Comment Re:one business model: military (Score 4, Insightful) 140
I'm sure law enforcement would be happy to have the same tech.
Comment Playing INGRESS! (Score 1) 256
My New New Years tradition will be playing Ingress in downtown Tampa.
Comment Winter cleaning.... (Score 1) 235
Gotta spare up cycles for ingress.
Submission + - Users abandon ship if online video quality is not up to snuff, says study (umass.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: The first large scientific study of how people respond to poor video quality on the Internet paints a picture of ever rising user expectations and the willingness to abandon ship if those expectations are not met.
Some nuggets...
1) Users are willing to wait for no more than 2 seconds for a video to start playing, with each additional second adding 6% to the abandonment rate.
2) Users with good broadband connectivity expect faster video load times and are even more impatient than ones on mobile devices.
3) Users who experience video freezing watch fewer minutes of the video than someone who does not experience freezing. A 1% freezing causes 5% less minutes watched.
4) Users who experience failures when they try to play videos are less likely to return to the same website in the future.
BIG data analyzed (260+ million minutes of video) and some cool new data analysis techniques used.
Some nuggets...
1) Users are willing to wait for no more than 2 seconds for a video to start playing, with each additional second adding 6% to the abandonment rate.
2) Users with good broadband connectivity expect faster video load times and are even more impatient than ones on mobile devices.
3) Users who experience video freezing watch fewer minutes of the video than someone who does not experience freezing. A 1% freezing causes 5% less minutes watched.
4) Users who experience failures when they try to play videos are less likely to return to the same website in the future.
BIG data analyzed (260+ million minutes of video) and some cool new data analysis techniques used.
Submission + - Longest U.S Space Mission Planned for 2015 (cnn.com) 1
SchrodingerZ writes: Capitan Scott Kelly, brother of former commander Mark Kelly, will embark on the United State’s longest manned space mission, set for 2015. Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will spend an entire year on the orbiting International Space station. The mission will be a first for the NASA’s space program, but it is far from the world record. The longest recorded time in space was the 438 day mission of Russia’s Valery Polyakov, working on the Mir Space Station 1994-1995. Kelly, a decorated Navy captain received degrees from “State University of New York Maritime College and the University of Tennessee,” and was the flight engineer for the space station expedition 25, and commander of expedition 25 in 2010. “Kornienko hails from Russia's Syzran, Kuibyshev, region and has worked in the space industry since 1986.” The yearlong study on humans working in space will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, spring 2015.
Comment Re:Respect (Score 1) 360
Its not like he killed it to make his quadcopter skin.
Yeah! It's not like he.... uh... so what if he did?
Comment Re:Kindle Fire is not bad, but too small (Score 1) 134
And apparently it comes with monospaced fonts, which is great for those of us who miss teletypes and typewriters.
Fixed that for you. Telegraph operators use handwriting. Teletype was what delivered a printed message with a mono-spaced font.
Comment The FCAT is going away (Score 1) 663
It's a moot point. According to WUSF, the Tampa NPR station, the FCAT is being replaced with a test shared by a couple dozen other states. This should be happening within the next year or so.
My 4th grader is in the middle of her FCATs now and loves taking tests... but she's always been weird that way
Comment Death by Peppering (Score 2) 337
This story brought to mind something from The Thirteen Gun Salute from the Aubrey Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian:
Apparently, this was at one time a common method of execution in the Malaysian states...
'Abdul is gruesomely executed in a bizarre sanctioned execution via "peppering," in which a bag of pepper is placed over the head (hands are also bound). The executioners, often the victim's family, then beat the bag, resulting in inhalation of the pepper and painful asphyxiation. '
Comment Herring Bone (Score 1) 514
Some of us mow the lawn to make it look good. If it takes a little longer to leave a nice pattern, that's what headphones and a good collection of MP3s are for.
Comment Re:Lets change the title to: (Score 0, Offtopic) 338
that's why Steve create Apple-Script and all sort of applications have exposed hooks so that users can script things that just ain't gonna happen in the other camp.
Comment Re:Olympic Games deja vu (Score 1) 200
Think that might have anything to do with the story being in the Sidney Morning Herald?
Comment Re:That's silly, but.. (Score 1) 102
NOW WE'RE TALKIN!
Comment Re:Based on what I saw in the article (Score 1) 403
I've just gone to the netflix website and watched from there, although I haven't checked in a while, I was able to launch my netflix account from within boxee.
Comment Re:That's too much (Score 1) 379
Fact Check... according to the last census statistics, over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million. True, he still won't pay the fine, but 1 Million is not many people's lifetime earnings.
