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Living Room / Intellivision®: Programmer Home Movies 1983/1984
« on: May 07, 2011, 03:54 PM »A glimpse inside the Mattel Electronics video game department by the Intellivision programmers.
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A glimpse inside the Mattel Electronics video game department by the Intellivision programmers.
CBS Interactive, CNET and Lime Wire have been named as defendants in a copyright infringement complaint filed this past Tuesday by a group of fifteen people, a vast majority of whom are rappers. While Lime Wire is no stranger to copyright infringement claims, the current lawsuit must have certainly come as a surprise to the other defendants, who are being accused of distributing and profiting from “software applications used to infringe copyrights on a massive scale.”
An experiment being conducted by an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aims to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon's small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a software boss pre-programmed with all the logic required to stitch myriad discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person.
The project is called My Boss is a Robot, and the boffins involved include the team of Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction, as well as freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell.
The idea is simple: computer scientists have already used Mechanical Turk to create a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. The entire process was overseen by software, not humans, and included everything from asking Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) to come up with the topic areas the entry should cover to having them fact-check the writing of previous workers to whom those topics had been assigned.
Based on this success, it seems logical that Turkers might be able to transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism. There are a million reasons this might not work, admit Giles and Campbell, but the exercise is meant to generate insight and discussion, whether or not it succeeds.
If you work in an office it's quite possible that you suffer from a condition called DAD. Now don't panic it's not serious and nothing a good book or a long walk won't cure.
My Internet browser has 24 tabs open. Among them are three separate attempts to reply to the same e-mail. My online banking session has timed out, and in the corner of my screen a Twitter feed is a never-ending scroll of news and links. Which I click. And click.
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong, is that I may have Divided Attention Disorder, or DAD. DAD encapsulates the growing phenomenon whereby the constant stream of online information could actually be changing the way our brains work.
In Japan robots are friendly helpers not Terminators.
So when they join the workforce, as they do often in factories, they are sometimes welcomed on their first day with Shinto religious ceremonies.
But whether the sick and elderly will be as welcoming to robot-like tech in their homes is a question that now vexes a Japanese care industry that is struggling with a massive manpower shortage.
Automated help in the home and hospitals, believe some, could be the answer. A rapidly ageing first world is also paying close attention to Japan's dalliance with automated care.
It wants to know whether it can construct the nursing-care and medical-care needed in a future with fewer younger people to take care of the elderly. Japan could show us how.
[...]
The country's biggest robot maker Tmsuk created a life-like one-metre tall robot six years ago, but has struggled to find interested clients.
Costing a cool $100,000 (£62,000) a piece, a rental programme was scrapped recently because of "failing to meet demands of consumers" and putting off patients at hospitals.
"We want humans caring for us, not machines," was one response.
If Donationcoder.com were a country, it would be larger than Marshall Islands
1 in every 27,624 internet users visit Donationcoder.com daily
Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, USA has a seating capacity of 65,000. A photo above is a good illustration of what a crowd of 62,771 daily donationcoder.com visitors would look like if they all gathered in one place.
Building a beautiful design is a great experience. Seeing the design break apart when people start putting in real content, though, is painful. That’s why testing it as soon as possible with real information to see how it fares is so important. To this end, Web services provide us with a lot of information with which to fill our products. In recent years, this has been a specialist’s job, but the sheer amount of information available and the number of systems to consume it makes it easier and easier to use Web services, even for people with not much development experience.
On Programmable Web1, you can find (to date) 2580 different application programming interfaces (or APIs). An API allows you to get access to an information provider’s data in a raw format and reformat it to suit your needs.
The Trouble With APIs
The problem with APIs is that access to them varies in simplicity, from just having to load data from a URL all the way up to having to authenticate with the server and give all kinds of information about the application you want to build before getting your first chunk of information.
Each API is based on a different idea of what information you need to provide, what format it should be in, what data it will give back and in what format. All this makes using third-party APIs in your products very time-consuming, and the pain multiplies with each one you use. If you want to get photos from Flickr and updates from Twitter and then show the geographical information in Twitter on a map, then you have quite a trek ahead.
Simplifying API Access
Yahoo uses APIs for nearly all of its products. Instead of accessing a database and displaying the information live on the screen, the front end calls an API, which in turn gets the information from the back end, which talks to databases. This gives Yahoo the benefit of being able to scale to millions of users and being able to change either the front or back end without disrupting the other.
Because the APIs have been built over 10 years, they all vary in format and the way in which you access them. This cost Yahoo too much time, which is why it built Yahoo Pipes2 — to ease the process.
Pipes is amazing. It is a visual way to mix and match information from the Web. However, as people used Pipes more, they ran into limitations. Versioning pipes was hard; to change the functionality of the pipe just slightly, you had to go back to the system, and it tended to slow down with very complex and large conversions. This is why Yahoo offers a new system for people’s needs that change a lot or get very complex.
YQL is both a service and a language (Yahoo Query Language). It makes consuming Web services and APIs dead simple, both in terms of access and format.
So, you want to learn about Git, the fast version control system? Then you’ve come to the right place!
In this eBook (free for the month of October! Usually $10), I’ll be guiding you through the sometimes-confusing waters of using Git to manage your development projects. The eBook clocks in at a solid 104 pages.
Most of the time, trying to be productive is pointless. In fact, it’s a big, fat waste of time. It’s kind of lame when time management (productivity techniques & hacks) ends up killing your time, huh? Here’s why this happens…
For a long time I’ve thought about why people are so crazy about productivity. I’ve wondered why I am so concerned with accomplishing and completing. I mean, when you get to the point of looking for more time-efficient ways to fold underwear, you might have a problem.
So why does productivity matter, anyway? What’s so important about achieving?
The answer… not much.
The feeling of needing to accomplish something stems from dissatisfaction with the present. With this mindset, the whole idea of achieving is to become something. On the surface, it may seem like you’re doing something positive, but there’s a subtle undercurrent of rejection of what is. Rejection of yourself.
Every company you work for always seems to have a horror story about something that happened before your arrival. Things likecurrent productionold legacy systems that used mode="SQLServer" for session state and then stored a ton of database reads in session to cache them.
The one I remember is the story of Dave, who had recently discovered the power of document.write and took it a little too far. Why have the server do all the work when the client can do it instead? Dave decided to have the server response.write a metric ton of document.write statements which would then produce the page at runtime in the browser. It’s possible he may have been thinking too hard about what David Wheeler said about indirection.
Back when JavaScript in the browser made people as nervous as a small nun at a penguin shooting, this story was pretty funny. But with the advances of in-browser JavaScript since the days of DHTML and the widespread popularity of libraries like jQuery, perhaps (and I may be giving him too much credit here) Dave was just ahead of his time.
| Application Name | Crazy URL Thing |
| Version | 0.0 |
| Short Description | Semi-Automated Mass Searching Assistant (SAMSA) |
| Supported OSes | Win-all |
| Web Page | (none yet) |
| Download Link | (none yet) |
| System Requirements |
|
| Version History |
|
| Author | app103 |
I've just opened my email and there's nothing out of the ordinary there. It's the usual daily flood of schedule, project, travel, information, and junk mail. Then I notice. I'm holding my breath.
As the email spills onto my screen, as my mind races with thoughts of what I'll answer first, what can wait, who I should call, what should have been done two days ago; I've stopped the steady breathing I was doing only moments earlier in a morning meditation and now, I'm holding my breath.
And here's the deal: You're probably holding your breath, too.
I wanted to know -- how widespread is email apnea*? I observed others on computers and BlackBerries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes. The vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, and noticed that most were mouth-breathing and hyperventilating. Consider also, that for many, posture while seated at a computer can contribute to restricted breathing.
Does it matter? How was holding my breath affecting me?
*Email apnea - a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email