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Comment Re:Show 'em, India!! (Score 1) 119

Thought I'd answer this one about standing up and showing the world.

Taco Cowboy - We're not in a hurry. I think (as an Indian), being inclusive is far more important and this will help us all succeed together. We still don't have the strength/power to do that today but as you can see, we're building up to it.

Yes, we (especially those of us who have worked outside India) are pretty aware of some of the racist comments - a lot of us have experienced it. But having been born and brought up in an extremely diverse society, we know how to come together to succeed together.

Give us time. One day, we will say yes we can!! (stand together)...

Comment Re:North Pole (Score 0) 9

by yagu (#49739359) Attached to: The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers
there are infinite answers to this:

anywhere north of the south pole such that, after walking south one mile, the "circumference" of that latitude is one mile, or some integer fraction (e.g., 1 mile west results in 4 "laps"), then one mile "north" will return to same starting point.

Submission + - Samsung's ARTIK Arduino Compatible From Small To Powerful (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Samsung has woken up to the Internet of Things (IoT) and decided to provide the foundation that it needs. Three new devices — ARTIK 1, 5 and 10 — span the range from tiny wearable to eight core ARM and all Arduino Certified.
The ARTIK 1 is tiny measuring just 12x12mm and is capable of running on a battery for weeks. It has a dual core processor, 1MB of RAM and 4MB Flash. It communicates with the outside world using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and it has a 9-axis motion sensor.
The ARTIK 5 is about twice the size of the ARTIK 1, but still small at 29x25mm. It has an ARM A7 dual core, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of Flash. This means it can run Yocto Linux. It has WiFi as well as BLE, Bluetooth and ZigBee — which more or less covers everything. It is also large enough to have two 30-pin connectors which provide 47 GPIO and more.
The ARTIK 10 is 29x39mm, making it big compared to the ARTIK 1, but you could still lose it in your pocket. It has an Octa Core ARM running at 1.3GHz. It comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB of Flash and runs Yocto Linux. It also has WiFi/BT/BLE and ZigBee. It has the same video codecs as the ARTIK 5, but with its increased processing power it can work at 1080p at 120fps. Its I/O is also bigger with 51 GPIO and 6 ADCs.
All three devices have hardware security built in, camera support, and they can be programmed in C/C++/Java or Groovy. You can use the standard Arduino IDE or the Samsung SDK.
There is clearly a lot we don't know as yet, but the ARTIK range look like an interesting addition to the Arduino world.
What's in it for Samsung? Well, of course, it wants to be the one to provide you the cloud support that everyone seems to assume is going to be bigger than the IoT itself.

Comment Re:It not very hard (Score 2) 167

by iamhassi (#49669619) Attached to: How Spotify Can Become Profitable
Funny I just cancelled my spotify today because it required a program to be installed to work on PC and it didn't allow me to login using their facebook login thing. Why does it require a program? Should work on any browser like..... uh, pretty much everything, everything except big games.

Comment Re:nature will breed it out (Score 1) 950

the problem will solve itself with modern technology. Kids these days don't get a $500 xstation and a tv and all that. They get a iPad and play everything on there. And no I'm not talking about the 16 yr old that still plays playbox because that's all there was 10 yrs ago before tablets, I mean the 6 year old that does not remember life before iPad. Ask any parent with a child under 8 that has a iPad, they're glued to that thing morning until night. They even watch youtube videos of other kids playing on their iPads. And iPads are far more social than a xstation, they're carrying that around everywhere.

Comment Re:Not $9 (Score 1) 180

by iamhassi (#49647543) Attached to: $9 Open Source Computer Blows Past Crowdfunding Goal

Really not. Who uses composite video nowadays? Realistically it is $19 or $24 for the VGA and HDMI respectively, especially in the use cases illustrated in the o-so-funny-and-games video.

Compare this with the Raspberry Pi line and the reason for C.H.I.P to exist is nowhere to be found.

Maybe a competitor for some Arduino use-cases. Maybe.

Agreed. It's bait and switch. "Hey $9 computer.... oh you want better than 480 resolution? Well that's another $10! Oh you want to connect to a modern HDTV? That's another $5".

And honestly, at these low specs, I could buy a used 1ghz, 512 mb, 4gb desktop PC for about $25 and it would have VGA and at least be able to run some flavor of Windows and be upgradeable.

Submission + - Microsoft's AI Insults People By Telling Them How Old They Are (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates their age and gender has attracted more attention than expected — not all of it complimentary.
The How-Old.net site demonstrates of some of the capabilities of the Face API included in Microsoft's Project Oxford that was announced at Build.
It may have been expected to be a source of amusement but instead it backfired when people started to upload their own photos and discovered just how wrong its estimates could be. It demonstrates not only that machine learning has a long way to go before it's good at estimating age, but also that machine learning may not be the most politically correct way to go about answering the question "How Old Do I look". It might be better to employ and algorithm that built in all the rules of how to make a polite answer to that request — such as always knock a decade off the age of anyone over 28.
Perhaps this particular neural network needs to learn some social skills before pronouncing how old people look.
However it is capable of telling some truths — a photo of Barak Obama in 2005 gives an estimated age of 46, close to his real age of 44, but just 9 years later in 2014 the age guessing robot places him at 65. It seems that Mr President aged 20 years in less than 10 years of office.
Any one want to be President?

Submission + - Reboot Your Dreamliner Every 248 Days To Avoid Integer Overflow (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: You may be used to rebooting a server every so often to ensure that it doesn't crash because of some resource problem, but what about a modern jet airliner like the Boeing 787?
A recent directive (https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/05/01/2015-10066/airworthiness-directives-the-boeing-company-airplanes) from the US Federal Aviation Administration reminds us that software in planes is about as trustworth as on the desktop.
To quote:
"This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs (Generator Control Units) that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane."
A simple guess suggests the the problem is a signed 32-bit overflow as 2^31 is the number of seconds in 248 days multiplied by 100, i.e. a 32 bit signed counter in hundredths of of a second.
Until there is a patch for the problem all Dreamliners have to be rebooted before the 248 day period is up. Apparently if the worse does happen and the GCUs overflow and switch off the power then the plane should have enough backup power from a lithium-ion battery for about 6 seconds while a ram air turbine deploys for emergency power generation. So, with luck, this isn't a bug that could cause planes to fall out of the sky.
It is estimated that the Airbus A380, comparable in complexity to the Dreamliner, has more than 100 million lines of code.

Submission + - Seeing Buildings Shake With Software (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: In 2012 a team from MIT CSAIL discovered that you could get motion magnification by applying filtering algorithms to the color changes of individual pixels. The method didn't track movement directly, but instead used the color changes that result from the movement.
Now another MIT team has attempted to put the technique to use in monitoring structures — to directly see the vibrations in buildings, bridges and other constructions. Currently such monitoring involves instrumenting the building with accelerometers. This is expensive and doesn't generally give a complete "picture" of what is happening to the building. It would be much simpler to point a video camera at the building and use motion magnification software to really see the vibrations and this is exactly what the team are trying out. Yes you can see the building move — in real time — and it seems to be a good match to what traditional monitoring methods say is happening.
The next stage is to use the method to monitor MIT's Green Building, the Zakim Bridge and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. I wonder if they will put up a monitor to allow people in the buildings, or passing over the bridge, to see just how much they move! It could be an unnerving experience.

Submission + - Intel Showcases RealSense 3D Camera Applications And Technologies In New York (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel gathered a number of its OEM and software partners together in New York City recently to showcase the latest innovations that the company's RealSense 3D camera technology can enable. From new interactive gaming experiences to video collaboration, 3D mapping and gesture controls, Intel's front-facing RealSense technology holds promise that could someday reinvent how we interact with PCs. The F200 RealSense camera module itself integrates a depth sensor and a full color 1080p HD camera together with standard technologies like dual array mics, but with an SDK, on-board processing engine and 3rd party software that can allow the camera module to sense numerous environmental variables, much more like a human does. In the demos that were shown, RealSense was used to create an accurate 3D map of a face, in a matter of seconds, track gestures and respond to voice commands, allow touch-free interaction in a game, and remove backgrounds from a video feed in real-time, for more efficient video conferencing and collaboration.

Submission + - Intent To Deprecate HTTP (i-programmer.info) 2

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A suggestion on the Mozilla Dev forum aims to deprecate HTTP in favour of HTTPS. Has it really come to this? Browser devs dictating the protocols we use? Of course, it is all in the name of freedom.
The basic idea is that HTTPS is more secure — it stops government agencies spying on what we do and it stops man-in-the-middle attacks. Hence there is a growing belief that all web traffic should be encrypted and hence the move to deprecate HTTP and phase out browser support for it.
The problem is that to use HTTPS you need to buy a certificate and this isn't cheap. The solution is to make use of a self-signed certificate which provides encryption but not authentication. At the moment this isn't an easy option, but initiatives like the EFF's Let's Encrypt promises a service that will provide free certificates with some automatic domain validation and a database of certificates. This is makes using "lightly validated" certificates a possibility, but at the moment browsers tend to put up warning messages when you encounter a website that has a self-signed certificate. This makes an HTTPS site using a self-signed certificate look more risky than an HTTP site that has no encryption at all!
This is a very complicated situation. It is clear that there are situations were HTTPS is essential and there are many situations were it is largely irrelevant and actually harmful.
Which to us is not a decision that should be left to browser developers.

Submission + - Intel Boss Controls Robot Spider Army (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: At the recent Intel Developer Forum, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took to the stage to demo its latest system-on-a-chip controlling an army of spiderbots.
OK it wasn't an army it was just four but in principle it could have been.
The Curie, announced back in January, might be Intel's best chance of getting more than a foothold in the IoT market. It is tiny button-like device that has a complete Intel Quark SoC and some sensors built in — 384K of Flash and 80K of SRAM to run the open source RTOS operating system. What is remarkable is that it also crams in Bluetooth LE, DSP hub and 6-axis accelerometer and gyro.
A small wristband containing a Curie monitored Krzanich's arm position and gestures and connected via Bluetooth to four spiderbots. You need to see the video to appreciate how spooky this is.
What is it with Intel and spiders? To show off its Edison processor Intel helped create a spider dress that reacted to protect the wearer's personal space if someone came to close, see Spider Dress Defends Your Space.
Now it has a bunch of spiders under the CEO's personal command. Perhaps this is how they plan to finish off ARM and any other competitors. Be afraid, be very afraid....

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