mibkay_alex

link
Произведение Boston Dynamics - полностью автономный робот с двигателем внутреннего сгорания. По ссылке - страница с предшественником WildCat, роботом Cheetah - он показывает большую скорость, но он не автономен.

ссылку прислал SGordon

Gif your butt (!) over to Animal Gifs for MOAR cyoot and funneh on loop!

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: gif , take , hide , food , Cats Share on Facebook

Довелось мне как-то пьянствовать в компании докторов. Выпивали обстоятельно, прям с полудня. Пили хороший виски под хорошую закуску и неспешную беседу. Между прочим Владик, хозяин дома и тоже доктор, пожаловался на свой домашний компьютер.

«Дай посмотрю», — сказал я. Сбегал за своим «тревожным чемоданчиком». Вентиляторам сделал уколы машинным маслом из шприца прямо сквозь заводские наклейки. На процессор нанёс свежую термопасту. Отсоединил все разъёмы и протёр ластиком, что мог: влажно у нас, контакты закисают. Буквально через полчаса компьютер ожил.

Как-то неожиданно беседа плавно перетекла на мои беды. Я жаловался, что из-за большущего фурункула на спине придётся переться в поликлинику, ломать рабочий график. Дома с таким не справлюсь.

«Дай посмотрю», — сказал Владик. Я почему-то не ожидал, что у врачей «посмотрю» означает то же, что у админов. И что у Владика тоже есть «тревожный чемоданчик».

Ну, укол лидокаина я прощёлкал: меня больше интересовал стакан в руках и дама напротив. А потом было поздно. Опыт подсказывал, что спорить с нетрезвым приятелем, размахивающим скальпелем, — не очень хорошая идея. Смотришь — ну и смотри.

Буквально через десять минут Владик уже зашивал и заклеивал рану. Я сделал ещё несколько глотков. И тут до меня дошло, что меня вот так вот походя починили.

Ezra Klein:

But I’m not sure I want to be a Google early adopter anymore. I love Google Reader. And I used to use Picnik all the time. I’m tired of losing my services.

All companies cancel services and abandon apps. The difference with Google Reader is that they’ve canceled something beloved.

 ★ 

The beloved but doomed Google Reader is still a healthy source of traffic. Google+, on the other hand…

According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)

We should add that this data isn't complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began defaulting users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data. And this doesn't include data from apps that use Google Reader as a sync service, such as Reeder. In other words, it's likely that we're actually missing some Reader traffic here.

The second graphic* shows measured Reader and Google+ referrals over time. This one, too, requires qualification: The changes in Reader's numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to BuzzFeed's partner network, not growth in Google Reader (the total number of visitors to partner sites increased, in other words).

But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.

*For reference: in August of 2012, according to the same data, Facebook drove over 70m visitors to sites in the network while Google Reader was well under 10m.

View Entire List ›

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS.

If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides.

Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they?

RSS is used for mundane things too, like Mac app updates (for non-App-Store apps) and Xcode documentation.

And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? They often get those links from their RSS reader.

One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Boring

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it. Which is cool.

But here’s why it’s great plumbing:

• There are many millions of feeds, from the smallest blog to the many feeds at the New York Times. Just about everything that gets published on the web is available via RSS. (Outside of Twitter and Facebook.)

• There are no user caps. No company can tell your favorite app how many users it can have. (Twitter does this.)

• Nobody can tell you how to display an article from an RSS feed. (Twitter does this with tweets.)

• The formats are stable. Code I wrote five years ago to parse feeds would work today and will work in five years. (The formats are simple, too.) Other services have APIs that change and break existing apps.

• RSS can’t be shut down. Any number of companies can go out of business, but nobody can stop anybody from publishing and reading RSS feeds.

• Nobody can force ads on you. A given RSS reader could add ads, but you can switch — because another RSS reader can read the same feeds. A given publisher could put ads in their own feeds, but you can unsubscribe. There is no company that can force ads on everyone, as Twitter and Facebook are working on for their systems.

• Nobody can force you to be tracked. If you’re not using a syncing system, then nobody knows what you subscribe to and what you read.

• You don’t need to register anywhere to write an RSS app. (You do need to register to write Facebook and Twitter apps.)

• In the general case there are no security issues with feed reading. (Unless you’re using a sync service or reading authenticated feeds.)

This is elegance. It derives from the design of the internet and the web and its many open standards — designed so that no entity can control it, so that it survives stupidity and greed when it appears.

Lots of things work like this. Not just RSS.

Capitalism

A naive reading of the above makes it sound like RSS is anti-business. That’s not true at all. (I did well with my RSS business.)

Instead, it’s anti-monopolist. By design it creates a level playing field. Anybody can write RSS apps, and anybody can use RSS however they want to.

This means that competition and innovation are permitted to thrive.

But it’s not a guarantee. In the past several years it seems to have slowed way down.

Prague 1948 Forever

When Eastern Europe opened up, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prague looked like it had been sealed up in a bubble since 1948.

Google Reader isn’t communist Russia, obviously, duh — but it’s a similar pattern. There was one gigantic player and a bunch of satellites, and RSS readers more-or-less looked like it was still 2006.

Not that there wasn’t any innovation — there was some — but it’s been pretty quiet, especially compared to the several years before 2006.

RSS the format has remained as useful and cool as ever, but RSS readers haven’t done so well.

My hope — my expectation, even — is that a few things will turn this around:

• The end of Google Reader takes away that one dominant player. The market for RSS readers is no longer frozen — and it will interest more developers than it has in recent years.

• Over-reach by Twitter and its diminishing user experience makes people interested in other ways of finding good stuff to read.

• The lower costs of server-side development and deployment brings creating RSS services within reach of smaller companies.

The challenge — as ever, with everything — is to make useful and delightful apps that people love.

But now, if I’m right, we’ll have more people working on that challenge.

In the meantime, the loss of Google Reader syncing is going to be tough. That’s a big hurdle. Marco proposes some baby steps. I don’t like Google Reader’s (undocumented) API, but I like the pragmatic approach.

Well

At any rate — these are interesting times! I know that’s a curse, but I take it as a blessing, because it’s way more fun that way.

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader because no one could stand my whining anymore.

News came unexpected (mind you, we are living in GMT, so it was literally the middle of the night), but we are doing out best. We tripled our user base (and still counting), and our servers are not amused so far. We will be deploying more capacity shortly, so things should get better by the end of the day. Please, be patient with us.

(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by repor.to/shuvayev)

This is overwhelming. When we started this as something for us and our friends to use, we never expected so many of you to join us in our journey. Thank you very much for your kind words and support, we appreciate this.

Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.

We are going to be honest, we have not even started coding this yet. However, we would like to get this news out as soon as possible for everyone to know the way we will be going. Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us.

We have our daily jobs, so we can’t promise that new features will be ready tomorrow or next week. We have no investors or fancy business plans, but we are open about everything we do, and we want to do it the right way.

We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.

For those of you who are posting feedback and creating new feature requests - please, double-check for existing items in Uservoice. We hate answering the same questions multiple times and removing duplicate requests.

Most asked questions are:
- “When will OPML import be working again?” As soon as we launch more capacity to handle this. Hopefully, later today.
- “Why are you asking for access to my Google contacts when I log in via Google account?” We don’t anymore.
- “When will you make an iOS app? How about Android?” We will start with API as soon as we can and see how it goes.
- “Why is there no way to login without Google or Facebook accounts?” We cover that one in our knowledge base, but we plan to implement own login code. The demand is high.
- “How do I rename a feed?”. Just browse the Tour page, please? 
- “Shut up and take my money!”. Will work on that, stay tuned.

We have lots of things to do, and it will probably take us several days to reply to all emails and tickets. Also, Twitter keeps reminding us about daily tweet limits, so there might be delays as well.

Some other news: last week our developer (on the left) turned 21, and we have implemented PubSubHubbub support. Many of you asked us to make feed updates faster, and PubSubHubbub makes compatible feeds refresh almost instantly. Yay!

Thank you very much for your support. We will do our best during next three months to prepare for the day Google Reader will no longer be around.