b8fait - Slashdot User

Clever guys at Drupal invent OOP -> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2009, @09:05AM

An anonymous reader writes "Hardly a scoop but, as those other cowards won't let me comment on their brilliance on their own website, I thought I'd throw it to the crowd to see if they want to pull it apart.

Apparently the guys at drupal are so clever that they've actually invented a way of writing object oriented code without having to use those pesky classes and objects. You really have to check this out. What a load of rubbish. I love the bit about the the "hook system" being equivalent to interface abstraction.

Now if any of you have actually looked at the Drupal code, the bit that's funniest about this post is the assertion that Drupal was intentionally "designed" this way because of PHP's lack of support for classes. Drupal just happened; no-one has ever bothered to design it."
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Canada's Stonehenge-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2009, @08:56AM

An anonymous reader writes "An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada's prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids. Read more here"
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Windows 7 to skip straight to RC 0

Submitted by b8fait on Saturday January 31 2009, @08:55AM

b8fait writes "The head of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows development confirmed that Windows 7 will take the unusual path of moving straight from a single beta, which was launched earlier this month, to a release candidate. Sinofsky fleshed out the plan today and hinted that just as there would be no Beta 2, the company would also not provide a RC2 build. In other words, there may be only one released build of Windows 7 before it ships, possibly much sooner than even some of the most aggressive rumors about Windows 7. How much different can Windows 7 really be with such a shortened beta cycle? To me, this is one of the most interesting stories right now."

iPhone developer C&D from another iPhone devel-> 0

Submitted by

tod_baudais

on Saturday January 31 2009, @07:06AM

tod_baudais writes "Hey Slashdot, I'm wondering how you guys would handle this situation. I'm an iPhone developer that has recently released an app on the App Store. It just so happens that another guy also released an app on the app store at roughly the same time that does very similar things. Yesterday, we noticed that they changed the name of their app to try and get searches from people that are obviously searching for our app. So we changed our name do do the same for people searching for theirs. Long story short is that I woke up to a threatening email from them telling us to C&D and threatening legal action. What would you guys do?"
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PC's Waste Heat Could Add To Processing Power 134

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 30 2009, @03:06PM
from the arm-phonon-torpedos dept.

Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons — photonic computing — is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons — ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or 'off' while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or 'on.' Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature — and data — intact for a long time."

Comrade, You Are So Not Getting a Dell 600

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 30 2009, @12:37PM
from the touchy-touchy dept.

theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"

Startup Hopes To Crowd-Source the Developing World 49

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 30 2009, @11:54AM
from the solving-captchas-in-cameroon dept.

GalaticGrub writes "Technology Review has an article about a startup that wants to build a business out of crowd-sourcing the developing world. The company, called txteagle, seems to be interested mainly in using local knowledge to translate information into less common languages. The Finnish cell-phone company Nokia is a partner in the project, and CEO Nathan Eagle says that it provides a good example of a Western company that could benefit from txteagle workers. Eagle explains that Nokia is interested in 'software localization,' or translating its software for specific regions of a country. 'In Kenya, there are over 60 unique, fundamentally different languages,' he says. 'You're lucky to get a phone with a Swahili interface, but even that might be somebody's third language. Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like "address book" into all of these languages.'"

Are 68 Molecules Enough To Understand Diseases? 133

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 08 2008, @02:35PM
from the enter-the-peer-review dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "A researcher from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) claims that 68 molecules can explain the origins of many serious diseases. After reviewing findings from multiple disciplines, he 'realized that only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids,' and he said that 'these 68 building blocks provide the structural basis for the molecular choreography that constitutes the entire life of a cell.'"