56138257
submission
mikejuk writes:
Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a DTP (DeskTop Publishing) program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe — long time DTP company. Now the Blink team propose to remove Regions support saving 10,000 lines of code in 350,000 in the name of efficiency.
If Google does remove the Regions code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11 as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.
56094783
submission
mikejuk writes:
A new open source CodePlex project makes it possible to run your own Windows 8 App Store designed to allow you to privately publish enterprise apps.
"BootyBay" is a private "sideloading" Windows Store.
"A proof-of-concept of a Windows Private Store solution for enterprise side-loading app management, including a Windows Store App as the “Private Store”, a Desktop App as the “Store Agent”, an ASP.NET MVC web application as the “Store Server”.
To make use of it you need Windows 8.1 or Windows 2012 R2 for the client and they have to be set up to allow sideloading. For the server you need an ASP.NET 4.5 MVC machine. The store app is currently not polished, but it allows the user to list apps, check details, etc. In the long run this will look like the real store app.
At the moment BootBay doesn't work with Windows RT devices but the team have plans to add ARM and RT support. There is no word of Windows Phone 8 support.
As they plan to appeal to enterprises perhaps the codename "BootyBay", after the port city in Warcraft III, is not a good choice. There is also the interesting question of what Microsoft will make of it. After all Microsoft really would like to keep control of the Windows app market and this certainly blows a fairly large hole in its walled garden.
56005059
submission
mikejuk writes:
Simulated bipedal creatures can learn to walk naturally without any input as to how they should do it. They even learn to adopt different gaits according to the speed they are trying to move at. The technique is simple in theory but the difficulties are in the detail. A new video of a variety of virtual creatures learning is fun to watch as they slowly evolve and fall over.
Take a simulated skeleton and attach a set of biologically inspired simulated muscles — both in full 3D, The muscles even have a neural delay included in all feedback paths. The arrangement of the muscles, the muscle routing, isn't fixed and it and it is part of the optimization along with the muscle control systems. This is a bit like evolving the muscle arrangement that works best with a given skeleton.
To obtain the optimum control and muscle routing, the performance of the creature is measured taking into account speed, pose, and effort. The optimization was performed offline using an evolutionary algorithm.
Yes the virtual creatures really do evolve the best way of walking and fall over a few times in the process.
55707839
submission
symbolset writes:
Ball lightning has been reported for hundreds of years, and experimentally produced, but for the first time a natural will 'o wisp has been captured on video and amazingly, spectrograph, accidentally by researchers studying ordinary lightning.
55681849
submission
mikejuk writes:
We tend to think of the most capable robots as being like us — bipedal and with two arms complete with hands. This isn't unreasonable as it is a remarkably effective form factor for a mobile system. Not only this, but as much of the constructed world is optimized for humans, a humanoid robot should be able to cope better with it.
However, the recent DARPA robotics challenge demonstrated how far we are away from an effective bipedal humanoid robot. Even when one of the rescue tasks was completed. the speed and hesitancy of the approach wasn't impressive. To put it bluntly there is still a lot of room for improvement.
The alternative approach is to abandon the humanoid form factor and see what can be achieved using wheeled robots. The Multi-Arm Robot Control Software MARCS that it has developed works with a dual-arm torso manufactured by HDT Robotics mounted on a custom chassis with tank-style treads. A second robot from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab joined in with its dual-arm platform to remove debris, stabilize the victim and transport the victim away.
There are a few things that might have occurred to you if you watch the video. The first is that even wheeled robots don't seem to get up the sort of speed that suggests they are dealing with an urgent situation. The performance is good, but it needs to be better. The second is that there is an "uncanny valley" effect relating to the the torso-mounted robot. This may not look very humanoid and there is something creepy about the way that its hands manipulate the dummy victim.
55315579
submission
mikejuk writes:
A recent xkcd cartoon has started some deep academic thinking. When AI expert Peter Novig gets involved you know the algorithms are going to fly. Code Golf is a reasonably well known sport of trying to code an algorithm in the shortest possible code. Regex Golf is similar, but in general the aim is to create a regular expression that accepts the strings in one list and rejects the strings in a second list. The xkcd cartoon in question http://xkcd.com/1313/ revealed that this is but the first step. Programmers like recursion and a regex is a string after all and a regex can process a string so a regex can process a regex and this means you can have meta-regex golf and meta-meta-regex golf.... Yes my friend, it's regexes all the way down!
The hover over text gives a regular expression that matches the last names of the elected US presidents, but not the losers. This started Peter Norvig, the well-known computer scientist, director of research at Google and wearer of brightly colored shirts, thinking about the problem. Is it possible to write a program that would create a regular expression to solve the xkcd problem? The result is an NP hard problem that needs AI like techniques to get an approximate answer.
To find out more read the complete description, including Python code, at Peter Norvig's blog post http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb which ends with the challenge:
"I hope you found this interesting, and perhaps you can find ways to improve my algorithm, or more interesting lists to apply it to. I found it was fun to play with, and I hope this page gives you an idea of how to address problems like this."
55255013
submission
mikejuk writes:
Bill Gates has emerged as the most admired person in the world in a survey conducted by UK opinion pollster YouGov. With a 10.10% share he narrowly beat Barack Obama who came in second overall.
The poll of almost 14,000 people was undertaken for the Times newspaper using a mix of Internet and mobile phone surveys conducted in Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the US, Australia, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, China, Egypt, Nigeria and Brazil.
Participants were asked to name the person they most admired and while many named their mom or dad nominating their head of state was also popular with The Queen topping the UK poll with 18.74% and Vladamir Putin coming top in Russia with 24.62% of his country's nominations. Barack Obama, however, didn't take top slot in the USA; his 10.35% shared was less than half that of Pope Francis at 21.07%.
While it is likely that Gates is the most admired person either on account of being the richest person on the planet or for his philanthropy, the result is still reported as "Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft ..." and it is tempting to wish that he could work some new magic for Microsoft.Taking over at Microsoft could make him even more admired next year.
55049205
submission
mikejuk writes:
The Imitation Game, a film based on Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, with Benedict Cumberbatch taking on the role of Turing, will be released later this year.
The Imitation Game was scripted by Graham Moore is based on Alan Hodges' biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. It isn't the first time that this biography has been dramatized. The play "Breaking the Code" was first staged in 1986 and later televised. It was shown across the world during the Turing Centenary in 2012 and there were several other dramatizations including an opera.
Filming of the biopic, produced by Black Bear Pictures was completed in November and a still from it was posted on Twitter on December 24th to mark the news of Turing's posthumous Royal Pardon expunging his conviction for gross indecency.
The Imitation Game's Twitter page also provides a link to this short video clip in which Cumberbatch reads a letter from Alan Turing to his friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge. Turing wrote the letter shortly before his court appearance for gross indecency and although he remarks that he should one day write a short story about the incident, he signed it "yours in distress".
55018115
submission
mikejuk writes:
For reasons that aren't fathomable, Microsoft has decided to lift some of the covers from its systems programming language based on C#, which seems to be called M# even though there is already a language using the name.
Joe Duffy, one of the team that has been developing a systems programming extension to C# for the past four years, has finally been allowed to talk about it http://joeduffyblog.com/2013/12/27/csharp-for-systems-programming/.
Duffy begins by saying the obvious:
"The first question is, “Why a new language?” I will readily admit that world already has a plethora of them"
but then goes on to justify the new language just like every other language inventor or enthusiast before him. In this case the idea is that C# is a great language but it is marginalized by the law of the "excluded middle" by being fairly easy to use but not very fast.
The argument is that there are languages that are faster, C/C++, and languages that serve in the "easy to use" category, e.g. JavaScript. However, the argument is that you need a safe but fast language for system programming and hence M#, which is based on the managed language C#. Given the group developing the new language it is safe to assume that it has been developed and used in the production of Microsoft's experimental operating system, Midori.
The new language is currently being implemented as part of the Roslyn compiler as a service model that is being rolled out for C# and other managed languages. It seems that we can look forward to something happening in 2014 and eventually to the language being open sourced.
54884267
submission
mikejuk writes:
Unicode already contains over 110,000 characters but when the next major version is released next year it will be expanded by a further 2,833, including some that are as yet undeciphered — and nobody knows what they are supposed to mean. Unicode 7.0 introduces 23 new scripts, all of them of historical or limited modern usage, but the most "extreme" in this respect is Linear A, the as-yet undeciphered writing system from the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete. So if you really want to write something that is really meaningless Unicode 7 is for you.
If Linear A isn't enough of a puzzle then what about U+1F57, listed as "MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING" which has already attracted a lot of attention. The question is when would you use it? Also new is "RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS" — yes its a live-long-and-prosper Vulcan salute. At least there is no mistaking the meaning of this one or the "REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED". Doesn't it just make you long for the days of ASCII....
54771755
submission
mikejuk writes:
You must have seen TV programs where the CSI person is asked to zoom in on face or worse the reflection of a face in the victim's eye. This is clearly impossible — or is it?
A recent paper by Dr Rob Jenkins of the Department of Psychology at York University (UK) has managed to prove that you can get useful images of faces from the reflections in eyes. It really is as simple as zooming in. The catch is that the experiments were done with a 39 mega pixel camera — even so the actual final images were low resolution.
In the experiment a number of people were photographed with a "bystander" in a position so that a reflection of their face would be captured in the eye. The resulting extracted image of the reflection in the eye was only 27x36 and then rescaled using bicubic interpolation to 400x240 or bigger and enhanced using standard PhotoShop operations to normalize the contrast and brightness.
Test subjects were able to match faces using the low resolution images but the important result was that if the subject knew the person in the photo then recognition went up to 90% with false positives down at 10%.
So the next time you appear in a photo consider the fact that a simple procedure might reveal who you are with.
54609889
submission
mikejuk writes:
Asm.js is a subset of standard JavaScript that is simple enough for JavaScript engines to optimize. Now Mozilla claims that with some new improvements it is at worse only 1.5 times slower than native code. How and why?
The problem with JavaScript as an assembly language is that it doesn't support the range of datatypes that are needed for optimization. This is good for human programmers because they can simply use a numeric variable and not worry about the difference between int, int32, float, float32 or float64. JavaScript always uses float64 and this provides maximum precision, but not always maximum efficiency.
The big single improvement that Mozilla has made to its SpiderMonkey engine is to add a float32 numeric type to asm.js. This allows the translation of float32 arithmetic in a C/C++ program directly into float32 arithmetic in asm.js. This is also backed up by an earlier float32 optimization introduced into Firefox that benefits JavaScript more generally. Benchmarks show that firefox f32 i.e. with the float32 type is still nearly always slower than native code, it is now approaching the typical speed range of native code.
Mozilla think that this isn't the last speed improvement they can squeeze from JavaScript. So who needs native code now?
54605041
submission
mikejuk writes:
Google seems to have a way with DARPA challenges, first the self driving car and now the rescue robot. Yes, Google's team Schaft has won. The robots had to complete eight different rescue tasks and were awarded a maximum of four points per task. Schaft using a standard off-the-shelf HRP-2 robot which is surprisingly more able and powerful than the previous star of the show, the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. Schaft scored 27 out of 32 beating its closest rival by seven points. However this makes the performance sound better than it actually was. Each task could take 30 minutes and most of the robots took their time and moved as slow as ice. It seems that the teams were precomputing every move and taking a lot of time rather than getting on with the task as quickly as possible. As a result there is a further to go in creating useful rescue bots than the scores might suggest.
Up to eight of the top teams will receive up to one million dollars to progress to the next stage of the challenge and their names will be announced soon. It appears that Google's company will be the number one contender in next year's trials. Where self driving cars go presumably rescue robots follow.
54336211
submission
mikejuk writes:
Google's Dart just reached version 1.0, but now it seems that it has aspirations to being an international standard. The question is will this make any difference to the language's future?
Given that Google effectively own Dart, what advantage does standardization bring? The answer to what Google thinks it brings is indicated in the Chromium blog:
"The new standardization process is an important step towards a future where Dart runs natively in web browsers."
and this seems reasonable. A standard is something that would be required before other browser makers decided to fall in line and support native Dart. It is probably a necessary but far from sufficient, condition, however, with Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla having other interests to further.
Last but not least, having the backing of a standard might just encourage possible users to believe that the language won't sink if Google gets distracted with other projects and decides that Dart is dispensable. However, a strong open source development community capable of supporting Dart without Google's input would be a better reassurance.
If you want to help, Google would like you to join the committee. After all, it still hasn't a Vice Chair.
So can we expect to see ECMA CoffeeScript or TypeScript in the near future? Probably not.
54236179
submission
mikejuk writes:
A few days ago the dates for the ending of retail and OEM availability of Windows 7 were announced, and then Microsoft backtracked.
Last week Microsoft announced the timings for Windows 7. For retail sales the date was October 30 2013, so if you wanted a copy you have missed the boat. Not in reality, however, because at the moment you can still buy a boxed copy from many retailers who still have stock.
The date for ending sales of Window 7 preinstalled on new machines was announced as October 30,2014 which is a much more important date in the life of an OS. Soon afterwards Microsoft announced that this was an error and the date was to be determined.
The time to end of OEM preinstalled sales is only available for the XP to Vista and Vista to Window 7 changeover — 3.7 years and 2 years respectively. XP had a bit longer because Vista wasn't suitable for smaller machines such as netbooks.Using the 2 years value, October 2014 is exactly when Windows 7 OEM preinstalled sales should end.
Now you can appreciate why Microsoft's backtracking is strange. Could it be that it all depends on how the take up of Windows 8.1 goes?
It could well be that customers will be asking Microsoft will extend mainstream support for Windows 7 on the grounds that Windows 8 isn't a suitable enterprise operating system. January 2015 seems very close all of a sudden.
