DocRea - Slashdot User

Easy-to-Make Material Scratches Diamond 213

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday April 21, 2007 @10:20AM from the mohs-hardness-scale-so-hosed dept.

holy_calamity writes "A material tough enough to scratch diamond that can be made without resorting to massive pressure has been developed at UCLA. A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium." Sound familiar? This is the other new material tougher than diamond, but no word yet on how they rate against each other.

Feed Clearview XL43 UMPC beckons a name change (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Saturday April 21, 2007 @09:52AM

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs

We've seen plenty of instances where companies ask their loyal customers to handle some of the dirty work, but Clearview Technology is only requesting your input on something as simple as a name change. Not satisfied with the current XL43 badge, the company has cranked up a submission venue to get ideas for its official name, but aside from the semantics, how about the hardware? The Windows CE-powered UMPC will reportedly feature a 620MHz AMD AU1250 processor, 128MB of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth, WiFi, an SD / MMC flash card slot, FM radio, 1.3-megapixel camera, integrated DVB-T TV tuner, and GPS to boot. Unfortunately, there's no timeline as to when we can expect this handtop to hit the market, but we've got all ideas that you can hasten the process if you toss your two pennies in the naming collection.

[Via Pocketables]

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Digital Media Archiving Challenges Hollywood 155

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday April 21, 2007 @09:14AM from the taping-over-m*a*s*h-reruns dept.

HarryCaul writes "Movies are moving to digital, but what about long-term archiving of the master source materials? Turns out it's harder for digital media than for contemporary analog. Data is being lost, and studios have to learn to cope. Phil Feiner of the AMPAS sci-tech division says when he worked on studio feature films he 'found missing frames or corrupted data on 40% of the data tapes that came in from digital intermediate houses' How to deal with it? Regular migration from old media to new media. Grover Crisp, says Sony has put in a program of migrating every two to three years. Other studios are following suit, but what about indie features? Will we lose films like we lost the originals of the 20s?"

Text Messages Used To Monitor Elections 42

Posted by Zonk on Saturday April 21, 2007 @03:10AM from the getting-the-word-out dept.

InternetVoting writes "The upcoming historic Nigerian elections are going to be defended by an army of observers armed, not with guns, but with text messages. Every one of the observers will be outfitted with a cell phone to report vote tampering. The volunteers are a part of the Network of Mobile Election Monitors, and they use freeware to do what they do. From the article: 'NMEM is using a free system called Frontline SMS, developed by programmer Ken Banks, to keep track of all of the texts. Originally developed for conservationists to keep in touch with communities in National Parks in South Africa, the system allows mass-messaging to mobile phones and crucially the ability to reply to a central computer. It has already been used in countries such as Zimbabwe as a way of bypassing broadcast restrictions and distributing information to rural communities.'"

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