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Comment Re:Not just Star Wars (Score 5, Informative) 99

by DaViking (#38572034) Attached to: Bob Anderson, the Man Behind Vader's Lightsaber, Dies at 89
The great thing about the "Chatty Duel" in the Princess Bride is how simple the blade work actually is. Besides the acrobatics and tossing of swords the fencing is relatively simple and well executed. That scene has generated more interest in fencing than any of our recent Olympic achievements can hope to. Nearly every student I've taught has been influenced to seek out the sport in part by that film and after 6 months or so I will tell them to re-watch it and see all the actions they just learned. As was said above, he was able to create such elegant choreography and able to teach the actors to perform it with such skill he was able to create so many of the great and memorable film duels.
The Internet

Amazon to Open DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store 197

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-to-share dept.
mtnlion1 writes "Amazon.com announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices and burn songs to CDs for personal use."
Space

Seeing the Earth Almost Live 143

Posted by samzenpus from the smile-for-the-satellite dept.
arobic writes "European Space Agency (ESA) is putting recent pictures of the Earth (taken 2 hours before) online using Envisat. To avoid filling up their disks too quickly, only the bmp of the last 30 days are available but jpg are kept. Also, only region receiving light can be seen, which explains why no recent pictures of Thailand are available."
Technology

VoIP Calls Double In Quality 116

Posted by Hemos from the sounding-better-and-better dept.
anthm writes "From Newsforge and LinuxPR
FreeSWITCH, an open source soft-switch and IVR platform, have announced that they can support 16khz audio calls thus doubling the potential voice quality. They have had successful tests with a conference bridge, a pass-through SIP call and an IVR that reads RSS news feeds with the Cepstral Text-To-Speech Engine."

Voip-Info.org has a good list of business VoIP providers.

Integrate iPod with Car or Risk Death 200

Posted by Hemos from the give-me-music-or-give-me-traffic-fatality dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNET has talked to Apple about its big plans for the car. Apple say they're keen to save the lives of anyone who risks death by "reaching into the footwell of his car to retrieve an iPod nano at around 90mph" and anyone who "considered skipping tracks on his iPod more important than the lives of multiple humans". Apple are also said to be "delighted by the efforts of Mac users who retrofit the Mac Mini into cars" and are "keeping an eye on what these hackers are up to with their Macs." The writer also pitched his own design ideas to Apple's director of global product marketing, Bob Borchers: "We suggested to Borchers that Apple should allow drivers to use their car steering wheel as a giant Clickwheel interface, so that you can change tracks by changing lanes. Borchers foresaw certain safety problems with such a device and rejected the concept.""

Voice Recognition for a Techie? 102

Posted by Cliff from the are-we-there-yet dept.
kaybee asks: "I am a long-time developer, sysadmin, and general computer junkie (for fun and for work) who needs to seriously curb the usage of his hands. I'm curious as to the current voice recognition options, preferably usable on Linux and Windows. I prefer the command-line to a GUI, I prefer Vim to anything else, and I still read my email with Pine. I'd like to hear options for sending email via voice, which I hope is easy, and I'd love to hear of any solutions that allow effective coding via voice, which seems much more difficult."

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