GAO: NASA Assessments of Selected Large-Scale Projects
"Many of the projects GAO reviewed experienced challenges in developing new or retrofitting older technologies, stabilizing engineering designs, managing the performance of their contractors and development partners, as well as funding and launch planning issues. Reducing the kinds of problems this assessment identifies in acquisition programs hinges on developing a sound business case for a project."
It's times like these that I'm glad I'm a woman and never have to shave my face. Hopefully it'll stay that way when I'm 60, otherwise I'll be looking down the barrel of a butterfly razor like this one.
Called the "G Blade," it was created by George Christou who, according to Yanko Design, was so concerned about electronic shavers wiping out blades, he had to whip this up. Which of you would dare use one? [Yanko Design]
If bacteria settle in between your teeth and form a cavity, your dentist must drill through your tooth just to get at it. But now dentists can trade their drills for a simple treatment that stops early-stage cavities.
The Icon system lets dentists halt decay between teeth. Usually when a dentist spots an early cavity-when bacteria have eaten away enough tooth such that it's a weak lattice but hasn't yet degraded into a true cavity's sinkhole-he prescribes an enamel-strengthening fluoride rinse and hopes the tooth heals itself. If that doesn't work, the only option is drilling through healthy tooth to get to the problem spot.
Icon, developed by dental-materials manufacturer DMG, does away with both the drill and the waiting time. A dentist simply slides a thin plastic applicator between the patient's teeth and squirts the cavity with hydrochloric acid, which etches away the enamel to access the tooth's deeper layers. Using a fresh applicator, he then injects a low-viscosity resin into the gaps in the tooth's lattice and hardens the resin with a quick flash of high-energy blue light to fortify the tooth.
DMG is working on a version that could hold up to the wear and tear of a tooth's chewing surfaces, which company president George Wolfe hopes to have ready in a year. The sooner the better, he says: "One of my greatest fears is having to hold down my scared kid for a filling. Hopefully, I'll never have to."
Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.
The first and only time I saw Windows Mobile 6.5.3 in action, it was a grim scene. But according to Mary Jo Foley, the OS, which is now shipping on a single device, it's more than a questionable makeover.
6.5.3's changes fall into two categories: the UI updates, which are piecemeal changes to 6.5 standard, and the platform updates, which fix some—some—of 6.5.x's core shortcomings. Here's the full list:
Ease of Use features
* Capacitive touchscreen support
* Platform to enable multitouch
* Touch controls throughout system (no need for stylus)
* Consistent Navigation
* Horizontal scroll bar replaces tabs (think settings>system>about
screen)
* Magnifier brings touch support to legacy applications
* Simplified out-of-box experience with fewer steps
* Drag and drop icons on Start ScreenIE Browser Performance
* Page load time decreased
* Memory management improved
* Pan & flick gestures smoothed
* Zoom & rotation speed increasedQuality and Customer Satisfaction features
* Updated runtime tools (.NET CF 3.5, SQL CE 3.1)
* Arabic read/write document support
* Watson (error reporting) improvements and bug fixes
While it's not the most riveting set of updates, these features are nothing to scoff at, if just for the addition of capacitive screen and multitouch support. Of course, with Mobile World congress less than two weeks away, Windows Mobile 7 is on everyone's mind, and if it shows (we think it will) it'll obviously be the star of the show. Just don't expect to see Microsoft disowning their current mobile platform quite yet, or really, anytime soon. [ZDNet]
A few days after the White House released its budget that proposes axing NASA’s Constellation program and providing more support to private space flight, the Obama administration began to follow through on the second part of that equation. NASA has announced that it’s giving $50 million to five companies to support new space vehicles.
That $50 million isn’t from the revised budget, but rather the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (or in more common parlance, the $787 billion federal stimulus package). Nevertheless, NASA chief Charles Bolden said these five companies–Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon Space Development Corp., and United Launch Alliance–would play a large part in future plans. “Ladies and gentlemen, these are the faces of the new frontier. The vanguard,” said Bolden. “We will certainly be adding to this group in the near future” [Space.com].
Sierra Nevada received the largest grant: $20 million for the development of their “Dream Chaser,” a seven-person crew vehicle based on the Hl-20 runway landing, heavy lifting body concept (looks similar to the canceled Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS) [Universe Today]. Boeing received $18 million to advance its work on a personnel capsule that could be launced by various different rockets; the company has partnered with Bigelow Aerospace on the project. Blue Origin, the pet project of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that DISCOVER has covered before, was awarded nearly $4 million to develop the escape system for its module. The others received funds for environmental controls on board their spaceships or for monitoring the health of old rockets that could be reused.
Those totals are small compared to the $3.5 billion NASA has already provided SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop vehicles to reach the International Space Station, as well as the monetary support that could reach private space companies if Congress approves Obama’s budget with its change of direction for NASA. But Bolden acknowledged that this announcement was tied to the Administration’s new plans, and NASA will be working more and more with these companies in the days to come.
Related Content:
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: SpaceX Scores a NASA Contract To Resupply the Space Station
80beats: Jeff Bezos’ Secret Rocket Program To Do Experiments in Space
Bad Astronomy: Give Space a Chance
Bad Astronomy: RUMOR: Obama to Axe Constellation And Ares
Image: flickr / PauloReCanuto
Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP's slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a "third" option, it's what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we've really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn't clear at all.
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That's the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo's Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that's sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that's another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It's a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you'd have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you're working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there's the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple's case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you'll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you're building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn't have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you'd have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There's copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there's no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can't even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there's minimal interaction between applications. That's not saying it can't be done, it's just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don't do it very often. If the OS maker doesn't do it, developers won't either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you're getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that's the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what's being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can't, and don't this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can't handle well. You're limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn't have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it's just a matter of wanting to put it in. There's no reason why these phone-based OSes can't accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It's just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can't be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you're looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you'd want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we're not seeing in these devices. I'm not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I'm talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That's right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android's tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they're on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won't do.
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There's the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you're doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You'll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you'll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn't a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice "tablet" interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don't. That's fine, better even, but it's not a coherent computing experience.
Since it's ultimately a desktop OS, it's not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft's making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They're offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Frankly, we're not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we've seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there's a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it's just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What's nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it's only for "video conferencing," if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public's imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They're all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
Surprisingly enough, it's Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that's perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you'll notice that it's an entirely new class of interface. It doesn't have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn't have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It's kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it's neither phone nor desktop—it's designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We're looking for something completely new with an interface that "just works" for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don't want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft's taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it's unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don't have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we'll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
Ker-BOOM. That's the thundering explosion of Amazon purchasing Touchco, a little company that makes incredibly cheap, infinitely multitouchable displays, and merging it into their Kindle division. Kindle Touch. It actually sounds kind of nice.
Touchco's touchscreen tech is designed to be cheap—under $10 a square foot—using a resistive display tech called interpolating force-sensitive resistance. What makes it more special is that unlike most resistive touchscreens, it's pressure sensitive, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. Plus, it's totally transparent (old school resistive touchscreen layers dim brightness and dull colors) and designed to work with full color LCD screens.
You know, the kind of gorgeous screen that's perfect for magazines, textbooks, and interactive content. The stuff that E-Ink Kindles can't do right now, but that a certain other reader announced last week can. So! A full color Kindle Touch. Just think about it.
Like we've been saying: The Great Publishing War is just getting started. [NYT]
Once Apple began allowing VoIP over 3G, we heard that iPhone app Fring had the feature built in—instantly allowing Skype calls over 3G. But we wondered when Skype itself would update their official iPhone app. Their answer? Soon.
You can watch the video above for more details, but according to the Skype blog there's a reason why we haven't seen the update yet:
You may have seen other apps offering calls over 3G, but we're holding ours back for a little bit longer. Why? So that we can give you the very best audio quality we can. When our 3G-capable Skype for iPhone app is released, it'll let you make calls in wideband audio, giving you greater clarity and fidelity – because that's what you expect from Skype.
According to our resident iPhone app aficionado John Herrman, the Fring app already works "pretty well," so I can't wait to see what we'll get directly from Skype. [Skype]
Apropos of my recent post showing a Hubble image of two asteroids colliding, the website Word Spy just happened to have a funny choice for their word of the day: cosmophobia, "the strong and irrational fear that in the near future the earth will be destroyed by some cosmic event."
Personally, I figured it’s really for people who don’t like vodka, triple sec, cranberry and lime juice all mixed together, which is silly. Unless it’s headed for you at 30 km/sec. Because that’ll give you a pretty wicked hangover.
In this week's iMac update, we talk to an Apple Authorized Service Provider/Reseller from the UK. And what does he tell us? Apple is so short on 27-inch displays that they're paying customers 15% to simply return faulty iMacs.
Nope.
The yellow screens have yet to be fixed. The flickering screens have just been addressed with a second firmware update, but we can't tell whether or not this update fixed the problem. (Write submissions@gizmodo.com to let us know your experience).
27-inch iMacs are still being delayed in what is allegedly a complete halting of their assembly line, though Apple has denied it. The three-week delay of last week has been shifted to a two-week delay (but such is to be expected, as we're a week later in whatever fix Apple appears to be working on). Of course, if Apple's screen issues are in any way related to believed supplier LG's production methods, these delays might not help. LG-sourced Dell displays are having color issues, too.
A UK-based Apple Authorized Service Provider/Reseller shared some interesting information with me. First, the UK appears to be totally out of 27-inch panels to repair iMacs (which makes sense if Apple's assembly lines are halted). Here's what he said, after sharing inventory lists with me:
(click for pop-out)
The short of it is that apple doesn't have any 27" LCDs in Europe and there is a backlog of 230 machines that are waiting on this part, with no eta on shipping. So to keep customers happy(ish) they're paying them. That's right apple is now (quietly) offering people a full refund and 15% of the price extra, and they are arranging a free pick up of your machine. I'm not 100% if this is the case in the US, but it's happening over here in the UK.
As far as i know it's both Apple stores and 3rd party retailers, but the refund itself comes from Apple not the 3rd party retailer. We've had two customer that have both gotten there machines' refunded plus the 15%.
In real numbers, that's an apology of $300 or more on Apple's part.
"The 27-inch iMac has been a huge hit with customers and we are working to increase supply to meet up with strong demand."
- Apple spokesperson
A flickering screen will be immediately obvious. As for issues where the bottom half of the screen looks a bit yellow, you can confirm those suspicions here.
I hardly use it, but I like CoverFlow and how it allows to wander through albums when you don't know what to play. I'm not so sure about how useful ContactFlow would be, but it's good eyecandy. And free. [iTunes]
Picture the classic shoot-out in a Western movie: The good guy and the bad guy face each other, their hands quivering over their gun holsters. The bad guy reaches for his weapon, causing the good guy to react–he whips out his pistol and BAM! The hero triumphs. Physicist Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won [New Scientist].
But new research suggests that Bohr didn’t have it exactly right. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists suggest that people do move faster when they are reacting to what is happening around them–but not fast enough for a heroic gunslinger to save his own life.
Researchers set up an experimental (and bullet-less) duel to study two types of movement, and found that “unplanned actions” were faster than “planned actions.” Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other…. “There was no ‘go’ signal,” said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research. “All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent – just like in the gunslingers legend” [BBC]. Welchman found that the subjects who started the sequence of button-pressing first didn’t move as quickly as their partners who were reacting to the action. Those reactive participants pressed their buttons 21 milliseconds faster.
Welchman observed: “If you’re making a cup of tea that would be an intentional decision. If we then knock the cup of tea off the table, the reactive comes into play as we try to catch the cup as fast as possible” [BBC].
But the button-pressing duel also revealed that the reactive party was critically delayed. A “reaction time” of 200 milliseconds elapsed between the moment the first player hit a button and when the second player began to move, which meant that the reactive player never won the duel. Welchman notes that the same reaction time would slow down a cowboy, so in a gunfight, the 21 millisecond reactionary advantage would be unlikely to save you [BBC].
The researchers plan to investigate whether there are two different brain processes for “planned actions” and “reactive actions.” They hope future findings will help patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, who have greater trouble with intentional movements like picking up a ball on the table, as opposed to catching it when thrown at them. This might be evidence that particular areas of the brain affected by Parkinson’s contribute more to intentional actions than reactive ones. If this turns out to be the case, then it may also be possible to develop some strategies to ease movement in such patients [University of Birmingham].
Related Content:
80beats: Boosting a Brain Wave Makes People Move Slow—and Bad at Video Games
80beats: Taming Parkinson’s With Electric Pulses Through the Spine
80beats: Google Founder Tries to Crack Parkinson’s Genetic Code With Crowdsourcing
80beats: For Treating Parkinson’s, A “Brain Pacemaker” Beats Out Medication
Image: Wikipedia/ James G. Howes
It makes total sense for a CEO to be optimistic about the future of his or her product. But predicting that netbooks will grow from 10% of the PC market to 90%? Warren East, you've gone and lost your mind.
ARM's head honcho made the remark in an interview posted today at PC Pro. His reasoning? Well... there wasn't really any. Not that was reported, at least. Probably because it's an indefensible (though attention-grabbing!) position.
This is nothing against netbooks as a category! They obviously scratch an itch, especially during a down economy. But unless they get significantly more powerful, there's no way they're going to make up the majority of PC sales, much less the super-ultra majority East proposes. And if they do become that much more powerful, are they still netbooks? Or are they ultraportables? Or neither, since all these categories are pretty much arbitrary marketingspeak anyway? [PC Pro via Slashdot]
NASA Internal memo: Message from the NASA Administrator: Feb. 3, 2010
"In anticipation of the President's new vision for NASA, I have been working closely with the NASA senior leadership team to ensure that we are ready to take on the opportunities we have been given. Early last fall, I asked Deputy Administrator Lori Garver to lead an Institutional Readiness Project (IRP) that focused on improving the area of institutional management. She and the IRP Team can be credited with surfacing progressive ideas that culminated into recommendations for organizational changes. Accordingly, I have notified the Congress that I intend to implement some organizational changes at NASA."
- NASA Administrator Names Braun NASA Chief Technologist
- NASA Administrator Names Woodrow Whitlow Associate Administrator for Mission Support
- Christensen Appointed Director for Ames International Space Station Office
"At a National Press Club event to "introduce new commercial space pioneers," the President's Science Advisor John Holdren and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden yesterday praised the seven winning companies of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) and Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) competitions."
- Boeing Chosen By NASA for Commercial Crew Development Initiative Funding
- Orbital Sciences Corporation Statement on NASA's New Direction
I am mounting a prototype unit on the front of a center steer stiga mower. The problem I have is trying to raise and lower the unit[400 lbs] with the existing hydraulic lift cylinder capable of lifting aprox. 100 lbs and allow the unit to maintain a 50 lb ground pressure. To do this I built a counte
TiVo's website is listing the TiVo HD—the company's core product—as completely out of stock. This isn't a retailer we're talking about here: TiVo is official out of TiVos. Is TiVo clearing the way for new models? Basically, yes.
The TiVo Premiere, which looks like a minor hardware evolution of the existing TiVo HD, was first shown to the public back in December, when TiVo accidentally sent a manual for the device with an existing box. So, at the very least, we're probably in for an announcement about the Premiere sometime soon.
Unfortunately, TiVo letting their box supply run dry doesn't tell us much of anything new. We could have safely assumed that the Premiere was imminent already, and we still don't know what—if any—software improvements TiVo will ship with it. And just because one box has been obsoleted doesn't mean that two couldn't sprout up in its place.
So, er, watch that space! [TiVo via Crunchgear]
In 1994, Steve Jobs was not on top of the world. Which is why he was willing to let Rolling Stone probe him at great length in this classic, must-read interview. The insights—into Steve and the industry—are astounding.
This quote is actually more true today than it was in 1994 when Steve Jobs said it:
"The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software."
Today, everybody uses the same guts, whether it's in big computers or little ones. The same chips from Intel power Windows PCs and Macs, which didn't used to be the case. iPhones and Palms Pres and Android phones and basically every other damn phone uses ARM-designed processors. What separates them all now? Software.
Steve takes a few stabby stabs at Microsoft too. Referring to the stagnancy of Macintosh in 1984, he sneers, "It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. " And says that the reason consumers often don't see the benefits of a technology before businesses is because "unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better."
Like I said, a must-read interview. [Rolling Stone via Marco Arment]
To open the secret entrance to the cave, try left-left-up-left-down-down-right-left then a-y-y-x-b-a and then hold the d-pad down while clicking y-y-b-b. Press start twice, and you will get in. [Flopculture]
The most common charge leveled at the Xbox 360 by Playstation 3 devotees is that Microsoft dares to charge for its Xbox Live service, unlike the free PSN. Not for long!
Back in November, a presentation slide revealed that Sony had a paid subscription plan in the works for PSN. And now Peter Dille, the head of PSN, had this to say in an interview with IGN:
Will we charge for it or why don't we charge for it? It's been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that's something we're looking at. I can confirm that as well. That's something that we're actively thinking about. What's the best way to approach that if we were to do that? You know, no announcements at this point in time, but it's something we're thinking about.
Now the question is what exactly will they be charging for. Will they charge for online multiplayer, like Xbox Live? Or will they offer up some new premium goodies to entice people to pay up while leaving the current offerings up for free? In any case, it looks like there's soon to be a little less ammo in the console wars. But don't worry, Sony fanboys: you still have Blu-ray. No one can take that away from you. [IGN via TFTS]
