thehickcoder - Slashdot User

Submission + - Neural "extention chord" developed

Submitted by moon_monkey on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @09:04AM

moon_monkey writes: Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a 'neural extention chord' by growing neurons attached to a microchip. The chord is made by gradually moving two batches of neurons apart, as they naturally grow towards one another. This biological 'data cable' could then naturally interface with the brain once implanted, the researchers say.

Submission + - Bionic Borg Cat Eye Implant Cures Blindness

Submitted by

docinthemachine

on Monday January 22, 2007 @11:21PM

docinthemachine writes: "A series of blindness reversing operations has just been completed in cats. Apparently, some felines get a version of retinitis pigmentosa and go blind just like their human counterparts. Several have been fortunate (?) enough to play guinea pig and receive a kitty version of an experimental human retinal implant. The 2-millimeter-wide chips are surgically implanted in the back of eye. Each chip's surface is covered with 5,000 microphotodiodes that react to light, sending electric signals along the eye's optic nerve to the brain. The post finishes up with a discussion of what should we do when the artifical limbs and retinas outperform the OEM body versions we were born with. read the full article at : http://docinthemachine.com/2007/01/22/cateye/"

Submission + - Google lost german toplevel domain google.de

Submitted by Korkman on Monday January 22, 2007 @08:40PM

Korkman writes: It seems Google has just lost one of it's major toplevel domains, google.de, to some german webhoster which was obviously well prepared for the traffic hit. See "http://www.google.de/", and, if already recovered, "http://www.goneo.de/" for the webhoster. Google.com stopped immediately redirecting german visitors to google.de. Anyone here to guess how much economic damage this will deal?

Submission + - Microsoft holds refugee children to ransom

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18, 2007 @03:18PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has launched a fundraising campaign for ninemillion.org (a UN Refugee Agency led campaign to raise awareness and funds for education and sport programs for refugee youth) based on searches performed at click4thecause.live.com between January 17 and March 31. According to PressEsc.com "Microsoft is only donating US$0.01 per search performed by a unique user on their site and while the maximum donation payable by Microsoft will be US$250,000, the company...is expected to rake in millions of dollars through advertising," and perhaps more sinister, "The website will try to automatically install a downloadable "gadget" on each visitor's computer."

Submission + - Internet Nostalgia Day

Submitted by

Victor Hugo Castro

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @03:20PM

Victor Hugo Castro writes: "I was reminiscing through archive.org and was wondering, "Wouldn't it be great if we had a Internet Nostalgia Day?" A day where major websites would display their old websites to give users a feeling of nostalgia. I propose August 6th in honor of Tim Berners-Lee and CERN's first website. What do slahsdot readers think?"

Submission + - HP's Advance Breathes New Life into Moore's Law

Submitted by silentounce on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @10:07AM

silentounce writes: Scientific American and other sources report that "researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have devised a way to make a specialized type of computer chip up to eight times denser using nanotechnology, in a development that could extend the life of current chipmaking technologies." They call the new technology a "field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)". They've created a switch that can route info more efficiently inside a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), a specific kind of chip. "We essentially provided a recipe to improve the circuitry of FPGA's by the equivalent of three generations of Moore's law without having to shrink the transistor," says Stan Williams, a senior fellow and director of quantum science research at HP's research laboratory.

Submission + - Barnes and Noble Refuses to Refund Lost Package

Submitted by

Flavio Ribeiro

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @09:54AM

Flavio Ribeiro writes: "On September 2006 I ordered $300 worth of books from Barnes & Noble. I've been ordering books online regularly for about 10 years, but this was my first order from B&N. I'm a grad student on a budget, so I payed for the cheapest shipping. Since I'm overseas and I've had packages take almost 3 months to arrive, I waited diligently. When nothing arrived, I e-mailed B&N. This is the response I got:
The package has not been returned to our warehouse as undeliverable to the shipping address you provided. (...) When no delivery confirmation is available, we will refund a lost package up to sixty (60) days after the expected delivery date. As it is now beyond sixty days, kindly contact your credit card issuer to dispute the charge.
My second attempt to contact B&N was answered with the same pre-written message, which I find quite insulting. My credit card issuer (Credicard Citi) refuses to dispute the charge, as is their policy with all charges. The fact I payed with Paypal also complicates matters. Additionally, Paypal automatically deferred and closed the claim I filed with them. The way I see this, B&N failed to deliver the purchased items, and refuses to take any action. They set an arbitrary short deadline that exempts them from further responsibility, which lets them bully international customers. This practice would never work out if B&N were a local company, since I'd be able to file claims at the local equivalent of the BBB.

I need your advice. What can I do to get a refund?"

Journal Journal: First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent 537

Journal by Ergasiophobia on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @04:31AM

Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made it's way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article:

Submission + - The thing that cannot be Googled

Submitted by tetsuo29 on Friday January 12, 2007 @05:05PM

tetsuo29 writes: So, I'm dissecting a Perl script that a co-worker wrote and not being very familiar with Perl, I have no idea yet what the line "$| = 1;" means. In trying to google for it, I've discovered that "$|" cannot be searched for by Google. Try it. It doesn't even return the standard page that says:

Your search — "[search terms]" — did not match any documents

Suggestions:

* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.

The results page is the equivalent of Google nothingness. Now, I think that "$|" is somehow related to CGI.pm and therefore probably CGI in general, but still shouldn't the brilliant coders at Google be able to code for this and index this as a search term so that clueless dolts like me can google for it to find out what it means?

So, I ask you Slashdotters:

* What does '$| = 1;' mean in Perl?
* Is there a way to google for that term?
* Has anyone else found any text that Google will return 'Google nothingness' as I've described it?

Submission + - State of the Union Website Analyzes and Visualizes

Submitted by

azalea666

on Friday January 12, 2007 @03:10PM

azalea666 writes: "http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/

The launch of Brad Borevitz's State of the Union website anticipates the 2007 State of the Union address scheduled to be delivered to Congress and the American people by George W. Bush on January 23rd.

Lamenting the triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity, Borevitz describes the gradual changes in political speech from argument to brand. The project asks us to consider if evidence for this assertion exists in the language of the State of the Union address which stands as a controlled sample of political speech over the course of U.S. history.

State of the Union provides searchable access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2007. Using visualization software, the site allows a user to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. State of the Union focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. From this information, users are invited to try and understand the connection between politics and language-between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being."

Submission + - IBM wants to sell our used hard drive

Submitted by

mvrekic

on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:48PM

mvrekic writes: "One of the hard drives on our company's servers died yesterday. Since the drive was under IBM warranty we contacted them to get a new drive only to learn that in order to get a new drive from IBM we have to give them our old one so they could repair it and resell it. Since the damaged drive contains thousands of user records (among them the private info of the IBM chairman as well) this was not an option for us. Then we have been told that in order to cover our warranty and keep the drive we have to pay an extra 700 dollars. Can they do this if it is not indicated in the warranty?"

Submission + - The Biggest List of Digital Camera Sample Photos

Submitted by

rudman

on Thursday January 11, 2007 @01:41PM

rudman writes: "View here the biggest list of digital camera sample photos ever. You can find here sample photos for various models of manufacturers like BenQ, Canon, Casio, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Olympus, Leica, Nikon, Panasonic, Pentax, Ricoh, Samsung and Sony. You can see the list here: Sample photos of all manufacturers And in the end of the page you can see some related resources where you can also view samples. Awesome list."

Submission + - PHP apps: security's low-hanging fruit

Submitted by

somersault

on Thursday January 11, 2007 @01:00PM

somersault writes: "There have been a lot of people on /. making jokes at the expense of PHP recently, but how many common security flaws in PHP are the fault of the language, and how many the fault of the developer? A recent Security Focus article (this version is from El Reg, the layout is better) has a brief discussion which suggests that PHP is no less secure than any other scripting language, and that it is the users of the language themselves who need to be educated. The other side of the story is that the developers of PHP themselves work on tightening up the language to make it more 'idiot proof' by default. Should the team developing PHP take a more active role in controlling the use of their language? What will it take to ensure that users of the language learn to use it securely, short of defacing every vulnerable website out there?"

Submission + - "Avatar" special effects, NYT

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @11:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: James Cameron, who directed "Titanic", has devised revolutionary methods to shoot "Avatar" and expects to create still more methods to bring to life the vision of a completely photo-realistic alien world. For its aliens, "Avatar" will present characters designed on the computer, but played by human actors. Their bodies will be filmed using the latest evolution of motion-capture technology — markers placed on the actor and tracked by a camera — while the facial expressions will be tracked by tiny cameras on headsets that will record their performances to insert them into a virtual world. The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film's virtual environment, as it happens. "It's like a big, powerful game engine," he explained. "If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It's pretty exciting." The live-action shoot with actors will begin in April, with major effects being done by Weta, the filmmaker Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based effects company, which created the effects for his "Lord of the Rings." The film is scheduled for release in summer 2009

Submission + - A failed attempt by Linux to market itself

Submitted by

WED Fan

on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @11:19AM

WED Fan writes: "URIG has some interesting insights, and makes a few good points. The problems he mentions are problems experienced by many FOSS projects. I think the symptoms point to a huge problem — Marketing. Companies have slick marketing. They have marketing professionals to front the company to the public. FOSS, by and large, makes the same mistake small companies do, putting gifted developers in front of their customers.

What if FOSS projects had some open source marketing? What if FOSS project leads could pull in young marketers needing to make their bones? Aren't there some slick marketing types in University right now, looking for a showcase?

If we get the geek factor, the developer jumble-speak, out of the marketing message, a greater acceptance will follow. The geeks come into play where they should, support and development. 99.8% of developers should never be allowed to front a project to customers, we kill our own message.

From URIG's blog:

It makes me somewhat sad to write about the Linux community's latest attempt at bringing their product to the wider public.

MakeTheMove.net is a website dedicated to spreading the word on why Linux and other FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) are the right choice for average Joes and Joans and not just for the ubergeeks.

Ironically, the website looks like a parody of Linux' user unfriendliness. It is a failed attempt at being communicative. The layout of graphic elements and text is downright bad and unattractive. The long (and wide) paragraphs are difficult to read and worse — downright boring. The "Why Should I Move?" section is a depressing example of this.

I am a fan of Linux as a concept, I guess. Nut as much as I admire the development of a powerful and robust open source OS, the last time I installed Linux on my machine was back in the days of RedHat v5.2. MakeTheMove.net certainly doesn't make me want to give it another try.
"

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