Recent news from the WWW

• Simulated Mad-Cow disease
• Mechanial Hearts with no pulse
• DRAM boom
• More on the Apple issue
• Cray systems to use Dual Opterons
• Cellphone moviegoers sprayed with mace and arrested
• Blogging out of context

An artificial prion was successfully created – Simply put, they have just mimmicked the mad-cow disease, and tested them on rats. I hope the military doesn’t get any ideas.

The new mechanical hearts will now have a steady stream of pressure to move the blood accross the body, at least that’s how I understand it. I guess they took the idea from the watercooling community hehehe.

Kidding aside, I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, at one side you got what’s supposedly a more efficient artificial heart, but then you’ll have no pulse (which is usually important for medical procedues (operations, etc. etc.)

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now is not the right time to be buying memory.

Chipsets, motherboards, etc. have been pumping out so many new technologies lately – it makes sense that the memory manufacturers are capitilazing on the “virgin” territories that spring out from those technologies.

On the RealNetworks and Apple debate

Those underground programmers, at least in the United States, risk running into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars “circumvention” of digital copy protection. By contrast, legal experts note that RealNetworks is “hacking” Apple’s technology in order to protect music in its own way, not to pirate or otherwise copy it without permission. This kind of reverse engineering for compatibility purposes happens routinely in corporate America, and is allowed as long as competitors aren’t actually using copyrighted code, attorneys say.

My thoughts exactly!

Cray supercomputers, a name not really heard in consumer computing is incorporating AMDs 64-bit Opterons on their Red Storm systems for Sandia National Laboratories.

The machine is expected to run ten times as fast as Sandia’s ASCI Red computer system on Sandia’s important application codes. (ASCI Red held first place on the top-500 list of the world’s supercomputers for three-and-one-half consecutive years.)

A little bit of trivia – There are rumors that in the movie Jurrassic Park, Crays were used to control the island’s fuctions. Of course I found no proof of this in the net, but interesting nonetheless.

Couple maced and arrested while using cellphones in a movie

I wish that was done here in the Philippines. I’d be happy even if they merely confiscated the phones. But macing and arrest is fine by me.

A little girl found her way to use Perl; and mistook it for a blogging community. Her discontinued weblog can be found intact

use Perl;‘s journal feature, though perfectly usable as any kind of publishing medium, is primarily for research and discussion on the Perl programming language. It’s beyond anyone how the hell the girl stumbled on it, when blogger or livejournal should’ve yeilded much much more hits on a search engine (e.g. Google)