That's not even close to what Lutz says. I've just read his book.
GM management was engineering-dominated. Lutz's big push was for "perceptual quality" - sheet metal fit, interior design, and styling. A "cool look". He was willing to give up engineering quality for that.
One example Lutz gives: GM had a standard that vehicles must be able to hit a 4" curb straight on at speed without damage. So if you hit a pothole or a rock, you could keep on driving. But the "big rim, thin tire" style borrowed from lowriders couldn't do that, and GM didn't use such tires. He insisted on giving up the 4"curb requirement to get a cool look.
What Lutz actually did was to strengthen the role of the designers over the engineers.
Hollywood is out of second-tier comic book superheroes and the plastic-toy genre has been well covered. As for remakes, "Police Academy 8" has been green-lighted, so the bottom of the barrel has been reached there. Some major franchises have reached end of life. The final Harry Potter movie, and what's probably the final Bond movie, are about to come out.
On the video game front, Rockstar won't let a studio make a GTA game; they think it would devalue the franchise. So Hollywood has to go through the bargain bin of video game rights.
The state of the industry is pathetic. Warner Bros. is doing so badly that only one of their movies last year made the top 100. (It was "Hot Tub Time Machine".) There's a backlash against bad 3D movies.
The desperate attempts to insure a hit on a big budget by redoing something that worked before are backfiring.
Anonymous individuals aren't the problem. Anonymous businesses are the problem. Most of the troubles we have on the Internet come from web sites which purport to be from some legitimate business, but aren't. Malware, spam, etc. all eventually involve some online business.
This is a consequence of ICANN's squishy-soft regulation of registrars and weak enforcement of WHOIS data quality rules. More recently, corrupt CAs have become a problem. The companies that collect money registering the identify of web sites are failing in their responsibilities.
All we need on the client side is good ISP ingress filtering, so that corrupted clients can't use an IP address other than their own. (All you can do with a fake IP address is send junk, since you don't get any of the replies.)
Then, DDoS attacks can be tracked and blocked.
assuming the spokes could be strong enough to support the vehicle and its rider.
Telescoping tubes work a lot better in cartoons than in real life.
I have seen one robot with a deforming wheel design which transitions from a wheel to a flat tracked drive. Their slogan is "wheels when possible, tracks when necessary.") It was fast, agile, showed up once at one trade show, and hasn't been seen much since. Nice mechanical engineering.
Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.
Right.
Some of the key architects of Facebook have spoken at Stanford about how the system is put together, and I went to that presentation and had a chance to talk to them. They didn't consider MySQL to be a bottleneck. Their big problem was PHP performance. They were writing a PHP compiler to fix that.
Internally, the user-facing side of Facebook is in PHP. But the front end machines don't talk directly to the databases. They use an RPC system to talk to other machines that do the "business logic" parts of the system. Building a Facebook reply page may involve a hundred machines. There's heavy caching all over the system, of course, so the databases aren't hit for most read requests.
The RPC system isn't HTML, JSON, or SOAP. It's a binary system that doesn't require text parsing. Otherwise, RPC would be the bottleneck.
This makes for a flexible, easy to enhance system. New services go in new machines, which talk to existing machines.
It's a cute idea. It assumes a single point of contact with the ground, and thus requires a flat, hard floor. This is limiting.
The various "omni-wheel" designs, with wheels composed of little wheels arranged around a big wheel, have a similar problem. The size of the little wheels, not the big one, determines the terrain-handling limits of the vehicle.
1980s robots tried to do everything by wheel odometry. Back then, most of the software was too dumb to plan moves given steering limitations, so omnidirectional drives were popular. Robots got a lot better when people stopped building robots with complex wheels and no suspension, and went to more ordinary wheels with off-road type suspensions.
The way they cut the motherboard safely for notebook covers is by using multi-ton presses. The even use presses to punch out the rivet holes for attaching the hardware to the cut motherboards.
That's a good idea. If you have access to ordinary sheet metal shop tools like a sheet metal shear and a turret punch, you can cut PC boards into various shapes without generating dust.
One shot of the launch control center after the launch showed one guy quietly cleaning out his desk, putting his stuff in his backpack, and walking out.
Everything I'm reading in English says they are dangerously close to bursting
Right.
There's internal concern in China when the GDP growth rate falls below 10%. It's currently 9.7%. Some cities have a housing bubble, and prices are starting to drop a bit, which is seen as a good thing by the Government.
China holds over 1 trillion in US treasury paper, and over 3 trillion in all foreign currencies. That's a nice cash cushion in case of trouble.
The general rule of thumb which the physicists learned the hard way is that assuming something general and hoping that the shortcuts you need to take to get a result magically fall out once you randomly scatter enough phd students at a subject, is futile.
I heard that exact approach proposed more than once at Stanford in the 1980s.
AI is no longer a hardware problem. Any major data center probably has enough power to do a human brain, if we only knew how to program it. In some areas, like vision, sheer compute power has helped in a big way. Some problems can be hammered into the ground with machine learning techniques and CPU time. In other areas, we're still stuck. There's been almost no progress on "common sense reasoning" in years.
On the other hand, having lived through the "AI Winter" (from 1985 or so, when it became clear expert systems were a dead end, to the late 1990s, when Bayesian statistics and machine learning started to take over), it's nice to see real progress being made again.
It's not clear that we need a different hardware architecture for AI. There used to be much enthusiasm for neural nets, but it turns out that modern machine learning techniques do better on the few problems neural nets can do. The modern approaches are all matrix algebra, and you usually work in Matlab. Much of that stuff is parallelizable, and what you want is more like a GPU than neurons.
OK, a mouse brain has about 1/1000 the mass of a human brain. So build a mouse brain with 1000 ARM CPUs, which ought to fit in one rack, and demonstrate the full range of mouse behavior, from vision to motor control.
I read the paper. It's a "build it and they will come" design. There's no insight into how to get intelligence out of the thing, just faith that if we hook enough nodes together, something will happen.
About 20 years ago, I went to hear Rodney Brooks (the artificial insect guy from MIT) talk about the next project after his reactive insects. He was talking about getting to human-level AI by building Cog, a robot head and hand that was supposed to "act human". I asked him why, since he'd already done insect-level AI, he didn't try mouse-level AI next, since that might be within reach. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse".
Cog turned out to be a dead end. It was rather embarrassing to all concerned. As one grad student said, "It just sits there. That's all it does."
good for real world earnings of about $10 per day - at least as long as the Bitcoin currency remains intact.
Iif you create a web page which does Bitcoin mining in the background while displaying something else, you may be able to get people to do the computation for you.
Bitcoin will probably tank before WebCL gets going. Bitcoin was supposed to be a transactional currency for micropayments. Instead, it's become almost entirely a speculative market. Bigcoin fans are franticallly "mining" and trading, but no major retailer accepts Bitcoins. Bitcoins are now so volatile that pricing anything in Bitcoins is hopeless. (Today's range is $12.40 to $15.00 per Bitcoin.)
Without significant usage as a currency, it's not a currency. It's a pyramid scheme. About $100,000 worth of new Bitcoins are generated each day, and to keep the price up, the scheme needs $100,000 of new sucker money each day. Lately there's been a sucker shortage, and the price has been declining.
It's always amused me that "high end" analog audio cables still mostly use RCA phono plugs, a bad connector design from the 1950s.. You'd think they'd use BNC or XLR connectors, like the pros. Those lock in, don't come loose, and are hard to damage through routine handling because the pins are recessed. But no, the high end guys just gold-plate a crap connector and put a plastic handle on it.
The Javascript code isn't doing the rendering of text. It uses dynamically loaded fonts and lets the platform's own font renderer render the glyphs. The Javascript code isn't pushing pixels.
There's less need for PDF than there used to be, now that you can download fonts in the browser. It might be worthwhile to take this PDF viewer and turn it into a server-side PDF to HTML translator.
Google revenue: 94% ads. Ad revenue: 70% ads on search pages, 30% ads elsewhere (Adsense, YouTube, etc.). That's what matters.
If Google does anything for which they charge customers money, the customers will expect support. Google hates providing support. They gave up selling Android handsets when they discovered that unhappy customers would call them. Even the rare Google business-to-business products, like the Google Search Appliance, were unsupported. (If it broke during warranty, they shipped you a new one.)
This limits Google to ad-supported business lines. Since they already dominate the one really profitable ad-supported business line, search, any area into which they expand is less profitable than the one they're in. So expansion reduces ROI and stock price.
Getting into "social" doesn't help much.
Facebook is dinky compared to Google. Facebook has hit its peak size, and it still generates an order of magnitude less revenue than Google.
RIM's "app store" has as its lead product something for getting sports news. Wrong answer.
They should be focusing on being a really good business tool, and having applications for business users. Some examples:
GetMeThere - a travel application for executives. You want to get somewhere, it figures out how and makes all the arrangements. It knows where you are, it knows your company travel policies, it knows your frequent flyer information, it knows your preferences, it knows about travel delays, and it knows how to talk to all the reservation systems. Including NetJets. The iPhone travel applications have all that data, but are too dumb to put it together.
ExceptionMonitor This ties in with corporate systems to report exceptions. If something was supposed to ship by Thursday, and it didn't, you get an alert. Monitors key ratios for your business while you're out of town, too.
BackgroundCheck Check out a company or an individual. Connects to Dun and Bradstreet, Hoovers, corporate registration information, criminal records, etc.
Tethered ground-powered rotor-lift platforms date back to WWII. Israeli Aircraft Industries has one in their product line today. They're usually installed on the back of a vehicle, so you can pop up the camera unit and take a look over the next hill. Early versions had no guidance and just used enough power to pull the tether taut. Modern ones fly actively, so they can be used to peek around buildings.
Using a fiber optic to transmit power is rather inefficient. Probably 70% - 80% of the power is lost that way.
establish a tax clearinghouse that any merchant can plug in to, and then anybody who collects money online can take advantage of their existing ecommerce infrastructure to both calculate and deliver the correct amount of tax to the clearinghouse, which then tags it with the EIN of the employer and sends it directly to the state and/or local government, each of which would pay a small percentage or else a flat fee based on their size to run the clearinghouse.
That's already in existence. The
Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement set up the framework, and there are six "certified service providers" which connect up with shopping cart systems, take the address and commodity code, calculate the tax, bill the merchant, and pay out the correct amount to each jurisdiction. The problem is that only 24 states have enacted legislation to work with this system.
It's not getting retailers to comply that's hard. It's trying to get state legislatures to go along. Some states have tax exemptions for specific products, and legal decisions in different states have resulted in inconsistent definitions. Some states have "sales tax holidays". Federal legislation was introduced in 2007 to make this work nationally, but it didn't pass.
The edge Facebook used to have is that it wasn't Myspace.
Facebook's user count is dropping. The problem seems to be that the users are becoming annoyed with all the junk,
The rise of mobile use may be a problem for Facebook. Anecdote: a female friend of mine in SF is very much into doing everything possible through her iPhone. She recently told me to use email, text, or voice to reach her, rather than messaging on Facebook. She's deluged with useless Facebook status updates, and now only checks Facebook every day or two. Paging through all that stuff on an iPhone was too much, and now she looks at Facebook only through her laptop or iPad.
Some other young people I know think of Facebook as a photo-sharing site. It's easy to upload photos from your phone to Facebook, and Facebook has good tools for organizing pictures. That's where you put your travel photos. It's not how you reach your friends.
The small screen could be a real problem for Facebook.
Here's New Media Animation's take on this. They're a quick-turn animation house in Tapei, and they do one or two commentaries on the day's news every day.
Turn off autorun for everything on all non-entertainment machines. It was originally put in so that entertainment CDs like Disney's The Lion King (remember those?) would autoplay.
There's almost no circumstance under which you'd want to autorun anything from a USB stick or any USB peripheral.
Microsoft is negligent in setting their defaults to "on", and providing a "use AutoPlay for all media and devices" checkbox.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not even close to what Lutz says. I've just read his book.
GM management was engineering-dominated. Lutz's big push was for "perceptual quality" - sheet metal fit, interior design, and styling. A "cool look". He was willing to give up engineering quality for that.
One example Lutz gives: GM had a standard that vehicles must be able to hit a 4" curb straight on at speed without damage. So if you hit a pothole or a rock, you could keep on driving. But the "big rim, thin tire" style borrowed from lowriders couldn't do that, and GM didn't use such tires. He insisted on giving up the 4"curb requirement to get a cool look.
What Lutz actually did was to strengthen the role of the designers over the engineers.
Right, MGM. Sorry.
Hollywood is out of second-tier comic book superheroes and the plastic-toy genre has been well covered. As for remakes, "Police Academy 8" has been green-lighted, so the bottom of the barrel has been reached there. Some major franchises have reached end of life. The final Harry Potter movie, and what's probably the final Bond movie, are about to come out.
On the video game front, Rockstar won't let a studio make a GTA game; they think it would devalue the franchise. So Hollywood has to go through the bargain bin of video game rights.
The state of the industry is pathetic. Warner Bros. is doing so badly that only one of their movies last year made the top 100. (It was "Hot Tub Time Machine".) There's a backlash against bad 3D movies.
The desperate attempts to insure a hit on a big budget by redoing something that worked before are backfiring.
Chrome is getting to be as intrusive as IE used to be.
Anonymous individuals aren't the problem. Anonymous businesses are the problem. Most of the troubles we have on the Internet come from web sites which purport to be from some legitimate business, but aren't. Malware, spam, etc. all eventually involve some online business.
This is a consequence of ICANN's squishy-soft regulation of registrars and weak enforcement of WHOIS data quality rules. More recently, corrupt CAs have become a problem. The companies that collect money registering the identify of web sites are failing in their responsibilities.
All we need on the client side is good ISP ingress filtering, so that corrupted clients can't use an IP address other than their own. (All you can do with a fake IP address is send junk, since you don't get any of the replies.) Then, DDoS attacks can be tracked and blocked.
assuming the spokes could be strong enough to support the vehicle and its rider.
Telescoping tubes work a lot better in cartoons than in real life.
I have seen one robot with a deforming wheel design which transitions from a wheel to a flat tracked drive. Their slogan is "wheels when possible, tracks when necessary.") It was fast, agile, showed up once at one trade show, and hasn't been seen much since. Nice mechanical engineering.
Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.
Right.
Some of the key architects of Facebook have spoken at Stanford about how the system is put together, and I went to that presentation and had a chance to talk to them. They didn't consider MySQL to be a bottleneck. Their big problem was PHP performance. They were writing a PHP compiler to fix that.
Internally, the user-facing side of Facebook is in PHP. But the front end machines don't talk directly to the databases. They use an RPC system to talk to other machines that do the "business logic" parts of the system. Building a Facebook reply page may involve a hundred machines. There's heavy caching all over the system, of course, so the databases aren't hit for most read requests.
The RPC system isn't HTML, JSON, or SOAP. It's a binary system that doesn't require text parsing. Otherwise, RPC would be the bottleneck.
This makes for a flexible, easy to enhance system. New services go in new machines, which talk to existing machines.
It's a cute idea. It assumes a single point of contact with the ground, and thus requires a flat, hard floor. This is limiting.
The various "omni-wheel" designs, with wheels composed of little wheels arranged around a big wheel, have a similar problem. The size of the little wheels, not the big one, determines the terrain-handling limits of the vehicle.
1980s robots tried to do everything by wheel odometry. Back then, most of the software was too dumb to plan moves given steering limitations, so omnidirectional drives were popular. Robots got a lot better when people stopped building robots with complex wheels and no suspension, and went to more ordinary wheels with off-road type suspensions.
The way they cut the motherboard safely for notebook covers is by using multi-ton presses. The even use presses to punch out the rivet holes for attaching the hardware to the cut motherboards.
That's a good idea. If you have access to ordinary sheet metal shop tools like a sheet metal shear and a turret punch, you can cut PC boards into various shapes without generating dust.
I'm hoping NASA stops developing "day to day" vehicles and starts working on next generation technologies.
They tried that. It didn't work. See NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, 1996-2002.
One shot of the launch control center after the launch showed one guy quietly cleaning out his desk, putting his stuff in his backpack, and walking out.
Everything I'm reading in English says they are dangerously close to bursting
Right.
There's internal concern in China when the GDP growth rate falls below 10%. It's currently 9.7%. Some cities have a housing bubble, and prices are starting to drop a bit, which is seen as a good thing by the Government.
China holds over 1 trillion in US treasury paper, and over 3 trillion in all foreign currencies. That's a nice cash cushion in case of trouble.
The general rule of thumb which the physicists learned the hard way is that assuming something general and hoping that the shortcuts you need to take to get a result magically fall out once you randomly scatter enough phd students at a subject, is futile.
I heard that exact approach proposed more than once at Stanford in the 1980s.
AI is no longer a hardware problem. Any major data center probably has enough power to do a human brain, if we only knew how to program it. In some areas, like vision, sheer compute power has helped in a big way. Some problems can be hammered into the ground with machine learning techniques and CPU time. In other areas, we're still stuck. There's been almost no progress on "common sense reasoning" in years.
On the other hand, having lived through the "AI Winter" (from 1985 or so, when it became clear expert systems were a dead end, to the late 1990s, when Bayesian statistics and machine learning started to take over), it's nice to see real progress being made again.
It's not clear that we need a different hardware architecture for AI. There used to be much enthusiasm for neural nets, but it turns out that modern machine learning techniques do better on the few problems neural nets can do. The modern approaches are all matrix algebra, and you usually work in Matlab. Much of that stuff is parallelizable, and what you want is more like a GPU than neurons.
OK, a mouse brain has about 1/1000 the mass of a human brain. So build a mouse brain with 1000 ARM CPUs, which ought to fit in one rack, and demonstrate the full range of mouse behavior, from vision to motor control.
I read the paper. It's a "build it and they will come" design. There's no insight into how to get intelligence out of the thing, just faith that if we hook enough nodes together, something will happen.
About 20 years ago, I went to hear Rodney Brooks (the artificial insect guy from MIT) talk about the next project after his reactive insects. He was talking about getting to human-level AI by building Cog, a robot head and hand that was supposed to "act human". I asked him why, since he'd already done insect-level AI, he didn't try mouse-level AI next, since that might be within reach. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse".
Cog turned out to be a dead end. It was rather embarrassing to all concerned. As one grad student said, "It just sits there. That's all it does."
Nuclear energy, the short version.
Pro: there's plenty of uranium and thorium.
Con: every 20 years or so you have to evacuate an area 50km across on short notice.
good for real world earnings of about $10 per day - at least as long as the Bitcoin currency remains intact.
Iif you create a web page which does Bitcoin mining in the background while displaying something else, you may be able to get people to do the computation for you.
Bitcoin will probably tank before WebCL gets going. Bitcoin was supposed to be a transactional currency for micropayments. Instead, it's become almost entirely a speculative market. Bigcoin fans are franticallly "mining" and trading, but no major retailer accepts Bitcoins. Bitcoins are now so volatile that pricing anything in Bitcoins is hopeless. (Today's range is $12.40 to $15.00 per Bitcoin.)
Without significant usage as a currency, it's not a currency. It's a pyramid scheme. About $100,000 worth of new Bitcoins are generated each day, and to keep the price up, the scheme needs $100,000 of new sucker money each day. Lately there's been a sucker shortage, and the price has been declining.
simple BNC
It's always amused me that "high end" analog audio cables still mostly use RCA phono plugs, a bad connector design from the 1950s.. You'd think they'd use BNC or XLR connectors, like the pros. Those lock in, don't come loose, and are hard to damage through routine handling because the pins are recessed. But no, the high end guys just gold-plate a crap connector and put a plastic handle on it.
The Javascript code isn't doing the rendering of text. It uses dynamically loaded fonts and lets the platform's own font renderer render the glyphs. The Javascript code isn't pushing pixels.
There's less need for PDF than there used to be, now that you can download fonts in the browser. It might be worthwhile to take this PDF viewer and turn it into a server-side PDF to HTML translator.
Google revenue: 94% ads. Ad revenue: 70% ads on search pages, 30% ads elsewhere (Adsense, YouTube, etc.). That's what matters.
If Google does anything for which they charge customers money, the customers will expect support. Google hates providing support. They gave up selling Android handsets when they discovered that unhappy customers would call them. Even the rare Google business-to-business products, like the Google Search Appliance, were unsupported. (If it broke during warranty, they shipped you a new one.) This limits Google to ad-supported business lines. Since they already dominate the one really profitable ad-supported business line, search, any area into which they expand is less profitable than the one they're in. So expansion reduces ROI and stock price.
Getting into "social" doesn't help much. Facebook is dinky compared to Google. Facebook has hit its peak size, and it still generates an order of magnitude less revenue than Google.
RIM's "app store" has as its lead product something for getting sports news. Wrong answer.
They should be focusing on being a really good business tool, and having applications for business users. Some examples:
That's what executives need, not Angry Birds.
Tethered ground-powered rotor-lift platforms date back to WWII. Israeli Aircraft Industries has one in their product line today. They're usually installed on the back of a vehicle, so you can pop up the camera unit and take a look over the next hill. Early versions had no guidance and just used enough power to pull the tether taut. Modern ones fly actively, so they can be used to peek around buildings.
Using a fiber optic to transmit power is rather inefficient. Probably 70% - 80% of the power is lost that way.
establish a tax clearinghouse that any merchant can plug in to, and then anybody who collects money online can take advantage of their existing ecommerce infrastructure to both calculate and deliver the correct amount of tax to the clearinghouse, which then tags it with the EIN of the employer and sends it directly to the state and/or local government, each of which would pay a small percentage or else a flat fee based on their size to run the clearinghouse.
That's already in existence. The Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement set up the framework, and there are six "certified service providers" which connect up with shopping cart systems, take the address and commodity code, calculate the tax, bill the merchant, and pay out the correct amount to each jurisdiction. The problem is that only 24 states have enacted legislation to work with this system.
It's not getting retailers to comply that's hard. It's trying to get state legislatures to go along. Some states have tax exemptions for specific products, and legal decisions in different states have resulted in inconsistent definitions. Some states have "sales tax holidays". Federal legislation was introduced in 2007 to make this work nationally, but it didn't pass.
The edge Facebook used to have is that it wasn't Myspace.
Facebook's user count is dropping. The problem seems to be that the users are becoming annoyed with all the junk,
The rise of mobile use may be a problem for Facebook. Anecdote: a female friend of mine in SF is very much into doing everything possible through her iPhone. She recently told me to use email, text, or voice to reach her, rather than messaging on Facebook. She's deluged with useless Facebook status updates, and now only checks Facebook every day or two. Paging through all that stuff on an iPhone was too much, and now she looks at Facebook only through her laptop or iPad.
Some other young people I know think of Facebook as a photo-sharing site. It's easy to upload photos from your phone to Facebook, and Facebook has good tools for organizing pictures. That's where you put your travel photos. It's not how you reach your friends.
The small screen could be a real problem for Facebook.
Here's New Media Animation's take on this. They're a quick-turn animation house in Tapei, and they do one or two commentaries on the day's news every day.
Turn off autorun for everything on all non-entertainment machines. It was originally put in so that entertainment CDs like Disney's The Lion King (remember those?) would autoplay.
There's almost no circumstance under which you'd want to autorun anything from a USB stick or any USB peripheral. Microsoft is negligent in setting their defaults to "on", and providing a "use AutoPlay for all media and devices" checkbox.