An anonymous reader writes “A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive [...]
A few months back we got word that Gmail had fixed the annoying “On behalf of” nonsense that showed in your email headers when you sent email from your consolidated email addresses via Gmail—an annoyance that steered many away from using Gmail to send from alternate addresses. It turned out to be a bug that [...]
CodeShark writes “The AP is reporting that mosquitoes have been used for the first time to deliver anti-malarial vaccine through their bites. According to this article the results were crystal clear: 100% of the vaccinated group acquired immunity, everyone in the non-vaccinated control group did not. Those in the control group and developed malaria when [...]
PDFs have become quite a mainstay in the document world, with a plethora of readers having cropped up beyond Acrobat, the original and Adobe-created offering that’s so often set as the default on new PCs.
This week we want to hear what application you use to read and manage your PDF files. Do you stick with [...]
destinyland writes “After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he’s learned two things about artificial intelligence. ‘Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence,’ and “There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence.” Both Apple and [...]
Mozilla lays out its major feature plans for Firefox 3.6, Google celebrates that YouTube can make money, and an absurd little bookmarklet reminds us how bad things were in IE6.
Firefox 3.6 for developers A guide for developers that lays out the official feature list for Firefox 3.6. [Mozilla via CNET]
Application Submission Feedback A resource for [...]
Steve Kerrison writes “With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its [...]
Next time your call goes to voicemail, there’s no reason to contend with the insufferable 15-second instructional that precedes the beep. Here’s how to skip ahead and leave your message in peace without wasting precious minutes.
Photo by Florida Hippy.
To avoid the dreaded how-to automated guide, simply remember “one star pound.” More specifically, our own Gina [...]
snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister suggests that Wolfram Research’s claim to copyright of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine could have significant ramifications for the software industry. ‘While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of [...]
Windows/Mac OS X/iPhone: NewsGator—the company behind some of the most popular desktop RSS readers for Windows, Mac, and the iPhone—announced today that they’re closing down their web-based reader, opting instead to sync all of your desktop feeds with Google Reader.
This shut-down is probably the best possible kind for many users, considering most of us would [...]
