Behind an unmarked door in Hanover, Germany, a bearded young man with stylish glasses and a pierced lip is loading 350-year-old pieces of paper onto glass plates for digitization by a souped-up scanner. These pieces of paper are part of an immense puzzle. If solved, it could give insights into one of the greatest minds of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
The article reports on the restoration of the surplus equipments disposed by high-tech companies. It states that parts of the surplus equipments were made into a computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) router tables which helps making paper templates from woods, metal sheets, and plastics easier. It mentions that the actuators will be useful in the restoration of indisposed equipments among the high-tech companies. It also notes the steps on the usage of the actuator and the used software.
The article discusses the application of open-source technology to electronic voting systems. It is said Open Voting Consortium proposed the use of open-source software due to concerns regarding electronic voting systems, such as that the machines used were buggy, easily subverted and difficult to audit accurately. OVC's system allows voters to choose candidates on a touch screen and print a ballot showing bar-code forms of the selected candidates, which will then be hand-scanned with a bar-code reader. However, according to Notable Software's Rebecca Mercury, the OVC system has its disadvantages, such as that the system is no more secure that electronically scanning paper ballots and that machines may not work properly in poorer precincts.
Back in the day, hands-on photography required you to be closeted away in a darkened room, where you dunked sheets of paper into solutions of smelly chemicals. Now we manipulate photographs with software, a much less messy and oppressive process. But wouldn't it be great to have more control still- even before the photo is taken? Many cameras allow you to adjust their exposure settings manually, but that's about it. What if you could have full command of your camera's hardware? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
The article reports on the major upgrades in the IEEE Spectrum web site. Aside from the technical improvements, the magazine web site now offers more Web-only audio, video and graphical content as well as several blogs related to information technology. There will be blogs about current technical events, gaming and gadgets, venture capital, software systems and software engineers, robotics as well as Microsoft research. The web site is in continuous development because "Spectrum" knows that the readers expect their web site to be increasingly interactive and not just a place where they can read text on screen instead of on paper.