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Comment film-making applications of this technology?!? (Score 1) 82

by chaosmind (#37706452) Attached to: Company Offers Creepily-Realistic Masks of Clients

a bit prohibitively-expensive for the backyard amateur filmmaker, but I'd be curious to see what FX-guys like George Romero/Tom Savini/KNB group would do with this technology. i think old-school, in-camera analog effects are always more dramatic... how will the next Martin Scorcese or Sam Peckinpah make use of this?!?

Comment Also, bias in handedness (Score 1) 638

by chaosmind (#35922350) Attached to: Mac Users More Liberal Than Windows Users

I was testing the original iBook (the toilet seat cover-looking one) at Apple computers many years ago, and I complained to a friend that the USB ports were on the left-hand side. The original hockey-puck mouse had a fifteen inch cable, so this was especially annoying. "Only one out of nine people are left-handed... this makes no sense!" I fumed...

There was an Apple engineer there who was listening intently, and chimed in, "You're absolutely right--but do you know how many *Mac* users are left-handed?" No.... "One in two."

Never got any confirmation on that one, but it has seemed to jibe with personal experience... as well as the "liberal Mac vs. conservative PC" thing, hardly surprising.

Comment Re:Seriously? Do your own job. (Score 1) 286

by chaosmind (#34323604) Attached to: SSL Certificates For Intranet Sites?

I think you're getting old and crotchety. In my day, you'd start doing your research and educating yourself through USENET groups. Then #freenode on IRC. Why do you deem Ask Slashdot an inappropriate place to begin a geek's self-education?

Where else, then, should one begin? Google is a corporate entity with advertiser influence and paid links (*cough* do no evil *cough*), and frequently the offerings on faqs.org are anemic or out-of-date.

Maybe some enterprising geeks could comb through the most commented Ask Slashdot postings, cull the best of the 5-scored postings and summarize them into a BBS-style Ask Slashdot FAQ. (This is a good place to learn; let's not flame those with questions beneath our current, personal level of knowledge, hmm?)

just my .02
Security

A Flood of Stable Linux Kernels Released 105

Posted by timothy from the five-is-better-than-one dept.
Julie188 writes "Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes."
Image

Japanese Turning To "Therapeutic Ringtones" Screenshot-sm 75

Posted by samzenpus from the take-two-calls-and-see-me-in-the-morning dept.
indiavision writes "A host of young Japanese are drawn to the allure of 'therapeutic ringtones' — a genre of melodies that promises to ease a range of day-to-day gripes, from chronic insomnia to a rotten hangover. Developed by Matsumi Suzuki, the head of the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, an eight-year-old subsidiary of the Japan Acoustic Laboratory, the tones are a hit with housewives as well as teenagers."
Input Devices

Best Mouse For Programming? 569

Posted by timothy from the keep-it-away-from-cigarettes-and-drugs dept.
LosManos writes "Which is the best programming mouse? Mandatory musts are wireless, and that it doesn't clog up like old mechanical mice. Present personal preferences are for: lots of buttons, since if I have moved my hand away from the keyboard I can at least do something more than move the pointer; sturdy feeling; not too light, so it doesn't move around by me accidentally looking at it." What would you recommend?
Handhelds

Here Comes iPhone Nano, But Not In the US 177

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rampant-speculation dept.
jehovajerieh writes to us in the time-honored tradition of rampant Apple speculation, pointing to an article over on IBTimes suggesting that while the iPhone Nano may be on the way, the US might not be the first to experience this gadget bliss. "Despite limited information in the supplier channels and typical secrecy with new Apple products, insiders have confirmed that the iPhone nano is not yet in the testing labs at AT&T, Marshal says, leading him to believe that the launch will most likely be with a non-US carrier. 'Obviously, the best-case scenario here would be a China launch (~600mil+ wireless subscribers total in the country), but we have no definitive knowledge of this and are working on identifying the [locale] of launch and other pertinent details,' he said."
Editorial

The Player Is and Is Not the Character 152

Posted by Soulskill from the i-agree-and-disagree dept.
Jill Duffy writes "GameCareerGuide has posted an intellectual article about video games which argues there is no such thing as 'breaking the fourth wall' in games. Written by Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the article considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters. Weise says that, unlike in theater and film, video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall. Players are always tethered to the technology, and the player is always just as much the main character as not the main character. Weise looks at both modern experimental games, like Mirror's Edge, as well as old classics, like Sonic the Hedgehog, to defend his point. He writes, 'Both avatars and the technological devices we use to control them are never simply in one reality. They are inherently liminal entities, contributing to a mindset that we, as players, exist in two realities at once. It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
Music

At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs 273

Posted by kdawson from the trading-analog-dollars-for-digital-pennies dept.
The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"
Transportation

Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid 388

Posted by kdawson from the recharge-it dept.
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
Internet Explorer

Triple-Engine Browser Released As Alpha 181

Posted by kdawson from the three-engines-no-waiting dept.
jcasman passes along a heads-up on Lunascape, a Japanese browser company that is releasing its first English version of its Lunascape 5 triple-engine browser. It's for XP and Vista only. There are reviews up at CNET, OStatic (quoted below), and Lifehacker. Both the reviews and comments point out that, in its current alpha state, the browser is buggy and not very fast; but it might be one to watch. "How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser ... that allows you to switch between all three of these prominent rendering engines. The company says that the Japanese version of Lunascape has been downloaded 10 million times and touts it as the fastest browser available."
The Internet

Inside Safari 3.2's Anti-Phishing Feature 135

Posted by kdawson from the just-tell-us dept.
MacWorld is running a piece from MacJournals.com's for-pay publication detailing how the Safari browser's anti-phishing works. The article takes Apple to task for not thinking enough of its users to bother telling them when Safari sends data off to a third party on their behalf. For it seems that Safari uses the same Google-based anti-phishing technology that Firefox has incorporated since version 2.0, but, unlike Mozilla, tells its users nothing about it. "Even when phrased as friendly to Apple as we can manage, the fact remains that after installing Safari 3.2, your computer is by default downloading lots of information from Google and sending information related to sites you visit back to Google — without telling you, without Apple disclosing the methods, and without any privacy statement from Apple."
The Internet

Researchers Latch Onto BitTorrent To Spot Connection Problems 87

Posted by timothy from the like-a-nice-drink-of-barium dept.
alphadogg writes "Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions."

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