Cowards Anonymous writes "The Sintef Group, a research company based in Trondheim, Norway, announced that it's designing a robot based on snakes. The 1.5-meter long robots, which are made of aluminum, are being designed to inspect and clean complicated industrial pipe systems that are typically narrow and inaccessible to humans. The intelligent robots have multiple joints to enable them to twist vertically and climb up through pipe systems to locate leaks in water systems, inspect oil and gas pipelines and clean ventilation systems."

holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."

An anonymous reader writes "Back in April, LSI was granted patent number 7028023. This is a patent on a stunning new technique in data structures ... the concept that a linked list can in fact have multiple orderings. Of course, this has been used since the beginning of (computer) time in the form of doubly-linked lists. Even if LSI wants to (somehow) claim that the doubly-linked list doesn't count as prior art, maintaining linked lists of graphical objects sorted by both x and y co-ordinates for collision detection has been done since "graphical objects" meant ASCII characters on a green-on-black screen, and has probably been widespread in databases for probably even longer."

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately. Update: 11/10 12:52 GMT by J : It's fixed.

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Heise Security has a report about new Proof of Concept virus for Mac entitled as OSX.Macarena by AV vendor Symantec. Symantec suffered from a slight lapse when it recommended in the first version of the virus description that users clean the system by deactivating the system restoration (Windows ME/XP). It is known that the virus infects other data in the folder in which it is started, regardless of extension, says Heise."

Andy Updegrove writes "Far too much attention has been paid to whether or not the Wikipedia is accurate enough. The greater significance of the Wikipedia today, and even more for those in the future, is its reality as the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time. Moreover, with its multiple language versions, it also demonstrates how different cultures understand the same facts, historical events and trends at the same time. Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find. In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure-trove for data."

Thought it's not terribly surprising, it's nice to hear. Final Fantasy XIII has been announced for the PlayStation 3. It actually sounds like there will be three separate titles: A traditional RPG, a mobile game, and a 'versus' title. From the article: "FINAL FANTASY XIII. They pulled a serious bait-and-switch on us. Sword-and-gun-wielding heroine who looks like Yuna, flipping her way around a high-tech, futuristic world ... Motomu Toriyama will direct the game. And apparently FFXIII isn't the only game coming out of this universe--there's a, uh, mobile game too. Oh. It's Final Fantasy Agito XIII ... Final Fantasy Versus XIII?" Additional announcements include a new Crystal Chronicles and Dragon Quest for the Wii, and a Final Fantasy VII universe title for the PSP.