Philadelphia Tech & Business News: |
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Latest Slashdot News: Half-Male Half-Female Fowl Explain Birds' Sex Determination Kanan excerpts from a BBC report out of Scotland: "A study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals. Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female and found that nearly every cell in their bodies — from wattle to toe — has an inherent sex identity. This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones."Kanan also supplies this link to some pictures of the mixed-cell birds. read more >> T-Mobile's First HSPA Modem Goes On Sale Sunday adeelarshad82 writes "T-Mobile announced that the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick the first HSPA device for the US will be available beginning on Sunday March 14. The device was originally announced at MWC in February. HSPA is interesting because it could enable 4G LTE-like speeds using existing 3G infrastructure and according to a hands-on it smokes Wi-Max. Right now it's still just for Philadelphia although we should see several major cities light up with HSPA on both coasts well before the end of 2010." read more >> EMI Cannot Unbundle Pink Floyd Songs smooth wombat writes "Before the advent of iTunes and MP3s EMI and Pink Floyd entered into a contract which stated that EMI could not unbundle individual songs from their original album settings. This was insisted upon by the members of Pink Floyd who wanted to retain artistic control of their works which they considered 'seamless' pieces of music. However with the advent of digital downloads EMI has been selling individual songs through its online store. Pink Floyd sued claiming EMI was violating the contract whereas EMI said the contract only applied to physical albums not Internet sales. Judge Andrew Morritt backed the band saying the contract protected 'the artistic integrity of the albums.' Judge Morritt also ruled EMI is 'not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd's consent.'" read more >> Bill To Ban All Salt In Restaurant Cooking lord_rotorooter writes "Felix Ortiz D-Brooklyn introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor it controls bacteria slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese." read more >> The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research." read more >> Multitasking in for iPhone 4.0? The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally havehonest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true. read more >> IE 6 & 7 Unpatched Exploit Goes Wild Kolargol00 writes "Heise online reports the availability of an exploit (Google translation) for the yet-unpatched MSA-981374 affecting Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It has already been spotted in the wild by McAfee and integrated into the Metasploit Framework." read more >> Apple Blocking iPhone Security Software Barence writes "Speaking exclusively to PC Pro Eugene Kaspersky has claimed Apple has repeatedly refused to deliver the software development kit necessary to design security software for the phone. 'We have been in contact for two years with Apple to develop our anti-theft software [but] still we do not have permission' said Kaspersky. Although he admits the risk of viruses infecting the iPhone is 'almost zero' he claims that securing the data on the handset is critical especially as iPhones are increasingly being used for business purposes. 'I don't want to say Apple's is the wrong way of behaving or the right way' Kaspersky added. 'It's just a corporate culture — it wants to control everything.'" read more >> Drizzle's Future Moving to Rackspace? abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle but with the Rackspace Cloud." read more >> OpenGL 4.0 Spec Released tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL or external APIs such as OpenCL without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification together with a set of ARB extensions to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware." read more >>
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