18369900
story
Dan East writes
"In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
11082834
story
MikeChino writes
"Right now it's difficult, if not impossible, to quickly detect HIV in patients living in impoverished countries. That may all change soon, though — researchers at a California outfit called the Palo Alto Research Center have built an iPod-sized handheld device that can provide an immune check-up in under 10 minutes — all with a prick of the finger. With millions of people around the world without access to a full-size laboratory, PARC's device could revolutionize the detection and treatment of HIV."
7907320
story
joabj writes
"While MySQL is the subject of much high-profile wrangling between the EU and Oracle (and the MySQL creator himself), the MySQL developers have been quietly moving the widely-used database software forward. The new beta version of MySQL, the first publicly available, features such improvements as near-asynchronous replication and more options for partitioning. A new release model has been enacted as well, bequeathing this version the title of 'MySQL Server 5.5.0-m2.' Downloads here."
5704791
story
KentuckyFC writes
"Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft has joined the likes of computer scientists Stephen Wolfram and Ed Fredkin in claiming that the universe can be accurately modeled by cellular automata. The novel aspect of 't Hooft's model is that it allows quantum mechanics and, in particular, the spooky action at a distance known as entanglement to be deterministic. The idea that quantum mechanics is fundamentally deterministic is known as hidden variable theory but has been widely discounted by physicists because numerous experiments have shown its predictions to be wrong. But 't Hooft says his cellular automaton model is a new class of hidden variable theory that falls outside the remit of previous tests. However, he readily admits that the new model has serious shortcomings — it lacks some of the basic symmetries that our universe enjoys, such as rotational symmetry. However, 't Hooft adds that he is working on modifications that will make the model more realistic (abstract)."
174949
submission
Alejandro writes:
The Application Security Trends Report identified 1,561 unique vulnerabilities during the first quarter of 2007. Of the reported vulnerabilities, file inclusion, SQL injection, cross-site scripting and directory traversal were the most prevalent, totaling 63 percent. While this report highlights the Top 10 vulnerabilities in commercial and open source applications, the problem is much worse if you factor in proprietary home grown applications, as these typically contain a large number of vulnerabilities.
174945
submission
JTT writes:
There are multiple sites reporting that in April a woman used craigslist to trade sex for WOW gold in order to purchase an 'Epic Flying Mount'. Aparent pictures of the craigslist ads can also be found floating around the net. The 'player' followed up with 'I got MY epic mount AND I got laid which is more than most of you failures can ever hope for.'
168191
submission
endtwist writes:
Tapefailure, a new web analytics startup, has gone public yesterday. According to the founder, Tapefailure is looking to change the face of web analytics: they record the users actions instead of just information about them. These actions are recorded as tapes, and the users can play back the tapes or view various statistics about them. They have launched with a plethora of features including some unique ones such as "Most Average Tape" and the Visual Mouse Maps (apparently, many, many more are in the works).
This new method of analytics has been hot as of late, with 3 major contenders in the field: Tapefailure, RobotReplay, and ClickTale. Tapefailure and RobotReplay are the first to go public, but it will be interesting to see where this type of analytics goes.
168183
submission
iBookUser writes:
Apple refuses to acknowledge logic board soldering problems in many iBook G4s. This guide explains how to fix your iBook G4 if you are experiencing the "fan of death". Over a hundred people have posted that this hack has worked for them.
http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/
168107
story
drhamad writes
"Apple stock dropped 2.2% today in mid-afternoon trading as Engadget published news based on a faked e-mail inside Apple. 'Apparently an internal memo was sent to several Apple employees--and forwarded to Engadget--around 9am CT today saying that Apple issued a press release with the news that the iPhone was now scheduled for October, and Leopard was delayed until January. About an hour and a half after that e-mail went out, a second e-mail was sent--this time officially from Apple--saying the first e-mail was a fake, and that the delivery schedule for the iPhone and Leopard had not changed.'"
168167
submission