An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.

This is some Davinci Code shit here. Crazy.

In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal - New York Times

Those not in the diamond trade might find it hard to understand why Emile Chayto, a Geneva dealer with more than 40 years of experience, gave $14 million worth of gems to a stranger who claimed to be the wife of the deceased president of the Congo — before she had paid him one penny.

Unfortunately for Chayto, she was not the widow of Mobutu Sese Seko. And her wire transfer never arrived.

As Scams Go, This Is a Gem

At several points in the past, we have attempted to get people to colonize a MemeStreams IRC channel. Each time, its had about the same result. Five or six people pop in the first day.. The times when people are chatting don't line up, and people stop coming. Then I see a trail of people entering and exiting for 15 minutes at a time for the next several days..

Lets try this again... This time, stay in the damn channel. Idle there. Attract some more people. It takes awhile for any given channel to grab traction.

The topic isn't limited to MemeStreams, but should have something to do with media, idea transfer, Internet issues, communication theory, or current events.

irc://irc.freenode.net:#memetics

Freenode is a great network. Its stable, there are numerous servers, and the channel/nick services work well so there is no need to have bots to administrate the channels.

For those that don't use IRC, its a very old chat protocol. There are numerous networks and a plethora of clients you can use to connect to it. Asking which client is the best to use is like asking for a major debate. I prefer XChat myself. The main site has the Windows and Linux clients. There is an OSX specific port as well.

MemeStreams/Memetics IRC Channel (again) - #memetics

The list of frameworks that are offered by the Eclipse development platform would take
several books to enumerate throughly. However, in addition to decorators and job support, let me
list a few that are extremely useful for application development.
JFace provides a wizard framework that makes defining wizards a snap. Swing provides
no such framework.
Eclipse provides a framework for adding markers to any disk-based resource. Markers
include a description and, optionally, locational information within the resource. Again,
Swing provides no such framework.
The Eclipse platform provides a robust preferences framework. Sure we have
java.util.prefs,
but that only takes care of backend storage, not front display and modification of the
values. With Swing, you would be left to code the front-end for user-configurable
preferences yourself.
The Eclipse help system is fully integrated with the plugin architecture of the
platform. Plugins can contribute help to specific topics within the help system.
A full featured status bar is standard issue with Eclipse-based applications. With
Swing, you have to roll your own.

Trashes Swing

Swing vs. SWT?

If the parasite can alter rat behavior, does it have any effect on humans?
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey (Associate Director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute) noticed links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in human beings, approximately three billion of whom are infected with T. gondii:
Toxoplasma infection is associated with damage to astrocytes, glial cells which surround and support neurons. Schizophrenia is also associated with damage to astrocytes.
Pregnant women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma are more likely to give birth to children who will develop schizophrenia.
Human cells raised in petri dishes, and infected with Toxoplasma, will respond to drugs like haloperidol; the growth of the parasite stops. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic, used to treat schizophrenia.

Mind Control by Parasites - Toxoplasma alters behavior

I came across the following document posted to the mysql mailing list today. It’s a great feature comparison between MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, MaxDB and Ingres.
You can download the paper here.
Whilst this may only list supported features as of MySQL 4.1.10 - once you know the new features available in MySQL 5.0, it’s easy to see there really isn’t very much holding MySQL back when compared to other open source offerings.
This is certainly one of those papers that should be handed to all of those PostgreSQL “fanboys” that constantly spout about MySQL *not* supporting ACID transactions, transaction isolation, row level locking and foreign keys etc. It even shows that MySQL supports *more* transaction isolation levels than PostgreSQL.
A very interesting read for anybody currently trying to decide which open source offering to go with!

A long and thorough comparison of the Open Source databases available.

Mark Leith » Blog Archive » Open Source DB Comparisons

Someone has re-cut Fight Club as a romantic comedy. It turns out that practically any weighty or horrific film can be re-cut as a romantic comedy with enough jaunty "Meet so-and-so!" voice-over and uptempo brass-band background music.

HAShahahahaha

Boing Boing: Fight Club trailer as a romantic comedy

Slot maker Unicum services 80% of Russian/CIS market;

New ‘Systems In Progress’ may revolutionize slot networking.

A big headline for a big company, Unicum is the gaming Goliath of Russia. With headquarters and manufacturing facilities in Saint Petersburg and offices in Moscow, Riga, Kiev and Ekaterinburg, Unicum currently provides gaming products and services to 80% of the market in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (former USSR members).

And, with its revolutionary new “Systems In Progress” (SIP) networking technology for slot machine linkage, tracking and control, Unicum’s impact on the CIS market appears poised to become even more massive. An overview of the company reveals a widely experienced, confident organization that is perfectly suited to launch a new era in gaming management tech.

Russia’s Gaming Goliath : Unicum

MaxDB is priced at $49 per named user on single-CPU systems with a minimum
of five users. Alternatively, customers may choose to pay $1,490 (€1,290) per CPU,
without user limitations. A "named user" is an actual end user who connects to
the database directly or indirectly.

MySQL AB :: MaxDB™

Although the Itanium is capable of sustaining a theoretical maximum of 6 instructions and executing up to 11 instructions, and despite its massive register set, it uses fewer transistors for its core than all competitors. The main disadvantage is that it needs much more cache and instruction fetch width, but the disadvantage of needing more cache diminish as process technology gets better (smaller). To improve performance, the Itanium needs much bigger caches than its competitors, but this adds very little to the overall power consumption. As superscalar RISCs in x86 competitors increase their instruction execution width, they need to upgrade the Out-Of-Order buffers and more importantly, increase the complexity of the schedulers. This leads to a much higher complexity and power consumption.

As the focus shifts to Thread Level Parallellism, the Itanium's small cores make it easier to use more cores without increasing the power consumption too much. Montecito will be the living proof of this. The Itanium is also wider than the competition, which results in bigger benefits from threading techniques.

While Itanium may not be very popular in the hardware enthusiast community, it is definitely an architecture that, from an academic and technical point of view, deserves a lot more attention. We'll delve deeper in upcoming articles.

Welcome to AnandTech.com [ Article: Itanium - is there light at the end of the tunnel?]