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We thought about a modular SAT concept in tahe past (looking to the second issue of Acta Futura its already there) .... but never made concrete steps ....

Nice opinion piece.

nice indeed .... especially like: "They make such great stuff, but they're such assholes. Do I really want to support this company? Should Apple care what people like me think? What difference does it make if they alienate a small minority of their users? There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems evil, the best programmers won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it's largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today. Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don't have to work for a company they have qualms about. But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it's not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that win."

Poor programmers can complain, but they will keep developing applications for iPhone as long as their bosses will tell them to do so... From my experience in mobile software development I assure you it's not the pain of the programmer that dictates what is done, but the customer's demand. Even though like this the quality of applications is somewhat worse than it could be, clients won't complain as they have no reference point. And things will stay as they are: apple censoring the applications, clients paying for stuff that "sometimes just does not work" (it's normal, isn't it??), and programmers complaining, but obediently making iPhone apps...

Pretty close to what we suggested for "system of systems." Was an excellent exercise in bullshitting, but of course ESA is not innovative enough. Now it's too late, Daimler did it...

not sure they will end up needing a lot of "space" though ...

There is no "space" yet, at least I didn't find any. But that's because they didn't consider specific hardware, but normal mobile phones. The step to include "space" is obvious, though, and I'm sure they thought about this as well...

Five great innovative initiatives already happening

"information experience" ... impressive

Nice!! I want that thing on my mobile which wakes you up in the morning with the weather and temperature....so cool

you will need to explain me what is nice in there ....

Might be of some interest to Christos?

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

One more nice citizen scientist example as I try to find for space since some time. Any good ideas this mit inspire you to?

why don't you programme one and get rich?

Would love to but this requires *TIME* :-( Automatic image-based mushroom recognition... perhaps could do as a FP7 study... it may save lives actually!

nice development! - not sure if it survives a crash test in this form at 70 or 110 km/h

Collaborative desing of a car - Could the technical approach be useful for spacecraft design?

nice and apparently simple idea to get 3D

Actually on these videos it seems to look very nice at times... have you tried it with your i-whatever?

not yet ...

I'm sure Leo will love it. Yet another argument not to have a facebook account or a smartphone.

Ditched? I never had either! But then on the other hand a recent Dilbert summarised me pretty well...

so you also don't have a mobile phone? I thought I knew only one person of my age who does not have one yet ... congratulations

Guinness World Record breaking, "first radio amplifier operating at terahertz frequencies could lead to communications systems with much higher data rates, better radar, high-resolution imaging that could penetrate smoke and fog, and better ways of identifying dangerous substances, say the researchers who built it". Built from HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors) made of InP (Indium Phosphide), this is a new milestone on the road to the THz applications.

is this the breaktrough that we were waiting for?

That depends on what application you are thinking of. For circuit board electronics this will allow integration of micro sized supercapacitors to provide operational power. They will have to be fed by external batteries still, but the close proximity allows for better tailored power demands. They also propose tapping into thermal/mechanical energy to charge the supercaps. In the end, they can provide significant specific power (W/kg) but you still need to upscale the production to cover large areas to also gain high specific energy (Wh/kg). This breakthough is for micro sized applications, not for replacement of large scale energy storage (electric vehicles, satellites) going up to kWh. That said, I know of several studies in supercaps at ESA, but they are still qualifying current relatively old commercial solutions.

TensorFlow is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.

And the interface even looks a bit less retarded than theano

Finish him!