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Wine 1.2 Released 427

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 16, 2010 @05:36PM from the pop-the-cork dept.

David Gerard writes "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text, and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now."

Chemical Cocktail Can Keep a Heart Viable 10 Days, Outside the Body 97

Posted by timothy on Saturday May 15, 2010 @12:32AM from the with-very-few-exceptions-not-a-worm dept.

nj_peeps writes "Harvard professor Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the Sanskrit for 'ambrosia of rejuvenation.' Using Somah, Thatte and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest — far longer than the four-hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab."

Submission + - Is that embedded software GPL-compliant? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder on Friday April 16, 2010 @10:16AM

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Open source software is everywhere these days. In particular, Linux is being used increasingly to power embedded systems of all kinds. That's good, but it's also a challenge, because the free software used in such products may not always be compliant with all the licences it is released under, notably the GNU GPL. For companies that sell such embedded systems using open source, it can be hard even finding out what exactly is inside, let alone whether it is compliant. Enter the new Binary Analysis Tool.

Submission + - Creating Artificial Consciousness (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by

jzoom555

on Saturday May 23, 2009 @11:56AM

jzoom555 writes: "In an interview with Discover Mag, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices (BBD's). His lab recently published details on a brain-model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex'."

Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share 414

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 01, 2009 @12:46PM from the hitslink-confirms-it dept.

je ne sais quoi writes "The April data is out for the Net Applications 'market share' survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month's increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%."

Is Your Mood a Result of Where You Live? 364

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @07:49PM from the home-is-where-the-misery-is dept.

Ed writes "Apparently, the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that geography can have a significant impact on mood. You may not be surprised to learn that Kentucky is more depressing than Hawaii. However, ranking up there with Hawaii are Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Frustratingly, they have not yet published the study on the web, so it is left as an exercise for the reader to find the original study and post a link for the rest of us."

iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service 420

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 15, 2009 @05:35AM from the free-as-in-no-longer dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."

Submission + - Sun Slips Firefox Extension Into Java Update (paulcardno.com)

Submitted by

pcardno

on Saturday February 21, 2009 @01:01AM

pcardno writes: "It seems it's not just Microsoft that have spotted a good opportunity to distribute their software through Firefox Addons. On installing the latest annoying, sysbar bubble based Java update, my Firefox informed me that I had a wonderful new Java addon automatically. Here's the addon screenshot. Yes, I could opt out of it, but why are Sun installing Addons to my Firefox without me making specific choices in the application itself? To be clear — I have never chosen to install this Addon, yet it has been installed without my permission with the latest Java Update."

Reverse Engineering a Missile Launcher Toy's Interface 118

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 14, 2009 @11:44AM from the target-that-explosion-and-fire dept.

nitro writes "A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling a USB missile-launching toy system. They develop an iPhone application to control the device. 'The hardware is coupled with a simple GUI controller written in Delphi (MissileLauncher.exe) and a USB Human Interface Device (HID) interface written in C++ (USBHID.dll). The toys lost their allure within minutes of harassing my team with a barrage of soft missile shots. That same night I thought I would be able to extend the fun factor by coding up a programmatic interface to the launchers in Python. ... One interesting thing is that we have a lot more granular control of the turret movement now than we did with the original GUI. I wrote two simple loops to count the number of possible horizontal and vertical ticks and the results were 947 horizontal and 91 vertical versus 54 and 10 from the original GUI respectively. Granular control allows you to slowly and quietly reposition the turret for stealthy attacks.'"

Submission + - Sun gives out free Solaris 10 DVDs

Submitted by

Tarmas

on Sunday January 14, 2007 @12:47PM

Tarmas writes: "For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu's ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD sporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11."

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