nepeta - Slashdot User

U.S. Plan For "Thinking Machines" Repository 148

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @07:19PM from the save-those-ideas-for-later dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the US's NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge — from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The agreement by ontologists — experts in word meanings and in using appropriate words to build actionable machine commands — outlines the critical functions of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the summit that produced the agreement here."

VLC Hits the Device Market 159

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @06:19PM from the long-time-coming dept.

JoeBorn writes "VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC. Now, Neuros and Texas Instruments have sponsored a port of VLC to their next generation open set-top box. The idea is to allow developers to easily create interesting plug-ins for recording and transcoding applications for the set-top box which will automate functions previously requiring a PC, like formating recordings for a portable player or streaming to another device on the LAN or the Internet, etc."

Authentic Viking DNA From 1,000-Year-Old Skeletons 189

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @05:32PM from the unless-that-was-really-ullyses-s.-grant dept.

FiReaNGeL writes "Scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers. Analysis of DNA from the remains of ancient humans provides valuable insights into such important questions as the origin of genetic diseases, migration patterns of our forefathers and tribal and family patterns. Using freshly sampled material from ten Viking skeletons from around AD 1,000, from a non-Christian burial site on the Danish island of Funen, Dissing and colleagues showed that it is indeed possible to retrieve authentic DNA from ancient humans."

KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Released 242

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @04:01PM from the when-improvements-amplify-each-other dept.

appelza contributed a link to Tuesday's announcement of the next step toward KDE 4.1: "The KDE Project is proud to announce the first beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 1 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 1 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in July 2008." I haven't used KDE much for the past few years, but the screenshots of a "grown-up" plasma are enough to make me correct that.

Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.3 Has Landed 161

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @03:31PM from the little-nudges dept.

jaymus of dawning writes with word that, as promised, "Apple has just released the latest major revision of OS X. The update yields improvements to tons of system components and applications including the Software Update system, Address Book, AirPort, Automater, iCal, iChat, Mail, Parental Controls, Spaces, Time Machine and VoiceOver. This release contains 200 bug fixes from 10.5.2. See Apple's release page for all the delicious details."

Spanish Village Jumps the Baby 1

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @02:40PM

If you think the tomato throwing festival in Valencia is the craziest party going on in Spain, you've never heard of the baby jumpers of Castrillo de Murcia. Since 1620 grown men have been donning costumes and leaping over mattresses of babies in a rite meant to ward off the devil. We have a similar ritual at the office where CowboyNeal jumps over a row of cheeseburgers to ensure better internet connectivity.

Comment don't ruin good evidence!! (Score 1) 812

by nepeta on Wednesday April 30, 2008 @01:01PM (#23252612) Attached to: Post-Suicide Account Cracking?

logging into his laptop directly, while extremely convenient, is just asking for evidence distruction!! you could squish SO MUCH -- the real password (should you choose to crack it later and find that it's something like "ihatemylife"), his browsing history, atime on files, etc. you've only got one copy... instead, why not just mirror the hd somewhere first and mess with that? if you've got a Unix-like OS, just (dd if=/dev/[hd] of=~/localfile && losetup /dev/loop0 ~/localfile) as root and then poke around all you want. (you could use Qemu to run the disk-file as a virtual machine.)

Slashdot Top Deals