CNETNate - Slashdot User

Submission + - Holographic human heads used by DJ in live show (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by Lanxon on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @07:15PM

Lanxon writes: Director Chris Cairns has turned his short 'Neurosonics' film — which features disembodied heads mounted on a selection of instruments — into a live performance that's just as jaw-dropping as the original, reports Wired. The director originally created the 'Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs' film back in 2009. It's set in a lab, and depicts three scientists mounting a number of different heads onto turntables and drum sets before playing them like real instruments. The original video was created with plenty of CGI, so shifting it into a live setting was always going to prove troublesome. To bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical, Cairns enlisted the assistance of holographic projection experts Musion. The company set up the performance for the first Musion Academy Media Awards — which exist to recognise the most impressive holographic creations — and the result is truly impressive.

Submission + - Artwork literally re-sells itself on eBay weekly (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by Lanxon on Saturday January 23, 2010 @01:26PM

Lanxon writes: How much would you pay for an artwork that you could only own for a week? A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, 2009, is a black, acrylic box that places itself for sale on eBay every seven days thanks to an embedded internet connection, which, according to the artist's conditions of sale, must be live at all times. Disconnections are only allowed during transportation, says the creator, Caleb Larsen. Larsen tells Wired: "Inside the black box is a micro controller and an Ethernet adapter that contacts a script running on server ever 10 minutes. The server script checks to see if box currently has an active auction, and if it doesn't, it creates a new auction for the work."

Submission + - How Apple orchestrates controlled leaks, and why (macobserver.com)

Submitted by Lanxon on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @07:20AM

Lanxon writes: "I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple and I was instructed to do some controlled leaks," confesses John Martellaro in a fascinating article in Mac Observer. Monday's article at the Wall Street Journal, which provided confirmation of an Apple tablet device, had all the earmarks of a controlled leak. Here's how Apple does it. Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple's consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, "We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!"

Submission + - Nokia N900 running linux-based Maemo 5 reviewed (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30, 2009 @02:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: Nokia N900 just got its first proper review over at CNet. The N900 runs Maemo 5, the Linux-based mobile OS, on an ARM Cortex A8 processor and has a touchscreen and slide-out Qwerty keyboard. Nokia says Maemo will be on all its N-series smart phones by 2012, but is it worth having? The reviewer says it's great as a mini-tablet, with a smooth user interface, great multi-tasking and web browser, but it's not so great as a phone.

Submission + - Last.fm: The hardware powering the music (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Sunday November 29, 2009 @09:39PM

CNETNate writes: Last.fm has streamed an incredible 275,000 years of audio around the world, and it's most popular songs are packed onto SSD-powered servers to completely eliminate some of the problems associated with streaming from platter-based hard disks. This detailed interview with Last.fm's Matthew Ogle, the company's head of Web development, explains some of the facts and figures behind the global music service. From the article: "We stream all music directly off our servers in London. We have a cluster of streaming nodes including a bunch of powerful machines with solid-state hard drives. We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter."

Submission + - Creationists Editing Darwin's Origin of Species

Submitted by sjbe on Monday November 23, 2009 @12:54PM

sjbe writes: Proponents of intelligent design have been distributing an edited version of Darwin's "Origin of Species". The edited version reportedly contains a 50 page introduction written by Ray Comfort favoring creationism. The full original text of the book is included with the new version. Over 1000 copies were allegedly handed out near Washington University in Saint Louis without any notice to or approval from the university. The author reportedly draw connections between Hitler and Darwin so Godwin's Law may need to be invoked.

Submission + - Modern Tech versus The Past (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Monday November 23, 2009 @12:31PM

CNETNate writes: Most of us assume modern life is the peak of human achievement, but is it really? We decided to take a look at the major technologies of the modern world and compare them to their closest equivalent of pre-digital mankind — Facebook vs dinner parties, World of Warcraft vs actual war craft, iPhones vs hills on fire — and the results are surprising. And slightly dumb, so laugh.

Submission + - After 35 years, another message sent from Arecibo (centauri-dreams.org)

Submitted by 0xdeadbeef on Sunday November 22, 2009 @08:42PM

0xdeadbeef writes: Two weeks ago, MIT artist-in-residence Joe Davis use the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message to three stars in honor of the 35th anniversary of the famous Drake-Sagan transmission to M13 in 1974. It was apparently allowed but not endorsed by the director of the facility, and used a jury-rigged signal source on what will now be known as the "coolest iPhone in the world". The message encoded a DNA sequence, but no word yet on whether it disabled any alien shields. You can get the low-down on Centauri Dreams: Part 1, Part 2.

Submission + - Greatest technology world records (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22, 2009 @08:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: Did you know the largest paired Bluetooth devices in the world are two of London's bridges? Or that the biggest camera sensor tops out at 2.3 gigapixels? CNet has a collection of 10 technology world records, spanning supercomputers, software downloads, high-resolution displays and distributed computing networks.

Submission + - Google demos Chrome OS, promises late 2010 release (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Friday November 20, 2009 @07:57AM

CNETNate writes: Netbooks running Google's own operating system — Chrome OS — rather than Windows, yesterday took a giant step forward as the company released the underlying source code to the developer community. At a conference in the US, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management, announced the lightweight operating system is about a year away from release. He also promised it would ship pre-installed on Chrome OS-optimised netbooks, rather than be provided as a free download for anyone to install on any computer. In related news, Engadget has got the OS running inside VMWare and gives an early look at how it functions.

Submission + - Camino 2 browser benchmarked, compared, loved (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Thursday November 19, 2009 @05:41PM

CNETNate writes: Camino just hit its gold 2.0 milestone, bringing with it a pile of new features to make it an even more compelling OS X-only alternative to Safari, Firefox and Opera on the Mac. Benchmarks suggest it's not as quick as Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 (or Chromium for Mac if you look at a different article), but it's faster than Opera, and less processor-demanding than Mozilla's own alternative. The pressure on the Camino team is increasing though, with the first official beta of Chrome for Mac potentially just days away. You can download Camino 2 here, or have a poke around some other alternative browsers for OS X, Linux and Windows beforehand.

Submission + - Releasing the Chromium OS open source project (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Kelson on Thursday November 19, 2009 @03:15PM

Kelson writes: Google has released the source to what will eventually become Chrome OS, and will begin developing it as an open source project like Chromium. The OS differs from the usual computing model by (1) making all apps web apps (2) sandboxing everything and (3) removing anything unnecessary, to focus on speed.

Submission + - Study shows "60% of Xbox 360s have broken" (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @07:53PM

CNETNate writes: A new survey suggests as many as 60% of Xbox 360s have failed in RROD disasters, compared to 16% of PS3s and just 6% of Wiis. CNET commissioned the survey last month — and the results don't reflect well on the Microsoft console. Some 1,128 UK-based console owners responded, of whom 562 owned Xbox 360s, 473 owned PS3s and 591 had Wiis (some owned more than one). Of those Xbox owners who have bought their Xbox since January 2008, 34% report that they have broken — still double the lifetime failure rate of the PS3. Only 25% of disappointed 360 owners had owned the console for more than 18 months before it broke, with 47% reporting a failure inside a year.

Submission + - The 8 most brainless tech rumours in history (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @07:29PM

CNETNate writes: At the turn of the 20th century, Royal Society physicist Lord Kelvin made the remarkable statement that he believed the discovery of X-rays to be "a hoax". The rumoured fallacy of the X-ray discovery obviously went nowhere. But it's one of eight enormous technology rumours to have plagued the minds of the confused over the last century (though admittedly X-rays are more science than tech) . But X-rays being a hoax probably isn't quite as demented as what some people still believe: that Bill Gates is, in all seriousness, the antichrist.

Submission + - T-Mobile staff sold personal data (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:20PM

SpuriousLogic writes: Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers, a spokesman for the firm has confirmed.
The suspected illegal trade emerged after the firm alerted the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham.
He said brokers bought the data and sold it on to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers, as their contracts were due to expire.
A T-Mobile spokesman said the data was sold "without our knowledge".

Slashdot Top Deals