Dead Space (X360)
The story behind Warren Ellis, the ‘new EA’ and ongoing ban controversy.
Pickens writes “The tendency to falsely link cause to effect — a superstition — is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around.” Foster worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off and found as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored. In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. “The chances are that most of them don’t do anything, but some of them do,” Foster says. Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect — often falsely — science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition. “You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,” Forstmeier says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, “quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often.”"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fight Night Round 4 (PS3)
EA boxing title crops up at GameStop Show.
eldavojohn writes “New research funded by the National Science Foundation at the University of Miami is showing that carbon dating (the 13C/12C ratio used to infer age) in the ocean can only be trusted up to 150 million years ago. From the primary researcher, “This study is a major step in terms of rethinking how geologists interpret variations in the 13C/12C ratio throughout Earth’s history. If the approach does not work over the past 10 million years, then why would it work during older time periods? As a consequence of our findings, changes in 13C/12C records need to be reevaluated, conclusions regarding changes in the reservoirs of carbon will have to be reassessed, and some of the widely-held ideas regarding the elevation of CO2 during specific periods of the Earth’s geological history will have to be adjusted.” While this research doesn’t necessarily throw carbon dating out the window, it should cause people to rethink so many theories about early life that revolved around ages of sediment in the oceans.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iconic band joins the SingStar roster on PS3 and PS2.
notdagreatbrain writes “Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft’s 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista’s early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn’t annoy its customers (or allow third parties to).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pure (PS3)
Do some sick tricks while you pass the competition.
NBA Live 09 All-Play (Wii)
Big time family fun in this video.
Gears of War 2 (X360)
The new sound design of Gears 2.
codemetre is able to produce source line count and
comment line count for languages such as Ada95,
C++, or Eiffel. It also proposes different models
to measure effort between two versions of a file.
License: GNU General Public License v3
Changes:
One last message was still not under i18n control.
pnmcurve is a command line tool that applies tone
curves to pnm images. Curves are specified as a
set of control points of a cubic spline. pnmcurve
applies the resulting spline curve to the pnm
image read from stdin and writes the resulting
image to stdout. Command line switches allow the
user to apply the curve only to selected color
channels.
License: GNU General Public License v2
Changes:
A graphical curve editor has been added. It can be used as a standalone program or called from the flimp as an external GUI program.
flimp is a generic graphical frontend to the many
excellent command line image manipulation tools
available. It allows you to create pipelines of
commands that read from standard input and write
to standard output. One can view and compare the
result of each stage of the pipeline. flimp leaves
the input image file untouched; the pipeline is
saved in a text file.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
Support for external GUI programs has been added (e.g. for tone curve editing).
Joomla! is an award-winning Web-based content
management system. It provides for split front end
content access and backend administrator access.
Group-based access control allows for different
levels of system control for both the site and the
administrator. The Joomla! framework allows for
extension by installable components
(applications), modules (template blocks),
languages, templates, and mambots (plugins that
enhance system functions).
License: GNU General Public License v2
Changes:
This is a security release and contains a number of bugfixes, improvements, and security fixes.
WikyBlog is a groupware application that fuses the collaborative editing features of wikis with the user friendly publishing characteristics of blogs. Designed for speed and ease of use, WikyBlog has a unique AJAX enhanced tabbed interface that enables users to view and edit multiple files within the same page. Custom templates, file attachments, a flexible user privilege system, and Google Maps number among its many features.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
This release candidate builds on the advancements made in the previous beta releases. Changes specific to the release candidate include renaming comments along with files and bugfixes.
WebIssues is a system that supports team
collaboration across the Internet. It can be used
for storing bugs and other information with
customizable attributes, comments, and file
attachments. The server can be installed on any
host with PHP and MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MS SQL
Server. The client is a native desktop application
for both Windows and Linux.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
The focus of this beta release is improved compatibility with Qt version 4.3 and earlier. It includes a custom print preview dialog that uses either standard components from Qt 4.4 or custom components when using previous versions. It also improves the look of reports with Qt versions before 4.4. There are some improvements related to the installation: a simple man page, support for DESTDIR, and a changed path for the manual.
Astaro Command Center (ACC) is an application for centralized management of Astaros gateway products. With ACC, network administrators can easily manage and control multiple Astaro devices. The two separated Web-Based GUIs (WebAdmin and Gateway Manager) enable the split of ACC-system administration and role-based Gateway monitoring and can be also implemented in existing Active Directory or eDirectory environments. provides an effective overview that details the actual health of each device, swiftly allowing administrators to see which gateways require more attention or immediate action (by reason of e.g. threat level, license, or CPU/memory/disk usage). Over the one-click WebAdmin SSO to each connected gateway, it is possible to react instantly if necessary.
License: Freely Distributable
Changes:
This release focuses on reliability, scalability, performance, and additional features. Also implemented is the split of the graphical user interface (GUI) into “WebAdmin” and “Gateway Manager”. This release offers Directory Service integration, trend indicators, filter bars, service monitoring, enhanced mouseover details, scheduled operations, and many small but very useful improvements.
Solido Spam Filter is a high performance, zero
maintenance spam filter.
License: Other/Proprietary License with Free Trial
Changes:
This release brings improved Spamassassin and Zimbra compatibility. Further enhancements include work on the administration interface, the installer, and overall performance.
Nhopkg is a package manager for operating systems
based on Linux. It was created for the nhoax
project, but it can be used in any other Linux
distribution. Nhopkg uses .nho packages. It can
install source and binary packages. If you prefer,
you can create a valid .nho source package to
compile and install it from sources in your
system.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
Compilation of source pacakges was added. The
creation of source packages was added. Some bugs
were fixed.
clapf is an email content filter application. It includes a statistical (inverse chi-square) anti-spam module, interfaces to several anti-virus products, a minefield (blackhole), spam quarantine, support for various RBL lists, training utilities, and much more. It can be used as an after queue content filter with Postfix (including as an appliance) or via a local delivery agent (LDA), preferably maildrop.
License: zlib/libpng License
Changes:
Debugging was improved. The parser routine was updated. “Junk” characters are now transformed to “j”. Blackhole training fixes were made. Long FQDNs are grabbed from the Received: lines. A bug that prevented spamdrop from printing its extra header information was fixed. The spam quarantine CGI menu was unified. The QP decoder was fixed. The whitelist feature was extended. The iterative training was enhanced. Default character encoding is added if it’s not specified. A bug in the clapf daemon which prevented training on the forwarded emails was fixed. The spam quarantine may be searched. Backscatter detection is done.
Rank Tracker is a rankings monitoring tool for
webmasters and SEOs who
need to monitor their most important keywords in
major search engines.
It reveals your rankings for an unlimited number
of keywords, tracks an
unlimited number of sites, supports regional
versions of Google, Yahoo!,
and MSN (and numerous local search engines), and
keeps you updated on
rankings fluctuations.
License: Shareware
Changes:
KEI and the number of searches are extracted from
Wordtracker. Keyword suggestions are taken from
Wordtracker. Twenty-five new regional versions of
Google were added. Arabic and Latvian versions of
Yahoo! and MSN were added. Three different rank
checking methods are available now. The ability to
track rankings of subdomains was added.
[fleXive] is a Java EE 5 framework for the
development of complex and evolving (Web)
applications. It speeds up development by easing
many tedious and repetitive programming tasks and
helping to keep your application(s) flexible
during the development cycle and in production. It
concentrates on enterprise-scale content modeling,
storage, and retrieval, and includes comprehensive
JSF support for displaying and manipulating these
contents in (Web) applications. The runtime
environment can be included in existing Java EE
applications, but you can also build new
applications and package them into stand-alone
Java EE applications. Key features include
persistence, security, versioning, multi-language
support, scripting, etc.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
Hierarchical XML-like data structures can be dynamically mapped and defined to relational databases. Content manipulation can be done without creating custom DAOs. The data and user interface were internationalized. Versioning, history, and workflows were implemented. Content and data structures can be imported and exported. Security can be enforced using access control lists, ruling mandators, and roles/groups/users. Event based JSR-223 scripting was added. A virtual tree-like file system was added. A powerful SQL-like query engine, caching, and support for mandator and ASP were added.
