Wordpress 2.3 released!

Posted by multippt

Wordpress 2.3 has just been released. This new version of Wordpress boasts the following new additions:
-Tag support, improves SEO of your site, and navigation.
-Update notification, notifies you of any future release of Wordpress.
-Updated SEO for URLs. Support for URLs with no “www.” in it.
-”Pending review”. Similar to drafts, except it in a way it ensures that someone else may look at it (whereelse drafts might get ignored if there are too many posts).
-Changes to WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. Allows for addition of so-called “hidden” features that otherwise need much JavaScript editing.
-Better ATOM feed support.
-Increase in loading time.

More features other than these main ones were added. The Wordpress codex documents on most of them.

A New Entry From A.M.D. In Chip Wars

Posted by signup

Advanced Micro Devices is counting on a new high-performance computer chip to hold on to hard-fought market share it has won from its principal rival, Intel.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is set today to release the next generation in its Opteron line of processors for computer servers. The new chip puts four processors on one piece of silicon, a technology known as quad-core, allowing for faster calculating and greater energy efficiency, features sought by companies running large data centers and server farms.

Mario Rivas, executive vice president for computing products at A.M.D., said the latest Opteron chip is the company’s most significant new product in several years.

For Advanced Micro, the stakes are high, with the new chip arriving just as it struggles to maintain its hard-earned gains from Intel, its far larger rival. A.M.D.’s product introduction comes less than a week after Intel tried to upstage it with a server update of its own: new Xeon server processors that bundle together two chips that each have the circuitry of two processing engines.

In July, A.M.D. reported a $600 million loss for the second quarter, its third loss in a row, as it grappled with the renewed competition from Intel and falling chip prices. But it also said that shipments of microprocessors rose 38 percent from the first quarter, and that it had begun to win back market share after several quarters of slipping.

Intel and A.M.D. have been locked in a race to deliver high-performing chips for several years. A.M.D. was first to market with a dual-core chip more than two years ago as Intel struggled to get its dual-core strategy off the ground.

When A.M.D. introduced the Opteron server chip in 2003, the industry was slow to warm to the product, but the company says that this time will be different. Four years ago, Intel’s server processors were favored by nearly all major hardware suppliers. But delays at Intel induced Dell, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems to gradually turn to the Opteron as an alternative.

A.M.D. gained market share, particularly in the desktop and server markets, though Intel managed to keep a tight grip on fast-growing notebook PCs.

In recent quarters, Intel has responded with a succession of processors, and has managed to win back some of the share it lost. Intel is now leading in the market for servers, analysts say.

Analysts expect the new Opteron to take off more quickly this time because the major hardware companies are already A.M.D. customers. “This chip will have a much faster impact on A.M.D.’s business,” said Nathan Brookwood of Insight64, a chip industry consulting firm, “but a lot will be riding on just how good it is.”

Source

Virus Is Seen as Suspect in Death of Honeybees

Posted by signup

Scientists sifting genetic material from thriving and ailing bee colonies say a virus appears to be a prime suspect — but is unlikely to be the only culprit — in the mass die-offs of honeybees reported last fall and winter.
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Bees Dying: Is It a Crisis or a Phase? (July 17, 2007)

The die-offs, in which adult bees typically vanished without returning to hives, were reported by about a fourth of the nation’s commercial beekeepers. The losses captured public attention as rumors swirled about causes, like climate change, cellphone signals and genetically-modified crops. Scientists have rejected those theories.

Now, one bee disease, called Israeli acute paralysis virus, seems strongly associated with the beekeeping operations that experienced big losses, a large research group has concluded, although members of the team emphasized that they had not proved the virus caused the die-offs.

“I hope no one goes away with the idea that we’ve actually solved the problem,” said Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist with the Department of Agriculture and co-director of a national group working on the puzzle, which has been given the name colony collapse disorder.

The project involved an unusual partnership between entomologists and scientists working at the leading edge of human genetic research. It employed the same technology being used to decode Neanderthal DNA and the personal genome of James Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

The research was described yesterday in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Details are available at eurekalert.org/bees.

Even with the caveats, the possible identification of a virus involved in large bee die-offs is “exceptionally important,” said May Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was not involved in the study. “Among other things, figuring out where this one came from will help us prevent future problems.”

Dr. Berenbaum, who led a 2006 National Academies study of problems with bees and other pollinators, said that finding ways to swiftly home in on novel diseases is ever more important in a globally linked economy. She noted that the first reports of the latest bee die-offs in the United States came in 2004, the first year the country allowed the import of honeybees — from Australia in this case — since 1922.

The new study found evidence of the virus in some Australian bee samples, although that country has not reported die-offs like those seen in the United States.

Dr. Pettis said that even if the virus was involved, it was likely that more than one factor had to align for a hive to collapse, with another possible influence being poor nutrition. Most of the colonies that had big losses last winter were in areas that experienced drought a few months beforehand, and thus a lack of nectar in flowers, he said.

Another factor, Dr. Pettis said, could be the stress that comes from the increasingly industrial-style beekeeping operations in the United States, in which truckloads of hives crisscross the country to pollinate California almonds or Florida orchards each season.

But the virus stands out as a top suspect. While seven viruses and a host of bacteria and parasites were identified in the genetic screening, only the Israeli bee virus, first identified in 2004, was strongly tied to the samples taken from keepers who reported the collapse disorder.

While the virus was first identified by scientists in Israel, it appears to exist in many parts of the world, said W. Ian Lipkin, an author of the new study and director of the Center for Infection and Immunology of Columbia University. In Israel, the virus also seems to produce bee symptoms not reported in the United States, including a pattern of finding dead bees near hives.

Dr. Lipkin, whose focus is human disease, became involved because the quest for a cause for the beehive collapses employed new genetic sifting techniques that he said might also prove useful in investigating outbreaks of human diseases.

One hint of the involvement of an infectious agent, he said, was the recent finding that abandoned hives sterilized with radiation could be repopulated with healthy bees.

The study initially examined bees from four beekeepers who reported die-offs, as well as healthy bees from Hawaii and Pennsylvania. Genetic material was extracted and analyzed with a machine from 454 Life Sciences, a company immersed in the race to make gene sequencing a fast, cheap technology.

Statistical analysis showed that a colony with the Israeli virus was 65 times more likely to have had the collapse disorder than one without it. To try to clarify cause and effect, the researchers said they were preparing a new suite of tests in which isolated bee colonies would be intentionally infected with the virus, both with and without possible secondary causes like certain parasites.

Source

Digg clone: Pligg goes on sale

Posted by multippt

In a bizarre twist of fate, Pligg [one of the more well known Digg clones] gets landed on the auction table - not by force, but due to the difficulty of maintaining it financially. The winning bidder would gain access to the CMS, its distribution, and the community - quite a nice bargain isn’t it, considering Pligg has a community of over 10000 members (that are registered), with 60000 downloads. It is hoped that the new owner would help bring Pligg to greater heights.

Fortunately, the change in hands of Pligg development would not occur so soon - it may take months. For now, Pligg would be still under the hands of its original owners, until next time.

*Hmm, what ever happened to supergu?

Via Pligg forums

Possible flaw in Microsoft office 2007?

Posted by multippt

As with any big product there are bound to be glitches within it. Microsoft is no exception. This time, it came in the form of headers and footers. While headers and footers are touted as one of the nicest ways of labelling your pages, especially when you can customize it with relative ease in office 2007, users have always been plagued by the problem of printing individual pages when specifying a rather unique header/footer - one that is automatically generated, such as page numbers. Lets say you want to devide your document into 2 parts, both parts have pages 1, 2, and so on. If you want to print page 1 of the second section [which happens to be the 8th page in your document], what would you have to specify? Page 8, or 1? Actually, none. You cannot simply print that particular page… instead, you could just print the entire document if you want that page.

Adobe reader 8.1

Posted by multippt

Adobe has just recently released a small update to it’s PDF viewer. The update contains mainly of bugfixes.

Features added:
-Improve Windows Vista support
-Improved forms performance
-Acrobat 8 3D support
-Integrated FedEx Kinko’s Print Online
-Several bugfixes

You can download Adobe Reader 8.1 here.
More information on the update can be found at Adobe TechNote.

Windows Vista Betas to expire today

Posted by multippt

The Windows Vista betas would expire today, 31st May 2007.

 If you want to save your data, you would need to upgrade/reformat your betas. Windows Vista Beta 2 requires a clean install, Windows Vista RC1 and RC2 could use an inplace upgrade (if you upgrade to Windows Vista ultimate) or clean install (you get to save about US$200) with the Windows Vista upgrades in the final release (RTM).

The in-place upgrade preserves all your data, while clean install will erase all your files and “repair” all settings [if needed].

Note that after this day, users of these betas would only be able to log in for 2 hours at any time to retrieve/backup data. After the 2 hours, the computer running the beta will shut down (without providing the opportunity to save data). During this period of time, you might be able to upgrade your beta to the final copy of Windows Vista (but, it is recommended that you have already upgraded the operating system earlier than the 31st of May). The 2 hour login sessions would be available for a while after the 31st of May for a limited amount of time (up till the 28th of August 2007).