Inductive charging is a good idea, but there are at least threecompetingstandards, which is why it isn't going anywhere. If the industry would settle on a standard and get business hotels to put a charging pad in hotel rooms, this mgiht get deployed.
That's pretty much what happened to UNIX on the desktop. The old wars between BSD, Sun's Solaris, Apple's A/UX, SGI's UNIX, and the actual AT&T versions are now mostly forgotten. They each had their own totally incompatible GUI. Sun went through about four proprietary GUIs, all terrible. Because of this, there were few graphical cross-platform applications.
So when Windows NT came along, and X86 PCs got powerful enough to run it well, it just rolled over UNIX on the desktop. Around 1998, I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks, where they had dozens of SGI workstations and two NT desktops for testing. Two years later, it was almost all NT workstations with a few SGIs for legacy projects. Today, of course, almost nobody even makes UNIX workstations. (What's left of SGI still sells an "Octane III", if anybody cares. It's a big box full of Intel CPUs.)
Linux on servers is more or less standardized, but on desktops, there's too much diversity. Mostly because the GUIs have never advanced beyond mediocrity.
Between DARPA and Space-X, we may get space travel back.
One of the better ideas in spacecraft was the Boeing/USAF X-20 Dyna-Soar., from 1957 to 1963. This was a small aerodynamic craft to be launched atop a booster and land on a runway like an airplane. It was the next step after the successful X-15. The project was cancelled in favor of the Gemini spacecraft. This DARPA project is a lot like the old Dyna-Soar.
The problem with archival-quality DVD blanks is that they cost too much. These cost about $8 each from Amazon.
It's not clear what the writing rate is. Etching pits is usually slower than turning a dye a different color. Despite this, it's a useful technology to have around.
Bletchley Park is getting more attention in recent years. I've been there, but before the restored Colossus or replica bombe was working. All we saw were static exhibits, plus a working Enigma, something I'd seen before. There were few visitors.
Now they have funding from the UK national lottery, "Family Fun Wednesdays", a conference center, a giant chessboard, a model railway (with a "Thomas the Tank Engine layout), a mini cinema, an auto museum, model boats, and swans in the lake.
Google remains #1 in search and incredibly profitable at it. Nothing else they've tried makes much money. This worries their management, because if someone with a broader product line (like Microsoft) gets any real traction in search, Google could be toast. (Consider what Microsoft did to the video game industry.) Google has no other revenue stream.
That's not a bad place to be. Consider Oracle. They've been a database company for decades. Everything else they've tried to do, from video streaming to supercomputers, has been disappointing.
Personally, I think that Google's biggest problem is that they're not focusing enough on the search engine and search quality, which is their cash cow. They've made some big mistakes in search since last October. The press on Google has been very critical. That's new for Google. Until late 2010, they received very little bad press.
Most of their engineering talent is going into money-losing projects. What I hear is that the cool kids there want to work on mobile and social, not the big boring search engine. Page told his people that their bonus this year depends on how Google does in "social".
The trouble with focusing on "social" is that Facebook is about a fifth the size of Google and has probably peaked. Ads on "social" systems are an annoyance, unlike search ads, which are sometimes useful. The only way for a social network to increase revenue is to become more ad-heavy. Myspace tried that. We know how that came out.
Also Surge Protectors can't really take a direct lighting strike.
But lightning arrestors can.
A serious lightning arrestor is a spark gap (sometimes open air, sometimes in an inert gas) to ground, with a very heavy cable or busbar to multiple ground rods, and no sharp turns in the path to ground. This is followed up by an inductor which is a few turns of busbar. This gear is usually placed where power lines or antenna feeds enter a building. MOV-type protection is further downstream.
Antenna towers are struck by lightning frequently, and the associated radio gear routinely continues to operate. This isn't rocket science. It's big hunks of copper.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, in their publication "The Locomotive" (they've been at this since 1867) has a good article on lightning protection. Hartford Steam Boiler insures not only against boiler explosions, but things like downtime due to lightning strikes. But only after their inspectors (they have 1200) have visited the plant and are satisfied with the equipment.
A question to ask your "cloud" provider - who handles your business interruption insurance, and do they inspect your faclities?
You might consider the fact that the phrase "Extended Validation" does not appear in the document.
I know. At first it looked like the CA/Browser Forum was now using the term "publicly trusted" instead of "extended validation". More on this later, probably in Wikipedia.
Take a look at
SAGrader and see what it is doing. It's not grading "essays". It grades answers to narrowly focused essay questions. It's looking for key phrases. The student''s correct strategy is thus to repeat, exactly, the language of the textbook.
unless they are truly designed to minimize running time
A CAM system has to deal with a number of goals. Minimizing running time is one of the major goals. Early CAM systems were poor at this, but modern ones are quite good.
If a tool is moved over an area it has already covered, it is normally lifted from the surface and moved much faster. Re-cutting a previously cut area is not only inefficient, but can leave tool marks. However, there's usually overlap between each pass, to get a smoother surface. (40% overlap is common for metal cutting on a final pass; 10% overlap is used in rough cutting.)
I think the proposal you are referring to (Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates) is not about EV certs but a proposed less-stringent standard for non-EV certs.
You may be right. But it's hard to tell. The CA/Browser Forum was originally limited to discussing policy for extended validation certificates. General certificate policy was managed by the IETF through the usual RFC process. Now, the CA/Browser Forum may be making statements about general certificate policy.
The CA/Browser forum (which is dominated by certificate authorities) is proposing to make changes in the way EV certificates are issued. The changes weaken EV certs.
This essentially makes EV certificates meaningless. The whole point of an EV certificate is to unambiguously identify the business owning the certificate. So if you need to sue, file criminal charges, or send in a collection agency, you know where to send the process server, cops, or collection agents.
(At SiteTruth, our system considers SSL certificates without a business name and address to have no value in establishing the legitimacy of a company. We've always done this for "domain controlled only" certs, and will now do it for EV certs missing a business name or address.)
All modern computer-aided machining systems have solvers for this problem. When you tell a CAM system to machine an arbitrary area, it computes a tool path to do the job. Here's MasterCam doing it.
Even low-end 2D CAM systems can solve the lawnmower problem. High-end systems can solve much tougher problems, automatically deciding what tool to use, clearing big areas with big tools and finishing up the tight spots with small ones. The most advanced CAM tools can do that in 3D on very complex objects.
Putting a bloated non-realtime OS like Linux on a board that directly controls hardware may not be the right answer, if you want, say, to do vision, balance, and motor control on the same CPU. But there aren't many alternatives. QNX no longer encourages hobbyist use, nobody likes Windows CE, and LinxOS costs too much. Most Linux-based robots have additional, smaller CPUs running the motors. Robots that need fast and tight coordination between the high and low levels, like BigDog, tend to run QNX.
Autodesk already has a deal with TechShop - if you're a TechShop member, you can get a 6-month free license for Autodesk Inventor, their high-end CAD package. The intent is to increase the pool of people who know how to design and make things. Those are the people who use Autodesk products.
Inventor takes weeks to learn, but is worth it if you're doing serious mechanical design. It's the attention to detail, like having a library of about 75,000 standard parts like bolts, nuts ("would you like a lockwasher with that?"), and bearings. The parts aren't just pictures; the system has strength and wear data for them, and can do the engineering calculations for a bolted joint or a bearing. It can handle moving parts, nested subassemblies, finite element analysis, wiring harness layout, piping - all those things which are a giant pain in real world design.
123D is a toy-level Autodesk Inventor. The 3D and graphic visualization tools are there, but not the engineering calculations or the big parts libraries.
Some parts from those libraries are distributed free with 123D, but without the engineering data. It's easier to use than Inventor, but it's definitely a CAD program,not a drawing program. It seems to be designed to get people thinking about mechanical design in the way it's done professionally. That makes sense from Autodesk's perspective.
I'd expect Google's driverless cars to have not only the Velodyne laser scanner and the vision system, but a dumb anti-collision radar system as a backup. We had one of those (an Eaton VORAD) on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, just in case the more advanced systems failed. So did most of the Grand Challenge teams, including Stanford. You can buy that as a factory option on some cars now.
So if they rear-ended another car, I'd suspect either manual driving or a low-level system failure.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete.
It's more than complete. Almost all the significant articles were written years ago. The English Wikipedia is up to about 3 million entries, and most of the good ones are in the first million.
Wales is struggling with the fact that he's old news. He tried to commercialize the Wikipedia concept with Wikia, and that turned into a hosting service for fan articles. He tried "human powered search", and that folded. He need to move on to other things.
"Rare earths" aren't that rare. They're just at low concentrations, which makes for an inefficient mining operation. Getting rid of the waste products is a big problem. Molycorp has re-opened a rare earth mine in California, and is expanding capacity.
There are other rare earth mines in the US. There's no shortage of places to mine. It's just that, until recently, it wasn't profitable.
I have three friends who are accomplished novelists. Two of them have cut off all Internet access to their homes. The other leaves his devices behind and sits in an unconnected cafe with a pen and a stack of paper for several hours a day.
Years ago, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had taken an advance on a book, and were getting very close to deadline with not much written. So they went off to an isolated cabin to write. They each wrote for half the day, taking turns; one sleeping during the day. The resulting book was reasonably good, and finished on time.
Right. This is the short explanation. I have a longer document which makes a more detailed proposal, and includes slices, with Python-like slice syntax for C.
Microsoft went down this road, with their "source-code annotation language" for C. Essentially the same information as I'm taking about is written, but as comments which can be machine-checked by tools. This never caught on outside Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Inductive charging is a good idea, but there are at least three competing standards, which is why it isn't going anywhere. If the industry would settle on a standard and get business hotels to put a charging pad in hotel rooms, this mgiht get deployed.
That's pretty much what happened to UNIX on the desktop. The old wars between BSD, Sun's Solaris, Apple's A/UX, SGI's UNIX, and the actual AT&T versions are now mostly forgotten. They each had their own totally incompatible GUI. Sun went through about four proprietary GUIs, all terrible. Because of this, there were few graphical cross-platform applications.
So when Windows NT came along, and X86 PCs got powerful enough to run it well, it just rolled over UNIX on the desktop. Around 1998, I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks, where they had dozens of SGI workstations and two NT desktops for testing. Two years later, it was almost all NT workstations with a few SGIs for legacy projects. Today, of course, almost nobody even makes UNIX workstations. (What's left of SGI still sells an "Octane III", if anybody cares. It's a big box full of Intel CPUs.)
Linux on servers is more or less standardized, but on desktops, there's too much diversity. Mostly because the GUIs have never advanced beyond mediocrity.
Between DARPA and Space-X, we may get space travel back.
One of the better ideas in spacecraft was the Boeing/USAF X-20 Dyna-Soar., from 1957 to 1963. This was a small aerodynamic craft to be launched atop a booster and land on a runway like an airplane. It was the next step after the successful X-15. The project was cancelled in favor of the Gemini spacecraft. This DARPA project is a lot like the old Dyna-Soar.
The problem with archival-quality DVD blanks is that they cost too much. These cost about $8 each from Amazon.
It's not clear what the writing rate is. Etching pits is usually slower than turning a dye a different color. Despite this, it's a useful technology to have around.
Bletchley Park is getting more attention in recent years. I've been there, but before the restored Colossus or replica bombe was working. All we saw were static exhibits, plus a working Enigma, something I'd seen before. There were few visitors.
Now they have funding from the UK national lottery, "Family Fun Wednesdays", a conference center, a giant chessboard, a model railway (with a "Thomas the Tank Engine layout), a mini cinema, an auto museum, model boats, and swans in the lake.
The thing is, bad press doesn't matter. Outside the technical community, no one notices these things.
It's gone way beyond that. There have been very critical articles in the New York Times. Google executives are being forced to testify before a Senate committee. Google's search problems are being noticed.
Google remains #1 in search and incredibly profitable at it. Nothing else they've tried makes much money. This worries their management, because if someone with a broader product line (like Microsoft) gets any real traction in search, Google could be toast. (Consider what Microsoft did to the video game industry.) Google has no other revenue stream.
That's not a bad place to be. Consider Oracle. They've been a database company for decades. Everything else they've tried to do, from video streaming to supercomputers, has been disappointing.
Personally, I think that Google's biggest problem is that they're not focusing enough on the search engine and search quality, which is their cash cow. They've made some big mistakes in search since last October. The press on Google has been very critical. That's new for Google. Until late 2010, they received very little bad press.
Most of their engineering talent is going into money-losing projects. What I hear is that the cool kids there want to work on mobile and social, not the big boring search engine. Page told his people that their bonus this year depends on how Google does in "social".
The trouble with focusing on "social" is that Facebook is about a fifth the size of Google and has probably peaked. Ads on "social" systems are an annoyance, unlike search ads, which are sometimes useful. The only way for a social network to increase revenue is to become more ad-heavy. Myspace tried that. We know how that came out.
Also Surge Protectors can't really take a direct lighting strike.
But lightning arrestors can. A serious lightning arrestor is a spark gap (sometimes open air, sometimes in an inert gas) to ground, with a very heavy cable or busbar to multiple ground rods, and no sharp turns in the path to ground. This is followed up by an inductor which is a few turns of busbar. This gear is usually placed where power lines or antenna feeds enter a building. MOV-type protection is further downstream.
Antenna towers are struck by lightning frequently, and the associated radio gear routinely continues to operate. This isn't rocket science. It's big hunks of copper.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, in their publication "The Locomotive" (they've been at this since 1867) has a good article on lightning protection. Hartford Steam Boiler insures not only against boiler explosions, but things like downtime due to lightning strikes. But only after their inspectors (they have 1200) have visited the plant and are satisfied with the equipment.
A question to ask your "cloud" provider - who handles your business interruption insurance, and do they inspect your faclities?
You might consider the fact that the phrase "Extended Validation" does not appear in the document.
I know. At first it looked like the CA/Browser Forum was now using the term "publicly trusted" instead of "extended validation". More on this later, probably in Wikipedia.
Take a look at SAGrader and see what it is doing. It's not grading "essays". It grades answers to narrowly focused essay questions. It's looking for key phrases. The student''s correct strategy is thus to repeat, exactly, the language of the textbook.
unless they are truly designed to minimize running time
A CAM system has to deal with a number of goals. Minimizing running time is one of the major goals. Early CAM systems were poor at this, but modern ones are quite good.
If a tool is moved over an area it has already covered, it is normally lifted from the surface and moved much faster. Re-cutting a previously cut area is not only inefficient, but can leave tool marks. However, there's usually overlap between each pass, to get a smoother surface. (40% overlap is common for metal cutting on a final pass; 10% overlap is used in rough cutting.)
I think the proposal you are referring to (Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates) is not about EV certs but a proposed less-stringent standard for non-EV certs.
You may be right. But it's hard to tell. The CA/Browser Forum was originally limited to discussing policy for extended validation certificates. General certificate policy was managed by the IETF through the usual RFC process. Now, the CA/Browser Forum may be making statements about general certificate policy.
The CA/Browser forum (which is dominated by certificate authorities) is proposing to make changes in the way EV certificates are issued. The changes weaken EV certs.
Existing EV cert policy is that EV certs MUST contain the organization name, its business name and address, and its jurisdiction of incorporation. In the proposed draft, (p. 13) "Organization name is OPTIONAL".
This essentially makes EV certificates meaningless. The whole point of an EV certificate is to unambiguously identify the business owning the certificate. So if you need to sue, file criminal charges, or send in a collection agency, you know where to send the process server, cops, or collection agents.
(At SiteTruth, our system considers SSL certificates without a business name and address to have no value in establishing the legitimacy of a company. We've always done this for "domain controlled only" certs, and will now do it for EV certs missing a business name or address.)
decentralized web-of-trust kind of system
Won't work, as long as spammers and scammers can cheaply create phony entities in the web of trust. It's exactly the same problem as link farms.
All modern computer-aided machining systems have solvers for this problem. When you tell a CAM system to machine an arbitrary area, it computes a tool path to do the job. Here's MasterCam doing it. Even low-end 2D CAM systems can solve the lawnmower problem. High-end systems can solve much tougher problems, automatically deciding what tool to use, clearing big areas with big tools and finishing up the tight spots with small ones. The most advanced CAM tools can do that in 3D on very complex objects.
32-bit machines with an Arduno form factor look promising. The usual Arduno ATmega 128 is rather limiting.
Putting a bloated non-realtime OS like Linux on a board that directly controls hardware may not be the right answer, if you want, say, to do vision, balance, and motor control on the same CPU. But there aren't many alternatives. QNX no longer encourages hobbyist use, nobody likes Windows CE, and LinxOS costs too much. Most Linux-based robots have additional, smaller CPUs running the motors. Robots that need fast and tight coordination between the high and low levels, like BigDog, tend to run QNX.
Autodesk already has a deal with TechShop - if you're a TechShop member, you can get a 6-month free license for Autodesk Inventor, their high-end CAD package. The intent is to increase the pool of people who know how to design and make things. Those are the people who use Autodesk products.
Inventor takes weeks to learn, but is worth it if you're doing serious mechanical design. It's the attention to detail, like having a library of about 75,000 standard parts like bolts, nuts ("would you like a lockwasher with that?"), and bearings. The parts aren't just pictures; the system has strength and wear data for them, and can do the engineering calculations for a bolted joint or a bearing. It can handle moving parts, nested subassemblies, finite element analysis, wiring harness layout, piping - all those things which are a giant pain in real world design.
123D is a toy-level Autodesk Inventor. The 3D and graphic visualization tools are there, but not the engineering calculations or the big parts libraries. Some parts from those libraries are distributed free with 123D, but without the engineering data. It's easier to use than Inventor, but it's definitely a CAD program,not a drawing program. It seems to be designed to get people thinking about mechanical design in the way it's done professionally. That makes sense from Autodesk's perspective.
There's not enough info available about this yet.
I'd expect Google's driverless cars to have not only the Velodyne laser scanner and the vision system, but a dumb anti-collision radar system as a backup. We had one of those (an Eaton VORAD) on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, just in case the more advanced systems failed. So did most of the Grand Challenge teams, including Stanford. You can buy that as a factory option on some cars now.
So if they rear-ended another car, I'd suspect either manual driving or a low-level system failure.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete.
It's more than complete. Almost all the significant articles were written years ago. The English Wikipedia is up to about 3 million entries, and most of the good ones are in the first million.
Wales is struggling with the fact that he's old news. He tried to commercialize the Wikipedia concept with Wikia, and that turned into a hosting service for fan articles. He tried "human powered search", and that folded. He need to move on to other things.
If you want an apartment in Dubai, the Burj Kalafia has space available. Rates start at about $20K/year for a hotel-room sized apartment.
"Rare earths" aren't that rare. They're just at low concentrations, which makes for an inefficient mining operation. Getting rid of the waste products is a big problem. Molycorp has re-opened a rare earth mine in California, and is expanding capacity.
There are other rare earth mines in the US. There's no shortage of places to mine. It's just that, until recently, it wasn't profitable.
The dude is just plugging his shopping-search engine
Which doesn't even work. I put "iphone", "xbox", and "cars" into the search box, and it found no matches.
They also have one of the most overreaching EULAs for their site I've seen in a while.
I have three friends who are accomplished novelists. Two of them have cut off all Internet access to their homes. The other leaves his devices behind and sits in an unconnected cafe with a pen and a stack of paper for several hours a day.
Years ago, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had taken an advance on a book, and were getting very close to deadline with not much written. So they went off to an isolated cabin to write. They each wrote for half the day, taking turns; one sleeping during the day. The resulting book was reasonably good, and finished on time.
The C language and Pascal were both developed in the 1968 to 1973 time frame for the PDP-x series of computers.
No, Pascal was originally developed, by Wirth, for the CDC 6600, which was considered a "supercomputer" at the time.
Right. This is the short explanation. I have a longer document which makes a more detailed proposal, and includes slices, with Python-like slice syntax for C.
Microsoft went down this road, with their "source-code annotation language" for C. Essentially the same information as I'm taking about is written, but as comments which can be machine-checked by tools. This never caught on outside Microsoft.