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Biotech

Synthetic DNA About To Yield New Life Forms 240

Posted by kdawson from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
mlimber sends along a Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."
Microsoft

Promise of OOXML Oversight By ISO Falls Through 216

Posted by Zonk from the so-it's-only-standard-for-them dept.
640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone writes "Microsoft is going back on one of their promises concerning OOXML. While they originally made assurances that the ISO would take control of the standard if it were approved, Microsoft is now reversing that position and keeping near-full control over OOXML with the ECMA. This is significant because the ECMA is the group that originally rubber-stamped OOXML. It seems unlikely that they will force changes to correct problems with the standard. In Microsoft's new plan, the ISO would only be allowed to publish lists of errata and would be unable to make OOXML compatible with existing ISO standards, while the ECMA would be the one to control any new versions of the standard."
PHP

Submission + - The fine art of PHP V5.2 memory management

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There are many improvements that have taken place in PHP V5.2, and one critical area is that of memory management. To understand the implications of these new features, this article delves into memory management functions in PHP5.2, tweaking the memory manager, limiting memory usage and consides why allocation overhead and speed are a big deal.
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3 Public Beta Due In Spring

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox users, get ready to start messing around with a new public beta; it's due out in the spring.. InformationWeek says Version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, will have "added features to include standardized support for running Web apps like mail and office suites when disconnected from the Internet. The new version will also offer Places, a revamped bookmarks and history manager that was bumped from the current version of Firefox, Version 2.



Mozilla expects to ship the final version of Firefox 3, codenamed Gran Paradiso, in the autumn, said Brendan Eich, chief technical officer for Mozilla.

Users of Web applications like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, or Google Apps Premier Edition will be able to download their data, disconnect from the Internet, and work offline, if the application publishers make a few simple changes to their code to comply with Firefox 3's APIs for running applications offline.

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