Apple is an excellent example of what happens when you take old ideas then apply the design and usability work which everyone else should have been doing from the start. Apple doesn't really innovate, they're just more likely to do their homework compared to the rest of the class.
Microsoft tends to innovate - look at Microsoft Research if you want to see the sort of things they're working on all the time in order to keep innovating - but the results either fail to make it into the market or end up as some feature slapped into a release haphazardly.
Innovation alone is ineffectual if your goal is to sell products and not just publish research papers.
I've talked to about a dozen or so people who do casual games for hand-held devices and browser-based delivery professionally. One guy being rude on the internet is "relaying his experiences" now? I'll go with what I heard, thanks.
Or would it help if I claimed to be an iPhone developer too? I could download the SDK in a jiff if that's the case. It's the internet, you know. Anyone can say anything. Making arguments from authority tends to imply that they're not very good ones, even if you are an authority. In other words: if you want people to be persuaded - show, don't tell.
Or, we could get back to the part where he keeps putting words in my mouth. My actual points are very simple.
This is a good point, but it's inconsistent with the verb tense he used. Then again, given the general quality of English as practiced on the internet and the tendency not to heavily proof posts, it may well have been what he meant even though it was not what he said.
You're also looking only at hardware, when you also need to take into account software, digital media distribution, and the fact that it was always more about manipulating the market than it was about directly generating revenue. Xbox is less about Xbox than it is about Windows and Office. The fact that it's now generating profits is merely a bonus.
Nor is either relevant to my original point, which was about Microsoft being damn well able to capture a meaningful slice of a given market if it pleases them to do so. Unless you want to argue about whether the Xbox platform holds a significant part of the gaming market?
I wasn't familiar with WAAS, so I consulted its Wikipedia entry.
The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) is an air navigation aid developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of improving its accuracy, integrity, and availability. Essentially, WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including precision approaches to any airport within its coverage area.
WAAS uses a network of ground-based reference stations, in North America and Hawaii, to measure small variations in the GPS satellites' signals in the western hemisphere. Measurements from the reference stations are routed to master stations, which queue the received Deviation Correction (DC) and send the correction messages to geostationary WAAS satellites in a timely manner (every 5 seconds or better). Those satellites broadcast the correction messages back to Earth, where WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use the corrections while computing their positions to improve accuracy.
That does seem like it could be a major selling point (noting that some smartphone devices might have it, and some dedicated GPS units might not). However, I'm not clear on how well it works for land-based use since it is a ground-based system intended for aviation use. Are there line-of-sight issues, or does it use a wavelength or configuration which prevents terrain from being an issue?
I assume that for hunting and camping use, cell towers might be unavailable or at least of limited use in resolving one's position. I think that's mainly a coarse-resolution fallback for when the GPS signal is blocked or degraded anyway (presumably by buildings).
Ruggedization is probably also a major concern - but not all GPS units have this and some phones do, and in either case it may be something which can be added. This may be more of a case where only appropriate units from either category should be considered than a point in favor of one or the other...but there may also be more or cheaper ruggedized GPS units.
Your perspective is to just dismiss something because you don't want to believe it. My perspective is I've been through this procedure, you haven't. So your impression of how it goes is irrelevant.
Wow, that's some really zen pot-kettle stuff right there. How about sharing your experiences instead of claiming you must be absolutely right and I must be absolutely wrong, then saying that I'm the one dismissing things? And you're not even using the word "perspective" correctly. You're looking for a word like "position" or "behavior" or even "approach." If you're going to be rude and insulting, please at least bother to say something which makes sense.
Let's file that with all the "Product X is going to kill the iPod" predictions shall we.
Now to go back to your original, and still unjustified claim that iPhone has an "ease of development" problem compared with Android.
Are you trolling or just bad at reading? You seem to keep trying to put words in my mouth.
Apple's current setup imposes a number of undesirable factors and bars to entry which can potentially make it less competitive if there are comparable platforms available. Within a year or two it's pretty inevitable that there will be comparable platforms. This will necessarily affect changes in the market compared to the current situation. How drastic this will be, we'll have to wait and see.
You're the one saying it will kill Apple's platform, not me. I think the whole meme of "X Killer" is stupid and almost invariably incorrect. True "X Killers" are almost never something that you can see coming since it tends to entail a fundamental shift from current conditions.
Not according to Gartner, nor Canalys, nor IDC. Three companies that have been supplying worldwide market share figures for the smartphone market for over a decade.
Your data is old. There are figures from earlier this month that say otherwise. I don't know when the inversion occurred though; it could have been between May and August for all I know since I checked current data and not trend data.
What complete bunk. iPhone entered the market which had already been occupied with smartphones for 10 years.
You're drastically oversimplifying. The situations are not directly analogous just because you call both things a "smartphone" - it's rarely that simple. Claiming the modern iPhone platform is anything like a smartphone from 10 years ago is just ridiculous.
It might not be a good idea for multi-day hikes, but you can probably get reasonable single-day battery life out of many or most models. Particularly if you power off the other radios, and if you can power off the unit itself when it's not being actively used.
As to why this and not a dedicated GPS unit - sure, a dedicated unit will probably have better battery life, and it might be better for GPS usage in other ways as well. But it's almost certainly less flexible. I can really only use it for GPS - what if I also want to take pictures or make notes about each location I'm at? Sure, I could carry more dedicated devices to handle those functions. But at some point, isn't it worth carrying one device which can serve several functions while fitting in my pocket? Also, a dedicated device probably comes with the software package that it comes with. Adapting a smartphone means that you're running a mobile computing platform which just happens to have a GPS sensor - you can probably pick among several options for the software, or even program your own. Some smartphones also have additional sensors like accelerometers or compasses which could improve the functionality - not all, of course, but potentially valuable if you can get it. Maybe some dedicated GPS units have this as well, but I doubt that the really cheap ones do.
For the subby, the situation they describe really does make it sound like a dedicated unit is at least worth a serious look. A dedicated unit is more likely to "just work" and that's likely all the guy wants.
Hmm, funny that I hear so many complaints about the app store approval process and the difficulty of marketing software through that venue and about the technical limitations of the platform then. I suppose that the people I associate with have been deliberately hoodwinking me - aren't I lucky that some random guy on the internet is more reliable?
C'mon, look at your own post. Apple does all the work for you? That's the same as saying that you get to do all the hard work but have minimal control over your marketing process. This is not an attractive proposition for anyone beyond individual programmers or small teams working out of a garage.
Nor have I said anything about it proving fatal. Just detrimental. Android is already a larger platform than iPhone. It looks like MeeGo is going to be a player soon as well. Additionally, the AT&T exclusivity places limits on the potential market. Which platform will professional developers want to prioritize? Apple's current model doesn't really take competition into account - it assumes it can maintain a monopoly. This is never a good assumption to make. They're also assuming that the things they're getting away with in iTunes map directly to the App Store...but the situations are not really analogous, as they will inevitably find out.
Not so much, no. We're talking computers now, not fashion accessories.
Also, relative ease of development will pretty inevitably bite Apple on the ass. It's a giant weak spot on the iPhone, and it's even worse on a device which is moving closer to traditional computing tasks. Given that the PADD space is still relatively unexplored, lack of ability to exploit that unexplored space could conceivably make it be an even larger vulnerability.
Besides, there's an old saying in business. It's much easier to carve a slice off an existing market than it is to create a new one. Apple managed to get slate-type tablets over the threshold after about a decade of Microsoft & others trying. But now the can of worms is open and it's anyone's game.
Even if you want to go back to portable media players - which are NOT directly analogous - how many of those sold are actually non-Apple devices? Total? Don't just look at Zune. Yeah, Apple is still raking in the cash there...but a lot of other companies have made tidy profits as well. Never bet on maintaining a monopoly, it won't happen. Maybe you can keep most of it...but sooner or later someone else will manage to take a cut of their own.
Nor would I exactly discount Microsoft. Ever hear of a little latecomer called the Xbox? Besides which, MSR has been doing HCI work in this space for ages now, they simply haven't been pushing much of it into Windows proper because supporting hardware is relatively uncommon thus unprofitable to specialize in. What happens if slate-like devices become common? Do you really think that one of the giants of software won't manage to carve off a piece if they want one?
Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. (Spock, The Enterprise Incident)
Here's the thing - nothing really can remain secret for long. At least, not from the guys you're actively engaged in fighting against. Beyond immediate operations, the only people you can hope to hoodwink for long are your own citizens by way of information control and propaganda.
Are there ethical (and practical) issues involved in releasing this info? Are there similar issues involved in not releasing this info? Certainly. But in all likelihood, the harm involved in releasing it will be very limited. Anyone who could make use of it in a military sense probably already knows most of this stuff. Not all...but probably most. So what remains? It seems like it would be reasonable to conclude that the main effect is to inform the American public and international community - people the American government very much wants to keep in the dark, but people who they have no right to keep in the dark.
Anyway, the cat's out of the bag now. Everything you're seeing is spin control - it's not like making a big fuss over this is going to make it be un-leaked. On the other hand, if the government puts a big enough spin on it, the odds are that they can strongly diminish any informing effect it would have for the public. They can't go back and hide it from the people they're fighting, but they have a pretty good shot of hiding it from their taxpaying voters and from the international community. Does it make any sense to hand them a win on that front? Any damage the info could do in a military sensehas already been done.
To some extent, you can design around this. Have it be human-directed semi-automatic operation instead of strict teleoperation. This is probably good enough for orbit. Possibly good enough for lunar. But beyond that...zip. Too much latency. Eight minutes of latency per astronomical unit of distance, period, no compromises.
Given that this particular case of horrible statistics fail was all over the net for a while before it hit Slashdot, I'm guessing "an anonymous reader" may be code for "several dozen readers all submitted it at once."
Advocating, maybe not. But I'm cynical enough to believe that there would be plenty of plausible rationales for such a thing. And since it would still function as a normal hard drive thereafter, it would make the "feature" even easier to push in the name of perceived security.
Position it as part of a security suite which requires that the hardware aspects of the authentication or encryption systems are kept up-to-date within 3 or 5 years. If your security features are too out-of-date, then the system is no longer secure and the secured data must be "protected" by activating the destruct. Unsecured data would still be accessible, and you could still migrate your data (plus a fee since you waited too long) or restore access while waiving liability about releasing the secure features (again for a fee).
Frags your drive on power loss, eh? Yeah, nothing could go wrong there.
How about this. It sounds like all you're really killing is the stored key. Instead of fooling around with what amounts to a RAM chip, why not take a lesson from floppy disks? Back in the day, when you were done writing to a disk there was a little tab you would break and then the disk would be permanently read-only (unless someone used tape). Why not store the key in a little thing that you break off? If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even make it into a "security fuse" which can also be destroyed electrically if certain conditions are met (apparent unauthorized access, external trigger from chassis intrusion, planned obsolescence, et cetera).
Deep space is considerably lower in radiative flux than it is when you're near a star for obvious reasons involving decay times and 1/r^2 laws. If it worked like you're saying, the universe would be extremely bright and extremely hot everywhere. In real life, most of it is just empty.
Also, there's an old trick which pops up in hard SF every now and then. Bury your interstellar ship inside layers of rock or water or both. Get it thick enough and it will shield out damn near anything which you're likely to encounter regardless of where you are or how fast you're going. Of course there are still places you're likely to want to avoid...stellar nurseries are probably not a nice place to be, nor do you want to get too far on the inside of the habitable zone of a star. Stuff like that. But the fun thing about radiation is that you can stop any conceivable level of radiative flux simply by putting enough matter between it and you. So much for "no way" eh?
As for something as simple as sending a probe to Mars - yes, you have to account for radiation in the design. But it's hardly insurmountable. If somehow it mysteriously happens that nothing else works, you can always fall back to covering the hull in water tanks. Higher fuel cost, but certainly possible.
The spacecraft will be placed in a polar orbit to study the planet's composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. Juno will also search for clues about how Jupiter formed, including whether the planet has a rocky core, the amount of water present within the deep atmosphere, and how the mass is distributed within the planet. Juno will also study Jupiter's deep winds, which can reach speeds of 600 km/h.
As to the big "why" as in "why this instead of spending money on something else"...Jupiter is the big laboratory in our solar system. Studying it lets us lets us collect data which will help us study places where terrestrial data alone leaves things a bit fuzzy. It helps us verify the models we're already relying upon. We can make some guesses based solely on what we can observe from Earth - some extremely good guesses. But Jupiter is the big checksum in the sky. Is our understanding of the behavior of the Earth's magnetic field correct? Do our existing models hold up well for a stronger field? Do all these weird patterns we see on the surface of Jupiter and the predictions and assumptions we've made about the forces driving them hold up if we take a lot of new data from a closer vantage point? Are our assumptions about the formation of the solar system valid - and thus most of the assumptions we start with when examining more distant objects?
If you're the kind of person who can't see the value in something which doesn't directly translate into new gadgets - where do you think the technology in the cell phone (or replacement device) you'll own 20 years from now is going to come from? New technological developments are predicated upon basic scientific research. Sure, you can come up with rocks and fire and a few other nice toys without understanding why they work. Maybe god did it, or a wizard, who knows. But modern technology doesn't really work that way, it's far too complicated. Your computer is based upon a number of scientists and engineers understanding what's going on in terms of quantum mechanics, solid state physics, chemistry...not to mention loads of math. You wouldn't be online to question this without people doing basic scientific research.
Besides, the best and most human reason to go is because it's there. How could we not?
Great, you can improve your motion blur removing algorithm by recording the motion which created the blur.
Although technically, the blur in the image itself already recorded the motion, with better precision and without calibration issues. So this is more of supplementary data. The before and after images leave out the whole "you can already do this without the extra sensor data" aspect.
And really, you'll get far better results if you just use an adequately short exposure time and some mechanical stabilization. Brace your shooting arm. If you want to get fancy, use something like Canon IS lenses.
Yeah, this is nifty, especially for smartphone based cameras which may already have built-in sensors to do this. But neither is it exactly revolutionary. You'll get better photos out of learning some basic photography than you will out of fancy sensors and analysis software.
This is not useful data. The average data usage per month for all cell phone users includes (from the article) the 47% of all cell phone users who are not data users at all. This is like trying to find the average upload & download per month for broadband users by finding out the total bandwidth used by broadband subscribers then dividing it by the entire population of Earth.
Now that we've established your level of mathematical competency, could I interest you in a few lottery tickets?
From reading the article, it sounds like all the software is doing is running next-cell error analysis against a dictionary. It's not exactly a keyboard so much as a slightly hopped-up spell checker. Assuming spell checking software doesn't already take QWERTY layout into account, that is.
They took something about them screwing up in a moderately serious way while doing something people tend to get upset about them doing, and turned it into being about the quality of their customer service while incidentally advertising a rather expensive game. Since it's over Steam, net cost to Valve is some time by their database people fixing the thing they're probably legally liable to fix plus some bandwidth. Damage contained, plus nearly free marketing which would have cost quite a bit through traditional methods.
I'm a bit out of date on the nuts and bolts, mainly because I'm not in web development, but my guess is that they can only track hover actions not raw mouse data. It's not terribly different than using a tracking pixel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm usually one of the first to start worrying about privacy issues. But I think that here, the likelihood of the data set being dominated by noise and leading to extremely weird marketing behaviors is a larger concern than the privacy concerns - assuming that the patent ever leads to a practicable implementation.
On the other hand, I'm even less likely to install Google Toolbar after hearing about this.
IMO the summary is a bit vague on certain points. This sort of gives the impression that the enzyme is restoring "lost data" which was corrupted by exposure to UV, which would amount to dark sorcery.
To get a bit more specific, what seems to be happening from TFA is that the UV dumps some unexpected energy into the DNA (things like light frequency, energy level, time distribution, and so forth probably play a part). This causes the DNA to fold up in order to store the received energy, and it binds to itself in a way it's not supposed to. When transcription or whatever occurs, the normal processes do their thing but aren't aware that the UV light has secretly substituted their normal DNA storage for something which is connected to itself in ways it shouldn't be. The enzyme acts as a catalyst to break these "bad" bonds, which are presumably characteristically different than the "good" bonds which make up the DNA molecule's structure, and probably weaker as well. Therefore the enzyme can break up the "bad" bonds so that the normal cellular processes get what they expect without the enzyme itself posing a risk to the DNA.
Short and simple version: the UV light makes the DNA get tangled up in ways it shouldn't like a user playing with cables, and the enzyme untangles this mess so that the cellular processes can actually find which cord goes where.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is an excellent example of what happens when you take old ideas then apply the design and usability work which everyone else should have been doing from the start. Apple doesn't really innovate, they're just more likely to do their homework compared to the rest of the class.
Microsoft tends to innovate - look at Microsoft Research if you want to see the sort of things they're working on all the time in order to keep innovating - but the results either fail to make it into the market or end up as some feature slapped into a release haphazardly.
Innovation alone is ineffectual if your goal is to sell products and not just publish research papers.
I've talked to about a dozen or so people who do casual games for hand-held devices and browser-based delivery professionally. One guy being rude on the internet is "relaying his experiences" now? I'll go with what I heard, thanks.
Or would it help if I claimed to be an iPhone developer too? I could download the SDK in a jiff if that's the case. It's the internet, you know. Anyone can say anything. Making arguments from authority tends to imply that they're not very good ones, even if you are an authority. In other words: if you want people to be persuaded - show, don't tell.
Or, we could get back to the part where he keeps putting words in my mouth. My actual points are very simple.
This is a good point, but it's inconsistent with the verb tense he used. Then again, given the general quality of English as practiced on the internet and the tendency not to heavily proof posts, it may well have been what he meant even though it was not what he said.
You're also looking only at hardware, when you also need to take into account software, digital media distribution, and the fact that it was always more about manipulating the market than it was about directly generating revenue. Xbox is less about Xbox than it is about Windows and Office. The fact that it's now generating profits is merely a bonus.
Nor is either relevant to my original point, which was about Microsoft being damn well able to capture a meaningful slice of a given market if it pleases them to do so. Unless you want to argue about whether the Xbox platform holds a significant part of the gaming market?
I wasn't familiar with WAAS, so I consulted its Wikipedia entry.
The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) is an air navigation aid developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS), with the goal of improving its accuracy, integrity, and availability. Essentially, WAAS is intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including precision approaches to any airport within its coverage area.
WAAS uses a network of ground-based reference stations, in North America and Hawaii, to measure small variations in the GPS satellites' signals in the western hemisphere. Measurements from the reference stations are routed to master stations, which queue the received Deviation Correction (DC) and send the correction messages to geostationary WAAS satellites in a timely manner (every 5 seconds or better). Those satellites broadcast the correction messages back to Earth, where WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use the corrections while computing their positions to improve accuracy.
That does seem like it could be a major selling point (noting that some smartphone devices might have it, and some dedicated GPS units might not). However, I'm not clear on how well it works for land-based use since it is a ground-based system intended for aviation use. Are there line-of-sight issues, or does it use a wavelength or configuration which prevents terrain from being an issue?
I assume that for hunting and camping use, cell towers might be unavailable or at least of limited use in resolving one's position. I think that's mainly a coarse-resolution fallback for when the GPS signal is blocked or degraded anyway (presumably by buildings).
Ruggedization is probably also a major concern - but not all GPS units have this and some phones do, and in either case it may be something which can be added. This may be more of a case where only appropriate units from either category should be considered than a point in favor of one or the other...but there may also be more or cheaper ruggedized GPS units.
Your perspective is to just dismiss something because you don't want to believe it. My perspective is I've been through this procedure, you haven't. So your impression of how it goes is irrelevant.
Wow, that's some really zen pot-kettle stuff right there. How about sharing your experiences instead of claiming you must be absolutely right and I must be absolutely wrong, then saying that I'm the one dismissing things? And you're not even using the word "perspective" correctly. You're looking for a word like "position" or "behavior" or even "approach." If you're going to be rude and insulting, please at least bother to say something which makes sense.
Let's file that with all the "Product X is going to kill the iPod" predictions shall we.
Now to go back to your original, and still unjustified claim that iPhone has an "ease of development" problem compared with Android.
Are you trolling or just bad at reading? You seem to keep trying to put words in my mouth.
Apple's current setup imposes a number of undesirable factors and bars to entry which can potentially make it less competitive if there are comparable platforms available. Within a year or two it's pretty inevitable that there will be comparable platforms. This will necessarily affect changes in the market compared to the current situation. How drastic this will be, we'll have to wait and see.
You're the one saying it will kill Apple's platform, not me. I think the whole meme of "X Killer" is stupid and almost invariably incorrect. True "X Killers" are almost never something that you can see coming since it tends to entail a fundamental shift from current conditions.
Not according to Gartner, nor Canalys, nor IDC. Three companies that have been supplying worldwide market share figures for the smartphone market for over a decade.
Your data is old. There are figures from earlier this month that say otherwise. I don't know when the inversion occurred though; it could have been between May and August for all I know since I checked current data and not trend data.
What complete bunk. iPhone entered the market which had already been occupied with smartphones for 10 years.
You're drastically oversimplifying. The situations are not directly analogous just because you call both things a "smartphone" - it's rarely that simple. Claiming the modern iPhone platform is anything like a smartphone from 10 years ago is just ridiculous.
It might not be a good idea for multi-day hikes, but you can probably get reasonable single-day battery life out of many or most models. Particularly if you power off the other radios, and if you can power off the unit itself when it's not being actively used.
As to why this and not a dedicated GPS unit - sure, a dedicated unit will probably have better battery life, and it might be better for GPS usage in other ways as well. But it's almost certainly less flexible. I can really only use it for GPS - what if I also want to take pictures or make notes about each location I'm at? Sure, I could carry more dedicated devices to handle those functions. But at some point, isn't it worth carrying one device which can serve several functions while fitting in my pocket? Also, a dedicated device probably comes with the software package that it comes with. Adapting a smartphone means that you're running a mobile computing platform which just happens to have a GPS sensor - you can probably pick among several options for the software, or even program your own. Some smartphones also have additional sensors like accelerometers or compasses which could improve the functionality - not all, of course, but potentially valuable if you can get it. Maybe some dedicated GPS units have this as well, but I doubt that the really cheap ones do.
For the subby, the situation they describe really does make it sound like a dedicated unit is at least worth a serious look. A dedicated unit is more likely to "just work" and that's likely all the guy wants.
Hmm, funny that I hear so many complaints about the app store approval process and the difficulty of marketing software through that venue and about the technical limitations of the platform then. I suppose that the people I associate with have been deliberately hoodwinking me - aren't I lucky that some random guy on the internet is more reliable?
C'mon, look at your own post. Apple does all the work for you? That's the same as saying that you get to do all the hard work but have minimal control over your marketing process. This is not an attractive proposition for anyone beyond individual programmers or small teams working out of a garage.
Nor have I said anything about it proving fatal. Just detrimental. Android is already a larger platform than iPhone. It looks like MeeGo is going to be a player soon as well. Additionally, the AT&T exclusivity places limits on the potential market. Which platform will professional developers want to prioritize? Apple's current model doesn't really take competition into account - it assumes it can maintain a monopoly. This is never a good assumption to make. They're also assuming that the things they're getting away with in iTunes map directly to the App Store...but the situations are not really analogous, as they will inevitably find out.
Getting software to market takes more than programming.
>Nor would I exactly discount Microsoft. Ever hear of a little latecomer called the Xbox?
Yes, it's a money loser for the company which produces it.
Would you care to google that? No, it's not making as much money as Office - but that wasn't the point of the division in the first place.
Not so much, no. We're talking computers now, not fashion accessories.
Also, relative ease of development will pretty inevitably bite Apple on the ass. It's a giant weak spot on the iPhone, and it's even worse on a device which is moving closer to traditional computing tasks. Given that the PADD space is still relatively unexplored, lack of ability to exploit that unexplored space could conceivably make it be an even larger vulnerability.
Besides, there's an old saying in business. It's much easier to carve a slice off an existing market than it is to create a new one. Apple managed to get slate-type tablets over the threshold after about a decade of Microsoft & others trying. But now the can of worms is open and it's anyone's game.
Even if you want to go back to portable media players - which are NOT directly analogous - how many of those sold are actually non-Apple devices? Total? Don't just look at Zune. Yeah, Apple is still raking in the cash there...but a lot of other companies have made tidy profits as well. Never bet on maintaining a monopoly, it won't happen. Maybe you can keep most of it...but sooner or later someone else will manage to take a cut of their own.
Nor would I exactly discount Microsoft. Ever hear of a little latecomer called the Xbox? Besides which, MSR has been doing HCI work in this space for ages now, they simply haven't been pushing much of it into Windows proper because supporting hardware is relatively uncommon thus unprofitable to specialize in. What happens if slate-like devices become common? Do you really think that one of the giants of software won't manage to carve off a piece if they want one?
Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. (Spock, The Enterprise Incident)
Here's the thing - nothing really can remain secret for long. At least, not from the guys you're actively engaged in fighting against. Beyond immediate operations, the only people you can hope to hoodwink for long are your own citizens by way of information control and propaganda.
Are there ethical (and practical) issues involved in releasing this info? Are there similar issues involved in not releasing this info? Certainly. But in all likelihood, the harm involved in releasing it will be very limited. Anyone who could make use of it in a military sense probably already knows most of this stuff. Not all...but probably most. So what remains? It seems like it would be reasonable to conclude that the main effect is to inform the American public and international community - people the American government very much wants to keep in the dark, but people who they have no right to keep in the dark.
Anyway, the cat's out of the bag now. Everything you're seeing is spin control - it's not like making a big fuss over this is going to make it be un-leaked. On the other hand, if the government puts a big enough spin on it, the odds are that they can strongly diminish any informing effect it would have for the public. They can't go back and hide it from the people they're fighting, but they have a pretty good shot of hiding it from their taxpaying voters and from the international community. Does it make any sense to hand them a win on that front? Any damage the info could do in a military sensehas already been done.
There's a hard limit though. The light barrier.
To some extent, you can design around this. Have it be human-directed semi-automatic operation instead of strict teleoperation. This is probably good enough for orbit. Possibly good enough for lunar. But beyond that...zip. Too much latency. Eight minutes of latency per astronomical unit of distance, period, no compromises.
Given that this particular case of horrible statistics fail was all over the net for a while before it hit Slashdot, I'm guessing "an anonymous reader" may be code for "several dozen readers all submitted it at once."
Is it bad that my first thought upon reading this was "Dude, replicators!"?
Advocating, maybe not. But I'm cynical enough to believe that there would be plenty of plausible rationales for such a thing. And since it would still function as a normal hard drive thereafter, it would make the "feature" even easier to push in the name of perceived security.
Position it as part of a security suite which requires that the hardware aspects of the authentication or encryption systems are kept up-to-date within 3 or 5 years. If your security features are too out-of-date, then the system is no longer secure and the secured data must be "protected" by activating the destruct. Unsecured data would still be accessible, and you could still migrate your data (plus a fee since you waited too long) or restore access while waiving liability about releasing the secure features (again for a fee).
Frags your drive on power loss, eh? Yeah, nothing could go wrong there.
How about this. It sounds like all you're really killing is the stored key. Instead of fooling around with what amounts to a RAM chip, why not take a lesson from floppy disks? Back in the day, when you were done writing to a disk there was a little tab you would break and then the disk would be permanently read-only (unless someone used tape). Why not store the key in a little thing that you break off? If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even make it into a "security fuse" which can also be destroyed electrically if certain conditions are met (apparent unauthorized access, external trigger from chassis intrusion, planned obsolescence, et cetera).
Deep space is considerably lower in radiative flux than it is when you're near a star for obvious reasons involving decay times and 1/r^2 laws. If it worked like you're saying, the universe would be extremely bright and extremely hot everywhere. In real life, most of it is just empty.
Also, there's an old trick which pops up in hard SF every now and then. Bury your interstellar ship inside layers of rock or water or both. Get it thick enough and it will shield out damn near anything which you're likely to encounter regardless of where you are or how fast you're going. Of course there are still places you're likely to want to avoid...stellar nurseries are probably not a nice place to be, nor do you want to get too far on the inside of the habitable zone of a star. Stuff like that. But the fun thing about radiation is that you can stop any conceivable level of radiative flux simply by putting enough matter between it and you. So much for "no way" eh?
As for something as simple as sending a probe to Mars - yes, you have to account for radiation in the design. But it's hardly insurmountable. If somehow it mysteriously happens that nothing else works, you can always fall back to covering the hull in water tanks. Higher fuel cost, but certainly possible.
what's the purpose of its mission?
Wikipedia say:
The spacecraft will be placed in a polar orbit to study the planet's composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. Juno will also search for clues about how Jupiter formed, including whether the planet has a rocky core, the amount of water present within the deep atmosphere, and how the mass is distributed within the planet. Juno will also study Jupiter's deep winds, which can reach speeds of 600 km/h.
As to the big "why" as in "why this instead of spending money on something else"...Jupiter is the big laboratory in our solar system. Studying it lets us lets us collect data which will help us study places where terrestrial data alone leaves things a bit fuzzy. It helps us verify the models we're already relying upon. We can make some guesses based solely on what we can observe from Earth - some extremely good guesses. But Jupiter is the big checksum in the sky. Is our understanding of the behavior of the Earth's magnetic field correct? Do our existing models hold up well for a stronger field? Do all these weird patterns we see on the surface of Jupiter and the predictions and assumptions we've made about the forces driving them hold up if we take a lot of new data from a closer vantage point? Are our assumptions about the formation of the solar system valid - and thus most of the assumptions we start with when examining more distant objects?
If you're the kind of person who can't see the value in something which doesn't directly translate into new gadgets - where do you think the technology in the cell phone (or replacement device) you'll own 20 years from now is going to come from? New technological developments are predicated upon basic scientific research. Sure, you can come up with rocks and fire and a few other nice toys without understanding why they work. Maybe god did it, or a wizard, who knows. But modern technology doesn't really work that way, it's far too complicated. Your computer is based upon a number of scientists and engineers understanding what's going on in terms of quantum mechanics, solid state physics, chemistry...not to mention loads of math. You wouldn't be online to question this without people doing basic scientific research.
Besides, the best and most human reason to go is because it's there. How could we not?
That would be a great point if it involved learning something more complicated than bracing your hand.
Great, you can improve your motion blur removing algorithm by recording the motion which created the blur.
Although technically, the blur in the image itself already recorded the motion, with better precision and without calibration issues. So this is more of supplementary data. The before and after images leave out the whole "you can already do this without the extra sensor data" aspect.
And really, you'll get far better results if you just use an adequately short exposure time and some mechanical stabilization. Brace your shooting arm. If you want to get fancy, use something like Canon IS lenses.
Yeah, this is nifty, especially for smartphone based cameras which may already have built-in sensors to do this. But neither is it exactly revolutionary. You'll get better photos out of learning some basic photography than you will out of fancy sensors and analysis software.
This is not useful data. The average data usage per month for all cell phone users includes (from the article) the 47% of all cell phone users who are not data users at all. This is like trying to find the average upload & download per month for broadband users by finding out the total bandwidth used by broadband subscribers then dividing it by the entire population of Earth.
Now that we've established your level of mathematical competency, could I interest you in a few lottery tickets?
From reading the article, it sounds like all the software is doing is running next-cell error analysis against a dictionary. It's not exactly a keyboard so much as a slightly hopped-up spell checker. Assuming spell checking software doesn't already take QWERTY layout into account, that is.
Also some good spin work.
They took something about them screwing up in a moderately serious way while doing something people tend to get upset about them doing, and turned it into being about the quality of their customer service while incidentally advertising a rather expensive game. Since it's over Steam, net cost to Valve is some time by their database people fixing the thing they're probably legally liable to fix plus some bandwidth. Damage contained, plus nearly free marketing which would have cost quite a bit through traditional methods.
I'm a bit out of date on the nuts and bolts, mainly because I'm not in web development, but my guess is that they can only track hover actions not raw mouse data. It's not terribly different than using a tracking pixel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm usually one of the first to start worrying about privacy issues. But I think that here, the likelihood of the data set being dominated by noise and leading to extremely weird marketing behaviors is a larger concern than the privacy concerns - assuming that the patent ever leads to a practicable implementation.
On the other hand, I'm even less likely to install Google Toolbar after hearing about this.
IMO the summary is a bit vague on certain points. This sort of gives the impression that the enzyme is restoring "lost data" which was corrupted by exposure to UV, which would amount to dark sorcery.
To get a bit more specific, what seems to be happening from TFA is that the UV dumps some unexpected energy into the DNA (things like light frequency, energy level, time distribution, and so forth probably play a part). This causes the DNA to fold up in order to store the received energy, and it binds to itself in a way it's not supposed to. When transcription or whatever occurs, the normal processes do their thing but aren't aware that the UV light has secretly substituted their normal DNA storage for something which is connected to itself in ways it shouldn't be. The enzyme acts as a catalyst to break these "bad" bonds, which are presumably characteristically different than the "good" bonds which make up the DNA molecule's structure, and probably weaker as well. Therefore the enzyme can break up the "bad" bonds so that the normal cellular processes get what they expect without the enzyme itself posing a risk to the DNA.
Short and simple version: the UV light makes the DNA get tangled up in ways it shouldn't like a user playing with cables, and the enzyme untangles this mess so that the cellular processes can actually find which cord goes where.