2017年7月30日 星期日

Moon's interior may contain water, Brown University scientists say ...

Moon's interior may contain water, Brown University scientists say ...

edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/us/moon-water-study/index.html
4 days ago - There may be water -- a good bit of it -- deep inside the moon, ... Moon's interior maycontain waterBrown University scientists say ... By analyzing satellite images, the scientists foundevidence of water ... of the moon, said Ralph Milliken, lead author of the new research, ... "If you do that you'll need water.

CNN
Researchers say they may have found water deep inside the moon. Here's how he discovery could be a boon for future lunar missions http://cnn.it/2eRktZ9


Brown U. researchers say they've found evidence of water inside the ...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/.../brown-researchers-say-they-found...water-inside-moon...
6 days ago - Researchers at Brown University say that they've found evidence of water trapped ... across the moon, and found glass beads with water trapped inside. ... While individual beads don'thave much water in them, the “size of the ... at the lunar poles, but the pyroclastic deposits are at locations that may be ...

2017年7月29日 星期六

The U.S. Air Force is testing IBM’s brain-inspired chips on aerial tank spotting

The U.S. Air Force has a lot of electronic eyes in the sky. Now it’s exploring whether brain-inspired computer chips could make those systems smarter.

Chips with silicon “neurons” could make satellites, aircraft, and drones…
TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

AI shouldn’t believe everything it hears


MIT Technology Review
Researchers are stress-testing machine-learning algorithms—and it's not going well for the algorithms.

A new trick can fool voice-recognition systems into totally mishearing what a recording says.
TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

2017年7月28日 星期五

Unlocking the secrets of Rome's super-strength concrete


The Romans produced concrete by mixing volcanic ash with lime and sea water to create a mortar, then adding chunks of volcanic rock—a process much different than what's used to make today's concrete.
From Curiosity

The Roman Empire fell more than a thousand years ago, but its concrete architecture still stands.
CURIOSITY.COM





BBC Science News 分享了 1 條連結

2017年7月27日 星期四

The famous "Earthrise" photo, taken by the Apollo 8 crew on Christmas Eve, 1968.

BBC Science News 更新了封面相片。
The famous "Earthrise" photo, taken by the Apollo 8 crew on Christmas Eve, 1968. This image has been credited as inspiring the start of the modern environmental movement.


2017年7月26日 星期三

Roomba, the cute little robovac, has got a side hustle

Your Roomba is also gathering data about the layout of your home.
The CEO of iRobot is pushing the company toward a broader vision of the smart home. It could soon sell maps of the interiors of people’s houses.
TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

2017年7月25日 星期二

2015 Tech World Prepares Obituary for Adobe Flash;Adobe宣布Flash將在2020年被「賜死」



【Adobe宣布Flash將在2020年被「賜死」】
相對於,微軟傳出要移除小畫家,引發使用者離情依依,甚至畫出墓碑哀鳴,科技網站指出,相信沒有人會為Flash即將消失落一滴淚。
除了安全問題之外,Flash為人詬病的一點是,非常非常耗電。這也就為什麼iPhone或iPad從來不支援Flash,而Android系統裝置也在2012年拋棄了Flash。

距離蘋果公司共同創辦人賈伯斯向多媒體程式播放器 Flash…
CW.COM.TW|作者:天下雜誌

Tech World Prepares Obituary for Adobe Flash

Latest security risk is only the latest strike against with the video software


The Mozilla Firefox and Google browsers blocked the Adobe Flash plugin from activating due to a security issue last week.ENLARGE
The Mozilla Firefox and Google browsers blocked the Adobe Flash plugin from activating due to a security issue last week. PHOTO: SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES
Flash, the popular software from Adobe Systems Inc., once brought Web to life, endowing pages formerly occupied by static text and photos with video clips and animated cartoons. Last week the program, criticized for years as a security risk and a drag on online progress, became a top contender for the technology dead pool.
Facebook Inc. chief security officer Alex Stamos last week offered Adobe some unsolicited advice: Stop trying to fix Flash and kill it outright. Google Inc. and Mozilla Corp. followed suit, temporarily disabling Flash in their Web browsers after it was revealed that hackers were exploiting a bug in the software. The tech giants’ offensive was the latest chapter in Flash’s downfall and an illustration of how mobile devices— Apple Inc.’s iPhone in particular —are rapidly reshaping the business landscape.
Adobe continues to distribute Flash and regular security updates for users to download. If consumers remain concerned about it being a drag on their system or a security risk, they can uninstall it from their computers, though they might then not be able to view some video and interactive content.
But Danny Brian, vice president of research at Gartner Inc., views Flash’s demise as inevitable. “The writing has been on the wall for at least a year or two,” he said.
Introduced in the early 1990s as an easy-to-use digital animation program, Flash went on to be included on virtually every computer shipped. It was the strategic cornerstone of Adobe’s $3.4 billion purchase of Macromedia Inc. in 2005. YouTube founded its streaming video operation on the technology, and Netflix used it as well. Advertising agencies championed it as a way to produce eye-catching online ads. It seemed as though Flash was a permanent fixture of the Web.
Then, in 2007, along came the iPhone. Adobe engineers embraced it immediately. “Everyone who was in the organization was carrying an iPhone,” said Carlos Icaza, an Adobe senior engineer at the time.
But Apple’s smartphone also troubled Mr. Icaza, who was in charge of Flash development on mobile phones. Flash had become bloated over the years and required lots of computing power to run. That wasn’t a big deal on PCs, but on mobile phones, with their limited battery life, it was a major problem, and Apple had opted not to support the technology.
Flash needed a major rewrite to work on the iPhone, but Mr. Icaza couldn’t get his superiors to allocate the necessary resources.
"For me, it was, ‘What the hell is going on? We have this amazing device that is going to change the world and everybody knows it,’” he said in an interview. “Nobody at the organization was trying to make Flash work on this device.”
Other former Adobe executives interviewed for this article said Adobe wanted very much to license Flash on the iPhone but couldn’t come to terms with Apple.
With the advent of the iPad tablet in April 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a public issue of the same problems Mr. Icaza had spotted years earlier: Adobe Flash was a battery hog, a security risk, and ultimately a bad choice for Apple’s mobile platforms, he said.
Mr. Jobs also had a personal grudge to settle. According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, he never forgave Adobe for refusing to make its industry-standard Adobe Premiere video-editing software run on Macintosh computers in 1999, when Apple was struggling to survive.
Mr. Jobs’s condemnation was enough for companies like BrightcoveInc., a Boston, Mass., video software developer. Brightcove, which had built its business on Flash, scrambled to replace it.
“Immediately, the entire ecosystem of people involved in video pivoted,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s chairman and founder. Like YouTube, his company switched to free software based on open standards that were equally well suited to desktop and mobile devices.
Adobe continued to make money on tools for making Flash-based websites, but it was unable to fully capitalize on them. It tried to sell Flash server software, but that product couldn’t compete with a free alternative. Flash still comes bundled with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s ChromeOS, and Apple’s MacOS, but Adobe doesn’t get any revenue from those deals.
Adobe itself now considers flash to be immaterial to its business, meaning that it accounts for less than 5% of company revenue, but it is still widely used on websites built for browsers. The software runs on under 6% of the Internet’s home pages and its use is declining, according to BuiltWith Pty Ltd, which tracks Internet technology.
Like Brightcove, Adobe has pivoted. It built its Creative Cloud tools for software developers around the technologies that replaced Flash. Creative Cloud can take advantage of Flash, but Adobe has increased its investment in the open Web standard HTML5 over the past four years. Microsoft, whose Silverlight software is a Flash competitor, has embraced HTML5, too. Microsoft says it will stop supporting Silverlight in six years.
For all of its initial success, Flash’s slide hasn’t hammered Adobe’s bottom line. The company’s stock has more than doubled since Mr. Jobs pushed Flash into a downhill slide.
Adobe has yet to grant Mr. Stamos’s request, but if Flash isn’t yet dead, it is breathing its last gasps—and some in the tech community still think of it fondly.
Netflix, for instance, still retains one of what once was a five-person Flash development team. Roman Staroushnik is the last man standing. Asked about the product’s decline, he delivered something of a eulogy.
“It’s kind of sad that it happened, because it was a great platform,” he said. “It did a great job of merging the gap between designers and developers.”

A BRIGHT FLASH THAT FADED

A timeline of Adobe Flash
  • 1993: FutureWave software introduces SmartSketch graphics software for computers that used a stylus rather than a keyboard.
  • 1996: With the World Wide Web on the rise, FutureWave’s reworks SmartSketch software into FutureSplash Animator software—which adds animation and video to the static Web experience—takes off. Macromedia buys FutureWave.
  • 2005: Youtube launches its streaming-video service based on Flash. The software comes pre-installed on virtually every computer sold. In the Japanese mobile phone market, Flash content generates more than $1.4 billion for NTT DoCoMo. Adobe buys Macromedia for $3.4 billion.
  • 2007: Apple introduces the iPhone but declines to support Flash, wary of the software’s drain on battery power.
  • 2010: Apple introduces the iPad. Steve Jobs says it will never run Flash. Digital video companies including Brightcove abandon Flash for open standards.
  • 2011: Netflix uses Flash to deliver streaming video on televisions and Blu-ray players. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen begins to play down Flash, telling then-Wall Street Journal reporter Walt Mossberg that it’s a ‘small part of the company.’
  • 2015: Security researchers discover serious bugs in Flash. Google and Mozilla temporarily disable it in their browsers. Facebook’s CSO calls on Adobe to kill the product.