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Top news on 24 September 2009 |
Best Tablet PC For Classroom Instruction?
dostert writes "With all of the recent hype of multitouch notebooks, the Apple Tablet, the Microsoft Courier, and the CrunchPad, I've been a bit curious about what happened to the good old pen and slate tablet PCs. I'm a mathematics professor at a small college and have been searching for a good cheap tablet (under $1000) which I can use to lecture, record the lecture notes along with my voice, and post up video lectures for the class. I have seen some suggestions, but many are large scale implementations at state universities, something my small private college clearly cannot afford. All I have been able to find is either tiny netbooks (like the new Asus T91), expensive full featured tablets (like the Dell XT), or multitouch tablets, that really wouldn't allow for the type of precision mathematics needs. I know a Sympodium device would work great, but we really can't afford to put one of those in each room, so something portable would be ideal. All I've been left with is considering an HP tx series. It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime, and HP, Fujitsu, and Dell are just doing incremental updates to their old designs. Does anyone have experience with this?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One Telescope Per Child
An anonymous reader writes "It seems one-<object>-per-child goes beyond laptops. A project from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has designed a high-quality, $20 telescope they're calling the Galileoscope, hoping to spark interest in astronomy among kids and make good scopes available to many who otherwise could not afford one. But as OLPC learned, it's not that easy; they are struggling to get enough volume to get production ramped up and costs down, resorting to tricks like auctioning off a few autographed ones, and trying Give-One-Get-One."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ISP Emails Customer Database To Thousands
Barence writes "British ISP Demon Internet has mistakenly sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of more than 3,600 customers with one of its new ebills. The spreadsheet contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system. It was attached to an email explaining how to use the new system. Police forces and NHS trusts are among the email addresses listed in the database. A spokesman for Demon Internet confirmed that the company "was aware this happened this morning"."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Newly Declassified FBI Docs Reveal Predictive Data System
An anonymous reader writes 'Newly declassified documents show that the FBI is developing a data-mining system to uncover terror sleeper cells. Among the 1.6 billion records in the National Security Analysis Center — tens of thousands of travel records, including hotel and airline records. Other revelations in the documents uncovered by a Wired.com FOIA request show that the feds want to expand the system for use in cyber-crime investigations, and it's already been used to scrutinize helicopter pilots and Philly cab drivers. The system has eerie resemblances to DARPA's once-banned Total Information Awareness program."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
HD Video From the Edge of Space, On the Cheap
SoundDoc75 links to a page describing the motivations and problem-solving behind "a 10-minute HD video taken on August 24th with a Canon Vixia HF20 HD camera suspended from a 1500g hydrogen balloon and launched near Edmonton, Alberta. This is the first known amateur video taken from this height — 107,145 feet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Barence writes "Mozilla has announced that its plans to bring Office 2007's Ribbon interface to Firefox, as it looks to tidy up its 'dated' browser. 'Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menu bar is going away,' notes Mozilla in its plans for revamping the Firefox user interface. '[It will] be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon, [which is] now in Paint and WordPad, too.' The change will also bring Windows' Aero Glass effects to the browser."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Coverity Report Finds OSS Bug Density Down Since 2006
eldavojohn writes "In 2008, static analysis company Coverity analyzed security issues in open source applications. Their recent study of 11.5 billion lines of open source code reveal that between 2006 and 2009 static analysis defect density is down in open source. The numbers say that open source defects have dropped from one in 3,333 lines of code to one in 4,000 lines of code. If you enter some basic information, you can get the complimentary report that has more analysis and puts three projects at the top tier in quality of the 280 open source projects: Samba, tor, OpenPAM, and Ruby. While Coverity has developed automated error checking for Linux, their static analysis seems to be indifferent toward open source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nominum Calls Open Source DNS "a Recipe For Problems"
Raindeer writes "Commercial DNS software provider Nominum, in an effort to promote its new cloud-based DNS service, SKYE, has slandered all open source/freeware DNS packages. It said: 'Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse. ... So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems.' This has the DNS community fuming. Especially when you consider that Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS cache poisoning problem of last year, something PowerDNS, MaraDNS and DJBDNS (all open source) weren't vulnerable to."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Radar Map of Buried Mars Layers Confirms Climate Cycles
Matt_dk writes "A radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has essentially looked below the surface of the Red Planet's north-polar ice cap, and found data to confirm theoretical models of Martian climate swings during the past few million years. The new, three-dimensional map using 358 radar observations provides a cross-sectional view of the north-polar layered deposits. 'The radar has been giving us spectacular results,' said Jeffrey Plaut of JPL, a member of the science team for the Shallow Radar instrument. 'We have mapped continuous underground layers in three dimensions across a vast area.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMD Radeon HD 5870 Adds DX11, Multi-Monitor Gaming
Vigile writes "Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles and their dominating hold on developers. Today AMD is releasing the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card based on the Evergreen-series of GPUs first demonstrated in June. Besides offering best-in-class performance for a single-GPU graphics board, the new card is easily the most power efficient in terms of idle power consumption and performance per watt. Not only that, but AMD has introduced new features that could help keep PC gaming in the spotlight, including the first DirectX 11 implementation and a very impressive multi-monitor gaming technology, Eyefinity, which we discussed earlier this month. The review at PC Perspective includes the full gamut of gaming benchmarks in both single- and dual-GPU configurations as well as videos of Eyefinity running on three 30" displays."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Judge Rejects Approval of Engineered Sugar Beets
countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wolfenstein Being Recalled In Germany
D1gital_Prob3 tips news that Activision's recently-released shooter, Wolfenstein, is being recalled in Germany due to the appearance of swastikas in the game. Such symbols are banned in Germany, and the German version of the game went through heavy editing to remove them. Apparently, they missed some. Activision said, "Although it is not a conspicuous element in the normal game ... we have decided to take this game immediately from the German market." Reader eldavojohn points out a review that has screenshot comparisons between the two versions of the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Delay, Renegotiation Sought For Google Books Settlement
Miracle Jones writes "The Google Books settlement has been removed from consideration by Google and the Authors Guild after the DoJ made it crystal clear that the settlement would not be ratified 'as is' due to foreign rights, privacy, and antitrust reasons. The October 7th 'fairness hearing' has been canceled, and the next step is a November 6th 'status hearing' where the plaintiffs will reveal changes to the new settlement, such as how they plan to make it more fair, legal, and inclusive, and whether or not they will need to notify all the members of the class action lawsuit (7 million writers or so) yet again as a result of the changes. Some people are very happy about this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Early Details On Courier, Microsoft's Take On a Tablet
rbanffy points out an article on Gizmodo about Courier, a tablet (or more accurately, a booklet) in development at Microsoft. "The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre." A concept video shows off the ability to use the two different screens for separate purposes, like browsing the web or a photo album on the left and using the right as a notepad or workspace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"
CWmike writes "They aren't selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn't too far off, as the costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use. Silicon Graphics International on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory. This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won't put it on the Top 500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. A key feature instead is the system's ease of use."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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