Daveydweeb writes, "The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on 'NPA personality theory' was confirmed to be a hoax. Not only had the article survived at Wikipedia for the better part of a year, but it had even been listed as a 'Good Article,' supposedly placing it in the top 0.2-0.3% of all Wikipedia articles — despite being almost entirely written by the creator of the theory himself."

gettin-bored noted a nice article running in very high priority on the Washington Post, right up there on page 17 of the print edition, where it's revealed that the CIA Director warned Rice about Bin Laden two months before 9/11. And strangely, the meeting was never mentioned during all the 9/11 commission reports making you really question what exactly they were actually hearing that was more important than the CIA director telling the National Security Advisor that Bin Laden was going to attack Americans.

Bride of Chucky writes "There's a new video codec out there that claims to offer 'up to 40 percent better video quality' but that resets your computer's DNS settings — opening the way for Trojans, rootkits, or whatever. Techworld warns that zCodec looks professional enough, is widely available, and comes in at 100KB. What's the bet the media companies are behind this somewhere?"

ExE122 writes "Since the unveiling of the low-cost, low-energy AMD Operton in 2003, Intel has been struggling in the server-grade processor insdustry. Now, IBM has announced their decision to use the AMD Opteron processor in their new line of BladeCenter servers. System x3455, x3655 and x3755 rack-mount servers, two-way Bladecenter LS21, and four-way LS41 blade servers sporting the new AMD processors have already been announced. IBM will continue this transition over the next three months.

From the article:
"IBM's choice is by all means an important victory over rival Intel, which is struggling to sell the remaining deposit of server processors before the general acceptance of Woodcrest X5100 chips. Unfortunately for Intel, at the end of the second quarter, Advanced Micro had 26 per cent of the market for servers built on personal computer chips, more than double its share a year earlier, according to Mercury Research."

Could this be lights out for Intel?"

Nicros asks: "I work for a company that is working toward an FDA approved software development process. We have always used C++ in a Windows environment, and we have more than 6 years of code, applications and libraries developed. Because of our long and convoluted software development history, our existing architecture is difficult to manage for a group of our relatively small size (5 FTEs), and development times are rather slow. Our IT director has made the decision that, to speed up development times, we need to re-architect all of our existing code, from C++ to Java." What would be the best way to go about handling such a migration? In a general sense, how would you go about moving a development team from one language to another?

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a very brief article, Health Data Management reports that Sensatex Inc. is looking for beta testers for its SmartShirt system. These fully washable shirts are using nanotechnology to weave a conductive fiber grid into the cotton fabric to monitor your movements or your heart rate and transmitted wirelessly to a central computer. If the tests are successful, these shirts could be used to remotely check old people living alone, but also soldiers in the field or athletes. Read more for additional details and pictures of these 'smart' shirts."

An anonymous reader writes "Dell has followed up and put their money where their mouth is after HardOCP panned them last year for selling 'gaming systems' that you could not even install some popular 3D games on due to the bloatware on the system. You can now get clean installs on some XPS Dell systems. Dell is running a 'You Spoke, We Listened,' header on their site." From the article: "It seems that Dell has taken our criticism (and our readers as well) to heart and has made the much sought after move to offer select XPS systems with "limited" pre-installed software. We phoned a Dell sales representative late Monday, and he confirmed that the installation is completely clean, except for the included anti-virus program. As explained to us by Dell, There is no AOL installation, no "media jukebox", and no ISP offers to weigh the supplied operating system down."

vegthura asks: "I have several coworkers that insist that logging into servers is an acceptable practice. They claim it's just easier than using sudo and it's just as safe - you know you're root so what else do you need? And why bother logging in as you if you're just going to use sudo to run commands with root privileges anyway? Everything I've ever read has been the exact opposite philosophy. There is very little you need to be root to do, if anything in practice, and using sudo lets you only use the power of root for when you really need it. So, die hard unix geeks, you've got root... do you use it or stick to sudo?"

Gamasutra reports that Jack Thompson has sued the Florida Bar Association, for "hector[ing] plaintiff Thompson for 19 months with SLAPP Bar complaints filed by opposing counsel (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participants). Continually, during that time, Thompson and his counsel in these Bar matters have repeatedly asked The Florida Bar to sit down with him and his counsel to try to resolve, once and for all, this dispute, which goes back more than 18 years when other baseless SLAPP Bar complaints were filed, resulting in the payment of money damages to plaintiff Thompson."

Golygydd Max writes "A Techworld story reveals that the reason Yahoo email has delivery problems is that the company's mail servers mysteriously close once in a while." From the article: "According to trimMail's Email Battles site, which recently monitored 16 of the company's advertised email hosts 240 times over a half hour period, only 133 of its probes were answered. Many of the servers were closed and unavailable. Overall availability ranged from 25 percent to 75 percent over the admittedly short test period. The average availability was 55 percent, with the worst of the servers available only 7 percent of the time."

prostoalex writes "World finals for 2006 ACM programming contest took place in San Antonio, TX this year, and the results are in. Russia's Saratov State University solved 5 contest problems in record time, followed closely by Altai State Technical University (Russia) with 5 problems solved as well. University of Twente (Netherlands), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), Warsaw University (Poland), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Moscow State University (Russia), University of Waterloo (Canada) and Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) all completed 4 problems."

linguizic writes "According to Scientific American Online: '10 month olds can learn to associate words with objects in their environment when given interesting enough stimuli. A two-year-old can quickly link an object--whether a flashy rattle or a boring latch--to a word. Even a one-year-old can follow a parent's gaze to an object and match it with a word being spoken. But although anecdotal evidence seems to show that babies younger than one year can learn words, it remains unclear whether they are in fact mastering language. Now a new study reveals that 10-month-old infants can link words and objects, but only if the object is already interesting to them.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A columnist at CNET is questioning whether Apple over-hyped last week's launch. From the article: 'Jobs' announcement of a new leather case for the iPod was especially ridiculous. Like the queen announcing a new toaster in Buckingham Palace. It seemed odd that Jobs was troubling himself to introduce fashion accessories to Apple's products.' Is Apple a victim of its own success? Can it hold a low-profile product launch anymore -- or do we inevitably expect too much?"