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Saturday 22 June 2013

Alt-week 6.22.13: The LRO's fourth moon-year, a 3D brain and alien telegrams (video)



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Mira qué bonitas fotos

La gente odia las fotogalerías en la Web. Es el mismo tipo de experiencia que ir a casa de un amigo y que te obligue a ver sus fotos de las vacaciones en un proyector de diapositivas.


– Chris Johanesen

en Por qué habría que prohibir las fotogalerías


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/frases-citas/mira-que-bonitas-fotos.html

iPhone Users Are Mindless Zombies in New Nokia Commercial



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Acer Aspire P3 review: a nice enough tablet, but wait for the refresh



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Google's Waze acquisition catches FTC's investigative eyes



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6 Apps You Don't Want To Miss



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La extrema sensibilidad del Gran Colisionador de Hadrones

Interior del túnel que alberga el LHC

Interior del túnel que alberga el LHC


En el Gran Colisionador de Hadrones dos haces de partículas circulan en sentido contrario por sendos anillos de 27 kilómetros de longitud prácticamente a la velocidad de la luz.


Pero para que el LHC pueda cumplir con su cometido estos haces de partículas tienen que chocar entre si para producir las colisiones que estudian los distintos instrumentos del LHC.


Claro que si tenemos en cuenta que cada uno de los protones, el tipo de hadrones con los que trabaja el LHC, que circulan por este mide unos 0,00000000000008775 centímetros de diámetro parece fácil ver que no es una tarea sencilla provocar estas colisiones, aún cuando los protones en cuestión viajen agrupados en haces para aumentar las probabilidades de que se produzcan estas colisiones.


En el CERN explican esto diciendo que es como disparar dos agujas una hacia otra desde una distancia de 10 kilómetros y conseguir que choquen de frente a medio camino.


Para esto el LHC usa miles de imanes superconductores y un sofisticado sistema de control para dirigir los haces, pero aún así es un instrumento increíblemente sensible, tal y como se puede leer en Is the moon full? Just ask the LHC operators .


Es tan sensible que le afecta la atracción gravitatoria de la Luna, hasta el punto de que hay que ajustar los haces para compensar el hecho de que la Luna ejerce más fuerza sobre un lado del anillo que otro según la posición en la que esté, y de hecho hay que ir ajustando los haces todo el rato porque la Luna no se está quieta.


El efecto además alcanza sus máximos cuando hay Luna llena porque el tirón gravitacional del esta y del Sol se combinan.


Número de colisiones en el LHC

Las líneas verde y veis muestran el número de colisiones detectadas en el LHC en la noche del 2 al 3 de junio de 2012; las caídas se corresponden con los ajustes de los haces


También le afecta el paso del TGV que conecta París y Ginebra, debido a la cantidad de energía eléctrica que libera en el suelo, algo en lo que en el CERN no cayeron en la cuenta hasta que unas misteriosas perturbaciones que se producían todos los días a la misma hora en el funcionamiento del LEP, el Gran colisionador de Electrones-Positrones, el antedecesor del LHC, desaparecieron durante una huelga de trenes.


De hecho lo de la Luna también se sabía desde los tiempos del LEP porque también afectaba a este, aunque en menor medida.


Pero además el LHC se ve afectado por las deformaciones que produce en la forma del túnel el nivel de agua del lago Lemán, que, igual que la Luna, hace que los anillos del LHC cambien, aunque sea de forma mínima de posición.


(Vía @alpoma).


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/curiosidades/la-extrema-sensibilidad-del-gran-colisionador-de-hadrones.html

25 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed



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Samsung Galaxy S4 Active and Other New Devices: The Recap



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How I Survived Without Tech at Digital Detox Camp



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Google News in Germany asks publishers to opt-in for indexing, sidesteps copyright fees



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Top 10 Tech This Week



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Meet B, the flying car that'll make it even easier to terrorize local wildlife (video)



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CloudUp Is A Fast, Dead-Simple Way To Share And View Files On Any Platform (Without The Folders)

ixKtropoJoO-1200x1200

In today’s world of email, social networks, SMS, chat applications and cloud services, there are plenty of ways to share share a file, folder, photo or video. And as intelligent devices and cloud computing infrastructure proliferate, and processing power and capacity improve, we expect file transfer and sharing to be speedy — and simple. Everything is about “realtime” and accessibility these days (not that we’re complaining, but thanks Twitter).


Yet, file-sharing still isn’t quite there. Even with all the options — whether it be the Skypes, Facebooks, Google Drives, WeTransfers and YouSendIts of the world or the Dropboxex, etc. — we’ve still got one eye out for a better way. (Here’s xkcd putting a fine point on it.) The file sharing service to end all file sharing services.


Dropbox has gotten the closest, gobbling up a ton of mindshare as a result, but its layout and presentation are more storage service than simple sharing tool. In other words, you may store your photos there, but it’s probably not where you’ll go if you want to show them off. This week, CloudUp became the latest to join a younger group of services that are pushing the conversation forward when it comes to speed and simplicity — and nibbling at the heels of the incumbents.


Sharing the mantle (most closely) with services like DropLr, CloudApp, Ge.tt and perhaps biz collaboration and sharing services like Dropmark, CloudUp aims to a new spin on file-sharing by creating a tool to make sharing images, links, documents and videos as simple as humanly possible for both the sharer and the viewer.


In practice, that means that CloudUp has a clean, minimalistic look that makes it feel like it’s made for designers, yet is easy enough to use that your mom could get excited about it. CloudUp enables users to share files by dragging them and dropping them into their browser, automatically generating a link which they can then share on email, Twitter, Facebook and so on.



Like Dropbox, the link-centric service is available for free on the Web or as a native OSX app, the latter of which puts CloudUp in your menu bar for easier drag-and-drop sharing. However, CloudUp wants the similarities to end there. Although the service is offering up to 1,000 uploads for free — that’s the equivalent of about 200GB of storage — CloudUp doesn’t want to just be a storage locker or a quick way to share URLs with your homedawgs.


What’s cool about CloudUp (and distinguishes it from most apps out there) is that it focuses on converting the design of file transfer from one that makes it clear that “THIS PRODUCT IS JUST A UTILITY” to one that’s elegant and minimalist, Jony Ive-style. But the minimalism isn’t there for the sake of itself (sorry hipsters), it’s meant to bring more of the focus to consumption — to make the content the focus, not the app itself.


For more than one file, many services use folders, which look and act like the same folder icons you’ve been seeing on desktops since the Apple IIGS. Instead, when you drag-and-drop multiple files into CloudUp in succession, it automatically collects them in a “Stream.” It functions similarly to folders one would find anywhere else, with a more Pinterest-style layout. Nothing is opaque, the app puts it all right there, making things easier to find. (Personally, I can never find files in Dropbox, but that could be because I was dropped on my head as a child.)


CloudUp also does a lot of cool stuff around conversion. The app creates thumbnails for “nearly every kind of file you can imagine, camera RAWS, office documents, code snippets, images, videos and many others,” Cloudup Engineer TJ Holowaychuk wrote on Medium last week. It’s kind of a small thing, so if you don’t share docs or images that much, it probably won’t matter to you, but if you do, this small stuff matters.



So, beyond just thumbnail rendering, CloudUp has applied some nifty conversion and rendering voodoo on the back-end so that everyone can see them, even if they’re still running IE6, like video transcoding, office doc PDF conversion and image compression so that images appear actually appear on your device.


User streams are also updated in realtime, synchronously, so that even if an image you’re downloading from a friend hasn’t fully transferred yet, you’ll still see it — on mobile, too. And not only that, but you can share a link to a Stream even if it hasn’t finished downloading. Of course, how instantaneous and “realtime” all this is tends to depend on the speed of your browser, but when it works, it’s another big point of differentiation — even if it’s not the one reason you’d download CloudUp.


The team also designed the app not just to be useful when sharing among friends and family, but to facilitate collaboration and productivity among teams as well, CEO Thianh Lu tell us. That, in particular, is something Lu and the rest of the team had been wrestling with for a long time — in other words, this ain’t their first trip around the block. All the EdTech homies in the house know them as the same team behind LearnBoost, a suite of free classroom administration apps for teachers.


While LearnBoost raised $2.87 million from Charles River Ventures, Atlas Ventures and others for its beautifully designed product and its mission to rethink the gradebook, Lu says that teachers were more interested in its Lesson Plan-sharing feature than grading. Teachers were still looking for new ways to share their content, and the more the team fought against the slow sales cycles in K-12 education, they kept coming back to the fragmented sharing problem.


Each member of their team had their own workflow, setup and preferred method of communication and sharing. There wasn’t a single solution out there that let them share and consume files quickly and easily that didn’t offend the eyeballs, so they built CloudUp.


And that’s the same reason that CloudUp’s OSX app attempts to remove the extra steps from the team collaboration process by letting users share files by dropping them on the CloudUp status icon in the menu bar, which automatically copies the Stream’s link to your clipboard so you don’t have to take any other steps. The app also supports automatic uploading of screenshots, which you may or may not think is awesome depending on how frequently you do the ole “shift+command+4″ dance.


All in all, CloudUp has a lot going for it and, at launch, it’s already competitive in a crowded space, which is saying a lot. That being said, it still has a long way to go. CloudUp doesn’t yet do simultaneous photo uploading, it doesn’t have native apps, premium tiers or actual team/business collaboration features — it’s more of an idea than a reality. However, all these are on the near-term roadmap, Lu says, and should becoming to CloudUp experiences near you in the months ahead.


Going forward, the company thinks that its take on file sharing can act as a complement to the Big Storage Kahunas in the space. That’s a smart and completely understandable position to take, but not sure anyone is really buying that. CloudUp is an alternative. Some might think of it as a sexier, frictionless-sharing-focused Dropbox skin and some may get enough use out of their familiar apps that needing an alternative file service sounds superfluous.


But it doesn’t take long to see that CloudUp has nailed the design and user experience. There’s no doubt that this looks better the majority of apps out there. It’s easy to use, and the stream function, instant viewing and link-sharing and the work its doing on the back-end (and front, for that matter) to make conversion and rendering easy pretty much blow Dropbox out of the water.


CloudUp isn’t for the enterprise, and it’s not a place you’re going solely for file storage — in that sense, the “complementary” analogy does make sense. Yes, CloudUp will add premium tiers, but it remains to be seen whether the more casual, file-sharing crowd it’s going after is going to be regularly uploading more than 1,000 files. That means, like LearnBoost, monetizing may be a long, bumpy road for CloudUp, at the same time, as Dropbox moves to scoop up other awesome, sexy mobile apps like Mailbox and photo tools like Snapjoy, a service like CloudUp could become very attractive.


But, in the end, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself to decide.








via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/dDkmiTFr4ow/

La Internet ya se puede comprar

Lainternet


En Esty han puesto a la venta La Internet , una réplica perfecta como la que se guarda en las oficinas de Reynholm Industries. Tiene su botón de encendido y apagado que nadie debe tocar so pena de sumir al mundo en un caos, tal y como explicaban Moss y Roy en uno de los epidodios de I.T. Crowd. Y como sabiamente explicó Jen, tampoco hay que forzar la máquina: «de buena autoridad sé que si buscas Google en Google se rompe La Internet»


Otro detalle importante es que La Internet es relativamente barata y de bajo consumo: se puede comprar por unos 15 o 20 euros al cambio y solo requiere una batería de 9 voltios para funcionar. Si acaso parece pequeña y ligera es porque está compuesta de minúsculos bits que son casi como átomos. De ahí que toda la información y saber humanos quepa en un pequeño espacio del tamaño de una caja de zapatos.


(Vía Neatorama.)


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/humor/la-internet.html

La torre Eiffel vista desde perspectivas inusuales y los 72 científicos cuyos nombres fueron grabados en ella

Eiffel-Inside

Dentro de la famosa torre (CC) Éole Wind @ Flickr


Kuriositas tiene una preciosa recopilación de fotografías inusuales de la torre Eiffel , bien por su perspectiva exterior o interior o por el uso del color u otros recursos. Desde luego unas tomas muy diferentes de las clásicas fotos de turista.


Y a raíz de otro artículo que ahora no recuerdo encontré una curiosidad interesante: la lista de 72 nombres de científicos y «sabios» cuyos nombres están grabados en las placas alrededor de la primera planta de la torre:


Nombres-En-La-Torre

Los 72 nombres en la Torre Eiffel (CC) Benh Lieu Song @ Wikipedia


Nombres-Eiffel

Los nombres de la cara norte (CC) Gede @ Wikipedia


Entre otros nombres de la época de Eiffel figuran Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Ampere, Gay-Lussac, Foucault, Poisson, Daguerre y Fourier. Todo un gran homenaje para los siglos venideros.


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/fotografia/torre-eiffel-perspectivas-inusuales.html

Hyper Drive


Probablemente, la sensación más parecida a moverse a velocidad hiperespacial: Hyper Drive . Con música de BS, Solar Storm. Grabado con una DMC-GH3 de Panasonic. Para ver en alta definición y a generoso volumen.


# Enlace Permanente







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Windows 8 Music update brings in-app searching, login-free trial streaming



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Twitch.tv is down, users will need to reset their passwords when it's restored



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Walmart Slashes Price on iPhone 5, iPhone 4S



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EFF looks at rules controlling NSA surveillance, sees big risks for Americans



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