Author: Rauf Aliev

Sometimes our pedestrian paths look like this

Interesting work. The guys claim that they’ve found the key to the Voynich manuscript (not the first nor the last, but it’s interesting to read about the actual approach to deciphering a language about which nothing is known)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566

It turns out, Americans pronounce niche as ‘nitch.’ And as a follow-up, just in case someone didn’t know, anxiety is pronounced as ‘ang-zahy-tee’ (as much as it can be conveyed in Russian letters).

This is the coolest Apple store I’ve been to. It opened on Saturday. It occupies almost the entire Historical Society of Washington building.

Currently, I am diving into (and simultaneously writing an article about) passwordless authentication systems. And I can’t understand why Apple hasn’t yet made a phone that can serve as an authentication tool on desktops. Imagine logging into something like Google Mail, and it simply asks you to swipe your phone, look at your iPhoneX, or press a button on your watch. You swipe, look, or press, and voila, you’re authenticated in your email. Of course, this would need to work when the computer and phone or watch are nearby and belong to the same user (both devices logged into the same iCloud account). It would be incredibly convenient.

Alex Patsay

Is the navigation in the Moscow metro inconvenient? Just like in Washington DC. The image shows a segment of the line that remains to be traveled. That is, the current station can’t be found at all. The whole segment doesn’t fit, so the last four stops are displayed over several slides.

Interesting service. It queries the HLR database. Here’s the link to a test page. Works with any phone numbers. Checked my own and several Russian ones. https://smsc.ru/testhlr/ There is an API

Last week I attended the biggest SAP conference, and here are my takeaways. 30 thousand people, nearly two hundred thousand square meters of exhibition space, hundreds of sessions, celebrity guests, and a finale concert by Lady Gaga. Walked my feet off, overloaded my brain for months to come.

At the end of the article, there’s a video where Lady Gaga explains what SAP is ;-)) very amusing

https://hybrismart.com/2019/05/12/takeaways-from-sap-sapphire-now-and-cx-live-2019/

Magic Leap, I’ll tell you, is just fantastic. I haven’t tried Microsoft’s Hololens yet, but I think such startups will only grow over time.

This is nothing like Google Glass in any aspect, not even close. Beyond the obvious entertainment applications, there’s a huge potential for business use; You can buy this device for production along with the software, and the cost of the helmet being around two thousand bucks is simply nothing compared to the benefits. Here’s how it looks: through the glasses, you see the room, in your hands is a “laser pointer” with which you can feel the objects around, both virtual and real. Virtual objects can be either semi-transparent or completely opaque. The physical world is digitized on the fly by the glasses, and they know there’s space between chairs and a table, and if a 3d object is supposed to be there, part of it will be obscured by the table. It works amazingly. Point the laser pointer at a chair – and it gets covered with a 3d mesh. Just the chair. Point it at a wall – the wall gets covered. All in real time, very fast. Virtual objects inserted into the world can move – for example, an engine can be disassembled by a single “click”, and reassembled. You can walk around it and examine the details, magnifying/minimizing them. But what’s really cool is that this object is visible to everyone who wears the glasses and uses the same software. Thus, several engineers can walk around the engine, discuss it, switch options for some components of the engine, start a virtual simulation, disassemble and reassemble it.

In the one-room hotel suite in Orlando where I stayed the last few days, there were 37 outlets. Thirty-seven. One extender with 6 plugs, plugged into one of the sixteen (!) double outlets. I counted them specifically. Five of the 37 are used for the TV, DVD player, floor lamps. The rest can be used to charge phones, tablets, power banks, cameras, laptops, smartwatches, and there would still be a ton left over.

Why then do you find hotels in Europe where there’s only one?

1) energy conservation?

2) fire safety?

3) historical reasons?