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Comment Re:Special 2-D glasses needed (Score 1) 495

by Dukebytes (#31818584) Attached to: Do You Have a Secret Immunity To 3D Movies?
It's a good idea. But 2-D glasses may or may not work for some people. I guess I'm in the above 12%. I can not go to an IMAX theater or see a 3-D movie. Makes me sick and makes my head hurt. But, I also wear prescription glasses and can not see far away with out them (i.e. my monitor). So even if 2-D glasses did work, I would not be able to actually see the movie itself.

I'm not sure what the big deal is anyway... I seen and loved the Avatar movie, but when they jumped off that cliff, I about jumped out of my seat. I had to close my eyes because I started getting vertigo pretty bad. If I was watching that in 3-D, not sure what would have happened. In other words it had more than enough "visually stunning" shots in there for me.

Is a movie in 3-D that much better? I have heard that some people like it and some could care less. Am I really missing anything?

Duke
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."
Communications

School System Considers Jamming Students' Phones 785

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the only-one-man-would-dare-give-me-the-raspberry dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The St. Ansgar, Iowa school system is considering buying cell-phone jamming equipment for up to $5000 if it is deemed legal. The use of the equipment would be suspended in the case of an emergency, but one has to wonder if they would be quick enough to shut it down should an emergency arise. 'A Federal Communications Commission notice issued in 2005 says the sale and use of transmitters that jam cellular or personal communications services is unlawful.'"
The Courts

Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions 646

Posted by kdawson from the incident-that-will-not-stay-down-the-memory-hole dept.
Stupified writes "High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four (complaint, PDF), because doing so destroyed the annotations he'd created to the text for class. The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.' The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit."

Comment Re:Hide them all (Score 2, Informative) 323

by Dukebytes (#28795129) Attached to: Cable Management To Defeat Clutter?
Rodrigovr is actually right, to a point. You do want to hide everything that you can. I have been racking eq and doing wiring work for 20+ years... Use cable ties, not velcro, or wraps or anything like that, just plain old cable ties. I know, if you have to replace something or move something you have to cut all those ties... YEP thats right. Big deal. Just tie it all up again and do a better job each time you have to do it. You want to keep power separate from everything else.

And thats a great idea to be able to turn off stuff you don't use all the time with diff power strips, I do that myself.

You may want to use a mounting head cable tie and screw stuff you your actual desk. This is the kind of tie http://www.cabletiesplus.com/Products/5-Mounted-Head-Cable-Ties-(40-lb)-(Natural)__CP-5-40MH-N.aspx and you can use very small screws.

BUT if you don't want harm your desk at all. Just leave it hang and lay on the floor and make it look at nice as you can. Don't use tape, or sticky strips, or sticky cable mounts, because NONE OF THEM WORK. About two days after you anchor something it will come off, trust me... Basic rule of thumb for cable work, if it seems like its going to be way too much work and a big pain in the ass, then your doing it right and it will look great in the end. And just remember I have done this with 20+ devices in a 72u rack (over 6 feet of eq...) and you could NOT see any power cable when I was done and all the network, KVM etc... were ladder wrapped and the rest of the ties were about 1ft apart... Took 2 days to do one rack, but it looked great when it was finished.

Duke

Comment Great Movie!! (Score 1) 592

by Dukebytes (#28016865) Attached to: What Did You Think Of The New Star Trek Movie?
New TV series spin off anyone???? Or at least 4 or 5 more movies outta this. I have been a Trek fan for a long time. Yea they messed around with some, but this was a great movie.

And it is cool to see some alt reality stuff sometimes. Come on we are Sci-Fi people right? I would have liked to seen a cameo of the real James T in there during the mind meld with future/older Spock and past/young James T, but can't have everything.

But, again I say a really great movie that I will be seeing again.

Duke
Biotech

Umbilical Cord Blood Banking? 409

Posted by kdawson from the banking-on-future-research dept.
Maestro writes "There must be many parents (and soon-to-be parents) here at Slashdot. What are your thoughts on umbilical cord blood banking? This seems like a major question for our newborn; the question is almost as stressful for us as naming the baby. Given Obama's stance on stem cells, the topic is timely. My understanding is that while the current uses for cord blood are limited, the sky's the limit for the future of stem cell therapies. But with the initial cost over $1000, and ongoing yearly fees, is it worth it?"

Comment haven't bought a PC err PC Game since.... (Score 1) 417

by Dukebytes (#26224429) Attached to: Is the Gaming PC Dead?

I had been gaming on the PC forever... (cough in my 40s now...)

But I have NOT bought a PC game since my 1st xbox... And I do not plan on buying one. REASON: guess what, my main PC is 5/6 years old and it STILL RUNS great....

I upgraded and bought new PCs all the time in the past... now I only spend money on the games, not the games and a new machine each year...

Duke

Software Tool Strips Windows Vista To Bare Bones 472

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-it-works dept.
Preedit writes "A free download that can cut Windows Vista's gargantuan footprint by half or more is developing a big following on the Internet. vLite is a configuration tool that lets users automatically delete a lot of unnecessary Vista components — such as Windows Media Player and MSN installer — to pare the OS down to a reasonable size. The software is catching on. An InformationWeek story notes that a forum that asks users to suggest new features has drawn nearly 50,000 page views. Meanwhile, Microsoft officials have themselves conceded that Vista is "bloated" and are developing the next version of Windows on a core called MinWin, which is smaller than Vista by an order of magnitude."
Music

Qtrax — Ad-Supported Music With iPod Compatibility? 131

Posted by kdawson from the see-it-when-i-believe-it dept.
dnormant writes in with a note about QTrax, a 5-year-old startup that just announced deals with all the major labels to provide free, ad-supported music downloads. The new wrinkle is that, though the free tracks come encumbered with Windows Media DRM, QTrax claims that they will be playable soon on iPods. Wired's assumption is that the company is on the verge of a deal with Apple to allow use of its FairPlay DRM in place of Microsoft's. (Apple hasn't licensed FairPlay to anyone so far.) The AP coverage of the story assumes that QTrax has found a way around FairPlay on the iPod, and if so, that its solution will break the next time Apple updates iTunes.
Communications

Multitasking Makes You Stupid and Slow 551

Posted by kdawson from the knew-it-all-along dept.
Reverse Gear recommends a long and interesting article over at The Atlantic in which Walter Kirn talks about the scientific results that support his claim and his own experiences with multitasking: that it destroys our ability to focus. "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."
Censorship

Suppresed Video of Japanese Reactor Sodium Leak 341

Posted by kdawson from the all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace dept.
James Hardine writes "Following an announcement this week that the infamous Japanese Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor would be re-opened with a new plutonium core, Wikileaks has released suppressed video footage of the disaster that led to its closure in 1995. The video shows men in silver 'space suits' exploring the reactor in which sodium compounds hang from the air ducts like icicles. Unlike conventional reactors, fast-breeder reactors, which 'breed' plutonium, use sodium rather than water as a coolant. This type of coolant creates a potentially hazardous situation as sodium is highly corrosive and reacts violently with both water and air. Government officials at first played down the extent of damage at the reactor and denied the existence of a videotape showing the sodium spill. The deputy general manager, Shigeo Nishimura, 49, jumped to his death the day after a news conference at which he and other officials revealed the extent of the cover-up. His family is currently suing the government at Japan's High Court."
Science

Similar DNA Molecules Able to Recognize Each Other 84

Posted by Soulskill from the dna-gps dept.
Chroniton brings us a story about research into DNA which has shown that free-floating DNA strands are able to seek out similar strands without the assistance of other chemicals. From Imperial College London: "The researchers observed the behaviour of fluorescently tagged DNA molecules in a pure solution. They found that DNA molecules with identical patterns of chemical bases were approximately twice as likely to gather together than DNA molecules with different sequences. Understanding the precise mechanism of the primary recognition stage of genetic recombination may shed light on how to avoid or minimise recombination errors in evolution, natural selection and DNA repair. This is important because such errors are believed to cause a number of genetically determined diseases including cancers and some forms of Alzheimer's, as well as contributing to ageing."

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