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Control avatars and 3D worlds with Kinect->

Submitted by descubes
descubes writes "The Kinect is more than just for games. SimplySim, a French startup making it easy to build 3D simulations and applications, has just posted a video showing how you can interact with photorealistic simulations just by moving the body. Is the Minority Report user interface finally becoming a reality?"
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First commercial carbon capture project is failing->

Submitted by Prune
Prune writes "A Saskatchewan report that the world's first commercial carbon capture project is failing could be grave news for those involved in efforts to blunt humanity's contribution to climate change.
It's a story with global implications, potentially bad ones, for the energy sector: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/greenpage/environment/carbon-injected-underground-now-leaking-saskatchewan-farmers-study-says-113276449.html"
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Stereoscopy: What works, what doesn't->

Submitted by descubes
descubes writes "We have been looking for a relatively cheap way to present the output of a 3D application using stereoscopy. Our objective was to see how an OpenGL application could generate stereoscopic output using commercially-available low-cost hardware. Our expectation was that a budget 3D laptop and a budget 3D projector would make for a budget 3D presentation solution. We tried machines with ATI and Nvidia chipsets, internal and external displays, Windows, Linux and MacOSX. The solution that ended up working the best was a total surprise..."
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Security

Hacker arrested after cracking Federal Reserve->

Submitted by PatPending
PatPending writes "Eastern District of New York Press Release

Defendant's Criminal Activities Extended to the National Security Sector

A four-count indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn today charging Lin Mun Poo, a resident and citizen of Malaysia, with hacking into a computer network of the Federal Reserve Bank and possessing more than 400,000 stolen credit and debit card numbers.1 The defendant was arrested on a criminal complaint shortly after his arrival in the United States on October 21, 2010, and has been held in custody since then. The case has been assigned to United States District Judge Dora L. Irizarry."
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Nobel Prize committee criticized over inaccuracies->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "A leading researcher in the field of graphene has published a letter to the Nobel committee asking them to address significant problems with the factual accuracy of the supporting documents that laid the case for awarding Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. Nature talks with letter author Walt de Heer about his claims that, aside from factual inaccuracies, the document diminishes the role of other groups and 'reads like a nomination letter'. At least one change has already been made by the committee."
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Math

Traffic Jams in Your Brain->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Carl Zimmer's latest foray into neuroscience examines why the brain can get jammed up by a simple math problem: "Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even today’s best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling." Some scientists think mental tasks can get stuck in bottlenecks because everything have to go through a certain neural network they call "the router.""
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Comment: Re:Kernel shared memory (Score 5, Interesting) 129

by descubes (#33212666) Attached to: Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs

Having written VM software myself (HP Integrity VM), I find this fascinating. Congratulations for a very interesting approach.

That being said, I'm sort of curious how well that would work with any amount of I/O happening. If you have some DMA transfer in progress to one of the pages, you can't just snapshot the memory until the DMA completes, can you? Consider a disk transfer from a SAN. With high traffic, you may be talking about seconds, not milliseconds, no?

Comment: He must have read my blog :-) (Score 1) 973

by descubes (#33188588) Attached to: Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking

I made a very similar argument a couple of years ago. I'm positive hundred of other people have: "If you are one in a million, there's a thousand like you in China".

But here's the rub: while sticking to Earth is dangerous, we don't know yet that we have any physical mean to leave it. So it doesn't really matter if Hawkins is saying we should abandon Earth, if he doesn't provide a credible way to actually do it.

So I guess the question becomes: Who is actually working on faster-than-light travel, life extension or other aspects of the problem? And if we don't know how to leave, what do we do to survive either until we figure it out, or forever if it happens there's no way to leave?

Comment: But Google Go is not the solution... (Score 1) 878

by descubes (#33016508) Attached to: Google Engineer Decries Complexity of Java, C++

Rob Pike criticism of Java and C++ is really advocacy for the new Google language, Go. Unfortunately, Go isn't a very good language, in my opinion. It makes things simpler by being less powerful. What we really need to replace C++ or Java is a language that can grow on demand. Otherwise, we'll keep hitting the limits of the language. And I can hit the limits of Go pretty quickly.

Also, it's time to go beyond imperative, text-oriented languages. Graphics, anyone? It's possible: Hello World in XL simply looks better!

Many people are secretly interested in life.