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Space

Lake On Titan Winks From a Billion Kilometers Away 139

Posted by timothy from the next-time-send-chocolate dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "NASA's Cassini spacecraft took an image of Saturn's giant moon Titan earlier this year that serendipitously provides proof of liquid (probably methane) on its surface. The picture shows a glint of reflected sunlight off of a monster lake called Kraken Mare (larger than the Caspian Sea!). Scientists have been getting better and better evidence of liquid methane on Titan, but this is the first direct proof."
Communications

FCC Considers Opening Up US Broadband Access 253

Posted by kdawson from the let-slip-the-dogs-of-the-market dept.
An anonymous reader writes On October 14, the FCC issued a call for public comments on a study (PDF) done by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society about whether the US should require the telephone and cable companies to open their networks to competitors so that independent ISPs could begin offering broadband, much in the way it was done back in the days of dialup access. The study found that open-access in virtually every other country 'is playing a central role in current planning exercises throughout the highest performing countries,' noting: 'While Congress adopted various open access provisions in the almost unanimously-approved Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC decided to abandon this mode of regulation for broadband in a series of decisions in 2001 and 2002. Open access has been largely treated as a closed issue in US policy debates ever since. We find that in countries where an engaged regulator enforced open access obligations, competitors that entered using these open access facilities provided an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics.'"
GUI

Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push 181

Posted by timothy from the here-are-your-new-buttons dept.
nerdyH writes "Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface."
Privacy

Wireless Network Modded To See Through Walls 161

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-can't-see-through-pants dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The way radio signals vary in a wireless network can reveal the movement of people behind closed doors, say researchers who have developed a technique called variance-based radio tomographic imaging which processes wireless signals to peer through walls. They've tested the idea with a 34-node wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol (the personal area network protocol employed by home automation services such as ZigBee). The researchers say that such a network could be easily distributed by the police or military wanting to determine what's going on inside a building. But such a network, which uses cheap off-the-shelf components, might also be easily deployed by your neighbor or anybody else wanting to monitor movements in your home."
Graphics

Rome, Built In a Day 107

Posted by timothy from the what-about-compilation dept.
spmallick writes "Researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with Microsoft, have recreated the city of Rome in 3D using images obtained from Flickr. The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags 'Rome' or 'Roma,' and it took 21 hours on 496 compute cores to create a 3D digital model. Unlike Photosynth / Photo Tourism, the goal was to reconstruct an entire city and not just individual landmarks. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process... A million photos would take more than a decade! The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts."
Medicine

Is "Good Enough" the Future of Technology? 350

Posted by Soulskill from the seems-to-work-for-the-movie-industry dept.
himitsu writes "In an article titled 'The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine,' Wired claims that the future of technology, warfare and medicine will be filled with 'good enough' solutions; situations where feature-rich and expensive products are replaced with bare-bones infrastructures and solutions. 'We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."'"

Comment Re:wealth generation by industry (Score 1) 362

by blurryrunner (#29222729) Attached to: US Call-Center Jobs — That Pay $100K a Year
Fashion takes less than a second to deduce. Quality, however, can take much longer and can be nearly impossible to determine. People expect computers to break and don't seem to notice when they don't. It's a black box that most people don't have have any hope of understanding and don't have confidence in determining its quality.

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Comment Meetings should be used to solve problems (Score 2, Interesting) 274

by blurryrunner (#28841125) Attached to: Manager's Schedule vs. Maker's Schedule
Meetings should be used to solve problems. Information can be passed by email, or better yet through formal documentation. Status reports can be done by email and should only contain tasks completed on time, tasks not completed or will not be completed on time, and why if there are any of the second. Regular meetings should be held one on one to help employees meet individual goals and discuss any problems in a private way. Beyond that, "meetings" like kick-off events and celebrations for meeting goals can be held to motivate and provide recognition. Though I wouldn't call those meetings in the traditional sense. In an Agile environment, stand up meetings are effective as long as they are short and to the point.

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Comment Re:What HTML 5 should have been (Score 1) 640

by blurryrunner (#28572713) Attached to: Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
I guess my real beef is that I see so much potential in the web platform and the reason that it doesn't advance is because two of the major players have their own competing platforms. Neither Microsoft or Apple have an incentive to make the web platform powerful. Their only motivations are to make sure that the web platform works well enough. If it becomes too powerful, their OS's become irrelevant.

I understand the reasons, but I just cringe at having to keep backward compatibility. It's just really sad and depressing that over several years we can only come to a standard that is incrementally better. I'm not suggesting to break old website but to have separate renderers for each of the major HTML versions. If the doctype says HTML4 use the old one. If it says HTML5, use the new one. If it's not specified, use the old one. Require it for 5. Yes, I realize that requires a lot more work, but we can't get to there from here dragging the burden of backward compatibility.

Maybe I paint it more sinister than it really is, and some may be offended at the way I characterize things, but I feel we should have been further by now. There has already been a lot of advancement in the GUI arena over the last three decades and it seems that WHATWG just wants to close their eyes to it and go on their own. I could be completely wrong about that, but it's disputable because HTML5 is what they came up with.

If you think that these opinions would be welcome on the list, I will join, but otherwise I would rather not exercise such futility.

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The Internet

XHTML 2 Cancelled 222

Posted by timothy from the that-html-5-he's-so-hot-right-now dept.
Jake Lazaroff writes "According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does 'plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML.' Looks like with HTML 5, we'll get the best of both worlds."

Comment Re:What HTML 5 should have been (Score 1) 640

by blurryrunner (#28567843) Attached to: Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
While I can understand all your counter points to the GP, it sounds like you are closer to the browser implementation side than the web development side. I'm on the web developer side and I deal mostly with writing web apps. On this side, development is a beast. There have been many improvements and I am grateful for the work that has gone into things, but it's 2009 and we are still writing web apps in a language targeted at documents! It's also sad that I don't see any easy way to make web development easier than grossly misusing the platform. Let me analogize:

Think about how silly it is when you encounter some accountant that has built this elaborate spreadsheet in excel, one with thousands of lines of VB that may even span multiple documents. I think any programmer is going to look at that as a tremendous feat, but also with a great deal of scorn for really extending the platform beyond it's intent. I remember feeling the same thing when gmail first came out. I thought, wow, what masochists!

But here we are years later. The revival of the browser wars has taken a good amount of that pain away, but web development is still a huge pain! Sure it's better than a lot of things, but I pray every night that ten years from now web development doesn't look anything like it does today! I think the div, float, clear model is probably the the source of many of my woes and I don't think that problem can be overemphasized! Perhaps if they chose a simpler rendering model we wouldn't have so many cross-browser issues?

I think that part of the problem is that standard makers are still hoping and pushing for a semantic web. They still see all pages as documents/resources. I agree that many pages are more documents than applications, but we still have applications. Even still, at this point it is still impossible to make any non-simple page design not have layout and style related markup. Many of the new web 2.0 type apps are a single page, which are basically just bootstrappers for their apps. Beyond the hype, there are many principles in web 2.0 apps that are good. Round tripping to the server for full screen renderings is such a drag and I don't understand why we would still want to imply in our standards that should be the SOP. You know this. What I'm talking about and what I am begging for is a spec that makes web apps full citizens of the web rather than its bastard child.

Things I want to when developing web apps:
  • Easier layout
  • Ability to make custom, first class controls/inputs
  • Easier styling, something less complicated than CSS

What sucks hard core is that the reason this is impossible is because everyone is either way too self interested or they are stuck hanging on a vision that is flawed and lacking all touch with reality. It will probably take 5 years to be able to safely use HTML 5, and maybe by then someone will have the balls to make the web the universal platform it ought to be.

And if anyone says that I'm totally missing the point on the web and that if I want to develop apps, I should choose an application platform and not a document platform, I swear I will go ballistic. I mean really, I hope no one really believes that. The web wants to be both an information platform and application platform. I wish we would stop fighting that. The web is more than information and porn.

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