Parece que en toda la historia, no ha habido un solo diciembre que no haya nevado en Varsovia.. excepto por supuesto, el diciembre en que yo vengo.
Anoche nevó un poquito.. una especie de peluza de nieve.. las calles se veian cubiertas por una muy fina capa de nieve, pero se derritió en 2 minutos..
En fin....
Check this post on Google Operating System blog with funny stuff found on google ads:
Wednesday, 8 November 2006
Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon.
Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, "an electromechanical sommelier", capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d'oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses...like "tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was."
But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot's omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.
Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated. Japanese unveil robot wine steward
Should we now rate Google Earth as PG for Brief Nudity ????Ok, so for a little history on computers design. This time about GUI development, and the Demo by Dougals Engelbart on Human Interfaces for computers, back in 1968... this is the first time ever someone uses what later was dubbed as THE MOUSE. Very interesting video to watch. It's over 1hr long, so be patient.
Douglas Englebart completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and settled down in a nice job at the NACA Institute (the forerunner of NASA). However, one day while driving to work he had an epiphany: he realized that his real calling as an engineer was not to work on small projects that might only benefit a few people. Instead, he wanted to work on something that would benefit all of humanity. He recalled Bush's essay and started thinking about ways in which a machine could be built that would augment human intellect. During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.
Finding someone to fund his wild ideas proved to be a long and difficult task. He received his PhD in 1955, and got a job at the Stanford Research Institute, where he received many patents for miniaturizing computer components. By 1959 he had earned enough recognition to receive funding from the United States Air Force to work on his ideas. In 1962, Douglas published his ideas in a seminal essay entitled "Augmenting Human Intellect." In this paper, Douglas argued that digital computers could provide the quickest method to "increase the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems." He envisioned the computer not as a replacement for human intellect, but a tool for enhancing it. One of the first hypothetical examples he described for this technology was of an architect designing a building using something similar to modern graphical CAD software.
ESA's Mars Express has obtained images of the Cydonia region, site of the famous 'Face on Mars.' The High Resolution Stereo Camera photos include some of the most spectacular views of the Red Planet ever."These images of the Cydonia region on Mars are truly spectacular, They not only provide a completely fresh and detailed view of an area famous to fans of space myths worldwide, but also provide an impressive close-up over an area of great interest for planetary geologists, and show once more the high capability of the Mars Express camera."
Cydonia is located in the Arabia Terra region on Mars and belongs to the transition zone between the southern highlands and the northern plains of Mars. This transition is characterized by wide, debris-filled valleys and isolated remnant mounds of various shapes and sizes.
Visitors to Costa Rica who insist on driving themselves do so with intuition and pure luck on not getting lock in the face of poor or lack of road signs directing them to their destination or warning of a dangerous curve ahead.
So intense is the drive to deliver high-speed Internet service to American homes that entrepreneurs have seemingly tapped every conceivable pathway: fiber-optic cable, the air, even power lines.
Now the relentless pursuit for faster, cheaper broadband is leading to perhaps the last unclaimed conduit to your house: natural gas pipes.
Nethercomm, a San Diego-area start-up, says it has developed technology to send lightning-fast broadband and TV services via wireless signals through the pipes that deliver the fuel used to heat homes and fire up stoves.
Gas pipes serve 62% of U.S. households, says the American Gas Association. Broadband in Gas, or BIG, could give consumers a third high-speed option at low costs and speeds that far surpass today's phone and cable offerings. It also could bring fast Internet to unserved rural areas. But, so far, the idea has been met with both excitement and skepticism.
"It's been a Coke and Pepsi (battle) between cable and phone companies," says
Nethercomm founder and CEO Patrick Nunally, 42, a veteran high-tech
entrepreneur. "We're in a position to come in and provide real competition."
More important, Nunally says, the pipes could be used by pay-TV providers to compete with cable and satellite. In fact, he says, Nethercomm and local gas companies would lease the wireless spectrum to any provider for myriad services: cable giants seeking extra bandwidth for their high-definition TV channels, phone companies looking to pare their multibillion-dollar investments in fiber-optic cable, even businesses such as medical providers with high-bandwidth needs.
Gas companies, besides earning revenue from leasing their pipes, could use the broadband service to remotely monitor the integrity of their lines and read gas meters.
"I think there is a general pulse of excitement" about the technology among publicly owned gas companies, says Bob Beauregard of the American Public Gas Association, which represents 650 gas providers serving 5 million rural customers.
Nunally says he hatched the idea in 2002 while searching for a new TV and broadband artery to the home that didn't require digging up streets. Around the same time, some California utilities were stringing fiber cable through gas lines to offer broadband. But the process was expensive.
Nunally says he had a "light bulb on the head" moment: wireless. Normally, the twists and turns of a gas pipe would cause wireless signals to lose strength. But ultrawideband, a new unlicensed wireless technology, sends out pulses of radio energy across such a wide swath of frequencies that if some data packets are lost, others can easily make it to the home.
Also, federal rules that limit the strength of ultrawideband signals don't apply in underground pipes. So, Nunally says, power levels can be boosted to provide each household bandwidth of up to 6 gigabits per second, several times that of a cable provider. Yet power is low enough so that signals can share the pipes with natural gas without starting a fire, he says.
A similar initiative, broadband over electric lines, is further along, with services offered in Manassas, Va., and Cincinnati and a rollout planned for Dallas this year. But the electric companies don't offer TV services and incur high costs to bend signals around transformers.
Broadband in Gas would require installation of an ultrawideband transmitter that's linked to an Internet backbone or pay-TV facility at a gas company's network hub. A receiver would be placed at a customer's gas meter. Build-out costs are about $200 per household, Nethercomm says. By contrast, broadband over power lines costs about $600 per household, while phone and cable TV networks each cost well over $1,000 per home to build, says West Technology Research Solutions.
Broadband in Gas "really has the potential to accelerate adoption of these technologies," says George West of West Technology.
Yet some say BIG is, well, a pipe dream. "It's really easy to make these kinds of claims, but it's much harder to prove in practice," says JupiterResearch analyst Joe Laszlo.
Nunally says the company, which has tested the service, plans field trials next year in San Diego, Chicago and Atlanta. But officials of Nicor Gas in Chicago and Atlanta Gas Light say they have no such plans.
"We're intrigued by the technology, but we never got that far in our
discussions,"
says Nicor spokeswoman Margi Schiemann.
Nunally says BIG could sharply cut costs for companies such as Verizon Communications, which is spending $20 billion on fiber rollouts. Verizon and Internet provider EarthLink say they have no immediate plans to deploy it.
And Freescale Semiconductor, the ultrawideband company that was working with Nethercomm, recently shifted course to focus on its handset business. "It would be hard for anybody to say (BIG) doesn't have tremendous potential," says Freescale's Jon Adams.
THE Crocodile Man, Steve Irwin, is dead. He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It appeared that he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest, Queensland Police Inspector Russell Rhodes said.
He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas where he had been filming an underwater documentary when it occurred.
Ambulance officers confirmed they attended a reef fatality this morning at Batt Reef off Port Douglas.
Mr Irwin, 44, was killed just after 11am, Eastern Australian time.
His American wife Terri learned for the tragedy from police in Tasmania, where she had been trekking in Cradle Mountain National Park.
His friend and manager John Stainton said Mr Irwin was filming some segment for daughter Bindi's show on the reef between sessions filiming the main documentary.
It is understood Mr Irwin was killed instantly.
A source said Mr Irwin was already dead when his body was brought onto the Isle.
A source said Mr Irwin's body was being airlifted to Cairns Hospital in North Queensland for formal identification.
An Emergency Services Response Management spokeswoman said they received a call about the tragedy at 11.11 am, Australian Eastern Standard Time.
"It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which
the dwarf planets exist"
En orden cronológico de la acción:
Yo, Robot y demás relatos de robots. (1950-1976)
Las Cuevas de Acero (1954).
El Sol Desnudo (1957).
Los Robots del Amanecer (1983).
Robots e Imperio (1985).
Las Corrientes del Espacio (1952).
En la Arena Estelar (Las Estrellas, como Polvo) (1951).
Guijarro en el Cielo (1950).
Preludio a la Fundación (1988).
Hacia la Fundación (1993).
Fundación (1951).
Fundación e Imperio (1952).
Segunda Fundación (1953).
Los Límites de la Fundación (1982).
Fundación y Tierra (1983).
En orden cronológico de publicación:
Yo, Robot. (1950)
Guijarro en el Cielo (1950).
Fundación (1951).
En la Arena Estelar (Las Estrellas, como Polvo) (1951).
Fundación e Imperio (1952).
Las Corrientes del Espacio (1952).
Segunda Fundación (1953).
Las Cuevas de Acero (1954).
El Sol Desnudo (1957).
Los Límites de la Fundación (1982).
Los Robots del Amanecer (1983).
Fundación y Tierra (1983).
Robots e Imperio (1985).
Preludio a la Fundación (1988).
Hacia la Fundación (1993).
En orden Mixto:
Yo, Robot y demás relatos de robots. (1950-1976)
Las Cuevas de Acero (1954).
El Sol Desnudo (1957).
Fundación (1951).
Fundación e Imperio (1952).
Segunda Fundación (1953).
Los Robots del Amanecer (1983).
Robots e Imperio (1985).
Preludio a la Fundación (1988).
Hacia la Fundación (1993).
Los Límites de la Fundación (1982).
Fundación y Tierra (1983).
Las Corrientes del Espacio (1952).
En la Arena Estelar (Las Estrellas, como Polvo) (1951).
Guijarro en el Cielo (1950).
The current state-of-the-art User Interface (UI) we've been enjoying has remained largely
stagnant since the 1980s. The greatest innovation that has been
recently released is based on video card layering/buffering techniques like Apple's Expose.
But, there is a large change coming. Rev 2 of the UI will be based on multiple
gestures and more directly involve human interaction. Apple is clearly working in the area as some of the company's patent filings demonstrate. Nevertheless, these videos might make Mac (and Windows) users experience a huge case of UI envy, as a
lot of UI development (in XGL in particular) makes the current Mac UI seem
creaky and old fashioned.
I've been collecting these links to cool new UIs
for a while (yea, I know, what a geek). Despite its geekiness, I thought some of
you might enjoy them as well. It seems there is a good chance that
multi-gesture/multi-input (MGMI) UIs will be in our future at least on some
level (apparently they will be accompanied by no dearth of techno
music).
Basically the rest of the article has a bunch of links, and brief
descriptions to those links, to cool videos of various UI that include: Wobbly
Window UIs (WWUIs), Multi-touch UIs, Mixed Physical UIs, Brain UIs, Art tools,
and even a little bit of history on the UI. Enjoy!
BBC NEWS Entertainment YouTube aims to show music videosYouTube says users watch more than 100 million videos a day Video sharing website YouTube is in talks with record labels about offering current and archive music videos.
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters news agency it was hoped that within 18 months the site would 'have every music video ever created'.
Another step forward for Microsoft's operating system
Intended for developers and not available to the public, build 5472 fixes known bugs and includes enhancements to Windows Media Center and various utilities. CNET's Robert Vamosi looks at what's changed
Windows Live Writer is a new tool from Microsoft that allows you to publish to your blog using a desktop client. While the software is integrated with Windows Live Spaces, you can also use it with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress.
What's nice about Windows Live Writer is that it reads your blog's template and it lets you preview your content while creating it. It's like seeing your blog post growing.
The rich-text editor is not impressing, as it contains the usual elements and doesn't produce clean code (you'll notice many unneeded tags). When you insert pictures, you've got more options: you can resize the picture, add a nice shadow, adjust brightness and even use some simple effects like sepia. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't allow you to publish images for the hosted blogs.
Windows Live Writer also lets you insert maps using Windows Live Local and the maps can be customized to show the aerial view or bird's eye detail.
When you select the preview mode, you'll see how your blog would look if you published the post, so it takes the idea of preview one step further.
Windows Live Writer is available to download here [4.74 MB, Windows] and it's still beta. The simple interface and the innovative additions make this tool a good replacement for the standard blogging interfaces and it's a good alternative to Performancing for Firefox, Qumana, but it's still far from a commercial application like ecto.
Google Operating System: The New BloggerEl resultado de un examen de paternidad practicado a gemelos dejó atónitos a los expertos de la sección de bioquímica del Laboratorio de Ciencias Forenses de la Policía Judicial.
La madre reclamaba el apellido de su excompañero, pero los exámenes determinaron que cada niño, pese a haber compartido al mismo tiempo el vientre materno, era de padre diferente.
The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong's famous "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," a NASA spokesman said on Monday.
Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer's Net specialist charts the web's remarkable early life and we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date. Tell us what you think of our choices here
OLGA is currently offline while we resolve legal issues with the archive. We greatly appreciate your support and hope to return to providing resources to the aspiring guitarist as soon as possible.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is streaking at 43,500 mph toward a 2015 rendezvous with Pluto. When it arrives, will it encounter the solar system's ninth planet or a demoted celestial has-been?
Nearly 3,000 astronomers and planetary scientists from around the globe will gather in Prague, Czech Republic, next week to answer that question by voting on an official definition of "planet."
For decades, schoolchildren have learned that nine planets circle the sun. But that number could drop to eight or soar to dozens, depending on the new International Astronomical Union definition.
The wording of the proposed definition has been a guarded secret since it was drafted in June.
The clandestine nature of the deliberations has heightened anticipation among scientists who have argued about Pluto's status for years. Many say it's time to resolve this thorny issue and move on.
"I have a well-developed opinion on this topic, but I'm willing to abide by whatever the IAU decides,"University of Colorado planetary scientist Larry Esposito said.
"I'm willing to give up my position for the interest of a good, solid definition that professional astronomers can agree to,"said Esposito, a team leader on the Cassini mission to Saturn
News leaks about the planet definition began to spout late this week, as the authors prepared to present a draft resolution to the IAU's executive committee Sunday in Prague. The IAU is the official arbiter of all issues related to astronomical nomenclature.
In a story that aired Thursday, unnamed sources told National Public Radio the proposed definition would include Pluto in a new class of small planets. A source also told the Rocky Mountain News on Thursday that a member of the seven-person definition panel said Pluto will remain a planet.
IAU Vice President Bob Williams described the reports as "interesting speculation" but would neither confirm nor deny them.
The May-December marriage of a young company called Microsoft and business powerhouse IBM would change the landscape of offices and homes across the globe.
August 12 is the 25th anniversary of the IBM personal computer launch, a pairing of MS and DOS, Microsoft and the disk operating system.
"MS-DOS moved computer access from a community measured in thousands to one measured in millions,"
said Benn Konsynski, professor of business administration at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.
"It was a key transition from the hobbyist and 'geek' environment to business applications,"
he said.
Several popular home computers existed before the 1981 IBM PC launch. But the regimented business world considered Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack's Tandy products "toys."
The IBM stamp of approval on a personal computer changed that mentality for good.
"Almost overnight, with IBM introducing the PC, it became OK to use it for real business applications,"
said Tycho Howle, CEO of nuBridges in Atlanta, a provider of business-to-business services.
Howle remembers with fondness his first desktop PC.
"In 1981 I had an IBM PC, two-floppy system,"
Howle said.
"To give young people these days a comparison: It would take 10 of those floppy disks to be able to hold the music that is on one MP3 song,"
he said.
A floppy disk is a thin, plastic disk that was coated with a magnetic substance used to store data. Earliest disks were 8 inches wide, more efficient disks shrunk to 5 1/4 inches, then 3 1/2 inches. Unlike a CDs or DVDs of today, the disks were floppy, or flexible.
IBM, the 800 pound gorilla of the business world at the time, flooded trade papers and television with promises that this new device would provide
"smoother scheduling, better planning, and greater productivity."
Esto está tomado de The Daily WTF. Algunos programadores estrella presentan:
I'm sure we've all heard an old-timer gruff "burglar alarm system? pmmfff! When I was a kid, we left all of our windows and doors open, and the only burglar alarm we needed was a Labrador; and we were all fine!" Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, old man. What I don’t think many of us realize is that *we* will eventually become that old fogey. Except, it won't be with burglar alarms: "eight-factor biometric synchronous quantum authentication? Pmmff! When I was a kid, all we needed to know was where the power button is and what side to boot the floppy to; and we were all fine!" So with the new drive to bigger and greater security, Brian K was happy to see that at least one company took a more nostalgic approach. He only wishes that, firstly, it wasn't the company that he just started working for; secondly, that he would have found out about it another way than being asked to join the Weekend Password Change Team; and, thirdly, that they had chosen somewhere other than one of the publicity accessible share drives to store passwords.xls, the spreadsheet which he was to work off of.
From: Network Operations Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 3:21 PM
To: Everyone
Subject: 2006 Password Change
It's that time of the year again, time for everyone to choose their new passwords. For new employees, we apologize for the inconvenience, but this a practice we follow to maintain theintegrity of our network security.Please reply to this email with the new password(s) you want touse for the systems outlined below. Starting next Friday evening,we will work through the weekend to change everyone's passwordsand anticipate being complete by Monday June 5th at 6:00am.
IT IS ESSENTIAL that you reply to this email no later than Friday, June 2nd at 5:00. If you fail to reply, you will be unable to access all of the systems below.
Windows Logon
All users receiving this email will need to submit a new passwordto use to log on to their workstation. This password must be exactly 8 characters long and can be any combination of lowercase letters and numbers. No special characters ($,@, etc.) orproper names (Mary, John, etc.) are allowed.
EmployeeNET+
Only full-time employees will need to submit a new password.This password will be used to log in to the EmployeeNET+ system and must be exactly four numbers.SPM, CRL, and EMS Systems
Only submit a password if you use these systems. The passwords for these systems need to follow the same guidelines as the Windows Logon password, and may be the same or different fromeach other.When we receive your reply, we will let you know if the passwordsmeet the guidelines outlined.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Thank you for your continued cooperation,
Network Security & Operations
STARTREK.COM: ST XI
