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Technology

Commodore 64 turns 30 218

Posted by samzenpus from the happy-birthday dept.
will_die writes "The Commodore 64 came out 30 years ago and to celebrate this the BBC went and got two groups of kids to try out an old system, complete with tape drive. It's sure to bring a few grins to people who had one of these old systems. From the article: 'The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.'" Last spring a modern version of the C64 was released.

Comment Nice (Score 1) 4

by Nick Number (#39629951) Attached to: Getting a Job

Getting paid to do what you do for fun sounds like a good deal.

I need to work out a way to get paid for cleaning up mistakes on Wikipedia.
Patents

Patent Attorneys Sued For Copyright Infringement 97

Posted by Soulskill from the sibling-fights-are-the-worst-fights dept.
Zordak writes "Patent blogger Dennis Crouch writes on Patently-O of a catch-22 for attorneys. Patent attorneys are required to submit all prior art that they know of to the patent office. Failing to do so is an ethical violation, and can result in a patent being invalidated. But now the Hoboken Publishing Company and the American Institute of Physics are suing a major patent firm for copyright infringement, because they submit articles to the patent office without paying a separate royalty."

Comment Re:CHEAP e-mail phone (Score 1) 294

by Nick Number (#39147495) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Mobile Phone Solution With No Data Plan?

Hey, no howling from this quarter. I'm still using my Treo 650 and I have a spare in reserve for when this one dies. It may not be fashionable, but it's a great tool for doing what I need - keeping contacts, notes, and calendar and syncing them with standalone Outlook. Many newer phones won't do that at all, or require you to take a roundabout route through Windows Live or Exchange.

Pertinent to the OP, the Treo is grandfathered in with Verizon and doesn't require you to buy a data plan. It does just fine with calling and SMS (though I have run into some problems with MMS).
Crime

Jedi Master's Hand-Made Lightsaber Stolen 174

Posted by samzenpus from the lost-your-weapon-you-have dept.
First time accepted submitter psiogen writes "Flynn Michael, an instructor at New York Jedi, an organization that teaches 'practical knowledge of how to use a lightsaber, left his custom-crafted blade for only a few imperial minutes, but when he returned, it was gone. From the article:'“Who steals somebody’s lightsaber? It’s like stealing someone’s toy out of the sandbox,” said Michael, the founder of New York Jedi, a stage combat performance group. “I finally got my uber custom saber, and then some jerk walks out with it."'"
Science

If You're Fat, Broke, and Smoking, Blame Language 297

Posted by samzenpus from the he-cannot-speak-it-good-like-we-do dept.
First time accepted submitter derekmead writes "A Yale researcher says that culture differences how much money we save, how well we take care of ourselves, and other behavior indicative of taking the long view, are all based on language. His study argues that the way a language's syntax refers to the future (PDF) affects how its speakers perceive the future. For example, English and Greek make strong distinctions between the present and the future, while German doesn't, while English and Greek speakers are statistically poorer and in worse health than Germans. (The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"
Image

DARPA Investing In Electric Brain Stimulation To Train Snipers Quickly Screenshot-sm 124

Posted by samzenpus from the heightened-reflexes-II dept.
New submitter Morganth writes "According to New Scientist, researchers at DARPA are investing efforts in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) machines to cut the time it takes to train snipers. From the article: 'a 2-milliamp current will run through the part of the brain associated with object recognition — an important skill when visually combing a scene for assailants.' The story also gives a nice explanation on the psychology of 'flow' — the state that experts tend to enter (e.g. programmers, tennis players, pianists) when focusing on their work." We covered similar research done on mice to improve their memory in September.
Media

Tapeheads and the Quiet Return of VHS 446

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the what-won't-hipsters-do-next dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Phillips writes that something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams as browsing aisles is no more and the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country. Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search of one whose cover art called back a story that echoed your interests. Josh Johnson, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary 'Rewind This!' hopes to tell the story of how and why home video came about, and how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine. 'Essentially, the rental market expanded, because of voracious consumer demand, into non-blockbuster, off-Hollywood video content which would never have had a theatrical life otherwise,' says Palmer. While researching the documentary Palmer found something interesting: there is a resurgence taking place of people going back to VHS because a massive number of films are 'trapped on VHS' with 30 and 40 percent of films released on VHS never to be seen again on any other format. 'Most of the true VHS fanatics are children of the 1980s,' says Palmer. 'Whether they are motivated by a sense of nostalgia or prefer the format for the grainy aesthetic qualities of magnetic tape or some other reason entirely unknown, each tapehead is unique like a snowflake.'"
The Media

New BBC Sports Website Makes Heavy Use of RDF 89

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the semantic-sports-league dept.
New submitter whyloginwhysubscribe writes "A technical blog post describes how the BBC has rolled out the latest changes to its sports website in anticipation of the Summer Olympics in London. The innovative content management system extends the already available dynamic semantic publishing, which enables their journalists 'to spend more time creating great content and less time managing that content.' The post covers some of the technical and lots of the HCI / UI design decisions and is accompanied by a non-technical overview of the re-design."

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