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Comment Re:profiles vs fast user switching (Score 1) 326

by nitecoder (#26404233) Attached to: Google Releases Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
I would love to be able to use GMail in one window and search Google in another, yet not have my searches associated with my gmail user id. If Google went ahead and implemented this feature in its own browser, my hat is really off to them! I thought they very much liked the current situation where everyone's activity relentlessly ends up being yoked to their google user id.

Comment A good resource to research this issue (Score 2, Informative) 737

by nitecoder (#26029541) Attached to: What the Papers Don't Say About Vaccines
I already posted as a reply to one of the comments, but I want to put this at the top level as well. If you are interested in this issue, there is a good book: http://www.amazon.com/Vaccine-Book-Decision-Parenting-Library/dp/0316017507

Also, see Dr. Sears' blog with a lot of current information http://www.askdrsears.com/thevaccinebook/

The author has spent may years of his practice (he is a pediatrician) to study in detail how each vaccine is made, what variants are available, which ingredients are present, what are the side effects, and when does the vaccine need to be administered. For each vaccine, he summarizes the reasons to take it, reasons to avoid it, and then gives his own recommendation.

Overall, I feel he provides a great overview of the available information to allow parents to make an informed choice.

Comment Good resource if you are really interested (Score 1) 737

by nitecoder (#26029287) Attached to: What the Papers Don't Say About Vaccines
This is a very good resources that presents both sides of the issue without assuming that either one of the crazy or criminal a priori: http://www.amazon.com/Vaccine-Book-Decision-Parenting-Library/dp/0316017507
And for the "science is great" camp out here - believe it or not, but not all of the people who may disagree with you on this issue are uneducated ignorant morons. In fact, if take your head out of your textbooks and look around, you might find the world is not quite as black and white as the letters on those pages lead you to believe.
Google

Google Honors Veterans Day, Finally 693

Posted by kdawson from the that-wasn't-so-hard-was-it dept.
theodp writes "It took nearly a decade, but Google has done a turnabout and is honoring Veterans Day with a special holiday design for its famous logo. Users who log onto Google's home page are greeted with three World War I-era helmets capping the letters 'o' and 'e' in Google's name. The decoration is a marked departure for the company, which has come under fire from veterans' groups for ignoring American holidays such as Veterans Day and Memorial Day since Google's inception in 1999."
Data Storage

Laptop/Server Data Synchronization? 305

Posted by kdawson from the two-way-update dept.
gbr writes "I've been trying to automatically synchronize data between a laptop and a server. When the laptop is connected to the network, I want all writes to automatically propagate across to the server. When the laptop is disconnected I want the laptop user to continue working with the local data. When the laptop is reconnected, I want the data to automatically re-sync. The issue is, the data on the server may have changed as well, which needs to propagate back to the laptop. The data doesn't contain anything too special, no database tables etc. It does contain binary data such as executables and word processing documents. I've looked at ChironFS, Unison file sync, and drbd. ChironFS needs a manual rebuild if a connection fails, and the user needs to know which machine contains the correct data. Unison requires the user to initiate the synchronization process manually every time, and drbd is just not meant for the job at hand. How do you automatically, and invisibly to the user (except in the case of conflicts), synchronize between a laptop and a server?"
Supercomputing

Quantum Computing and Optically Controlled Electrons 74

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
eldavojohn writes "Researchers have released a new paper on quantum computing theorizing how to use optically controlled electrons to make an ultrafast quantum computer. From the article, "Scientists have designed a scheme to create one of the fastest quantum computers to date using light pulses to rotate electron spins, which serve as quantum bits. This technique improves the overall clock rate of the quantum computer, which could lead to the fastest potentially scalable quantum computing scheme of which the scientists are aware.""
Education

Real Open Source Applications for Education? 185

Posted by kdawson from the stacking-the-blocks dept.
openeducation writes "I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of open source applications that are alternatives to the large and costly commercial packages. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for a while, is part of the solution stack. They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source."
The Internet

Super-Fast RDF Search Engine Developed 144

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the google-to-buy-ireland dept.
The Register is reporting that Irish researchers have developed a new high-speed RDF search engine capable of answering search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second. "'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. 'These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.'"
Portables

OLPC Available to the Public Early 2008 192

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the but-is-it-a-tax-writeoff dept.
Zoxed writes "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC will be available to the public early next year on a buy-2-get-1 basis through eBay. With its cheap price, fully open spec. and full/open hardware support for Linux, expandability, 2W rating and LinuxBIOS booting it sounds like an embedded-Linux hackers favorite new toy."
Education

MIT's OpenCourseWare Program 167

Posted by kdawson from the let-a-thousand-scholars-bloom dept.
Kent Simon writes "Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare, an initiative to share all of their educational resources with the public. This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free, open, and available. It's a great resource for people looking to improve their knowledge of our world. OpenCourseWare should prove exceptionally beneficial to those who may not be able to afford the quality of education offered at a school like MIT. Here's a link to all currently available courses. It is expected that by the end of the year every course offered at MIT will be available on the OpenCourseWare site, including lecture notes, homework assignments, and exams. OpenCourseWare is not offered to replace collegiate education, but rather to spread knowledge freely."
Hardware Hacking

A 3D Printer On Every Desktop? 426

Posted by kdawson from the abs-fab dept.
holy_calamity writes "Two Cornell researchers have designed an open source 3D printer that costs just $2,400. The self-assembly kit is part of what they call the Fab@Home project — they hope it will spark development of rapid prototyping for the consumer market in the same way the Altair 8800 did for personal computing in seventies." Here is a video showing a completed machine constructing a silicone bulb (16-MB WMV).
Update: 01/10 04:02 GMT by KD : The developers of this kit are at Cornell, not Carnegie Mellon University as the original post erroneously stated.
Software

Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org 370

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the patent-office-dot-org dept.
l2718 writes to mention that In the wake of their recent deal with Microsoft, Novell has announced a new version of OpenOffice.org which will support Microsoft's planned Office formal, Open XML. From the article: "The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites."

Microsoft Invites Black Hats into Vista 189

Posted by Zonk from the you-may-want-to-think-this-through dept.
gtzpower writes "Microsoft is inviting hackers to 'Take Your Best Shot' at Vista. 'You need to touch it, feel it,' Andrew Cushman, Microsoft's director of security outreach, said during a talk at the Black Hat computer-security conference. 'We're here to show our work.'" From the article: "A security team with oversight of every Microsoft product — from its Xbox video game console to its Word program for creating documents — has broad authority to block shipments until they pass security tests. The company also hosts two internal conferences a year so some of the world's top security experts can share the latest research on computer attacks." Essentially a tie-in with an article we discussed yesterday.

Tracking the Congressional Attention Span 89

Posted by CowboyNeal from the hot-button-issues dept.
Turismo writes "Ars Technica covers a new research project that uses computers to look at 70 million words from the Congressional Record. The project's goal was to track what our representatives were talking about at any given time, and researchers were able to do it without human training or intervention. From the article: '...researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. In fact, the topic produced the most number of words published in a single "day" of the Congressional Record: 230,000 on November 12, 2003.' It looks like automated topic analysis has truly arrived."

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