The Null Device

2005/1/20

"Cyborg researcher" Steve Mann has produced a prototype user-pays chair. The chair is fitted with spikes which retract when a seating licence is purchased by swiping a credit card; a buzzer sounds when the licence is about to expire. A CCTV camera is used to prevent the smuggling in of licence-circumvention devices such as boards and cushions. (Apparently the seat was exhibited in San Francisco in 2001, but bOING bOING only mentioned it now.)

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And America's transformation into the Soviet Union moves forward one step, with American Airlines requiring visitors to supply lists of people they would be staying with whilst in the US, and claiming it's a TSA regulation. (via bOING bOING)

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After what seems like ages, the Amiga is on the verge of a comeback... again. This time, it's brought to you by Hyperion, a British company contracted to write Amiga OS4 who had the foresight to get the contract to give them ownership should Amiga Inc. go bankrupt (as it did). Developers can now buy PowerPC-based Amiga boards, which will boot a prerelease of OS4. The article has screenshots, which look like GNOME or Xfce on Linux, except for conspicuous gaps in the range of supported applications (for one, there are no modern standards-compliant web browsers for Amiga OS4).

The target market for the prerelease is ostensibly developers wishing to get a head start on the next killer platform, though in practice it may well be nostalgic Amiga users and/or collectors of world-changing machines from alternate timelines wishing to put an AmigaOne Micro next to their NeXT Cube, BeBox and Acorn Archimedes. The jury is still out on which is cooler: the AmigaOne Micro or the C-One.

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Interesting technical factoid of the day, from this page: (via /.)

Did you know your 10D and 300D run DOS? That's right. Embedded in the camera is DataLight's ROM-DOS. In fact, if you use the right tool such as s10sh you can see that inside the camera is an A: and B: drive. On the A: drive reside command.com and autoexec.bat, and most interestingly, camera.exe.
And this page has a tool for getting a shell on your camera, and gives a list of Canon camera models known to work with it. Unfortunately, I left the USB cable for my PowerShot G2 in Australia, so I can't try it out.

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