Non-camera Smartphone...

Asia. Increase in demand for non-camera smartphones in security-related sectors

from picturephoning.com by emily

According to AsiaOne, Smartphone manufacturers they are seeing an increase in demand for smartphones without photo-taking capabilities.

No-frills feature phones are no longer the only option for those who work in areas where camera phones are not allowed.

These days, people with jobs in security-related sectors can still enjoy the connectedness and convenience offered by a smartphone, thanks to models that come without a camera.
Smartphone manufacturers said they are seeing an increase in demand for smartphones without photo-taking capabilities.
Seven mobile-phone shops in Toa Payoh, Singapore, said they have seen an increase in inquiries about such phones. However, the shops declined to provide sales figures. 

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei sees opportunities in the non-camera smartphone market, a company spokesman said, citing the firm's market research .Huawei has two such models: the Sonic and Honor.

Intel building for Android... Int-droid / Droid-Tel?

Intel porting Jelly Bean to its Atom architecture, is in no hurry to tell you when it's done

from Engadget by Daniel Cooper

Intel has revealed that it's working on bringing Jelly Bean to its low-power Atom architecture. In an email to PC World, company rep Suzy Greenberg confirmed the project was ongoing, but didn't offer a timeline as to when the latest flavor of Google's mobile OS would arrive on a device. It's the same story regarding when Ice Cream Sandwich would turn up on Medfield-powered devices like the San Diego and its brethren. The report also pours cold water on hopes for Clover Trail powered Android gear -- saying that it's pencilled in as a Windows 8-only platform.

A lot less needed... Google is for Free?

Spy Satellite Companies Form Space Monopoly

from Danger Room by Robert Beckhusen

A satellite image of Washington D.C. during the inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. Photo:DailyM/Flickr

Earlier this year, the spy satellite industry was hit hard by defense budget cuts. For the top two commercial satellite companies, which survive largely by providing imagery to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, the cuts left only enough money for one to survive. Now budget austerity has forced the companies to merge together and create a new space monopoly with control over what we see from orbit.

On Monday, Colorado-based satellite firm DigitalGlobe announced it’s merging with Virginia-based competitor GeoEye in a stock and cash deal worth $900 million. The merger works out in DigitalGlobe’s favor, which keeps its name intact and whose shareholders will control 64 percent of the new company. DigitalGlobe will also take over GeoEye operations. Best known for providing imagery for applications like Google Earth, the companies combined provide more than three-quarters of the U.S. government’s satellite images.

The company also has somewhat of a codependent relationship with the Pentagon. For one, the companies help serve a need for satellite images that the government’s own aging fleet of satellites can’t always fulfill. Meanwhile, the companies are dependent on funding from Congress and the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in order to stay afloat. This year, that funding got cut — severely.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced it was pushing “significant reductions” for commercial satellite imagery for fiscal year 2013. Although the total amount the government spends on reconnaissance satellites is kept secret, analysts expected losses up to 50 percent. This served as the catalyst for an austerity-driven merger war.


A week before the budget dropped in February, GeoEye launched a failed hostile takeover bid for DigitalGlobe, offering to acquire the company for $792 million. DigitalGlobe called GeoEye’s bluff, saying GeoEye’s offer “substantially undervalue[d] the company in relation to DigitalGlobe’s standalone business and financial prospects” — i.e., their company’s ability to withstand a body-blow brought on by defense cuts.
Then in late June, doubts emerged whether GeoEye’s funding would continue. The NGA diced into two parts GeoEye’s share of the agency’s 10-year, $7.3 billion EnhancedView program, which provides funds for imagery and helps develop satellite technology.

The agency gave GeoEye two options: either renew the contract for EnhancedView for three months or nine months instead of a full year. It was a worrying sign the agency was looking for a way out of the contract. If the agency renewed with GeoEye for a full year, the agency’s cost would come out of a budget that might get cut. If Congress was set to cleave apart that budget, the NGA might not have the means for pay for it.

GeoEye’s stock plunged. There was speculation the company wouldn’t be able to secure lending from banks — already considerably difficult for companies that depend on a static defense budget for contracts.
But competitor DigitalGlobe also had a share of the EnhancedView contract, and it wasn’t touched. With its competitor now on the ropes, DigitalGlobe was set up to consume it.

Of course, with the merger, that means DigitalGlobe is now the main player in the satellite industry. The company is currently building two new satellites: the World View-3 and is finishing GeoEye’s latest orbital, the GeoEye-2. The company plans to launch one sometime in 2013 or 2014. The GeoEye-2, though not as zoomable as the governments’ top secret spy satellites, is expected to be able to photograph the ground at higher resolutions than the best current commercial satellites. Whichever satellite doesn’t launch is planned to be kept grounded as a spare.

DigitalGlobe expects the merger will also allow net savings of up to $1.5 billion, saving taxpayers money while allowing the company to diversify. But with most of the U.S.’s geospatial intelligence now absorbed by one company, it’s worth wondering what that will do to satellite costs over the long term. It’s not difficult to factor that monopolies distort the marketplace, and exclude competitors which work to keep down prices.

It also means more and more space imagery will be the preserve of one company. Like it or not, that means DigitalGlobe will control an increasing amount of what we can — or can’t — see from space.

Imagery as cheap as dirt?

Forty years of our planet, from space

from Google LatLong by Lat Long Blog

Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Landsat satellite program -- now the longest-running continuous acquisition of satellite images of the Earth's surface. Over the years, Landsat has collected petabytes of images offering an historic perspective on planetary change that can help scientists, independent researchers, and nations make informed economic and environmental policy decisions.

We’re working with the USGS and Carnegie Mellon University, to make parts of this enormous collection of imagery available to the public in timelapse videos of the Earth's surface. With them you can travel through time, from 1999-2011, to see the transformation of our planet. Whether it’s deforestation in the Amazon, urban growth in Las Vegas or the difference in snow coverage between the seasons. Here are a few highlights.

Landsat timelapse tour of the Amazon rainforest shows the spread of deforestation between 1999 (left) and 2011 (right).

The rapid growth of Las Vegas, Nevada between 1999 (left) and 2011 (right) is visible in the Landsat timelapse tour.

A seasonal timelapse created using MODIS imagery, where every video frame represents about one week. This shows snow-cover differences over the U.S. between February and August, 2002.
We believe these may be the largest video frames ever created. If you could see the entire video at full resolution, a single frame would be 1.78 terapixels which is 18 football fields' worth of computer screens laid side-by-side.

In 2008, the USGS opened access to the entire Landsat archive for free. Google Earth Engine makes it possible for this data to be accessed and used by scientists and others no matter where they are in the world. Watch the video below to learn more about the history of the Landsat program and how Google Earth Engine was used to process and analyze this enormous archive of planetary imagery.

Popout

Happy 40th, Landsat! We're proud to be making this vast archive available to the public, and to be enabling deep analysis of this data by scientists and policymakers all over the world. Head over to the Google Earth Engine site to experience all the fully interactive tours of these timelapse videos.

Posted by Eric Nguyen, Software Engineer for Earth Engine and Randy Sargent, Visiting Researcher from Carnegie Mellon University

Smart Cams - JVC ADIXXION

http://www.cultofmac.com/176391/jvc-adixxion-the-worst-named-rugged-camcorder-ever/

Pretty much the only segment of the camcorder market that hasn’t been destroyed by either cellphones or video-shooting SLRs is the rugged sports-cam market, if only because nobody wants to strap their iPhone or Canon 5D MkIII to their head and ski down a mountain.

So it’s no surprise that JVC’s latest offering is – you guessed it – a rugged sports cam, complete with various attachment to mount it on helmets, bikes and even goggles.

It’s called – somewhat embarrassingly – the Adixxion, spelled in all caps, and it is indeed rugged. You can freeze it and use it in a dust storm and it won’t care. You can dive to five meters (16.4 feet) underwater, drop it up to two meters (6.5 feet) without breaking it, and all the while shoot HD video or 5MP stills.

An LED on the side is there for playback, but the real killer feature is Wi-Fi.

Using the Wi-Fi radio you can monitor the video using your phone, which is very handy to check framing when the camera is stuck up on your head. Which makes me wonder if Wi-Fi works underwater?

The $350 Adixxion doesn’t skimp on the accessories either: It comes with a “flexible” mount and a goggle mount in the box, and if you need anything more specialized you can buy it seperately.

The Adixxion is available now.

Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/176391/jvc-adixxion-the-worst-named-rugged-camcorder-ever/#xMyaUg8UiurmOiYD.99

JVC’s GC-XA1 ADIXXION Can Capture Your Action Video

by Jackson Wong | June 28th, 2012

The GC-XA1 from JVC eliminates accessories and seeks to be operable right away, no other attachments to buy. This may not sound extraordinary, but consider the advancements that other sportcams have made recently, and accessories quickly come to mind. The GC-XA1 ADIXXION comes with many of the features that have only been made available via accessory, until now.

Take the LCD screen, Wi-Fi connection and make it all water, shock and dust proof and you’ve cleaned off at least one or two attachments or housings. All this aside, what kind of video capability does the GC-XA1 have? It’s likely that 1920×1080 at 30p and 1280×720 at 60p will suffice. As for included mounting options, there is a both a flexible and goggle mount.

The shape of this action cam is encased by scratch resistant rubber and looks like an item you’d pick up in a video game. It is black, a rectangular prism with small triangles removed from each edge. Along the top are the power and record buttons, then on the left and right sides are the 1.5-inch LCD monitor and standard 1/4-inch mount – in case you wanted to do something “standard” with this camera!

JVC put even more thought into this camera by paying attention to rolling shutter and reducing blurred images that can easily occur with high motion subjects. Ultimately you’ll have a wide angle view of the action and relative ease to view your video with an HDMI mini output. The fact that this five-megapixel camera has image stabilization, manual white balance, an SD card slot and can take stills should be noted and accounted for. At the end of the day, it’s not brand new technology , but it is housed in a new and different way, so isn’t that like many great innovations in life? The bottom line is, the JVC GC-XA1 ($350, available late this summer) is an instant competitor in the world of action sports videography

Transflective Display - Reading in direct sunlight...

What happened to transflective displays?

Fri, 06/29/2012 - 9:40am 

Jason Lomberg, Technical Editor

http://www.ecnmag.com/articles/2012/06/what-happened-transflective-displays?et_cid=2742392&et_rid=45559474&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ecnmag.com%2farticles%2f2012%2f06%2fwhat-happened-transflective-displays 

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The most notable feature of this year’s SID Display Week was what wasn’t there: transflective displays. Sure, they were somewhere, tucked away in a corner or hidden in plain sight. But no one was talking about them anymore. Their conspicuous absence was underscored by their ubiquitous presence at the lasttwo Display Weeks. So why did transflective displays abruptly disappear?

Transflective displays both transmit and reflect light (hence the name), eliminating the need for a backlight under sunlight or ambient light conditions and thus, saving energy. But like advanced technology vehicles and solid-state lighting, transflective displays entail a higher upfront cost for long-term savings.

As explained by Dave Hagan of Sharp, “A transflective display has both a transmissive and reflective mode of operation. Each pixel can generate color/brightness by controlling the amount of light transmitted from a backlight or by controlling the amount of light reflected from an external light source.”

“To have enough brightness in a backlight to overpower bright ambient light would require a specialized backlight with a tremendous amount of output power – and an equally tremendous power draw. The solution is a transflective display, because it can use reflected light to create a readable display,” he said.

A display’s backlight is a huge energy hog. The biggest drain on the iPhone’s famously short battery life is its radiant backlight.

So a display that promises energy savings seems like an attractive option. According to Ralph Polshak of Kyocera Display America, the advantages of transflective displays include “lower power for high ambient light applications, very good sunlight readability, and good balance between indoor and outdoor readability...they perform better under all lighting conditions, especially direct sunlight.”

“The transflective display remains readable in bright light without requiring a specialized backlight. This reduces thermal issues and power consumption,” says Hagan.

But the enduring popularity of incandescent lightbulbs and plasma TVs proves that consumers are willing to trade efficiency for aesthetics (and in some cases, functionality). What they aren’t willing to trade is aesthetics (and a higher upfront cost) for long-term energy savings. And that’s why transflective displays, like hybrid cars, are a tough sell.

Best Buy and other electronics retailers routinely jack up the brightness settings on their floor-model TVs in order to grab the consumer’s eye.

The same goes for small electronics – the key is to seize the customer’s attention, like a carnie waving a fancy stick. And no consumer gadget waves a bigger stick than mobile phones. According to a CTIA report, telecoms have achieved 104.6% market penetration in the U.S. Nearly 1/3 of all households don’t even have a landline.

Thus, cellular handsets are the primary catalyst for fostering innovation in display technology.

And this is where transflective displays come up short. For one, the cost for fitting color TFT displays with transflective technology is prohibitively expensive. OEMs would inevitably pass this cost on to consumers, and telecom patrons are notoriously finicky (and with good reason).

“Transflective technology is very easy and cost-effective for passive monochrome displays; it is not as easy or inexpensive for color TFT displays,” said Polshak.

And let’s face it – aesthetics do matter. Otherwise, we’d all be toting primitive brick phones and watching giant cathode-ray tubes. So it’s important to consider the point-of-sale issue.

Transflective displays are more efficient than their transmissive cousins, but the power savings is offset by a loss of contrast. If they’re not viewed under direct sunlight or bright ambient light, transflective displays have a tendency to look washed out.

According to Hagan, “If you compare a transflective display to a reflective display, without power applied, the transflective display will have a slight silver tint to it. The transmissive display will appear black. Except in very high ambient light conditions, the transmissive display will look better.”

“This is critical for products that are sold in retail stores, where products are displayed side-by-side with competitors. For many products, the most important characteristic is how good the display looks on the showroom floor,” he said.

And how good it looks in your hand, presumably.

OEMs know that consumers love their shiny gadgets (this editor has a particular affinity for his shiny iPhone), so companies like Apple are mindful of contrast ratios and brightness levels.

This doesn’t bode well for transflective displays.

Says Ralph Polshak, “Since cell phones are by far the largest market for small-format color displays, they really drive the industry as a whole. So when cell phones stopped using transflective displays, manufacturers really stopped talking about and developing them.”

So with transflective displays on the QT, what are the alternatives?

A combination of LED backlighting, anti-reflective surface treatment, and even memory LCDs and E-Ink (or other bi-stable technologies) could fit the bill.

In fact, the increased efficiency and reduced cost of new backlighting techniques is partially responsible for the ignominious retirement of transflective displays in the first place.

“As LED backlighting became more and more efficient it became easier to build very high bright displays to compete with direct sunlight. It is much easier and more cost effective to ‘high bright’ an existing transmissive TFT array backlight than re-tool the very expensive TFT array to add the inner reflective mirror that makes it transflective,” said Polshak.

Hagan concurs: “As LED backlights become more efficient, displays are becoming brighter for less power. These displays have the advantage of being brighter, higher contrast, and cheaper than the equivalent transflective display.”

E-Ink – owing to its efficient bi-stable properties – would be a fine replacement for transflective displays, but heat can adversely affect it. And memory LCD is monochrome – at that point, we may as well stick with transflective displays.

OEMs might choose transflective displays for niche industrial applications like ATMs and drive-through screens – areas where low-power consumption is a critical issue. But the advent of cheaper backlighting techniques – particularly in consumer electronics – has driven transflective displays to early obsolescence.

Top Mouse - Air Force Cyberspace Battles

Pentagon Digs In on Cyberwar Front 

Elite School Run by Air Force Trains Officers to Hunt Down Hackers and Launch Electronic Attacks

By JULIAN E. BARNES

The U.S. military is accelerating its cyberwarfare training programs in an aggressive expansion of its preparations for conflict on an emerging battlefield.

The renewed emphasis on building up cyberwarfare capabilities comes even as other defense programs have been trimmed. Along with unmanned aircraft and special operations, cyberwarfare is among the newer, more high-tech and often more secretive capabilities favored by the Pentagon's current leadership.

In June, the U.S. Air Force's elite Weapons School—the Air Force version of the Navy's famed "Top Gun" program—graduated its first class of six airmen trained to fight in cyberspace. The new course, at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, trains airmen working at computer terminals how to hunt down electronic intruders, defend networks and launch cyberattacks.

"While cyber may not look or smell exactly like a fighter aircraft or a bomber aircraft, the relevancy in any potential conflict in 2012 is the same," said Air Force Col. Robert Garland, commandant of the Weapons School. "We have to be able to succeed against an enemy that wants to attack us in any way."

Enlarge Image

U.S. Air Force

The Air Force's Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., pictured, long known for advanced pilot training, now has a cyberwarfare program..

The training effort comes amid a push by the Obama administration to rapidly deploy offensive and defensive techniques across the government, including at the Central Intelligence Agency, other intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security.

Cyberwarfare techniques have been deployed in an apparent U.S. and Israeli campaign to undermine Iran's nuclear program, elements of which were reported last month by the New York Times. The U.S. also contemplated using cyberweapons to incapacitate Libyan air defenses in 2011, before the start of U.S. airstrikes.

The military's cyber buildup began in 2008, leading to creation of a formal "U.S. Cyber Command." The command marshals computer-warfare capabilities from across the military and integrates them with expertise at the National Security Agency. Some of the defenses could someday be extended to the private sector.

Overall the Air Force spends about $4 billion a year on its cyber programs, though the training initiatives are a fraction of that cost.

Other military services also are taking steps to strengthen cyberwarfare capabilities and training. The Navy is revamping courses for 24,000 people trained each year at the Center for Information Dominance each year.

"It is that full span, from peace time to war and everything in between," said Capt. Susan Cerovsky, commander of the Center for Information Dominance.

James Cartwright, a retired Marine general and former vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, argues the new emphasis on cyber training is critical. But he said the military should do a better job publicizing that it is working to hone all of its cyber capabilities—both defensive and offensive.

"For cyber deterrence to work, you have to believe a few things: One, that we have the intent; two, that we have the capability; and three, that we practice—and people know that we practice," Gen. Cartwright said.

The full range of U.S. cyberweapons is a closely guarded secret. U.S. officials have said the military is developing weapons aimed at cutting off power to precise, limited locations.

"Our curriculum is based on attack, exploit and defense of the cyber domain," said Lt. Col. Bob Reeves, who oversees the cyber course as commander of the 328th Weapons Squadron.

The U.S. also has acknowledged it has cyberweapons that could help suppress enemy air and sea defenses. Israel used cyber techniques to hide its aircraft in a 2007 attack on a Syrian nuclear facility, according to current and former officials.

Such methods are taught at Weapons School, officials acknowledge. The course focuses on combining cyber power with more traditional combat, said Lt. Col. Reeves. That includes "affecting an adversary's computer system in a way that allows us to fly in an airstrike more effectively, with less resistance," he said.

Lt. Col. Steven Lindquist, one of the inaugural students, said the course asks officers to study how an attacker could launch a cyberattack against an Air Force command center or an individual airplane, and to construct defenses. An Air Force "aggressor" team at Nellis then tests the defenses.

"The Air Force aggressor acts as a hacker coming against us and we see how our defensive plan measured up," said Lt. Col. Lindquist.

The Air Force Weapons School provides advanced training for a handful of elite officers each year in traditional skills, like teaching aerial combat, reconnaissance and bombing, and also for the growing ranks of drone pilots. Adding the cyberwarfare course to the most elite school, officials say, is important to changing the mind-set of the military, where many still regard radios, telephones and computers as communications tools—not targets and weapons.

"We know this is a contested domain," said Lt. Col. Timothy Franz, staff director for the Air Force Office of Cyberspace Operations. "There are people out there trying to get into your telephones and networks for military purposes, and we recognize that having similar capabilities is imperative for the future fight."

Write to Julian E. Barnes at julian.barnes@wsj.com

MPEG DASH - Someday soon?

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=83672

MPEG DASH offers a promise of simplified endoding and delivery for adapative streaming, but that promise is still years away. Speaking in a red carpet interview at the recent Streaming Media East conference, Robert Reinhardt, inventor for VideoRX, says the problem is getting the major players to agree.

"Let's just say Apple continues with HLS and that's all they do for adaptive streaming and they are like "Eh, MPEG DASH, we don't really need it, we've got our own solution already." But then we still have this environment where we have two streaming standards," noted Reinhardt. "Two is better than what we currently have, which is Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple all sort of pushing their own adaptive streaming manifest "

The future of MPEG DASH was a hot topic at the conference, and Reinhardt likes what a fellow speaker had to say on it:

"I love the quote from Will Law at Akamai who's on the MPEG DASH panel here, he said that all the adaptive streaming specifications are 80% similar and 100% incompatible with each other," said Reinhardt. "I love that because they all pretty much do the same thing right and they do it almost the same way with the video. They chunk up the video, most of them have rallied around H.264 and it's just a different specification for how those things are wrapped up, right?, but essentially the structure is the same."

Satellite Imagery Business Ecology - Merger the Solution?

Major commercial Earth observation merger announced

from Between the Poles by Geoff

One of the things that has transformed and is transforming many industries is the availability of high resolution digital satellite photography.  This used to be a government preserve, primarily defence.   Commercial Earth observation started around 1996.  In the last decade the two companies that have played a leading role in the commercial application of satellite and other types of high resolution photography are Digital Globe and GeoEye, who have justannounced that the boards of directors of both companies have unanimously approved a merger agreement.

GeoEye
GeoEye is best known for GeoEye-1, claimed to be the world's highest resolution commercial earth-imaging satellite, launched September, 2008. GeoEye-1 is able to simultaneously acquire 0.41-meter panchromatic and 1.65-meter multispectral imagery.  GeoEye-2 is scheduled to be launched in early 2013.

Digital Globe
DigitalGlobe owns and operates a constellation of high-resolution commercial earth imaging satellites, QuickBird (November, 2000), WorldView-1 (September, 2007) and WorldView-2 (October, 2009).    WorldView-3 is expected to be launched in 2014.  Digital Globe also provides aerial wall-to-wall coverage at 30 cm resolution (Clear30) of the continental United States and Western Europe.

Woo-Hoo! Just-in-time ESRI ... 5th time Perfection? Woops my annual support agreement just died

http://www.spatialscrawl.com/arcgis-10-service-pack-3-released/

Five Service Packs since July 2011 and a whole new version.... It can not get any better than this for a user or developer?  This one was well received along with the 180 other patches.... useless as we gave-up on 10.0 on 10.1?

NIM079457 - A map document that opens in Version 9.3.1 crashes when opened in Version 10

The ESRI 9.x to 10.x migration path explained... once you go you can never go back...

And the news that we had to wait for... maybe this time?

ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 5

 

 

from Mapping Center by Rob Elkins

In an ongoing effort to improve the quality of ArcGIS, I’m happy to announce the release of ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 5

This Service Pack includes many fixes since the 10.0 release. Here is list of issues fixed in SP5. If you have any feedback or questions regarding this service pack, please post in the ArcGIS Resource Center Forums or contact Esri Support.

If you have additional enhancements or ideas that you would like to see included in future service packs or releases, please post them on the ArcGIS Ideas site.

NMEA gets an update... 4.10

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

New Version of NMEA 0183 Released

Get your NMEA 4.10 Reference Here...

Latest changes to electronics interfacing standard create major improvements in boating safety

SEVERNA PARK, MD—The National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) has released a significantly updated version of NMEA 0183, its well-known standard that enables the interfacing of marine electronics. Version 4.10 will improve boating safety and navigation through updates and expansions of various electronic communications “sentences” pertaining to a number of navigation and communications devices, including Galileo satellite receivers and Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).

NMEA 0183 defines electrical requirements, data transmission protocol and timing, and specific sentence formats for a 4800-baud serial data bus. Version 4.10 impacts shipboard, non-shipboard and land-based equipment as well as networks for maritime and other industry use. The standard has been expanded to include the new Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Many of the existing GNSS sentences have been extended to accommodate Galileo and future GNSS improvements.

Version 4.10 replaces V 4.00, created in 2008. The new version is backward- compatible to V 2.00.

Continued advancements in AIS technology from the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) have resulted in enhancements to a number of AIS sentences as well as the development of new ones. NMEA has worked closely with the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) Technical Committee 80 Working Group 15 (AIS) to include the latest AIS updates in Version 4.10.

The NMEA, in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard and RTCM (Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services), has established in Version 4.10 standardized wire coding labels for NMEA signal wiring to differentiate between the NMEA 0183 “talker” and “listener” connections. In addition, a new wiring diagram illustrates device connection options.

“For over 30 years, the NMEA has developed and maintained standards that are essential to the marine electronics industry all around the world,” said Bruce Angus, NMEA interim executive director. “Technology and usage of electronics change quickly, and the NMEA staff, in conjunction with a group of dependable industry professionals, ensure that the standards updates keep pace to meet the needs, performance, and safety requirements of millions of boaters and commercial mariners.”

Specifically, updates to the GNSS sentences include:
GBS, GNSS Satellite Fault Detection
GGA, Global Positioning System Fix Data
GMP, GNSS Map Projection Fix Data
GNS, GNSS Fix Data
GRS, GNSS Range Residuals
GSA, GNSS DOP and Active Satellites
GST, GNSS Pseudorange Error Statistics
RMC, Recommended Minimum Specific GNSS Data

AIS sentence updates:
ABK, AIS Addressed and Binary Broadcast Acknowledgment
ABM AIS Addressed Binary and Safety Related Message
ACA, AIS Regional Channel Assignment Message
AIR, AIS Interrogation Request
BBM, AIS Broadcast Binary Message
MEB, Message Input for Broadcast, Command

New sentences:
GFA, GNSS Fix Accuracy and Integrity
HBT Heart beat

Apple Worried?

You may have missed the recent news that Apple was able to stop sales of a Samsung android handset over a possible patent issue. In this case they were able to slow the competition but if all of those threatened keep digging sooner or later they too will have an injunction on the one "best seller" Apple branded product and they too will be shut down. And that will be a very big issue when it occurs?  One reason Android will prevail is found just below... FYI

Your Warranty is Not Void – XDA TV

from xda-developers by JimmyMcGee

XDA-Developers is a site dedicated to phone development and customization. Sometimes carriers and device manufactures lock down their devices. Sometimes this is done to cover devious practices. Other times, it’s done to try and ensure that you will buy the next device they release. Why would anyone buy the Galaxy S III when they can put Ice Cream Sandwich on their Galaxy S II?

Here at XDA we port things to other things, and we create new things. Our developers figure out ways to get the lastest Android on older devices and the latest features on all devices. Currently to do this, you have to root your device. Some people—even some manufacturers—think that rooting your device violates your warranty. XDA Elite Recognized Developer  AdamOutler talks your the freedom to root your device in the United State of America. This right is granted with any full warranty with a device. Check out this video to understand your rights.

Portable Google Earth - When wires and radios fail

Written by Kevin P. Corble

 GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 5 (October)

 

Industry Seeks New Ways To Deliver Imagery
And Derived Products More Efficiently To
Commanders In The Field Or Wherever
Geospatial Information Is Most Needed.

The U.S. defense/intelligence community has a seemingly insatiable appetite for commercial satellite imagery. The unclassified nature of images from private-sector remote sensing operators makes these products appealing to the military because they can be quickly transmitted between commands and freely shared among allied forces without the time-consuming clearances required for distribution of classified images.

While purchases by the Pentagon have been a boon to commercial satellite operators, these firms face the added challenge of staying ahead of the evolving needs of military end-users. In recent years, this has meant supporting the Department of Defense in finding new ways to deliver imagery and derived products more efficiently to commanders in the field or wherever the geospatial information is needed the most.

PORTABLE GOOGLE EARTH

The defense/intelligence community has embraced the Google Earth environment as one in which geospatial users with little or no formal training are comfortable viewing and accessing geographic information. The Google Earth Enterprise product enables customers such as NGA to build Web-accessible Google Earth Globes populated with their own data sets. In the military setting, this allows commanders to drill down through multiple levels of satellite and aerial imagery, as well as vector and video data, to gain 2-D or 3-D insights into nearly any area of interest on Earth.

Google and Spot Image teamed in 2008 to develop a portable and deployable version of Google Earth Globe for warfighters to take imagery with them on laptop computers or external drives where no Internet is available. Google Earth Enterprise Portable offers all of the same viewing and processing features as the larger product, but it is designed for use with smaller slices of the Globe, such as a single country or geographic region.

“The main advantage is that you now have imagery in the field in a completely disconnected version of the same, easy-touse, Google Earth,” said Sean Wohltman, a Google geospatial engineer.

With hard-drive space always an issue in mobile computing, Google looked for a medium- to high-resolution image product to serve as the base map for the portable Globe, recommending to customers the SPOTMaps line of products. These are fully orthorectified and color-balanced mosaics of recent 2.5-meter, natural color Spot imagery prepared as COTS products for specific countries and regions around the world. The mosaics are produced by Spot Image and delivered in the fusion-ready format compatible with the Google Earth environment.

Wohltman said the SPOTMaps products are the perfect base maps for the mobile application because the file sizes are relatively small for the amount of detail they contain, and Spot Image has already produced mosaics for many parts of the world. Availability of these mosaics in Google Earth formats eliminates weeks of processing and color-balancing for end-users who might otherwise try to create their own mosaics from individual scenes from other satellites, Wohltman added.

Google Mapped Earth Engine - NGA and others

Spy Agency Amends No-Bid Contract Notice, But Google Still Favored

By James Rosen

Personal Tech

Published August 24, 2010

FoxNews.com

That was 2010  and a Current Search?

One of America’s most secretive spy agencies, responding in part to inquiries made by Fox News about a no-bid contract set to be awarded to Google, announced Tuesday it will revise the terms of its notice for the contract – but Fox News has learned that Google will still have the inside track for the deal.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, headquartered in Bethesda, Md., first posted online on Aug. 19 a formal notice of its plans to award the “sole source,” or no-bid, contract to the Internet and software giant. The contract synopsis – posted on fedbizopps.gov, a sort of bulletin board for federal contractors – stated that the agency was seeking “a secured, hosted environment that provides web-based access to geospatial visualization services.” No dollar figure was attached.

One of 16 spy agencies reporting to the president, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provides aerial satellite imagery and mapping, as well as analyses of those products, to civilian and military officials at the other spy agencies and the Pentagon. Experts told Fox News the agency's contract was designed to provide the agency with an integrated system that would allow analysts from different disciplines to use the Google Earth mapping program in a way that allows for a freer exchange of data between them.

“They want to be able to acquire servers where they can host their data, the NGA's data,” said Kevin Pomfret, executive director of the Center for Spatial Policy and Law in Richmond, Va. “They want it to be secure, but they want it to be web-based, so that it can be easily accessed.”

Others suggested the agency's contract notice reflected the inadequacy of the intelligence community’s current computer systems. “This NGA no-bid contract is a cry for help,” said Tim Brown, an imagery analyst for globalsecurity.org, in an interview from Los Angeles. “They're basically saying that their classified customers from all over the intelligence agencies, and from (the Department of Defense), are not able to use the clunky, older systems that are all designed very, very top-secret.”

The agency's online synopsis indicated that the agency wants to steer the contract to Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., on a no-bid basis because “Google is the only source that can meet the government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing, and Open Geospatial Consortium complaint web service interfaces.”

But Microsoft, the computer behemoth headquartered in Redmond, Wash., has indicated that it believes its Bing Maps program can also meet the agency's needs. In response to several calls, the agency told Fox News that a number of “interested parties” had met a Tuesday evening deadline for formally challenging the agency’s no-bid plan.

Karen Finn, an agency spokeswoman, said Tuesday afternoon that the agency planned to post a revised version of the contract synopsis no later than Wednesday. Concerns over the appearance of the no-bid contract plan were partly behind the agency’s decision to revise the synopsis. “The (agency's) acquisition folks thought about how that might be perceived,” Finn said. “Yours was not the only media call we received.”

Finn said the revised synopsis would provide more data about the kind of work the agency requires under the contract. “We realized we did not put out enough technical information for (companies) to be able to discern whether they could (perform the work) or not,” Finn said. But she also made clear the revised synopsis will still reflect agency's intention to award the contract to Google without entertaining competitive bids.

Brown told Fox News he believes the agency's claim that only Google can perform the necessary work. He noted, for example, that a user of Microsoft’s Bing Maps service can obtain detailed, panoramic, street-level views of Los Angeles and other relatively open cities, but that Bing stops at an aerial view when it is trained on an authoritarian stronghold like Tehran. Google Earth, by contrast, can deliver more detailed views of Tehran’s streets, or of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

“So we can map every single street with a (geographical) coordinate,” Brown said. “We can monitor it to see if there's any cell phones or wi-fis there. This allows the NGA to have a classified version of what we've been using all along here in the United States, which is Google Street Maps.”

The satellite mapping galaxy is not vast. Google Earth came into being only after Google’s 2004 acquisition of Keyhole, a company that was in part funded by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm run by the CIA. And those firms, along with Microsoft, tend to purchase their aerial imagery principally from two other companies: DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. Those firms on Aug, 6 received federal contracts worth close to $4 billion each, in order to collaborate on a next-generation satellite that can deliver even more detailed imagery -- money that was awarded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Because this nexus of private firms and government is so heavily dominated by a few titans – Google, Microsoft, GeoEye, and DigitalGlobe chief among them – many corporate and industry trade executives were unwilling to discuss the agency's contract notice on the record. They told Fox News that Google and Microsoft, in particular, were either customers, sponsors, or members, respectively, of their own firms or trade associations.

But Pomfret noted that similar firms, sometimes backed by their own countries’ governments, are cropping up in Italy and Germany, South Korea and Japan. And times are flush for the satellite industry as a whole. In 2009, according to statistics published by the Satellite Industry Association, the industry grew 11 percent, for total billings of $161 billion, during a year when the U.S. economy as a whole shrank by nearly 3 percent.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/24/spy-agency-amends-bid-contract-notice-google-favored/#ixzz20FNqUWAR