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Medicine

Submission + - The new market for life-saving kidney-swap chains (miller-mccune.com)

Submitted by
John Mecklin
John Mecklin writes: "Using game theory and market-design software, doctors are arranging kidney-transplant "swaps" — sometimes in long chains — to give more people with renal disease better transplant options and healthier futures. Kidney transplants are the treatment of choice for people with end-stage renal failure, kept alive — barely — with weekly rounds of debilitating dialysis treatments, and nationally, some 78,000 people await transplants. Doctors prefer to use kidneys from live donors because on average they last nearly twice as long as transplants from cadavers, but the need for live kidneys outstrips the supply. To increase the number of live-kidney transplants, doctors are turning to what are known as paired exchanges and even creating chains of exchanges among strangers that link together as many as 10 pairs of live donors and recipients. This push to boost the number of live transplants is improving and even saving lives — but creating logistical and ethical concerns, too."
NASA

Submission + - Extrasolar planet was hiding in old Hubble image (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by
Kristina at Science News
Kristina at Science News writes: "A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture. After ground-based telescopes found three planets orbiting the young star HR 8799, a team took that information and reprocessed some 11-year-old Hubble Space Telescope images. Voila. There was one of the three planets, captured by Hubble but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light. The technique could reveal hidden treasures in many archived telescope images."
Power

Submission + - New Way to Produce Hydrogen (thefutureofthings.com)

Submitted by
Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: "Scientists at Pennsylvania State University and Virginia Commonwealth University are producing hydrogen by exposing clusters of aluminum atoms to water. Rather than relying on the electronic properties of the aluminum, this new process depends on the geometric distribution of atoms within the clusters and requires the presence of Lewis acids and Lewis bases in those atoms. Unlike most hydrogen production processes, this method can be used at room temperature and doesn't require the application of heat or electricity to work."
Java

Submission + - RazorSQL as an example of Missed Opportunity (theopensourcery.com)

Submitted by
jbsurveyer
jbsurveyer writes: "RazorSQL is a robust Java app that one can rarely find on LAMP based servers. It is typical of a broad range of Open Java tools (think Alfresco, Maven, Hibernate, etc, etc)that still are not available on most web hosting services and Linux distributions. This is an ongoing shame for the Linux community — why such short sightedness, given that Java's creators (Sun) have been such big contributors to Open Source, is hard to fathom."

Comment vi (Score 1) 663

by finnw (#26519179) Attached to: Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY

Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.

Well almost. You still have to reach for the ESC key to switch between typing and moving the cursor. I find that slightly harder than reaching for the enter or backspace keys. You can train yourself to reach for it in a certain location, then find that when you switch to a laptop you keep hitting backquote or F1 instead.
Patents

Submission + - Concept of Swarming patented

Submitted by Wertigon
Wertigon writes: It looks like someone has received a patent on Swarming, which among other things Bittorrent utilises. FTA:

[The patent] describes file swarming, which is a class of data transfer technology whereby data is broken up, distributed to other sources and then reassembled at an endpoint. These core algorithms form the foundation of many common modes of next-generation network data transfer, including peer-to-peer, grid content delivery and multi-source streaming. File swarming provides the ability to harness unused network capacity by distributing and exchanging small pieces of data between servers, network routers or personal computers.
AMD

Submission + - AMD sued by worker for disabling her son (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
icecap
icecap writes: "An ex AMD employee is suing AMD, claiming that exposure (before she became pregnant) to glycol ethers and acetates in an AMD Fab plant clean room caused severe birth defects in her son. "AMD negligently failed to use chemicals, which were less hazardous, and/or failed to design its facility or use equipment so as to prohibit or minimize the hazards," Writes the angry ex-employee. "Quite simply, AMD put profits ahead of employee safety, and the safety of its employees' unborn children.""
Windows

Submission + - Software RAID on XP/Linux Dual Boot System?

Submitted by FilmAddict
FilmAddict writes: Hi all, Just dusting off the old desktop and turning it into a media/backup server. I installed two 500gig drives solely for storage (OS's are on another drive). What I'd like to do is make a 200gig partition on each and mirror the partitions, then use the rest of the space for unsecured storage (media, etc). My issue is that I want to dual boot Ubuntu and XP and have access to all of the data, as well as backup data to the RAID over the network regardless of which OS is booted. I can "hardware" mirror the drives (my motherboard supports RAID 0 and 1 through the BIOS — I know it's not ideal) but I don't need all 500gigs for secure storage, so I'd rather save some of the space. Is there a way to use a software RAID to accomplish this? Is there a cross platform software RAID solution? Thanks for your help! -Jon
Communications

Submission + - The end of l33t speak on forums (custompc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by
arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes: "Software developers create a 'StupidFilter' to block out phrases like 'OMGZ hax!!!111one' from forums. Once the software has been installed on a webserver, it will scan posts before they are published for nonsense terms including 'OMG!!' and 'LOL', blocking the worst offenders with a message that says 'This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - MS: New VS to be allowed for Cross Platform

Submitted by
WED Fan
WED Fan writes: "Aiming at being a "kinder gentler Microsoft", the company has announced that it will allow developers to use Visual Studio to develop for cross-platform solutions.

In what amounts to a monumental reversal of policy, Microsoft said Monday in a press release — so it's in writing — and publicly at TechEd in Barcelona that it's changing its licensing terms and will no longer restrict developers "to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only."


...

Microsoft said it plans to create one of its shared source licensing programs for the Premier-level partners in its VSIP program so they can see VS IDE source code for debugging purposes and to simplify the process of integrating their products with the thing.

The move obviously suggests that Microsoft is under increasing pressure from the open source movement and is acting to protect its precious developer base.
"
Government

Submission + - Forgotten memory cards nearly flip election result (indystar.com)

Submitted by CorporalKlinger
CorporalKlinger writes: Many of America's larger election districts have already switched to electronic touchscreen voting. Despite all of the usual complaints about software security and lack of paper records for auditing purposes, one of the less insidious flaws with digital election recording came to light in Indianapolis this week: the ease with which an election could be flipped if officials simply 'forgot' to count votes on memory cards from specific districts. 'Two computer memory cards inadvertently left inside voting machines on Tuesday held enough votes to give the victory to Democrat incumbent Angela Mansfield in the race to represent City-County Council District 2. Tuesday, with all precincts reporting, [Republican candidate Schumacher] was listed as the winner on the Marion County Election Board's Web site. By 2 p.m. Thursday, after the memory cards were retrieved and the votes on them counted, [Schumacher] had 5,591 votes compared to Mansfield's 5,900. The reversal of fortune for Schumacher would leave the GOP with 16 seats and give the Democrats 13.' It leaves one to wonder how many other election results may be in error from November 6th due to mistakes such as this.
The Media

Submission + - Press crew thrown out at UK iPhone launch

Submitted by chocokrispy
chocokrispy writes: According to a blog on ZDNET, an english press crew was thrown out of this morning's Apple iPhone press conference in London for 'being rude'. "Apparently, the interviewer expressed some negative thoughts about the details of the 18 month contract — my informant reckons the word 'rip-off' was used — and the film crew was immediately shown the door. The ITN newsroom is agog: it's the sort of thing one might expect when dealing with President for Life Gzonk of Gzonkistan, but not normal behaviour during a product launch."

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