Apple News: Apple heads for home: Why HomeKit may not bring an ‘iLight’ or ‘iLock,’ but a new Apple TV
The promise of so many mid-century science fiction stories is now closer to reality than it has been at any point since the invention of the transistor: our homes are coming alive, learning to respond to and even anticipate our needs. One could, if one was so inclined, at this very moment knit together any of a number of free web services and devices available at local hardware stores to have their home lighting, security, ventilation, and audiovisual systems respond automatically to their owner’s presence or absence. But it’s difficult. Not in the way that doing very large-scale integration for processor design is difficult, but in the same way that getting the $0.20 clocks on your microwave, oven, and television to display the same time at the same time is difficult. As Steve Jobs would have said, it’s a bag of hurt.
Read full story => AppleInsider
Technology News: Nanotechnology Assembles the Future
Nanotechnology is not a future science; it is a current assembly of different disciplines working to change how we live. The term nanotechnology itself is still not defined in any one way. The word and the science diverts in two different directions, according to who is speaking. The smallness of nanotechnology is a concept and reality difficult to grasp. The word nanos is Greek, meaning dwarf or something very small. The meaning has shifted however to mean one-billionth, as milli means one-thousandth and micro means one-millionth. For example, if a nanometer could be magnified to appear as long as a person’s nose, a red blood cell would be as tall as the Empire State Building, a human hair perhaps three miles across and a finger could span the length of the US.
Read full story => GuardianLV
Programming News: 9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer
Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living. Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any sense of 40 GB of brain scan data you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and write scripts to crunch those numbers, and I was always a good programmer. But it wasn’t until I quit my job (and possibly my future) in academia and started working for a small and ambitious start-up that I understood what being a software engineer — and more importantly, being in the business of software engineering — is really about. It’s not knowing more programming languages, libraries, algorithms, and design patterns. It’s a mindset. That mindset would have made my work a lot easier if only I had known and adopted it before I started grad school.
Read full story => Medium
Photography News: The 20 photographs of the week
Luis Suárez, the violence in Iraq, the Glastonbury festival – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week.
Read full story => TheGuardian
