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Comment Many a medical tool has gone to never come back (Score 3, Informative) 615

by mpieters (#35069416) Attached to: Do Tools Ever 'Die?'

Due to changes in medical knowledge, plenty of 'tools' used in medical practices have fallen into disuse because the underlying medical theory has been dis-proven.

As an example, I present to you the Tobacco smoke enema device. How many of these do you think are still in use today? Do you really want tobacco smoke blown up your backside when you just have been pulled out of the water with a set of bellows and a pipe? Yet in the 17th and 18th centuries they hung these things all along the river Thames to help 'warm' people just pulled out of the water.
Input Devices

Elliptic Labs To Bring Touchless Gestures To iPad 55

Posted by timothy from the unhand-me-sir-unhand-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Elliptic Labs will reveal their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology at CES 2011. Elliptic Labs sprung forth from the signal processing environment at the University of Oslo and what they've come up with is an [iPad] dock which creates a 'touchless zone' that extends out about 1 foot in front and to the sides of the iPad screen. Users can then initiate a number of gestures, much like on Microsoft Kinect, to manipulate onscreen content."

Submission + - Nominum calls Open Source DNS 'a recipe for proble

Submitted by
Raindeer
Raindeer writes: "In an effort to promote its new Cloud based DNS service SKYE, Nominum one of the commercial DNS-software, providers slaundered all open source/freeware DNS packages. It said: "Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse.(....) So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems. " This has the DNS community fuming. Especially when you know Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS Cache poisoning problem of last year. Something PowerDNS, MaraDNS and DJBDNS all open source weren't vulnerable too."
Science

Rare Venomous Mammal Filmed 233

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-annoy-the-solenodon dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that footage of one of the world's most strange and elusive mammals has been captured by scientists. Large, and with a long, thin snout, the Hispaniolan solenodon resembles an overgrown shrew. It can inject passing prey with a venom-loaded bite. Dr Sam Turvey, a ZSL (Zoological Society of London) researcher involved with the program, told BBC News: 'It is an amazing creature — it is one of the most evolutionary distinct mammals in the world.' Along with the other species of solenodon, which is found in Cuba (Solenodon cubanus), it is the only living mammal that can actually inject venom into their prey through specialized teeth. Little is known about the creature, which is found in the Caribbean, but it is under threat from deforestation, hunting and introduced species. Researchers say conservation efforts are now needed. The mammal was filmed in the summer of 2008 during a month-long expedition to the Dominican Republic — one of only two countries where this nocturnal, insect-eating animal (Solenodon paradoxus) can be found (the other is Haiti). The researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Ornithological Society of Hispaniola were able to take measurements and DNA from the creature before it was released."
Earth

Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow? 877

Posted by timothy from the four-horsemen-dressage dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, Yellowstone National Park has been having a very unusual number of earthquakes. Many of the most recent tremors have been deeper underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!"

Comment For kids (Score 3, Interesting) 403

by umoto (#26224683) Attached to: Interesting Uses For a USB LED Screen?

I've been thinking it would be cool to get a sign like that and post it in a visible place at home, then use it to post announcements about my kids' accomplishments. I'd set it up so my wife could change it as well. We'd post things like "John did the dishes every day this week", "Mary aced her math test", etc.

The intent would be to show them we care and to give them positive reinforcement.
It's funny. Laugh.

The DIY Tank 334

Posted by samzenpus from the but-how-much-is-the-insurance dept.
Will Foster, a Kettering University student, has built his own half sized Panzer tank. It took Will 2 years and around $10,000 to build his mini-tank and he says the process has been "a lot of trial and error...I'd buy a $200 part that didn't work, then go to a $300 part that didn't work before finding a $50 part that did." The tank is about as big as a small car, and can reach speeds of around 20 mph with its three-cylinder diesel engine. It runs on treads, has a cannon powered by compressed air from a scuba tank and parks wherever the hell it wants.

Comment Alternate Install Method (Score 1) 295

by umoto (#19911067) Attached to: Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers
The problem is entirely in the installer, not the driver.

After I bought an SCX-4100 a couple of years ago, I ran the installer. I saw right away that most of what the installer did was worthless. It installed some GUI that was simply inferior to CUPS+KDE. That made me mad, so I undid the effects of the installer and dissected it until I figured out what actually needed to be installed to just print and scan. The list of files required turns out to be pretty simple, as long as you connect via USB instead of the parallel port:

- /usr/lib/cups/backend/mfp

- /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertosamsung{pcl,spl,splc}

- /usr/lib/libmfp.so*

- /usr/share/ppd/Samsung/scx4100.ppd.gz

- /usr/lib/sane/libsane-smfp.so*

- /etc/sane.d/smfp.conf

You can get all of these files out of the driver package. None of them need to be installed suid root or anything out of the ordinary. All you need is read/write access to /dev/usb/lp0 (provided by the usblp kernel module), which you can usually gain by being a member of group "lp" or whatever your distribution calls it. Also, you need a line in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf that contains "smfp" so that sane will look for libsane-smfp.so .

Use the normal CUPS and SANE configuration steps to set it up. If you're lucky, you can use http://localhost:631/ , unless your distribution has disabled that method of configuration.

I blogged about this two years ago:

    http://hathawaymix.org/Weblog/2005-07-15

Note that many of the details have changed. This post is more correct.

Even though I've avoided the setuid security hole by installing by hand, I'm still very irritated that I have to use proprietary binaries with who knows how many security holes. Next time I'm not going to settle for a proprietary driver. Samsung advertised Linux support and that's half the reason I bought the printer, but I didn't realize the driver was proprietary until I already had the printer.

Samsung, if you read this, listen up: I am happy with the speed and reliability of this printer (I've gone through 5-6 reams of paper and only 1 cartridge), and I am happy that you have added x86_64 support. However, if I had known that I would spend about 40 hours messing with your drivers just to get the printer to work, I would have bought an HP printer instead, even if it cost twice as much. I will not be a repeat customer and I will not recommend any of your printers to anyone else unless you open your drivers.

Comment What keeps me off Windows (Score 1) 2071

by Shane Hathaway (#9374579) Attached to: What Keeps You Off of Windows?
Check this out.

I received a new IBM Thinkpad when I started a new job. It was preloaded with Windows XP. I asked permission to put Linux on it; they didn't mind. So I tried to set it up to dual-boot, but apparently Windows has a special partition table that I didn't know about, and I managed to make Windows unbootable. I even destroyed the restore partition by accident.

I tried every tool I could find to get Windows working again because some projects at work are using .Net. No luck. So I ordered Windows recovery CDs from IBM. (The CDs don't come with the laptop.)

Meanwhile, I set up Gentoo with the latest kernel, hundreds of neat applications, OpenOffice, Xinerama, etc... Linux is better than ever on this hardware. Development is going well, though I can't work on the .Net projects yet.

Now I've been waiting for the recovery CDs for a month, all the while enjoying the competition immensely. They say the CDs are on back-order. So I guess a support problem is keeping me off Windows, but I'm right now I'm pretty glad to have this problem!

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