Lack of Testing Threatening the Stability of Linux? [Slashdot: 4/22/2005; 9:53:50 AM] Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer, has said that he thinks that the lack 'credit or money or anything' given to those people who put in long hours testing Linux releases is going to cause serious problems further down the line. In his speech at Linux.Conf.Au he also waded into the ongoing BitKeeper debate, saying 'If you pick a good technology and the developers are insane, it's all going to come to tears. 4/22/2005 10:12:09 PM    

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Scientists figure out how caffeine keeps us awake. [via CBS News 4/21/2005] When cells in a certain part of the brain become overworked, a compound in the brain kicks in, telling them to shut down. This causes people to become drowsy and fall asleep. Alter that natural process by adding coffee or tea, and the brain compound - called adenosine - is blocked, and people stay awake. "We knew that coffee kept us awake," Dr. Greene said. "Now we know why: Coffee and tea are blocking the link between the prolonged neural activity of waking and increased levels of adenosine in cells, which is why they prevent us from getting drowsy." Press release: Overworked brains release adenosine to slow cells, trigger sleep process. Neuron article: Adenosine Mediation of Presynaptic Feedback Inhibition of Glutamate Release. 4/22/2005 10:04:17 PM    

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Best-ever Freeware Utilities [TechSupportAlert 3/1/2005 via Lockergnome 4/22/2005] There are a lot of great freeware products out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives. This extensive list features Ian Richards' personal pick of the "best of the best," by category. 4/22/2005 9:05:30 PM    

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Berkeley Professor explains terrifying consequences for student that stole his laptop. [Boing Boing 4/21/2005; 2:52:53 PM] Mark Frauenfelder: The last few minutes of this video from a biology class at Berkeley is of professor explaining the terrifying consequences that will soon befall the student that stole his laptop. Hell, I'm 500 miles away from Berkeley and I'm scared after watching this. Here's a torrent of the pertinent part of the video (8,000 downloads so far). A transcript of Professor Rine's speech is available here. A lot of blogs have been commenting on the super-advanced anti-theft and tracking technology that Professor Rine says his stolen laptop possesses. This comic strip parody is a hilarious take on the incident. 4/22/2005 9:20:05 AM    

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GCC 4.0.0 Released [Slashdot: 4/21/2005; 10:53:07 PM]  Version 4.0.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been released. You can read the changelog or you can download the source tarball. The new version finally features SSA for trees, allowing for a completely new optimization framework. The changelog is pretty lengthy, and there's updates for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...). 4/22/2005 8:30:37 AM    

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