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LeopoldS

French National Police Force saves €2 million a year with Ubuntu | Canonical - 0 views

www.canonical.com/about-canonical/resources/case-studies/french-national-police-force-saves-€2-million-year-ubuntu

INF

shared by LeopoldS on 23 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • pacome delva on 25 Nov 10
     
    Be careful, the article is written by the company who did the migration to Ubuntu. Here is a comment by a police guy from IT (in french...). In brief he says that tyhe migration was not a problem for most of the people; exepc for some probleme with access. But it did cost money ! and the saving was not the main argument. "Personnellement concerné par la news qui n'en est pas une, je peux vous assurer que le message de Canonical est surtout commercial... Le choix d'Ubuntu est dû à son hégémonie et le fait que ce soit basé sur du Debian qui est considéré comme très stable. La distrib est d'une maintenance plus aisée que la plupart de celles qui ont été testées. "4500 postes" veut dire "4500 unités de gendarmerie" donc dans les brigades que vous connaissez... Pour ce qui est d'OpenOffice, le passage s'est fait assez tranquillement sauf pour les applis Access qui ont eu un peu de mal à passer sur le module Base...La plupart ont été reprise au sein d'applis php/mysql ou d'applis centralisées... Aujourd'hui, les gendarmes qui je le rappelle ne sont pas informaticiens mais vivent pour vous (au sens le plus strict je vous l'assure) utilisent donc firefox/thunderbird et oppenoffice en clients lourds, le reste étant des applis sur l'intranet ou "invisibles" pour l'utilisateur. Le passage à Ubuntu ne gène en rien dans l'utilisation car le trio précédemment cité est déjà connu et maîtrisé par nombre de mes collègues. Je ne suis pas censé m'exprimer en lieu et place de mes supérieurs mais à titre personnel, le choix d'Ubuntu est un choix intelligent car c'est une distribution avec une prise en main très accessible et avec une maintenance vraiment aisée pour les spécialistes informatiques dont je fais partie...Il ne faut pas oublier qu'une distribution plus élitiste aurait été maîtrisée par moins de monde et donc la maintenance aurait été plus coûteuse... Donc aujourd'hui nous "maîtrisons" cette part de notre infrastructure et la trans
  • Ma Ru on 25 Nov 10
     
    Lotus Notes doesn't run on Linux anyway...
Joris _

In Pictures: 10 Of Science's Biggest And Costliest Experiments - 2 views

www.forbes.com/...throughs-experiment_slide.html

space cost MAD

shared by Joris _ on 06 Dec 09 - No Cached
  • Joris _ on 06 Dec 09
     
    Half of them are space related!
pacome delva

A Battery Made With Paper - 0 views

sciencenow.sciencemag.org/...2

phy nrg nan carbon_nanotubes batteries

shared by pacome delva on 09 Dec 09 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Researchers are reporting that they've made batteries and other energy-storage devices by printing layers of carbon nanotube–based ink atop standard photocopy paper. The result is a highly conductive sheet that can carry a charge and be easily incorporated into a flexible battery. Because of paper's low cost, that could help lower the price of batteries used in electric vehicles, wind farms, and other renewable sources.
  • LeopoldS on 13 Dec 09
     
    can we use it for space :-) ?
Nicholas Lan

Nuclear experts clean radioactive site with Cillit Bang - 1 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ive-site-with-Cillit-Bang.html

NRG COTS spin-in

shared by Nicholas Lan on 10 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Nicholas Lan on 10 Dec 09
     
    Use of COTS products for low-cost nuclear reprocessing plant decommissioning. I suggest a brainstorming session for potential spin-in technologies involving walking around digros.
Francesco Biscani

What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? | January 2010 | Communications of t... - 3 views

cacm.acm.org/...fulltext

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
Dario Izzo liked it
  • Industry wants to rely on tried-and-true tools and techniques, but is also addicted to dreams of "silver bullets," "transformative breakthroughs," "killer apps," and so forth.
  • This leads to immense conservatism in the choice of basic tools (such as programming languages and operating systems) and a desire for monocultures (to minimize training and deployment costs).
  • The idea of software development as an assembly line manned by semi-skilled interchangeable workers is fundamentally flawed and wasteful.
  • Francesco Biscani on 15 Jan 10
     
    Nice opinion piece by the creator of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup. Substitute "industry" with "science" and many considerations still apply :)
  • Juxi Leitner on 18 Jan 10
     
    "for many, "programming" has become a strange combination of unprincipled hacking and invoking other people's libraries (with only the vaguest idea of what's going on). The notions of "maintenance" and "code quality" are typically forgotten or poorly understood. " ... seen so many of those students :( and ad "My suggestion is to define a structure of CS education based on a core plus specializations and application areas", I am not saying the austrian university system is good, but e.g. the CS degrees in Vienna are done like this, there is a core which is the same for everybody 4-5 semester, and then you specialise in e.g. software engineering or computational mgmt and so forth, and then after 2 semester you specialize again into one of I think 7 or 8 master degrees ... It does not make it easy for industry to hire people, as I have noticed, they sometimes really have no clue what the difference between Software Engineering is compared to Computational Intelligence, at least in HR :/
Juxi Leitner

Open Manufacturing - 6 views

openmanufacturing.org

open manufacturing technology

shared by Juxi Leitner on 24 Jan 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • LeopoldS on 25 Jan 10
     
    who in the group will build the first fabber? bets are open ...
  • ...4 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 25 Jan 10
     
    and btw: still ahve to organise the visit to the rapid prototyping machine of the CDF ...
  • Juxi Leitner on 01 Mar 10
     
    is that an official contest ;) yeah that visit would be interesting!
  • LeopoldS on 01 Mar 10
     
    please remind me on Thursday or Friday - thanks
  • pacome delva on 02 Mar 10
     
    I have a friend who has one. With one you can build most of the pieces to build another one, so he proposed me... You still have to buy some pieces but it reduces the cost a lot ! interested ???
  • LeopoldS on 02 Mar 10
     
    yes! very much so!!! is he in Holland? since would also probably be nice to get some first hand experience from him/her ....
  • pacome delva on 05 Mar 10
     
    but what would we do with it...? any idea ?
Luís F. Simões

Crowdfund a Moon Monolith Mission? - Slashdot - 1 views

idle.slashdot.org/...wdfund-a-Moon-Monolith-Mission

2001 monolith moon crowdsourcing private-spaceflight sci-fi fun

shared by Luís F. Simões on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Jamie found a somewhat amusing little essay on putting together a crowd-sourced mission to put a monolith on the moon. The author estimates it would cost half a billion dollars, which is a sum he thinks could be raised.
  • Let's raise the stakes. I propose raising half a trillion dollars to develop a time machine and put a monolith in Olduvai Gorge three million years in the past to influence Astralopithecus Afarensis evolution. Our very existence might depend on it.
Giusi Schiavone

cost-utility analysis of abolishing the law of gravity - 3 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...20071204s00038p1536.pdf

anti-gravity

shared by Giusi Schiavone on 19 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Giusi Schiavone on 19 Jan 11
     
    Crazy and funny
Nicholas Lan

Betting on Green - 5 views

www.economist.com/18304172

technology economics innovation

shared by Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11
     
    breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    interesting guy indeed ... "Forget today's green technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and smart grids, in other words. None meets what Mr Khosla calls the "Chindia price"-the price at which people in China and India will buy them without a subsidy. "Everything's a toy until it reaches that point," he says. I also like this one since its a bit like ACT topic selection: ""I am only interested in technologies that have a 90% chance of failure but, if they do succeed, would change the infrastructure of society in some radical way," he says." should we propose SPS to him ? :-)
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    one more: ""I never compute returns. If you start forecasting cash flows, you lose innovation, you lose instinct. You average yourself down to mediocrity." "I've had many more failures than successes in my life," admits Mr Khosla. "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed."
  • Nicholas Lan on 17 Mar 11
     
    indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.
  • Ma Ru on 25 Apr 11
     
    "Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)
Luís F. Simões

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen - 10 views

launch.is/...dangerous-project-weve-ev.html

bitcoin p2p money disruptive

shared by Luís F. Simões on 16 May 11 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • After month of research and discovery, we’ve learned the following:1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.
  • The benefits of a currency like this:a) Your coins can’t be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)b) Your coins can’t be trackedc) Your coins can’t be taxedd) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)
  • An individual with the name -- or perhaps handle -- of Satoshi Nakamoto first wrote about bitcoins in a paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • * We made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who believe in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free speech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science over religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people who build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and Wikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves. They are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are bought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They include splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of hacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after Sony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.
  • Ma Ru on 17 May 11
     
    Sounds good!
  • ...9 more comments...
  • pacome delva on 18 May 11
     
    wow it's frigthening! it's the dream of every anarchist, every drug, arm, human dealer! the world made as a global fiscal paradise... the idea is clever however it will not replace real money because 1 - no one will build a fortune on bitcoin if a technological breakthrough can ruin them 2 - government never allowed parallel money to flourish on their territory, so it will be almost impossible to change bitcoin against euros or dollars
  • Nicholas Lan on 18 May 11
     
    interesting stuff anyone read cryptonomicon by neal stephenson? similar theme.
  • Luís F. Simões on 18 May 11
     
    :) yes. One of the comments on reddit was precisely drawing the parallels with Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash / Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon. Interesting stuff indeed. It has a lot of potential for misuse, but also opens up new possibilities. We've discussed recently how emerging technologies will drive social change. Whether it's the likes of NSA / CIA who will benefit the most from the Twitters, Facebooks and so on, by gaining greater power for control, or whether individuals are being empowered to at least an identical degree. We saw last year VISA / PayPal censoring WikiLeaks... Well, here's a way for any individual to support such an organization, in a fully anonymous and uncontrollable way...
  • tvinko on 18 May 11
     
    One of my colleagues has made a nice, short write-up about BitCoin: http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~victor/bitcoin.html
  • LeopoldS on 18 May 11
     
    very nice analysis indeed - thanks Tamas for sharing it!
  • pacome delva on 20 May 11
     
    mmm I'm not an expert but it seemed to me that, even if these criticisms are true, there is one fundamental difference between the money you exchange on internet via your bank, and bitcoins. The first one is virtual money and the second one aims at being real, physical, money, even if digital, in the same way as banknotes, coins, or gold.
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 20 May 11
     
    An algorithm wanna-be central bank issuing untraceable tax free money between internet users? not more likely than the end of the world supposed to take place tomorrow, in my opinion. Algorithms don't usually assault women though !:P
  • LeopoldS on 21 May 11
     
    well, most money is anyway just virtual and only based on expectations and trust ... (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply) and thus if people trust that this "money" has some value in the sense that they can get something of value to them in exchange, then not much more is needed it seems to me ...
  • pacome delva on 23 May 11
     
    @Leopold: ok let's use the rigth words then. Bitcoin aim at being a currency ("physical objects generally accepted as a medium of exchange" from wikipedia), different than the "demand deposit". In the article proposed by Tamas he compares what cannot be compared (currencies, demand deposits and their mean of exchange). The interesting question is wether one can create a digital currency which is too difficult to counterfeit. As far as I know, there is no existing digital currency except this bitcoins (and maybe the currencies from games as second life and others, but which are of limited use in real world).
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 23 May 11
     
    well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?
  • pacome delva on 23 May 11
     
    well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...
Luzi Bergamin

DIY Spy Drone Sniffs Wi-Fi, Intercepts Phone Calls | Threat Level | Wired.com - 2 views

www.wired.com/...blackhat-drone

technology spy

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 05 Aug 11
     
    Forget about cube-sats, this is the low cost version of your personal spying device...
Juxi Leitner

Technology Review: Startup That Builds Biological Parts - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...23567

bio technology

shared by Juxi Leitner on 06 Oct 09 - Cached
  • "Think of it as rapid prototyping in biology--we make the part, test it, and then expand on it," says Reshma Shetty, one of the company's cofounders. "You can spend more time thinking about the design, rather than doing the grunt work of making DNA." A very simple project, such as assembling two pieces of DNA, might cost $100, with prices increasing from there.
LeopoldS

Focus Fusion Society: Developing an environmentally safe, clean, low cost, unlimited e... - 0 views

focusfusion.org

nuclear NRG fusion fission plasma

shared by LeopoldS on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 26 Oct 09
     
    is this just another cold fusion crap or something we could have a closer look at .... still not clear to me ... anybody?
Francesco Biscani

Robot Armada Might Scale New Worlds - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...091027195507.htm

ai

shared by Francesco Biscani on 28 Oct 09 - Cached
  • We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time.
Joris _

U.S. Should Prepare for Mars With Asteroid Flight, Panel Says - Bloomberg.com - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...news

MAD asteroids Mars

shared by Joris _ on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The “most cost effective” scenario is a plan to visit asteroids and potential sites for future spacecraft fuel depots and fly over Mars
LeopoldS

Access : Coherent emission of light by thermal sources : Nature - 0 views

www.nature.com/...416061a.html

SPS NRG WPT

shared by LeopoldS on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 13 Sep 09
     
    how "large" could these distances be? - ready for SPS?
  • pacome delva on 14 Sep 09
     
    I don't think that the distance is the important criteria... It seems that the directivity is of the order of a laser one, so the divergence will be equivalent. Perhaps the important criteria is that the cost of these type of light sources could be cheaper...? and also perhaps what power transmission is achievable? It seems also that now that this concept could be used for to focus cheap lasers, instead of using complex optics in cd-rom players, etc... see http://news.softpedia.com/news/Highly-Directional-Semiconductor-Laser-Created-at-Harvard-90839.shtml
ESA ACT

SPACE.com -- Delays and Cost Overruns Epidemic at NASA, Former Official Charges - 0 views

www.space.com/...081205-msl-delay-nasa.html

NASA space Mars exploration policy

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    we could say to them " welcome to the club" ...
LeopoldS

SpaceX Targets 2013 for Launch of Falcon Heavy | SpaceNews.com - 1 views

spacenews.com/...pacex-launch-falcon-heavy.html

spacex launcher

shared by LeopoldS on 05 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 05 Apr 11
     
    big big booster coming ... !
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Joris _ on 06 Apr 11
     
    In similar story (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-spacex-rocket-elon-musk-20110405,0,3234336.story) the quote: " "This is a rocket of truly huge scale," said Musk, adding it would have the capability to one day enable moon or Mars missions." tells a lot about the ambition of it...
  • Luís F. Simões on 17 Apr 11
     
    even bigger booster also coming: China Aims To Build World's Largest Rocket "Back in March, China revealed it is studying the feasibility of designing the most powerful carrier rocket in history for making a manned moon landing and exploring deep space, according to Liang Xiaohong, vice head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. The rocket is envisaged to have a payload of 130 tonnes, five times larger than that of China's current largest rocket. This rocket, if built, will eclipse the 53 tonne capacity of the planned Falcon 9 Heavy from SpaceX. It will even surpass the largest rocket ever built, the 119-tonne Saturn V."
  • LeopoldS on 18 Apr 11
     
    still only "is studying the feasibility of designing a powerful carrier rocket" - we could easily do the same at no cost almost ... but still ... they might be serious ...
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