>To be honest, what more do you want to see in it?

An App Store for OSX would be nice. Or even just a repository mechanism - I am so sick of updating the apps on my Mac systems when my multiple Linux boxes are always up-to-date with the latest stable releases.

Its 2010, can we please have an OSX repo mechanism, Apple?

Most OS X apps seem to have this built in. The donkey is somewhat out of the stable with auto-update on OS X, no?

Some apps use third-party libraries like Sparkle to provide this. But it's inconsistent between applications with no guarantee that any given app is updated without user intervention.

This set of data is just screaming to be turned into an iPhone app .. imagine, you're somewhere in Europe. The GPS figures out where, and gives you a picture (modern-day) to wipe your fingers over .. revealing the WW2-era pic underneath.

For some European cities, this would be killer .. I know a lot of people who are interested in the history of Europe from the perspective of WW2, and this could be quite an intriguing application to develop ..

Don't think I have read about any well-funded startups in this area yet, but boy there's a business opportunity here. Aside from the major historical locations, most every state/city in the US has a "historical society" of some sort that has thousands/millions of old pictures laying around. My own (Minneapolis) had a project many years back where they went around and took a pic of every single house in the city limits. I'd like to be able to go to a cool neighborhood and point my phone to a street corner and see what was there, sort of my own interactive history lesson. Rather than each of these government agencies or museums figuring out how to do an aug reality app on their own dime, someone needs to build the template/service and offer it up.

This is really a great idea. I'd love to be involved in such a startup .. iPhone/Android/PlaszmaOS/Angstrom developer here, ready to be recruited!! :)

The pictures of the Heldenplatz (here in Vienna) are particularly sobering, considering that its a very bright and vibrant place these days .. oh, except for the one week a year when the Austrian military put on their big displays there, of course .. that is a bit freaky.

I live in Vienna, and am constantly on the lookout for signs of the old wars. Its a very sobering experience to walk down some street and then realize later that was the site of intense street fighting and massacre.

There are, I believe, buildings in Vienna where the bullet holes are left unplastered and the cyrillic graffiti left by Soviet soldiers can still be read. At least, there were when I lived there a decade or so ago.

And, of course, there is this

http://pics.livejournal.com/sergey_larenkov/pic/0005twp2

Yes, there are a few. The most recent one I saw was in the 5th district, by the Schlossquadrat, on a backstreet. It had a plaque.

In light of the WEIRD study, medicating children for anything deemed by this society to be 'un-normal' is a tragedy.

Great article, and as it happens right now I'm using this algorithm in a hardware MIDI sequencer I'm working on .. it works very well for phrase-based recognition of patterns in a MIDI context, also ..

I've posed the same question to viggity, but in case you only see this in your 'threads' view: how did you know about the existence of this algorithm? Do you:

- Simply know about it, because it was mentioned once, somewhere in a book on algorithms or a class and you remembered it when you knew what you needed?

- Knew what you needed and searched for it. If so, how do you know where to search and what terms do you use?

- Rediscover the algorithm, because you knew what you needed, implemented it and recognized it only later?

I don't have a formal CS background and I sometimes get stuck on: I know what I need and I'm sure someone has implemented it before (and better), but I don't know how to get at that information.

I first encountered the Levenshtein distance at work (where I am part of a team developing SIL-4 level operating systems for use in the transportation industry), as part of our coding rules which describe the differences in variable names allowed (e.g. "char fic; char foc; // ") .. After I looked up the algorithm on my own intuition, I realized it had applicability to MIDI sequences in unique ways, and thats how it came about.

The reason for this all-encompassing effort, I believe, is that it gives the Developer everything they need to get started and get rolling .. while at the same time giving the Artist everything they need to get started as well. It doesn't matter what engine you use, if you've got Art assets that don't jive with what your engine expects, then you've got a massive, extraordinary headache, as a Developer.

Also, the point of having yet another accelerometer/input suite is platform compatability .. these engines aren't very useful if they restrict you to a single platform, so they go for as many platforms as possible .. well all of these platforms have to have a common input method, and thats why the engines have to account for it - so that a developer can target the Engine, not the Platform, and benefit from having all these other target architectures available to them ..

Disclaimer: I've built my own 3D engine for use on Android/iPhone/Plaszma/Linux-AngstromOE environments ..

So buy two packages, put an Ion drive in one, payload in the other, have them mate in orbit.

An ion drive would be insufficient to keep it in orbit.

Because you're too busy waiting for all that C++ code to compile before you can be too busy debugging it ..

FtFT! :)