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Comment MR Spectroscopy (Score 2) 23

The article summary is incorrect. MR Spectroscopy (MRS) is used today to measure molecules inside the brain. Resolution is not great for 3D MRS in clinical applications (due to the tradeoff between SNR and resolution, acquisition times are slow), but it's more than high enough to distinguish between different regions of the brain. And it's very common to perform single-voxel imaging and only get the spectroscopy for a given piece of tissue - for example, where a tumor is located.

MRS easily detects metabolites and ratios, like choline, NAA, as well as things like lipids, and alcohols. It requires expensive scanners, but it works and is used routinely in brain imaging today. The article mentions something that does not work clinically, and is being demonstrated in a lab with a piece of meat. The technology in the article is not a "first step" to understanding molecules in the brain, because we already have that technology today with MRS.

Comment Qt/Trolletch (Score 4, Insightful) 136

I guess I'm glad they spun off Qt before going back and regressing past the paid-commercial-development trolltech days for Qt.

Admittedly Trolltech used to offer free GPL noncommercial Qt licenses, but that sort of licensing isn't even possible with Windows Phone. Still painful to see open source transition into the most closed model of all.

Comment Confirmation Bias - better title (Score 4, Insightful) 285

One in five macs where people chose to install antivirus software have (inactive) Windows malware.

Which is a bit like saying "one in five cars brought to the mechanic get serviced for something." The survey is skewed due to the sample group - most Mac users never install any anti-virus software.

The only places I've seen it installed are on computers in corporate environments where there are already viruses being passed around commonly via email attachment, USB stick, and network drives. These places install antivirus on Macs so users don't forward a virus to Windows users - and it sounds like from this survey, that's with good reason.

Apple's Mail software (and Microsoft's Outlook for Mac) cache attachments locally on the user's disk, so it's very easy to "have" malware and viruses if you just receive email (even without opening it).

It's a bit ridiculous to claim they are "infected" however, and again, the sample group is not really representative. That said, I don't think Macs are in any way immune from viruses. Apple's iOS-like sandboxing and signed-app requirements would likely help OS X considerably in this regard, but of course every decision that increases security by removing control from the user also infuriates free/open software proponents and hackers. Think of jailbreaking iOS and how Apple patches security holes - this is maddening for people who want to jailbreak, but is ultimately an attempt to fix a potential infection vector.

Comment Citrix + Amazon (Score 4, Interesting) 29

Citrix already has a close relationship with Amazon. They have testing images available, white papers on how to integrate private and public EC2 cloud "farms" with your existing Citrix infrastructure, and not only promote Amazon AWS/EC2 for corporate usage, but make it easy for admins to draw on it as a test base for learning and playing with their new software offerings.

It wouldn't surprise me if they have plans to tie in per hour or other commoditized Citrix licensing with Amazon at some point in the future.

As they do all of this they will inevitably move closer towards Amazon and further away from Amazon's competitors. I don't see this as a surprising development.

I think is less about OpenStack and its relative merits and detriments, and more about Citrix and their corporate partnerships and strategic direction.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 265

ogg is not hardware accelerated on your laptop, and if you're still using a PDA then you're a couple generations back anyways.

All modern smartphones (anything that runs android, pre, iPhone, even most of RIM's stuff) play H.264 and have hardware acceleration for it, many "dumbphones" even play H.264.

Netbooks all have H.264 hardware acceleration...

sorry that your decade old 3Com Palm Pilot doesn't play HD video, don't blame google for that one.

Comment Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score 1) 265

To clarify, from the site

Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)

*Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)

Ads will still play, and will in fact inflict flash on you. There's really no good way right now to force people to watch advertisements if the whole video is H.264 (since you could just scrub past the ads), so I can understand this, even if I don't like it.

What they'll probably eventually do is break the video up into a bunch of shorter videos, with ads in between. Then they can load each part in sequence, and enforce a timer on the ad portion so even if you scrub through the ad you still have to wait for the timer.

Comment This is fantastic news (Score 1) 265

I've been using ClickToFlash with safari for a long time now, which suppresses the flash in youtube videos and plays them in H.264 (when possible) directly. This is a tremendous CPU boon on a netbook - I can't play flash, HD or otherwise, fullscreen, but quicktime plays H.264 just fine. Flash is a horrible monster, and with all the vulnerabilities and instability that it brings along with it, the faster youtube moves away from it, the better.
Security

SSLStrip Now In the Wild 208

An anonymous reader writes "Moxie Marlinspike, who last week presented his controversial SSL stripping attacks at Black Hat Federal, appears to have released his much-anticipated demonstration tool for performing MITM attacks against would-be SSL connections. This vulnerability has been met with everything from calls for more widespread EV certificate deployment to an even more fervent push for DNSSEC."
Input Devices

Brain Control Headset for Gamers 152

gbjbaanb writes "Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone. Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le [president of US/Australian firm Emotiv] said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming. 'This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp,' she said. 'It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars.'" Wait until the government can get warrantless wiretaps on the logs of those things.
Programming

Microsoft Releases Office Binary Formats 259

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Obsolete Technical Skills 603

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Robert Scoble had an interesting post on his blog a few days ago on obsolete technical skills — 'things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.' Scoble's initial list included dialing a rotary phone, using carbon paper to make copies, and changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor. The list has now been expanded into a wiki with a much larger list of these obsolete skills that includes resolving IRQ conflicts on a mother board, assembly language programming, and stacking a quarter on an arcade game to indicate you have next. We're invited to contribute more."
Space

Milky Way Is Twice the Size We Thought 301

Peter writes to tell us about a research group at the University of Sydney in Australia, who in the middle of some calculation wanted to check the numbers everybody uses for the thickness of our galaxy at the core. Using data available freely on the Internet and analyzing it in a spreadsheet, they discovered in a matter of hours that the Milky Way is 12,000 light years thick, vs. the 6,000 that had been the consensus number for some time.

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