Slide100 writes "Just found the coolest desktop toy while browsing my latest R/C Aircraft magazine ( It's a 4" long tracked R/C vehicle with plenty of torque and a 200 foot range. Four frquencies are available (racing, anyone?). You can also get a single board B/W UHF transmitter for remote telepresence! Check the website for more information"

Last week you asked Sam Lantinga , developer of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) about SDL and other issues related to gaming. He's responded with answers about the SL port to Sony Playstation, game audio, DirectX, his new job at Blizzard, and more. He even drops some hints about some interesting gaming developments to watch out for.

A reader writes "Saintsong, our favorite manufacturer of tiny PC's (see here and here) is at it again. They've released the TX2 version of the Cappuccino PC everyone drooled over not to long ago. It's designed by Gingko corp., the same folks who designed the iMac. The new unit includes 2 Firewire ports and an additional 2 USB ports over it's predecessor, the Cappuccino GX1. Unfortunately it appears that Saintsong is only distributing it in kit form, so you'll have to supply your own socket 370 processor, RAM, hdd, etc. No prices are listed, but it's still a slick looking toy."

The popular media's coverage of the Dmitri Sklyarov case is a scandal. 26-year-old programmer and encryption gadfly Sklyarov has been languishing in jail for almost two weeks now, and the popular media has paid almost no attention to his truly outrageous arrest. It's a case that has the ugliest implications not only for the press (online and off) but for open discussion of technology, and especially for the First Amendment, now clearly being undermined in the name of copyright protection by the DMCA. This is the opposite of what copyright law was meant to do.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is really a technological fairy tale, the story of some software that wanted to be real actors in a real movie. Not so fast. It would take a platoon of Blue Fairies to take code this far. I've never played the game, but it has to be way more fun than this movie. How sad that the first studio film ever with human leads played by non-actors is so lifeless and plastic. The voices are out-of-sync like those Japanese sci-fi movies. At least the film could have had the decency -- give Tomb Raider some credit here -- to hire a real actor and have a little fun with itself. Dr. Lara Croft understood what she was created for -- to kick a lot of butt. Dr. Aki Ross, played here by some code with too much lip balm, is more like Enya, a new age scientist whose weapons are dreams and wiggly spirits rather than guns and bombs. Bring noseplugs to this stinker. And don't worry about the ending being given away here. I couldn't tell you what it was if I wanted to.

Michael Cook writes: "Ars Technica has just posted a follow up to the review of the original Espresso PC (Slashdotted here(1), and here(2)), a review of the new and much-improved Cappuccino PC! It finally has ethernet and now it's truly possible to have a server farm in a bread box!" This is a slightly off-the-wall review of this promising machine, considering (among other things) that the review unit was stolen, but it sure sounds like a worthy non-toy toy.

Give director Simon West credit for navigating some tricky ground. Some movies have been greatly influenced by video games -- The Mummy's Return -- and still others were literal, and stinky spin-offs (Mortal Kombat and Super Mario Brothers for instance) but Tomb Raider is one of the most expensive, ambitious and closely watched of this new hybrid-cinematic format -- the game that not only inspires a movie but becomes one. Games have come a long way. The movie is perhaps too faithful to the game that inspired it, raising the question of whether games and films can really mix. And Angelina Jolie is stellar bungee-jumping in those silk pj's.

(H)elix1 writes: "I'm sure /. is about to be hit with this, but CNET just released a story about a web bug detector plug-in for IE called Bugnosis by the Privacy Foundation. An interesting toy, but the thing that grabbed my attention was the Web Bug Gallery. It would seem our beloved slashdot has them as well. Course, so did CNET, but that is a different story...." I think improved cookie-handling is much more useful in preventing tracking, but this is interesting because it provides visible feedback about tracking efforts.

zardor writes: "According to a spacehab news release, the LEGO company shipped a few bricks up to the station for the cosmonauts to play with. (US astronauts were probably not allowed to play since they can't "engage in commercial activities"). From the news release: "The LEGO Company flew an experiment designed to help students learn about weight and mass. Space Media's STARS Academy global education program developed this experiment, and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education contributed educational materials for it. In this first-ever toy-based experiment on the ISS, cosmonauts attached a LEGO Life on Mars Red Planet Protector toy set to a mass measurement device and determined the oscillation frequency of the toy in the device in order to gauge its mass in space. Cosmonauts videotaped the experiment for educational uses. The LEGO payload also included a promotional banner, which cosmonauts unfurled and photographed in space, and 300 toy ``alien'' figures. Most of the figures will be awarded to winners of the LEGO ``Life on Mars Survival Challenge National Building Contest'' for children aged 5-12. Its a shame they flew the bricks down, otherwise they could have used them to repair that broken CanadaArm 2."

From the earliest screens I've seen from Shrek, I've been anticipating this film. Besides the unique computer animation that brings this film to life, it features Mike Meyers, Eddie Murphy, John Lithgow, and Cameron Diaz (See A Life Less Ordinary for a cool Diaz flick). But can it live up to the month long advertising blitz that has been oozing from every flat surface for the last month? Or will it just be a big pile of crap. Well I was there opening night, and you can read my review, complete with minimal spoilers and bad jokes.

Delrin writes "This article on Zdnet reports on how Linux is slowly becoming an important player in the high-end graphic design industry. The latest upcoming movie "Shrek" a perfect example. Dreamworks and others are turning to linux for a large portion of their work, turning away from the likes of SGI and Microsoft." The movie looks visually astonishing: I'm definitely checking it out asap. Hopefully the story can live up the credits (Mike Meyers, John Lithgow, Eddie Murphy) and the visuals (the trailers blow away much of Toy Story 2).

As usual, updates and tangents from previous stories in tonight's Slashback. Read on for more on toys from Pittsburgh, the newest iteration of the Magician-named distro, open source directory entries, and everyone's favorite trademark dispute. So hit the button.

cowgin asks:"My coworkers and I were talking about dog sleds and the different type of dogs that pull dog sleds. We also talked about how many dogs there are in a dog sled team. Then I thought in the my usual slashdot manner, "how many hamsters would it take to pull a dog sled?" Unfortunately, I thought aloud. Needless to say that there were many stares (very blank stares). I envision some sort of harness that could be attached to those toy balls that allow the hamster to roam freely. Does anybody have any ideas on how many hamsters it would take to move a dog sled?"

Vantage writes: "Quite possibly the coolest toy ever for the athletic Geek. PowerSkips allow an energetic Geek to jump over 6 feet in the air. These things are the coolest things I have ever played with."

FreekyGeek writes incredulously: "Here's a simple question: Why the heck is everyone still using 8.3 character file names for everything downloadable? We don't use 8.3 filenames for our own stuff. Every Real Operating System, and even toy GUI shells like Windows now support long file names. So why are we still using a filename convention that's almost 20 years old? Why do we have to deal with hard drives full of files named 'vcd43bup.exe' instead of 'Video Card Driver Update version 4.3 -- English'?" So can we really get rid of them?

plumpy asks: "I am a developer at a small (~100 people) company that develops web and wireless (Palm, WAP) applications. Recently a few developers began a campaign to get a wireless access point for the company so that we could carry our laptops to meetings and work more flexibly. Two people had been bringing in their own personal access points from home while we waited for someone to actually purchase one for the company. Everything was going okay, and it sounded like the purchase request was going to go through. Then our IT manager read a few of the recent articles about the lack of security in 802.11 networks and killed the idea." Wireless Networks, like their wired counterparts are only as secure as the procedures behind the people that maintain them. A wireless AP can be secured against casual attacks and WEP, properly implemented, should take care of the rest, shouldn't it?

Reiji Asakura's Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony PlayStation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games is an authorized account of how some renegade Sony programmers and engineers battled one another and their own corporate hierarchy to create the PlayStation. The rest is history. This book is an interesting if worshipful yarn, and one of the few book-length accounts ever published about the corporate politics inside of the video-game arena. (Read more)

smirkleton writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a story about the current struggles of CueCat manufacturer DigitalConvergence. One of several interesting factoids within the article: CueCat is trying to procure product endorsements from Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and Lisa Simpson. Mr. Groening, for the love of Flanders, don't do it! 'The Simpsons' once dissed on Apple's Newton (hilariously)- and it had an actual purpose and loyal following. Endorsing this utterly useless and universally despised advertising toy would constitute a sellout of Dilbertian proportions."

John Brown writes: "[T]oday I called 1-888-Shop-IBM and talked to a representive about the possibility of buying a Thinkpad X20; I wasn't too happy with the fact that it lacks an internal floppy drive, so the guy told me that during the next week IBM will be releasing a storage device called 'USBKey' which basically looks like a (guess what...) key (it is even meant to be kept in your key-ring), but fits into a USB port, allowing you to store up to 8MB of data in it. Amazing! You may very well live in a world in which 100Mbits/s is a common thing, but for the rest of us a highly portable and universally accepted data medium which allows you to store 5 times more than 1.44MB is good news." I would also like to see AOL start sending out (rewriteable) 8MB USB keychains. Note: no reason that such things should be limited to 8MB, either -- we featured a similar toy a while ago; I wonder if IBM is licensing it. Update: 02/06 04:39 AM by T : Thanks to PongoX11, who writes: "It looks like the drive you heard about already exists. I work in a computer retailer and remember seeing these on the shelves."

ronys asks: "I've just bought my son (yeah, sure) a Meade ETX-70AT telescope. It's a pretty cool toy, with an RS-232C port and an optional ($$$) cable and software that connects it to a PC. Since there's nice 3rd party software that supports telescope control, I was wondering if anyone has already hacked the pinout of the serial cable?"