412529
submission
CajunArson writes:
The Register has a story about a rather naughty Santa. It appears that the seemingly nice holiday service provided via Windows Live Messenger took on a mind of it's own. When the AI version of Santa Claus began to talk dirty to underage children, it appears that the ghost of Microsoft management present decided to sent AI Claus packing back to the digital north pole.
231999
submission
CajunArson writes:
An interesting article over at Ars Technica discussing Intel's recent release of its http://osstbb.intel.com/">Thread Building Blocks 2.0 templating library for C++. This library provides a higher level of abstraction for writing parallel code than normal POSIX or Windows threads provide. It has been pushed by Intel in the past as a similar concept to OpenMP, although its template nature means it is much more focused on C++.
Some interesting notes on Intel's earnestness in open-sourcing the project: Released under GPL version 2, it runs on non-Intel CPUs (even non-x86 as in the G5), and it is already ported to Linux and Solaris as well as Windows.
109669
submission
CajunArson writes:
The Beryl Project which is a fork of the well-known Compiz desktop compositing project has just released version 0.2.0. The anouncement is here.
Having used Beryl from the SVN tree I can say that it has made quite a few improvements, and while it continues to borrow from the Compiz core it also has some fun plugins like the group plugin and wall plugin that can actually help usability on the desktop in addition to just being pretty eye-candy.
