The "Joel on Software" guy is involved with this, so he's plugging an activity of his own.
There's no programmer shortage. Businesses want "just in time" employees with exactly the skill set they need this week. Then they whine when they have to pay market rate for them. They're not willing to retrain their own people, or hire competent people with related skill sets and send them to training classes. Anyone who's competent in at least two programming languages can learn a third in a few months.
(Actually, the headache today is learning APIs. Everything seems to come with an API with hundreds to thousands of functions, some of which work, some of which sort of work, and some of which don't work at all. The documentation usually consists of examples rather than a reference manual. Worst case, it's a wiki.)
Dreamweaver used to be excellent until the CSS clowns went and mucked up HTML. Dreamweaver 3 really was WYSIWYG, worked on pure HTML, and didn't require knowing HTML. Dreamweaver today has a display window and an HTML window, and you need to work in both, plus fuss explicitly with CSS values in other windows. It's still quite useful.
In the post-CSS era, almost nobody has decent round-trip HTML editors. Instead, we have "content management systems" which generate bad HTML in bulk, and can't read what they write. This is the main source of web page bloat.
The open source alternatives listed are far worse. I've tried Nvu. They had the right idea, but couldn't keep up with the changes to HTML. Also, there's a difference between an single-page HTML editor and something like Dreamweaver, which manages files for the whole site.
MySQL does have spatial feature support. The underlying data structure can do point-in-rectangle tests cheaply. More complex geometry is supported, but the query engine will generally construct a bounding rectangle for index lookup purposes, then sequentially test the hits against the more complex geometry.
I've tried this, and it does work. It's good enough for efficient "all gas stations within N miles of here" queries, for example.
Interesting. Objective-C up (presumably because of iPhone usage), C# passes C++, and Python in a screaming dive.
The languages that are on the way down suffer from mismanagement. The C++ committee went off into template la-la land years ago, focusing on features used by few and used well by fewer. Python had a "Perl 6" experience - von Rossum pushed the language to Python 3, which is only marginally better, no faster, and incompatible. That seems to have hurt the language's market share.
The languages on the way up are rather similar. They're strongly and explicitly typed, compilable, memory-safe (mostly), and have garbage collection. That describes Java, C#, and Objective-C, and even Delphi. The only exception on the way up is Javascript, which has progressed from being an awful language to a pervasive although mediocre one. Javascript does have the advantage of fast implementations, unlike Perl and Python.
These stats, of course, are based on what people are blithering about on blogs, not what's implemented in them.
We need fully automated driving, so the vehicle occupant can concentrate on their web surfing, TV watching, game playing, and communications tasks. Really. Automated driving is already probably better than the bottom 20% of drivers, the ones who have most of the accidents.
It should be mandatory that if a car has any "infomatics" stuff that requires user attention, beyond a map display and music player, it has to also have, as a minimum, anti-collision radar tied to the brakes. (Some high-end cars already have that, and the manufacturers are trying to get the cost down.)
If my electronic is accidentally exposed to water after being Liquipelled what do I do?
Do not panic! Please follow the aftercare instructions such as drying the device as much as possible, powering down the unit (if it is not an emergency and you do not need to make a call), removing the battery and battery cover if possible and not restarting until it has dried. Please note not to charge your device for 24 hours until it has dried out.
Most electronics will survive water contact if dried out. After all, one of the last steps in PC board manufacture is a pass through a dishwasher-like device. This "nanocoating" starts to sound like a placebo.
It's lame that phones have connector holes in them at all. With inductive charging, Bluetooth headphones, and WiFi or cellular for everything else, why should there be connectors at all. I'm surprised that Steve Jobs didn't eliminate holes years ago on uglyness grounds.
There are at least three phones on the market designed to survive immersion in water. It's not rocket science.
CES has all the fun of going to Best Buy. Vast amounts of useless consumer junk, hawked by annoying sales people, in a big ugly box of a building. What's not to like?
"Let's go to Birmingham", from 1960, shows the trip by rail from London to Birmingham in two hours. With a nice lunch. (That's a fun video to watch. You can see why the existing rail route isn't suitable for high speed trains.) The current Virgin Rail timetable shows a time of 1 hour 24 minutes from London (Euston) to Birmingham. Tunneling half the distance to speed that up seems excessive.
I can understand higher costs; the West won't accept salaries below a certain threshold, there's unions, and I entirely respect that. However, the schedule problem is ridiculous.
Yet not unusual. Last year I had some specialized paper rolls made for an obsolete printer. I talked to about 10 US firms. Some didn't want to make up 500 rolls, several didn't return phone calls and emails, one produced a low-quality sample, and one produced a good sample but quoted $10 a roll. That's in an industry, paper converting, which is in a severe recession.
Then I tried looking on Alibaba, the search engine for offshort manufacturing. I found a company in Fujian, China, which asked for a $100 deposit to make two sample rolls. The samples were promptly delivered and worked. Then I ordered 500 rolls, at $1 each, which were again delivered promptly, although the shipping cost more than the paper.
The firm in Fujian answered E-mails consistently and with useful answers within 24 hours, something few US companies seem to be able to do any more.
We're releasing a Google ad blocker, which is in test now. It lets one ad through, and blocks the rest, to de-clutter Google results. We could add some other blocking capabilities. Let me know what Google won't let you turn off. If you try this, and there are new "social" ads which slip through, we'd really like to hear about it. Thanks.
Google's recent direction seems to follow H. L. Mencken's line "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Google is getting better at answering dumb questions, and worse at answering hard ones. The problem is that Google now assumes the question is dumb, auto-correcting in the direction of common words and questions. That's yet another problem with feeding "social" data into search. Then they try to patch this by profiling each user with "search customization". But that assumes there's a pattern to an individual user's hard questions. (This leads to the concept that search customization should estimate how smart each user is, a data item which can be sold to advertisers to generate sucker lists.)
The article in the Toronto Review of Books has at least three spelling errors and typos, including the common error "free reign" instead of "free rein". (That's supposed to be a horse term.) The body text is in a sans-serif font, while the headings are in a serif font. The body leading is huge, almost double-spaced. This publication is in no position to talk about layout. Besides, how much good layout can you do on a tiny screen that updates slowly?
As for the eBook Alice, colorizing the Tenniel illustrations is bad enough, and animating them is just tacky. What next, 3D? If you want a good version of Alice, get The Annotated Alice, which is not currently available as an eBook and would look terrible on the tiny screen.
As far as I understand, film still has its use - in very low temperatures (say, -30C), CCDs do not work as well as film. I am sure that there are special cameras with heated CCDs, but they would cost a lot, where film can be used with a (relatively) cheap camera.
I think they buried the lead here... 100mph, sans seat-belt, and he walked away? That's goddamn incredible. I've seen first hand what an accident at 170km/h looks like (on the Autobahn) and walking away seems basically impossible.
You have to be impressed with the performance of the air bag system. The logging shows the seat belt unbuckled, and the air bag controller firing the first stage charge, then the second stage charge 10ms later as the system detects a severe crash.
The accelerations indicate the car first hit something that didn't stop the vehicle. Then it hit something hard, but either bounced off or broke through. That's the brief 40G spike. (Football players experience 40G spikes in normal play.) Then there's some banging around.
Understand that this is just the airbag's record. All the airbag controller has is some accelerometers and seat belt information. Airbag controllers record that data primarily to improve the performance of airbags. In the early years of airbags, there were a very few incidents where airbag deployment caused fatalities. (The worst it ever got was 0.5 fatality per million years of car registration.) This was essentially fixed (down to 0.01) by 2003.
About a second of data is kept at all times, and shortly after the airbag fires, that data is locked in memory. Note that there's only 712ms of history here. The deceleration of 23MPH during airbag deployment is about typical for a crash that didn't involve hitting a solid obstacle like a bridge. The airbag has to fire at just the right time to be most effective, and the two-stage systems have to react properly to accidents of various types and severity. Here, the airbag system did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the driver walked away from the crash.
There's no vehicle computer data in the report. Vehicle data has more data sources and much longer term.
You need three computers - the customer-facing machine, which handles web services, the business logic machine, which runs your application, and the database machine, which runs the database. Communication between them is by message passing and is very limited.
Strip down all the machines involved in the secure application. None of them should handle mail, or FTP, or web serving generally. You should know why every process on those machines is running, and why every port that's open for connections is open. Only the customer-facing machine is accessible from the outside world.
Don't use Apache or PHP. You'll need to find a high-security web framework. Even then, all it does is talk to the business logic machine.
Consider running SELinux. It's a pain to set up, but it works reasonably well.
The article cited offers a crap solution, but there is a problem. It's the "What menu is that in?" problem. This is a real issue with some programs, especially the ones with modal and/or context sensitive toolbars and menus. It's really annoying when you read the manual, it tells you to use the "join" menu item, you can't find the "join" menu item, and the manual doesn't tell you under what circumstances the "join" menu item will be available.
The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines insisted that menu items should be greyed out when inapplicable, but they shouldn't disappear. Many GUIs today either make them disappear, or leave them looking normal but inoperative. The right solution today is probably to grey them out, but bring up a tooltip that explains what's needed to make that function usable.
(My current hatred in user interface design is invisible buttons, ones that only appear when moused over. Facebook is notorious for this. Many users don't know that if you hover over an ad, you get the option to make that advertiser go away.)
Assume that any Google service that doesn't have ads is going away. They've discontinued everything from the Google search API to Google Scholar.
Wikipedia has a full list, from Google Aardvark to Google Web Accelerator. Most of the no-revenue services are already gone.
Likely to go: Google Fusion Tables, Google Refine, Trendalyzer, Correlate, Visigami, Sky Map, Speak to Tweet, Web Fonts, Open Social, and Web Toolkit. Those all have a limited audience.
Likely to become a pay service: Google Business Solutions (Google Docs, etc.), Google Voice.
Microsoft makes most of their money selling things for which end users, be they businesses or individuals, pay real money. Microsoft Office, Xbox, stuff like that. Their customers are their users. Microsoft's aggressive activity is generally aimed at competitors.
Google sells ads, and information about and access to their users. Google's customers are almost entirely (94% of revenue) advertisers. Google's aggressive activity is aimed at their users. When Microsoft got into serious legal trouble, it was over their behavior towards competitors. When Google got into serious legal trouble, it was about their behavior towards users. See the DOJ non-prosecution agreement in the pharmacy case.
I have misgivings about these intermediate stops between manual driving and automatic driving. Fully automatic driving is starting to work well. But the vehicles which do that, from the DARPA Grand Challenge and later, have enough sensing to have a clear model of obstacles around them. Those have vision, LIDAR, and radar systems, and dynamic planners working out a path with good road surface and clear of obstacles.
One camera looking forward can't do that. Just sensing lane departure isn't enough to stay in lane, especially when lane markings are ambiguous. Any car with this should have millimeter radar anti-collision as well.
"I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers." That guarantees a worthless product.
Recorded lectures aren't that great to begin with. On top of that, most of the useful content is on the board or the slides, so you want a format which emphasizes them, not the speaker. A fixed wide-angle shot of the front of the room is almost useless.
One little trick Stanford used for years was having presenters write on a paper pad, which was picked up by an overhead camera and projected to the students as well as being recorded. The pad was only 5" x 7", so that the instructor couldn't overfill a single page with more text than would survive mediocre analog TV.
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The "Joel on Software" guy is involved with this, so he's plugging an activity of his own.
There's no programmer shortage. Businesses want "just in time" employees with exactly the skill set they need this week. Then they whine when they have to pay market rate for them. They're not willing to retrain their own people, or hire competent people with related skill sets and send them to training classes. Anyone who's competent in at least two programming languages can learn a third in a few months.
(Actually, the headache today is learning APIs. Everything seems to come with an API with hundreds to thousands of functions, some of which work, some of which sort of work, and some of which don't work at all. The documentation usually consists of examples rather than a reference manual. Worst case, it's a wiki.)
Dreamweaver used to be excellent until the CSS clowns went and mucked up HTML. Dreamweaver 3 really was WYSIWYG, worked on pure HTML, and didn't require knowing HTML. Dreamweaver today has a display window and an HTML window, and you need to work in both, plus fuss explicitly with CSS values in other windows. It's still quite useful.
In the post-CSS era, almost nobody has decent round-trip HTML editors. Instead, we have "content management systems" which generate bad HTML in bulk, and can't read what they write. This is the main source of web page bloat.
The open source alternatives listed are far worse. I've tried Nvu. They had the right idea, but couldn't keep up with the changes to HTML. Also, there's a difference between an single-page HTML editor and something like Dreamweaver, which manages files for the whole site.
MySQL does have spatial feature support. The underlying data structure can do point-in-rectangle tests cheaply. More complex geometry is supported, but the query engine will generally construct a bounding rectangle for index lookup purposes, then sequentially test the hits against the more complex geometry.
I've tried this, and it does work. It's good enough for efficient "all gas stations within N miles of here" queries, for example.
Interesting. Objective-C up (presumably because of iPhone usage), C# passes C++, and Python in a screaming dive.
The languages that are on the way down suffer from mismanagement. The C++ committee went off into template la-la land years ago, focusing on features used by few and used well by fewer. Python had a "Perl 6" experience - von Rossum pushed the language to Python 3, which is only marginally better, no faster, and incompatible. That seems to have hurt the language's market share.
The languages on the way up are rather similar. They're strongly and explicitly typed, compilable, memory-safe (mostly), and have garbage collection. That describes Java, C#, and Objective-C, and even Delphi. The only exception on the way up is Javascript, which has progressed from being an awful language to a pervasive although mediocre one. Javascript does have the advantage of fast implementations, unlike Perl and Python.
These stats, of course, are based on what people are blithering about on blogs, not what's implemented in them.
We need fully automated driving, so the vehicle occupant can concentrate on their web surfing, TV watching, game playing, and communications tasks. Really. Automated driving is already probably better than the bottom 20% of drivers, the ones who have most of the accidents.
It should be mandatory that if a car has any "infomatics" stuff that requires user attention, beyond a map display and music player, it has to also have, as a minimum, anti-collision radar tied to the brakes. (Some high-end cars already have that, and the manufacturers are trying to get the cost down.)
Their site reads:
If my electronic is accidentally exposed to water after being Liquipelled what do I do?
Do not panic! Please follow the aftercare instructions such as drying the device as much as possible, powering down the unit (if it is not an emergency and you do not need to make a call), removing the battery and battery cover if possible and not restarting until it has dried. Please note not to charge your device for 24 hours until it has dried out.
Most electronics will survive water contact if dried out. After all, one of the last steps in PC board manufacture is a pass through a dishwasher-like device. This "nanocoating" starts to sound like a placebo.
It's lame that phones have connector holes in them at all. With inductive charging, Bluetooth headphones, and WiFi or cellular for everything else, why should there be connectors at all. I'm surprised that Steve Jobs didn't eliminate holes years ago on uglyness grounds.
There are at least three phones on the market designed to survive immersion in water. It's not rocket science.
California law treats vacation as accrued wages. If you don't take your vacation days, the employer must pay you for them at the end of employment.
Still, many employers prefer to pay than let their employees take time off.
CES has all the fun of going to Best Buy. Vast amounts of useless consumer junk, hawked by annoying sales people, in a big ugly box of a building. What's not to like?
Remember the last hype from those guys? "Canonical sent along a note announcing that its Ubuntu Linux OS (10.10) is now available pre-loaded on three ASUS Eee PC models including the 1001PXD, the 1011PX and the 1015PX. More models packing Ubuntu will be made available throughout the year.", back in June 2011. Didn't happen. Still hasn't happened. Canonical has no credibility.
"Let's go to Birmingham", from 1960, shows the trip by rail from London to Birmingham in two hours. With a nice lunch. (That's a fun video to watch. You can see why the existing rail route isn't suitable for high speed trains.) The current Virgin Rail timetable shows a time of 1 hour 24 minutes from London (Euston) to Birmingham. Tunneling half the distance to speed that up seems excessive.
I can understand higher costs; the West won't accept salaries below a certain threshold, there's unions, and I entirely respect that. However, the schedule problem is ridiculous.
Yet not unusual. Last year I had some specialized paper rolls made for an obsolete printer. I talked to about 10 US firms. Some didn't want to make up 500 rolls, several didn't return phone calls and emails, one produced a low-quality sample, and one produced a good sample but quoted $10 a roll. That's in an industry, paper converting, which is in a severe recession.
Then I tried looking on Alibaba, the search engine for offshort manufacturing. I found a company in Fujian, China, which asked for a $100 deposit to make two sample rolls. The samples were promptly delivered and worked. Then I ordered 500 rolls, at $1 each, which were again delivered promptly, although the shipping cost more than the paper.
The firm in Fujian answered E-mails consistently and with useful answers within 24 hours, something few US companies seem to be able to do any more.
We're releasing a Google ad blocker, which is in test now. It lets one ad through, and blocks the rest, to de-clutter Google results. We could add some other blocking capabilities. Let me know what Google won't let you turn off. If you try this, and there are new "social" ads which slip through, we'd really like to hear about it. Thanks.
Google's recent direction seems to follow H. L. Mencken's line "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Google is getting better at answering dumb questions, and worse at answering hard ones. The problem is that Google now assumes the question is dumb, auto-correcting in the direction of common words and questions. That's yet another problem with feeding "social" data into search. Then they try to patch this by profiling each user with "search customization". But that assumes there's a pattern to an individual user's hard questions. (This leads to the concept that search customization should estimate how smart each user is, a data item which can be sold to advertisers to generate sucker lists.)
The article in the Toronto Review of Books has at least three spelling errors and typos, including the common error "free reign" instead of "free rein". (That's supposed to be a horse term.) The body text is in a sans-serif font, while the headings are in a serif font. The body leading is huge, almost double-spaced. This publication is in no position to talk about layout. Besides, how much good layout can you do on a tiny screen that updates slowly?
As for the eBook Alice, colorizing the Tenniel illustrations is bad enough, and animating them is just tacky. What next, 3D? If you want a good version of Alice, get The Annotated Alice, which is not currently available as an eBook and would look terrible on the tiny screen.
As far as I understand, film still has its use - in very low temperatures (say, -30C), CCDs do not work as well as film. I am sure that there are special cameras with heated CCDs, but they would cost a lot, where film can be used with a (relatively) cheap camera.
Actually, that's backwards. At low temperatures, photographic film becomes brittle and must be heated. On the other hand, CCDs have less noise at lower temperatures. Astronomers use cooled CCDs extensively. IR cameras often have cooled CCDs; if you want to image heat, you want as little extraneous heat as possible at the imager.
I think they buried the lead here... 100mph, sans seat-belt, and he walked away? That's goddamn incredible. I've seen first hand what an accident at 170km/h looks like (on the Autobahn) and walking away seems basically impossible.
You have to be impressed with the performance of the air bag system. The logging shows the seat belt unbuckled, and the air bag controller firing the first stage charge, then the second stage charge 10ms later as the system detects a severe crash.
The accelerations indicate the car first hit something that didn't stop the vehicle. Then it hit something hard, but either bounced off or broke through. That's the brief 40G spike. (Football players experience 40G spikes in normal play.) Then there's some banging around.
Understand that this is just the airbag's record. All the airbag controller has is some accelerometers and seat belt information. Airbag controllers record that data primarily to improve the performance of airbags. In the early years of airbags, there were a very few incidents where airbag deployment caused fatalities. (The worst it ever got was 0.5 fatality per million years of car registration.) This was essentially fixed (down to 0.01) by 2003. About a second of data is kept at all times, and shortly after the airbag fires, that data is locked in memory. Note that there's only 712ms of history here. The deceleration of 23MPH during airbag deployment is about typical for a crash that didn't involve hitting a solid obstacle like a bridge. The airbag has to fire at just the right time to be most effective, and the two-stage systems have to react properly to accidents of various types and severity. Here, the airbag system did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the driver walked away from the crash.
There's no vehicle computer data in the report. Vehicle data has more data sources and much longer term.
It's quite possible to do this. See this video of quantum-locked magnetic levitation. And this one, with an actual levitating skateboard.
It looks like the people behind this video cheaped out and didn't actually build the thing, which is lame.
Rent-a-Coder, Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com, and now this.
Manpower, Inc. is one of the US's largest "employers".
A few guidelines.
The article cited offers a crap solution, but there is a problem. It's the "What menu is that in?" problem. This is a real issue with some programs, especially the ones with modal and/or context sensitive toolbars and menus. It's really annoying when you read the manual, it tells you to use the "join" menu item, you can't find the "join" menu item, and the manual doesn't tell you under what circumstances the "join" menu item will be available.
The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines insisted that menu items should be greyed out when inapplicable, but they shouldn't disappear. Many GUIs today either make them disappear, or leave them looking normal but inoperative. The right solution today is probably to grey them out, but bring up a tooltip that explains what's needed to make that function usable.
(My current hatred in user interface design is invisible buttons, ones that only appear when moused over. Facebook is notorious for this. Many users don't know that if you hover over an ad, you get the option to make that advertiser go away.)
Assume that any Google service that doesn't have ads is going away. They've discontinued everything from the Google search API to Google Scholar. Wikipedia has a full list, from Google Aardvark to Google Web Accelerator. Most of the no-revenue services are already gone.
Google isn't selling people.
Microsoft makes most of their money selling things for which end users, be they businesses or individuals, pay real money. Microsoft Office, Xbox, stuff like that. Their customers are their users. Microsoft's aggressive activity is generally aimed at competitors.
Google sells ads, and information about and access to their users. Google's customers are almost entirely (94% of revenue) advertisers. Google's aggressive activity is aimed at their users. When Microsoft got into serious legal trouble, it was over their behavior towards competitors. When Google got into serious legal trouble, it was about their behavior towards users. See the DOJ non-prosecution agreement in the pharmacy case.
Even Microsoft offers very specific end-of-lifecycle dates and they're always several years in to the future. With every version, too!
With Microsoft, you're the customer. With Google, you're the product.
Covered back in November.
I have misgivings about these intermediate stops between manual driving and automatic driving. Fully automatic driving is starting to work well. But the vehicles which do that, from the DARPA Grand Challenge and later, have enough sensing to have a clear model of obstacles around them. Those have vision, LIDAR, and radar systems, and dynamic planners working out a path with good road surface and clear of obstacles.
One camera looking forward can't do that. Just sensing lane departure isn't enough to stay in lane, especially when lane markings are ambiguous. Any car with this should have millimeter radar anti-collision as well.
"I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers." That guarantees a worthless product.
Recorded lectures aren't that great to begin with. On top of that, most of the useful content is on the board or the slides, so you want a format which emphasizes them, not the speaker. A fixed wide-angle shot of the front of the room is almost useless.
One little trick Stanford used for years was having presenters write on a paper pad, which was picked up by an overhead camera and projected to the students as well as being recorded. The pad was only 5" x 7", so that the instructor couldn't overfill a single page with more text than would survive mediocre analog TV.