While it's a crying shame that Sony's PlayStation Move won't have full four-player support, at least the technology is efficient; our buddies at Joystiq are reporting that the camera-and-wand based motion control game system will only minimally impact game performance. Quizzing Sony's David Coombes, they found out that the advanced image processing required to make sense of your wild, flailing movements will take only 1-2 MB of RAM. Of course, when you consider that the PS3 has only 256MB of...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Earthquake Retrofit writes "The Register has a rather funny story about the Zeus botnet: 'The latest version of the Zeus do-it-yourself crimeware kit goes to great lengths to thwart would-be pirates by introducing a hardware-based product activation scheme similar to what's found in Microsoft Windows. ... They've also pushed out multiple flavors of the package that vary in price depending on the capabilities it offers. Just as Windows users can choose between the lower-priced Windows 7 S...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

WolverineOfLove writes "I'm recreating a 1980s abandonware game with copyrights that have been seemingly unused for the past 18 years. The situation is detailed further in a Slashdot journal entry I just wrote, but in short: Is it worth dealing with all the copyrights and paying money if I want to recreate an abandonware title as an open source game? I know there are legal implications to certain decisions I might make, but there is a real possibility that this game's copyright holder wi...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

While it's hard to say if Apple's Magic Mouse really needs "fixing" -- it depends somewhat on your grip -- it's not a huge stretch to say that the slender multitouch device doesn't quite fit in the palm of one's hand. Sensing a market opportunity, Will of MMFixed.com recently decided to come to our collective rescue. For $10, he offers a simple silicone block that matches the mouse's contoured surface nicely, with an integrated suction cup that keeps it securely fastened. While it's...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Dthief writes "A long-running legal battle between the United States government and a group of 29 scientists and engineers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has now reached the US Supreme Court." At issue: mandatory background checks for scientists and engineers working at JPL, which they allege includes snooping into their sexual orientation, as well as their mental and physical health. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Maemo 5 didn't stand on its own for long before being mashed together with Intel's Moblin, but Nokia's N900 still stands as one of the best handhelds for web browsing. It's hardly the world-beater that Nokia (may have) hoped it to be, but that's not because the internals aren't impressive. We're guessing that only a handful of you made the effort to fork over wads of cash in order to pick an unlocked version up, but if you did, you no doubt have some opinions post-purchase. Is the display liv...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

Today the CFUnited team published the full list of topics for CFUnited 2010 and I'm pretty impressed! In past year's I've grumbled that I've found it a bit hard to fill my schedule but there's a lot of va...

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

donadony writes "After twitter, now it's Digg who's decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Casandra, an open source project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database. Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008 and is licensed under the Apache License. The reason for this move, as explained by Digg, is the increasing difficulty of building a high-per...

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski lays out a plan for 21st century digital access, citizenship, literacy, and safety.

VoxOx's claim on a robust feature set makes it a powerful, if slightly unstable, multi-protocol chat and VoIP client--now with free universal translation for all IMs and tweets.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski lays out a plan for 21st century digital access, citizenship, literacy, and safety.

Usually when we hear the phrase "contract-free developer phone" the words "unlocked" and "GSM" follow shortly thereafter, but apparently Palm didn't get the memo -- it just announced discounted hardware prices for its devices, but they're carrier-locked to Verizon and Sprint. Yeah, that's a big sad face out of us -- it's not like Verizon's going to give you a cheaper plan if you show up with a contract-free device. In fact, you might be better off picking up a $7...

VoxOx's claim on a robust feature set makes it a powerful, if slightly unstable, multi-protocol chat and VoIP client--now with free universal translation for all IMs and tweets.

You picked up an Okoro media PC last month, didn't you? If you're nodding up and down in a worried fashion, you're probably better off ignoring everything else we'll say in this post. For the rest of you HTPC hounds, the boutique outfit has something that's very likely to pique your interest (and kick that upgrade itch into high gear). Announced today, the company is adding Core i3 and Core i5 processors to its 2010 media center PC lineup, and as if the extra horsepower weren't enough, users...

VoxOx's claim on a robust feature set makes it a powerful, if slightly unstable, multi-protocol chat and VoIP client. It now comes with free universal translation for all IMs and tweets.

Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010

VoxOx's claim on a robust feature set makes it a powerful, if slightly unstable, multi-protocol chat and VoIP client. It now comes with free universal translation for all IMs and tweets.

As the Web generation descends on the South by Southwest Interactive show in Austin, several location-based start-ups try to put themselves on the map.

Zoom is kind of like Mitsubishi -- it sort of does it all. Months after shipping one of the greatest pocket audio recorders every known to man, the company is now hitting back with none other than a pair of guitar effects pedals. The G2Nu and G2.1Nu boards both feature 100 preset guitar sounds, 20 of which have purportedly been given the almighty thumbs-up from Steve Vai. If you're curious about differences, the latter adds a built-in expression pedal for additional control, but frankly, the...

As the Web generation descends on the South by Southwest Interactive show in Austin, several location-based start-ups try to put themselves on the map.

The case of a "runaway" Prius in San Diego demonstrates how claims about electronic flaws requires investigators to look carefully at the human element too.

A court decides to fine a man for offensive messages sent to his former lover on Facebook. What kind of precedent might this set?

PipianJ writes "A recent preprint posted on arXiv by Vadim Bobylev presents some startling new numbers about a future close pass of one of our stellar neighbors. Based on studies of the Hipparcos catalog, Bobylev suggests that the nearby orange dwarf Gliese 710 has an 86% chance of skirting the outer bounds of the Solar System and the hypothesized Oort Cloud in the next 1.5 million years. As the Oort Cloud is thought to be the source of many long-period comets, the gravitational effects...

ChocSnorfler writes "James Lupski, a physician-scientist who suffers from a neurological disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, has been searching for the genetic cause of his disease for more than 25 years. Late last year, he finally found it — by sequencing his entire genome. While a number of human genome sequences have been published to date, Lupski's research is the first to show how whole-genome sequencing can be used to identify the genetic cause of an individual's disease...

Software giant's patch process speeds up after researcher releases code on Net that can be used to target the vulnerability and take over PCs.

A court decides to fine a man for offensive messages sent to his former lover on Facebook. What kind of precedent might this set?

We hate to turn your entire world -- nay, your very belief system -- on its end, but it's at least conceivable here that the so-called Nokia Mystic with the portrait QWERTY keyboard may not be the upcoming C6 after all. Instead, Tom's Guide is submitting this bright white exhibit as the device lucky enough to wear the C6 name, a phone that looks a whole hell of a lot like a 5230 with a QWERTY slider tacked on for good measure. That would make sense considering Nokia's goal of turning the fres...

Was it a glitch or a mischievous prankster who pulled the fire alarm during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival? Or is it a sign that everyone should just head to happy hour?

It's been four years since laptop computers passed desktop in unit sales in the US. But laptop vendors can't rest. The netbook phenomenon swept the tech world in 2009, changing the rules for the category. And this year, tablets like the iPad might change

The annual interactive festival has only been under way for hours, but already the scene is full of energy--and lots of people.

Macharius writes "Today, the Texas Board of Education approved 11-4 a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. The article goes on to mention that Texas's textbook approvals carry less influence than they used to due to digital localization technology, but is that even measurable given how many millions o...

barnyjr writes "According to a story from Reuters, 'Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own, a special US court ruled on Friday, dealing one more blow to parents seeking to blame vaccines for their children's illness. The special US Court of Federal Claims ruled that vaccines could not have caused the autism of an Oregon boy, William Mead, ending his family's quest for reimbursement. ... While the state court determined the au...

Using a camera as an input device is hardly a new idea -- even on a mobile device -- but most examples so far have been to enable functionality not possible on a touchscreen. As Master's student Daniel Bierwirth has shown in the video after the break, however, a phone on a camera can also be used as an alternative input method for features like scrolling or zooming, potentially allowing for easier interaction on devices with smaller screens. Bierwirth also takes the idea one step further, and...

GDC is winding down here in San Francisco, but Playcast Media is hoping to snag its 15 minutes by announcing new partnerships with Atari, Capcom, Codemasters and THQ (to name a few) for use in its "console-free games-on-demand" service. 'Course, streaming games in through a set-top-box is nothing new, but few operators in the States offer such a thing with any real substance behind it. Playcast's solution enables titles to be pushed through existing cable and telco STBs, and we're t...

The annual interactive festival has only been underway for hours, but already the scene is full of energy. And lots of people.

But the source of the Zeus banking Trojan is back in action after unidentified agents cut off upstream connectivity to an ISP in Kazakhstan.