Links from 2012-02-18

World’s First Biological Computer Decrypts Images Stored in DNA - International Business Times

An international team of scientists have created the world’s first biological computer that is made from biological molecules and can decode images stored and encrypted within DNA. Built by U.S. and Israeli researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in California and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have created a computing system from a mixture of DNA molecules, enzymes and ATP, the substance that gives energy for human cells. The computer was able to decrypt information from a DNA chip.

IBM: Future computers will be constant learners

Tomorrow’s computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will help them provide users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM’s Watson system. Computers in the future „will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM’s principal investigator for Watson technologies. Ferrucci spoke at the IBM Smarter Computing Executive Forum, held Wednesday in New York.

Doodle Defense is played with a whiteboard and Kinect | Ubergizmo

If you’re a fan of tower defense games, you’re going to love Doodle Defense – at least I think you will. Played with a whiteboard, a Kinect, a projector, and a Mac computer, Doodle Defense takes drawing games and tower defense to a whole new level. While the concept of the gameplay is the same (prevent units from travelling from the entrance to the exit), how the game is played is very different to what we’re normally used to. Instead of dragging and dropping buildings and towers on our computers, Doodle Defense is played with a marker on a white board. Players use a marker pen to draw mazes in order to slow down the invaders, and towers to destroy them – however, they’ll have a finite supply of ink so they’ll have to use it wisely in order to win the game.

Google Becomes Largest Public DNS Provider - Security - Privacy - Informationweek

Google has become the largest public DNS service in the world, an event that might either please or frighten you, depending on your view of Google. The company launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 and on Tuesday said its service is handling more than 70 billion requests a day.

Building Real Software: Technical Debt - How much is it Really Costing you?

Sonar, an Open Source dashboard for managing code quality, also tries to calculate a technical debt cost for a code base, again using static analysis findings like code coverage of automated tests, code complexity, duplication, violations of coding practices, comment density. Thinking of technical debt in this way is interesting, but let’s stop pretending that these are hard numbers that we can use to make trade-off decisions. Although the numbers appear precise, they’re arbitrary, guesses. And they assume that technical debt can be calculated by a tool looking at the structure of the code. Unfortunately, dealing with technical debt is not that straightforward. But if debt is too fuzzy to be measured in detailed cost terms, how do you know what kind of debt is hurting you the most, how do you know when you have too much? Let’s look at different kinds of technical debt, and how much they might cost you, using a fuzzier approach.

High Scalability - High Scalability - A Super Short on the Youporn Stack - 300K QPS and 100 Million Page Views Per Day

Eric Pickup from Youporn.com posted on a news group that Youporn is now 100% Redis based and will soon be revealing more about their architecture at the ConFoo conference. Some stunning, but not surprising numbers were revealed: 100 million page views per day A cluster of Redis slaves are handling over 300k queries per second.

Warum Science Fiction einfach nicht totzukriegen ist | Telepolis

Vorbei sind die Zeiten, in denen eine gute Geschichte ohne Redundanzen auf 200 Seiten erzählt wird. Verleger wollen dicke Bücher, weil sie einen höheren Verkaufpreis erzielen, und Autoren betreiben das Seitenschinden bis zum Exzess und schreiben Endlos-Serien, weil ihre Verleger es wünschen. Einen Kontrollmechanismus gegen diese selbstverliebte Aufgeblähtheit, wie einen rigiden Lektor, gibt es schon lange nicht mehr.

A myth called the Indian programmer « miles to go…

Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports. In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming meth

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation

Mass Effect is epic. It’s the product of the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and more with a protagonist who could be the love-child of Picard, Skywalker, and Starbuck. It’s one of the most important pieces of science fiction narrative of our generation. Mass Effect goes so far beyond other fictional universes in ways that you may not have yet realized. It is cosmic in scope and scale. Basically, Mass Effect is the most important science fiction universe of our generation. Here’s why.

YSlow Released Under BSD License on GitHub

Yahoo! has released its popular Web page performance analysis tool (first developed by Steve Souders) under the BSD license and put it on GitHub to encourage community interaction in its development.

js1k.com - A lovely js competition

The object of this competition is to create a cool JavaScript „application” no larger than 1k. Starting out as a joke, the first version ended with a serious amount of submissions, prizes and quality.

Tagged as: delicious, links | Author: Martin Leyrer
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