Red Team writes "Today is the day. The official race route for the DARPA Grand Challenge was released to the first five teams at 4:00AM PST this morning. Our race planners are pouring over the race route getting ready for the launch. H1ghlander will start first at sunrise, around 6:15AM PST, followed by Stanford and then Sandstorm. For real-time updates on the race, you can track the Red Team race-day blog or catch the webcast on the official Grand Challenge page." Update: 10/08 20:57 GMT by Z : USSJoin writes "Stanford Racing, home of Stanley, has just finished the 131.2 mile DARPA Grand Challenge course. Considering that the CalTech Vehicle (Alice) jumped off the track toward onlookers only 8.3 miles in, this demolition derby-meets-AI demo has certainly been exciting."

Poromenos writes "Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed the intelligent door handle. It combines a camera, buzzer, RFID locks and various other systems inside the door, making keys obsolete. RFID chips for opening doors will offer 'added advantages for elderly or handicapped people, saving them the trouble of wielding keys or holding the door open in order to get inside the building.'"

Cyberherbalist writes "Nantero, a nanotechnology company, is expecting prototypes of products using NRAM technology (nanotube-based, non-volatile random access memory) to be available in 2006. In the article at nature.com, it says that 'the company has succeeded in making circular wafers, 13 centimetres in diameter, that hold 10 gigabits of data.' And they are ten times faster than 'flash' memory."

fist_187 writes "In this article at The Register, they show thath Dell's Open PC costs more than a PC shipped with Windows XP. That's right, getting a PC with a blank hard drive costs more than the same hardware running Windows XP." From the article: "As it turns out, Dell's sales staffers have a secret web page for the product that you can't find with normal search tactics. A kind lass we'll call 'M' pointed us here. On this site, Dell presents a couple different versions of the mysterious E510n. The lowest-end system starts at $774 and is exactly like the boxes above - including the free flat panel - except it has 512MB of memory. For some reason, Dell told reporters that the box starts at $849 - yet another one of the odd sales tactics surrounding this "open source" kit. [Following the publication of our story, Dell raised the price of the PC back up to $849. See the sales pages below for the original $774 price comparisons.]"

Wescotte asks: "While the priority of moving paperless at my company is very low I've made it my personal mission to get rid of as much paper as I can. Creating a basic electronic form and approval system for our internal documents is a big job but I feel the largest hurdle will be creating a system in which the average employee can scan in additional documents to attach to these forms. For example am employee scanning in all receipts to attach to an expense report. Ideally I would like to find a piece of hardware that allows for print/copy/scan, and would allow for some personal identification by swiping our employee id card or even finger print identification. Does such a product exist and nearly compete price wise with the Xerox products?" Is anyone aware of a system or hardware additions that could streamline this process, and provide centralized document storage for document scans?

mikael writes "The London Aquarium currently has an exhibit based on autonomous robotic fish. Each fish is 50 cm long, 15 cm high, and 12cm wide with a maximum swim speed of 50cm/second with battery life lasting up to 5 hours at half speed. The BBC has more details (with video). Many more videos are available at the Robotics Video Gallery." From the article: "We have embedded sensors on board - so, unlike the previous fishes that have remote controls, these are fully autonomous and artificial-intelligence based ... This one is more life-like - it mimics normal swimming and sharp turning ... People get confused and think it's a real fish."

DeliBoy asks: "After getting tired of the noisy power-sucking IBM PC Server 325 that I've been using as a JBOD server, I've decided to purchase a small network disk. Specificially, I'm looking at the Buffalo HD-HG300LAN. With FTP, a USB print server, and expandibility options, this unit looks very attractive. I was wondering what other NAS solutions Slashdot readers were purchasing for their home or small office. Is there anything better out there for around the same price?"

Quinthar asks: "For years I've been reading of amazing extensions to wifi-range, but they always seem to include external hardware rather than what's built into regular laptops. As wifi makes it almost everywhere, is there anything I can use to eek out extra coverage in the coffeeshops? I've read of USB antennae -- are these snakeoil? If not USB, how else can I plug a real antenna into a simple Centrino chipset without the hassle of an external card? My dream would be a tiny parabolic dish with a tripod that folds up neatly. Does such a thing exist? Can I hold a Pringles can up to the right spot and expect results? Basically, what are my options, and which do you recommend?"

planetjay writes "Tom's Hardware takes a closer look at Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC." The article considers noise, aesthetics, and remote control. See also recent Ask SlashDot on MythTV extras and my favorite DIY PVR Resource"

Xerotope writes "DARPA announced today the 23 finalists[pdf warning] of the DARPA Grand Challenge at the closing ceremonies of the National Qualifying Event. Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team will start on Saturday with the first and third positions, with 'H1ghlander' taking the pole position and 'Sandstorm' following 10 minutes later. Stanford's 'Stanley' will start second. Of the 43 semi-finalists, 23 robots managed to finish the 2.2 mile course at least once. 5 robots (Stanford, Red Team, Red Team Too, Axion Racing, and Team Teramax) completed all of their runs. CMU's 'H1ghlander' and 'Sandstorm' finished the four runs with an average time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds each. Stanford's Stanley average time was 10:43."

Buccaneer-American writes "Over here on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that PS2 mod chips are now legal in Australia. The highest Australian court decided in Stevens v. Sony to overturn a lower court ruling that PS2 mod chips were 'technological protection measures' which would run afoul of the Australian DMCA-equivalent. Because they do not protect copyrights per se, but are rather region coding devices, they were ruled to be regional coding devices. In short, we have Sony to thank for being a loser yet again and establishing some of our rights in case law, albeit sometimes inadvertantly." The High Court's decision is online, with some legal commentary from the Australian court. More coverage of this story available at The Age and SMH.

prostoalex writes "Japanese company Maspro Denkoh will start selling transmission systems, enabling WiFi signal over 5 km, Network World magazine reports. From the article: "There are two types of antenna: one is a tube-shaped model about 40 centimeters long, and the other is a much shorter and square-shaped model. Combining two of the tubular antenna -- one on each end of the link -- will result in a transmission distance of about 5 kilometers while one of each antenna will work on distances up to 2 kilometers and two of the compact antenna will be fine for up to a kilometer, the company said.""

Edge Online reports that Nintendo's DS WiFi service will be launching in Europe as soon as November 25th. From the article: "As explained a few weeks back, Nintendo plans for the system to be safe, secure and easy to access. Players will be able to access the WiFi Connection service via hotspots in their local shop, their internet service at home (shared with the USB dongle) or via public hotspots. Nintendo Europe is still in the process of signing a deal with a telecomms operator to make the latter work, with an official announcement due shortly." Gamasutra has coverage of the WiFi announcement as well, with details on a Nintendo branded adaptor and new wireless titles.

An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River launched a Consumer Electronics Linux distribution today targeting 'mobile phones, set-top boxes, PVRs, and other small-footprint consumer devices.' The company says several phones based on its brand of Linux will begin shipping before the end of this year, and is rumored to have teamed with PalmSource, which itself is busy converting Palm OS into a software stack for Linux mobile phones."

MojoDog writes "ATi has officially launched their all new Radeon X1000 family of 3D Graphics cards this morning and a full showcase with benchmarks of the entire line-up can be found at HotHardware. What may or may not be surprising to you, is the fact that the new high-end flagship X1800 is still a 16 pixel pipe GPU but now running at a blistering 625MHz. Is it fast enough to catch NVIDIA's 24 pipe GeForce 7800 GTX?"

Sans writes "Dell began offering a new desktop Dimension E510n PC this week with no operating system installed. The machine is designed for people who want to run open-source software such as Linux instead of Windows. The PC comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system, which can be installed by customers."

wellington map writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists say they are developing a new lithium battery technology capable of making batteries smaller, last longer and, soon, accept a charge from outside the body without the need for surgery. These organosilicon batteries are projected to power tiny implantable devices for more than 12 years."

Hiawatha writes "iRobot has teamed up with Boston University to create a robot that can spot enemy snipers on a battlefield. Before the smoke of the shot clears away, the REDOWL robot should have the shooter in its sights." iRobot is the same company that brought you the popular Roomba robotic vacuum.

An anonymous reader writes "This Intel-written whitepaper introduces a way to determine location with the aid of freely accessible, nearby radio sources, such as fixed Bluetooth devices, 802.11 access points, and GSM cell towers. Basically, the device reads the IDs of these local 'radio beacons' (each of which has a unique or semi-unique ID), looks up their positions in a locally-cached database, and performs a computation akin to triangulation. Intel created Place Lab in an effort to satisfy the emerging requirement for location-awareness within mobile devices such as smartphones, PDAs, and laptops, or even moving vehicles. According to the whitepaper, over four million of the required radio beacons have already been mapped."

Anonymous Coward writes "An R&D affiliate of the world's largest telephone company has achieved a stable release of a new Linux file system said to improve reliability over conventional Linux file systems, and offer performance advantages over Solaris's UFS file system. NILFS 1.0 (new implementation of a log-structured file system) is available now from NTT Labs (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone's Cyber Space Laboratories)."