner with Boxee, which already provides a popular AppleTV hack."
Operating Systems

Submission + - OpenSUSE 11.1 license changes examined (desktoplinux.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: Novell's recent openSUSE 11.1 release includes a new end-user license agreement modeled after Fedora's EULA, says Community Manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier in this detailed interview. Zonker says distributions should apply the "open source principle" and standardize trademark agreements and EULA, similar to how the OSI sought to reduce open source license proliferation a few years back. But with Fedora and openSUSE being so different, can one size really fit all? And, will open source licenses ever finally get translated into languages besides English?

Comment Put i/o-intensive filesystems on a ramdisk? (Score 1) 137

by nerdyH (#25982231) Attached to: Optimizing Linux Use On a USB Flash Drive?
I/O to RAM is really fast compared to I/O to any block device (most USB keys appear to the host PC as block devices, because they have a little ARM7 or other low-power 16-bit MCU on them that emulates the IDE interface). So, maybe you could get a speedup by mounting any I/O intensive parts of your filesystem on a ramdisk. It might also save wear and tear on the flash (though MLC NAND is never going to be all that reliable). Here's an fstab excerpt showing one technique:
/dev/ram0 /tmp tmpfs defaults,nodev,nosuid 0 3
/dev/ram1 /var/run tmpfs defaults,nodev,nosuid 0 3
/dev/ram2 /var/log tmpfs defaults,nodev,nosuid 0 3
This makes three ramdisks with dynamic capacity, and mounts /tmp, /var/run, and /var/log on them. The next step would be to write something to serialize and unserialize the ramdisks at startup and shutdown, and optionally snapshot them from time to time to safeguard against power failure. This example uses the parts of a filesystem that'd be I/O intensive on a server, but I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing with your home directory or whatever else. You could profile your USB distro by instrumenting your kernel, or just list your recently touched files from time to time to get a sense of where the I/O is happening.

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