Archives for 2012

Never get in the way of a hobbyist, we always say!
=======Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit – usually only for brief periods of time – but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.”The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said.
Via www.bbc.co.uk

Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings. But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.

In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy — meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren’t so different from younger adults.
“Many people think that it is just natural for older people’s brains to slow down as they age, but we’re finding that isn’t always true,” said Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the studies.
“At least in some situations, 70-year-olds may have response times similar to those of 25-year olds.”
Via www.sciencedaily.com

THE industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology’s other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question—a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin—pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory. Small items can be made by a machine like a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a shop or even a house; big items—bicycle frames, panels for cars, aircraft parts—need a larger machine, and a bit more space.
Via www.economist.com

The really big Internet IPO returned and the massive venture capital funding bubble inflated, which seems difficult considering that the venture capital industry is far smaller than it was three years ago. But look at some of the crazy valuations on revenue-less photo-sharing startups like Color and Path. And there is clearly another bubble inflating in the cloud computing sector, with every company that uses a distributed architecture now calling itself a “cloud company.” So what does 2012 have in store? Here are my predictions.
Via venturebeat.com

A NASA spacecraft fired its engine and slipped into orbit around the moon Saturday in the first of two back-to-back arrivals over the New Year’s weekend.Ground controllers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers and applause after receiving a signal that the probe was healthy and circling the moon. An engineer was seen on closed-circuit television blowing a noisemaker to herald the New Year’s Eve arrival.”This is great, a big relief,” deputy project scientist Sami Asmar told a roomful of family and friends who gathered at the NASA center to watch the drama unfold.
Via www.cbc.ca