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[Ed. comment: This story has been updated with a recent decision from MLB]"dalek" writes:What do Don Denkinger and Jim Joyce have in common? If you're a baseball fan, you might recognize them as umpires who are known for famously missing a critical call late in a game on national TV. Before Major League Baseball (MLB) embraced video-assisted replay (VAR), which it resisted long after other sports like football had demonstrated that replaces could be used successfully, there was no way to reverse the missed calls. Even after MLB finally allowed VAR to be used, by far the most frequent call in a game still cannot be reviewed: whether a pitch is a ball or strike.The technology to track the fight of a baseball and reliably determine balls and strikes has been in use for a couple of decades. Systems like QuesTec, PITCHf/x, and Statcast can accurately track the flight of a baseball and determine whether its trajectory crossed the strike zone when it reached home plate. Statcast not only determines each pitch's horizontal and vertical location when it crossed the plate, but a plethora of other data like the pitcher's release point in three dimensions, the velocity when the pitch left the pitcher's hand, it's spin axis and rate, the pitch's acceleration in three dimensions, and a classification of the pitch type. Despite the capability to accurately call balls and strikes automatically, MLB still relies solely on human umpires this call.The horizontal location of the strike zone is identical for every pitch, requiring that some portion of the baseball pass above home plate. However, the vertical location is defined as being from the bottom of the hitter's kneecap to the midpoint between the top of the hitter's pants and the hitter's shoulders. This is affected by the hitter's height, body shape, and their batting stance. A hitter won't have exactly the same batting stance on any two pitches, so the actual strike zone varies slightly from pitch to pitch, even for the same hitter. This data is determined by Statcast while the pitch is in flight, and is recorded in the sz_bot (bottom of the strike zone in feet above ground) and sz_top (the top, with the same units) fields in Statcast data. The flight of the baseball is currently tracked by 12 Hawk-Eye cameras stationed throughout each stadium, five of which operate at 300 frames per second. The images from the different cameras can be used to pinpoint the location of the baseball within a few millimeters. The same type of camera is used for VAR in tennis matches to determine if a ball was out of bounds.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Breaking: CrowdStrike code update bricking Windows machines around the worldc0lo writes:Announcement

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upstart writes:FTC Warns Gaming Companies Over Warranty Stickers:

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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/will-space-based-solar-power-ever-make-sense/

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upstart writes:Fats from thin air: Startup makes butter using CO2 and water:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/code-sneaked-into-fake-aws-downloaded-hundreds-of-times-backdoored-dev-devices/

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fliptop writes:The growing reach of gesture-based user interfaces:

Our Shy Submitter has provided the following story:Scientific American is running an opinion piece that claims the origin of the t-test is a scientist working at the Guinness Brewery in the early 1900s, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-guinness-brewery-invented-the-most-important-statistical-method-in/

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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/report-apple-approves-epic-games-store-on-ios-in-europe/

fliptop writes:Why Rust is becoming the programming language of choice for many high-level developers:

looorg writes:https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce784r9njz0o

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/openai-board-shakeup-microsoft-out-apple-backs-away-amid-ai-partnership-scrutiny/

VLM writes:MBed OS and platform are shutting down in 2026, although rumor has it almost all of the devs have already been downsized.https://os.mbed.com/blog/entry/Important-Update-on-Mbed/A couple of possible discussion points from the perspective of someone who used it for STM32:It was one of those FOSS-but-not-really products that was completely corporate controlled and funded and written, but under a FOSS license. It never really gained any traction outside corporate. There is a winner-take-all mentality in microcontroller RTOS... why use Mbed if Zephyr supports 10x as much "stuff" out of the box? Also, given the primary source of funding, it really only practically functioned on ARM processors. Pragmatically it seems multiplatform RTOS are the only ones that survive long-term, single platform seems always doomed, a bit different than the desktop/laptop/phone market.There was something of a product-tying thing going on with Pelion IoT cloud platform, which used to be free, but the free tier disappeared. It was pretty awesome for hobbyist use until they intentionally got rid of the hobbyists, presumably to "save money". However this seems to be a common pattern for decades, the devs who influence million dollar contracts during the day want to play with pirated/free versions at home at night, so arguably Pelion and thus Mbed shot themselves in their own foot.I wonder how much C19 killed Mbed a couple years later. After STM32 procs and ARM microcontrollers were unobtainable for couple of years, there was no way to get hardware to run Mbed.It was a bit memory-hungry; IIRC by the time you got a full IoT platform with auto-updates and telemetry over WiFi working on commodity dev board hardware, you were out of either flash, ram, or both so you couldn't run your app.I have happy memories of being introduced to LwM2M protocol; it was an interesting innovation on MQTT but a little too "organized" for widespread use. Take MQTT and "compress" by turning all common (and uncommon) nouns and verbs into integers; kind of like the old Apollo spacecraft computer, kind of like a fixed compression standard.A final interesting discussion point is tool manufacturers going out of business is a pretty strong signal the bubble is over. The permanent solution to "The S in IoT stands for security" may very well be the IoT industry drying up and blowing away, and this shutdown is a sign of the start of the end.Anyone else have fond memories of MbedOS? I thought it was pretty awesome back in the day, although I switched to Zephyr years ago. Other contemporary microcontroller or IoT comments?Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

upstart writes:Out-of-control heat is making Earth more "weird":

upstart writes:PHP Vulnerability Exploited to Spread Malware and Launch DDoS Attacks:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/threat-actors-exploited-windows-0-day-for-more-than-a-year-before-microsoft-fixed-it/

upstart writes:Starlink satellites lost on Falcon 9 upper stage failure:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/new-blast-radius-attack-breaks-30-year-old-protocol-used-in-networks-everywhere/

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upstart writes:Expletives fly as admins deal with recommendation to move to Power Automate workflows:

upstart writes:Aggressive scratching is a stress response; small children are a common source of stress:

Japan Deploys Humanoid Robot for Railway Maintenanceupstart writes:Japan deploys humanoid robot for railway maintenance:

upstart writes:Trojanized jQuery Packages Found on npm, GitHub, and jsDelivr Code Repositories:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/immensely-disappointing-nike-killing-app-for-350-self-tying-sneakers/

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upstart writes:Hippos can get airborne when moving at high speeds over land, according to a new study:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/court-ordered-penalties-for-15-teens-who-created-naked-ai-images-of-classmates/

upstart writes:Scientists in China say they have discovered that a type of moss would survive on Mars:

upstart writes:When their pay suddenly dropped, delivery drivers audited their employer:

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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/30-years-later-freedos-is-still-keeping-the-dream-of-the-command-prompt-alive/

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/congress-apparently-feels-a-need-for-reaffirmation-of-sls-rocket/

upstart writes:Boeing accepts guilty plea deal over 737 Max crashes:

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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/middle-schoolers-lash-out-at-20-teachers-with-disturbing-fake-tiktok-accounts/

upstart writes:Samsung launches Galaxy smart ring to track sleep and periods:

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quietus writes:On August 8, Elon Musk is going to present his fully-autonomous, all-electric car. But on the other side of the Atlantic, somebody has pipped him to it.That somebody is a real tech wunderkind, a 36-year old Bosnian/Croatian by the name of Mate Rimac.During his high-school years, Mr. Rimac won local, national and international competitions for electronics and innovation. Then he got interested into racing, and, at the age of 18, bought the cheapest racing car he could find, a 1984 BMW E30 323i. After that car's gasoline engine exploded during a race, he decided to turn the car into an electric one.That was 2006. He was laughed at and ridiculed for the idea alone, but by 2009 his car started winning races, while beating a couple of world FIA and Guinness records. That success encouraged him to try and start a company which built electrical cars, insisting that the company should be based in Croatia, which did not have a car industry to talk about. Fast forward some more episodes of ridicule, tethering on the edge of bankruptcy and so on, and that fledgling company has turned into the main provider for battery software and electrical powertrain systems to about half the car industry, world-wide: Porsche, Hyundai, Kia, Renault, Jaguar, Aston Martin, SEAT, Koenigsegg and Automobili Pininfarina are some of its customers.Rimac didn't stop building cars though: supercar enthusiasts know him, and his partner in crime, designer Adriano Mudri, as the men behind the Rimac Nevera (which can be yours for a cool (estimated) $2.2 million), and the guys who, three years ago, took over Bugatti from Volkswagen, with the participation of Porsche.And now Rimac Automobili has come out with the Rimac Verne (yes, yes, that Verne), a fully autonomous robotaxi. Rollout towards world domination starts in 2026 in Zagreb, Croatia, where you'll be able to order its taxis through an app, complete with the interior lighting and scent you want. What you will need, though, is a bit of trust: there will be no steering wheel or brakes present, which might turn into an advantage in case you want to get rid of your elderly mother-in-law for a while.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/the-dangers-of-sneezing-from-ejected-bowels-to-torn-windpipes/

oregonjohn writes:Propublica report July 8, 2024https://www.propublica.org/article/cyber-safety-board-never-investigated-solarwinds-breach-microsoft

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owl writes:https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/