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Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis" 368

Posted by samzenpus from the sounds-like-rickets-to-me dept.
It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
Encryption

OpenSSH 5.4 Released 127

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-secret dept.
HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"
Input Devices

New I/O Standard Bids To Replace Mini PCI Express 31

Posted by kdawson from the lame-name dept.
DeviceGuru writes "LinuxDevices reports that a group of companies today unveiled — and demonstrated products based on — a tiny new PCI Express expansion standard. Although it's somewhat larger than the PCI Express Mini Card, the tiny new 43mm x 65mm FeaturePak card's high density 230-pin edgecard connector provides twice the number of PCI Express and USB 2.0 channels to the host computer, plus 100 lines dedicated to general purpose I/O, of which 34 signal pairs are implemented with enhanced isolation for use in applications such as gigabit Ethernet or high-precision analog I/O. While FeaturePaks will certainly be used in all sorts of embedded devices (medical instruments, test equipment, etc.), the tiny cards could also be used for developing configurable consumer devices, for example to add an embedded firewall/router or security processor to laptop or notebook computers, or for modular functionality in TV set-top-boxes and Internet edge devices." The president of Diamond Systems, which invented the new card, said "Following the FeaturePak initiative's initial launch, we intend to turn the FeaturePak specification, trademark, and logo over to a suitable standards organization so it can become an industry-wide, open-architecture, embedded standard" (but to use the logo you have to join the organization).
OS X

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Posted by timothy from the well-it-wouldn't-be-polite-to-patch-windows dept.
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Input Devices

Razer, Valve, and Sixense Working On Motion Control For PC Games 126

Posted by Soulskill from the trendy-name-guaranteed dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Shacknews: "Gaming hardware developer Razer has announced a new multi-year partnership with Sixense Entertainment and Valve Software to deliver a '...revolutionary true-to-life, next-generation motion sensing and gesture recognition controller for PC gaming.' Razer, Valve, and Sixense, along with a selection of PC OEM partners, are aiming to produce '...ultra-precise one-to-one motion sensing controllers that use electromagnetic fields to track precise movements along all six axes.' Each controller will reportedly track its orientation within a single degree, and detect positioning within one millimeter. Thankfully, the device will be compatible with both current and future generation PC games."
Education

Ocean-Crossing Dragonflies Discovered 95

Posted by samzenpus from the incredible-journey dept.
grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."
Programming

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."
NASA

Simulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By 148

Posted by Soulskill from the close-enough-to-feel-the-vacuum-breeze dept.
c0mpliant writes "NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a simulation of the path of an asteroid, named Apophis, that will come very close to Earth in 2029 — the closest predicted approach since humans have monitored for such heavenly bodies. The asteroid caused a bit of a scare when astronomers first announced that it would enter Earth's neighborhood some time in the future. However, since that announcement in 2004, more recent calculations have put the odds of collision at 1 in 250,000."
Games

Over 160 Tutorial Videos Created For Unreal Dev Kit 48

Posted by Soulskill from the how-it's-done dept.
As a follow-up to Epic Games' release of a free version of the Unreal Engine last month, the company has now posted over 160 video tutorials which demonstrate the various uses of the Unreal Development Kit. Roughly 20 hours of footage were created by technical education company 3D Buzz, with topics ranging from user interface to game physics to cinematics.
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Lord of the Rings

Tolkien Trust Okays Hobbit Movie 325

Posted by Soulskill from the if-i-say-he-is-a-burgla-a-burglar-he-is dept.
saudadelinux writes "Last year, the Tolkien Trust, which administers JRR's estate, bellowed stentoriously, 'Youuuu shall not make The Hobbit!' and sued New Line Cinema for 'a reported $220m (£133m) in compensation, based on breach of contract and fraud.' New Line, chastened, has settled for an undisclosed sum of money. The Trust has given its blessing to New Line for Guillermo del Toro to film The Hobbit and for New Line to make other films based on Tolkien's work. Much rejoicing!"
The Internet

Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215

Posted by kdawson from the all-eggs-one-basket dept.
David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
Spam

Obama Beats McCain In Spam Landslide 154

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-unfortunate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times runs an article about the spammers' choice of presidential candidate. From the article: 'According to Secure Computing Corp., spammers were nearly seven times more likely to slap Obama's name in the subject line than McCain's during September. The bulk of Obama's lead in the spam wars came from a massive blitz early in the month.' Secure Computing released additonal numbers for the past weeks, and McCain was able to close the gap in the latest spammers' poll."

Comment Perl in bioinformatics (Score 2, Interesting) 963

by ewanb (#24671307) Attached to: Why Corporates Hate Perl

As someone who has both written and read _alot_ of perl, in particular in Bioperl and Ensembl, in bioinformatics I have a rather love/hate relationship with Perl.

I love: the low learning curve for people coming from biology, with alot of forgiving behaviour (in particular I think the auto-creation of datastructures as you use notation to fill in complex anonymous - think pointer based - structures). This is probably the critical one which means we can hire a much broader group of people with a much better understanding of biology and for them to be productive far earlier

I love: the large and robust libraries accessing nearly every sort of database, web-app and other things you need

I love: the consistency of behaviour between systems (don't get me started on Java or porting C++ code between compilers/library systems. Ugh! unbelievable pain as one starts using those languages and move between high end systems. Its C for the fast stuff and Perl for anything else for portability in my book).

I love/hate: The (huge) amount of robust existing Perl code that we have in Ensembl and that works day in, day out on multiple outings

I hate: The lack of clean objects. Why, oh why, oh why?

I hate: The inability to switch on strong typing and bigger checking optionally in libraries - I know you can do more these days, but it is still clunky.

I hate: switching the word "continue" (in C) to "next" (it gets me every time)

I hate: having to always brace if statements

I hate: operators designed for one-liners that gets in the way of good readable code - grep and map in complex lines are pet hate of mine.

I hate: the tortorous cross-language capabilities - compare python's jython and other C-level compilers. Soooo much better.

Interestingly I coded in python for about 6 months in the late 90s - very early on python - and lots python appeals to me. But then Perl came along, and lots of bioinformaticians were using it, and systems people were installing it by default on systems...

Roll on Parrot. I want Parrot to be able to run
Perl5 syntax code, Perl6 and Python/Java syntax
all together, with easy ways to load in C level or compiled down libraries. That's what Perl needs to save it.

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