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PlayStation (Games)

Sony Announces PS3 Slim, Price Cut, Improvements To Home 427

Posted by Soulskill from the worst-kept-secret dept.
Sony's press conference today at the Gamescom convention was full of announcements. They officially revealed the PS3 Slim, which will be 36% lighter and 33% smaller than the normal PS3. It will come with a 120 GB hard drive and list for $299 when it hits retail stores in early September. Normal PS3s will drop to that price as well starting tomorrow. (Unfortunately for Sony, their unveiling was spoiled a bit by several retailers jumping the gun on new advertisements, not to mention the rumors that had been swirling for weeks ahead of time.) Sony also announced a PS3 firmware update as well as new features and customization options for Home. In addition to that, the PS3 and PSP will be getting a digital reader service. At launch it will bring access to Marvel comic books, and will expand from there. They didn't talk much about their upcoming motion control scheme, but promised more details next month at the Tokyo Game Show.
Communications

Wi-Fi Allergy a PR Stunt 174

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hope-he-made-his-buck dept.
ADiamond writes "There is no Wi-Fi allergy. The English DJ claiming a Wi-Fi sensitivity, chronicled earlier, was a PR stunt to promote his new album. It would appear that the stunt was highly successful, appearing in multiple high-profile media outlets like The Sun, The Telegraph, and Fox News. The article at Ars goes on to discuss the evidence, or lack-thereof, of electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity."
Biotech

Human Sperm Produced In the Laboratory 368

Posted by timothy from the that's-not-starting-from-scratch dept.
duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The BBC is carrying a report from a team of researchers at Newcastle University who claim to have developed a the first 'artificial' human sperm from stem cells. The research, reported in the journal Stem Cells and Development, involved selecting meristematic germ cells from a human embryonic stem cell culture and inducing meiosis, thus producing a haploid gamete. The authors claim that the resulting sperm are fully formed, mature, human sperm cells but the announcement has been greeted with mixed reaction from colleagues who claim the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation."
Games

Ubisoft CEO Says Next Gen Consoles Closer Than We Think 326

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-faster-stronger dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot tells CNBC that he believes the next generation of video game systems isn't as far away as the public has been led to believe. Guillemot noted that public demand for the best machine possible, as well as coming competition from companies such as OnLive could spur Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to roll out new systems sooner than they want. That's not good news for publishers, though, as he says games in the next generation will likely cost $60 million to create."

Comment Re:I'll pass. (Score 1) 228

by martinmarv (#28323757) Attached to: First Look At Microsoft Silverlight 3

35% is actually a much higher figure than I had in my head. About 12-18 months ago, a Microsoft representative was unable to tell us what percentage of users had Silverlight installed and web estimates seemed to put it at less than 5%. If the 35% figure is true, that's huge growth over that period, and more than enough to make it a serious consideration for shops considering rich internet applications.
I'd like to see some research to back that figure up, because if it's true, it's enough to change our product's technological road-map for the future. We're a Microsoft shop producing premium data products delivered over the web. Creating rich data applications is likely to be far easier in Silverlight (1.0 or 2.0, let alone 3.0) than, say, Ajax, Java or Flash. We couldn't say to our customers "install Silverlight - 1 in 20 people have already", but we can say "install Silverlight - just over a third of people have".
Earth

Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element 461

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-many-ideas dept.
koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of 'super-heavy' element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as 'ununbi' means 'one one two' in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man, I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.
Biotech

Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants 398

Posted by samzenpus from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."
Transportation

Do We Need Running Shoes To Run? 776

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the kenyans-have-it-right dept.
prostoalex writes to tell us The Daily Mail has an interesting look at current research in the field of running and injuries related to running. Most of the evidence pointed at a lack of any need for running shoes. Some of the more interesting points: the more expensive the running shoes, the greater the probability of getting an injury; some of the planet's best and most intense runners run barefoot; Stanford running team, having access to the top-notch modern shoes sent in for free by manufacturers, after a few rounds of trial and error still chose to train with no shoes at all."
Security

Adobe Flaw Heightens Risk of Malicious PDFs 193

Posted by kdawson from the driving-by dept.
snydeq writes "Security companies warn of a new flaw in version 9 of Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could compromise PCs merely by the opening of a malicious PDF. Although attacks are not yet widespread, hackers are exploiting the flaw in the wild, gaining control of computers via buffer overflow conditions triggered by the opening of specially crafted PDFs." Adobe is calling the flaw "critical" and says a patch for Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 will be released by March 11.
Windows

Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7 1127

Posted by kdawson from the just-who-did-you-think-owns-your-machine dept.
TechForensics writes "A few days' testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files." Read on for more details of this user's findings.
Security

UK Conservatives Slammed Over Open Source Stance 281

Posted by timothy from the fully-support-my-party's-stance-on-the-issue dept.
Golygydd Max writes "The UK government has been criticised by the opposition Conservative (Tory) party for its lack of support for open-source software. Now, according to Techworld, a security company that has examined the Tory plans has come out against the use of open source software, citing the number of security problems inherent in the software. This is a sensitive issue for the UK government, still smarting from the loss of 7m family records from HM Revenue and Customs in 2007. What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government — it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office. It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election."

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