Will the translators free work be freely available? If so, then this is great. If not, then there are problems.
Indeed. Because Steam exercises considerable direction and control over their translators, they might be considered employees. AOL ran into minimum wage laws when they had forum moderators. Eventually, they had to pay them back pay.
"In the first instance the digitized documentation will be restricted to John Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade for the purposes of Plan 28 and in 2012 will be made available for research purposes and hopefully will have full public availability in due course."
That's a bit much for century-old documents. Fortunately, Plan 25 is open source and on line, along with a simulator in Java.
The article link is to a scraper site that runs most of the major ad networks, from Amazon to DoubleClick to Fox. Slashdot's "editors" have been had. Again.
The article was scraped from Physorg, which scraped it from Google News, which obtained it from Agence France-Presse.
You would need a physical simulation - i.e.something that does real material, friction, gravity etc. - to be certain that the thing would actually work.
Modern CAD environments like Autodesk Inventor and Pro Engineer support that. Generally, you'd model subassemblies with the physical simulator (with friction, torque, stress analysis) to make sure they'd work, then switch debugged subassemblies to kinematic mode, where gears work in an idealized way and big systems can be simulated.
When companies have tried to enforce the provisions of an EULA against consumers, the courts have not been that supportive. This usually comes up involving mandatory arbitration clauses and anti-class-action provisions. PayPal lost in court on that one.
It's yet another publish/subscribe system, of course. The new thing will be that it's "social" or tied to every social network and advertising system within reach.
Hopefully it does not continue the Microsoft tradition of executing anything executable that appears in any data stream or comes in any data port. Microsoft has had trouble with that on everything from Word documents to USB devices.
No, it's an N-dimensional configuration space. This is a variation on the Piano Mover's Problem.
Visualize getting a point-sized object through a maze. The maze can be treated as a graph, with junctions as graph nodes. All dead end links and closed subgraphs not containing the endpoints can be discarded. What remains contains a usable path. Then you use a path finding graph algorithm. If links have costs, there are ways to find an optimal or (with much less work) a near-optimal solution.
Now consider getting a round object through a 2D maze. You can just expand all the walls by the radius of the object. This may close some paths. Then proceed as above.
The next step up is moving a rectangular object through a 2D maze. Turns may be needed to get through tight corners. This is the piano mover's problem. For this, consider a 3D stack of 2D mazes, representing all the possible orientations of the rectangle. Expand the walls as before to make the problem into a graph, then find the path through the graph.
It's possible to extend this concept to handle arms with joints. The dimensionality of the space increases with the number of joints, but in the end, it's a graph problem. This is where advanced motion planning was in the mid-1980s.
That approach leads to solutions which work, but are sort of clunky, since velocity and acceleration aren't considered. The graph gets very large as the workspace gets cluttered, and you need full information about the workspace before you can start. It's a reasonable approach for CNC machine tools, but not robots that have to work in a less structured environment.
So robotics has moved on to techniques which use more randomized search and produce more efficient motion. See the paper from the article.
Anyway, that's a very brief introduction to motion planning in configuration space.
Going to Mars on chemical rockets is never going to work very well. That's a job that needs nuclear power. That was known back in the 1950s. The US and the USSR both had major nuclear rocket development efforts in the 1950s in the 1970s.
With nuclear rockets, a trip to Mars should take about a month.
That's a neat result. I used to work on that problem. Today's solutions use a lot more compute power, but now that's available. Early approaches to this problem worked by treating it as a maze problem in N-dimensional configuration space and running a maze solver. Latoumbe at Stanford was behind a lot of that. That approach became combinatorialy infeasible as N increased. Newer techniques are more like a random greedy search. That works, but the paths aren't all that great. This latest solution seems to improve on random greedy search. That makes sense.
Are you of the opinion that Apple should not be able to enter into these agreements?
When you're a near-monopoly in field A, and you make an exclusivity deal with someone who's the leading player in field B, that does raise antitrust concerns.
I watched the whole committee session. Schmidt did reasonably well. Susan Creighton, a lawyer from Wilson Sonsini speaking for Google, not so much.
The chart showing Google Shopping almost always in the #3 position in organic results was interesting, and weird. I look forward to seeing more details on that in the SEO blogs.
Schmidt had a painful time replying to questions about Google's active encouragement of offshore pharmacy ads. He refused to say much. Part of the plea deal is that Google can't deny in public statements what they admitted in writing in their plea bargain. (If they do, the plea bargain is off and DOJ takes them to court on criminal charges.) So Schmidt can't claim Google did nothing wrong. He could have been more apologetic, though.
Susan Creighton had a rough time. Google pays Apple $100 million a year or so to be the default search engine on the iPhone. She was asked about that, and tried hard to evade answering the question, which was put to her several times before a grudging admission that Google paid Apple for that. That's a real antitrust issue - buying your way into a new market when you're #1 in a related market doesn't go over well.
Seeing myself in the reflection on milled aluminum is normal. cheap 3d printer output looks like a slightly finer version of my kids playdough projects.
Right. The major 3D printer manufacturers have been working on that, though. Several now offer "finishers", which are convection ovens with a precise time and temperature cycle. They do just enough surface melting to get rid of the surface jaggies in plastic without deforming the part. This gets the smooth look of injection molded parts, or so claim the ads.
Big data centers which buy thousands of machines at a time to run Linux will insist on being able to do so. We'll certainly see rackmount machines that will run Linux.
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
The economics of 3D printing are worth noting. Complexity doesn't cost much, but material volume does. Watch size objects, yes. Auto bumpers, no.
This is somewhat different from CNC machining, where complexity and high detail costs machining time. You have to use smaller tools and can't remove metal fast in high-detail areas. Big smooth surfaces can be machined quickly with big tools.
We're quite likely to see systems that kill anybody who is shooting at friendly troops. The U.S. Army has had artillery radar systems for years which detect incoming shells and accurately return fire. There have been attempts to scale that down to man-portable size, but so far the systems have been too heavy.
Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone will put something like that on a combat robot.
Virtual billboards. A rather lame application of augmented reality, neither original or impressive.
There are far more interesting things one might do. Show the area as it existed at some time in the past. Show the tracks of all taxis and buses that have passed through. Show who owns each building, and its sales history. Color restaurants based on their inspection reports or reviews. Show locations of crimes in the area.
Or even show social stuff. Figure out who the cool people are from their Facebook links, and show the coolness of areas of a city from their tracking data. Show which businesses have negative feedback. Do something useful.
But no. All we get are ads.
Computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. It's discouraging. When IBM and Microsoft were on top, they were somewhat annoying monopolies. But at least they sold products to end users. Now, the end user is the product. The customers of Google and Facebook are their advertisers, not their end users.
Yes. "The SDK developers plan to follow the browser's release cycle and will release each new version two weeks before the new browser version becomes available." The Mozilla clowns expect everybody to drop what they're doing and frantically update to keep up with them. What will actually happen is that even more add-ons will become abandonware.
Have they totally lost it? It's not like the browser world is making sudden great progress. It's a mature technology. The big problem today is getting stuff fixed.
I'm doing some Firefox extension development, and I'm finding documentation from versions 1.5 to the current one, all out of sync.
Wireless devices ought to be totally wireless. They already have Bluetooth, so they don't need a headphone jack. Syncing can be done over the Bluetooth, WiFi, or cellular radios, which are already present. Charging should be inductive. (The inductive-charging people need to agree on a standard, or one of the three competing schemes needs to win.)
Then the unit can be sealed up and made watertight and dust-tight. There's already a Casio G-Shock phone that meets military ruggedness standards, so this is quite possible.
I don't see the need. The process of swiping your credit card through the reader and signing on the little screen is the fastest part of the checkout process in most stores. Getting to the front of the line, and either getting all the merchandise scanned or ordering something, takes much longer. Also, I want to see the amount being charged before I authorize the charge. And you have to haul out some brick-sized smartphone when a little card could do the job.
I could see this for transit systems, but for routine shopping, why bother?
A much better solution, IMO, would be a *REAL* wealth tax, where one pays an tax that is based on their net worth.
Switzerland does that. The current rate is about 0.6% in the canton of Geneva, and 0.3% in Vaud. This is in addition to an income tax, with a top rate of 51%.
No, they're not. Look at the list of the Forbes 400 and notice how often "hedge fund" appears. Almost all income of hedge fund managers gets treated as capital gains.
Slashdot Mirror
Will the translators free work be freely available? If so, then this is great. If not, then there are problems.
Indeed. Because Steam exercises considerable direction and control over their translators, they might be considered employees. AOL ran into minimum wage laws when they had forum moderators. Eventually, they had to pay them back pay.
It looks like they're about 75% done translating.
I had an app under development that would mail you whenever someome unfriends you..
Just add a "Revenge" button.
From the article:
"In the first instance the digitized documentation will be restricted to John Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade for the purposes of Plan 28 and in 2012 will be made available for research purposes and hopefully will have full public availability in due course."
That's a bit much for century-old documents. Fortunately, Plan 25 is open source and on line, along with a simulator in Java.
The article link is to a scraper site that runs most of the major ad networks, from Amazon to DoubleClick to Fox. Slashdot's "editors" have been had. Again.
The article was scraped from Physorg, which scraped it from Google News, which obtained it from Agence France-Presse.
This is a commercial product called "ChildChecker", from Purple Scout.
You would need a physical simulation - i.e.something that does real material, friction, gravity etc. - to be certain that the thing would actually work.
Modern CAD environments like Autodesk Inventor and Pro Engineer support that. Generally, you'd model subassemblies with the physical simulator (with friction, torque, stress analysis) to make sure they'd work, then switch debugged subassemblies to kinematic mode, where gears work in an idealized way and big systems can be simulated.
This has been tried. See the story of "TakemymoneyandnoEulasapply@aol.com." That seems to have had no effect. For an overview of current law, see this legal commentary on terms of use.
When companies have tried to enforce the provisions of an EULA against consumers, the courts have not been that supportive. This usually comes up involving mandatory arbitration clauses and anti-class-action provisions. PayPal lost in court on that one.
It's yet another publish/subscribe system, of course. The new thing will be that it's "social" or tied to every social network and advertising system within reach.
Hopefully it does not continue the Microsoft tradition of executing anything executable that appears in any data stream or comes in any data port. Microsoft has had trouble with that on everything from Word documents to USB devices.
No, it's an N-dimensional configuration space. This is a variation on the Piano Mover's Problem.
Visualize getting a point-sized object through a maze. The maze can be treated as a graph, with junctions as graph nodes. All dead end links and closed subgraphs not containing the endpoints can be discarded. What remains contains a usable path. Then you use a path finding graph algorithm. If links have costs, there are ways to find an optimal or (with much less work) a near-optimal solution.
Now consider getting a round object through a 2D maze. You can just expand all the walls by the radius of the object. This may close some paths. Then proceed as above.
The next step up is moving a rectangular object through a 2D maze. Turns may be needed to get through tight corners. This is the piano mover's problem. For this, consider a 3D stack of 2D mazes, representing all the possible orientations of the rectangle. Expand the walls as before to make the problem into a graph, then find the path through the graph.
It's possible to extend this concept to handle arms with joints. The dimensionality of the space increases with the number of joints, but in the end, it's a graph problem. This is where advanced motion planning was in the mid-1980s.
That approach leads to solutions which work, but are sort of clunky, since velocity and acceleration aren't considered. The graph gets very large as the workspace gets cluttered, and you need full information about the workspace before you can start. It's a reasonable approach for CNC machine tools, but not robots that have to work in a less structured environment.
So robotics has moved on to techniques which use more randomized search and produce more efficient motion. See the paper from the article.
Anyway, that's a very brief introduction to motion planning in configuration space.
Going to Mars on chemical rockets is never going to work very well. That's a job that needs nuclear power. That was known back in the 1950s. The US and the USSR both had major nuclear rocket development efforts in the 1950s in the 1970s.
With nuclear rockets, a trip to Mars should take about a month.
That's a neat result. I used to work on that problem. Today's solutions use a lot more compute power, but now that's available. Early approaches to this problem worked by treating it as a maze problem in N-dimensional configuration space and running a maze solver. Latoumbe at Stanford was behind a lot of that. That approach became combinatorialy infeasible as N increased. Newer techniques are more like a random greedy search. That works, but the paths aren't all that great. This latest solution seems to improve on random greedy search. That makes sense.
Now I'm glad I always turned down the Borders Rewards Card.
Are you of the opinion that Apple should not be able to enter into these agreements?
When you're a near-monopoly in field A, and you make an exclusivity deal with someone who's the leading player in field B, that does raise antitrust concerns.
I watched the whole committee session. Schmidt did reasonably well. Susan Creighton, a lawyer from Wilson Sonsini speaking for Google, not so much.
The chart showing Google Shopping almost always in the #3 position in organic results was interesting, and weird. I look forward to seeing more details on that in the SEO blogs.
Schmidt had a painful time replying to questions about Google's active encouragement of offshore pharmacy ads. He refused to say much. Part of the plea deal is that Google can't deny in public statements what they admitted in writing in their plea bargain. (If they do, the plea bargain is off and DOJ takes them to court on criminal charges.) So Schmidt can't claim Google did nothing wrong. He could have been more apologetic, though.
Susan Creighton had a rough time. Google pays Apple $100 million a year or so to be the default search engine on the iPhone. She was asked about that, and tried hard to evade answering the question, which was put to her several times before a grudging admission that Google paid Apple for that. That's a real antitrust issue - buying your way into a new market when you're #1 in a related market doesn't go over well.
Seeing myself in the reflection on milled aluminum is normal. cheap 3d printer output looks like a slightly finer version of my kids playdough projects.
Right. The major 3D printer manufacturers have been working on that, though. Several now offer "finishers", which are convection ovens with a precise time and temperature cycle. They do just enough surface melting to get rid of the surface jaggies in plastic without deforming the part. This gets the smooth look of injection molded parts, or so claim the ads.
Big data centers which buy thousands of machines at a time to run Linux will insist on being able to do so. We'll certainly see rackmount machines that will run Linux.
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
The economics of 3D printing are worth noting. Complexity doesn't cost much, but material volume does. Watch size objects, yes. Auto bumpers, no.
This is somewhat different from CNC machining, where complexity and high detail costs machining time. You have to use smaller tools and can't remove metal fast in high-detail areas. Big smooth surfaces can be machined quickly with big tools.
We're quite likely to see systems that kill anybody who is shooting at friendly troops. The U.S. Army has had artillery radar systems for years which detect incoming shells and accurately return fire. There have been attempts to scale that down to man-portable size, but so far the systems have been too heavy.
Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone will put something like that on a combat robot.
Virtual billboards. A rather lame application of augmented reality, neither original or impressive.
There are far more interesting things one might do. Show the area as it existed at some time in the past. Show the tracks of all taxis and buses that have passed through. Show who owns each building, and its sales history. Color restaurants based on their inspection reports or reviews. Show locations of crimes in the area.
Or even show social stuff. Figure out who the cool people are from their Facebook links, and show the coolness of areas of a city from their tracking data. Show which businesses have negative feedback. Do something useful.
But no. All we get are ads.
Computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. It's discouraging. When IBM and Microsoft were on top, they were somewhat annoying monopolies. But at least they sold products to end users. Now, the end user is the product. The customers of Google and Facebook are their advertisers, not their end users.
As I understand it, the new SDK is available:
Yes. "The SDK developers plan to follow the browser's release cycle and will release each new version two weeks before the new browser version becomes available." The Mozilla clowns expect everybody to drop what they're doing and frantically update to keep up with them. What will actually happen is that even more add-ons will become abandonware.
Have they totally lost it? It's not like the browser world is making sudden great progress. It's a mature technology. The big problem today is getting stuff fixed.
I'm doing some Firefox extension development, and I'm finding documentation from versions 1.5 to the current one, all out of sync.
Wireless devices ought to be totally wireless. They already have Bluetooth, so they don't need a headphone jack. Syncing can be done over the Bluetooth, WiFi, or cellular radios, which are already present. Charging should be inductive. (The inductive-charging people need to agree on a standard, or one of the three competing schemes needs to win.)
Then the unit can be sealed up and made watertight and dust-tight. There's already a Casio G-Shock phone that meets military ruggedness standards, so this is quite possible.
I don't see the need. The process of swiping your credit card through the reader and signing on the little screen is the fastest part of the checkout process in most stores. Getting to the front of the line, and either getting all the merchandise scanned or ordering something, takes much longer. Also, I want to see the amount being charged before I authorize the charge. And you have to haul out some brick-sized smartphone when a little card could do the job.
I could see this for transit systems, but for routine shopping, why bother?
A much better solution, IMO, would be a *REAL* wealth tax, where one pays an tax that is based on their net worth.
Switzerland does that. The current rate is about 0.6% in the canton of Geneva, and 0.3% in Vaud. This is in addition to an income tax, with a top rate of 51%.
who are the most productive people in our society
No, they're not. Look at the list of the Forbes 400 and notice how often "hedge fund" appears. Almost all income of hedge fund managers gets treated as capital gains.
Whatever. What really annoys me is that Thomas the Tank Engine has been converted from models to CGI. That's just wrong.