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Games

Submission + - Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by
MarkN
MarkN writes: "Facebook has been trumpeting the fact that Farmville, the most popular game on its site, has more users than Twitter, with 69 million playing over a month and 26 million playing each day. Combined with Facebook's announcement that they have hit 350 million users, that means that one out of every five people on Facebook is playing Farmville. Gamasutra has a featured post taking a critical analysis of Farmville, its deceptively slow level grind, how a number of gameplay features end up as simply decorative since they aren't balanced with the benefits of raising crops, and discussing why Farmville succeeds so well in virally spreading itself and addicting people."
Science

Submission + - Reducing one amino acid could increase lifespan (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by
John Bryson
John Bryson writes: "Eating less of one amino acid might lengthen your life. There have been lots of previous studies showing that many species live long on highly restricted calories, but a lot of this benefit may be possible by only restricting one amino acid. Amino acids that have shown this have been tryptophan and methionine. A recent study, published online December 2 in Nature, a highly respected journal, may help explain some of the health benefits of restricted-calorie diets. Grandison, R.C., Piper, M.D.W., and Partridge, L. 2009. Amino-acid imbalance explains extension of lifespan by dietary restriction in Drosophila. Nature, published online Dec. 2. doi:10.1038/nature08619"

Comment Re:the usual suspect (Score 1) 724

by Gearoid_Murphy (#27388889) Attached to: Reliability of Computer Memory?
"random crashes on a Vista machine are not a feature and is probably a hardware issue" How comes this is an issue with vista?, xp and linux work perfectly and in case you haven't noticed, I'm not alone with these kind of issues, I've never had to resort to lies when describing the complete and utter failure of Microsoft to produce something of value, ask yourself this fanboy, how a bunch of volunteers prodcued an operating system that is superior in performance in every way to vista?

Comment the usual suspect (Score 1) 724

by Gearoid_Murphy (#27385397) Attached to: Reliability of Computer Memory?
sorry buddy, but random crashes on a vista machine are a feature not a bug. I've been using linux for the last 6 years and not once have I had an unexplained crash. I started a new job in a developer environment which is exclusively windows and within the first week my vista machine had to be wiped and reinstalled to solve the problem of repeated and unexplained crashes. Colleagues have had their machines simply reboot for no reason, and the performance of the machine is painful. I can unzip the same file faster in a virtual box linux guest than I can in the vista host, pardon my language, but it's a f**king joke that vista is being pushed as a "replacement"
Upgrades

Submission + - CMS tracking detector installed at CERN

Submitted by Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: physorg has a peice about the latest development at CERN. Installation of the world's largest silicon tracking detector was today successfully completed at CERN. In the early hours of Thursday 13 December the CMS Silicon Strip Tracking Detector began its journey from the main CERN site to the CMS experimental facility. Later that day it was lowered 90 metres into the CMS cavern. Installation began on Saturday 15 December and was concluded this morning. Such a system would be able to provide proof for some of the more exotic and testable(!) physics theories out there.
United States

Submission + - Russia sparks Cold War scramble

Submitted by Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: bbc has a story about US jet fighters being scrambled to meet Russion Tu-95 turboprops, something that hasn't been done since the cold war. This coincides with recent reports from Georgia about a Russian missile found on their territory, reportedly fired by a Russian jet tracked by radar as well as the recent diplomatic tiff that occured between Russia and Britain over the murder of a former Russian spy in London from radioactive poisoning with iostopes that identified it as coming from a specific Russian reactor. Whats with the Russians all of sudden?, I thought we were getting along just fine.
Operating Systems

Submission + - fallacy of function within Linux systems

Submitted by
Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: "I am an admin for a beowulf processing cluster. Time and again, I am struck by the fragmented nature of the functions of these systems. There is never a coherent strategy for providing a specific function, take authentication, for example. We currently maintain several seperate indpendent systems for controlling access on authentication, one for wireless access, one for firehol trusted networks, one for nfs, a set of netgroups, nssswitch configs and pam configs. Many of these systems have considerable overlap in function (ldap and nss, for example). I would like to hear what people make of this situation. Should operating systems be prepared with coherent functions like this in mind?, are we simply observing the limitations of current operating system implementations with respect to todays complex multi-user, multi-device, multi-function systems. Is this a symptom of open source applications, which simply look after their own functions and ignore the bigger picture?, can the same be said for commercial systems?. Should there be an attempt to develop a well defined standard of functions within the context of operating systems, within which applications would provide functionality but never in a fragmented isolated way?, is this just a pipe dream?"
Caldera

Submission + - google lawsuit over search results

Submitted by Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: physorg has a story about a company ( American Blind Wallpaper Factory Inc) suing google for including competitors (of that company) in search results for the American Blind Wallpaper Factory Inc. The reasoning for the lawsuit is fraud or some such noise. seems like everyone and anyone is lining up to take a slug at google, lets hope they sue for a billion dollars! this is the link : http://www.physorg.com/news98160497.html
Biotech

Submission + - scientists weigh a living cell

Submitted by Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: for the first time scientists have accurately measured the weight of a living cell, detailed on bbc's world web news. The article refers to the use of zeptograms; one thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram, sweet. I'm not sure how this weighs on a molecular level or even if there is such a metric, the mass equivilent of an angstrom, but it must be thousands if not millions of functional protiens and such chemical jiggery

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