Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Kyle Orland At a “Driving the Future of Innovation at Sony” panel today, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida revealed the company’s long-rumored plans to enter a virtual reality headset space that has gained new relevance in the wake of the Oculus Rift’s development . The headset, codenamed Project Morpheus (after the god of dream, not the Matrix character, Sony clarified), is being developed by an international team of Sony engineers. “Virtual Reality is the next innovation from PlayStation that may well change the future of games,” Yoshida said. “Nothing elevates the level of immersion better than VR,” he continued, adding that VR “goes one step further than immersion to deliver presence.” The headset will have its position and orientation tracked 100 times per second in a full 360 degrees of rotation within a three cubic meter “working volume.” Tracking will make use of high-fidelity inertial sensors in the unit itself, tiny tracking markers on the surface of the headset, and the same stereo PlayStation Camera that tracks the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Move. Sony R&D engineer Dr. Richard Marks wryly noted at the panel that the PlayStation Camera “almost seems as if it was designed for VR, actually,” to laughs from the audience. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Python 3.4 Released

New submitter gadfium writes: “Python 3.4 has been released. It adds new library features, bug fixes, and security improvements. It includes: at standardized implementation of enumeration types, a statistics module, improvements to object finalization, a more secure and interchangeable hash algorithm for strings and binary data, asynchronous I/O support, and an installer for the pip package manager.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Python 3.4 Released

Project Morpheus: Sony’s Oculus Rift Competitor Looks Incredible

It was only a matter of time. The Oculus Rift has caught so much attention—deservedly so—that of course one of the big dogs was going to start honing in on its virtual reality territory. Tonight, that’s Sony. And its Project Morpheus VR headset sounds fantastic. Read more…        

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Project Morpheus: Sony’s Oculus Rift Competitor Looks Incredible

Build a DIY Ambient Weather Indicator with an Adafruit Neopixel Ring

Have an office without a window? Not sure whether to grab your jacket or umbrella on the way out. Sure you could hit the Internet or pop open a weather app on your smartphone, but what fun would that be? Read more…        

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Build a DIY Ambient Weather Indicator with an Adafruit Neopixel Ring

Java 8 Officially Released

darthcamaro writes “Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. ‘It’s a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java, ‘ James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. ‘In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Java 8 Officially Released

Firefox 28 Arrives With VP9 Video Decoding, HTML5 Volume Controls

An anonymous reader writes “Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio. Firefox 28 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The full release notes are available. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play (Android release notes).” Mozilla also announced tools to bring the Unity game engine to WebGL and asm.js. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 28 Arrives With VP9 Video Decoding, HTML5 Volume Controls

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages. Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services. The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd , and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Animals See Power Lines as Terrifying Bursts of Light

We’ve known that most critters try to avoid power lines, but until recently, scientists were pretty much in the dark when it came to why . Now, it turns out that to animals, power lines and pylons look like terrifying bands of glowing, flashing bursts of light . Read more…        

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Animals See Power Lines as Terrifying Bursts of Light

Toshiba’s New Breathalyzer Diagnoses Diseases, Not Drunks

Toshiba just took the wraps off a medical breathalyzer that the company says can diagnose diseases by analyzing the air a patient exhales. “Bad breath” just took on a whole new meaning. Read more…        

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Toshiba’s New Breathalyzer Diagnoses Diseases, Not Drunks

NSA System Can Record Entire Countries’ Calls for 30 Days at a Time

Remember all that business about the NSA saying it only collects phone metadata ? Yeah, that’s not true. Not only can the NSA listen in on foreigners’ phone calls. It can record “every single” conversation in an entire country and store the recordings for 30 days at a time, according to a new Washington Post report . Read more…        

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NSA System Can Record Entire Countries’ Calls for 30 Days at a Time