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Comment Re:Woo-hoo (Score 1) 229

Rather, the developers are staying within the existing confines of the BattleTech universe. In 3015, it simply isn't possible to have a variable weapons loadout, especially not out in the field. Mechs were rare commodities, very very very few NEW mechs were being produced, and the ones that were generally were based on older designs.

There were no Omnimechs. There was no system to effectively retrofit a battlemech in the field. There WERE Battlemech Variants. So you may be able to choose from a Battlemaster C and a Battlemaster A, but you couldn't (easily) convert from A to C.
Science

6000-Year-Old Tomb Complex Discovered 83

Posted by samzenpus from the nobody-knows-who-they-were-or-what-they-were-doing dept.
duh P3rf3ss3r writes "National Geographic reports that a 6000-year-old tomb complex on 200 hectares (500 acres) has been discovered on the Salisbury Plain just 24 km (15 miles) from Stonehenge. The site has come as a surprise to the archaeologists who had thought that the area had been studied in such depth that few discoveries of such magnitude remained. The site, fully 1000 years older than Stonehenge, has been called 'Britain's oldest architecture.'"
AMD

Submission + - AMD Demos DirectX 11 Capable ATI Graphics Card

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in stored for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11. AMD shows three primary features of DirectX 11; one being tessellator which allows for less blocky and more fluid and realistic details, Compute Shaders which allows for less restricted programming, and finally they show us how DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores.
Input Devices

A No-Touching 3D Computer Interface 123

Posted by timothy from the in-development dept.
Justin Schunick points out a video demonstration of a 3D input system which senses the user's hand position, but without requiring the user to touch a controller or wear a trackable position indicator. From the provided description: "Utilizing the theory of electrostatics, we have designed a low-cost human-computer interface device that has the ability to track the position of a user's hand in three dimensions. Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body. To control the device, the user simply waves their hand above it in the air."
Biotech

Device Keeps Lungs Breathing Outside the Body 74

Posted by timothy from the trade-creepy-feeling-for-staying-alive dept.
Al writes "A new system that keeps lungs breathing outside the body could improve the chances of a successful transplant. The Toronto XVIVO Lung Perfusion System, developed at Toronto General Hospital, can keep a pair of human lungs slowly breathing inside a glass dome attached to a ventilator, pump, and filters. The lungs are maintained at normal body temperature of 37 C and perfused with a bloodless solution that contains nutrients, proteins, and oxygen. The organs can be kept alive in the machine for up to 12 hours while surgeons assess function and repair them. See a video of the system keeping a pair of lungs alive."
Censorship

German Wikileaks Domain Suspended Without Warning 215

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the boom-headshot dept.
mb writes to mention that Germany has gone one step further in impeding access to Wikileaks. Germany's registration authority, DENIC, recently suspended Wikileaks.de without notice. "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."

Comment ANA/HANA != Scaler (Score 1) 346

by Fireye (#27301803) Attached to: Increase In Xbox 360 E74 Problems

Minor correction, the ANA/HANA chip does not do scaling for the x360. The Xbox360 does all scaling in software. Purportedly the ANA/HANA chip handles transferring the framebuffer to the output format (composite, hdmi, component, s-video, SCART, etc).
First Person Shooters (Games)

Tribes 1 Returns In-Browser At GDC Next Week 55

Posted by Soulskill from the a-fad-has-begun dept.
An anonymous reader writes "GarageGames purchased the IP rights to the entire Starsiege Tribes universe, and next week at GDC they'll be showing off their updated version of Tribes 1 running in a browser, using all the original artwork. Afterwards, it will be available to play standalone or via the Instant Action website. While you wait, you can play Fallen Empire Legions in your browser, which is based on the Tribes 2 engine. Their blog entry about the Tribes 1 preview at GDC has further details."
Science

Extinct Pyrenean Ibex Cloned 249

Posted by Soulskill from the intrepid-endeavor dept.
jamie points out a story in the Telegraph about a project to clone the Pyrenean Ibex (known also as bucardo), a species that went extinct in 2000. Before the last known member of the species died, scientists took tissue samples to begin a project to clone the animal. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. " Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the gestation period, living for seven minutes after birth. One of the researchers said, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
Data Storage

Fedora 11 To Default To the Ext4 File System 161

Posted by kdawson from the better-in-many-dimensions dept.
ffs writes "The next release of Fedora, 11, will default to the ext4 file system unless serious regressions are seen, as reported by heise online. The LWN story has a few comments extolling the virtues of the file system. Some benchmarks have shown ext4 to be much faster than the current default ext3. Some of the new features that matter for desktop users are a faster file system check, extents support (for efficiently storing large files and reducing fragmentation), multiblock allocation (faster writes), delayed block allocation, journal checksumming (saving against power / hardware failures), and others. The KernelNewbies page has more information on each feature. As is the extfs tradition, mounting a current ext3 filesystem as ext4 will work seamlessly; however, most new features will not be available with the same on-disk format, meaning a fresh format with ext4 or converting the disk layout to ext4 will offer the best experience."

Comment Re:Space Solar Power does make sense, sometimes (Score 1) 275

by Fireye (#26192311) Attached to: Obama Transition Team Examining Space Solar Power

So, a SSP array would produce 5 times as much raw power as one on the ground on a sunny day.

When is it not a sunny day in space? There's a lot less weather outside of our atmosphere to interfere with solar power gathering. Granted, you have to deal with other issues, I'd be especially worried about large arrays of solar panels being hit by space junk.

Some have suggested sourcing construction material from the moon, and assembling panels outside of earth, which would certainly reduce cost if it is feasible.

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