An anonymous reader sends word that the Marines have decided that Boston Dynamics' robotic pack mules are too noisy to use. NBC reports: The massive robotic mule developed by Alphabet-owned Boston Dynamics won't see combat with U.S. Marines. LS3 (Legged Squad Support Systems) was meant to carry cargo for weary soldiers in the field. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the robot was capable of walking with 400 pounds of equipment on its back. LS3 could run for 24 hours straight on a 20-mile mission across rough terrain. No controller was needed; it took visual and verbal cues from soldiers to find its way. So why doesn't the Marine Corps want to use it? The robot's gas-powered engine isn't exactly the stealthiest piece of technology.

MojoKid writes: The cool thing about playing Duck Hunt on the NES back in the day, was that you got to point a plastic gun at the television and shoot directly at fowl or clay discs. It offered a deeper level of immersion than what would have been possible with a standard controller. Such is the pitch for a new Kickstarter project called Rail Gun. Rail Gun is a series of attachments designed to work with your existing Air Soft gun. The pieces attach to any standard Air Soft gun to give you a "truly realistic and immersive experience for FPS games." There are five units that comprise the Rail Gun. The Main Unit houses the power and sensitivity buttons; the Jog Unit has an analog stick, special action button, and a few other components; the Weapon Unit lets you cycle through weapons, walk, drop items, and so forth; the Trigger Unit features the trigger and buttons for jumping, zooming, reloading, and crouching; and the USB Unit is what plugs into your PC or console. The Rail Gun uses fast rotation technology to track your vision based on where you're pointing your Air Soft gun. It also uses an algorithm to enhance aiming by detecting minor hand trembles, and you can adjust the sensitivity of this to your liking.

Nerval's Lobster writes: David Foote, an analyst who accurately predicted the tech industry's job growth in 2015, is back with some new predictions about which segments will do well in 2016 (Dice link). At the top of his list: DevOps, cloud and software architects, and cybersecurity experts. Those that won't perform well? SAP specialists, storage 'gurus,' and network managers could all face some headwinds. 'Companies are continuing to outsource infrastructure and that will reduce the need for network specialists except for network security which will remain in-house,' he says. Whether or not he's right about which parts of the tech industry will do better than others, there are also increasing signs that things could get very tight from a funding perspective for startups, as even the so-called 'unicorns' risk seeing investor money (and customers) dry up.

Ammalgam writes: Microsoft's CMO recently admitted that Microsoft was behind in the mobile arena and needed time to build a competitive phone. In the Windows community however, some feel that the Windows Phone platform is out of time. On Windows10Update.com, the author discusses some of the reasons why a "Surface Phone" might not be enough to fundamentally change public perception about Microsoft mobile phones.

An anonymous reader writes: FCC filings published today are offering a glimpse of the "Enterprise Edition" of Google Glass. According to Engadget: "...The work-focused eyepiece touts a much slicker (and likely more durable) design with both a larger display prism and a hinge that lets you fold it up for travel. The test photos also reveal a spot for a magnetic battery attachment and what looks to be a speedier Atom processor. There's still no word on when Google will announce this headset, although the FCC presence hints that it might not take long."

An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass production. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. The current goalpost is set to year 2018. While solid state disks based on Flash memory keep seeing rapid improvements as well, HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds. The areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch.

At MIT Technology Review, Rachel Metz lists four factors she believes will mean great advancements for virtual reality in the next year. More and better games; wider adoption of specialized cameras for capturing the deep imagery that immersive worlds require; specialized presentation techniques that supplement VR with physical cues like temperature or direction; and availability of better viewing hardware. That better hardware seems poised to take off. According to the article, Facebook-owned Oculus’s first consumer headset, Rift, is slated for release in the first quarter of the year, while the HTC Vive—a headset created by smartphone maker HTC and video-game company Valve—is set to be available to consumers in April. Sony, meanwhile, is building its own headset, called PlayStation VR, which the company says will be released in the first half of the year.

Press2ToContinue writes: Apple's Lightning cable cartel be damned: Switzerland is moving forward with a plan for a single, universal phone charger across the country, standardizing phone chargers across the board. While the exact standard hasn't been mentioned yet, it wouldn't be hard to guess the standard: Micro USB, used across phone platforms, most especially Android, which has a gigantic chunk of the cell phone market worldwide.

The likely loser? Apple, which has relied on proprietary chargers since introducing the iPhone in 2007. While many companies have tried releasing generic cables, Apple often relies on DRM software to ensure that it's an Apple certified cable, charging $19 a piece for the Lightning charger used by the iPhone 5 and 6 and similar models.

What do you think -- are government-mandated standards for chargers a good idea? Despite the success of the standard household 3-prong electrical plug, doesn't this hamper progress? China seems to have done most of the work on the wall-circuit side of the equation,several years ago. But as to the "standard" 3-prong plug, any particular plug type is only as universal as the sockets and voltages they supply.

An anonymous reader writes: I have a shelf full of books and other book-like things ranging from old to very old that I would like to turn into PDFs (or other similarly portable format), and have been on a slow-burn quest for the right hardware and method to do so on a budget. These are mostly sentimental — things handed down over generations, and they include family bibles, notebooks, and photo albums, as well as some conventional — published, bound — books from the late 19th and early 20th Century. None of them are especially valuable as antiques, as far as I know; my goals in preserving them are a) to make them available to other people in my family who are into genealogy or just nostalgia, and b) so I can read some of those old, interesting books (et cetera) without endangering them any more than it takes to scan them once. I was intrigued by the (funded, but not yet available) scanner mentioned earlier this year on Slashdot; it seems to do a lot of things right, but like any crowdfunded project, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding hasn't yet arrived. It's also cheap, and that fits my household budget. What methods and hardware are you using to scan old documents? Any tips you have from a similar project, with regard to hardware, treatment of the materials being scanned, light sources, file formats, clean-up and editing tools, file-size-vs-resolution tradeoffs? In the end, I'm likely to err toward high-resolution scans, since they can be knocked down to size later if need be, but I'd be interested in hearing about what tradeoffs you've found to work for you.

One big question that I'd like to have answered: Is there stand-alone Free / Open Source software, or even just cheap software (I am mostly on Linux, by choice, but won't leap onto a sword to keep my Free Software purity) that makes for easy correction of the distortion introduced by camera-based imaging? If I could easily uncurl and keystone-correct pages, then a lot of input methods (even my phone) are suddenly much more attractive. My old Casio camera could do this 10 years ago, but I haven't found a free software desktop utility that lets me turn photos into nicely squared-up pages.

New submitter writes: I just replaced my dishwasher with a basic, inexpensive Sears model. It works fine, but only has 3 different wash cycles. I'm betting that the code to manage more cycles (as in more-expensive models) is already in the microcontroller and just needs inputs to select it. Is there any information available on this? Beyond dishwashers, have you done any useful hacks to household appliances more generally? I'd probably support a Kickstarter project that adds nice wireless notifications to my oven, clothes washer, and dishwasher.

An anonymous reader writes: Back in February, Sony unloaded the part of its business that built PCs. Now, a year later, competitor Fujitsu is doing the same. The company announced it would be spinning off its PC and mobile business, effective 1 February 2016. Your first reaction was probably, "Fujitsu had a PC and mobile business?" You're not alone, and this is likely why the split is happening. In their press release, they say, "With the ongoing commoditization of ubiquitous products, mainly of PCs and smart phones, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve differentiation, and competition with emerging global vendors has intensified." More simply: they couldn't make a competitive product. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend; the race to zero in the Windows laptop market is finally killing off some of the participants.

An anonymous reader writes: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is one of the biggest investors in technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, he spoke about how he envisions the future of computing. It's essentially an extension on the idea of the "Internet of Things." He thinks mobile phones will begin to be replaced in just 10 years. "The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting. By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project." Within 20 years, he expects most new physical objects to have some sort of chip implanted within them. "The end state is fairly obvious — every light, every doorknob will be connected to the internet." The term for this is "ambient computing." There will obviously be a transition period — perhaps the so-called internet of things is just an early phase of that transition. But with powerful chips and sensors becoming incredibly cheap, Andreessen's scenario seems possible. I guess it's time to get cracking on those security and privacy concerns.

dkatana writes: AWS started out defining its virtual CPUs as being composed of EC2 compute units, or ECUs, which it defined as an equivalent to a physical Xeon processor. However, a virtual CPU now looks suspiciously variable... A virtual CPU is whatever Amazon wants to offer in an instance series. The user has no firm measure to go by. From the article: [B]y doing a little math, you could actually compare what you were getting in virtual CPUs in EC2 versus Azure. Also by doing a little math, you knew how to compare one Amazon instance to another based on the ECU count in each virtual CPU. Microsoft didn't look too bad in the comparison. That is one of the casualties of the nomenclature change. I have searched for updated information on how a virtual CPU is measured and found nothing comparable to the definition of the 2012 ECU measure. I have questioned Amazon representatives three times between Oct. 27 and Dec. 21, and don't have much of an answer."

An anonymous reader writes: While the Western vision of an internet café includes a shoddy WiFi hotspot and a few old desktops running Windows XP, the Chinese counterpart is more closely related to LAN gaming centers, offering up not only high speed internet access but also high performance gaming systems. In an effort to expose this quite massive population of gamers to virtual reality, HTC announced a partnership with ShunWang Technology, the software provider behind some 70% of China's internet café market. ShunWang plans to roll out arcade-like Vive VR systems to partner internet cafés across China.

Evidently even Forrest Mimms isn't famous enough to fly without hassle when carrying a briefcase full of electronics; he writes at Make about his experiences, both before and after 2001. A relevant slice: After police were called when I was going through security at the San Antonio International Airport and after major problems going through security in Kona, Hawaii, I finally realized the obvious: Most people who don’t make things have no idea how to evaluate homemade equipment. Some are terrified by exposed wires and circuit boards, maybe because of bomb scenes in movies. So I gave up. Now my carryon bag is only half stuffed with electronics; the rest is shipped ahead via FedEx.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is of course, deleting them even as they're created). The machine, called a "Kopimashin," is cobbled together out of a Raspberry Pi, some hacky python that he doesn't want to show anyone, and an LCD screen that calculates a running tally of the damages he's inflicted upon the record industry through its use. The 8,000,000 copies it makes every day costs the record industry $10m/day in losses. At that rate, they'll be bankrupt in a few weeks at most.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that Firefox OS smartphones would no longer be sold via carriers. Because the company refused to talk about what's next for Firefox OS, aside from saying it will experiment with "connected devices," many were left simply to speculate as to what could be in the pipeline. Today, we have a leaked document, which Mozilla confirmed is legitimate. My favorite of the concepts is a Raspberry Pi-based keyboard.

An anonymous reader sends word that many online systems at the United States Patent and Trademark Office are down due to damaged equipment after a power outage. A statement from the USPTO reads in part: "A major power outage at USPTO headquarters occurred last night resulting in damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems. This includes our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use. We are working diligently to assess the operational impact on all our systems and to determine how soon they can be safely brought back into service in the coming days. We understand how critical these systems are for our customers, and our teams will continue to work around the clock to restore them as quickly as possible, though the impacts may be felt through the Christmas holiday. We know many people have questions regarding filing and payment deadlines. We are reviewing this topic and will provide an update when we have further information."

hypnosec writes: Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully produced 50 grams of plutonium-238, an isotope that produces heat without a lot of other, problematic radiation. This makes it suitable for use in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which can power space probes. The new sample effectively revives the U.S.'s end-to-end plutonium-238 production capabilities, which have been dormant for around 30 years since work was stopped at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. The ORNL is optimistic this important milestone will pave the way for regular production of the material, ensuring constant supply for NASA's future missions.

mdsolar writes: The Department of Energy is formally launching its initiative aimed at establishing a disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. The department said Monday that it is accepting input on the disposal plan, which centers on finding at least one place to store spent fuel, with the consent of the local community. Officials are also planning forums throughout 2016 to inform a more concrete plan for establishing a disposal site. It's a key step toward rolling out what the Obama administration thinks is the best way forward for nuclear waste disposal. It stands in stark contrast to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which was designated by Congress to be the country's main waste site, but which the Obama administration canceled amid strong local and state opposition to it.