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It started as an eccentric's dream in a junk-filled store. Now, the Shadow Robot Project has Nasa as a clientSome people dream of climbing Mount Everest; Richard Greenhill dreams of a general-purpose robot that can bring you a cup of tea.Greenhill is the archetypal eccentric British hobbyist. For years he spent all his spare time working on ideas behind a blank north London storefront filled with bins of electronic parts salvaged from junkyards. With no degree, no funding, and no university department backing, it was easy to find people who thought he was not only not credible, but actually crazy.Yet today, the Shadow Robot Project has 11 employees working behind the same storefront, now an organised engineering works. It has outlasted all the apparently more credible government-funded and university robot-building projects that Greenhill remembers from the late 80s and early 90s. It has customers including Nasa, Carnegie Mellon University in the US, and Germany's Bielefeld University.

LinuxPlanet: 'In the last article in this series Juliet Kemp looked at how init (the system we've all been using for years to start up our services) works, and how upstart, the new replacement for init, works instead. This article looks at upstart and its scripts in more detail.'

Site will open a new adult services category where adverts will be monitoredPressure from US officials has forced classified advertising website Craigslist to pull the shutters down on its controversial sex adverts in favour of a new, closely-monitored system.In an announcement earlier today, Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster said the site would be closing the 'erotic services' category next week - an open messageboard described as 'a blatant internet brothel' by one official. Instead, the site will open a new 'adult services' category, in which every advert will be manually approved by staff before it is seen by members of the public.'Each posting to this new category will be manually reviewed before appearing on the site, to ensure compliance with Craigslist posting guidelines and terms of use,' said Buckmaster in a post on the Craigslist blog. 'We are optimistic that the new balance struck today will be an acceptable compromise.' The move comes as the San Francisco-based web

PL/SQL Guy writes 'The Kindle has a number of 'remote kill' flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a 'read only once' flag? A 'no turning the pages backwards' flag?' of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has hired the former director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child, Ivan Krstic, according to ZDNet. Krstic developed the Bitfrost security specification for the OLPC project, which he considers a foolproof system to protect against malware attacks. With the new position at Apple, Krstic will be working on core OS security....

QuantumG writes 'The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the 'altruistic vaccine' doesn't specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement.' of this story at Slashdot.

NEW YORK Dell hosted what the PC maker called an urban meetup in New York City earlier this week to showcase the companys latest and greatest computers. On display on this trip was Dells high-end Adamo laptop, which got the tech world talking when Dell first acknowledged the ultra-thin and stylish laptop at 2009 CES Expo. In addition, Dell had several of its Inspiron and Studio models on display, including the new Inspiron Mini 10v, a lower-cost version of its netbook line with a starting price of $299. Dell also plans to offer a special antenna and built-in tuner for its Inspiron Mini lineup that allows users to tune into local broadcast television. Dell has worked overtime to shed its image as unimaginative box maker and, like Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and especially Apple, has tried to add some life into PC design, especially with laptops such as its Adamo and the Studio line, which are aimed specifically at consumers. eWEEK offers a guided tour of some of Dells latest desktop

The company's first big SaaS effort may need major reconstructive work before SAP can bring its ERP suite to market.

Learning to play the guitar can be extremely easy if all you really want to do is knock out power chords and make some loud noise. There's nothing wrong with that -- some musicians really have won fame and glory with little more than three working fingers and an overpowered amp.

The company has mostly retracted a generally reviled change to which 'tweets' show up in a user's timeline, but says that the old way of displaying them 'didn't scale' and that an improved strategy is in the works.