deesvito - Slashdot User

Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Star Wars Episode 7 Due In 2015 816

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @04:34PM from the wait-what dept.

Jason Levine writes "Disney will acquire Lucasfilm, including the Star Wars trilogy. Additionally, Star Wars: Episode 7 is due to be released in 2015, with more feature films on the way. George Lucas said, 'For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime. I'm confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come.'"

FDA Approves Vaccine For Prostate Cancer 194

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 29, 2010 @07:23PM from the where-you-can-stick-it dept.

reverseengineer writes "The US Food and Drug Administration has given its first first approval for a therapeutic cancer vaccine. In a clinical trial 'involving 512 men, those who got Provenge (sipuleucel-T) had a median survival of 25.8 months after treatment, while those who got a placebo lived a median of 21.7 months. After three years, 32 percent of those who got Provenge were alive, compared with 23 percent of those who got the placebo. ... "The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle and proof that immunotherapy works in general in cancer, which I think is a huge observation," said Dr. Philip Kantoff, chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the lead investigator in Dendreon's largest clinical trial for the drug. "I think this is a very big thing and will lead to a lot more enthusiasm for the approach."'"

Dedicated Halo 2 Fans Keep Multiplayer Alive 239

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @06:42AM from the never-surrender dept.

On April 15th, Microsoft terminated Xbox Live support for the original Xbox console, marking the end of online multiplayer for many older games. However, a group of Halo 2 players have refused to give up online play by leaving their consoles on and connected since then. Overheating consoles and dropped connections have taken their toll, but at present, 13 players are still going strong.

Company Invents Electronic Underpants 110

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @12:31PM from the batteries-not-included dept.

theodp writes "SIMsystem have created the world's first electric underpants that let you know that you've got issues by texting. Incontinence issues, to be more precise. The new-and-improved skivvies come equipped with a sensor strip that alerts caregivers to wetness via text message. From the technology summary: 'The SIMbox, when fitted into the individual resident's stretchpants (SIMpants), transmits sensor readings from the SIMstrip in the SIMpad® over a wireless network to the SIMserver. The SIMsystemManager software running on the SIMserver then detects key information about continence events and determines when to alert care staff about an event requiring attention.' So, who's going to start an open source project?"

Comment I LOVE retrocomputing. And have a bunch of stuff! (Score 2, Insightful) 622

by deesvito on Thursday May 28, 2009 @03:28PM (#28128531) Attached to: 45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web

So I have the following (it all works unless specified and I fire it up at least twice a year unless specified). And yes, my office looks like a train-wreck twice a year when I pull all this stuff out to keep it alive..

2 Commodore 64s (one works, the other is for parts), and a Commodore 64C
1 1541-II disk drive (works) and a bunch of software.
1 Commodore 128 (Has a couple of broken keys on the numeric pad), and a 1571 disk drive
1 Laser 128 (Apple II clone) with two drives. Works fine and I have a bunch of games and office type software to go with it.
1 Amiga 500, the internal and two external drives (one pulled from an A1000 so it's very big. Another is an off-brand, very small and cool 3 1/2)
1 Commodore Plus/4. Works great.
1 Commodore Vic-20. Works great
1 Commodore 16 which is unfortunately busted
I have a serial modem (14.4) I use to hook up the Amiga to a PC. I cheat because it's actually just doing telnet, but it's cool to get on the web with Lynx by using a kermit terminal program (my Amiga software is so old that it doesn't have a TCP stack). At some point I started getting some public domain amiga tcp stack off ftp but I needed a hard drive to hold it all so I stopped (even emulation is better than the real thing when you don't have enough hardware).

And of course I also keep a bunch of emulators on the modern machines so I can try things out and have interesting stuff to run (being able to run it on the actual hardware gives you a reason to want to pull it out). I love retrocomputing. In fact, that's how I plan on teaching programming to my kids. Yes, they'll use modern hardware too, but for programming I want them to see how there can be very little between you and the metal and you can still accomplish a bunch. All the layers of abstractions can actually make the basics (like why assembly is important and how you actually talk to hardware) a lot harder to understand. If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.

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