CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency - and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features - the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Whups! That's not the right one. Here we go:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing's growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University's graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics crea... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Processing 1.0 released

Decius wrote:

"Photos like nude shots of someone's spouse are not the only sensitive data on a smartphone," Tom Cross, IBM X-force researcher, told InternetNews.com.

How often do you get a quote like that?

In other iPhone data confidentiality news...

RE: InternetNews Realtime IT News - Nude Photos on iPhone a Wakeup Call

Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google, took 9 carefully selected cross sections from a MRI scan and glued them on wooden blocks to create a 3D representative model. The result is a collection of 60 1-inch cubes, of wich 94 outside faces are simply varnished, and 266 internal faces feature a square slice of the MRI images. One can then "dig" into the brain to carve out custom shapes.

Wooden Model of a 3D MRI Scan

Acidus wrote:
Ran across an old document today at work. When SPI was purchased by HP a little over a year ago my boss had me compose a memo about why we needed completely unfiltered internet access. HP IT doesn't like us very much...

Nice writeup.

The main problem with unfiltered/unproxied access is logging/accountability. Passive URL monitoring via the IDS devices takes care of web logging and as long as the hosts are static/reserved DHCP and authenticated, there's your accountability too. Since you won't be getting authenticated proxy logs, you'll have to correlate auth and access logs.

It's a bit more work to accommodate the "problem children" but at the end of the day all the regulatory nuts and bolts are still effectively intact with that sort of monitoring system.

RE: Memo from Work

Remember that more than a year ago Subprime Mortgage Bonds forecast a total meltdown in that industry, and that nearly all of the companies in that space would go bankrupt. We were told that this sort of "Armageddon" scenario would not and could not occur, and that the credit market was playing "histrionics". A number of so-called "smart money" investors (Wilbur Ross anyone?) stepped in and bought these supposedly-undervalued instruments - and promptly got slaughtered when the actual performance was worse than the credit markets were forecasting.

The credit market was right and those who said it couldn't happen were wrong.

Now the credit market is saying that we are going to have more defaults than happened during The Great Depression. That is, it is forecasting a Greater Depression that worse than the 1930s. The TNX (10 year yield) is threatening to break three percent, down another 6% (!) this morning to 3.16%. The bottom going back as far as my charts extend is 3.07%. Almost there.

The 13 Week T-Bill (IRX) stands at 0.1%, which is for all intents and purposes zero. The Effective Fed Funds trading rate has been between 0.2 and 0.3% since the last putative rate cut to 1% - that is, effectively zero.

Corporate AAA commercial mortgage spreads are at extreme wides, standing at over 700 bips; added to reference this means that super senior AAA commercial mortgages now yield more than 10%. Given the level of credit enhancement in these deals this forecasts default rates of more than thirty percent in this space. Similar extreme spreads are found among both the "high grade" and "high yield" corporate bond markets.

The credit market is telling you that we are headed for an S&P 500 trading at three hundred and a DOW at under three thousand. That we are headed for unemployment north of 20% on the U6 (broad) measure, and GDP contraction of twenty percent cumulatively from top to bottom.

That's one person in five in the US without a job, deflation of 20% cumulatively or more in prices, over 2 million businesses going bankrupt in the next three years, and literal starvation and privation - all across America. No part of this nation will be spared.

The market callers are all saying all this is impossible.

Even though every thing the credit market has forecast thus far since this problem began has been not only proved correct but conservative; that is, if you bought believing that it would not be as bad as the credit market is forecasting, you have had your head handed to you.

So who are you going to listen to?

Ben Bernanke ("we won't have a recession") and Hank Paulson ("the economy is fundamentally strong"), along with all the market "callers" on CNBC, who have been wrong every single time for more than 18 months?

Or the credit market which has been right 100% of the time thus far since this crisis began?

This Isn't The Bottom Part Deux

Remember that more than a year ago Subprime Mortgage Bonds forecast a total meltdown in that industry, and that nearly all of the companies in that space would go bankrupt. We were told that this sort of "Armageddon" scenario would not and could not occur, and that the credit market was playing "histrionics". A number of so-called "smart money" investors (Wilbur Ross anyone?) stepped in and bought these supposedly-undervalued instruments - and promptly got slaughtered when the actual performance was worse than the credit markets were forecasting.

The credit market was right and those who said it couldn't happen were wrong.

Now the credit market is saying that we are going to have more defaults than happened during The Great Depression. That is, it is forecasting a Greater Depression that worse than the 1930s. The TNX (10 year yield) is threatening to break three percent, down another 6% (!) this morning to 3.16%. The bottom going back as far as my charts extend is 3.07%. Almost there.

The 13 Week T-Bill (IRX) stands at 0.1%, which is for all intents and purposes zero. The Effective Fed Funds trading rate has been between 0.2 and 0.3% since the last putative rate cut to 1% - that is, effectively zero.

Corporate AAA commercial mortgage spreads are at extreme wides, standing at over 700 bips; added to reference this means that super senior AAA commercial mortgages now yield more than 10%. Given the level of credit enhancement in these deals this forecasts default rates of more than thirty percent in this space. Similar extreme spreads are found among both the "high grade" and "high yield" corporate bond markets.

The credit market is telling you that we are headed for an S&P 500 trading at three hundred and a DOW at under three thousand. That we are headed for unemployment north of 20% on the U6 (broad) measure, and GDP contraction of twenty percent cumulatively from top to bottom.

That's one person in five in the US without a job, deflation of 20% cumulatively or more in prices, over 2 million businesses going bankrupt in the next three years, and literal starvation and privation - all across America. No part of this nation will be spared.

The market callers are all saying all this is impossible.

Even though every thing the credit market has forecast thus far since this problem began has been not only proved correct but conservative; that is, if you bought believing that it would not be as bad as the credit market is forecasting, you have had your head handed to you.

So who are you going to listen to?

Ben Bernanke ("we won't have a recession") and Hank Paulson ("the economy is fundamentally strong"), along with all the market "callers" on CNBC, who have been wrong every single time for more than 18 months?

Or the credit market which has been right 100% of the time thus far since this crisis began?

This Isn't The Bottom Part Deux

How many of the automaker CEOs (and by the way, that includes Gettlefinger, if my viewing of the hearings is correct) travelled commercial to get to Congress yesterday and today?

Zero.

.....

All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM's $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.

.....

GM and Ford say that it is a corporate decision to have their CEOs fly on private jets and that is non-negotiable, even as the companies say they are running out of cash.

.....

Fine.

As a US Taxpayer this is my answer to your request for a bailout:

Is that clear enough or do you need it spelled out one letter at a time?

Show Of Hands

janelane wrote:

Decius wrote:

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."

You can say that again.

This is a seriously asinine proposition. Quit a job? In this economy? Reduce your income and go into foreclosure on purpose?

We don't need to compound our financial woes by suggesting that responsible people turn irresponsible, or that they'll be "punished" for fulfilling their debt obligations on their rationally structured mortgage loans.

-janelane, spending 14%

BTW, Schiff is not advocating this loan restructuring program. The quote is ambiguous. Just wanted to make sure that got cleared up.

RE: You Might Want To Think About Stopping Your Mortgage Payments and Reducing Your Income

Decius wrote:
One agenda item that remains up there is Obama's community service plan, which currently says:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

Previously this text said something else entirely:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

That bit of bald faced authoritarianism made a lot of people absolutely furious, myself included. If we have a bunch of people waltzing into the whitehouse who do not appreciate the full implications of the use of the word "require" by a policy maker we are in very serious trouble.

The question of exactly what Obama's agenda actually is has been somewhat difficult to nail down. If Change.gov was intended to help clarify things it is a complete failure at this point.

Mankiw scooped this as well as quoting a dissection of Kennedy's "ask not" speech.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-draft.html

I think people are going to get "change" alright.

RE: Changes at Change.gov

The CorporaWhorehouse at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue keeps doling out the goodies. The latest surprise came from a bump in the interest paid to banks by the Federal Reserve Bank. Before the Wall Street bailout bill, banks got no, as in zero, interest on excess reserve balances held by the Fed.

Starting October 9, the Fed began paying interest on excess balances using a formula. Two weeks later they improved the formula, netting banks and additional .4% return, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Did your bank call and raise your savings rate or interest checking account by a corresponding amount? I didn't think so. Many plan to use the recent cash infusion to buy other banks, instead of loaning it out (the intent of the injection).

Banks Beneficiary of Latest Bush Corporafornication