Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Impossible to do without VR? (Score 2) 448

I can suggest a cheaper, significantly more effective way: full body henna tattoo.

There is no physical discomfort for the user; they can wear the same clothing, perform their usual activities in real-world scenarios, and their sensations are not altered. The same cannot be said with VR gear.

The effect would be immediate, and while not permanent, the user cannot stop participation because of some slight discomfort: they'd have to live the life of a non-white person for several weeks. You're not going to get the same kind of emotional reactions unless participants are all-in, and some reactions are going to take time to develop after the initial shock.
Apple

Protecting Your Tablet From a Fall From Space 130

First time accepted submitter xwwt writes "G-Form has a nice video of an iPad launched into the stratosphere via weather balloon and protected using its new protective gear 'Extreme Edge' to see how well the gear worked in the iPad free fall to Earth. The gear is being introduced at this year's CES where our own timothy will be attending and reviewing new products. The cool part of this whole video is really that the iPad survives the free fall from space, remaining fully functional."

Comment Re:I've taken mine offline at 3.41 (Score 1) 336

Mine's been offline since 3.15. I haven't used 'Install Other OS' (yet), but I still get to see it.

What about new games? I'm not buying new games until Sony relents. This probably means I'm not ever going to buy any more PS3 games, but I'm more than willing to wait.

If the console stops playing bluerays/DVDs, I'll replace it with a non-Sony unit and sell off the few games I have.

Comment Use a Carabiner (Score 1) 763

I've used a carabiner for several decades. Not one of the toy ones sold as key rings, but a small climber's carabiner, about 2.5 inches tall, and the 'tube' is about .25 inches in diameter. The advantages are:
  • the carabiner can hook on most anything; on a belt loop, my keys are inside the pocket but are suspended, reducing wear and eliminating perforation.
  • the carabiner makes it easy to organize/separate keys on separae loops; I keep my work keys/RFIDs on one, home/personal on another, and vehicle keys on a third.
  • the carabiner makes it easy to detach keys as necessary; say for driving, or lending keys.

I've had to replace carabiners twice due to wearing out of the latch spring. A new one costs $3-4 at a local hardware store.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 700

Correct. It is a rather unfortunate turn of events. My PS3 was used occasionally as a BD player, but the vast majority of the time it was running Life with Playstation; I seldom gamed on it at all. As I do not wish to lose the 'install other OS' option, and Life with Playstation requires signin on PSN to submit work units, the PS3 is now off most of the time and is used solely for BD. The collateral damage is my contribution to protein folding research.
PC Games (Games)

A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come 427

Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting: "Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
PC Games (Games)

Left 4 Dead DLC, SDK Announced 66

Today Valve announced plans for Left 4 Dead's first DLC, called The L4D Survival Pack. It will include a new game mode and two campaigns for Versus mode. The new content is coming to both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game (a PS3 port to the base game still seems unlikely). The press release goes on to say, "In addition, for PC gamers and aspiring developers, the first Left 4 Dead release for the Source Software Development Kit (Source SDK) will allow the creation of custom Left 4 Dead campaigns that will be discoverable via L4D's matchmaking system. The SDK update is also due for release this spring, and is free of charge to all owners of L4D on the PC." The Opposable Thumbs blog also reports on a way to play Left 4 Dead in 3D.

Comment Market-Speak Semantics (Score 1) 320

Most of the comments here are from people who are getting tripped up on the market-speak. When they say 'unclonable', most of us here think 'not possible to copy'. And this idea is reinforced with the idea of PUFs, so it's understandable you'd think this way.

However, I think they mean 'not clonable AND still functional'.

See, there's one thing they are doing that other RFID implementors have typically avoided, which is communication with a central database. When you have that, you don't have physical access to the central store, so that is, by itself, a (or the) PUF.

Couple that with read/write storage in the RFID itself, and you have a simple, automated way to make all copies invalid: if you successfully clone a working RFID, if the original is used, the challenge-response counter is incremented in the central database as well as in the original RFID. The clone _cannot_ have the same counter, so it is immediately unusable.

However, if their scheme is mostly that simplistic, then it's ripe for DoS attacks, where you clone an RFID and use the clone before the original can be used again, making the original unworkable.

If there is a defense for such a DoS attack, then they still have an issue: if the central database considers an RFID invalid for any reason (non-malicious, but slow communication with central database causes the RFID to miss its RF power cycle window, perhaps), such that you no longer trust it, is it still an 'id'? If it is, what's all the crypto for? Maybe it's just a sales tool, too?

Anyway, semantics aside, I think someone will prove them wrong in relatively short order.

For crypto products in general, this may always be the case: to me, it seems that there's more unemployed brain power with the right mindset to tackle such problems than there is in employment, in large part, because being employed causes the right mindset to become not-the-right-mindset over time.

Feed Science Daily: Brain Implant Being Studied At Jefferson Could Predict And Stop Epilepsy Seizure (sciencedaily.com)

An implanted stimulator being studied at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, may be able to predict and prevent seizures before they start in people with uncontrolled epilepsy. Researchers are enrolling patients in a study of the Responsive Neurostimulator System made by Neuropace, to determine if it is effective in stemming seizures. The system contains a computer chip that detects seizures and then delivers electric current to the brain to stop them.

Feed Science Daily: Hepatitis C Helicase Unwinds DNA In A Spring-loaded, Three-step Process (sciencedaily.com)

The process by which genes are duplicated is mysterious and complex, involving a cast of characters with diverse talents and the ability to play well with others in extremely close quarters. A key player on this stage is an enzyme called a helicase. Its job is to unwind DNA or RNA so that another enzyme, a polymerase, can faithfully copy each nucleotide in the genetic code. A study to appear in Science sheds new light on how the hepatitis C helicase plays this role.

Feed Science Daily: Presence Of Wolves Allows Aspen Recovery In Yellowstone (sciencedaily.com)

The wolves are back, and for the first time in more than 50 years, young aspen trees are growing again in the northern range of Yellowstone National Park. The study shows that a process called "the ecology of fear" is at work, a balance has been restored to an important natural ecosystem, and aspen trees are surviving elk browsing for the first time in decades.
Privacy

Submission + - Merely "cloaking" data may be incriminatin

n0g writes: In a recent submission to Bugtraq, Larry Gill of Guidance Software refutes (successfully or not, you decide) some bug reports for the forensic analysis product EnCase® Forensic Edition. The refutation is interesting, but one comment raises an important privacy issue: When talking about perps creating "loops" in NTFS directories to hide data, Gill says, "The purposeful hiding of data by the subject of an investigation is in itself important evidence and there are many scenarios where intentional data cloaking provides incriminating evidence, even if the perpetrator is successful in cloaking the data itself."

That begs the question, if one "cloaks" data by encrypting it, say, exactly what incriminating evidence does that provide? And how important is that evidence compared to the absence of anything else found that was incriminating? If you find an encrypted hard drive on my system, that doesn't mean there's pr0n in there, that's just to hold my bank records. No, seriously.

Feed Science Daily: Hidden Order Found In A Quantum Spin Liquid (sciencedaily.com)

Scientists have detected a hidden magnetic "quantum order" that extends over chains of 100 atoms in a ceramic without classical magnetism. The findings, published in Science, have implications for the design of devices and materials for quantum information processing.

Slashdot Top Deals

One small step for man, one giant stumble for mankind.

Working...