100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars. Zooming in reveals 87 major named stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist's rendition.

The project allows users to zoom in and out using the mouse or track pad on a notebook. You can get more information on stars, including their name, and you can see a digital version of the real star. It reminds me a little of that old Windows screen saver with starts zooming by.

Google helps you kill time with 100,000 Stars experiment

We currently offer two products: Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. Both are platforms for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. We support many kinds of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. Our products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use, and collaboration.

Palantir Government is broadly deployed in the intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities, and is spreading rapidly by word-of-mouth. Most of Palantir’s government work remains classified . Palantir Finance is in use at some of the world’s leading hedge funds and financial institutions.

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Take a look at the article it is an interesting read.

Palantir - A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

By now, cars that drive themselves have become old news. Every time we turn around there's another organization out to wander half the globe with a driverless van or tackle one of the world's most demanding hill climb events with an automated Audi TT. It just never ends. But the guys and gals at Georgia Tech Research Institute have taken things one step further with its Collaborative Unmanned Systems Technology Demonstrator. During a demonstration for the US Army, the school effectively demonstrated how vastly different robotic vehicles could work together. You know, to get us coffee, take over the world or whatever.

As a part of the 2010 Robotic Rodeo, GTRI used two unmanned aerial vehicles to work in coordination with a roboticized Porsche Cayenne. Once airborne, the two RC planes take over everything from navigation and target location.

So what can all this tech do? GTRI says that in one instance, one of the UAVs can locate a target and radio the location back to the UGV, or unmanned ground vehicle, which then navigates around buildings and obstacles to the location. Meanwhile, the second UAV can continue to use its sensors to evaluate the surroundings. Welcome to the new world

Georgia Tech pairs autonomous Porsche Cayenne with two R/C airplanes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9JCW-YtaqQ

Robotic cat from Japan! Yume Neko Smile: JapanTrendShop.com

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Identity 2.0

By piecing together multiple signals the technology can achieve as much as 326 megabits per second in downloads on a 20MHz slice of the wireless spectrum; uploads peak at 86MHz, says the standards body. The finished version of LTE also cuts latency down to 10 milliseconds between the tower and the user, allowing relatively time-sensitive activities such as video calls or games.

News of the approval comes after Nokia has already demonstrated the 4G cell service in action, reaching 173Mbps in real-world tests that involved an interference-prone downtown environment and several users connected to a station at once. Practical use may see a further drop once service is commercially available and more users are present on a single network.

Electronista | 3G group finalizes 326-megabit 4G spec

Damn it, I have people skills!!!! :)

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Interpersonal skills are more important in the workplace than IT skills, according to the results of a survey commissioned by Microsoft.

In the survey of approximately 500 board-level executives, 61 percent said interpersonal and teamworking skills were more important than IT skills.

Survey: People skills valued over those for IT

Ubuntu isn't that bad, Firefox, Evolution (email client) and Open Office are very nice. I ran Ubuntu in Parallels on OS X for awhile and liked it. Ubuntu will get the job done but it does not have the polished look you would expect in a 2007 app. I think other "home apps" could use improvement - photo editor, mp3 manager, video manager. Most linux apps are ugly, IMHO.

Get one of the new color Dell's (black looks cool) that supports Ubuntu and you can get in-home hardware replacement (next business day - after you talk to the support guy in India or Argentina over a shitty VoIP connection) including a laptop. Dell has done a good job at building a support infrastructure to do these on-site hardware replacements. I have been impressed when I had to use them. Apple should use this same support model.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/ubuntu

System76 looks like they have a full hardware (laptop, desktop, server) offering with Ubuntu. I am not sure of System76 operational hardware support model though. Will Dell or someone else eat their lunch in the market for Linux based systems? Will they be around next year? who knows.. But they are worth looking at and asking them a few questions.

http://www.system76.com/

BTW, Here is a better Linux IM client (it is not as ugly).

http://pidgin.im/pidgin/about/

So to recap your questions:

1. Better corporate based hardware support to Linux is available even on laptops now.

2. Ubuntu has done a better job at asking: what are the core apps that need to be on the desktop. The other options is to just install the OS with only what you need. Easy problem to solve.

3. I 1000% agree with you on getting work done vs. supporting or managing the system. I think you are going to run into this with any OS you run and not likely to go away any time soon. Pick your poison.

4. There are better IM clients now than ugly GAIM. See above.

You can always get Vista and turn on all the eye candy and repeat: this is OS X, this is OS X, this is OS X. j/k

Decius wrote:

The last time I ran linux on my desktop, it had the following problems:

1. It didn't really work right. It sort of worked, but not really. Things were broken. Things weren't well supported. Things like the mouse. It actually didn't click exactly where it pointed some of the time. And this was an IBM laptop. Not something oddball. And some hardware was tweaky... like wifi adapters that had to be unplugged and replugged sometimes in order to reload the drivers.

2. It came with WAY, WAY too much shit by default. Every jackass who had ever written an open source GUI application had managed to get it placed in the default menu.

3. Things needed to be screwed with a lot. A lot of tinkering, a lot of configuring and compiling and updating. Systems Administration. People who run linux desktops like to configure stuff and seem to enjoy applications like mutt that are way too feature rich and are basically useless if you don't want to invest a few hours into getting them to work right. I don't want to do that. I want basic shit to just work. I have work to do. I want to get it done. My computer should enable that. The reason I'm sick of my mac is that its getting in the way.

4. Firefox was fine, everything else was crummy. The IM clients were just downright ugly.

RE: Desktop Linux

From exotic locales like Maui and Paris to local restaurants and schools, Google Earth puts a planet's worth of Earth imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop.

Google Earth for OSX

] RSA Security on Tuesday said that over three months of
] consistent effort helped a team of mathematicians from
] Europe and North America solve the company's latest
] encryption puzzle.
]
] The multinational team of eight experts used about 100
] workstations to crack the code that won them a $10,000
] prize.
]
]
] The contestants' task was to determine the two prime
] numbers that have been used to generate eight "challenge"
] numbers, which are central to RSA™s 576-bit encryption
] code.

Multinational team cracks RSA 576-bit encypted code