Check out Autodesk Home Styler, which is a little hosted Flash-based CAD package for home layout. Autodesk sold a kitchen design program over 10 years ago. There wasn't much volume in that, so now they have a free one, subsidized by having a library of items from major manufacturers.
A "superphone" should be super strong. It should be able to handle being run over by a car, immersion in water, and falling off a building.
Like the Sonim XP3, the Kyocera KX12, and the Casio Ravine phones, all of which can do that. Those thin black plastic things, not rigid enough to survive and not flexible enough to bend when necessary, aren't "super".
Another thing a "superphone" should have is fallback to Iridium satellite links. None of this "no service" crap.
Supermodels - ha! Nothing super about them. Spoiled, stupid little stick-figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves. I used to design for GODS!
I have some suspicions about this. They're getting more information out of one microphone than is usually possible. You might be able to extract some positional information by picking up the echoes off the edges of the object.
Checking the list of supporters vs. the legislative agenda of the organization shows some gaps.
Congressional Fire Services Institute, the lobby for firefighters. SOPA isn't on their list of legislation they support. Their list, reasonably, has legislation about fire safety, pay, and spectrum for first responders.
The Fraternal Order of Police the cops' lobby, has an explicit "Legislation Supported by the National Fraternal Order of Police" list. SOPA isn't on it.
That's very cute. That's the most obscure programming language I've ever seen not created as a joke. They can generate mediocre techno with about 20 characters of code.
Google once offered access to their search engine via a SOAP API. That disappeared years ago. Then they offered more limited access with the "Google Web Search API", which came with an obfusicated interface, a restrictive EULA which permitted its use only for widgets on a web page, and is now closed to new users. Now they have the Custom Search API, where you get only 100 queries a day before you have to pay.
The 3D mania isn't helping. When Cameron does 3D, it's good. In Avatar, at no time does anything appear in front of the screen plane. Most other "3D" movies have excessive in-your-face depth effects, as studios desperately try to justify the excess price. It's like being whacked in the face with a wet noodle.
Even worse: in your face 3D commercials. Grrr. Especially Coca-Cola commercials. Also commercials which try to make little grey cars look exciting.
Not worth $14.
(Recommended: "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". See in 2D: "Hugo", "Tintin". Avoid: "Tom Cruise goes to Dubai".)
Is Google doing this automatically, like face-blurring in StreetView? Or do they have thousands of low-paid employees somewhere doing this? It doesn't seem cost-effective.
Once upon a time, search was an expensive, high-end service, sold by companies like Nexis/Lexis and Mead Data Central. Then it looked like search might be something you paid for with your ISP bill, like premium cable. Then it was free, supported by ads, but users had go to to the search site. Search engines competed on search result quality, which is how Google beat Lycos, Yahoo, and AltaVista. Now Google has to pay cash for traffic flow. Search now has negative market value.
This is striking. TV networks have never had it that bad. US cable networks pay for their channels, at the rate of $0.03 to $0.25 per subscriber per month for most of what's on basic cable.
Some channels do pay for access to cable networks, but that's for ad-heavy junk like the Jewelry Channel.
This may be an indication that search results are now too ad-heavy. That's a bad place to be. Myspace went there, and crashed from hero to zero in three years.
The article misses that Hon Hai, the parent of Foxconn, the company that really makes Apple's products, announced last week that they were going into the solar business. The reaction in the industry was that they will force prices down.
(Hon Hai is a very big company, with over 400,000 employees.)
Microsoft faced a similar problem in automotive systems. At one point, Microsoft wanted to control the in-car entertainment and navigation system market. The problem was that they wanted to have a direct relationship with the car buyer. (Think "OnStar, by Microsoft"). This did not go over with the auto companies. (A QNX sales rep once told me that an auto exec went through the roof when shown a demo with the Microsoft logo appearing on screen when the car was started.) Microsoft remains active in that sector, but has neither a dominant position nor control over the auto companies.
Armed military robots bunny hopping and dolphin diving over a battlefield.
Check out the
Precision Urban Hopper from Boston Dynamics. This is a successor to a White Sands project for mobile land mines. Those were spheres with a fuel-powered piston that could launch them a few meters. This is a wheeled vehicle which can jump, but crash lands, which it can tolerate.
The theory of jumping locomotion is interesting, and I once did some work on that in the mid 1990s. (See the kangaroo at the end.) Most locomotion is treated as maintaining some kind of stability, but that won't handle jumps. Jumps can be treated as a two-point boundary value problem. You pick the desired landing point and stance, then work backwards from that. It's rocket science - how, with only the ability to accelerate in one direction, some ability to change attitude over time, and the restriction that you spend most of the time unpowered, you get to a desired position, velocity, and time point. This is good, because rocket science is a well understood problem.
The Federal Trade Commission's Mail Order Rule applies here. It's real simple:
Mail orders must ship within 30 days unless there was an explicit delivery date specified. If the seller knows there will be a delay in shipping, they must contact the customer and offer the customer a full refund or the option to wait another 30 days, at the customer's choice.
After 60 days, the seller must provide a full refund unless the customer explicitly consents in writing to a further delay. If the customer takes no action, the refund must be sent.
Staples paid a big fine for this. So did the Beanie Baby people. In the early days of the Internet, a lot of companies were hit by this, because they had web sites accepting orders at high speed, but the back end fulfillment operation was manual and couldn't keep up. Now, most serious online merchants have the ordering system tied to the inventory system, so they stop taking orders when the inventory is used up,
The risk of being sued for patent infringement is sufficiently high to prevent me from bothering. I wonder how unique I am in this regard.
Not very. I have five patent plaques on the wall behind me. For me, the risk is not being able to collect for infringement because of high litigation costs.
What if consumer spending never goes back up, adjusted for inflation?
I know that adjusted for inflation the median has had less income every year for something like 40 years.
That's what "competitiveness" is all about. Wages decline until they're just above survival level. This eliminates most discretionary consumer spending, and the economy stabilizes at a low level. That's the "free market" applied to labor. Your life will just barely work, forever. Deal with it.
the biggest problem with Blender is its VERTICAL learning "curve"
True. If you haven't encountered Blender, imagine a user interface for 3D designed by someone who likes EMACS. The condensed hotkey reference is 19 pages.
Blender's game engine is interesting. Programming is done by wiring together blocks in a graph. You can write new blocks in Python if you want. It's a nice demonstration of the fact that graphical programming does not scale well. I once wrote a program to simulate LIDAR processing for a mobile robot using the Blender game engine. This was Not Fun.
Do you realize how bad BASIC would be on a phone? No objects, so an API for dealing with a DOM would have to represent everything as a string. No callbacks, so dealing with an event-driven environment would not work well. BASIC would have to be extended substantially (essentially up to the VB level) to be usable at all. At that point, you'd have something that does what Javascript does, but lamer.
There is a BASIC for the iPhone. It emulates a green-screen terminal running BASIC. So there.
Much as I like the steampunk concept, Babbage's machine was at the upper end of what was buildable as an expensive prototype. Bear in mind that even consistently-good, moderately priced steel wasn't available until the 1880s. That's why fine machinery was made of brass until the 20th century.
The commercial history of mechanical calculators is not what you'd expect. Leibniz built the first mechanical multiplier in 1694. The commercial version, the "Arithmometer", wasn't produced until 1851. (It took a very long time to commercialize technology before there was industrial infrastructure.) Adding machines came later, because an adding machine is only a marginal improvement over an abacus, but a multiplier is a huge win.
The first high-volume mechanical arithmetic device was the cash register. When, in 1884, cash registers first got tape printers, for the first time merchants had some real mechanical bookkeeping assistance. By then, good steel was available, and stamped parts could be made in volume.
That's the point at which something like Babbage's machine might first have been a commercial success.
Which it was. Hollerith's first punched card machines were used for the 1880 census. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company manufactured Hollerith machines commercially. The CTR became the International Tabulating and Recording Company, which became International Business Machines, which is today's IBM.
By 1880, there was enough manufacturing infrastructure to make stuff, and there was continuous year to year progress in mechanical calculation. The peak in purely mechanical systems was probably the Burroughs Sensimatic, in 1953, which was essentially a spreadsheet program made out of gears. IBM tabulators were more advanced, but they were electromechanical.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
That's a classic "free market" claim. Then look at how Wal-Mart works.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Store managers have almost no autonomy in the Wal-Mart system. Even the store thermostats are controlled from Bentonville. Purchasing is centralized in Bentonville, where vendors go to the famous Corridor of Doom to present their products to Wal-Mart buyers. ("What can you do for Wal-Mart today?" is how each buyer starts the conversation.)
Everything is bar-coded or has RFID tags. Wal-Mart insisted on vendors providing bar-codes on everything. Everything entering or leaving a Wal-Mart store or warehouse gets scanned, and Central Control (the data center in Jane, MO, about 15 miles from Bentonville) gets all the data each day.
Wal-Mart's data cycle is daily, and their planning cycle is weekly. Most small retailers don't have that clear an idea of what their stores are actually doing. This gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage.
That's a level of control the USSR could only dream of.
It's interesting to speculate whether the USSR's style of communism would have worked if it had survived into the era where data collection, communications, and computing made central planning really effective. Gosplan, the USSR's national planning operation, had a monthly data cycle and a yearly planning cycle. They also had a lot of phony data in the system, because it was being summarized at lower levels. It's easy to fake "we made 10,000 widgets". It's hard to fake "we made 10,000 widgets, shipped in these transactions, and scanned in by the recipients".
Wal-Mart runs a bigger economy than Gosplan ever did.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Autodesk Home Styler, which is a little hosted Flash-based CAD package for home layout. Autodesk sold a kitchen design program over 10 years ago. There wasn't much volume in that, so now they have a free one, subsidized by having a library of items from major manufacturers.
It's a nice example of what Flash can really do.
A "superphone" should be super strong. It should be able to handle being run over by a car, immersion in water, and falling off a building.
Like the Sonim XP3, the Kyocera KX12, and the Casio Ravine phones, all of which can do that. Those thin black plastic things, not rigid enough to survive and not flexible enough to bend when necessary, aren't "super".
Another thing a "superphone" should have is fallback to Iridium satellite links. None of this "no service" crap.
Supermodels - ha! Nothing super about them. Spoiled, stupid little stick-figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves. I used to design for GODS!
It's fascinating to watch Microsoft fail in market after market where it didn't start with a monopoly.
Like game consoles?
I have some suspicions about this. They're getting more information out of one microphone than is usually possible. You might be able to extract some positional information by picking up the echoes off the edges of the object.
Checking the list of supporters vs. the legislative agenda of the organization shows some gaps.
Somebody is making this stuff up.
That's very cute. That's the most obscure programming language I've ever seen not created as a joke. They can generate mediocre techno with about 20 characters of code.
Google once offered access to their search engine via a SOAP API. That disappeared years ago. Then they offered more limited access with the "Google Web Search API", which came with an obfusicated interface, a restrictive EULA which permitted its use only for widgets on a web page, and is now closed to new users. Now they have the Custom Search API, where you get only 100 queries a day before you have to pay.
Yahoo used to have a Yahoo Search API, which was free. Then they had the Yahoo BOSS API, which was also free. Now they only have a pay API.
Bing's search API remains free, but you have to sign up with Bing first, and Microsoft reserves the right to start charging.
The 3D mania isn't helping. When Cameron does 3D, it's good. In Avatar, at no time does anything appear in front of the screen plane. Most other "3D" movies have excessive in-your-face depth effects, as studios desperately try to justify the excess price. It's like being whacked in the face with a wet noodle.
Even worse: in your face 3D commercials. Grrr. Especially Coca-Cola commercials. Also commercials which try to make little grey cars look exciting.
Not worth $14.
(Recommended: "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". See in 2D: "Hugo", "Tintin". Avoid: "Tom Cruise goes to Dubai".)
Is Google doing this automatically, like face-blurring in StreetView? Or do they have thousands of low-paid employees somewhere doing this? It doesn't seem cost-effective.
Once upon a time, search was an expensive, high-end service, sold by companies like Nexis/Lexis and Mead Data Central. Then it looked like search might be something you paid for with your ISP bill, like premium cable. Then it was free, supported by ads, but users had go to to the search site. Search engines competed on search result quality, which is how Google beat Lycos, Yahoo, and AltaVista. Now Google has to pay cash for traffic flow. Search now has negative market value.
This is striking. TV networks have never had it that bad. US cable networks pay for their channels, at the rate of $0.03 to $0.25 per subscriber per month for most of what's on basic cable. Some channels do pay for access to cable networks, but that's for ad-heavy junk like the Jewelry Channel.
This may be an indication that search results are now too ad-heavy. That's a bad place to be. Myspace went there, and crashed from hero to zero in three years.
The article misses that Hon Hai, the parent of Foxconn, the company that really makes Apple's products, announced last week that they were going into the solar business. The reaction in the industry was that they will force prices down.
(Hon Hai is a very big company, with over 400,000 employees.)
It's a classic four-quarters calendar, but with a leap week every six years or so, rather than a leap day every 4 years.
The new thing is that weeks stay in sync, which matters to some religious types.
Microsoft faced a similar problem in automotive systems. At one point, Microsoft wanted to control the in-car entertainment and navigation system market. The problem was that they wanted to have a direct relationship with the car buyer. (Think "OnStar, by Microsoft"). This did not go over with the auto companies. (A QNX sales rep once told me that an auto exec went through the roof when shown a demo with the Microsoft logo appearing on screen when the car was started.) Microsoft remains active in that sector, but has neither a dominant position nor control over the auto companies.
Armed military robots bunny hopping and dolphin diving over a battlefield.
Check out the Precision Urban Hopper from Boston Dynamics. This is a successor to a White Sands project for mobile land mines. Those were spheres with a fuel-powered piston that could launch them a few meters. This is a wheeled vehicle which can jump, but crash lands, which it can tolerate.
The theory of jumping locomotion is interesting, and I once did some work on that in the mid 1990s. (See the kangaroo at the end.) Most locomotion is treated as maintaining some kind of stability, but that won't handle jumps. Jumps can be treated as a two-point boundary value problem. You pick the desired landing point and stance, then work backwards from that. It's rocket science - how, with only the ability to accelerate in one direction, some ability to change attitude over time, and the restriction that you spend most of the time unpowered, you get to a desired position, velocity, and time point. This is good, because rocket science is a well understood problem.
The people doing aggressive maneuvers with model helicopters and quadrotors do that kind of analysis, but it hasn't filtered down to legged robots much as yet. It should.
The Federal Trade Commission's Mail Order Rule applies here. It's real simple:
Staples paid a big fine for this. So did the Beanie Baby people. In the early days of the Internet, a lot of companies were hit by this, because they had web sites accepting orders at high speed, but the back end fulfillment operation was manual and couldn't keep up. Now, most serious online merchants have the ordering system tied to the inventory system, so they stop taking orders when the inventory is used up,
So you're suggesting that capitalism desires that people have no money to spend to support the businesses that require their spending?
Right. Capitalism is dysfunctional in that way. What individual businesses want isn't necessarily optimal for businesses collectively.
Here's the CEO of Wal-Mart complaining that his customers are running out of money.
The risk of being sued for patent infringement is sufficiently high to prevent me from bothering. I wonder how unique I am in this regard.
Not very. I have five patent plaques on the wall behind me. For me, the risk is not being able to collect for infringement because of high litigation costs.
What if consumer spending never goes back up, adjusted for inflation? I know that adjusted for inflation the median has had less income every year for something like 40 years.
That's what "competitiveness" is all about. Wages decline until they're just above survival level. This eliminates most discretionary consumer spending, and the economy stabilizes at a low level. That's the "free market" applied to labor. Your life will just barely work, forever. Deal with it.
Marketing speak decoded:
the biggest problem with Blender is its VERTICAL learning "curve"
True. If you haven't encountered Blender, imagine a user interface for 3D designed by someone who likes EMACS. The condensed hotkey reference is 19 pages.
Blender's game engine is interesting. Programming is done by wiring together blocks in a graph. You can write new blocks in Python if you want. It's a nice demonstration of the fact that graphical programming does not scale well. I once wrote a program to simulate LIDAR processing for a mobile robot using the Blender game engine. This was Not Fun.
Do you realize how bad BASIC would be on a phone? No objects, so an API for dealing with a DOM would have to represent everything as a string. No callbacks, so dealing with an event-driven environment would not work well. BASIC would have to be extended substantially (essentially up to the VB level) to be usable at all. At that point, you'd have something that does what Javascript does, but lamer.
There is a BASIC for the iPhone. It emulates a green-screen terminal running BASIC. So there.
Much as I like the steampunk concept, Babbage's machine was at the upper end of what was buildable as an expensive prototype. Bear in mind that even consistently-good, moderately priced steel wasn't available until the 1880s. That's why fine machinery was made of brass until the 20th century.
The commercial history of mechanical calculators is not what you'd expect. Leibniz built the first mechanical multiplier in 1694. The commercial version, the "Arithmometer", wasn't produced until 1851. (It took a very long time to commercialize technology before there was industrial infrastructure.) Adding machines came later, because an adding machine is only a marginal improvement over an abacus, but a multiplier is a huge win.
The first high-volume mechanical arithmetic device was the cash register. When, in 1884, cash registers first got tape printers, for the first time merchants had some real mechanical bookkeeping assistance. By then, good steel was available, and stamped parts could be made in volume. That's the point at which something like Babbage's machine might first have been a commercial success.
Which it was. Hollerith's first punched card machines were used for the 1880 census. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company manufactured Hollerith machines commercially. The CTR became the International Tabulating and Recording Company, which became International Business Machines, which is today's IBM.
By 1880, there was enough manufacturing infrastructure to make stuff, and there was continuous year to year progress in mechanical calculation. The peak in purely mechanical systems was probably the Burroughs Sensimatic, in 1953, which was essentially a spreadsheet program made out of gears. IBM tabulators were more advanced, but they were electromechanical.
LV has a weak case here. Warner isn't making anything LV makes. They themselves didn't make an infringing product. They just showed pictures of one.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
That's a classic "free market" claim. Then look at how Wal-Mart works.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Store managers have almost no autonomy in the Wal-Mart system. Even the store thermostats are controlled from Bentonville. Purchasing is centralized in Bentonville, where vendors go to the famous Corridor of Doom to present their products to Wal-Mart buyers. ("What can you do for Wal-Mart today?" is how each buyer starts the conversation.)
Everything is bar-coded or has RFID tags. Wal-Mart insisted on vendors providing bar-codes on everything. Everything entering or leaving a Wal-Mart store or warehouse gets scanned, and Central Control (the data center in Jane, MO, about 15 miles from Bentonville) gets all the data each day.
Wal-Mart's data cycle is daily, and their planning cycle is weekly. Most small retailers don't have that clear an idea of what their stores are actually doing. This gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage.
That's a level of control the USSR could only dream of. It's interesting to speculate whether the USSR's style of communism would have worked if it had survived into the era where data collection, communications, and computing made central planning really effective. Gosplan, the USSR's national planning operation, had a monthly data cycle and a yearly planning cycle. They also had a lot of phony data in the system, because it was being summarized at lower levels. It's easy to fake "we made 10,000 widgets". It's hard to fake "we made 10,000 widgets, shipped in these transactions, and scanned in by the recipients".
Wal-Mart runs a bigger economy than Gosplan ever did.
"Foxconn posts $943 million net profit for first half of 2011". That's not bad. Hon Hai (Foxconn's parent) continues to grow each year. They've just entered the solar panel industry.