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Software

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Science

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.
ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

Comment Re:Amazon S3 (Score 1) 411

by chameleon_skin (#31354686) Attached to: Long-Term Storage of Moderately Large Datasets?
One major caveat to this: storing data on S3 is not compatible with many types of compliance standards (PCI, SOX, HIPAA, etc.) If your business is required to have any particular types of compliance, either because the government requires it of you or your partners do, make sure you are storing the data offline. That's about the only way to do it and still meet compliance measures.

I also love the idea of using S3 for storage; just keep in mind that depending on the type of data you are storing it may not be the appropriate choice.

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