Archive for January, 2009

Open Source Software For Experimental Physics?

jmizrahi writes “I’ve recently started working in experimental physics. Quite a few programs are used in the lab for assorted purposes — Labview, Igor, Inventor, Eagle, to name just a few. They are all proprietary. This seems to be standard practice, which surprised me. Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific […]

LimeWire’s Mark Gorton Brings Open-Source To Urban Planning

mytrip writes to tell us that Mark Gorton of LimeWire fame is translating his knowledge from moving bits to moving people. Taking profits earned from his software business, Gorton is applying them to projects aimed at making urban transportation safer, faster, and more sustainable. “That’s not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton’s vision […]

If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins

Julie188 writes “Microsoft blogger Mitchell Ashley, who has been using Windows 7 full-time, predicts that Windows 7 will fail to lure XP users away from their beloved, aging operating system — after all, Windows 7 is little more than what Vista should have been, when it shipped two years ago. But eventually old PCs must […]

Lucene and SOLR Get Commercial Support

ruphus13 writes “Two of the technical leads and core committers of the Lucene Project have launched Lucid Imagination, a venture backed company now offering commercial versions of Lucene and SOLR in the hopes of making it the de facto choice of search technologies used by companies within their products. ‘The Lucene search library ranks amongst […]

Google Unofficially Announces GDrive By Leaked Code

An anonymous reader writes “Google has unofficially announced the GDrive by source code. In an in-direct way, Google has publicly advertised the new, much-anticipated online storage drive called the GDrive. If you take a look at the source code of some javascript within the Google Pack, you will clearly see the GDrive referenced. The code […]

Startup Hopes To Crowd-Source the Developing World

GalaticGrub writes “Technology Review has an article about a startup that wants to build a business out of crowd-sourcing the developing world. The company, called txteagle, seems to be interested mainly in using local knowledge to translate information into less common languages. The Finnish cell-phone company Nokia is a partner in the project, and CEO […]

Lie Detector Company Threatens Critical Scientists With Suit

An anonymous reader writes “The Swedish newspaper DN reports that the Israeli company Nemesysco has sent letters to researchers at the University of Stockholm, threatening legal action if they do not stop publishing findings (Google translation). An article called ‘Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously’ was pulled by the publisher […]

More Claims From NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice

eldavojohn writes “Russell Tice, former NSA employee & whistleblower, has revealed yet more details claiming that wiretapping was combined with credit card data to target civilians. He also suggests the CEOs of major companies hold the truth: ‘To get at what’s really going on here, the CEOs of these telecom companies, and also of the […]

When To Consider Taking Shares In an IT Company ?

pgpark writes “I’ve been working as a key resource for a small IT consulting firm in the US. While the job has been interesting and the company’s growth quite impressive over the last few years, it’s been almost half a dozen years now and being ready for something new, I was ready to quit for […]

CMU Video Conference System Gets 3D From Cheap Webcams

Hesham writes “Carnegie Mellon University’s HCI Institute just released details on their “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-style” 3D video conferencing application. Considering how stale development has been in this field, this research seems like a nice solid step towards immersive telepresence. I was really disappointed with the “state-of-the-art” systems demoed at CES this year — they are all still […]