hanscats - Slashdot User

Submission + - Japan’s Robot Picks Only the Ripest Strawber (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner on Sunday December 05, 2010 @02:09PM

kkleiner writes: The Institute of Agricultural Machinery at Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, along with SI Seiko, has developed a robot that can select and harvest strawberries based on their color. Ripened berries are detected using the robot’s stereoscopic cameras, and analyzed to measure how red they appear. When the fruit is ready to come off the vine, the robot quickly locates it in 3D space and cuts it free. From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. Creators estimate that it will be able to cut down harvesting time by 40%.

Submission + - Vuvuzelas Blare on Pirated Copies (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04, 2010 @07:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas.
Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user’s game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates.

But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates.

Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman’s cape-glide ability doesn’t work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps.

If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game.

Submission + - Ubuntu Rolling release rumours wrong (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by ddfall on Thursday November 25, 2010 @07:03AM

ddfall writes: Previously on /. — http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/1346221/Ubuntu-May-Move-To-Rolling-Releases — This is wrong! Engineering Director of Ubuntu Rick Spencer says "Ubuntu is not changing to a rolling release". He goes on to say, "We are confident that our customers, partners, and the FLOSS ecosystem are well served by our current release cadence. What the article was probably referring to was the possibility of making it easier for developers to use cutting edge versions of certain software packages on Ubuntu. This is a wide-ranging project that we will continue to pursue through our normal planning processes".

Nokia's Maemo Switching To Qt 182

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 04, 2009 @06:50PM from the on-the-qt-but-not-very-hush-hush dept.

suka writes "During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt. Maemo Harmattan is going to switch away from GTK+ / Hildon, derStandard.at reports from the conference." Michael Pyne also writes with a post describing day one of the conference from a KDE perspective.

Fungus Fire Spores With 180,000 G Acceleration 69

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @09:22AM from the easy-at-that-size dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include 'squirt guns' that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it 'the fastest flight in nature.' Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera."

Slashdot Top Deals