prostheticknowledge:

British researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years 

The familiar pixel could be on it’s way out, as developers are putting together a video codec which works with vectors, via Extreme Tech:

The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British researchers have their way, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with… vectors.

If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on.

These two methods are very different, and they fulfill very different needs. Vector graphics, because they’re made out of geometric primitives, are infinitely scalable, making them the ideal image format for illustrations, clipart, maps, typography, Flash animations, and so on. For everything else, we use pixel bitmaps. Streaming videos, digital cameras, movie editing, video game textures — all bitmaps. There might be different file formats involved (PNG, MOV, JPG), but they’re all ultimately converted into pixel bitmaps when it comes to displaying them on your monitor, TV, or cinema screen …

… Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors. In a conventional digital camera, images (or videos) are captured as pixel bitmaps and compressed using a codec such as JPEG or H.264. Willis and Patterson have devised a codec called Vectorized Streaming Video (VSV) that converts the bitmap image into vectors. This builds on their previous work with VPI — vectorized photographic images [PDF] — which deals with converting bitmap images into perfect, vectorized copies. More Here… 

So excited about this! A few years ago I became a bit obsessed with the idea of cameras that recorded in vectors instead of pixels, but, back then, there was nothing to research online. I’m so interested in the science and tech behind this… 

ikenbot: Curiosity Rover Touches 1st Martian Rock, Makes Longest Drive Yet NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity reached out and touched a Martian rock with its huge robotic arm for the first time, then took off on its longest Red Planet drive to date. Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named “Jake Matijevic,” testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) arm. These tools include the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), which measures elemental composition, and the Mars Hand Lens Imager close-up camera, or MAHLI. The rover performed these initial “contact science” operations on Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 22 and 23), researchers said. Photos snapped on those days show Curiosity’s arm sidled up against “Jake Matijevic,” with the arm’s turret obscuring most of the 16-inch-tall (40 centimeters) rock. Full Article
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ikenbot:

Curiosity Rover Touches 1st Martian Rock, Makes Longest Drive Yet

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity reached out and touched a Martian rock with its huge robotic arm for the first time, then took off on its longest Red Planet drive to date.

Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named “Jake Matijevic,” testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) arm. These tools include the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), which measures elemental composition, and the Mars Hand Lens Imager close-up camera, or MAHLI.

The rover performed these initial “contact science” operations on Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 22 and 23), researchers said. Photos snapped on those days show Curiosity’s arm sidled up against “Jake Matijevic,” with the arm’s turret obscuring most of the 16-inch-tall (40 centimeters) rock.

Full Article

(via scinerds)

Source: ikenbot

spytap:

Anonymous claims to have captured 12 million Apple device UUIDs from FBI Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl

soupsoup:

Anonymous states:

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of “NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.” 

The UUID uniquely identifies an iPhone from one another. It also ties directly to personal information stored on the phone. Anonymous alleges the FBI was using the UUIDs to track phones, over 12 million of them.

As an owner of an Apple device and an American under federal jurisdiction of the FBI, I find myself far less concerned that Anonymous hacked its way into owning a list of 12 million identified devices along with personal information on most, and far more concerned that the FBI had the aforementioned list in the first place.

Source: soupsoup

via mashabletech on twitter

How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so.

Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.

In the new study, lead author James Quach and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia say the hypothesis can be tested by looking for defects that would have formed in the structure of space-time whenthe universe crystallized. The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old.

“Think of the early universe as being like a liquid,” Quach said in a statement. “Then as the universe cools, it ‘crystallises’ into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice.”

If they exist, these cracks should be detectable, the researchers said, because light and other particles would bend or reflect off of them as they trek across the cosmos.

Thanks NASA: Ustream tops cable news

shortformblog:

  • 3.2 millionusers watched the official NASA broadcast of Curiosity’s Mars landing on UStream
  • 500,000 users tuned in during the Ustream broadcast’s peak point, via several different content streams source

» Those numbers were enough to beat the Nielsen ratings almost every major cable news network — including CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC — leaving Fox News as the lone out-performer with 803,000 viewers. The folks at UStream don’t seem to think it was a fluke either. “This speaks to how much more sophisticated social media tools are getting on the web,” said company spokesman Tony Riggins, adding, “Consumers are adapting technologies to get news now from sources like Ustream.”

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Forget Instagram’s billion-dollar payday. Forget IPOs, past and future, from Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and the like. And ignore, please, the online ramblings of attention-hungry venture capitalists and narcissistic Silicon Valley journalists with the off-putting habit of making their inside-baseball sound like the World Series. Their stories, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying very little about the impact of technology on most of our lives.

- Paul Smalera, via soupsoup, reply via rickwebb

While this is probably directed to my ilk, I take no offense. Most people, including myself, don’t particularly know what they’re talking about with this deal. And we’re all guessing on the future impact of technology.

But do feel compelled to point out to you that the Facebook-Instagram deal is significantly bigger than the World Series by every conceivable measure: economic, number of people effected, societal, cultural. The most profitable world series ever raked in about $50 million in ad revenue and attendance revenue: 1/20th the economics of this single deal. The largest viewership ever totalled 25 million: 1/40th the number of people involved this deal. Americans spend about 12 times more time per year on Facebook than they do watching even a 7 game series. Even in terms of games, Zynga makes forty times more money per year than the World Series does. Most of that is on Facebook. Though sadly they do not have a baseball game yet.   

With all due respect, the World Series is child’s play compared to this deal. A poor metaphor.

(via rickwebb)

Source: soupsoup

via here’s som eawesome :

How robots see the world

Both brilliant and appropriately creepy, Robot readable world by Timo Arnall attempts to show us how computers “see” the world, gathering “meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us.”

So now that we know how the machines see us, how long will it be untii we start deploying camouflage in order to hide from the machines?

Robot readable world, created by Timo Arnall.

Music: ”Cold Summer Landscape” by Blear Moon.

via we speak for the earth:

Congressional staffers behind SOPA get shiny new jobs as entertainment industry lobbyists - Allison Halataei (former deputy chief of staff for House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas)) and Lauren Pastarnack (former senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee) have cool new jobs. Having written the Internet-destroying Stop Online Piracy Act for their bosses while drawing a salary at public expense, they’ve now accepted massive raises to go work for the entertainment companies who stand to benefit from the law they wrote. Their new job? Helping to run the campaign to push their law through.

Halataei recently joined the National Music Publishers’ Association, and Pastarnack is jumping to the Motion Pictures Association of America, two lobbying groups pressing Congress to pass the proposals…

“This is one of those mega-fights where there is a lot of money at stake and whenever it gets to that, it’s kind of ‘Katy bar the door’ as far as what they’ll pay for talent,” said McCormick Group headhunter Ivan Adler. “This fits into the perfect scenario of why senior-level people from well-placed committees get hired, and it’s because they really know the three p’s: people, policy and process. And that makes them very valuable in the Washington marketplace.”

The former aides will face one-year lobbying bans, which means they cannot lobby the respective committees where they previously worked. But those bans don’t render the former aides useless to their new employers.

“They can provide invaluable insight to people on the outside — even in the consultation mode,” one tech industry lobbyist said, noting that Halataei had been Smith’s secondhand person and knows how the Texas Republican thinks and what would be an effective lobbying strategy.

Here are is the facebook page for Allison Halataei, the twitter accounts for Lamar Smith and Lauren Pastarnack, message them, twitter @ them; let them know that they are corporate shills, that they deserve to answer for what they’ve done. Make no mistake, there would be no turning back from SOPA.

(via scinerds)

Source: Boing Boing

parislemon:

Well, we all knew this was coming. 

In a sit down with Forbes’ Eric Savitz, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie talks about how Microsoft has actually been doing what Siri offers for the past year with Tellme technology on Windows Phone. He dismisses Siri’s buzz as basically just good marketing and people being “infatuated” with Apple. 

Sadly, the majority of the time a company comes out with something that excites people, a competitor will come out and yell “FIRST!”. When Apple makes the product, it tends to happen every single time. And Microsoft is the worst at this type of “us first” nonsense. They don’t seem to realize that it just makes them look pathetic — or worse, highlights their own irrelevance in the space. 

I’m reminded of a line from the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:

“If you had invented Facebook, you would’ve invented Facebook.”

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