brumgrunt writes "JJ Abram's hugely successful — on many levels — reboot of Star Trek has, for Den Of Geek, brought to the fore a lesson about special effects that many movie makers have been missing. Surely it's time now that special effects were actually used properly?" (The new film is not without some goofs, though only a few of the ones listed by Movie Mistakes' nitpickers are sciency.)

ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."'"

You haven't tried everything to get your kids to study until you've tried the Study Ball. The Study Ball is a 21-pound prison-style device that locks onto your child's leg and only unlocks after a predetermined amount of study time has passed. The homework manacles can't be locked for more than four hours, and come with a safety key. The product website states, "Quite often, students who are having problems concentrating tend to get up every ten minutes to watch TV, talk on the phone, take something out of the fridge, and a long list of other distractions. Were they to dedicate all this wasted time to studying, they would optimise their performance and have more free time available. Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently." Stop Teasing Your Brother Pepper Spray coming soon.

An anonymous reader writes "Every now and then a new- or old-media journalist tries to explain to everyone why Linux is not yet ready for the desktop. However all those men who graduated from their engineering universities years ago have only superficial knowledge about operating systems and their inner works. An unknown author from Russia has decided to draw up a list of technical reasons and limitations hampering Linux domination on the desktop." Some of the gripes listed here really resonate with me, having just moved to an early version of Ubuntu 9.10 on my main testing-stuff laptop; it's frustrating especially that while many seemingly more esoteric things work perfectly, sound now works only in part, and even that partial success took some fiddling.

Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.

An anonymous reader writes "Local newspaper talks to Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, who lives in New Hampshire, and who since 1989 has had a 'Live Free or Die' UNIX license plate — a real one, not a conference hand-out — on his Jeep. From the story: 'The day he installed the UNIX plates, he went early to work at DEC's office on Spit Brook Road in Nashua, to be sure to get the parking space right next to the door used by all the Unix engineers. He watched them come in and, one after another, do a double take at seeing the real-world version of the famous fake plate. "People would race in and yell, 'Who is it? Whose plate is it?!?'" Hall said. It was his then and it is his now. After 20 years, one suspects you will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.'"

Ismenio writes "Does anyone have any ideas for a do-it-yourself Google-Street-View-like project on the cheap? I am planning to visit a few places outside the US that are important to me, and would like to be able to set up a site for friends and family to visit and give them the Street View-like experience so that they could navigate, pan and zoom in the areas I have. Though being able to use GPS coordinates would be great, that's certainly something I can do without. I know I can take pictures and stitch them together to create panoramic views, but I would like to be able to also navigate though some streets. Would it make sense to record it with an HD camera, then batch export frames as pictures? Is there any software in the open source community that I can use?" Ismenio includes links to some related pages: Popular Mechanics' look at the camera tech used for Street View, and a company that claims better panoramic image technology than Google's.

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

reporter writes "According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, scientists have discovered the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and Slashdotters. The 47 million year old fossils were discovered in Germany. The ancestor physically resembles today's lemur. Quoting: 'The skeleton will be unveiled at New York City's American Museum of Natural History next Tuesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an international team involved in the discovery. According to Prof. Gingerich, the fossilized remains are of a young female adapid. The skeleton was unearthed by collectors about two years ago and has been kept tightly under wraps since then, in an unusual feat of scientific secrecy. Prof. Gingerich said he had twice examined the adapid skeleton, which was "a complete, spectacular fossil." The completeness of the preserved skeleton is crucial, because most previously found fossils of ancient primates were small finds, such as teeth and jawbones.'"

allenw writes "In a recent blog post, Yahoo's grid computing team announced that Apache Hadoop was used to break the current world sorting records in the annual GraySort contest. It topped the 'Gray' and 'Minute' sorts in the general purpose (Daytona) category. They sorted 1TB in 62 seconds, and 1PB in 16.25 hours. Apache Hadoop is the only open source software to ever win the competition. It also won the Terasort competition last year."

An anonymous reader writes "DJ Danger Mouse famously fought with EMI over his Beatles/Jay-Z mashup, 'The Grey Album,' and now seems to be battling with the label again. Rather than release his latest album and face legal issues with EMI, Techdirt is reporting that Danger Mouse will be selling a blank CD-R along with lots of artwork, and buyers will be responsible for finding the music themselves (yes, it's findable on the internet) and burning the CD."

eldavojohn writes "The BBC has more details about something we last discussed in 2008 — the showdown of open source versus proprietary software in Africa. When discussing the issue of cost, the piece quotes Microsoft's chairman on the scene, Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra, who alludes that open source continually costs you money by saying 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.' On the other end of the story is Ken Banks from Kiwanja.net who has spent 15 years developing open source applications in Africa. His logic is that 'Today we're seeing growing open-source programmer, developer communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries. Clearly, if you have this informal programming sector coming up, access to source code is almost critical if they are going to be able to take advantage of these new tools that are emerging.' Well, the battle rages on, hopefully the emerging African developers and users pick the tool(s) that suit their needs the best."

Several users have pointed out a recent request to technology companies from the Defense Information System Agency for ideas on how to build an e-mail defense system to catch spam. The solution would have to scan about 50 million inbound messages a day across some 700 unclassified network domains. "Defense currently scans e-mails for viruses and spam coming into systems serving the military services, commands or units. DISA wants to extend the protection to the interface between the Internet and its unclassified network, the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network. The agency also wants the ability to scan all outbound e-mails from the 5 million users. [...] DISA's request ties in with recommendations that the Defense Science Board issued in April that said Defense is more vulnerable to cyberattacks because of its decentralized networks and systems. The board envisioned a major role for DISA in developing the architecture for enterprise-wide systems."

miller60 writes "A Japanese company called Freebit has released ServersMan, an app that turns the iPhone into a web server. It debuted in Japan in February, has now been launched in the US, and is being touted as a 'Personal Data Center.' Freebit also has a video with additional information on server-enabling your iPhone. 'Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.'"

fm6 writes "Bloomsbury Publishing, best known for the Harry Potter books, has announced a new series of science books that will be available for free online. Bloomsbury thinks they can make enough money off of hard-copy sales to turn a 'small profit.' The online version will be covered by a Creative Commons license which allows free non-commercial use. They've already had some success with the one book they've published this way, Larry Lessig's 'Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy.' The series, 'Science, Ethics and Innovation,' will be edited by Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project."