The Linkielist

Linking ideas with the world

Why robots are still so stupid

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Robin

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El reg has a nice article on why development of intelligent / multifunctional robots is still stagnated and run by hobbyists. It runs through some of the real problems of software development for robot brains.

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Robin

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An Israeli team has created a tiny little robot that can travel up and down your veins and arteries, being manipulated by magnetic fields. It has a diameter of 1mm and crawls along your bloodstream using little arms.

The floating plastic ducks

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Robin

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I’ve been following this story for years now – tens of thousands of plastic ducks which had gone overboard during a storm in 1992 are still being tracked, and are looking likely to wash up on the UK coasts. Apparently these ducks are now being sold for $500,- a piece. Leave them alone though! Let the ducks swim the oceans in perpituity!

Flickr in 3D

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Robin

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3dvia.com is a flickr copy, except it hosts 3d models. They’re backed by Daussault Systems of France and hope to be as big as flickr / utube. They use the 3dxml as a standard, which has some slightly better editors for it than Google’s Earth 3D unit editor. Good luck to ’em.

Transparent transistors

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Robin

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Using nanowires assembled on glass and thin films of flexible plastic built using zinc oxide or indium oxide the transistors are not visible to the human eye. The researchers hope to create HUDs and displays on windsheilds, visors, spectacles, etc. Make my car look like the inside of an F-16 please!

Vista only games not really so much

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Robin

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MS is pushing the Vista upgrade with two games only supposed to work on Vista. Unfortunately people have allready managed to get them running on XP.

Optimism for cloning extinct species

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Robin

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DNA splicing has now come such a long way from 5 years ago, that the experts are starting to become optimistic of being able to reacreate whole DNA sequences and cloning them into living animals fairly soon in the future. These guys want woolly mammoths back. Give me a sabre tooth tiger!

Another smoking consulate

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Robin

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Now in the UK, Southampton, the Wellington Arms has allready become a consulate for the Island of Redonda. It’s now trying to become an embassy, in order to escape VAT and most importantly, the bans on smoking that will be in effect from 1/7 in England.
Smokers will continue the fight!

Liftport space elevator vs Slashdot

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Robin

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Slashdot users have apparently been going to town on LiftPort’s ass. Enough that a fairly frank and complete rebuttal has been issued by the presidents of the space elevator company, showing how they think the company can work and how much work has allready been done.

Translating blood movements into physical actions

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Robin

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Hitachi scientists have a machine that tracks the blood moving around in the brain using optical topography, and by thinking of calculations you can force blood to go through a specific area of the brain, allowing the machinery to perform an action. Currently it seems to be a binary system, but they’re hopeful that it will expand to be useable as a full keyboard.

Boys aren’t girls

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Robin

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And so this guy, who has written a book “The Dangerous Book for Boys” is written for them, harkening from a time when it wasn’t so bad to get hurt a bit. Instead of treating boys as “girls who wash slightly less” he says treat them as boys!

New programming language

Posted on June 19, 2007 by Michiel

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LOLCODE.
Clean syntax, consistent capitalization and Internet ready. It’s the language for the new web, baby.


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
	UP VAR!!1
	VISIBLE VAR
	IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

EU shares police data across the board

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Robin

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Against the wishes of the EU European Data Protection Supervisor, police will share data about DNA, fingerprints and licence plates all over the EU. The problem is that whichever country has the least security on their systems, will be an automatic easy entry point to all this data. I don’t want my DNA in any databases for starters, but I certainly don’t want the Greek cop trying to pin something on me after I got drunk at some beach party having access to it either!

Wanting to wake up late is genetic

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Robin

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And they recognise it in Denmark – it’s normal for a certain breed of people to just want to wake up late, so it’s also logical to have companies and schools starting a bit later to accommodate these people. Let’s hope it comes over here too!

EADS gets into the space tourism game

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Robin

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EADS showcased a model of it’s airplane looking space rocket, which they hope will fly in 2012 and take passengers up at EUR 150,000 – 200,000. They see a big market in this and want some of it. Very coincidental how the pricing is similar to the Burt Rutan Spaceship One / Virgin Galactic prices.

Quercus: PHP in Java

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Robin

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Quercus is Caucho Technology’s fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language. Quercus is a feature of Caucho Technology’s Resin Application Server and is built into Resin – there is no additional download/install. Developers using Resin can launch PHP projects without having to install the standard PHP interpreter (http://www.php.net) as Quercus takes on the role of the PHP engine.
What is Quercus

Quercus implements PHP 5 and is internationalization/localization (i18n/l10n) aware. Quercus natively supports Unicode and the new Unicode syntax of the up-and-coming PHP 6. Quercus implements a growing list of PHP extensions (i.e. APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, Postgres, etc.). Many popular PHP applications will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, WordPress, and XOOPS.