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Comment lame, the one things besides windows that MS had (Score 1) 99

First they killed their crown jewel powerpoint by neglect, now the other useful app that is so simple and easy to use and manage, trying force people to teams that everyone hates to be forced to use, just ask people MS! We will never use teams, instead whatsapp or mattermost or something that we don't need IT dept to care for. This is so dumb.

Comment Re:biomimetic for purely philosophical reasons (Score 1) 165

Well to be fair just as they say in real estate*, machine vision needs good lighting, lighting, lighting - just these retina sensors naturally don't like deeply modulated flickering lighting. They like DC lighting, but it needn't be uniform or very bright. We've run this demo in a variety of situations, private homes, lecture halls, offices with lights on and off, shadows across the balancer, outdoors, etc. Some exhibition halls use sodium lighting which flickers very deeply and I guess that was the situation above. I wonder if high frame rate conventional cameras are bothered by this type of lighting also? Maybe they beat against it?

The machine vision community in general doesn't take kindly to an new form of representation that does away with frames, which have been with us since the days of drum scanners. But there's no reason that the beautiful developments of machine vision can't be brought to this new representation, which allows one to think in a new way about vision which seems in some ways closer to how it happens in animals.
* location location location

Comment Re:Amazing (or hoax)? (Score 1) 165

No hoax. There is a rubber cup (what we call the hand) that the tip sits in, but it only serves to let the balancer move the tip laterally. Without the balancer being active, the pencil falls right over. In fact we noticed recently that the performance dropped off (couldn't balance as long as before) and cleaning off all the nice accumulated graphene from the cup helps it hold onto the pencil better. Slow motion recordings with another retina showed that at least once when the pencil fell down it was because noise in the retina input or some other source of noise called for a very rapid movement of the cup that was so quick that the pencil just bounced up out of the cup.

Science

Physicists Do What Einstein Thought Impossible 193

An anonymous reader writes "Einstein worked on Brownian motion (the movement of small particles in a fluid as they collide with the fluid's molecules) in 1905, but said it would be 'impossible' to determine the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance. Now researchers have gone and done it, by suspending a dust-sized glass sphere in air (which slowed down its dance moves, since it had fewer collisions with spaced-out air molecules than it would have had with water molecules). The researchers held the sphere in place with 'laser chopsticks,' and then watched how the glass bead bounced around to determine its direction and speed (abstract)."
Censorship

A Detailed Dive Into China's Information Underground 65

eldavojohn writes "MIT's Tech Review has an article on the current state of Internet censorship in China. We've read the stories about Green Dam and the Great Firewall, but this article relates the story of one of the many ways around these tools and how they're little more than an added complexity to getting what you want from the Internet in China. The article starts out with an aliased user named Xiaomi who wakes up and utilizes Google Docs to collaborate with other Mandarin-English speakers so they can translate the day's news. Once it's there she makes it public and sends out a note on Twitter and Buzz to her followers, who copy the document to their blogs and link back to the public Google Document. The blogs survive for various lengths of time, but while they are up more people read and publish to their blogs, and the pyramid branches out." (Read more, below.)
Transportation

VisLab Sponsors Milan-to-Shanghai Driverless Trek 133

incuso writes "VisLab announced the most advanced challenge so far ever organized for autonomous vehicles. Two driverless electric cars will perform a trip from Italy to China to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous driving in real traffic conditions. Each vehicle will be equipped with five laser scanners, seven cameras, GPS, inertial measurement unit, three Linux PCs, and an x-by-wire driving system. The mission will start on July 10 in Milan, Italy, and will reach Shanghai, China, on October 10 (10/10/10) on a 13,000 km route though Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and finally China."
Java

"Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/Oracle 396

Thrashing Rage writes "James Gosling has confirmed he is leaving Sun/Oracle: 'Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St. Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.'"

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