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Comment Re:Having looked at the design... (Score 1) 69

In point of fact, for individual scanning, the video even mentions that this linear scanner is SLOWER than a manual scanner such as the diybookscanner. The gains come in that since its automatic, a single person could keep 8 or 10 of them running at at time.

Yup. Progress in clock speeds has pretty much slowed down, and Google appears to expect future performance enhancements to come in the form of parallelism

Google

Submission + - Google open non-destructive book scanner; books and libraries rejoice (google.com)

leighklotz writes: "Google released open hardware designs for a book scanner that "sucks" pages to turn them, using a vacuum cleaner. The Google Tech Talk Video starts with Jeff Breidenbach of the Google Books team, and moves on to Dany Qumsiyeh showing how simple his design is to build. Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it? Or maybe the just want to up-stage the Internet Archive's Scanning Robot.

Disclaimer: I worked with Jeff when we were at Xerox (where he did the awesome hack Gnu Chess on your Scanner), but this is more awesome because it saves books."

Comment Email theft (Score 2) 148

Email lists are regularly stolen from ecommerce and info sites, as anybody who owns their own domain for email and can give out single-use email addresses knows. I report it every time it happens, and I've only gotten a positive response once, from Walgreen's Photo. Everybody else either fails to answer or points me to their privacy policy (as if that somehow prevented them from having data stolen). My suspicion is that there is a back-door or two in popular mailing-list software that ecommerce sites use; it can't be *that* many corrupt insiders stealing and selling email addresses to have actual human inside involvement.

Comment Re:Enlighten me please (Score 1) 203

How many bits for a IPv6 IP vs a IPv4 IP?

Yes of course they should of thought about this before designing the hardware with a maximum ability to comprehend a ipv4 IP...

I remember having this discussion with people close to the principles about the NCP to TCP/IP transition when the 32-bit (four octet) address size was picked.
The sound bite was that it's bigger than the biggest European phone number, so they planned ahead for a time when there would be as many computers as phones, which seemed way enough. (Remember, NCP had a hosts.txt file that listed all the hosts.)

For DNS, they designed an hierarchical system, but events overtook the hierarchy and people got fetishistic about names, leading to most names being in ".com" and being public-facing. The original theory was that the hierarchy would be more important, with more hosts in organizations and so on.

But on the IP side, the segmentation with subnetting (and later, classless subnetting) made things more complicated, so it became possible to run out of IP addresses even though there were still plenty available, but fragmented. Along the way with all the subnetting routing got more complicated and there were a few routing table crises that required new algorithms and lots of new designs, and that pretty much works miraculously now, but doesn't solve the walled-off inaccessible IP address problems.

If you can figure out a way to transparently change who firewalled-off Class A subnet over to a non-routable private net and then release the class A net, you could reset the clock back to the problem IPv4 thought it was solving and become a zillionaire in the process.

Comment Moving apps to Lumina (Score 1) 396

You can get help migrating your apps to the Lumina using a program from Mark/Space that helps you move your data as well.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/31/mark-space-welcome-home-eases-us-into-new-nokia-lumias/

Disclaimer: I work for Quixey, a company not mentioned in the Engadget article, but which provides part of the back-end service.

NASA

Submission + - NASA launches rocket to collect data on aurora (newsminer.com)

leighklotz writes: "NASA launched MICA, a rocket with an ion-field probe and a magnetic-field probe, from Fairbanks Alaska, straight up into a roaring aurora display, and then like Gravity's Rainbow, back down again. No word on whether they encountered Mrs. Coulter. CNN Video shows more surprisingly cogent popular press coverage. One of my sempai from college worked on this project, and shared pretty the pretty pix, some of which are in the University of New Hampshire news release, and in Astronomy Magazine. They should be analyzing the data for a while."
Chrome

Submission + - Web Browser Grand Prix 9: Chrome 17, Firefox 10, And Ubuntu (tomshardware.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The latest Web browser benchmarks from Tom's Hardware are out. Last month TH ran these tests in OS X on a MacBook, this time they ran the top five Windows 7 browsers against the top three for Linux (on Ubuntu 11.10). Testing includes page load time, start time, memory, reliability, JavaScript, CSS, DOM, Flash, HTML5, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, and standards conformance. The Windows 7 standings are pretty much the same as last month, but now have IE9 solidly in last place, and Chrome almost stealing first. Chrome did manage to steal the show on Ubuntu, while Firefox actually performs the worst of the three Linux browsers. In contrast to a recent cross-platform benchmarks of Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7 (where Ubuntu actually wins a majority of the tests), the Linux browsers just didn't stand up to their Windows versions. The author calls the combo "a meaningless victory and a defeat" for Linux.
Japan

Submission + - NRC releases audio of Fukushima disaster (marketplace.org)

mdsolar writes: ""The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today released transcripts and audio recordings made at the NRC Operations Center during last year’s meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The release of these audio recordings comes at the request of the public radio program "BURN: An Energy Journal," and its host Alex Chadwick.

The recordings show the inside workings of the U.S. government’s highest level efforts to understand and deal with the unfolding nuclear crisis as the reactors meltdown. In the course of a week, the NRC is repeatedly alarmed that the situation may turn even more catastrophic. The NRC emergency staff discusses what to do — and what the consequences may be — as it learns that reactor containment safeguards are failing, and that spent fuel pools are boiling away their cooling water, and in one case perhaps catching fire.""

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