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Comment Re:News? (Score 3, Interesting) 169

by susub23 (#22501144) Attached to: Scientists Find Believing Can Be Seeing
It may not be a breaking news story, but it's definitely interesting. I think we all have had things like this happen, and I guess I'm not surprised that it's triggered more by vague context. I've always just figured people were exaggerating when they describe stories about things that happened and someone else calls them out on it - but they probably thought they really saw what they claimed to see.
Robotics

Dutch Unveil Robot Gas Station Attendant 287

Posted by kdawson from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
Lucas123 writes "According to a Reuters' story, Dutch inventors today took the wraps off a $110,000 car-fueling robot they say is the first of its kind. (It was inspired by a cow milking robot.) After registering the car as it pulls up to the pump, the machine matches your fuel cap design with those in a database and your car's fuel type, and then a robotic arm fitted with multiple sensors extends from a regular gas pump, 'opens the car's flap, unscrews the cap, picks up the fuel nozzle and directs it towards the tank opening, much as a human arm would, and as efficiently.' Wait till Hollywood gets hold of this scenario."
Graphics

NVIDIA To Buy AGEIA 160

Posted by kdawson from the it's-all-physics dept.
The two companies announced today that NVIDIA will acquire PhysX maker AGEIA; terms were not disclosed. The Daily Tech is one of the few covering the news to go much beyond the press release, mentioning that AMD considered buying AGEIA last November but passed, and that the combination positions NVIDIA to compete with Intel on a second front, beyond the GPU — as Intel purchased AGEIA competitor Havok last September. While NVIDIA talked about supporting the PhysX engine on their GPUs, it's not clear whether AGEIA's hardware-based physics accelerator will play any part in that. AMD declared GPU physics dead last year, but NVIDIA at least presumably begs to differ. The coverage over at PC Perspectives goes into more depth on what the acquisition portends for the future of physics, on the GPU or elsewhere.
Announcements

2008 Turing Award Winners Announced 66

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the nobel-of-computing-awards dept.
The Association for Computing Machinery has announced the 2008 Turing Award Winners. Edmund M. Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis received the award for their work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. "Model Checking is a type of "formal verification" that analyzes the logic underlying a design, much as a mathematician uses a proof to determine that a theorem is correct. Far from hit or miss, Model Checking considers every possible state of a hardware or software design and determines if it is consistent with the designer's specifications. Clarke and Emerson originated the idea of Model Checking at Harvard in 1981. They developed a theoretical technique for determining whether an abstract model of a hardware or software design satisfies a formal specification, given as a formula in Temporal Logic, a notation for describing possible sequences of events. Moreover, when the system fails the specification, it could identify a counterexample to show the source of the problem. Numerous model checking systems have been implemented, such as Spin at Bell Labs."
Technology

Intel Doubles Capacity of Likely Flash Successor 91

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the double-or-nothing dept.
Intel has announced a new technique that allows them to effectively double the storage capacity of a single phase-change memory cell without adding cost to the current fabrication process. "Phase-change memory differs from other solid-state memory technologies such as flash and random-access memory because it doesn't use electrons to store data. Instead, it relies on the material's own arrangement of atoms, known as its physical state. Previously, phase-change memory was designed to take advantage of only two states: one in which atoms are loosely organized (amorphous), and another where they are rigidly structured (crystalline). But in a paper presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, researchers illustrated that there are two more distinct states that fall between amorphous and crystalline, and that these states can be used to store data."
Security

Mass Hack Infects Tens of Thousands of Sites 259

Posted by kdawson from the stay-safe-out-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tens of thousands of Web sites have been compromised by an automated SQL injection attack, and although some have been cleaned, others continue to serve visitors a malicious script that tries to hijack their PCs using multiple exploits, security experts said this weekend. Hacked sites included both .edu and .gov domains, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center reported in a warning posted last Friday. The ISC also reported that several pages of security vendor CA's Web site had been infected. Roger Thompson, the chief research officer at Grisoft, pointed out that the hacked sites could be found via a simple Google search for the domain that hosts the malicious JavaScript. On Saturday, said Thompson, the number of sites that had fallen victim to the attack numbered more than 70,000. 'This was a pretty good mass hack,' said Thompson, in a post to his blog." By Sunday a second round of the same attack had infected over 90,000 servers.

Feed Engadget: Winner: Vii meets the PS3 and a new legacy is born (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming

An eager tipster sent in a pic and some info on what appears to be some sort of PS3 clone called "Winner" - think Vii meets PS3. While the Vii concentrated on mimicking (horribly, but still) the Wii's feature set, the Winner is all about mimicking the PS3's myriad media functionalities. That means a photo player, karaoke functions, SDHC for media storage. But it's all about the (really crappy) games, right? Winner is going to be packing 2D and 3D graphics with online and motion sensing features (note the totally not-a-Wiimote controller). How much would you expect to pay for the privilege? Did you say $600? No! Did you say $400? No! How does $120-150 sound? At that bargain basement price, these things are really going to go fast; good thing they're promising 3 million consoles for the Japanese and North American markets.

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Feed The Register: China ramps up its space programme (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
15 launches planned for 2008

China will this year launch 15 rockets, deploy 17 satellites and mount its third manned space mission, the country's secretary-general of the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defence has announced.

Feed The Register: Hackers turn Cleveland into malware server (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
And Computer Associates too

Tens of thousands of websites belonging to Fortune 500 corporations, state government agencies and schools have been infected with malicious code that attempts to engage in click fraud and steal online game credentials from people who visit the destinations, security researches say.

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"In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognise terrorism if it came up and bit him on his Internet." -- Ross M. Greenberg

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