How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - Alexis C. Madrigal
An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. And for good reason. "If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. This is not just a theoretical concern. Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. But that would entail actually building a better map.
It's Hard to Believe that this Insane Real Time 3D Demo Is Not a Real Life Video
Why It Takes So Long to Fix a Power Outage
3D NAND Chips Are Going to Make High-Capacity SSDs a Reality
Remembering Alan Turing
Yep. Hence the name "bombe", which is not an English word. Joe Desch also led a simultaneous indedpendent effort in Dayton, Ohio, to build a bombe machine after the Germans added a fourth wheel to their enigma machine. Turing, however, was dismissive of the bombe effort at National Cash Register in Dayton, and thought it would never work. It eventually did, though Desch suffered a nervous breakdown in the process. [www.daytondailynews.com] A lot of the guys who worked at the Dayton bombe project at National Cash Register eventually went to be founding members of the first real computer companies in the U.S., at places like Engineering Research Associates (now defunct) and IBM. I found out a year ago that my grandfather, who died in the 1970s, worked on the Dayton bombe.
3-D Copying Makes Michelangelos of the Masses
When Cosmo Wenman went to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in late May, he did what many people do. He took photos of some of his favorite sculptures. But instead of a few snapshots, Wenman took hundreds of pictures, documenting busts and reliefs from every accessible angle. Then he did something currently unusual -- but likely to become common. Wenman turned the photos into three-dimensional digital maps, using a free program called Autodesk 123D Catch. On Thingiverse, you can also find data maps for around three dozen sculptures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Digital Scans The technology is still primitive and frustrating, and the scans it produces are far from perfect, but the future is clear. The question is how the elite palaces will react. The initial response, by the Met and the Getty, is encouraging. Pettis says he always assumed that digitizing sculptures would require a virtual “heist” involving an expensive scanner and a lot of subterfuge. Plaster Casts
Supercomputer simulates nuclear explosion down to the molecular level
No it isn't. The nuclear test ban treaty went into effect in 1963. In 1964 supercomputers worked in the megaflops range. The LLNL supercomputer is likely in the teraflops to petaflops range, a million to billion times faster. This is precisely why the major nuclear powers don't do weapons testing anymore. Sorry, but that's not the reason. There's no rational reason for declared nuclear powers not to test their weapons, it was always an emotional decision made for publicity reasons (because everyone knows that nuclear weapons are, ummm, bad). Pretty much. I refer only to recent work. The test ban in the 60s only covered above ground testing and testing in space. Perhaps back in 1987 the matter was still in dispute, but, according to the Obama Administration, thanks to the huge advances in supercomputers in recent decades, the United States need not ever test nuclear weapons again. But I feel pretty safe in believing the current administration if they say that. [cryptome.org] [gcn.com]
This Is What Happens When Anonymous Tries to Destroy You
25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web
Sometime around 1988, my landlady and I cut a deal. She would purchase a Macintosh computer, I would buy an external hard drive, and we would leave the system in the living room to share. She used the device most, since I did my computing on an IBM 286 and just wanted to keep up with Apple developments. But after we set up the Mac, I sat down with it one evening and noticed a program on the applications menu. "HyperCard?" I wondered. I opened the app and read the instructions. Not only that, but HyperCard included a scripting language called "Hyper Talk" that a non-programmer like myself could easily learn. Intrigued, I began composing stacks. This month, I glanced at my historical watch. "What was this thing?" And so the Cupertino company exiled the program to its Claris subsidiary, where it got lost amidst more prominent projects like Filemaker and the ClarisWorks office suite. Even before its cancellation, HyperCard's inventor saw the end coming.
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia 5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
