Wolfbone - Slashdot User

Submission + - Sweden to open embassy in Second Life.

Submitted by sinserve on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @09:54PM

sinserve writes: Sweden to open world's first embassy in Second Life. Sweden is at an advanced stage of planning the opening of the worlds' first official embassy in Second Life. The embassy, a copy of Sweden's embassy House of Sweden, in Washington D.C., will act as a link between the real and the virtual world. Through the official portal of Sweden, www.sweden.se the embassy will provide visitors with information about Sweden. Reaching out internationally, to an increasingly selective crowd, calls for an inventive and progressive way of working with communication. It is of great importance that we find our target groups where they are most likely to be open to our information, in their own context. Second Life is one of many alternative channels we ought to look further into, says Olle Wästberg, Director General of the Swedish Institute.

Submission + - Cancer cure Ignored due to not being profitable

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @01:02AM

An anonymous reader writes: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap- safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs. Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar. [.........]

Submission + - MS copies feature, then patents it

Submitted by

jbgreer

on Friday January 26, 2007 @05:46PM

jbgreer writes: "Michael Kölling, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and one of the developers of BlueJ, an educational development environment, realized last year that Microsoft had copied one of the BlueJ features into Visual Studio. Flattery, right? Recently he was informed that Microsoft has filed a patent describing the very same feature. For more details, read Michael's blog entry."

Submission + - Is a CS degree any good for an old guy?

Submitted by mbuckingham on Friday January 26, 2007 @04:00PM

mbuckingham writes: I'm 39 and have been programming for 20 years. By "programming", I'm talking about the usual business applications type of stuff. Easy stuff really. I went to college for a while, but never got my degree. It bugs me that I've never completed my degree, but since I've always had decent jobs, it hasn't really mattered too much. I'm really bored with what I do every day though. Anyway, I'm thinking about going back, getting the degree, because I think it will make it possible to move towards doing some more advanced system-level type stuff. Does this make sense? Would a CS degree or a Computer Engineering degree be better? I know I don't want a MIS degree, because that would be rehashing everything I'm already bored with.

Submission + - US Patent Office to Re-Examine Blackboard Patent

Submitted by

Mr_5tein

on Thursday January 25, 2007 @11:42PM

Mr_5tein writes: "Groklaw has reported that the US Patent and Trademark Office has just ordered re-examination of the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070125 20202052), thanks to a filing by the Software Freedom Law Center. SFLC's press release states, "The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises 'a substantial new question of patentability' regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent..."

The SFLC goes on to explain that though such re-examinations may take a couple of years to complete, approx. "70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked.""

Submission + - Crystal Space 1.0 and the future of OSS games

Submitted by Amir Taaki on Thursday January 18, 2007 @08:42AM

Amir Taaki writes: In recent days a landmark release for Crystal Space has been reached with a 1.0 release after 10 years of development. With CEL and the tools of celstart and blender2crystal, as has been seen at the recent blender conference, amazing results can be achieved quickly making the turnaround for developing games very fast.

What does this mean for the future of making OSS games- a typically lagging behind area compared to commercial software? With the concentration of development on one core set of generic tools this means that innovative ideas can be quickly be churned out.

With the recent verse and OpenSoundControl additions, this opens up more possibilities for collaborative gaming between artists and gamers- coupled with the great blender support this opens many intruiging possibilities.

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