Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fee’s become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoin’s slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.
Well, in less than 4 days the block count will reach the first of these 210,000 block milestones and the reward for solving a Bitcoin block will half from 50BTC to 25BTC. (Have a look at bitcoinclock.com)
Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence
Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.
The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.
via Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence – NYTimes.com.
Orange Finds Its Web Services Voice
The app has been launched for iOS in 95 countries and will be ready for Android early next year. It is free for anyone to download, no matter which mobile network they are on. It enables users to make free high-definition voice calls and send instant messages to other Libon users over mobile or Wi-Fi connections, as well as set up three personalized visual voicemails that can be set to respond to certain individuals or contact groups. In addition, voicemails can be updated with the user’s most recent Twitter of Facebook status messages (converted into a voicemail using a text-to-speech tool — that could be interesting…).
via Orange Finds Its Web Services Voice – 4G/LTE – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Mobile.
UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming
Discover the world of computing, learn software design and development while solving puzzles with world renowned lecturer Richard Buckland.
UNSW Computing 1 is presented by OpenLearning with original content derived from UNSW COMPUTING’s first year computing course. Take the course for online for free, the next cohort starts on December 3rd 2012.
via UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming – (OpenLearning).
BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe
For example, the BlackBerry knows when it’s in a holster. It knows when it’s on a nightstand so it can do all kinds of “I’m in a nightstand now” things. You know what’s “incoming” without taking it out of its case – you can tell that from the LED indicator. (Enthusiasts have written programs to allow you to set sophisticated ‘Blinkenlights’ sequences of coloured flashes, telling you in much more detail what is going on.) The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key. You can set up a custom shortcut key to show you all the emails from Alice in the last three months, for example.
via BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe • The Register.
Once you’ve got used to it, and that the Hub is the home screen, BB10 is by some distance the most brutally efficient multitouch interface I have used so far. It makes the others look like hard work.
“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
via “Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak.
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users
The new design is obviously optimized for touchscreen use (where big targets are helpful), but Microsoft is also imposing this style on its traditional PC users because all of Windows 8 is permeated by the tablet sensibility.
How well does this work for real users performing real tasks? To find out, we invited 12 experienced PC users to test Windows 8 on both regular computers and Microsoft’s new Surface RT tablets.
via Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
The underlying problem is the idea of recycling a single software UI for two very different classes of hardware devices. It would have been much better to have two different designs: one for mobile and tablets, and one for the PC.
Haiku Project
Why not Linux?
Linux-based distributions stack up software — the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt — that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be. [top]
Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout
via General FAQ | Haiku Project.
What platform(s) is Haiku targeted to run on?
The main target for Haiku R1 is the x86 (Intel, AMD, and compatible) platform. There are ports to other platforms underway, such as PowerPC, MIPS and ARM. However, it is not clear whether these will be supported or not. What platforms we support in the future will heavily depend on the availability of resources to support their development
GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes
I have never gotten into the KDE vs GNOME debates, so this is not GNOME bashing, nor, as you’ll soon see, are these systemic development problems limited to GNOME. Yet what I’m hearing is that with GNOME v3 the goal is to promote their “brand” and make it dominant, in part by greatly limiting what users can change on their own systems, and partly by breaking or simply removing whatever support they’re no longer promoting as ‘The Way’. The reach of this selfish and narrow-sighted development goes beyond GNOME and affects GTK apps in general.
via GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes « IgnorantGuru’s Blog.
What follows is a sampling of quotes from various places and assorted devs which paint a picture of a growing culture of anti-user, conformist philosophies. There’s a bit of text to review here, but I think it’s worth it to hear what GNOME devs have to say about their intentions and goals, in their own words, and what others are saying about that!
Quantum cryptography conquers noise problem
Physicists have attempted to solve the problem by sending photons through a shared fibre along a ‘quantum channel’ at one characteristic wavelength. The trouble is that the fibre scatters light from the normal data traffic into that wavelength, polluting the quantum channel with stray photons. Andrew Shields, a physicist at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, UK, and his colleagues have now developed a detector that picks out photons from this channel only if they strike it at a precise instant, calculated on the basis of when the encoded photons were sent. The team publishes its results in Physics Review X.
via Quantum cryptography conquers noise problem : Nature News & Comment.
Still, 90 kilometres is a “world record that is a big step forward in demonstrating the applicability of quantum cryptography in real-world telecommunications infrastructures”, says Vicente Martín, a physicist at the Technical University of Madrid.