The purpose of this exercise is not necessarily to reproduce physical sensations from the film. Such haptic devices already exist, such as TN Games’ 3rd Space Gaming Vest and its upcoming HTX Helmet. The Philips researchers are more interested in determining what sort of emotional responses touch can elicit from a viewer.
A series of reports and rumors predict that Apple will ship a netbook this year. Lenovo suddenly “leaks” a two-year-old prototype with a unique form-factor that would be *perfect* for Apple’s netbook. Coincidence?
Matt_dk writes “Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. ‘We’ll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet’s atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,’ said Kaltenegger. ‘We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'” The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers’ work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Arnie87 writes “One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: ‘If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista’s successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The entertainment industry managed to convince the French government to draft a law that will make it possible to disconnect people from the Internet, if they receive more than two copyright infringement warnings. Sadly, most of the politicians who plan to sign the law into action have no clue what they’re dealing with.
I recently visited a cell site shared by Clearwire and two other unnamed carriers—without frying my nuts. We’ve all driven past them so many times, but have you ever actually wondered how they work?
“Modern psychology has attempted to classify how good we are at a certain skill by observing how deep it perforates that iceberg. It thus describes four stages of competence an individual can achieve. In this article I’ll try to apply this simple scheme to the skill we practice everyday: programming.”
Thought you knew everything about Facebook, didn’t you? Here is how to take your Facebook account to the next level.
Nine Inch Nails released their new tour sampler NIN/JA on their website a few hours ago. While the regular quality MP3s can be downloaded straight from their server, the band has set up their own BitTorrent tracker for the higher quality ‘lossless’ downloads.
MBCook writes “AppleInsider has an article discussing Dell’s attempt to enter the smartphone market, as well as the news that the phone was rejected by carriers as too dull. The article doesn’t pull punches: ‘Dell’s failure to successfully step from the commodity PC business into the mobile handset market should come as no surprise, as smartphones requires expertise in software platform development, consumer design savvy, and portable device engineering, all things Dell has never demonstrated any proficiency in.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
