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Spillikins №185. The Curiosity rover and how we lost our space.

It so happened that I am writing this issue not from Moscow, in conditions close to camping, far from civilization. To argue that this has become possible thanks to modern technology is trite, this is a common place. It seemed to me interesting to compare another moment, namely, that modern technologies are always perceived by us as some kind of improvement compared to what was before. We a priori believe that the new TV should show better than the old one, and very often we convince ourselves of this. This style of consciousness has already spread to books and culture – newer films are better than old ones, according to many viewers. I will not convince you that this is not so, I think this is obvious. There is a huge number of works that not only have not lost their relevance, but are extremely fresh despite the fact that they were written dozens or even hundreds of years ago.

The sensational and set a new bar in the visual effects of "Avatar" in terms of the script and what it contains, the film is frankly weak, promoting betrayal. On the contrary, the film of the 40s of the last century “Treasures of the Sierra Madre” cannot boast of color or frills in other areas, but the characters and situations shown are written out so well that this picture still looks in one breath today. The same can be said about most of the films of Hitchcock, Kubrick – these are not pictures that take their toll with special effects, they are not caliphs for one hour.Probably, it would be necessary to talk about this in more detail, but over the past week so many topics have accumulated that my head is spinning. For example, Spillikins did not include a chronicle of legal battles between Apple and Samsung; during the hearings, such a number of sensational details were revealed that one can only wonder. You can read a large and detailed material on this topic, it also appeared on the site today. In the meantime, I'll throw the hook – Apple involuntarily admitted that it expects to establish its own monopoly in the phone market and other manufacturers only copy the company's achievements. No more, no less. When I read the Apple presentation, I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. Are they serious?

From what personally shocked me last week – lighthouses will soon disappear from our world, which is probably why I decided to talk about it in detail. As well as my observation about paper and electronic books, unexpectedly my choice fell on the archaic form of books, below I will try to explain why. Finally, the main event of the past week was the landing (landing, apparently, is more accurate, but does not sound) of the Curiosity rover. Let's start with this topic.

But first, let me recommend you an article about the history of Android before it appeared in real stories, this is the story of what this OS could have been, but never became.

Content:

Curiosity rover – the curiosity of humanity and Mars.

The childhood of a Soviet schoolboy was marked by various achievements of the USSR – I remember how we boasted to each other that our missiles are the most accurate, but the US pershings are not so good. There was no doubt about the superiority of Soviet weapons, however, as well as the fact that our cosmonautics is leading in all areas. In 1985, on one of the first days of September, we wrote an essay about who we would be in the year 2000. The mania regarding the year 2000 as some kind of watershed existed even then. The standard set of dreams of elementary school students was that someone wanted to be a military man, a fireman, an astronaut. My children are about the same age as I was then, and no one in their class dreams of being an astronaut, much less a fireman or a military man. The romance of these professions in our country has given way to everyday life, the ideal is completely different “heroes”, and sometimes the complete absence of them. This is probably not bad in terms of adapting children to adulthood, but somehow boring. I am sure that the situation is even worse in less prosperous schools in Moscow and other Russian cities.

My friend, who has been living in the USA for about twenty years, has two boys – 9 and 6 years old. They have a prosperous life, their parents drag them to different cities and show them to museums, they offer very different entertainments. The older child dreams of space, but, to my surprise, he does not want to be an astronaut (our analogue of astronauts, different ideologies even made the designation of the profession different). The child wants to create robots to work in space and on other planets. Of course, as an adult, I understand that this is the future and this is a promising profession. To some extent, I was jarred that parents orient the child and his impulses already at such a tender age. Carefully touching on this topic, I was even more amazed – for the parents it was the same shock as it was for me. They explained that the child developed a love of space after visiting Cape Canaveral and later exploring the NASA website. It turned out that a 9-year-old child spends several hours a week on the NASA website and studies different sections. I can hardly imagine that someone in their right mind would spend several hours on the Roscosmos website. I don't even know if such a site exists, went to Google to look.

I've returned – Roscosmos has a website, but there is no place for children there. The main problem of our state is that it is only interested in the problems of adults. Where are films about professions, where are stories about different specialties and an attempt to create interest in children? As a rule, this is always a private initiative of enthusiasts and individual companies, but the state policy in this area is a spherical horse in a vacuum. Even if appropriate programs exist somewhere, unfortunately, they are not visible and not noticeable to the naked eye. I'm offended by this.

Millions of people watched the landing of the Curiosity rover last week on the NASA website or through similar broadcasts (text, photos, videos) on hundreds of other resources. The landing was broadcast in real time, and the interest shown in it overlapped all the events of that day. Why are people so drawn to space? Out of curiosity, of course. For us, it is in space that a space is preserved that can be explored, explored, these are undiscovered lands and spaces. The next area for human expansion.

There are several sections on the NASA website devoted to the study of Mars, I think that those who want to know a little more should start here.

It should be noted that the race between the USSR and the USA also affected Mars, in the 70s our countries competed for who would be the first on the red planet. First successful overflight for the USA, landing on the surface for the USSR. But the number of failed launches and failed missions was greater than the number of successful ones. You can read about it in a huge number of sources, for example, even Wikipedia.

Why am I writing all this when I should show photos from Mars, what everyone else is doing, and note that this topic also excites me and arouses curiosity. I guess it hurts the hell out of me that the space industry is dying in Russia, which was one of the most innovative and for three decades kept on what our fathers did and what we could not squander in the 90s, but successfully destroy today. Space does not begin in the gigantic workshops of factories where rockets are made. It does not begin in research laboratories or even in the minds of politicians, although they sometimes flatter themselves with this. Space, like all other undertakings, is an idea that can take hold of the minds of children and make them devote their lives to this direction. Someone will be an engineer, like my friend's son (he can change his mind a hundred times, but what matters is what he dreams about today), someone will become an astronaut, and someone will write programs for space stations. The struggle for a long time has been for children to choose what will capture them and make their life interesting and not insipid.

We must fight to prevent existing missiles from falling, as Proton-M did last week with two satellites (Russia is the absolute leader in the number of missiles lost during launch today). This is understandable and should be one of the current goals. But if we want the country to be strong, then we need space. To get space, you need to interest children, and this interest is not measured in money and cannot be invested overnight. It is necessary to recreate museums, make films, write books. And then in 20-30 years our space industry has a chance to take off. In the meantime, it suffers from exactly the same problems as the entire state, which is in a systemic, ongoing crisis. It's time to do something and change, because we are again losing a generation of children who could change a lot in our country, we are losing our future.

The last beam of the lighthouse – an unexpected discovery.

On one of my business trips to Southeast Asia, I came across the building of an old lighthouse, which was destroyed, desolation reigned around. A small area around the foot of the lighthouse is overgrown with bushes, the paint has faded. Inside – broken glass, abundantly mixed with some scraps of paper, taken from nowhere by British magazines. The spiral staircase has been preserved, on the landing there is a huge lens, it squinted and screwed up its broken edges. A local guide said the lighthouse building had a caretaker, but the Revolutionary War abolished the position and made it dangerous. The lighthouse turned into a kind of landmark, to which government troops or partisans went out. Some caught others and were not against the help of the caretaker, who quickly realized that neutrality would not save and fled in an unknown direction. I would like to believe that he escaped and abandoned his lighthouse, but saved his life.

Every time I see lighthouses, I remember exactly that building – old, shabby and not at all romantic. Like a ship that has run aground and is now slowly dying, unable to move one iota. How many lighthouses have I seen in my life? Never counted, but I'll try to do it now. In the US, on the coast, I climbed about a dozen lighthouses – half of them have been turned into museums. In Europe, these are just over a dozen buildings in different countries, some of them have been turned into museums of antiquity, some of them have automatic lighthouses. In Asia, up to a dozen. I didn’t see so many lighthouses in the USSR, but I visited the North and I will never forget how the howler of the lighthouse sounds dull and deep through the fog. Light is not visible, only the sound that is carried over the water. This feeling cannot be forgotten or confused with something else. As a child, I read books by Viktor Konetsky, which described the North and its beauty, the life of ordinary people. This is a very strong prose that sounds real, perhaps because it describes people, relationships and vast spaces where, at first glance, there is nothing. For me, my acquaintance with the North and the marine theme began with his books. Take the time to read the travel novel For Good Hope, Salt Ice, and other books. I think that it is extremely difficult to miss the choice of a book, they are equally good. It is possible that in the modern world they would try to call Konetsky a blogger and thereby belittle his feelings, impressions of reality. Finally, question its impact on this reality. In vain, since people of the level of Viktor Konetsky are outside the categories. In a word, I recommend that you read his prose, I think you will not regret it.

The romantic mood about lighthouses is a universal phenomenon, all over the world there are communities of lighthouse keepers, their fans. For example, in Russia there are several resources dedicated to lighthouses (as lighthouse keepers are called), one of them can be found here. This profession is already a thing of the past, since over the past few decades, many lighthouses have been turning into autonomous stations, acquiring hydrometeorological equipment. But soon they may disappear almost everywhere in the world, and their light will go out.

The development of the GPS global navigation system (GLONASS as an analogue and backup of GPS for civilian use) raised the question of the need to maintain beacons. Most of the seas are well studied and mapped, the presence of GPS on board, coupled with radar, echo sounders, computer systems, makes navigation much easier and more autonomous. The need for beacons is gradually disappearing. And not only in lighthouses, for example, in the Western world it is said that the Loran system (its latest version of Loran-C) is losing its relevance. This radio positioning system appeared after the Second World War, when global positioning systems did not yet exist. The radio signal comes from two points (in reality, you need two pairs of stations, or at least three stations), and on a ship, submarine or aircraft, they can measure the delay and calculate their coordinates. In Russia, there is a similar technology "Seagull", which is compatible with Loran-C.In 2009, the United States announced that they were ending support for Loran-C, as GPS was sufficient for navigation. Since the United States maintained most of the system abroad and had a common system with Canada, the departure of America, which stood at the origins of this system, de facto means the termination of its existence in the near future. Indeed, at first glance, there is no need for such systems. Defenders of Loran-C, as well as beacons, say that autonomous means of navigation are not enough. For example, it is mentioned that the DGPS signal is not protected from interference, although Loran-C is subject to distortion.

Beacons are being abandoned all over the world, they have retreated under the onslaught of GPS. Depending on the country of subordination of the beacons to a particular organization, they are converted into research laboratories or automatic meteorological stations, less often preserved for future use, just in case and in reserve. Since 2000, this process has been gaining momentum, many countries have adopted relevant programs since 2005. The closest analogy, understandable to the city dweller, will be the disappearance of payphones from the streets of cities with the spread of mobile phones. There are very few of them left – the lighthouses go the same way.

The world is changing, and perhaps for the better. On the other hand, new threats arise in it that we could not have imagined ten years ago. For example, devices have already been created that can interfere with the GPS signal – not just block it, but change the coordinates in an arbitrary way. This means that an attacker can disguise themselves and hide their location using the phone (no need to change the software in the phone, it's an external device). In court, evidence in the form of a mobile phone with fake movements will be taken with a bang, since it will be difficult to prove the imaginaryness of these coordinates. The plot shown in “Die Hard 2”, which in Russia is better known under the name “Die Hard”, becomes easily realizable. Remember how a fake control center landed a plane at an airport, the ground level was changed on the computer, and the plane just crashed on approach.At the same time, the fake dispatcher asked the pilots to turn off their own systems and led them to land on their own. At sea, the same scenario is possible, when autonomous navigation systems can somehow be disabled, and GPS can be deceived. On the other hand, in any such scenario, malicious intent is provided, this is a necessary component. At the time when the GPS system was being designed, no one was thinking about civilian applications. Moreover, the signal is open and not coded for civilian use. Threats like the one described above will pose new challenges, I think that GPS / GLONASS systems will acquire protection from intruders in the next decade, this is simply a necessity. The usual process of adapting new technology is underway.

If you spend fifteen minutes, you will hear how you can fool the GPS in a mobile phone today, this is one of the presentations from TED. Quite interesting and made me think about these topics.

Still, I'm terribly sorry for the lighthouses, this relic of the past, evoking a romantic mood and making you remember the era of sailing ships. It is clear that our world is changing a lot and we are jumping to the next step. But I am still too young or, conversely, old to find nostalgia in electronic devices that hovered in geostationary orbits. Despite their venerable age, they are not perceived as something with a touch of romance, they are just pieces of iron doing their job. Unlike lighthouses, which carried light and showed the way. Are you sorry that lighthouses are disappearing?

E-books versus paper books – a resounding loss for the former.

The e-book market is booming, even the advent of tablets with color screens and at a bargain price could not destroy e-readers. But against the backdrop of the relative calm of this market, even some relaxation, I have to say that in my world, books in electronic formats have almost disappeared.

Once I already told you that I was given a Sony PRS-505 and this book very quickly took a place in my hiking backpack. I read a lot of books on the plane on Sony, but for the last couple of years it has just been lying around, along with several other e-books that have been donated in the meantime. It's not at all a warm tube sound, rustling pages or something like that. Giving up the e-book for me happened by itself, it was a pragmatic decision.

Firstly, the number of devices in my backpack hasn't gone down, but the space it takes up has drastically decreased. This allowed me to make room for something else and keep the weight that I find comfortable. The main thing in this story is that books began to be placed here again – from one to three, depending on their size. Secondly, my tablet also has several apps for reading books, but I hardly use them. The biography of Steve Jobs was bought electronically in the Kindle app, but never fully read. Interestingly, I often read it in paper form, swallowing several dozen pages when I get to my coffee table, where it was registered.

My problem is that I read a lot. As a child, I was able to read more, on average 300-400 pages a day, without resorting to speed reading. In adulthood, one manages to read 5-7 books in a month. From the point of view of common sense, it is more profitable for me to read in electronic form, it is cheaper and I can keep a lot of books at hand. Moreover, at the same time I can read a book about business, psychology and something from fiction. I try not to confuse genres, this is perhaps the only limitation. Sometimes I get tired of a certain author and give myself a break by choosing something just the opposite.

In reality, every paper book I read finds its place and time. There is a book that lives in the bathroom, and only there, some books have settled in the office on the coffee table, I carry something with me or take it only on trips. In this aspect, it can be said that I even have beach books that are hoarded in order to be consumed during vegetable sunbathing. A kind of ritual that gives each book its own brilliance.

This is the time to exclaim that the e-book will perfectly replace all these books scattered in different places. But for me it's not. I don't want to remember that I need to take the book with me, I want to find it where I left it. Another consideration has to do with how the book is published. I really want to see the paper, its quality, the thickness of the book, for me it is psychologically important. Retrograde? Undoubtedly. After playing with e-books, I returned to paper books. I like to spend my time aimlessly searching for unknown books in a bookstore as you walk through the shelves and your eye catches on familiar titles that you recognize as something familiar. It is a kind of therapy when, like a hunter, you bring a lot of books from the store, they pile up on the shelf to be read in due time. Reading is not utilitarian for me, it is a part of life that is difficult to explain. This is not only light reading, rather, even the opposite. Eating books, I am digesting information, looking for new ideas – in a word, doing the same work as always.

I have already written that the disappearance of bookstores is painful for me, especially in the US. But it seems to me that, as in any story, there will be a turning point and in this one, some of the paper books will be preserved. It is possible that stores will have signal copies, but the printing of the book will be carried out at the checkout at your request. This path has not yet been fully explored. And for the final victory of e-books, it is necessary that a generation grow up that will learn from them in schools (or on tablets). Considering that these devices are only making their way into the education system, I can be sure that at least the next twenty years there will definitely be enough books for my age.

Do you read? If so, how often and what. To what extent is reading a part of your life for you? What are the last three books you read?

Extracurricular reading :

Fighting piracy is the first step towards changing search algorithms.

For the market of search engine optimizers or, as they are called for short, SEO specialists, the first wake-up call sounded. The entire business of such companies is built on existing search algorithms by major search engines, primarily Google. Any change in the search algorithm brings a headache, makes you look for new tools in order to raise your customers in search queries.

Unfortunately, search engines are not perfect and do not take into account many factors. Often, search results show pages that do not contain up-to-date information, but are optimized for typical search. Search engines are trying to correct for this behavior of optimizers, but have not yet succeeded in this, and do not want to break existing search algorithms. But the first step in this Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt direction made by Google, sure that this is only the first wake up call.

The company said that it plans to change the search algorithm for sites with a large number of claims from copyright holders (these are torrent trackers, sites with illegal content, and so on). In particular, as a result of the search, these sites will be shown in low positions, but official sites that sell or broadcast content within the law will be shown higher. Let me remind you that until recently all search engines took a completely different position – they supposedly have nothing to do with third-party sites, and therefore search results reflect only what people are interested in. As long as they are interested in pirated content sites, they will show up at the top of the list.

In my opinion, the situation is normal, and moreover, it was high time to bring this area to a certain common denominator, when the interests of different parties are taken into account. For example, I sincerely do not understand why a site that de facto stole an article from another resource and does not have any rights to it can be displayed in search results – it is secondary to the original resource. After all, the issue is by no means limited to music, films, but also affects articles, books, and other objects of copyright. I really hope that the algorithms that Google will use will play into the hands of those who create content, and do not steal it. So far, I don’t see anything terrible or remotely resembling censorship in this.

Sony Xperia Tablet – try number two.

Martin Elm, describing Sony Mint, noticed a very interesting feature: in Sony, fixing bugs turns into fixing one miscalculation, while all the others remain unchanged. I imagine that the brainstorming inside Sony touches on a bunch of shortcomings of a particular model, the company's employees discuss them heatedly and then highlight the main shortcoming, which they begin to fight with all their might. Sony does not have an integrated approach in this matter.

Let me remind you that the first two tablets from Sony were a resounding failure in sales – the high cost made them not so interesting even in comparison with Android models, although the design was attractive. The peculiarity of the Tablet P, equipped with two screens, led to the fact that this product turned out to be completely unclaimed. The result is minimal sales.

What did Sony decide to fight against this time? The obvious answer is with the price. The new model, which continues the ideas of the S1 and has a thinner body, will be positioned below.

In total, three versions of 16, 32 and 64 GB of memory are supposed, their price in the USA is 399, 499, 599 dollars. The price is adequate only at first glance, if you forget about the presence of the iPad and the possible appearance in September of a cheaper version of this tablet with a diagonal of 7 inches. This attempt to play with the price, slightly improving the characteristics and introducing a new generation of the device, is obviously doomed to failure. However, those who do not believe can ask about the S1 sales statistics, they are completely non-existent. During 2012, I did not see this device in the hands of people in any country of the world, which does not mean anything, but it is extremely significant. Devices of not so well-known brands I met all the time, not to mention the iPad.

Specifications are commonplace for the current generation of Android tablets – Tegra3, 8-megapixel camera, weight 570 grams, magnesium alloy and a 9.4-inch screen. It is curious that the tablet was again stuffed with a bunch of unnecessary programs from Sony, which negatively affect its speed. This is Sony's chronic disease when the company sincerely believes that the mass of garbage programs that replace the standard ones is very necessary for the end user. Finally, learn your lesson well – these additional programs are not needed. And the inability to remove them sometimes infuriates.

Unfortunately, I do not see any bright prospects for this tablet, no work has been done on the bugs, and the story with the S1 will repeat itself. So far everything points to it.

Spillikins №185. The Curiosity rover and how we lost our space.

It so happened that I am writing this issue not from Moscow, in conditions close to camping, far from civilization. To argue that this has become possible thanks to modern technology is trite, this is a common place. It seemed to me interesting to compare another moment, namely, that modern technologies are always perceived by us as some kind of improvement compared to what was before. We a priori believe that the new TV should show better than the old one, and very often we convince ourselves of this. This style of consciousness has already spread to books and culture – newer films are better than old ones, according to many viewers. I will not convince you that this is not so, I think this is obvious. There is a huge number of works that not only have not lost their relevance, but are extremely fresh despite the fact that they were written dozens or even hundreds of years ago.

From what personally shocked me last week – lighthouses will soon disappear from our world, which is probably why I decided to talk about it in detail. As well as my observation about paper and electronic books, unexpectedly my choice fell on the archaic form of books, below I will try to explain why. Finally, the main event of the past week was the landing (landing, apparently, is more accurate, but does not sound) of the Curiosity rover. Let's start with this topic.

But first, let me recommend you an article about the history of Android before it appeared in real stories, this is the story of what this OS could have been, but never became.

Content:

Curiosity rover – the curiosity of humanity and Mars.

The childhood of a Soviet schoolboy was marked by various achievements of the USSR – I remember how we boasted to each other that our missiles are the most accurate, but the US pershings are not so good. There was no doubt about the superiority of Soviet weapons, however, as well as the fact that our cosmonautics is leading in all areas. In 1985, on one of the first days of September, we wrote an essay about who we would be in the year 2000. The mania regarding the year 2000 as some kind of watershed existed even then. The standard set of dreams of elementary school students was that someone wanted to be a military man, a fireman, an astronaut. My children are about the same age as I was then, and no one in their class dreams of being an astronaut, much less a fireman or a military man. The romance of these professions in our country has given way to everyday life, the ideal is completely different “heroes”, and sometimes the complete absence of them. This is probably not bad in terms of adapting children to adulthood, but somehow boring. I am sure that the situation is even worse in less prosperous schools in Moscow and other Russian cities.

My friend, who has been living in the USA for about twenty years, has two boys – 9 and 6 years old. They have a prosperous life, their parents drag them to different cities and show them to museums, they offer very different entertainments. The older child dreams of space, but, to my surprise, he does not want to be an astronaut (our analogue of astronauts, different ideologies even made the designation of the profession different). The child wants to create robots to work in space and on other planets. Of course, as an adult, I understand that this is the future and this is a promising profession. To some extent, I was jarred that parents orient the child and his impulses already at such a tender age. Carefully touching on this topic, I was even more amazed – for the parents it was the same shock as it was for me. They explained that the child developed a love of space after visiting Cape Canaveral and later exploring the NASA website. It turned out that a 9-year-old child spends several hours a week on the NASA website and studies different sections. I can hardly imagine that someone in their right mind would spend several hours on the Roscosmos website. I don't even know if such a site exists, went to Google to look.

I've returned – Roscosmos has a website, but there is no place for children there. The main problem of our state is that it is only interested in the problems of adults. Where are films about professions, where are stories about different specialties and an attempt to create interest in children? As a rule, this is always a private initiative of enthusiasts and individual companies, but the state policy in this area is a spherical horse in a vacuum. Even if appropriate programs exist somewhere, unfortunately, they are not visible and not noticeable to the naked eye. I'm offended by this.

Millions of people watched the landing of the Curiosity rover last week on the NASA website or through similar broadcasts (text, photos, videos) on hundreds of other resources. The landing was broadcast in real time, and the interest shown in it overlapped all the events of that day. Why are people so drawn to space? Out of curiosity, of course. For us, it is in space that a space is preserved that can be explored, explored, these are undiscovered lands and spaces. The next area for human expansion.

There are several sections on the NASA website devoted to the study of Mars, I think that those who want to know a little more should start here.

It should be noted that the race between the USSR and the USA also affected Mars, in the 70s our countries competed for who would be the first on the red planet. First successful overflight for the USA, landing on the surface for the USSR. But the number of failed launches and failed missions was greater than the number of successful ones. You can read about it in a huge number of sources, for example, even Wikipedia.

Why am I writing all this when I should show photos from Mars, what everyone else is doing, and note that this topic also excites me and arouses curiosity. I guess it hurts the hell out of me that the space industry is dying in Russia, which was one of the most innovative and for three decades kept on what our fathers did and what we could not squander in the 90s, but successfully destroy today. Space does not begin in the gigantic workshops of factories where rockets are made. It does not begin in research laboratories or even in the minds of politicians, although they sometimes flatter themselves with this. Space, like all other undertakings, is an idea that can take hold of the minds of children and make them devote their lives to this direction. Someone will be an engineer, like my friend's son (he can change his mind a hundred times, but what matters is what he dreams about today), someone will become an astronaut, and someone will write programs for space stations. The struggle for a long time has been for children to choose what will capture them and make their life interesting and not insipid.

Every time I see lighthouses, I remember exactly that building – old, shabby and not at all romantic. Like a ship that has run aground and is now slowly dying, unable to move one iota. How many lighthouses have I seen in my life? Never counted, but I'll try to do it now. In the US, on the coast, I climbed about a dozen lighthouses – half of them have been turned into museums. In Europe, these are just over a dozen buildings in different countries, some of which have been turned into museums of antiquity, and some of them have automatic lighthouses. In Asia, up to a dozen. I didn’t see so many lighthouses in the USSR, but I visited the North and I will never forget how the howler of the lighthouse sounds dull and deep through the fog. Light is not visible, only the sound that is carried over the water. This feeling cannot be forgotten or confused with something else. As a child, I read books by Viktor Konetsky, which described the North and its beauty, the life of ordinary people. This is a very strong prose that sounds real, perhaps because it describes people, relationships and vast spaces where, at first glance, there is nothing. For me, my acquaintance with the North and the marine theme began with his books. Take the time to read the travel novel For Good Hope, Salt Ice, and other books. I think that it is extremely difficult to miss the choice of book, they are equally good. It is possible that in the modern world they would try to call Konetsky a blogger and thereby belittle his feelings, impressions of reality. Finally, question its impact on this reality. In vain, since people of the level of Viktor Konetsky are outside the categories. In a word, I recommend that you read his prose, I think that you will not regret it.

In the North, in the 90s of the last century, we ended up on a small island where an automatic beacon was installed. The standard, typical structure, in which a radioisotope power source was used, in the USSR did not skimp on the use of new technologies when it came to navigation that could help the fleet. Dual-use technologies were in favor. There was no longer a battery in that lighthouse; fortunately, marauders tore it out, leaving a lifeless lighthouse, which was of little concern in those years. The feeling of the desolation of the North is perfectly conveyed in the film by Alexei Popogrebsky “How I Spent This Summer”. In it, the hero of Grigory Dobrygin warms his hands over an isotope power source, in any case, such an interpretation is possible based on the designations on the case of this device.

From other stories with lighthouses, I can recall children's adventure novels in which the inhabitants of coastal villages created fake lighthouses so that ships would crash on the rocks. The https://tonaton.co.ke/c_commercial-properties survivors were killed and the goods appropriated. They say that such stories happened often in troubled Europe.

The romantic mood about lighthouses is a universal phenomenon, all over the world there are communities of lighthouse keepers, their fans. For example, in Russia there are several resources dedicated to lighthouses (as lighthouse keepers are called), one of them can be found here. This profession is already a thing of the past, since over the past few decades, many lighthouses have been turning into autonomous stations, acquiring hydrometeorological equipment. But soon they may disappear almost everywhere in the world, and their light will go out.

The development of the GPS global navigation system (GLONASS as an analogue and backup of GPS for civilian use) raised the question of the need to maintain beacons. Most of the seas are well studied and mapped, the presence of GPS on board, coupled with radar, echo sounders, computer systems, makes navigation much easier and more autonomous. The need for beacons is gradually disappearing. And not only in lighthouses, for example, in the Western world it is said that the Loran system (its latest version of Loran-C) is losing its relevance. This radio positioning system appeared after the Second World War, when global positioning systems did not yet exist. The radio signal comes from two points (in reality, you need two pairs of stations, or at least three stations), and on a ship, submarine or aircraft, they can measure the delay and calculate their coordinates. In Russia, there is a similar technology "Seagull", which is compatible with Loran-C.In 2009, the US announced that they were ending support for Loran-C, as GPS was sufficient for navigation. Since the United States maintained most of the system abroad and had a common system with Canada, the departure of America, which stood at the origins of this system, de facto means the termination of its existence in the near future. Indeed, at first glance, there is no need for such systems. Defenders of Loran-C, as well as beacons, say that autonomous means of navigation are not enough. For example, it is mentioned that the DGPS signal is not protected from interference, although Loran-C is subject to distortion.

Beacons are being abandoned all over the world, they have retreated under the onslaught of GPS. Depending on the country of subordination of the beacons to a particular organization, they are converted into research laboratories or automatic meteorological stations, less often preserved for future use, just in case and in reserve. Since 2000, this process has been gaining momentum, many countries have adopted relevant programs since 2005. The closest analogy, understandable to the city dweller, will be the disappearance of payphones from the streets of cities with the spread of mobile phones. There are very few of them left – the lighthouses go the same way.

The world is changing, and perhaps for the better. On the other hand, new threats arise in it that we could not have imagined ten years ago. For example, devices have already been created that can interfere with the GPS signal – not just block it, but change the coordinates in an arbitrary way. This means that an attacker can disguise themselves and hide their location using the phone (no need to change the software in the phone, it's an external device). In court, evidence in the form of a mobile phone with fake movements will be taken with a bang, since it will be difficult to prove the imaginaryness of these coordinates. The plot shown in “Die Hard 2”, which in Russia is better known under the name “Die Hard”, becomes easily realizable. Remember how a fake control center landed a plane at an airport, the ground level was changed on the computer, and the plane just crashed on approach.At the same time, the fake dispatcher asked the pilots to turn off their own systems and led them to land on their own. At sea, the same scenario is possible, when autonomous navigation systems can somehow be disabled, and GPS can be deceived. On the other hand, in any such scenario, malicious intent is provided, this is a necessary component. At the time when the GPS system was being designed, no one was thinking about civilian applications. Moreover, the signal is open and not coded for civilian use. Threats like the one described above will pose new challenges, I think that GPS / GLONASS systems will acquire protection from intruders in the next decade, this is simply a necessity. The usual process of adapting new technology is underway.

If you spend fifteen minutes, you will hear how you can fool the GPS in a mobile phone today, this is one of the presentations from TED. Quite interesting and made me think about these topics.

Still, I'm terribly sorry for the lighthouses, this relic of the past, evoking a romantic mood and making you remember the era of sailing ships. It is clear that our world is changing a lot and we are jumping to the next step. But I am still too young or, conversely, old to find nostalgia in electronic devices that hovered in geostationary orbits. Despite their venerable age, they are not perceived as something with a touch of romance, they are just pieces of iron doing their job. Unlike lighthouses, which carried light and showed the way. Are you sorry that lighthouses are disappearing?

E-books versus paper books – a resounding loss for the former.

The e-book market is booming, even the advent of tablets with color screens and at a bargain price could not destroy e-readers. But against the backdrop of the relative calm of this market, even some relaxation, I have to say that in my world, books in electronic formats have almost disappeared.

Once I already told you that I was given a Sony PRS-505 and this book very quickly took a place in my hiking backpack. I read a lot of books on the plane on Sony, but for the last couple of years it has just been lying around, along with several other e-books that have been donated in the meantime. It's not at all a warm tube sound, rustling pages or something like that. Giving up the e-book for me happened by itself, it was a pragmatic decision.

Firstly, the number of devices in my backpack hasn't gone down, but the space it takes up has drastically decreased. This allowed me to make room for something else and keep the weight that I find comfortable. The main thing in this story is that books began to be placed here again – from one to three, depending on their size. Secondly, my tablet also has several apps for reading books, but I hardly use them. The biography of Steve Jobs was bought electronically in the Kindle app, but never fully read. Interestingly, I often read it in paper form, swallowing several dozen pages when I get to my coffee table, where it was registered.

I have already written that the disappearance of bookstores is painful for me, especially in the US. But it seems to me that, as in any story, there will be a turning point and in this one, some of the paper books will be preserved. It is possible that stores will have signal copies, but the printing of the book will be carried out at the checkout at your request. This path has not yet been fully explored. And for the final victory of e-books, it is necessary that a generation grow up that will learn from them in schools (or on tablets). Considering that these devices are only making their way into the education system, I can be sure that at least the next twenty years there will definitely be enough books for my age.

Do you read? If so, how often and what. To what extent is reading a part of your life for you? What are the last three books you read?

Extracurricular reading :

Fighting piracy is the first step towards changing search algorithms.

For the search engine optimizer market or, as they are called for short, SEO specialists, the first wake-up call sounded. The entire business of such companies is built on existing search algorithms by major search engines, primarily Google. Any change in the search algorithm brings a headache, makes you look for new tools in order to raise your customers in search queries.

Unfortunately, search engines are not perfect and do not take into account many factors. Often, search results show pages that do not contain up-to-date information, but are optimized for typical search. Search engines are trying to correct for this behavior of optimizers, but have not yet succeeded in this, and do not want to break existing search algorithms. But the first step in this Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt direction made by Google, sure that this is only the first wake up call.

The company said that it plans to change the search algorithm for sites with a large number of claims from copyright holders (these are torrent trackers, sites with illegal content, and so on). In particular, as a result of the search, these sites will be shown in low positions, but official sites that sell or broadcast content within the law will be shown higher. Let me remind you that until recently all search engines took a completely different position – they supposedly have nothing to do with third-party sites, and therefore search results reflect only what people are interested in. As long as they are interested in pirated content sites, they will show up at the top of the list.

Google received 4.9 million complaints in the last month about various URLs that contain content that violates the rights of third parties. This is more than in the whole of 2009, and, first of all, is due to a change in the companies' policy regarding such complaints.

Is Google's move the first step towards censorship? Yes and no. In my opinion, from the point of view of the law, the owner of the resource is responsible for posting materials, and there is no doubt about that. On the other hand, if another site advertises or facilitates the distribution of these materials, then it is an accomplice (very much depends on the country and jurisdiction, somewhere it is not considered a crime). Google, apparently, is afraid of facing lawsuits from copyright holders and has spread straws just in case.

The MPAA was quick to respond to Google's statement and literally said that the devil is in the details and that the organization will be closely monitoring how the new search algorithm will be organized. I think the MPAA is sleeping and seeing how to remove pirated sites from search results altogether. It is unlikely that they will succeed, but the attempt is not torture.

In my opinion, the situation is normal, and moreover, it was high time to bring this area to a certain common denominator, when the interests of different parties are taken into account. For example, I sincerely do not understand why a site that de facto stole an article from another resource and does not have any rights to it can be displayed in search results – it is secondary to the original resource. After all, the issue is by no means limited to music, films, but also affects articles, books, and other objects of copyright. I really hope that the algorithms that Google will use will play into the hands of those who create content, and do not steal it. So far, I don’t see anything terrible or remotely resembling censorship in this.

Sony Xperia Tablet – try number two.

Martin Elm, describing Sony Mint, noticed a very interesting feature: in Sony, fixing bugs turns into fixing one miscalculation, while all the others remain unchanged. I imagine that the brainstorming inside Sony touches on a bunch of shortcomings of a particular model, the company's employees discuss them heatedly and then highlight the main shortcoming, which they begin to fight with all their might. Sony does not have an integrated approach in this matter.

Let me remind you that the first two tablets from Sony were a resounding failure in sales – the high cost made them not so interesting even in comparison with Android models, although the design was attractive. The peculiarity of the Tablet P, equipped with two screens, led to the fact that this product turned out to be completely unclaimed. The result is minimal sales.

What did Sony decide to fight this time? The obvious answer is with the price. The new model, which continues the ideas of S1 and has a thinner body, will be positioned below.

In total, three versions of 16, 32 and 64 GB of memory are supposed, their price in the USA is 399, 499, 599 dollars. The price is adequate only at first glance, if you forget about the presence of the iPad and the possible appearance in September of a cheaper version of this tablet with a diagonal of 7 inches. This attempt to play with the price, slightly improving the characteristics and introducing a new generation of the device, is obviously doomed to failure. However, those who do not believe can ask about the S1 sales statistics, they are completely non-existent. During 2012, I did not see this device in the hands of people in any country of the world, which does not mean anything, but it is extremely significant. Devices of not so well-known brands I met all the time, not to mention the iPad.

The sensational and set a new bar in the visual effects of "Avatar" in terms of the script and what it contains, the film is frankly weak, promoting betrayal. On the contrary, the film of the 40s of the last century “Treasures of the Sierra Madre” cannot boast of color or frills in other areas, but the characters and situations shown are written out so well that this picture still looks in one breath today. The same can be said about most of the films of Hitchcock, Kubrick – these are not pictures that take their toll with special effects, they are not caliphs for one hour. Probably, it would be necessary to talk about this in more detail, but over the past week so many topics have accumulated that my head is spinning. For example, Spillikins did not include a chronicle of legal battles between Apple and Samsung; during the hearings, such a number of sensational details were revealed that one can only wonder. You can read a large and detailed material on this topic, it also appeared on the site today. In the meantime, I'll throw the hook – Apple involuntarily admitted that it expects to establish its own monopoly in the phone market and other manufacturers only copy the company's achievements. No more, no less. When I read the Apple presentation, I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. Are they serious?

From what personally shocked me last week – lighthouses will soon disappear from our world, which is probably why I decided to talk about it in detail. As well as my observation about paper and electronic books, unexpectedly my choice fell on the archaic form of books, below I will try to explain why. Finally, the main event of the past week was the landing (landing, apparently, is more accurate, but does not sound) of the Curiosity rover. Let's start with this topic.

But first, let me recommend you an article about the history of Android before it appeared in real stories, this is the story of what this OS could have been, but never became.

Content:

Curiosity rover – the curiosity of humanity and Mars.

The childhood of a Soviet schoolboy was marked by various achievements of the USSR – I remember how we boasted to each other that our missiles are the most accurate, but the US pershings are not so good. There was no doubt about the superiority of Soviet weapons, however, as well as the fact that our cosmonautics is leading in all areas. In 1985, on one of the first days of September, we wrote an essay about who we would be in the year 2000. The mania regarding the year 2000 as some kind of watershed existed even then. The standard set of dreams of elementary school students was that someone wanted to be a military man, a fireman, an astronaut. My children are about the same age as I was then, and no one in their class dreams of being an astronaut, much less a fireman or a military man. The romance of these professions in our country has given way to everyday life, the ideal is completely different “heroes”, and sometimes the complete absence of them. This is probably not bad in terms of adapting children to adulthood, but somehow boring. I am sure that the situation is even worse in less prosperous schools in Moscow and other Russian cities.

My friend, who has been living in the USA for about twenty years, has two boys – 9 and 6 years old. They have a prosperous life, their parents drag them to different cities and show them to museums, they offer very different entertainments. The older child dreams of space, but, to my surprise, he does not want to be an astronaut (our analogue of astronauts, different ideologies even made the designation of the profession different). The child wants to create robots to work in space and on other planets. Of course, as an adult, I understand that this is the future and this is a promising profession. To some extent, I was jarred that parents orient the child and his impulses already at such a tender age. Carefully touching on this topic, I was even more amazed – for the parents it was the same shock as it was for me. They explained that the child developed a love of space after visiting Cape Canaveral and later exploring the NASA website. It turned out that a 9-year-old child spends several hours a week on the NASA website and studies different sections. I can hardly imagine that someone in their right mind would spend several hours on the Roscosmos website. I don't even know if such a site exists, went to Google to look.

I've returned – Roscosmos has a website, but there is no place for children there. The main problem of our state is that it is only interested in the problems of adults. Where are films about professions, where are stories about different specialties and an attempt to create interest in children? As a rule, this is always a private initiative of enthusiasts and individual companies, but the state policy in this area is a spherical horse in a vacuum. Even if appropriate programs exist somewhere, unfortunately, they are not visible and not noticeable to the naked eye. I'm offended by this.

Millions of people watched the landing of the Curiosity rover last week on the NASA website or through similar broadcasts (text, photos, videos) on hundreds of other resources. The landing was broadcast in real time, and the interest shown in it overlapped all the events of that day. Why are people so drawn to space? Out of curiosity, of course. For us, it is in space that a space is preserved that can be explored, explored, these are undiscovered lands and spaces. The next area for human expansion.

There are several sections on the NASA website devoted to the study of Mars, I think that those who want to know a little more should start here.

It should be noted that the race between the USSR and the USA also affected Mars, in the 70s our countries competed for who would be the first on the red planet. First successful overflight for the USA, landing on the surface for the USSR. But the number of failed launches and failed missions was greater than the number of successful ones. You can read about it in a huge number of sources, for example, even Wikipedia.

Why am I writing all this when I should show photos from Mars, what everyone else is doing, and note that this topic also excites me and arouses curiosity. I guess it hurts the hell out of me that the space industry is dying in Russia, which was one of the most innovative and for three decades kept on what our fathers did and what we could not squander in the 90s, but successfully destroy today. Space does not begin in the gigantic workshops of factories where rockets are made. It does not begin in research laboratories or even in the minds of politicians, although they sometimes flatter themselves with this. Space, like all other undertakings, is an idea that can take hold of the minds of children and make them devote their lives to this direction. Someone will be an engineer, like my friend's son (he can change his mind a hundred times, but what matters is what he dreams about today), someone will become an astronaut, and someone will write programs for space stations. The struggle for a long time has been for children to choose what will capture them and make their life interesting and not insipid.

We must fight to prevent existing missiles from falling, as Proton-M did last week with two satellites (Russia is the absolute leader in the number of missiles lost during launch today). This is understandable and should be one of the current goals. But if we want the country to be strong, then we need space. To get space, you need to interest children, and this interest is not measured in money and cannot be invested overnight. It is necessary to recreate museums, make films, write books. And then in 20-30 years our space industry has a chance to take off. In the meantime, it suffers from exactly the same problems as the entire state, which is in a systemic, ongoing crisis. It's time to do something and change, because we are again losing a generation of children who could change a lot in our country, we are losing our future.

The last beam of the lighthouse – an unexpected discovery.

On one of my business trips to Southeast Asia, I came across the building of an old lighthouse, which was destroyed, desolation reigned around. A small area around the foot of the lighthouse is overgrown with bushes, the paint has faded. Inside – broken glass, abundantly mixed with some scraps of paper, taken from nowhere by British magazines. The spiral staircase has been preserved, on the landing there is a huge lens, it squinted and screwed up its broken edges. A local guide said the lighthouse building had a caretaker, but the Revolutionary War abolished the position and made it dangerous. The lighthouse turned into a kind of landmark, to which government troops or partisans went out. Some caught others and were not against the help of the caretaker, who quickly realized that neutrality would not save and fled in an unknown direction. I would like to believe that he escaped and abandoned his lighthouse, but saved his life.

Every time I see lighthouses, I remember exactly that building – old, shabby and not at all romantic. Like a ship that has run aground and is now slowly dying, unable to move one iota. How many lighthouses have I seen in my life? Never counted, but I'll try to do it now. In the US, on the coast, I climbed about a dozen lighthouses – half of them have been turned into museums. In Europe, these are just over a dozen buildings in different countries, some of which have been turned into museums of antiquity, and some of them have automatic lighthouses. In Asia, up to a dozen. I didn’t see so many lighthouses in the USSR, but I visited the North and I will never forget how the howler of the lighthouse sounds dull and deep through the fog. Light is not visible, only the sound that is carried over the water. This feeling cannot be forgotten or confused with something else. As a child, I read books by Viktor Konetsky, which described the North and its beauty, the life of ordinary people. This is a very strong prose that sounds real, perhaps because it describes people, relationships and vast spaces where, at first glance, there is nothing. For me, my acquaintance with the North and the marine theme began with his books. Take the time to read the travel novel For Good Hope, Salt Ice, and other books. I think that it is extremely difficult to miss the choice of book, they are equally good. It is possible that in the modern world they would try to call Konetsky a blogger and thereby belittle his feelings, impressions of reality. Finally, question its impact on this reality. In vain, since people of the level of Viktor Konetsky are outside the categories. In a word, I recommend that you read his prose, I think that you will not regret it.

In the North, in the 90s of the last century, we ended up on a small island where an automatic beacon was installed. The standard, typical structure, in which a radioisotope power source was used, in the USSR did not skimp on the use of new technologies when it came to navigation that could help the fleet. Dual-use technologies were in favor. There was no longer a battery in that lighthouse; fortunately, marauders tore it out, leaving a lifeless lighthouse, which was of little concern in those years. The feeling of the desolation of the North is perfectly conveyed in the film by Alexei Popogrebsky “How I Spent This Summer”. In it, the hero of Grigory Dobrygin warms his hands over an isotope power source, in any case, such an interpretation is possible based on the designations on the case of this device.

From other stories with lighthouses, I can recall children's adventure novels in which the inhabitants of coastal villages created fake lighthouses so that ships would crash on the rocks. The survivors were killed and the goods appropriated. They say that such stories happened often in troubled Europe.

The romantic mood about lighthouses is a universal phenomenon, all over the world there are communities of lighthouse keepers, their fans. For example, in Russia there are several resources dedicated to lighthouses (as lighthouse keepers are called), one of them can be found here. This profession is already a thing of the past, since over the past few decades, many lighthouses have been turning into autonomous stations, acquiring hydrometeorological equipment. But soon they may disappear almost everywhere in the world, and their light will go out.

The development of the GPS global navigation system (GLONASS as an analogue and backup of GPS for civilian use) raised the question of the need to maintain beacons. Most of the seas are well studied and mapped, the presence of GPS on board, coupled with radar, echo sounders, computer systems, makes navigation much easier and more autonomous. The need for beacons is gradually disappearing. And not only in lighthouses, for example, in the Western world it is said that the Loran system (its latest version of Loran-C) is losing its relevance. This radio positioning system appeared after the Second World War, when global positioning systems did not yet exist. The radio signal comes from two points (in reality, you need two pairs of stations, or at least three stations), and on a ship, submarine or aircraft, they can measure the delay and calculate their coordinates. In Russia, there is a similar technology "Seagull", which is compatible with Loran-C.In 2009, the US announced that they were ending support for Loran-C, as GPS was sufficient for navigation. Since the United States maintained most of the system abroad and had a common system with Canada, the departure of America, which stood at the origins of this system, de facto means the termination of its existence in the near future. Indeed, at first glance, there is no need for such systems. Defenders of Loran-C, as well as beacons, say that autonomous means of navigation are not enough. For example, it is mentioned that the DGPS signal is not protected from interference, although Loran-C is subject to distortion.

Beacons are being abandoned all over the world, they have retreated under the onslaught of GPS. Depending on the country of subordination of the beacons to a particular organization, they are converted into research laboratories or automatic meteorological stations, less often preserved for future use, just in case and in reserve. Since 2000, this process has been gaining momentum, many countries have adopted relevant programs since 2005. The closest analogy, understandable to the city dweller, will be the disappearance of payphones from the streets of cities with the spread of mobile phones. There are very few of them left – the lighthouses go the same way.

The world is changing, and perhaps for the better. On the other hand, new threats arise in it that we could not have imagined ten years ago. For example, devices have already been created that can interfere with the GPS signal – not just block it, but change the coordinates in an arbitrary way. This means that an attacker can disguise themselves and hide their location using the phone (no need to change the software in the phone, it's an external device). In court, evidence in the form of a mobile phone with fake movements will be taken with a bang, since it will be difficult to prove the imaginaryness of these coordinates. The plot shown in “Die Hard 2”, which in Russia is better known under the name “Die Hard”, becomes easily realizable. Remember how a fake control center landed a plane at an airport, the ground level was changed on the computer, and the plane just crashed on approach.At the same time, the fake dispatcher asked the pilots to turn off their own systems and led them to land on their own. At sea, the same scenario is possible, when autonomous navigation systems can somehow be disabled, and GPS can be deceived. On the other hand, in any such scenario, malicious intent is provided, this is a necessary component. At the time when the GPS system was being designed, no one was thinking about civilian applications. Moreover, the signal is open and not coded for civilian use. Threats like the one described above will pose new challenges, I think that GPS / GLONASS systems will acquire protection from intruders in the next decade, this is simply a necessity. The usual process of adapting new technology is underway.

If you spend fifteen minutes, you will hear how you can fool the GPS in a mobile phone today, this is one of the presentations from TED. Quite interesting and made me think about these topics.

Still, I'm terribly sorry for the lighthouses, this relic of the past, evoking a romantic mood and making you remember the era of sailing ships. It is clear that our world is changing a lot and we are jumping to the next step. But I am still too young or, conversely, old to find nostalgia in electronic devices that hovered in geostationary orbits. Despite their venerable age, they are not perceived as something with a touch of romance, they are just pieces of iron doing their job. Unlike lighthouses, which carried light and showed the way. Are you sorry that lighthouses are disappearing?

E-books versus paper books – a resounding loss for the former.

The e-book market is booming, even the advent of tablets with color screens and at a bargain price could not destroy e-readers. But against the backdrop of the relative calm of this market, even some relaxation, I have to say that in my world, books in electronic formats have almost disappeared.

Once I already told you that I was given a Sony PRS-505 and this book very quickly took a place in my hiking backpack. I read a lot of books on the plane on Sony, but for the last couple of years it has just been lying around, along with several other e-books that have been donated in the meantime. It's not at all a warm tube sound, rustling pages or something like that. Giving up the e-book for me happened by itself, it was a pragmatic decision.

Firstly, the number of devices in my backpack hasn't gone down, but the space it takes up has drastically decreased. This allowed me to make room for something else and keep the weight that I find comfortable. The main thing in this story is that books began to be placed here again – from one to three, depending on their size. Secondly, my tablet also has several apps for reading books, but I hardly use them. The biography of Steve Jobs was bought electronically in the Kindle app, but never fully read. Interestingly, I often read it in paper form, swallowing several dozen pages when I get to my coffee table, where it was registered.

My problem is that I read a lot. As a child, I was able to read more, on average 300-400 pages a day, without resorting to speed reading. In adulthood, one manages to read 5-7 books in a month. From the point of view of common sense, it is more profitable for me to read in electronic form, it is cheaper and I can keep a lot of books at hand. Moreover, at the same time I can read a book about business, psychology and something from fiction. I try not to confuse genres, this is perhaps the only limitation. Sometimes I get tired of a certain author and give myself a break by choosing something just the opposite.

In reality, every paper book I read finds its place and time. There is a book that lives in the bathroom, and only there, some books have settled in the office on the coffee table, I carry something with me or take it only on trips. In this aspect, it can be said that I even have beach books that are hoarded in order to be consumed during vegetable sunbathing. A kind of ritual that gives each book its own brilliance.

This is the time to exclaim that the e-book will perfectly replace all these books scattered in different places. But for me it's not. I don't want to remember that I need to take the book with me, I want to find it where I left it. Another consideration has to do with how the book is published. I really want to see the paper, its quality, the thickness of the book, for me it is psychologically important. Retrograde? Undoubtedly. After playing with e-books, I returned to paper books. I enjoy wasting my time aimlessly searching for unknown books in a bookstore as you walk through the shelves and your eye catches on familiar titles that you recognize as something familiar. It is a kind of therapy when, like a hunter, you bring a lot of books from the store, they pile up on the shelf to be read in due time. Reading is not utilitarian for me, it is a part of life that is difficult to explain. This is not only light reading, rather, even the opposite. Eating books, I digest information, look for new ideas – in a word, I do the same work as always.

I have already written that the disappearance of bookstores is painful for me, especially in the US. But it seems to me that, as in any story, there will be a turning point and in this one, some of the paper books will be preserved. It is possible that stores will have signal copies, but the printing of the book will be carried out at the checkout at your request. This path has not yet been fully explored. And for the final victory of e-books, it is necessary that a generation grow up that will learn from them in schools (or on tablets). Considering that these devices are only making their way into the education system, I can be sure that at least the next twenty years there will definitely be enough books for my age.

Do you read? If so, how often and what. To what extent is reading a part of your life for you? What are the last three books you read?

Extracurricular reading :

Fighting piracy is the first step towards changing search algorithms.

For the search engine optimizer market or, as they are called for short, SEO specialists, the first wake-up call sounded. The entire business of such companies is built on existing search algorithms by major search engines, primarily Google. Any change in the search algorithm brings a headache, makes you look for new tools in order to raise your customers in search queries.

Unfortunately, search engines are not perfect and do not take into account many factors. Often, search results show pages that do not contain up-to-date information, but are optimized for typical search. Search engines are trying to correct for this behavior of optimizers, but have not yet succeeded in this, and do not want to break existing search algorithms. But the first step in this Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt direction made by Google, sure that this is only the first wake up call.

The company said that it plans to change the search algorithm for sites with a large number of claims from copyright holders (these are torrent trackers, sites with illegal content, and so on). In particular, as a result of the search, these sites will be shown in low positions, but official sites that sell or broadcast content within the law will be shown higher. Let me remind you that until recently, all search engines took a completely different position – they supposedly have nothing to do with third-party sites, and therefore search results reflect only what is interesting to people. As long as they are interested in pirated content sites, they will appear at the top of the list.

Google received 4.9 million complaints in the last month about various URLs that contain content that violates the rights of third parties. This is more than in the whole of 2009, and, first of all, is due to a change in the companies' policy regarding such complaints.

Is Google's move the first step towards censorship? Yes and no. In my opinion, from the point of view of the law, the owner of the resource is responsible for posting materials, and there is no doubt about that. On the other hand, if another site advertises or facilitates the distribution of these materials, then it is an accomplice (very much depends on the country and jurisdiction, somewhere it is not considered a crime). Google, apparently, is afraid of facing lawsuits from copyright holders and has spread straws just in case.

The MPAA was quick to respond to Google's statement and literally said that the devil is in the details and that the organization will be closely monitoring how the new search algorithm will be organized. I think the MPAA is sleeping and seeing how to remove pirated sites from search results altogether. It is unlikely that they will succeed, but the attempt is not torture.

Let me remind you that the first two tablets from Sony were a resounding failure in sales – the high cost made them not so interesting even in comparison with Android models, although the design was attractive. The peculiarity of the Tablet P, equipped with two screens, led to the fact that this product turned out to be completely unclaimed. The result is minimal sales.

What did Sony decide to fight this time? The obvious answer is with the price. The new model, which continues the ideas of S1 and has a thinner body, will be positioned below.

In total, three versions of 16, 32 and 64 GB of memory are supposed, their price in the USA is 399, 499, 599 dollars. The price is adequate only at first glance, if you forget about the presence of the iPad and the possible appearance in September of a cheaper version of this tablet with a diagonal of 7 inches. This attempt to play with the price, slightly improving the characteristics and introducing a new generation of the device, is obviously doomed to failure. However, those who do not believe can ask about the S1 sales statistics, they are completely non-existent. During 2012, I did not see this device in the hands of people in any country of the world, which does not mean anything, but it is extremely significant. Devices of not so well-known brands I met all the time, not to mention the iPad.

Specifications are commonplace for the current generation of Android tablets – Tegra3, 8-megapixel camera, weight 570 grams, magnesium alloy and a 9.4-inch screen. It is curious that the tablet was again stuffed with a bunch of unnecessary programs from Sony, which negatively affect its speed. This is Sony's chronic disease when the company sincerely believes that the mass of garbage programs that replace the standard ones is very necessary for the end user. Finally, learn your lesson well – these additional programs are not needed. And the inability to remove them sometimes infuriates.

Unfortunately, I do not see any bright prospects for this tablet, no work has been done on the bugs, and the story with the S1 will repeat itself. So far everything points to it.

Spillikins №185. The Curiosity rover and how we lost our space.

It so happened that I am writing this issue not from Moscow, in conditions close to camping, far from civilization. To argue that this has become possible thanks to modern technology is trite, this is a common place. It seemed to me interesting to compare another moment, namely, that modern technologies are always perceived by us as some kind of improvement compared to what was before. We a priori believe that the new TV should show better than the old one, and very often we convince ourselves of this. This style of consciousness has already spread to books and culture – newer films are better than old ones, according to many viewers. I will not convince you that this is not so, I think this is obvious. There is a huge number of works that not only have not lost their relevance, but are extremely fresh despite the fact that they were written dozens or even hundreds of years ago.

The sensational and set a new bar in the visual effects of "Avatar" in terms of the script and what it contains, the film is frankly weak, promoting betrayal. On the contrary, the film of the 40s of the last century “Treasures of the Sierra Madre” cannot boast of color or frills in other areas, but the characters and situations shown are written out so well that this picture still looks in one breath today. The same can be said about most of the films of Hitchcock, Kubrick – these are not pictures that take their toll with special effects, they are not caliphs for one hour. Probably, it would be necessary to talk about this in more detail, but over the past week so many topics have accumulated that my head is spinning. For example, Spillikins did not include a chronicle of legal battles between Apple and Samsung; during the hearings, such a number of sensational details were revealed that one can only wonder. You can read a large and detailed material on this topic, it also appeared on the site today. In the meantime, I'll throw the hook – Apple involuntarily admitted that it expects to establish its own monopoly in the phone market and other manufacturers only copy the company's achievements. No more, no less. When I read the Apple presentation, I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. Are they serious?

From what personally shocked me last week – lighthouses will soon disappear from our world, which is probably why I decided to talk about it in detail. As well as my observation about paper and electronic books, unexpectedly my choice fell on the archaic form of books, below I will try to explain why. Finally, the main event of the past week was the landing (landing, apparently, is more accurate, but does not sound) of the Curiosity rover. Let's start with this topic.

But first, let me recommend you an article about the history of Android before it appeared in real stories, this is the story of what this OS could have been, but never became.

Content:

Curiosity rover – the curiosity of humanity and Mars.

The childhood of a Soviet schoolboy was marked by various achievements of the USSR – I remember how we boasted to each other that our missiles are the most accurate, but the US pershings are not so good. There was no doubt about the superiority of Soviet weapons, however, as well as the fact that our cosmonautics is leading in all areas. In 1985, on one of the first days of September, we wrote an essay about who we would be in the year 2000. The mania regarding the year 2000 as some kind of watershed existed even then. The standard set of dreams of elementary school students was that someone wanted to be a military man, a fireman, an astronaut. My children are about the same age as I was then, and no one in their class dreams of being an astronaut, much less a fireman or a military man. The romance of these professions in our country has given way to everyday life, the ideal is completely different “heroes”, and sometimes the complete absence of them. This is probably not bad in terms of adapting children to adulthood, but somehow boring. I am sure that the situation is even worse in less prosperous schools in Moscow and other Russian cities.

My friend, who has been living in the USA for about twenty years, has two boys – 9 and 6 years old. They have a prosperous life, their parents drag them to different cities and show them to museums, they offer very different entertainments. The older child dreams of space, but, to my surprise, he does not want to be an astronaut (our analogue of astronauts, different ideologies even made the designation of the profession different). The child wants to create robots to work in space and on other planets. Of course, as an adult, I understand that this is the future and this is a promising profession. To some extent, I was jarred that parents orient the child and his impulses already at such a tender age. Carefully touching on this topic, I was even more amazed – for the parents it was the same shock as it was for me. They explained that the child developed a love of space after visiting Cape Canaveral and later exploring the NASA website. It turned out that a 9-year-old child spends several hours a week on the NASA website and studies different sections. I can hardly imagine that someone in their right mind would spend several hours on the Roscosmos website. I don't even know if such a site exists, went to Google to look.

I've returned – Roscosmos has a website, but there is no place for children there. The main problem of our state is that it is only interested in the problems of adults. Where are films about professions, where are stories about different specialties and an attempt to create interest in children? As a rule, this is always a private initiative of enthusiasts and individual companies, but the state policy in this area is a spherical horse in a vacuum. Even if appropriate programs exist somewhere, unfortunately, they are not visible and not noticeable to the naked eye. I'm offended by this.

Millions of people watched the landing of the Curiosity rover last week on the NASA website or through similar broadcasts (text, photos, videos) on hundreds of other resources. The landing was broadcast in real time, and the interest shown in it overlapped all the events of that day. Why are people so drawn to space? Out of curiosity, of course. For us, it is in space that a space is preserved that can be explored, explored, these are undiscovered lands and spaces. The next area for human expansion.

There are several sections on the NASA website devoted to the study of Mars, I think that those who want to know a little more should start here.

It should be noted that the race between the USSR and the USA also affected Mars, in the 70s our countries competed for who would be the first on the red planet. First successful overflight for the USA, landing on the surface for the USSR. But the number of failed launches and failed missions was greater than the number of successful ones. You can read about it in a huge number of sources, for example, even Wikipedia.

Why am I writing all this when I should show photos from Mars, what everyone else is doing, and note that this topic also excites me and arouses curiosity. I guess it hurts the hell out of me that the space industry is dying in Russia, which was one of the most innovative and for three decades kept on what our fathers did and what we could not squander in the 90s, but successfully destroy today. Space does not begin in the gigantic workshops of factories where rockets are made. It does not begin in research laboratories or even in the minds of politicians, although they sometimes flatter themselves with this. Space, like all other undertakings, is an idea that can take hold of the minds of children and make them devote their lives to this direction. Someone will be an engineer, like my friend's son (he can change his mind a hundred times, but what matters is what he dreams about today), someone will become an astronaut, and someone will write programs for space stations. The struggle for a long time has been for children to choose what will capture them and make their life interesting and not insipid.

In the North, in the 90s of the last century, we ended up on a small island where an automatic beacon was installed. The standard, typical structure, in which a radioisotope power source was used, in the USSR did not skimp on the use of new technologies when it came to navigation that could help the fleet. Dual-use technologies were in favor. There was no longer a battery in that lighthouse; fortunately, marauders tore it out, leaving a lifeless lighthouse, which was of little concern in those years. The feeling of the desolation of the North is perfectly conveyed in the film by Alexei Popogrebsky “How I Spent This Summer”. In it, the hero of Grigory Dobrygin warms his hands over an isotope power source, in any case, such an interpretation is possible based on the designations on the case of this device.

From other stories with lighthouses, I can recall children's adventure novels in which the inhabitants of coastal villages created fake lighthouses so that ships would crash on the rocks. The survivors were killed and the goods appropriated. They say that such stories happened often in troubled Europe.

The romantic mood about lighthouses is a universal phenomenon, all over the world there are communities of lighthouse keepers, their fans. For example, in Russia there are several resources dedicated to lighthouses (as lighthouse keepers are called), one of them can be found here. This profession is already a thing of the past, since over the past few decades, many lighthouses have been turning into autonomous stations, acquiring hydrometeorological equipment. But soon they may disappear almost everywhere in the world, and their light will go out.

The development of the GPS global navigation system (GLONASS as an analogue and backup of GPS for civilian use) raised the question of the need to maintain beacons. Most of the seas are well studied and mapped, the presence of GPS on board, coupled with radar, echo sounders, computer systems, makes navigation much easier and more autonomous. The need for beacons is gradually disappearing. And not only in lighthouses, for example, in the Western world it is said that the Loran system (its latest version of Loran-C) is losing its relevance. This radio positioning system appeared after the Second World War, when global positioning systems did not yet exist. The radio signal comes from two points (in reality, you need two pairs of stations, or at least three stations), and on a ship, submarine or aircraft, they can measure the delay and calculate their coordinates. In Russia, there is a similar technology "Seagull", which is compatible with Loran-C. In 2009, the United States announced that they were ending support for Loran-C, as GPS was sufficient for navigation.Since the United States maintained most of the system abroad and had a common system with Canada, the departure of America, which stood at the origins of this system, de facto means the termination of its existence in the near future. Indeed, at first glance, there is no need for such systems. Defenders of Loran-C, as well as beacons, say that autonomous means of navigation are not enough. For example, it is mentioned that the DGPS signal is not protected from interference, although Loran-C is subject to distortion.

Beacons are being abandoned all over the world, they have retreated under the onslaught of GPS. Depending on the country of subordination of the beacons to a particular organization, they are converted into research laboratories or automatic meteorological stations, less often preserved for future use, just in case and in reserve. Since 2000, this process has been gaining momentum, many countries have adopted relevant programs since 2005. The closest analogy, understandable to the city dweller, will be the disappearance of payphones from the streets of cities with the spread of mobile phones. There are very few of them left – the lighthouses go the same way.

The world is changing, and perhaps for the better. On the other hand, new threats arise in it that we could not have imagined ten years ago. For example, devices have already been created that can interfere with the GPS signal – not just block it, but change the coordinates in an arbitrary way. This means that an attacker can disguise themselves and hide their location using the phone (no need to change the software in the phone, it's an external device). In court, evidence in the form of a mobile phone with fake movements will be taken with a bang, since it will be difficult to prove the imaginaryness of these coordinates. The plot shown in “Die Hard 2”, which in Russia is better known under the name “Die Hard”, becomes easily realizable. Remember how a fake control center landed a plane at an airport, the ground level was changed on the computer, and the plane just crashed on approach.At the same time, the fake dispatcher asked the pilots to turn off their own systems and led them to land on their own. At sea, the same scenario is possible, when autonomous navigation systems can somehow be disabled, and GPS can be deceived. On the other hand, in any such scenario, malicious intent is provided, this is a necessary component. At the time when the GPS system was being designed, no one was thinking about civilian applications. Moreover, the signal is open and not coded for civilian use. Threats like the one described above will pose new challenges, I think that GPS / GLONASS systems will acquire protection from intruders in the next decade, this is simply a necessity. The usual process of adapting new technology is underway.

If you spend fifteen minutes, you will hear how you can fool the GPS in a mobile phone today, this is one of the presentations from TED. Quite interesting and made me think about these topics.

Still, I'm terribly sorry for the lighthouses, this relic of the past, evoking a romantic mood and making you remember the era of sailing ships. It is clear that our world is changing a lot and we are jumping to the next step. But I am still too young or, conversely, old to find nostalgia in electronic devices that hovered in geostationary orbits. Despite their venerable age, they are not perceived as something with a touch of romance, they are just pieces of iron doing their job. Unlike lighthouses, which carried light and showed the way. Are you sorry that lighthouses are disappearing?

E-books versus paper books – a resounding loss for the former.

The e-book market is booming, even the advent of tablets with color screens and at a bargain price could not destroy e-readers. But against the backdrop of the relative calm of this market, even some relaxation, I have to say that in my world, books in electronic formats have almost disappeared.

Once I have already told you that I was given a Sony PRS-505 and this book very quickly took a place in my hiking backpack. I read a lot of books on the plane on Sony, but for the last couple of years it has just been lying around, along with several other e-books that have been donated in the meantime. It's not at all a warm tube sound, rustling pages or something like that. Giving up the e-book for me happened by itself, it was a pragmatic decision.

Firstly, the number of devices in my backpack hasn't gone down, but the space it takes up has drastically decreased. This allowed me to make room for something else and keep the weight that I find comfortable. The main thing in this story is that books began to be placed here again – from one to three, depending on their size. Secondly, my tablet also has several apps for reading books, but I hardly use them. The biography of Steve Jobs was bought electronically in the Kindle app, but never fully read. Interestingly, I often read it in paper form, swallowing several dozen pages when I get to my coffee table, where it was registered.

My problem is that I read a lot. As a child, I was able to read more, on average 300-400 pages a day, without resorting to speed reading. In adulthood, one manages to read 5-7 books in a month. From the point of view of common sense, it is more profitable for me to read in electronic form, it is cheaper and I can keep a lot of books at hand. Moreover, at the same time I can read a book about business, psychology and something from fiction. I try not to confuse genres, this is perhaps the only limitation. Sometimes I get tired of a certain author and give myself a break by choosing something just the opposite.

In reality, every paper book I read finds its place and time. There is a book that lives in the bathroom, and only there, some books have settled in the office on the coffee table, I carry something with me or take it only on trips. In this aspect, it can be said that I even have beach books that are hoarded in order to be consumed during vegetable sunbathing. A kind of ritual that gives each book its own brilliance.

This is the time to exclaim that the e-book will perfectly replace all these books scattered in different places. But for me it's not. I don't want to remember that I need to take the book with me, I want to find it where I left it. Another consideration has to do with how the book is published. I really want to see the paper, its quality, the thickness of the book, for me it is psychologically important. Retrograde? Undoubtedly. After playing with e-books, I returned to paper books. I like to spend my time aimlessly searching for unknown books in a bookstore as you walk through the shelves and your eye catches on familiar titles that you recognize as something familiar. It is a kind of therapy when, like a hunter, you bring a lot of books from the store, they pile up on the shelf to be read in due time. Reading is not utilitarian for me, it is a part of life that is difficult to explain. This is not only light reading, rather, even the opposite. Eating books, I am digesting information, looking for new ideas – in a word, doing the same work as always.

I have already written that the disappearance of bookstores is painful for me, especially in the US. But it seems to me that, as in any story, there will be a turning point and in this one, some of the paper books will be preserved. It is possible that stores will have signal copies, but the printing of the book will be carried out at the checkout at your request. This path has not yet been fully explored. And for the final victory of e-books, it is necessary that a generation grow up that will learn from them in schools (or on tablets). Considering that these devices are only making their way into the education system, I can be sure that at least the next twenty years there will definitely be enough books for my age.

Do you read? If so, how often and what. To what extent is reading a part of your life for you? What are the last three books you read?

Fighting piracy is the first step towards changing search algorithms.

For the search engine optimizer market or, as they are called for short, SEO specialists, the first wake-up call sounded. The entire business of such companies is built on existing search algorithms by major search engines, primarily Google. Any change in the search algorithm brings a headache, makes you look for new tools in order to raise your customers in search queries.

Unfortunately, search engines are not perfect and do not take into account many factors. Often, search results show pages that do not contain up-to-date information, but are optimized for typical search. Search engines are trying to correct for this behavior of optimizers, but have not yet succeeded in this, and do not want to break existing search algorithms. But the first step in this Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt direction was made by Google, I am sure that this is only the first bell.

Unfortunately, search engines are not perfect and do not take into account many factors. Often, search results show pages that do not contain up-to-date information, but are optimized for typical search. Search engines are trying to correct for this behavior of optimizers, but have not yet succeeded in this, and do not want to break existing search algorithms. But the first step in this Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt Rwanda Designed Women\'s Yellow T-shirt direction made by Google, I am sure that this is only the first wake up call.

The company said that it plans to change the search algorithm for sites with a large number of claims from copyright holders (these are torrent trackers, sites with illegal content, and so on). In particular, as a result of the search, these sites will be shown in low positions, but official sites that sell or broadcast content within the law will be shown higher. Let me remind you that until recently all search engines took a completely different position – they supposedly have nothing to do with third-party sites, and therefore search results reflect only what people are interested in. As long as they are interested in pirated content sites, they will show up at the top of the list.

Google received 4.9 million complaints in the last month about various URLs that contain content that violates the rights of third parties. This is more than in the whole of 2009, and, first of all, is due to a change in the companies' policy regarding such complaints.

Is Google's move the first step towards censorship? Yes and no. In my opinion, from the point of view of the law, the owner of the resource is responsible for posting materials, and there is no doubt about that. On the other hand, if another site advertises or facilitates the distribution of these materials, then it is an accomplice (very much depends on the country and jurisdiction, somewhere it is not considered a crime). At Google, apparently, they are afraid of facing lawsuits from copyright holders and have spread straws just in case.

The MPAA was quick to respond to Google's statement and literally said that the devil is in the details and that the organization will be closely monitoring how the new search algorithm will be organized. I think the MPAA is sleeping and seeing how to remove pirated sites from search results altogether. It is unlikely that they will succeed, but the attempt is not torture.

In my opinion, the situation is normal, and moreover, it was high time to bring this area to some common denominator, when the interests of different parties are taken into account. For example, I sincerely do not understand why a site that de facto stole an article from another resource and does not have any rights to it can be displayed in search results – it is secondary to the original resource. After all, the issue is by no means limited to music, films, but also affects articles, books, and other objects of copyright. I really hope that the algorithms that Google will use will play into the hands of those who create content, and do not steal it. So far, I don’t see anything terrible or remotely resembling censorship in this.

Sony Xperia Tablet – try number two.

Martin Elm, describing Sony Mint, noticed a very interesting feature: in Sony, fixing bugs turns into fixing one miscalculation, while all the others remain unchanged. I imagine that the brainstorming inside Sony touches on a bunch of shortcomings of a particular model, the company's employees discuss them heatedly and then highlight the main shortcoming, which they begin to fight with all their might. Sony does not have an integrated approach in this matter.

Let me remind you that the first two tablets from Sony were a resounding failure in sales – the high cost made them not so interesting even in comparison with Android models, although the design was attractive. The peculiarity of the Tablet P, equipped with two screens, led to the fact that this product turned out to be completely unclaimed. The result is minimal sales.

What did Sony decide to fight this time? The obvious answer is with the price. The new model, which continues the ideas of S1 and has a thinner body, will be positioned below.

In total, three versions of 16, 32 and 64 GB of memory are supposed, their price in the USA is 399, 499, 599 dollars. The price is adequate only at first glance, if you forget about the presence of the iPad and the possible appearance in September of a cheaper version of this tablet with a diagonal of 7 inches. This attempt to play with the price, slightly improving the characteristics and introducing a new generation of the device, is obviously doomed to failure. However, those who do not believe can ask about the S1 sales statistics, they are completely non-existent. During 2012, I did not see this device in the hands of people in any country of the world, which does not mean anything, but it is extremely significant. Devices of not so well-known brands I met all the time, not to mention the iPad.

Specifications are commonplace for the current generation of Android tablets – Tegra3, 8-megapixel camera, weight 570 grams, magnesium alloy and a 9.4-inch screen. It is curious that the tablet was again stuffed with a bunch of unnecessary programs from Sony, which negatively affect its speed. This is Sony's chronic disease when the company sincerely believes that the mass of garbage programs that replace the standard ones is very necessary for the end user. Finally, learn your lesson well – these additional programs are not needed. And the inability to remove them sometimes infuriates.

Unfortunately, I do not see any bright prospects for this tablet, no work has been done on the bugs, and the story with the S1 will repeat itself. So far everything points to it.