"Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free. Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."
Translation from Jobs-esque:
"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."
It's just a model for software development, a base to step on.
There are more than enough commercial companies willing to "take responsibility" and provide support. Yes: just grabbing some source code from teh internet isn't a replacement for the services a full-blown software corporation may offer to you as a customer.
But who the hell claimed otherwise (except some geeks, that noone listens to).
Toasting bread with your Linux toaster.. for Dummies
Configuring For Toasting:
Change directory to/usr/src/Linux and issue the command: make menuconfig This will build a few programs and then quickly pop up a window. The window menu lets you alter many aspects of toast configuration. After you have made any necessary changes, save the configuration and follow these instructions--do a
make dep; make clean...
..... snip few pages later....
and then, if you are on a toaster slower than 200MHz, go and make a cup of tea. This takes about 20 minutes on a Pentium 90...the toasting kernel has a lot of source code as you may have noticed when downloading it. When this is complete do a: make modules This will not take as long.
Installing a New Toast:
Phew, finally! The last step is installing the new kernel to the right place in/boot with the command cp/usr/Linux/src/arch/i386/boot/zImage/boot/newkernel then make modules_install This will install the modules in/lib/modules. Next, edit/etc/lilo.conf to add a section like this image =/boot/newkernel label = new read-only
At the next reboot, select the kernel 'new' in lilo, and it will load the new kernel. If it works fine, move it to the first position in the lilo.conf so it will boot every time by default.
..... snip few pages later....
Summary:
Preparing a toast with your Linux appliance is a relatively simple operation - if you have done it before! At first it can seem daunting, but well within the capabilities of today's average housewife.
Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy
This is from their Chief Culture Officer. Do as I say, not as I do?
This is only natural. See: they are a big corporation now, and it operates like a big corporation. But they recognize their old image lets them do a lot of things without a public outcry.
They are so casual and open, it's simply so ok to hold your personal data (since they're good guys and won't abuse it), and it's even ok if they mess up and lose some of your emails and settings (they're just guys like you and me, not robots, give 'em a break!).
But it's really just a shell. Do you know those exotic bees which lay their eggs inside caterpillars. To anyone outside, this is still a caterpillar for a long, long time (Google-y! Yei!), but on the inside the bee is eating it up ("Chief Culture Officer" and other corporate signs).
One day the caterpillar cracks open and you see nothing is left except the bee and an empty shell.
cause as soon as you move it, the scene will fail to change and the illusion is lost.
Call me when you can give me 3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms.
The illusion isn't lost, but the experience is as if the universe in front of you just got skewed a little.
Cinematographically speaking, having a fixed set of pictures for you both eyes is a LOT , A LOT better for a movie than a "3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms", as it means the moviemaker has control over depth of field, camera angles, and a lot more control at post-production.
I don't imagine that "hologram" kind of cinema will ever pick up. While someone who's on the right side gets tos ee all the action, someone looking 40 degrees left has to watch all actors in back all the time.
The cost of such a movie wouldn't be worth it either.
3D cinema will never be accepted while you need to wear those cheap paper glasses. It will always be a gimmick. It doesn't matter if a major studio releases a children's school-holidays blockbuster in 3D - in fact that just makes it more gimmicky. Wake me up when a 3D film wins an Oscar for Best Picture.
The first even movie was simply a moving train and people moving.
Then lots of years of news reports and gimmicky comedies followed (Chaplin anyone? I'm not sure his work is Oscar worthy but..).
First comes technology and the technology demos, the movies exploiting the technology for technology's sake. Then come artists. Always has been this way..
BTW, correct me if I'm wrong, but 3D with polarised light has been around for quite some time now. What's different with Real D??
I hope that ClassicMenu works on Access, because I have a project to do for my database class...okay, after reading TFA I think I'm SOL.:( How am I ever going to figure out how to do the silly crap I'm supposed to do? -- Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Well don't you ever think about anything silly, such as spending a minute with the manual or looking around in the interface to get accustomed.
Follow your signature: wait, and good things will come to you.
I know, that in the first two days with Office 2007, I've not only caught up with the new position of the commands I used, but learned far more about Excel/Word's capabilities compared to what I was used for so many years before it.
The "ok where the heck they put that" moments come only the first time you need to locate something, and the manual is right there, with searchable text. You did saw the "?" icon, right, that's the help. Click it, it works in 2007 too.
The examples I can find in flash are 1-2 liners in R. Seriously, plotting a bar graph or pie graph or scatter plot is 2 lines (1 line input the data, 1 line to plot the graph.) Now, do something complicated and interesting as shown above. Do a multi-dimensonal plot. Do a box and whiskers plot (again, a 1 liner in R) that calculates medians, quartiles, etc.
Lookup Flex Charts. An open-source Flash library for rendering charts, by Adobe.
It can renders charts if you just feed it the data (in XML format) and what chart type you want.
Remember how programmers always talk about using the right tool for the right job?
If you want to do something like graphing, then why not learn a language like R, where you can easily and interactively create amazing visuals in very little time? I write code in Java, python, bash, and interact with Oracle and MySQL database. R fits in as a nice way to visualize data, and it's very easy to script up solutions that you can plug into your programming pipeline.
There's Flash for Linux/Windows/Mac, and it can render animated charts with filters, dynamic ordering and show details on demand.
I really doubt someone beats that (and Java doesn't beat that, for 20 times the size it's 20 times harder to pull off the same results there).
Something says it would be more polite if Google were to close the Performics division outright and then reverse-engineer its tactics to stomp out SEO-spam companies.
How about they dismantle the whole DoubleClick, and then stop showing AdWords/AdSense! That'll make them popular. And kill their share value.
For a public traded company, selling Performics is hard enough, even more is to close a valuable asset without any compensation.
You have to hand it to the RIAA. That is a brilliant business model. By claiming these royalties and "holding on to them" until the artist pays a fee to receive what is rightfully theirs, the RIAA is essentially getting an interest free loan from every artist that gets net radio play. ON TOP OF THAT, the artists have to PAY the RIAA in order to be compensated for the loan (on which the artists collect no interest)! That my friends, is the best money making scheme I have ever seen. Ever. Just beautiful. From a businessman's point of view, it brings a tear to my eye.
This business model is brilliant on paper. If it was actually brilliant, people wouldn't ignore/rebel/fight against it.
As far as I know, this is no different [nogenre.com] from other performance rights organizations like ASCAP/BMI/etc. right? They collect money for everyone, whether the artist is registered with them or not. The only question is whether we need yet another performance rights organization...
Being unable to air your songs for free on radio unless you pay someone (not the author), that's insane, there's gotta be a loophole somewhere about what constitutes a "performance" that can be charged.
For example dealing with the artist to represent the songs as internal production of the workstation (to the RIAA/SongExchange only), in which case, no money changes hands as no one pays royalties to himself for his own work.
They can't control internet stations airing independent artists anyway, internet stations pop-up in thousands all over the place, may be placed well outside USA (but be heard in USA). We're seeing the last gasps of those organizations striving for relevance.
assuming you could find a way to scan it's structure. Though the process would likely involve causing brain death to prevent changes to the brain while you were scanning...
Hehe, indeed. Scanning a 3D structure with such detail would be incredibly tricky. Furthermore, to emulate it, you're need more or less a full blown physics simulator.
But then it's not about the brain research at all. You need research in deep 3D scanning and accurate physics simulation. The rest goes naturally:P
I don't know who you are and how you operate, but most people who speak this way are materialists and came up with this idea while sitting behind their wide-screen TV eating pizza. The idea of you being the sum of your parts and actually experiencing the process directly are two entirely different things. Have you laid on your back in the grass and felt the blood course through your veins, and the palpitations of the heart, recognizing how fragile the system is? Have you sick with a disease that actually affects the functioning of the brain? It makes you TRULY realize that these supposed Platonic, monolithic steel ideas in your head are really just organized meat that will soon disintegrate into the surrounding environment. When you actually feel all the parts of your body working at once, wake up to it, the initial shock can be VERY scary.
And this above is, I suppose, your brain on drugs.
So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?
That's just as unlikely. People used to computer technology know that the hardware structure and the software state are two completely different things. This is why you can build a model of the hardware, feed it the state, and bang, you have a Gameboy emulator (or whatever).
But with biology, those two are intermixed. Brain saves information by changing the connections and structure itself. This means that you can build a model of a generic human brain, run it, and you have full blown AI.
But you can't feed it the state of any human being. As every human being has different "wiring", hence won't "play" in your model.
Someone mentioned Smalltalk. Smalltalk kinda works like a brain in that regard. State is structure is state.
Unlikely, given that we are really no where close to even understanding completely everything about our complex brains.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?
afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control?
Don't be afraid to know more. It's coming if you want it or not. It doesn't mean a thing about free will: did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.
As for the "mental storage" - simulating a brain doesn't mean much about mental storage. Knowing and simulating an Intel chip in a program doesn't mean you can crack open an already produced Intel chip unit and hack few more cores in it.
Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc.
All these act as peripheral devices to our brain, and we should expect tighter integration between the brain and those (for example a wire projecting video directly in your cortex), but nothing that "expands" the brain structure at such a low level as is hinted in the summary.
It's not a sustainable stable solution to the censorship, it helps China save face and claim it still has control. I suppose those who wants to share information freely already use anonymizers and encrypted traffic.
You can't detect/censor encrypted traffic, unless you ban all of the encrypted traffic.
China will open up, but by the looks of it, it'll be a slow and painful process (pun not intended).
Make OLPC's CPU non-x86. Windows is portable like... Like... Like... It's not.
Windows NT started on the Alpha processors, later was ported to x86. In recent years it was ported to x64 and Itanium (Itanium share nothing with x86 except the company that made them).
Now that the OLPC and Intel's Classmate PC can both run Windows, is Linux in the developing world in trouble?
In trouble of what. It had very low desktop market share and will continue to have low market share. Not exactly a "trouble", not a victory either.
If "Vista Capable" level of compatibility is what we should expect from an OLPC running XP starter edition, I think Linux will prevail.
While I'm a strong supporter of Windows versus Linux as a desktop client (as Linux simply has too many logistical and usability problems YET), for the purpose of the OLPC, and given that it'll come pre-configured and pre-bundled with the necessary apps, Linux is quite up to the task.
So are black holes true singularities or is that just a mathematical simplification?
It's a true singularity. The "big mass in small space" is the previous stage, "neutron star", where the atom structure collapses and protons merge with electrons. But anyway - black holes have no volume, for real.
The article claims, that unlike a black hole, a "wormhole" (in the sense they explain it) has no event horizon. If it has no event horizon, it means light can escape it.
So it wouldn't look like a black hole AT ALL. I call bullshit on the whole article.
We have to assume that if blackholes can form in our universe, then they can form in the "other" universe.
Let's just be clear that without more details, the claim that wormholes open in some "other" universe appear quite random. The original theory of wormholes doesn't claim any other universes, just different points in the same (and only) mother universe we know.
There are two types of "other" universes currently science theorizes about: parallel universes as found in quantum theory (all possibilities of a super-state), and the universes formed by the additional dimensions suggested by the string theory (where "sliding" along the additional dimensions may create alternative universes where laws of physics change and even Pi might change as a constant).
Again, maybe just the article is written poorly, but it seems they're talking about some kind of Star Trek -style "other" universe, and we should expect lots of aliens with rubber foreheads. It's hard to take any of this seriously when all of the substance and coherence was sucked out (if it ever existed) in the process of turning it into an article.
Slashdot Mirror
"Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free. Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."
Translation from Jobs-esque:
"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."
It's just a model for software development, a base to step on.
There are more than enough commercial companies willing to "take responsibility" and provide support. Yes: just grabbing some source code from teh internet isn't a replacement for the services a full-blown software corporation may offer to you as a customer.
But who the hell claimed otherwise (except some geeks, that noone listens to).
Toasting bread with your Linux toaster.. for Dummies
/usr/src/Linux and issue the command:
..... snip few pages later ....
/boot with the command /usr/Linux/src/arch/i386/boot/zImage /boot/newkernel /lib/modules. Next, edit /etc/lilo.conf to add a section like this /boot/newkernel
..... snip few pages later ....
Configuring For Toasting:
Change directory to
make menuconfig
This will build a few programs and then quickly pop up a window. The window menu lets you alter many aspects of toast configuration.
After you have made any necessary changes, save the configuration and follow these instructions--do a
make dep; make clean...
and then, if you are on a toaster slower than 200MHz, go and make a cup of tea. This takes about 20 minutes on a Pentium 90...the toasting kernel has a lot of source code as you may have noticed when downloading it. When this is complete do a:
make modules
This will not take as long.
Installing a New Toast:
Phew, finally! The last step is installing the new kernel to the right place in
cp
then
make modules_install
This will install the modules in
image =
label = new
read-only
At the next reboot, select the kernel 'new' in lilo, and it will load the new kernel. If it works fine, move it to the first position in the lilo.conf so it will boot every time by default.
Summary:
Preparing a toast with your Linux appliance is a relatively simple operation - if you have done it before! At first it can seem daunting, but well within the capabilities of today's average housewife.
Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy
This is from their Chief Culture Officer. Do as I say, not as I do?
This is only natural. See: they are a big corporation now, and it operates like a big corporation. But they recognize their old image lets them do a lot of things without a public outcry.
They are so casual and open, it's simply so ok to hold your personal data (since they're good guys and won't abuse it), and it's even ok if they mess up and lose some of your emails and settings (they're just guys like you and me, not robots, give 'em a break!).
But it's really just a shell. Do you know those exotic bees which lay their eggs inside caterpillars. To anyone outside, this is still a caterpillar for a long, long time (Google-y! Yei!), but on the inside the bee is eating it up ("Chief Culture Officer" and other corporate signs).
One day the caterpillar cracks open and you see nothing is left except the bee and an empty shell.
Yeah man.. this concept of watching 3d figures on a stage of some kind.. it'll never take off.
:P
You're hinting at the fact that people think of theatre as some sort of 3D cinema? Wow, how shallow and misunderstood
cause as soon as you move it, the scene will fail to change and the illusion is lost.
Call me when you can give me 3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms.
The illusion isn't lost, but the experience is as if the universe in front of you just got skewed a little.
Cinematographically speaking, having a fixed set of pictures for you both eyes is a LOT , A LOT better for a movie than a "3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms", as it means the moviemaker has control over depth of field, camera angles, and a lot more control at post-production.
I don't imagine that "hologram" kind of cinema will ever pick up. While someone who's on the right side gets tos ee all the action, someone looking 40 degrees left has to watch all actors in back all the time.
The cost of such a movie wouldn't be worth it either.
3D cinema will never be accepted while you need to wear those cheap paper glasses. It will always be a gimmick. It doesn't matter if a major studio releases a children's school-holidays blockbuster in 3D - in fact that just makes it more gimmicky.
Wake me up when a 3D film wins an Oscar for Best Picture.
The first even movie was simply a moving train and people moving.
Then lots of years of news reports and gimmicky comedies followed (Chaplin anyone? I'm not sure his work is Oscar worthy but..).
First comes technology and the technology demos, the movies exploiting the technology for technology's sake. Then come artists. Always has been this way..
BTW, correct me if I'm wrong, but 3D with polarised light has been around for quite some time now. What's different with Real D??
I hope that ClassicMenu works on Access, because I have a project to do for my database class...okay, after reading TFA I think I'm SOL. :( How am I ever going to figure out how to do the silly crap I'm supposed to do?
--
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Well don't you ever think about anything silly, such as spending a minute with the manual or looking around in the interface to get accustomed.
Follow your signature: wait, and good things will come to you.
I know, that in the first two days with Office 2007, I've not only caught up with the new position of the commands I used, but learned far more about Excel/Word's capabilities compared to what I was used for so many years before it.
The "ok where the heck they put that" moments come only the first time you need to locate something, and the manual is right there, with searchable text. You did saw the "?" icon, right, that's the help. Click it, it works in 2007 too.
The examples I can find in flash are 1-2 liners in R. Seriously, plotting a bar graph or pie graph or scatter plot is 2 lines (1 line input the data, 1 line to plot the graph.) Now, do something complicated and interesting as shown above. Do a multi-dimensonal plot. Do a box and whiskers plot (again, a 1 liner in R) that calculates medians, quartiles, etc.
Lookup Flex Charts. An open-source Flash library for rendering charts, by Adobe.
It can renders charts if you just feed it the data (in XML format) and what chart type you want.
Remember how programmers always talk about using the right tool for the right job?
If you want to do something like graphing, then why not learn a language like R, where you can easily and interactively create amazing visuals in very little time? I write code in Java, python, bash, and interact with Oracle and MySQL database. R fits in as a nice way to visualize data, and it's very easy to script up solutions that you can plug into your programming pipeline.
There's Flash for Linux/Windows/Mac, and it can render animated charts with filters, dynamic ordering and show details on demand.
I really doubt someone beats that (and Java doesn't beat that, for 20 times the size it's 20 times harder to pull off the same results there).
Something says it would be more polite if Google were to close the Performics division outright and then reverse-engineer its tactics to stomp out SEO-spam companies.
How about they dismantle the whole DoubleClick, and then stop showing AdWords/AdSense! That'll make them popular.
And kill their share value.
For a public traded company, selling Performics is hard enough, even more is to close a valuable asset without any compensation.
You have to hand it to the RIAA. That is a brilliant business model. By claiming these royalties and "holding on to them" until the artist pays a fee to receive what is rightfully theirs, the RIAA is essentially getting an interest free loan from every artist that gets net radio play. ON TOP OF THAT, the artists have to PAY the RIAA in order to be compensated for the loan (on which the artists collect no interest)! That my friends, is the best money making scheme I have ever seen. Ever. Just beautiful. From a businessman's point of view, it brings a tear to my eye.
This business model is brilliant on paper. If it was actually brilliant, people wouldn't ignore/rebel/fight against it.
It's only a matter of time before they're gone.
As far as I know, this is no different [nogenre.com] from other performance rights organizations like ASCAP/BMI/etc. right? They collect money for everyone, whether the artist is registered with them or not. The only question is whether we need yet another performance rights organization...
Being unable to air your songs for free on radio unless you pay someone (not the author), that's insane, there's gotta be a loophole somewhere about what constitutes a "performance" that can be charged.
For example dealing with the artist to represent the songs as internal production of the workstation (to the RIAA/SongExchange only), in which case, no money changes hands as no one pays royalties to himself for his own work.
They can't control internet stations airing independent artists anyway, internet stations pop-up in thousands all over the place, may be placed well outside USA (but be heard in USA). We're seeing the last gasps of those organizations striving for relevance.
assuming you could find a way to scan it's structure. Though the process would likely involve causing brain death to prevent changes to the brain while you were scanning...
:P
Hehe, indeed. Scanning a 3D structure with such detail would be incredibly tricky. Furthermore, to emulate it, you're need more or less a full blown physics simulator.
But then it's not about the brain research at all. You need research in deep 3D scanning and accurate physics simulation. The rest goes naturally
I don't know who you are and how you operate, but most people who speak this way are materialists and came up with this idea while sitting behind their wide-screen TV eating pizza. The idea of you being the sum of your parts and actually experiencing the process directly are two entirely different things. Have you laid on your back in the grass and felt the blood course through your veins, and the palpitations of the heart, recognizing how fragile the system is? Have you sick with a disease that actually affects the functioning of the brain? It makes you TRULY realize that these supposed Platonic, monolithic steel ideas in your head are really just organized meat that will soon disintegrate into the surrounding environment. When you actually feel all the parts of your body working at once, wake up to it, the initial shock can be VERY scary.
And this above is, I suppose, your brain on drugs.
So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?
That's just as unlikely. People used to computer technology know that the hardware structure and the software state are two completely different things. This is why you can build a model of the hardware, feed it the state, and bang, you have a Gameboy emulator (or whatever).
But with biology, those two are intermixed. Brain saves information by changing the connections and structure itself. This means that you can build a model of a generic human brain, run it, and you have full blown AI.
But you can't feed it the state of any human being. As every human being has different "wiring", hence won't "play" in your model.
Someone mentioned Smalltalk. Smalltalk kinda works like a brain in that regard. State is structure is state.
Unlikely, given that we are really no where close to even understanding completely everything about our complex brains.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?
afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control?
Don't be afraid to know more. It's coming if you want it or not. It doesn't mean a thing about free will: did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.
As for the "mental storage" - simulating a brain doesn't mean much about mental storage. Knowing and simulating an Intel chip in a program doesn't mean you can crack open an already produced Intel chip unit and hack few more cores in it.
Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc.
All these act as peripheral devices to our brain, and we should expect tighter integration between the brain and those (for example a wire projecting video directly in your cortex), but nothing that "expands" the brain structure at such a low level as is hinted in the summary.
It's not a sustainable stable solution to the censorship, it helps China save face and claim it still has control. I suppose those who wants to share information freely already use anonymizers and encrypted traffic.
You can't detect/censor encrypted traffic, unless you ban all of the encrypted traffic.
China will open up, but by the looks of it, it'll be a slow and painful process (pun not intended).
Anyone know if it will be "Vista Ready"? :)
Right, but your battery power expires while still booting.
Make OLPC's CPU non-x86. Windows is portable like... Like... Like... It's not.
Windows NT started on the Alpha processors, later was ported to x86. In recent years it was ported to x64 and Itanium (Itanium share nothing with x86 except the company that made them).
Don't invent problems where there aren't.
Now that the OLPC and Intel's Classmate PC can both run Windows, is Linux in the developing world in trouble?
In trouble of what. It had very low desktop market share and will continue to have low market share. Not exactly a "trouble", not a victory either.
If "Vista Capable" level of compatibility is what we should expect from an OLPC running XP starter edition, I think Linux will prevail.
While I'm a strong supporter of Windows versus Linux as a desktop client (as Linux simply has too many logistical and usability problems YET), for the purpose of the OLPC, and given that it'll come pre-configured and pre-bundled with the necessary apps, Linux is quite up to the task.
So are black holes true singularities or is that just a mathematical simplification?
It's a true singularity. The "big mass in small space" is the previous stage, "neutron star", where the atom structure collapses and protons merge with electrons. But anyway - black holes have no volume, for real.
I spend more than I probably should on music, but I still pay for one of those subscription services. Why? To audition new music.
You can use free and legal services like Pandora for this.
The article claims, that unlike a black hole, a "wormhole" (in the sense they explain it) has no event horizon. If it has no event horizon, it means light can escape it.
So it wouldn't look like a black hole AT ALL. I call bullshit on the whole article.
We have to assume that if blackholes can form in our universe, then they can form in the "other" universe.
Let's just be clear that without more details, the claim that wormholes open in some "other" universe appear quite random. The original theory of wormholes doesn't claim any other universes, just different points in the same (and only) mother universe we know.
There are two types of "other" universes currently science theorizes about: parallel universes as found in quantum theory (all possibilities of a super-state), and the universes formed by the additional dimensions suggested by the string theory (where "sliding" along the additional dimensions may create alternative universes where laws of physics change and even Pi might change as a constant).
Again, maybe just the article is written poorly, but it seems they're talking about some kind of Star Trek -style "other" universe, and we should expect lots of aliens with rubber foreheads. It's hard to take any of this seriously when all of the substance and coherence was sucked out (if it ever existed) in the process of turning it into an article.