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Comment Re:Speaking as a professional Lighting Designer (Score 1) 99

by waderoush (#42744943) Attached to: Turning SF's Bay Bridge Into a Giant LED Display
Author of TFA here. Perhaps "debugging" was a dangerous word to use (clearly it has set off a lot of Slashdot readers). What Villareal is doing, mostly, is comparing the patterns and algorithms he developed on his simulator with the actual look of these patterns on the bridge, and tuning for what looks best. That was the part that couldn't be done until the lights were installed.
Technology

Submission + - Turning SF's Bay Bridge into a Giant LED Display (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "It may be the biggest art hack ever: a project to install 25,000 individually addressable LED lights on the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. New York-based 'light sculptor' Leo Villareal was in San Francisco last week to test the vast 'Bay Lights' art installation, which will officially debut on March 5 and last for two years; Xconomy has photos and video of Villareal running the light show from his laptop. To optimize his algorithms and figure out which patterns would be most interesting or arresting, Villareal needed to experiment on the bridge itself, says Bay Lights director Ben Davis, who has raised $5.8 million for the project so far. 'This has never been done before in history — literally debugging software 500 feet in the air, in front of a million people,' says Davis."

Submission + - California's Surreal Retroactive Tax on Tech Startup Investors (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Engineers and hackers don't think much about tax policy, but there's a bizarre development in California that they should know about, since it could reduce the pool of angel-investment money available for tech startups. Under a tax break available since the 1990s, startup founders and other investors in California were allowed to exclude or defer their gains when they sold stock in California-based small businesses. Last year, a California appeals court ruled that the tax break was unconstitutional, since it discriminated against investors in out-of-state companies. Now the Franchise Tax Board, California’s version of the IRS, has issued a notice saying how it intends to implement the ruling — and it’s a doozie. Not only is the tax break gone, but anyone who claimed an exclusion or deferral on the sale of small-business stock since 2008 is about to get a big retroactive tax bill. Investors, entrepreneurs, and even the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit are up in arms about the FTB’s notice, saying that it goes beyond the court’s intent and that it will drive investors out of the state. This Xconomy article takes an in-depth look at the history of the court case, the FTB’s ruling, and the reaction in the technology and investing communities."
Programming

Submission + - Better Tools for Programming Literacy (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Adam Wiggins, co-founder of Heroku, agrees with anthropologist Bonnie Nardi that programming isn’t just for geeks. The problem, he says, is that today’s tools for teaching programming are woefully inadequate. In a commentary, Wiggins argues that there are two major gaps preventing programming tools from being accessible to beginners: 1) they’re too fussy, requiring extensive setup, and 2) they’re focused on the technology rather than everyday tasks. A good tool for learning programming, Wiggins argues, would emulate an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet – beginners would be able to fire it up instantly, and would be able to get useful things done right away. (He’s dismissive, though, of visual programming tools that ‘attempt to hide logic behind a point-and-click interface.’) ‘Broad programming literacy is crucial in a world increasingly made of computers,’ Wiggins says. ‘Despite common stereotypes, programming is not out of reach for the average person,’ as long as the tools are easy to set up and specialized on the programmer’s task."
Android

Submission + - Your Next Game Console Will Be an Android Phone (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Charles Huang, the co-founder of RedOctane and the co-creator of its blockbuster game Guitar Hero, is up to something new. At Santa Clara, CA-based Green Throttle Games, he's working to give smartphone owners a way to display games on their high-definition TVs and compete with their friends via Bluetooth game controllers. Since coming out of stealth mode in November, the company has raised $6 million in venture backing and has begun to share previews of the first Green-Throttle-enabled games. In an in-depth interview, Huang and co-founder Matt Crowley argued that the era of $60 game discs is almost over, and that today's smartphones have more than enough power to run high-fidelity games on big screens. He says the company's key technical challenge has been building a software platform (called Arena) that allows a smartphone to handle inputs from multiple controllers. 'We’re talking about allowing four controllers to connect to the same device, and having the device know who Player One, Player Two, Player Three, and Player Four are,' says Huang. 'That use case doesn’t even exist in mobile.' Huang expects Green Throttle's first games to hit the market in early 2013."

Comment Re:didn't this used to exist years ago? (Score 2) 76

by waderoush (#42268595) Attached to: Google's Second Brain: How the Knowledge Graph Changes Search
Author here. Yes, from 2009-2011 or so they had a Google Labs project called Google Squared that presented results in tabular form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Squared). I asked Shashi Thakur about this and he said they killed it because it wasn't deep enough to be useful. He told me there were actually pockets of structured, graph-like data popping up all over Google (in verticals like travel search and product search) but every team was doing it differently and it became clear the "the pockets were not coinciding." That's why they decided to take a top-down (or maybe you'd call it bottoms-up) approach and just buy Metaweb.
Google

Submission + - Google's Second Brain: How the Knowledge Graph Changes Search (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Last spring Google introduced its English-speaking users to the Knowledge Graph, a vast semantic graph of real-world entities and properties born from the Freebase project at Metaweb Technologies (which Google acquired in 2010). This month Google began showing Knowledge Graph results to speakers of seven other languages. Though the project has received little coverage, the consequences could be as far-reaching as previous overhauls to Google’s infrastructure, such as the introduction of universal search back in 2007. That’s because the Knowledge Graph plugs a big hole in Google’s technology: the lack of a common-sense understanding of the things in its Web index. Despite all the statistical magic that made Google’s keyword-based retrieval techniques so effective, ‘We didn’t ever represent the real world properly in the computer,’ says Google senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal. He says the Knowledge Graph represents a ‘baby step’ toward future computer systems that can intuit what humans are searching for and respond with exact answers, rather than the classic ten blue links. ‘Now, when you encounter encounters the letters T-A-J-M-A-H-A-L on any Web page, the computers suddenly start understanding that this document is about the monument, and this one is about the musician, and this one is about a restaurant,’ Singhal says. ‘That ‘aboutness’ is foundational to building the search of tomorrow.’"

Submission + - iCracked Fixes Shattered iPhones, Wants to Be the AAA of Mobile (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "The iPhone's screen may be made of Gorilla Glass, but that doesn't stop people from finding ways to destroy it. In fact, warranty provider SquareTrade says 30 percent of iPhone owners break their phones in the first 12 months after purchase; for people under 35, the rate is closer to 50 percent. Now there's a startup in Silicon Valley called iCracked that specializes in fixing fractured iOS devices, at costs below what owners will likely pay Apple if they go to the Genius Bar. From iCracked's Web or mobile site you can enter your location and device type, then wait a few minutes for a local 'iTech' to call you to schedule a repair visit. The company, which is backed by the Y Combinator startup accelerator, can also send you a DIY repair kit or buy your broken phone for cash, and it plans to offer insurance plans to ease replacement headaches for chronic iPhone-crushers. CEO AJ Forsythe says he wants the company to grow into 'the AAA of smartphones.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Can a 30-Year-Old Company Act Like a Startup? The Case of Intuit (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Back in 1997, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen described "the innovator's dilemma" — the difficulty established companies face when adapting to new technologies or developing products that might disrupt existing business lines. Executives at Intuit, the personal finance giant, are conscious of this dilemma and have set up an impressive array of programs designed to route around it. But the payoffs are unclear so far. Despite progress integrating Mint.com and developing new mobile apps such as SnapTax, the company is still dependent on aging products like TurboTax and QuickBooks for most of its revenue. And in emerging areas like mobile payments for small business, Intuit has been slow to respond to challenges from upstarts such as Square. Xconomy surveys Intuit's innovation programs and concludes that this PC-era company may need to take more risks if it hopes to succeed in the age of mobile and cloud services."

Submission + - "Getting Things Done" Gets A Boost from Charles Simonyi (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "He's famous now for dating Martha Stewart and going into space (twice), but Charles Simonyi is known to software engineers mainly as the father of Microsoft Word and the creator of 'intentional programming,' a method that generates code automatically based on high-level commands from domain experts. Now Simonyi and his Bellevue, WA, company Intentional Software are teaming up with 'Getting Things Done' author David Allen to translate the personal-productivity guru's time-management technique into mobile apps. Surprisingly, there's never been an official GTD app — and Allen dismisses most to-do-list software as 'dispersive rather than integrative.' But in an extended Q&A with Xconomy, Allen says 'These guys [at Intentional Software] came to me tabula rasa and said ‘we don’t know what’s needed, but we think we have a technology that could be utilized to help knit together a lot of this stuff.’' No product development timeline has been announced.
 "

Submission + - Romney disses green jobs, but Republican governors love them (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney claims that 'for every ‘green job’ created there are actually more jobs destroyed.' But the campaign rhetoric doesn't have much to do with reality on the ground, especially in Republican-dominated states. A San Francisco-based cleantech venture capital firm, DBL Investors, has issued a report showing that most of the states adding green jobs the fastest are either red states or swing states — and that Republican governors like Haley Barbour, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal have been among the most aggressive courtiers of the cleantech industry. 'The governors didn't get the memo that said cleantech is really controversial,' says co-author Nancy Pfund, managing partner at DBL."
Science

Submission + - San Diego Zoo Creates Biomimicry Incubator (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "The San Diego Zoo has built a world famous reputation as a tourist destination, for helping to rescue the California Condor, and maybe (if you're old enough) for Joan Embery's appearances with Johnny Carson. Now the zoo is using its expertise to drive innovation by establishing a new 'Centre for Bioinspiration.' While the Anglicized spelling of 'center' might seem pretentious, the zoo has a down-to-earth goal of innovating through the emerging field of biomimicry, which is exemplified by Qualcomm's Mirasol display technology (the displays generate colors using the same type of interference between light waves that causes iridescence in butterfly wings). The center includes an incubator for developing new bio-inspired products and technologies, where ideas would be advanced to a proof of concept or working model, and then licensed. The incubator also intends to help develop bio-inspired ideas from outside the zoo."
Games

Submission + - Inside Nukotoys' Project to Build a Monster iPad Hit for Kids (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "San Francisco-based Nukotoys this week introduced two new kids' games for the Apple iPad that are literal crossovers between trading cards (à la Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering) and 3D video game worlds. The cards show various mythical creatures (in "Monsterology") and African megafauna (in "Animal Planet Wildlands"), but they're also imprinted with an invisible, capacitive ink. When players tap the cards on the iPad screen, 3D versions of the creatures are activated inside the games. The games evolved from an earlier physical-virtual crossover game concept that used RFID technology. 'We are interested in creating a new type of toy that really takes advantage of this fantastic platform and can evolve over time and become more interesting as the child uses it,' says Nukotoys' co-CEO Rodger Raderman."
The Internet

Submission + - Content Centric Networking & The Next Internet (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "PARC research fellow Van Jacobson argues that the Internet was never designed to carry exabytes of video, voice, and image data to consumers’ homes and mobile devices, and that it will never be possible to increase bandwidth fast enough to keep up with demand. In fact, he thinks that the Internet has outgrown its original underpinnings as a network built on physical addresses, and that it’s time to put aside TCP/IP and start over with a completely novel approach to naming, storing, and moving data. The fundamental idea behind Jacobson's alternative proposal — Content Centric Networking — is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored. If implemented, the idea might undermine many current business models in the software and digital content industries — while at the same time creating new ones. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of revolutionary idea that has remade Silicon Valley at least four times since the 1960s."

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