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| Robotic Surgery |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @08:19PM
from the cold-steel dept. Raven42rac writes "Interestling article on my local newspaper's website dealing with a remote controlled, voice controlled, three dimensional surgery assisting robot."
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Read More... | 26 of 49 comments
) Universal Music Hit with Anti-Piracy Suit |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @06:31PM
from the sticky-fingers dept. prostoalex writes "Remember Bon Jovi trying to fight piracy with individual PIN numbers that legitimate buyers could get off the CD? DownloadCard, who claims to have invented the technology, filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group saying the music execs stole the technology and trade secrets from the company. Yahoo! Launch headline suggests that Bon Jovi album might be delayed because of the lawsuit."
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Read More... | 86 of 134 comments
) Motion Simulator for Home Theater |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @05:05PM
from the dramamine-not-included dept. Dalvenjah FoxFire writes "D-Box, a Canadian speaker company, has designed a system called the Odyssee consisting of four motor-driven actuators that go under your couch and a controller box with a CD-ROM drive for the control files. The controller reads the Dolby Digital bitstream from your DVD player, and plays back synchronized motion effects designed by the company. For about $20,000, you too can add motion simulation to your home theater. They have a list on their site of the movies they've encoded, including The Matrix, Drunken Master, Star Wars Episode I, and more, though it also has an 'audio driven' mode which will work with any source."
(
Read More... | 49 of 76 comments
) Features: New Technology for Digital Democracy |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @03:30PM
from the sit-down-strike dept. An anonymous reader submitted this interesting software request/editorial piece. The idea of digital demonstrations is still more or less in its infancy; various methods have been tried but none have proven to be perfect. Slashdot recently covered one presentation about digital demonstrations given at H2K2 [grep Dornseif] - the slides are online. The writer has glossed over some technical details, and the theoretical system he describes doesn't meet all of Dornseif's criteria for a digital demonstration which mimics physical ones (which seemed pretty well thought out at H2K2), but it's certainly an interesting idea nonetheless.
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Read More... | 10168 bytes in body | 87 of 149 comments | Features
) Automakers to Make Diagnostic Codes Available |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @01:58PM
from the keys-to-the-kingdom dept. Rubbersoul writes "As reported on /. a few months ago independent auto repair shops are a bit tense about not having access to car computer diagnostic codes. Well it seems that now the auto makers will share these codes after all. According to an article at CNN the codes will be available to all professional mechanics as well as amateurs working out of their garage at home. Good to see the auto makers came around on this one, even if it did take Congress to help a bit."
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Read More... | 89 of 151 comments
) Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @12:41PM
from the steamboat-shenanigans dept. Sylver Dragon writes "Business week has a story about Eldred v. Ashcroft. Seems that Eldred wants to put some of Robert Frost's works on the web, but, sadly, those were copyrighted. What makes this more interesting, is that the works would have become public domain, had congress not extended the length of copyright after an artists death. So now, the Supreme court must decide if congress overstepped the bounds of the constutional provisions for copyright laws, when they made the last extension. With any luck, the Supreme Court will choose the "road less traveled."" The plaintiffs have a webpage with much information.
(
Read More... | 164 of 246 comments | Your Rights Online
) Survivor Meets Junkyard Wars for Scientists |
Posted by
chrisd
on Saturday September 28, @11:28AM
from the all-they-need-is-coconuts dept. MyNameIsFred writes "Stepping back to Gilligan's Island, PBS has a new "reality" show Rough Science where "five scientists are challenged to put their collective scientific knowledge to practical use. Transported to isolated locations, they are presented with a series of tasks, with two notable restrictions: they must complete their work within three days and, with the exception of a rudimentary tool kit, must use only indigenous materials." Could the Professor really build all of those things? We'll soon know." Check out the Episode guide.
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Read More... | 102 of 143 comments
) Science: Controlling Robots with the Mind |
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday September 28, @10:35AM
from the clango-and-company dept. loucura! writes "Scientific American has a fairly technical article on the real-time control of robotic limbs using recorded neuron patterns. The researcher's macaque has simultaneously controlled two robotic arms in addition to its own arm motion. The amazing thing? One of the arms was 600 miles away. So, they transmitted and translated the "commands" into motion in less than 300 milliseconds!" It's still a long ways off from helping the disabled or making a Dr. Octopus suit, but the potential uses are pretty cool.
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Read More... | 52 of 84 comments | Science
) Worst and Best Predictions on Technology |
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday September 28, @09:24AM
from the not-quite-how-we'd-planned-it dept. prostoalex writes "Dow Jones News asked several mahor scientists and technologists about their worst and best predictions of the future. The story, republished at Yahoo! Finance Singapore quotes Lester Thurow, Professor of management and economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management; Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; Glover Ferguson, Chief scientist, Accenture; Alan Nugent, Chief technology officer, Novell; Peter Cochrane, Director, ConceptLabs; Michael Earl, Dean, Templeton College, University of Oxford. There seems to be a common agreement on having overrated the ability of machines to talk back to users and vice versa."
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Read More... | 113 of 167 comments
) Windows 2000 Runs On Xbox Under Linux |
Posted by
Hemos
on Saturday September 28, @06:36AM
from the oh-the-irony-of-life dept. MBCook writes "Everybody's favorite Xbox hackers have got Linux running for roughly six weeks, and now it runs well enough to announce that Windows has been run inside Linux with common PC virtualization software. They even have a little video of it playing a MPEG 4 of The Matrix fullscreen!"
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Read More... | 149 of 235 comments
) Tom's Hardware Review of Yamaha CRW F1 |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @06:23AM
from the spin-the-bottle dept. Tremblay99 writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the Yamaha CRW F1 CD burner. Not interested, you say? Well, it can burn images on the media side of a CD. While it's not the fastest burner around, it can do CD-RWs at 24x. Not bad at all."
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Read More... | 78 of 111 comments
) P2P Internet Radio |
Posted by
michael
on Saturday September 28, @03:26AM
from the need-tunes-badly dept. fdsa writes "O'Reilly's openp2p.com has
an article
describing two programs for peer-to-peer audio streaming, Streamer and PeerCast. Streamer is currently Windows-only but GPLed, and desperately searching
for somebody to port it to Linux. PeerCast was on slashdot before, but now runs on Linux and supports Ogg Vorbis. There's an impressive list of channels already. Planned features include video streaming and a "tip jar" system for paying artists. Setting up your own station is as simple as installing the oddcast
winamp plugin or liveice for xmms."
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Read More... | 55 of 92 comments
) VNC, No Longer Orphaned |
Posted by
chrisd
on Saturday September 28, @12:28AM
from the pc-anywhere-with-the-right-price dept. geogeek6_7 writes "Icronic informs us of a couple new developments to everyone's favorite piece of remote-managment software, VNC. You may remember that the UK Lab responsible for the creation and maintainence of VNC closed. A company called RealVNC has been formed, sporting the original coders from the AT&T lab, and aiming to 'act as the focal point for open source VNC.' Secondly, the new company has released version 3.3.4 of VNC for Windows and Linux. Greater security and a new, speed-enhancing auto-encoding feature are included among many others in the new version."
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Read More... | 136 of 182 comments
) PCI Shortwave Receiver |
Posted by
michael
on Friday September 27, @10:30PM
from the hamtacular dept. payman writes "WiNRADiO Communications has just announced news of its forthcoming WR-G303i PCI based shortwave, digital radio, narrowband FM receiver. This is said to be "the world's first dedicated shortwave receiver on a PC card. It is also the first commercially available receiver where the entire final intermediate frequency stage and an all-mode demodulator are entirely executed in software, running on a personal computer." Winradio has in the past supported Linux for its products (see Linradio), and it most likely will continue to do so with the WR-G303i."
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Read More... | 102 of 175 comments
)
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Book Reviews |
Need something to read? Slashdot's book reviews section is full of reader-submitted reviews of books you should know about. Recent reviews cover a variety of topics -- here's a sampling.
On the evolutionary front, Danny Yee reviews Patterns
and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, and Anthony Campbell
tackles The
Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw.
For a dose of truth stranger than fiction, read johnzo's review of Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.
Pick your poison: XML and
Java, Developing Web Applications; JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition; Perl
and XML; Python Programming with the Java Class Libraries; and many more books on computer languages await.
You maintain an Internet hookup, or administer a database, or need
wireless connectivity -- and you want these things to be secure?
Guarantees are hard to come by, but check out readers' reviews of O'Reilly's
802.11 Networks, The Definitive Guide, Lance
Spitzner's Honeypots: Tracking Hackers, and the excellent
Translucent
Databases from Peter Wayner.
Round out your reading with some books based on character, plot and vision
-- for instance, see Brooks Peck's review of Robert Charles
Wilson's The Chronoliths, and Brooks Talley review of
Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs
Found in a Bathtub.
Don't forget Matt Eberle's review of Alton Brown's I'm Just
Here for the Food, or timothy's take on Andrew Marlatt's Economy
of Errors.
Submitting your own review for consideration is easy, too! Just read the
Slashdot book
review guidelines, and then use the web submission form.
Update: 20020830 12:15 by timothy
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