Slashdot Mirror

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have a bright idea — at least at first sight. They want to create a sustainable transportation system by using hydrogen-powered cars. They would like to create an infrastructure where people could use a liquid fuel for driving while the carbon emission in their vehicles is trapped for later processing at a fueling station. 'The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel.' Where will all this liquid carbon be stored? The researchers don't know. They suggest that it could be stored in geological formations or under the oceans."

Schneier points out an interesting (and long, 117-pages) paper on the ethical implications of robots in war [PDF]. "This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity."

Renata writes "Researchers from Georgia Tech's GVU Center have installed AR Façade at the Grand Auto Text exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, CA. The AR Façade installation presents an augmented reality version of desktop-based game Façade. The exhibit marks the first time this elaborate augmented reality interactive drama has been seen outside the GVU lab. The AR Façade immersive drama presents the virtual characters of Façade inside a real, physical apartment. Players play the role of an old friend invited over for drinks at a make-or-break moment in the collapsing marriage of the reactive characters, Grace and Trip. While some players attempt to pacify the characters, others break the ice with comic relief, performing for friends who can observe the unfolding drama from outside the exhibit. The uneasy social situation becomes all too real as players are able to move freely throughout a physical apartment and use gestures and speech to interact with the autonomous characters who appear graphically imposed in the space using a video-mix head-mounted AR display. The three month long exhibition will be open to public until December 15th."

Renata writes "Researchers from Georgia Tech's GVU Center have installed AR Façade at the Grand Auto Text exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, CA. The AR Façade installation presents an augmented reality version of desktop-based game Façade. The exhibit marks the first time this elaborate augmented reality interactive drama has been seen outside the GVU lab. The AR Façade immersive drama presents the virtual characters of Façade inside a real, physical apartment. Players play the role of an old friend invited over for drinks at a make-or-break moment in the collapsing marriage of the reactive characters, Grace and Trip. While some players attempt to pacify the characters, others break the ice with comic relief, performing for friends who can observe the unfolding drama from outside the exhibit. The uneasy social situation becomes all too real as players are able to move freely throughout a physical apartment and use gestures and speech to interact with the autonomous characters who appear graphically imposed in the space using a video-mix head-mounted AR display. The three month long exhibition will be open to public until December 15th."

vigmeister writes "A group of Russian kids have uncovered and rebuilt some arcade games from the Soviet era. These games apparently offered free play when someone played well, but no list of hi-scores. Roughly 32 of them have been found and although they are based on other arcade games, I hope these games were unique enough to offer playability for the present day arcade game lovers. 'Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of "entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities." Production of the games ceased with the collapse of communism, and as Nintendo consoles and PCs flooded the former Soviet states, the old arcade games were either destroyed or disappeared into warehouses and basements. It was mostly out of nostalgia that four friends at Moscow State Technical University began scouring the country to rescue these old games. '"

Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."

LED lover writes "The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognized Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply."

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have created a working prototype nanogenerator capable of generating as much as 4 watts per cubic centimeter of continuous direct current. The generators are green (to use), drawing power from natural motion in the surrounding environment. They are based on non-toxic chemicals and should be safe for use in biomechanical implants, but that's not their only potential use. From the article: "If you had a device like this in your shoes when you walked, you would be able to generate your own small current to power small electronics," Wang noted. "Anything that makes the nanowires move within the generator can be used for generating power. Very little force is required to move them."

eldavojohn writes, "A new robot named Haile (pronounced hi-lee), which 'listens' to what musicians are playing and play along with them, has been developed at the [corrected] Georgia Institute of Technology. There are some videos at the GATech site. From the article: "If the musicians change the beat or rhythm, Haile is right there with them. 'With Haile there are two levels of musical knowledge... The basic level is to teach it to learn to identify music, to imitate,' Weinberg said. 'The higher level is stability of rhythm, to be able to distinguish between similar rhythms. In essence, Haile has the ability to recognize if a rhythm is more chaotic or stable, and can adjust its playing accordingly.' I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but I can't wait for the day when I have my very own Robo Puente to play along with."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Georgia Tech researchers have shrunk an optical device called wavelength demultiplier (WD) by combining into one crystal three unique properties of photonics crystals. This optical discovery opens the way to sophisticated and cheap bio-sensors mounted on 'lab-on-a-chip' devices -- sensors to run blood tests, detect chemicals in water supplies or for drug testing. Their new WD is less than a millimeter in all dimensions rather than the several centimeters of other currently available WDs. And it should not cost more to produce."

Roland Piquepaille writes "The next generation of optical networks needed to satisfy our appetite for bandwidth is currently under development. And researchers from Georgia Tech have built a new architecture which delivers super-broadband wired and wireless service simultaneously. This hybrid system 'could allow dual wired/wireless transmission up to 100 times faster than current networks.' In fact, this optical-wireless network can carry as many as 32 different channels, each providing 2.5 gigabit-per-second service to your home or your office. And companies such as NEC and BellSouth are already working on such hybrid optical-wireless communications networks."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a new nano imaging device which is 100 times faster than current technology. Not only is the 'FIRAT' (Force sensing Integrated Readout and Active Tip) much faster than the current 'AFM' (atomic force microscopy), it also is able to take movies and to simultaneously capture several physical properties of nanostructures, such as stiffness, elasticity or viscosity. In fact, the FIRAT probe, which works like a microphone, could one day replace AFM. One of the researchers commented that 'We've multiplied each of the old capabilities by at least 10, and it has lots of new applications.'"

Psy writes "I attended Phreaknic this weekend where Acidus released TinyDisk, a shared file system that runs on top of TinyURL or his own implementation NanoURL. TinyDisk compresses a file, encrypts it, and dices it into clusters. Each cluster is submitted to TinyURL as if it were a url. This clusters can be read back out of the database, making TinyDisk a global file system anyone can use. There are safeguards in the default config to prevent people from dumping gigs of MP3s into TinyURL. While file-system-on-web-applications are nothing new (GMail file system anyone?) this hack shows how easy it is to accidentally design a web application insecurely despite the default PHP protections. See his presentation for more info"

spackbace writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard."

spackbace writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard."

An anonymous reader writes "There are lots of multi-robot designs out there. Most are either research platforms well over $2K (often $10K or more), or are hobbyist bots under $400 with tiny brains and few sensors. But George Mason University's new FlockBots wiki is interesting. They're trying to pack as much functionality as possible into a roughly $800, 7" mobile swarmbot, and publish the design and software as a free and open spec. So far their design includes a wireless 200MHz Gumstix Linux computer, a camera, range and bump sensors, wheel encoders, a can gripper, and lots more. It's a great-looking design and I think the cost could drop to $500 with vendors doing consolidation."

Academia Blog Grand Text Auto has up a long set of notes from last week's first AI and Interactive Entertainment conference, which includes keynote talks from Doug Church, Will Wright, Chris Crawford and Damian Isla of Halo 2. From the Doug Church talk: "none of the AI detail gets attention in a 30 second ad or magazine blurb...also, if a character in battle only lives a minute, there's not much fidelity players can even perceive...industry has been promising good characters for a long time, not delivered... players are cynical, don't want to hear it anymore...hard to back out of the fakery"

An anonymous reader writes "The NETI@home Internet traffic statistics project (featured in Wired and Slashdot previously) has a quick analysis on the malicious traffic they observed. It's a rough world out there." Perhaps not suprising, but still disheartening, the researchers find among other things that a large portion of typical end-user traffic consists of malicious connection attempts.

An anonymous reader writes "The NETI@home Internet traffic statistics project (featured in Wired and Slashdot previously) has a quick analysis on the malicious traffic they observed. It's a rough world out there." Perhaps not suprising, but still disheartening, the researchers find among other things that a large portion of typical end-user traffic consists of malicious connection attempts.

Because I know you haven't had your fill of the surreal today, Grand Text Auto has up a link to a Flash movie which depicts a climactic battle between the consoles of old and the PSP...using the end of Final Fantasy VI. Commentary available at Game Girl Advance. My favorite part is where the GBA, GameBoy, GameCube, and N64 team up to defeat the Master Famicom and Rob. Actually pretty cool, if long.

George P. Burdell asks: "On April 5, Georgia Tech's Honor Advisory Council will host a panel discussion between opposing sides of the P2P downloading issue. Among other panel members, a representative from the RIAA has agreed to attend the event. The discussion is intended to raise the level of awareness of students who may think they know all they need to know about the issue. What are some of the pressing questions the tech community has for panel members on both sides of the issue?"

George P. Burdell asks: "On April 5, Georgia Tech's Honor Advisory Council will host a panel discussion between opposing sides of the P2P downloading issue. Among other panel members, a representative from the RIAA has agreed to attend the event. The discussion is intended to raise the level of awareness of students who may think they know all they need to know about the issue. What are some of the pressing questions the tech community has for panel members on both sides of the issue?"

George P. Burdell asks: "On April 5, Georgia Tech's Honor Advisory Council will host a panel discussion between opposing sides of the P2P downloading issue. Among other panel members, a representative from the RIAA has agreed to attend the event. The discussion is intended to raise the level of awareness of students who may think they know all they need to know about the issue. What are some of the pressing questions the tech community has for panel members on both sides of the issue?"

George P. Burdell asks: "On April 5, Georgia Tech's Honor Advisory Council will host a panel discussion between opposing sides of the P2P downloading issue. Among other panel members, a representative from the RIAA has agreed to attend the event. The discussion is intended to raise the level of awareness of students who may think they know all they need to know about the issue. What are some of the pressing questions the tech community has for panel members on both sides of the issue?"

Vict0r writes "Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have recently demonstrated a way to grow carbon nanotubes in towers. The article also discusses applications for solar cells." From the article: "Reflections off the Gothamesque towers would provide more opportunity for each photon of sunlight to interact with the p/n junction of the cell. That would increase the power output from PV cells of a given size, or allow cells to be made smaller while producing the same amount of power."

d4 asks: "Thad Starner has been using a wearable computer daily since 1993, and Steve Mann has had an impressive amount of press coverage over the years. But if you want wearable computing in 2005, it seems you must build your own system. Why, after all this time and attention, are wearables still not commercially available?"

Saint Aardvark writes "eWeek reports on the latest trick of spammers: getting around DNS-based lookups. By registering a domain *after* the spam goes out advertising it, they can get around blacklists. However, that causes all sorts of problems for ISPs and anti-spam services. Paul Judge, CTO at Ciphertrust, says "Even in large enterprises, it's becoming very common to see a large spam load cripple the DNS infrastructure.""

fygment writes "A new microgenerator developed at Georgia Tech can now produce enough power to run a small electronic device, like a cell phone, and may soon be able to power a laptop. The microgenerator is about 10 millimeters wide, or about the size of a dime. When coupled with a similarly sized gas-fueled microturbine (or jet) engine, the system, called a microengine, has the potential to deliver more energy and last 10 times longer than a conventional battery. This is still just a quarter of the problem. A turbine is still being developed to turn the generator and that will require fuel and storage of some kind."

fygment writes "A new microgenerator developed at Georgia Tech can now produce enough power to run a small electronic device, like a cell phone, and may soon be able to power a laptop. The microgenerator is about 10 millimeters wide, or about the size of a dime. When coupled with a similarly sized gas-fueled microturbine (or jet) engine, the system, called a microengine, has the potential to deliver more energy and last 10 times longer than a conventional battery. This is still just a quarter of the problem. A turbine is still being developed to turn the generator and that will require fuel and storage of some kind."

metlin writes "The organizers of the Ansari X-Prize have launched the equivalent of the X-Prize in a variety of technology areas, called the WTN X-Prizes. The idea is to have a series of prizes for important technology challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, which will be judged by the World Technology Network. The website mentions that, 'The concept of the WTN X PRIZES is to utilize the concepts, procedures, technologies and publicity developed X PRIZE Foundation's Ansari X PRIZE competition for space and the global science and technology innovators identification process and community developed by the World Technology Network (WTN) to launch a series of technology prizes seeking to meet the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.' Sounds like a good idea, maybe this will help make that flying car a reality?"

PasteEater writes "The good people over at XBox Scene have the scoop. Mac OS X has been successfully installed on a modified Xbox. What does this mean? Well, it's no Xbox Media Center, but it does prove that nerds are at the forefront once again!"

nazarijo writes "In an article entitled Spammers using sender authentication too, study says, Infoworld reports that a study by CipherTrust shows that SPF and Sender ID (SID) aren't nearly as effective as we expected them to be when combatting spam. The reason? Spammers are able to publish their own records, too. 'Spammers are now better than companies at reporting the source of their e-mail,' says Paul Judge, noted spam researcher and CipherTrust CTO. Combined with low adoption rates of either SID or SPF (31 of the Fortune 1000 according to CipherTrust), this means that the common dream of SPF or SID clearing up the spam problem wont be coming true. Wong, one of the original authors of SPF and a co-author of SID, says that it was never intended to combat all spam. Weng, another researcher in the space, says that this is just one of the many pieces of the puzzle needed to combat spam. Various SID implementations exist, including a new one from Sendmail.net based on their milter API, making it easy for you to adopt SID and try this for yourself."

SeanCier writes "The SIGGraph 2004 conference showed off a lot of trends: high-dynamic-range (HDR) displays and video, suddenly ubiquitous general-purpose GPU programmability (it's not just for polygon shading anymore), 3D and high-colour displays, ever-more-refined fluid dynamics, crowd animation, and point-based graphics, to name just a few. But there was an unspoken undercurrent, a trend that's waiting to happen in the visual effects community, and happen in a big way: Open Source." Read on for more.

There are plenty of examples of open source and the graphics community getting along grandly: Gimp and CinePaint (aka FilmGimp), ILM's OpenEXR, and projects like Open Scene Graph. Linux, in particular, has made spectacular inroads: nearly everybody uses it for rendering, and many (most?) use it as their desktop OS of choice. In the RenderMan user's group (I'll get into RenderMan more in a minute), for example, somebody asked how many people used Linux as their main OS. Plenty of hands, and some approving chuckles all around. Mac OS X? A few hands, and woots. Windows? No hands at all -- and moreover, an handful of boos, followed by everybody cracking up as they realized the whole community was abandoning Microsoft wholesale.

But then there's the other side. All the major visual effects and animation studios -- ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks, Digital Domain, Blue Sky, Disney, and so on -- have a team of programmers in-house. Five, ten, two dozen, or more. They're the ones that'll write the software that does special rendering algorithms for Shrek 2, or an animation control system for Mr. Incredible, or produce massive crowd simulators for Lord of the Rings. Things that commercial software doesn't quite do -- or that nobody else has tried to do, or even thought of. Things they need to do just so. Things they need to do now.

Everybody has a ton of custom software written -- often good software, with flexible frameworks and clever hacks. Moreover, they don't want to rely any more than necessary on commercial software, because if ILM finds a bug in Maya that holds them up or slows them down, they best they can do is pay Alias to fix it fast (i.e. weeks) and then have hundreds of animators waste thousands of hours time working around it for weeks. And worse, if Digital Domain buys Alias and decides they'll keep new versions of Maya to themselves, ILM is simply screwed, in a big way. If they want to get a particular feature in Maya, and a plugin won't cut it? Well, that's even harder -- and involves more money and more time.

So ILM writes their own stuff whenever they have to, and whenever they can. And Digital Domain writes their own stuff. And Dreamworks writes their own stuff. And Disney writes their own stuff.

And most of it is all the same stuff. Fluid dynamics? Hair? Subsurface scattering? Muscle-and-skin systems? Crowd control? Dozens of topics -- and every studio pretty much has pretty similar, rather redundant code to do 'em all.

These studios aren't in the business of writing software, they're in the business of making movies. So why are they spending their time and money writing software? Because they have to; it's a Necessary Evil.

So, what if they all worked on Open Source stuff instead? Look at what I just wrote. Every word is a reason to go Open Source. No drawbacks, all upside: no lock-in, you can fix stuff, you can add stuff, you don't have to wait on anybody else, and plus, you can do all this while also using what others have written.

The knee-jerk reaction that may be some executives' first objection: our code is a strategic advantage, giving it away would be throwing away money. If we can do hair and our competitors can't, we'll make better films then they can (and, if it's a visual effects studio, we'll win contracts based on that unique ability).

Bull honkus. If your competitors need hair, they'll write hair software, no problem. Another quote from the Pixar RenderMan user's group, this one by a RenderMan developer (paraphrased): "this is based on the subsurface scattering papers from a couple years ago. Everybody does this, based on those papers." Nope, I don't see strategic advantage there: I see waste.

It is, as they say, a win-win scenario; the studios contribute their code to Open Source projects, and everybody helps make that code better. ILM started it in a small way, with OpenEXR, and it worked: OpenEXR is *the* format for high-dynamic-range images, no questions asked. Did it benefit ILM? You betcha: major packages everywhere (Photoshop, RenderMan, etc) either import/export OpenEXR now, or will soon. Pixar even contributed new compression code.

So, a great scenario, and proof that it works. Why hasn't it happened in a bigger way yet? Fear of the unknown. But listen close, and you'll hear a flood coming that could change the landscape -- and it's hard to divert a flood.

That leaves only one question: how will it start? Well, it could begin with open source projects becoming valuable to studios, as started happening with Gimp (though here I'm talking more about advanced 3D animation, simulation, and rendering; Blender's great for what it does, but medium-to-large studios aren't its intended audience; it's not going to displace Maya any time soon, because it doesn't offer anything that Maya lacks as far as the studios are concerned). Or it could start with a studio making a bunch of their custom in-house software Open Source (like ILM did with OpenEXR). Either way, it's up to us as a community -- either to write the software or to sell the concept.

I'd suggest that a great place for all this to start would be with Pixar's PRMan (PhotoRealistic RenderMan, these days often called just RenderMan). And note I say this as a shareholder. Selling RenderMan and related software accounts for less than 5% of Pixar's revenue; the real reason -- the *only* business reason -- they still develop it is for the other 95% of the company to use. If open-sourcing it would bring in collaboration and improvements that would make them just 5% more efficient in generating movie revenue, doesn't that justify the decision right there? And of course that's not counting those who would still pay for service contracts, or the reduction in development costs that could come from the rest of the community helping with their R&D (the budget for which, BTW, surpasses their software revenue). RenderMan has always been a product ahead of its time, and that's why -- despite Pixar's belligerent and hostile use of patents and close-held IP -- it's still the golden standard in this industry. The RenderMan protocol and API was intended fifteen years ago to be a renderer-independent standard, the PostScript of the 3D world. That dream died because of Pixar's unwillingness to release IP: it became difficult or impossible for others to implement that standard officially, or at all, because Pixar grasped the it so tightly (case in point, ExLuna: their lawyers summarily killed what was the best chance in years of having a RenderMan-compliant renderer with new and different functionality, complementary to PRMan). But the renderer -- PRMan -- doesn't have to die through the same mistake, even in the face of an ever-shrinking market share and competitors with the advanced global illumination algorithms PRMan lacks.

But that's not to say Pixar is the only -- or even the best or most likely -- option here. They most certainly don't hold all the cards. So, don't sit back and wait for Pixar or another studio to start the ball rolling: we need to give it a push.

glockenspieler writes "Recently on the the Gnome Foundation mailing list, Dave Camp posted a draft Gnome Roadmap for versions 2.8 and Beyond. Issues up for discussion are Mozilla/Epiphany, incorportation of peer to peer filesharing, blogging, addition of more media widgets, and many others. Time for Gnome users to weigh in on what improvements that you would like to see. If that's not enough, then there's always the the C# versus Java versus ? discussion."

glockenspieler writes "As reported by Ars Technica, for the week ending April 24th, AMD accounted for 52% of desktop CPU sales. Granted its just one week but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum in the desktop market. So, when will Dell begin carrying AMD?"

sessha asks: "I want to log data from a Bluetooth Accelerometer (actually 5) attached to different parts of the body. How one would go about logging the data onto a bluetooth compatible PDA. I know quite little about PDA OS's, but the main concern is functionality - it doesn't matter if it is PalmOS or Windows CE or whatever. The Linux and Windows directions for data logging are shown, but how would one best go about this on a PDA? Also, it would require at least 256 MB storage, preferably more, since this will be recording 300 of these ASCII strings a second for a number of days. Suggestions as to the best equipment and software to use for such an endeavor would be greatly appreciated."

sessha asks: "I want to log data from a Bluetooth Accelerometer (actually 5) attached to different parts of the body. How one would go about logging the data onto a bluetooth compatible PDA. I know quite little about PDA OS's, but the main concern is functionality - it doesn't matter if it is PalmOS or Windows CE or whatever. The Linux and Windows directions for data logging are shown, but how would one best go about this on a PDA? Also, it would require at least 256 MB storage, preferably more, since this will be recording 300 of these ASCII strings a second for a number of days. Suggestions as to the best equipment and software to use for such an endeavor would be greatly appreciated."

sessha asks: "I want to log data from a Bluetooth Accelerometer (actually 5) attached to different parts of the body. How one would go about logging the data onto a bluetooth compatible PDA. I know quite little about PDA OS's, but the main concern is functionality - it doesn't matter if it is PalmOS or Windows CE or whatever. The Linux and Windows directions for data logging are shown, but how would one best go about this on a PDA? Also, it would require at least 256 MB storage, preferably more, since this will be recording 300 of these ASCII strings a second for a number of days. Suggestions as to the best equipment and software to use for such an endeavor would be greatly appreciated."

sessha asks: "I want to log data from a Bluetooth Accelerometer (actually 5) attached to different parts of the body. How one would go about logging the data onto a bluetooth compatible PDA. I know quite little about PDA OS's, but the main concern is functionality - it doesn't matter if it is PalmOS or Windows CE or whatever. The Linux and Windows directions for data logging are shown, but how would one best go about this on a PDA? Also, it would require at least 256 MB storage, preferably more, since this will be recording 300 of these ASCII strings a second for a number of days. Suggestions as to the best equipment and software to use for such an endeavor would be greatly appreciated."

It wouldn't be Halloween without a linux jack-o-lantern like the one submitted by h0mee, who writes "Just an amusing little Halloween set of pics. If you're curious about making your own, Buddy Moore provides us with a mini howto. For some spooky, fleener notes that the University of Texas at Austin's Digital Morphology Library provides X-Ray CT views of living and extinct vertebrates, like this full skeleton of a fruit bat or just its gnashing skull. Other spine-chilling notables include: the veiled chameleon, scaleless dragonfish, black cat, and the fearful pineapple. Lastly, BrGaribaldi noticed that Ridley Scott has re-edited Alien and is releasing it on Halloween in some lucky theaters. Not very many movies are scarier than that." Updated!

Update: 10/31 19:30 GMT by C : Barry sent in this one for you Apple lovers: "I saw your Linux jack-o-lantern, but how about this? The guys over at iPodHacks.com have actually carved an iPod into a pumpkin, creating the world's only iPod-o-Lantern. That's 7000 songs in your...pumpkin. Thought you might want to update the Halloween posting, as this is an ideal fit."

Also, David Clubb submits this achievement for your consideration: "Since it's Halloween, we at the University of Rochester's Computer Interest Floor decided to build a web server out of a pumpkin. We dissembled a 100MHz PII and placed it into a 54 lbs. pumpkin. It runs Gentoo and can be accessed here. Please don't Slashdot it too badly!"

And it just wouldn't be Halloween without the following, from a nameless submittor: "To quote the site, 'Extreme Halloween Fright.' A fairly comprehensive guide to making your pumpkin a bit more hi-tech using power tools, and perhaps the definitive pumpkin trepanning site." Pumpkins and powertools. How can you go wrong?

It wouldn't be Halloween without a linux jack-o-lantern like the one submitted by h0mee, who writes "Just an amusing little Halloween set of pics. If you're curious about making your own, Buddy Moore provides us with a mini howto. For some spooky, fleener notes that the University of Texas at Austin's Digital Morphology Library provides X-Ray CT views of living and extinct vertebrates, like this full skeleton of a fruit bat or just its gnashing skull. Other spine-chilling notables include: the veiled chameleon, scaleless dragonfish, black cat, and the fearful pineapple. Lastly, BrGaribaldi noticed that Ridley Scott has re-edited Alien and is releasing it on Halloween in some lucky theaters. Not very many movies are scarier than that." Updated!

Update: 10/31 19:30 GMT by C : Barry sent in this one for you Apple lovers: "I saw your Linux jack-o-lantern, but how about this? The guys over at iPodHacks.com have actually carved an iPod into a pumpkin, creating the world's only iPod-o-Lantern. That's 7000 songs in your...pumpkin. Thought you might want to update the Halloween posting, as this is an ideal fit."

Also, David Clubb submits this achievement for your consideration: "Since it's Halloween, we at the University of Rochester's Computer Interest Floor decided to build a web server out of a pumpkin. We dissembled a 100MHz PII and placed it into a 54 lbs. pumpkin. It runs Gentoo and can be accessed here. Please don't Slashdot it too badly!"

And it just wouldn't be Halloween without the following, from a nameless submittor: "To quote the site, 'Extreme Halloween Fright.' A fairly comprehensive guide to making your pumpkin a bit more hi-tech using power tools, and perhaps the definitive pumpkin trepanning site." Pumpkins and powertools. How can you go wrong?

An anonymous reader submits "Georgia Institute of Technology was given an anonymous $36 million donation for a nanotech research facility. The state has pledged to chip in another $45 million over the next few years. This money should nicely supplement the current nano research at GT, covering areas such as biological nanoscale systems and self assembley of nanosystems."

An anonymous reader submits "Georgia Institute of Technology was given an anonymous $36 million donation for a nanotech research facility. The state has pledged to chip in another $45 million over the next few years. This money should nicely supplement the current nano research at GT, covering areas such as biological nanoscale systems and self assembley of nanosystems."

unassimilatible writes "MIT will reportedly announce new high-tech glasses which they claim will improve memory by up to 50%. The spectacles are implanted with a CPU that sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages - like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine - flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. Pardon me, but I'll wait for the reviews, since I am still smarting from buying those X-ray glasses in the back of magazines." These "memory glasses" were also discussed at the recent International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago (Oct21-23) the 7th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'03) took place in White Plains (N.Y., U.S.A.). Aside from the cool evening reception/visit @ IBM TJ Watson Research Center Hawthorne, one of the most popular events was (as usual) the gadget show where we saw some interesting gadgets as well as a few funny demonstrations. Some short video clips (DivX 5.05) are available (please be gentle on my ADSL connection!)."

NoData writes "Treating phobias with exposure therapy--gradually putting patients in fear-inducing situations, is a well-established method, even using virtual means, like VR simulators. However, now CNN is reporting on research that shows off-the-shelf PC video games can effectively treat phobias as well. Games like "Half-Life" were used to treat arachnophobia, and "Unreal Tournament" to treat acrophobia and claustrophobia."

Codeine writes "The Seventh Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), to be held later this month, will again feature members of MIT's Media Lab showing off the group's MIThril jacket. Taking its name from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the jacket combines body-worn computation, sensing, and networking in a clothing-integrated design, according to the project." According to a new paper (PDF link) to be presented at the conference, the latest version of this long-evolving system uses a Sharp Zaurus running Linux.

Thanks to Ludology.org for pointing to the Georgia Tech game morphology project, which, although still in development, has asked famous creators and academics for their favorite games of all time. Interesting picks include Warren Spector's kudos for Ultima IV ("Wait, you mean games can be about more than just killing things? Whoa! This game, with its ethical underpinnings, changed my life"), Henry Jenkins' choice of Myst ("not a great game from the perspective of game play... [but influential because] it brought some degree of middle class respectability to games"), and Will Wright's picking of Pinball Construction Set ("[a] heavy influence for me - construction is fun.")

Thanks to the Grandtextauto site for their post showcasing an exhibition using unique game controllers at the Japanese National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. The photos on the page show racing game controllers as wacky as a "..direct-manipulation coffee cup - the text on it reads 'Drink me. Drive me'", and "a synthesizer keyboard that moves forward when you play notes toward the center and turns when you play notes at the edges", as well as a horse you control with physical reins, and a more conventional steering wheel controller, all networked together and racing through a 3D model of the museum.

carambola5 writes "No, this isn't a dupe from a year ago. The University of Wisconsin-Madison team has taken the FutureTruck title for the second year in a row. The overall goals of the competition are to modify an existing Ford Explorer (make and model dependant on year) to improve fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining or exceeding customer expectations. The University of California-Davis team took 2nd, with Michigan Tech, Georgia Tech, and Penn State following close behind. Speaking as a member of the winning team, I am quite sure that all of the students and advisors from the participating teams are well-deserving of appreciation after those many, many hours of preparation." Too bad Ford isn't actually using any of this hard work. One thing to note: The FutureTruck website still has to be updated with the winning info.