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Movies

The Home-Built Dark Knight Batmobile 87

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-the-little-jokers-to-school dept.
ElectricSteve writes "RM Auctions recently declared James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 to be 'the world's most famous car,' but there's no doubt that there is another contender for that title — the Batmobile. One thing that muddies the waters a bit is the fact that the term 'Batmobile' actually describes at least three different vehicles: the modified Lincoln Futura concept car from the '60s TV series, the vaguely Corvette-shaped 1989-and-beyond movie cars, and now the car from the most recent two movies, the military-spec Tumbler. Michigan-based movie props artist Bob Dullam really likes the Tumbler, so he did what any of us would do in his position — he built one of his own from scratch."
Open Source

Linux 2.6.36 Released 238

Posted by CmdrTaco from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.
diegocg writes "Version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes support for the Tilera architecture, a new filesystem notification interface called fanotify, CIFS local caching, support for Intel Intelligent Power Sharing in i3/5 systems, integration of the kernel debugger and KMS, inclusion of the AppArmor security system, a redesign of workqueues optimized for concurrency, and several new drivers and small improvements. See the full changelog here for more details."

Comment Re:And the people who don't need the hype (Score 3, Interesting) 113

by imroy (#33705444) Attached to: Arduino Project Upgrades With 2 New Boards
That's one of the great things about the Arduino - most of the hardware "magic" is really just the built-in capabilities of the Atmel AVR micro-controller. If you don't need to use a "shield" (daughterboard), there's plenty of simpler (and cheaper) clones for more specific purposes. They just need to be programmed with the Arduino bootloader (which they usually are) and the Arduino IDE will program it just fine.
AMD

AMD One-Ups Intel With Cheap Desktop Chips 362

Posted by samzenpus from the price-war dept.
CWmike writes "Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday announced inexpensive desktop microprocessors with up to six cores to put pricing pressure on rival Intel. AMD's new chips include the fastest AMD Phenom II X6 1075T six-core processor, which is priced 'under $250' for 1,000 units, AMD said. AMD also introduced a range of dual-core and quad-core Athlon II and Phenom II desktop microprocessors priced between $76 and $185. By comparison, Intel's cheapest six-core processor is the Core i7-970 processor, which is priced at $885 per 1,000 units, according to a price list on Intel's website."
Image

Stewart and Colbert Plan Competing D.C. Rallies 696

Posted by samzenpus from the power-of-the-internet dept.
Lev13than writes "In a direct retort to Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have announced competing rallies on October 30th. Stewart plans to host a 'Rally To Restore Sanity' on Oct. 30 on the National Mall in D.C. for the Americans he says are too busy living normal, rational lives to attend other political demonstrations. Colbert, meantime, will shepherd his fans in a 'March To Keep Fear Alive.' 'Damn your reasonableness!' Colbert said. 'Now is not the time to take it down a notch. Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom!' Stewart, meanwhile, has promised to provide attendees with signs featuring slogans such as 'I Disagree With You But I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Hitler' and 'I'm Afraid of Spiders.'"
Image

Steve Jobs Tries To Sneak Shurikens On a Plane 661

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-throwing-star-for-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs, while on a family vacation to Japan in July, picked himself up some Shuriken, otherwise known as Ninja throwing stars, as a souvenir. In his wisdom he decided to put them in his carry on luggage for the return journey. As it was a private plane he probably thought there would be no issue, but he was wrong. Even private plane passengers have to have all their baggage scanned, and the throwing stars were detected and deemed a hazard. It's alleged that Jobs argued that he could take them on the plane as no one could steal them on his private jet and use them. Security at the airport disagreed and demanded he remove the stars. Jobs, clearly angry at losing his throwing weapons, stated he would not be returning to the country." Undoubtedly this is part of the iNinja project.
Microsoft

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus from the messy-verdict dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

Comment Re:Pentax K-1000 (Score 1) 342

by imroy (#33535782) Attached to: My Camera ...

I will concede that film and processing is getting expensive. So you have to be smart and find ways of keeping costs down:

  • Get C-41 done at your local supermarket. Those minilabs have been around for ages and must be fairly simple to operate. Obviously, change if they can't hire people to operate it correctly. Besides, it's colour negative - it has to be "corrected" to get any useful image out of it, so colour casts are not such a big issue.
  • Only get prints with C-41. It's what 99% of their customers want, so they're really cheap.
  • If you do B&W, get a bulk loader and buy 100 foot rolls of film. It really gets the price per roll down.
  • ... and process B&W yourself. You don't need a darkroom to process film, just a film changing bag for loading the film into the tank. The rest is pretty simple.
  • You can also process your own C-41 and E-6 colour film, but the temperature requirements are more difficult. I've not done this myself.
  • Most importantly, get a good film scanner. You'll want to display your work online. And just about everything else is digital now anyway - the minilabs scan your film before sending the photos off to their digital printer, there's professional inkjet printers and lots of online printers. Hell, even Ilford has an online service for printing digital images onto genuine silver-gelatin paper!

Comment Re:Pentax K-1000 (Score 1) 342

by imroy (#33534334) Attached to: My Camera ...

...the cost of print film hit $1/frame to buy, develop, and print.

Where are you that film costs that much? Even here in Australia it's only that bad if you make some really bad choices.
Android

Flash On Android Is 'Shockingly Bad' 657

Posted by timothy from the not-so-flash dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. 'While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset,' writes Lawler. 'All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.'"
Image

National Park Service Says Tech Is Enabling Stupidity 635

Posted by samzenpus from the you-got-yourself-into-this-mess-now-get-yourself-out dept.
theodp writes "The National Park Service is finding technology to be a double-edged sword. While new technologies can and do save lives, the NPS is also finding that unseasoned hikers and campers are now boldly going where they never would have gone before, counting on cellphones, GPS, and SPOT devices to bail them out if they get into trouble. Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"

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