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United Kingdom

Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves 130

Posted by samzenpus from the card-catalog-of-the-gods dept.
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
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World's First Transcontinental Anesthesia 83

Posted by samzenpus from the ping-me-when-the-patient-is-asleep dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Medical Daily reports: 'Video conferences may be known for putting people to sleep, but never like this. Dr. Thomas Hemmerling and his team of McGill's Department of Anesthesia achieved a world first on August 30, 2010, when they treated patients undergoing thyroid gland surgery in Italy remotely from Montreal. The approach is part of new technological advancements, known as 'Teleanesthesia', and it involves a team of engineers, researchers and anesthesiologists who will ultimately apply the drugs intravenously which are then controlled remotely through an automated system.'"

Comment Re:Car analogy. (Score 1) 353

by frozen_kangaroo (#31790190) Attached to: PS3 Owner Refunded For Missing "Other OS"

That doesn't work at all. No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature. It was a pointless feature which had nothing to do with its basic operation or the reason it was purchased.

I did.

I bought it so that I could run MythFrontend on a games console under the TV. This lets me watch and manage recorded programs stored on a server in another room. So, I spent extra money on a PS3 rather than an XBOX. I was very pleased with the results.

Also, I can run GameOS and play games, and currently enjoy MW2 online for which I need to talk to PSN.

This was the purpose for which I intended my PS3 to be used, and now I have to choose one or the other. This p*sses me right off.

Comment Re:Good enough? (Score 1) 1713

by frozen_kangaroo (#30925154) Attached to: Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open
I have my MacBook Pro, iPhone and Steve-Jobs-Picking-Up-A-Quarter-Blow-Up-Doll, presumably just like everyone else who would consider buying one of these things. But I agree that it is less good than the other devices that I have for all of the above tasks. Therefore I can't see why I would want one of these.
Networking

Nmap 5.20 Released 36

Posted by Soulskill from the more-and-better dept.
ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"
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Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687

Posted by samzenpus from the duck-and-cover dept.
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
Bug

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill from the more-or-less-finished dept.
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

Comment Re:Consoles (Score 3, Interesting) 536

by frozen_kangaroo (#30306448) Attached to: Best PC DVR Software, For Any Platform?
I use an old, practically scrap, Pentium 4 hidden away in the loft running Mythbackend with tuners and big hard drives in it. It sits there and records programs. It uses a Fedora 9 distro, and dependency hell was dealt with smoothly by running yum.

Under the main television that we watch is a PS3, which sees the backend as a UPnP media server without any fuss. All recorded programs show up under the "video" menu. Any machine in the house can also be used as a frontend, if Mythfrontend is installed. Mythweb can be used to configure it remotely (even off-site if I'm feeling brave enough to let incoming conections to it from the outside world) so you can log in and set something to record if you are out and about.

I'm really happy with the system and not got any particular moans, other than the fact that tuners don't just work out of the box and forums have to be read ...

Comment Re:what exactly did they detect? (Score 1) 169

by frozen_kangaroo (#30025096) Attached to: Antimatter In Lightning
I think it would be a surprise if antimatter was not discovered in a lightening flash. Gamma rays up to 20 MeV have been discovered there. I think they are technically X-rays, not gamma rays because they are not coming from the nucleus of an atom, they are coming from accelerated free electrons.

Gamma rays of energy > 1.022 MeV ( i.e. 2 x 511keV, the mass of an electron) can decay to form an electron-positron pair in the presence of another atom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation

If this happens (which it should) , then positrons will be present in the storm.

Positrons decay by a reverse process to the above, meeting an electron and decaying into two gamma rays of 511keV back-to-back. Spotting these 511keV photons is the classic signature for "anti-matter". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-positron_annihilation .
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New Food-Growth Product a Bit Hairy 243

Posted by samzenpus from the what-can-your-grow-from-fingernails dept.
MeatBag PussRocket writes "An article from Marketplace.org reports, 'A Florida company has developed an all-natural product that it says could revolutionize how food is grown in the US. It's called Smart Grow, but it might be a tough sell. It's inexpensive. It eliminates the need for pesticides, so it's environmentally friendly, but it's human hair. Plant pathologists at the University of Florida have found the mats eliminate weeds better than leading herbicides and can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger.'"

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