Carl Rosenberger asks: "In this article at IT Managers Journal [which is another part of OSTG, Slashdot's parent publishing company], db4objects CEO Christof Wittig speculates about the future effect of open source globalization on organizations and individuals. According to his opinion 'Engineers like globalization', although it may mean tougher worldwide competition for jobs. What is the opinion of Slashdot readers on this article? Is open source globalization going to happen? Will it make our jobs better or worse?" As the referenced article puts it, open source globalization is the ability to hire programmers from all over the globe to collaborate together on a single project with low overhead. Heck if it works for open source projects, why not for corporate software? Do you see the corporations you are familiar with embracing or fighting this concept?

BuzzSkyline writes "The world's smallest robotic hand has been built by Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin "CJ" Kim at UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. The microhand can make a fist that can grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across. Check out the freaky video on the researchers' website of the microhand grabbing a blob that looks like a fish egg. The tiny hand is made of inert materials, making it ideal for handling gooey biological samples. Lu and Kim describe their microhand in a paper published October 16 in the journal Applied Physics Letters."

ROMRIX writes "The Discovery Channel is reporting that Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar. The article also states that this type of radar may someday be used on Mars to locate water in a future mission."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"

gehel asks: "While working in Rwanda as a computer engineer, I've had a discussion with a small NGO that produces video documentaries. Internews produces videos about Rwanda to raise the population awareness on different issues, mainly the Gacaca popular court for reconciliation. Those videos are the shown in public projections all over Rwanda. They would be interested in distributing this content to a larger audience: the internet. They have the rights to their documentaries, and are willing to distribute them under a Creative Common license, so we could use the Internet Archives to host the files, however we'd still have to find a good front end. I have been looking into a couple of solutions. Ourmedia is a bit too complicated to use, the Broadcast Machine doesn't seem ready for prime time, so I'm back to the standard Joomla!. I'm pretty sure there is the perfect solution somewhere, but I cant find it. Could you help me?

Jerry Smith writes "The Register reports that the Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong, and took snapshots of two colliding galaxies. The sizes average between thousands and hundreds of thousand light years, containing ten million to one trillion stars. The process took hundreds of millions of years, and will take many more hundreds of millions of years."

ATI is well on their way to being acquired by AMD . "The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has issued the final order approving the arrangement under which all of ATI's outstanding common shares will be acquired by an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of AMD." The proposed acquisition is expected to be completed during the week of October 23.

What is 1.3 inches thick, weighs four pounds, and boasts a dual-core processor? The Avaratec 2300, Avaratec's latest offering in the ultraportable space. "Sporting a 12.1-inch WXGA AveraBrite LCD, the machine boasts an 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 dual-core processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 100GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g, and a dual-layer DVD burner. It also packs a plethora of ports for its size, including gigabit Ethernet, 56k modem, audio in / out, 4-in-1 flash card reader, VGA output, 4-pin FireWire, a trio of USB 2.0 connectors, and a snazzy ExpressCard slot to boot. To top it off, Averatec coupled the boosted specs with a drop in price -- the 2300 ranges from just $849.99 to $949.99, depending on those BTO add-ons."

Aglassis writes to tell us that recent proposed EU legislation could require anyone running a website featuring video content to acquire a broadcast license. From the article: "Personal websites would have to be licensed as a "television-like service". Once again the reasoning behind such legislation is said to be in order to set minimum standards on areas such as hate speech and the protection of children. In reality this directive would do nothing to protect children or prevent hate speech - unless you judge protecting children to be denying them access to anything that is not government regulated or you assume hate speech to be the criticism of government actions and policy."

According to AMD, we can expect to see the 4x4 platform in November . The base of the 4x4 platform is projected to include AMD Athlon 64 FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 microprocessors. According to X-bit Labs, "Even though AMD's 4x4 platform may be significantly more expensive and power hungry than Intel Core 2 Extreme-based offerings with two or four cores, AMD may be able to offer significantly increased performance in many cases because of relatively high clock-speeds of its new FX-series central processing units. As a result, AMD 4x4 may address users who demand absolutely highest performance at any cost, leaving the market of more balanced systems to the rival."

kaufmanmoore writes "Cnet is reporting that some video Ipods made after September 12th have the RavMonE virus loaded onto it. In Apple's announcement they take a swipe at Windows security and encourage Windows users to install anti virus applications."

gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years. From the article: 'The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.'" No missing link here, we already have the troll-like humans to prove it.

An anonymous reader writes "TechWorld is reporting that they have a leaked copy of a letter written to the European Commission detailing the extent of lobby pressure coming from proprietary software groups working against open source software. From the article: 'Lueders sent the letter [PDF] on 10 October to leaders of the Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry, in response to an EC-commissioned study into the role of open source software in the European economy (referred to by Lueders as Free/Libre/Open Source, or FLOSS). In the letter, he criticised the study as biased and warns that its policy recommendations, if carried out, could derail the European software economy.'"

kjh1 writes to tell us the folks over at SlingCommunity are running an interview with Brian Jaquet of Sling Media. They get the scoop on the upcoming SlingPlayer for Mac OSX. There is a text transcript as well as a video version of the interview."

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia, it's now possible to detect skin cancer cells present in blood samples by listening to the sound of melanoma cells. The scientists have used a method named photoacoustic detection, which uses a laser to make cells vibrate and ultrasound techniques to pick the sound of cancerous cells. This technique is so precise that it's possible to identify the spread of cancer even if there are only ten melanoma cells in a blood sample. Still, large clinical tests must be done before this method can be widely used."