The techies at Waterloo Labs in Austin, Texas are putting “shooter” into the first-person shooter game… literally! Using accelerometers, a big sheet of drywall and computer triangulation, they’ve made it possible to play a FPS like Half-Life with actual firearms and other physical weapons!
Behold the carnage…
I’d love to play Doom like this, but knowing me I’d just wind up chainsawing the drywall to pieces not long into Episode 1 Mission 2 😛...
Josh Muszynski of Manchester, New Hampshire went to the local convenience store and bought a pack of Camel cigarettes. He put the purchase on his debit card. And then when he got home found out that he had been charged more than TWENTY THREE QUADRILLION DOLLARS for his smokes.
Turns out to have been a programming error on the part of Visa, and apparently it’s hit a number of its cardholders. Visa and his bank quickly resolved the issue for Muszynski, and he was no longer stuck with a tab that was more than 2007 times the current national debt.
But hey, as bad as inflation is getting, it’s just a matter of time before all our purchases are this astronomical! 😛...
I’d already thought that 3D printing is one of the neatest new technologies to have come along in recent years.
But look at what Jorge Lopes, a design student and doctoral candidate of the Royal College of Art, has done with it…
Marrying ultrasound imaging and MRI data to the rapid prototyping process, Lopes has engineered a way to create a life-sized exact model of a human fetus while it’s within its mother’s womb!
Whoa.
Lopes foresees the technology being used in the near future to give expectant parents a model of their forthcoming new arrival, as well as becoming useful in treating birth defects.
Absolutely, unbelievably mind-boggling stuff. Jorge Lopes is a genius!
Click here for the rest of the story and more amazing photos!...
Twenty years ago this month, the broadcast of the crackdown on the pro-democracy protesters in Beijing by the Chinese government was widely hailed as the moment that international television news coverage like that of CNN became a serious factor at long last.
That was CNN in 1989.
In 2009 it is Twitter, of all things, that is marking the end of television’s dominance of the news.
Here’s the Twitter feed for most of the “tweets” about what’s going down in Iran. At this hour there’s a massive rally in Tehran by anti-Ahmedinejad protesters. The police have opened fire and killed at least one person. Just about everything we know about all this is coming from regular people who are sending live reports via Twitter.
Remember this well, folks. June 2009 is when people in Iran took hold of the power of “you media” and played it to the hilt. ...
K.C. Budd – aka “phreakmonkey” – is a guy who loves to play around with gadgets. So when he came into possession of a Livermore Data Systems “Model A” he decided to put it to good use.
So what’s a Livermore Data Systems “Model A”? It’s a way old-fashioned modem that was first made in 1964!
Here’s the video that phreakmonkey made of himself using Wikipedia with a laptop and a 45-year old modem…
So as you can see from the screen capture on the right, I couldn’t resist having a little fun with it. But all joviality aside, Wolfram Alpha might be the hugest leap forward in search engine technology since Google debuted more than ten years ago.
Calling itself a “computational knowledge engine”, Wolfram Alpha takes your query and then instead of trying to match it up with a best result, it computes an answer from a vast base of structured data. Ask it “2+2” and it will give you 4. Punch in some quadratic equations or other advanced math and Wolfram Alpha will spit out a bunch of graphs for it. Tell Wolfram Alpha “Greensboro, North Carolina” and it will give you a map of the town’s location, the population, average elevation from sea level and some other relevant data. Ask for the weather in a certain place on the day ...
If you use Twitter, the latest craze on the Intertubes, then it’s quite likely that you are going to abandon the service after your first month. That’s the finding of a Neilsen report which found that 60% of new Twitterers get tired of it after just one month.
However, I have to wonder how many of these Twitter expatriates eventually come back. Robert Strohmeyer elucidates on that further over at the ABC News website. Strohmeyer’s point is that many folks first come to Twitter under the assumption that it’s supposed to just chronicle the minutia of daily life, like “I’m cold” or “Going to the bathroom now”… when that’s not what Twitter is about at all. And that when they realize how Twitter is actually quite useful as a serious micro-blogging utility, then they have the tendency to drift back.
I can vouch for that. When Twitter ...
Apparently, somebody somewhere has been working on getting World of Warcraft to run on the iPhone.
Mash down here for details on what will certainly be the end of productivity in the modern era....
This is gonna be something to keep yer eyes on folks: General Electric has engineered a new kind of optical storage technology. It’s based on holography and it can be used to put 100 DVDs on a single disc!
I wouldn’t chuck out that new Blu-Ray player just yet. An innovation like this usually takes awhile before it comes to market (and even longer before they’re ubiquitous enough for most folks to consider adopting it). But it’s easy to see how something like this would eventually supplant everything we’ve come to know about optical storage and playback.
Between this and the stuff happening in the realm of flash memory, this is very very cool. I’ll certainly be watching for more about it....
Only four incoming freshmen were without personal computers at the University of Virginia this academic year. So the school is shutting down all the computer labs on campus in an effort to save money. And there’s some lively discussion over at Slashdot about whether computer labs are even necessary anymore.
If they ever go away completely… wow. I was a computer lab manager during all four of my years at Elon. So was my filmmaking partner “Weird” Ed and a lot of others. ‘Twas some of the best work that you could ever do as a student. Most of the time you were sitting on shift for three or four hours with nothing to do but surf the ‘net. That is, until another student… or an instructor… came to you about “there’s no paper in the printer”, or “the printer is jammed”, or “THE MOUSE ISN’T WORKING!” That ...