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Software

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

Feed Engadget: Nikon's Coolpix S51c with a lick of WiFi sugar (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Mmm mm, WiFi and digital photography go together like brown on Zune (whatever that means). Sprinkle in a 3-inch LCD, optical lens shift vibration reduction, SDHC expansion, and Nikon's new EXPEED image processing and you've got Nikon's Coolpix S51c. Under the hood you'll find an 8.1 megapixel, 1/2.5-inch CCD pumping away in support of that 3x Zoom-NIKKOR glass. All well and good, but the WiFi seems limited to pushing photos up to Nikon's new "My Picturetown" service only. At least from there it "supports picture transfer to various imaging devices as well as Internet services." €299/$407 -- less if you opt for the WiFi-less S51.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Engadget: LG's new 5000:1 LCDs coming your way (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Displays


LG is touting its fancy new Digital Fine Contrast tech today, which gives it a new "world's highest" contrast ratio, at 5000:1. And who are we go argue with numbers like those? LG is planning to implement the tech into all of its monitors, except for the M8W, L18, L196WS and Fantasy Series. Along with the existing displays getting the DFC boost, LG has two new displays sporting the tech: the 20-inch USB-based L206WU pictured -- which showed up in the States last month -- and the 22-inch L227WT. The latter display includes Wide Color Gamut tech for showing off 100 percent of the NTSC spectrum, and a 2ms response time. The L206WU will be out globally in October, while the L227WT will hit the scene in November. No word on prices.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Engadget: Honeywell, in cooperation with the Borg, develop self-healing HDMI cable (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: HDTV

Yesterday there was Monster Cable's Speed-Rated HDMI cables and today, Honeywell's CURxE self-healing cable. Sounds like someone in the marketing department decided that the error correcting built into the HDMI spec wasn't good 'nough and told the engineers to incorporate a little chip into the cable. Of course brightly colored LEDs were added to help potential suckers justify the extra expense. The last set of enhanced HDMI equipped with LEDs and "chips" didn't help the picture at all; it made the picture worse. We don't know how much these HDMI cables are going to retail for or when they are going to be available but honestly, even if we did, we highly doubt anyone would rush out and pick a set up. We have a bad feeling with CEDIA right around the corner, this is only the beginning of off the wall, greed-driven HDMI marketing.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Submission + - Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years... (cnn.com)

Submitted by
teambpsi
teambpsi writes: "Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," Mark Badau said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

Never in our imagination? Clearly this guy doesn't get enough sci-fi in his diet :)"
KDE

Submission + - DIY Linux Live CD -- the Really Easy Way!

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: A new release candidate of Custom NimbleX 2 became available this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images — in minutes! NimbleX is a small-footprint distribution based on Slackware Linux, with the addition of "linux-live" scripts. It can boot from business-card CDs, USB thumb drives, MP3 players, or from over a network, and it appears to run entirely from RAM. One especially interesting feature of the NimbleX live CD is that it allows access to the hard drive on the system on which it boots — making it a useful system troubleshooting tool, but also potentially dangerous.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Contest gets SysAdmins to sing their own praises (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
bednarz
bednarz writes: "To the musically inclined, here's a contest for you. It's part of the annual SysAdmin of the Year award and asks entrants to put the daily duties of systems administrators to music. Here's a sample, credited to Eric "Maverick" Garner: "I download all the patches and fixes/ and countless system updates/ I push 'em out to all the servers/ So nobody escalates." The chorus goes even further to sing the praises of the system administrator: "SysAdmin Rockstar, I'm your IT go-to guy/ SysAdmin Rockstar, I'll make it work do or die." First prize gets a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate. Network World has the story. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/083007-sysad mins-singing-contest.html"

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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