Comment Leverage (Score 1) 158
With all these vendors tripping over each others patents it will likely result in a bunch of cross licensing.
8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study 174
flintmecha writes "A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns. The paper itself is well worth reading. It's written entirely in the kids' voices, complete with sound effects (part of the Methods section is subtitled, ''the puzzle'duh duh duuuhhh') and figures drawn by hand in colored pencil."
Comment Lotus Symphony (Score 3, Informative) 510
Latest version of Lotus Symphony is yet another fork and it has the best Excel compatibility of all the ooo variants. It is free but not open source however (look at SISSL license conditions).
Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Spider Silk 188
disco_tracy writes "Silkworms have been modified to produce spider silk, creating a fabric that could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons." For some reason, this is far less revolting to me than the idea of spider silk being milked out of goats.
Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
Submission + - Del Toro quits "The Hobbit" due to continuing dela (stuff.co.nz)
jamesrt writes: Guillermo Del Toro has quit as director of the two The Hobbit movies, but will still help write the screenplays for the Lord of the Rings prequels. 'In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming The Hobbit I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien's Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures.'
Submission + - When mistakes improve performance (bbc.co.uk)
jd writes: "Professor Rakesh Kumar at the University of Illinois has produced research showing that allowing communication errors between microprocessor components and then making the software more robust will actually result in chips that are faster and yet require less power. His argument is that at the current scale errors in transmission occur anyway and that the efforts of chip manufacturers to hide these to create the illusion of perfect reliability simply introduces a lot of unnecessary expense, demands excessive power and deoptimises the design. He favors a new architecture, which he calls the "stochastic processor" which is designed to gracefully handle data corruption and error recovery. He believes he has shown such a design would work and that it will permit Moore's Law to continue to operate into the foreseeable future. However, this is not the first time someone has tried to fundamentally revolutionize the CPU. The Transputer, the AMULET, the FM8501, the iWARP and the Crusoe were all supposed to be game-changers but died a cold, lonely death instead — and those were far closer to design philosophies programmers are currently familiar with. Modern software simply isn't written with the level of reliability the Stochastic Processor requires in mind (and many software packages are too big and too complex to port), and the volume of available software frequently makes or breaks new designs. Will this be "interesting but dead-end" research, or will the Professor pull off a CPU architectural revolution really not seen since the microprocessor was designed?"
Submission + - Tenth Suicide At iPhone Factory (reuters.com)
carre4 writes: Another employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn. Police are not saying yet whether this was a suicide attempt, a suspicious death or an accident. It happened just one day after Foxconn started playing music to workers on the assembly line to try to ease the pressure on them; the company's founder had denied he works his staff too hard.
Submission + - Hubble Spots Hungry Star Eating One of its Planets
An anonymous reader writes: What do hungry stars eat? Planets of course! NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, with its newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, has captured data about a planet 600 light years away which may "soon" be consumed by its parent star. While the artists rendering gives a nice idea of what may happen over the next 10 million years, the planet has already been warped into an enlongated shape by the sun's strong gravitational forces. The planet in question, WASP-12b, has a mass 40 percent greater that Jupiter and has the highest known surface temperature of any known planet at around 1500C. One reason why it has begun to warp and will be consumed by the star is that it is so incredibly close to the star. So close, in fact, that it orbits the star in only 24 hours. These observations confirm theoretical predictions by Astronomer Shu-lin Li of Peking University, in which he states the core of the planet would become so hot that it would greatly expand the atmosphere of the planet. This matches the observations made by researchers in which they "see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star."
Submission + - VALVe Announces Half-life 2 on Mac (youtube.com)
SteveTauber writes: In a press release sent earlier today, VALVe released a video promoting Half-life 2 for Mac.
Submission + - Extensions for Safari to be announced at the WWDC? (daringfireball.net)
gyrogeerloose writes: John Gruber of Daring Fireball has suggested the possibility that Apple will announce a new extension archtecture for it's Web browser. In his latest blog, Gruber made this sly comment: '[one] big thing that's missing is a proper extension API. If only Apple had an imminent developer conference where they could unveil such a thing.' If this is true, it will be a great boon to Mac users who like Safari's page rendering performance and compliance with Web standards but would like to be able to take advantage of the types of plug-ins available for Chrome and Firefox.
Submission + - Game Nation: gamer theme park to be built (gamepron.com) 1
UgLyPuNk writes: Ever wanted to go and hang out with Lara Croft, or a human sized Ratchet or Clank, well you might have your chance. Game Nation have just announced they will be building a Experiential Video Game Theme Park and Resort.
Submission + - Google Releases Add-On to Disable Google Analytics (blogspot.com) 1
Kilrah_il writes: Many sites use Google Analytics to analyze their users' behaviors. Now Google is offering an add-on that disables tracking, effectively allowing a user to opt-out of being tracked by Analytics. "Those that are concerned about their privacy can install an add-on and permanently disable the script. After installing the add-on, you'll notice that the browser still sends a request for this file: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js when visiting a page that uses Google Analytics, but it no longer sends information to Google Analytics." The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3.5+ and Chrome 4+.
Submission + - George W. Bush embraces alternative energy (star-telegram.com) 1
Geoffrey.landis writes: It's hard to believe, but former Texas oilman George W. Bush just came out in favor of alternate energy sources. At the American Wind Energy Association conference in Dallas, Bush said: "It's in our economic interests that we diversify away from oil. It's in our environmental interest. And, finally, it's in our national security interest."
More details are on the green blog:
He had said in a State of the Union address that America was addicted to oil. "If you’re a guy from Texas and you say America is addicted to oil, it's a surprising moment," Mr. Bush said... These days, the former president said, "The overall trend in my judgment is that new technologies will find new ways to power our lives. I fully believe that hybrid plug-ins will be a transition to electric cars," he said, and that new ways to generate electricity will be needed.
In a time when climate-warming-deniers are screaming that shifting to alternate energy sources is going to destroy America's economy, it's amazing to see the former number-one Republican actually say that moving to alternate energy is in our economic interest, and new ways to generate electricity are needed
Now if we could only get the ones who are still in power to understand this...
Submission + - Google releases Chrome 5.0 for Win/Mac/Linux (h-online.com)
ddfall writes: Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms
