The Animation Guild. They represent animators and digital effects artists at almost all the Hollywood-based studios. They have an organizer and are actively trying to sign up the remaining non-union studios. Union animators get overtime. 1.5x pay after 40 hours. Double time after 6 days.
Hollywood accepts that there will be crunches during production, but by long tradition and union rules, management has to pay extra for them. That's why "film scheduling" is an accepted discipline in the film industry.
The Animation Guild makes an interesting point - the union studios stay in business longer than the non-union ones. Because the workers can push back against management idiocy, it tends not to go too far.
A conductive ink pen and a trace-cutter used to be standard equipment when debugging new PC boards. Today, you usually get it right the first time using CAD tools. Today's pin spacing is too close for hand drawing.
Google needs to focus on improving search. Blekko is doing a better job in some areas, especially health.
Ads which appear in search results appear when the user is actually looking for something. This makes those ads valuable. On "social" systems, ads are annoying interference while talking to your friends. Facebook has a fraction of the ad revenue of Google.
Facebook's period of growth is over. Facebook, like all its predecessors from AOL to Myspace, has peaked on user count and is now shrinking. They should have gone public before that happened. Now their value is far less.
Still, the lessons of Fukushima Daiichi are serious. There are a sizable number of reactors out there which will melt down if they lose cooling pump power. (The reactors and the pumps at Fukushima survived the earthquake and tsunami. Cooling continued until the battery bank ran down, then stopped. All the damage shown in photos is from later hydrogen explosions.) That's unacceptable. There has to be backup passive cooling.
All plants should have catalytic hydrogen recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions. There's no excuse for not having those. That should have been fixed after TMI, decades ago.
Long term storage of used fuel rods on site has got to stop. After initial cooling, those need to go to dry cask storage.
The really tough issue is evacuation zones. Indian Point in New York has 19 million people within 50 miles.
Right. The energy-efficient alternative is big, fixed base camps. The American military (especially the Marines) tries to avoid being tied to fixed base camps, because a base camp doesn't project power - it just sits there and has to be defended. To accomplish anything useful, troops have to go where the enemy is and put bullets in them.
Hence the need to air-condition tents in the middle of nowhere.
It's a browser, Firefox people. It doesn't need many new features. One new release every year or two is enough.
If so many new releases are needed for bug fixes, have longer betas. If the problem is security, beef up the sandbox design so that less of the code is security critical.
That's a well-known early development in walking machines. Technically it's closer to being an exoskeleton than a robot. It's slaved to the limbs of the guy inside, and is dependent on his balance reflexes. That didn't work out too well.
It took a long time to get legged machines to work well. Most early work was about gait and foot coordination. It turns out that balance is more important than gait, and slip control is more important than balance. It finally all came together with BigDog. (BigDog demonstrates that the technology was finally far enough along that throwing $20 million at the problem was a win. Money alone is not enough; see the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which NASA blew over $200 million in the late 1980s. DARPA also funded a 6-legged walking truck in the 1980s, but it never got beyond a slow walk on easy terrain.)
The GE walker dates from an era when American industry tried to push the state of the art with ambitious internal research projects. That's rare in the US today. But in Germany, there's Festo. Every year, Festo does an impressive robotics project. They've done a flexible manta ray which swims through water; it's highly maneuverable and moves and looks like a real manta ray. Most recently, they built a robot bird, which flies around gracefully and under good control.
There's something to be said for this. Kids should be taught all the common scams in school. Every kid should know the classics - the shell game, the badger game, the big store, the Spanish prisoner, lottery scams, pyramid schemes, forced teaming, etc. See List of Confidence Tricks on Wikipedia.
Worse, they'll probably put eavesdropping in the audio path of the PC (where the DRM is now), so that no crypto software on the client end can bypass it.
Reddit - added quotes around a reference to 4Chan. Unclear why.
Baba Ramdev - edit warring over profitability of business interests of some guru.
None of those added any value to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is mostly done. All the important topics were covered in the first million articles. Most new pages are junk. It's about cleanup and correction now. That's a detail-oriented job. It's not like posting to some forum.
I'm all in favor of full automatic driving. (I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team.) But it needs a full sensor suite and good situational awareness. This is quite possible now. With devices like the Velodyne scanner, you have a full real-time depth image of everything around the car. (Yes, the Velodyne thing is too bulky and too expensive. There are ways around that. Advanced Scientific Concepts needs to get their flash LIDAR out of the high-end military market, and you need to build up your model from multiple sensors to get rid of that huge scanner on the roof.)
Automatic driving needs to handle the hard cases. A child running in front of a car. Trash on the road. Ice. This is not only feasible, hardware has much better reaction times than humans, especially tired or distracted ones. Google's automatic cars have encountered deer and avoided them. They can even pull off maneuvers that humans can't. There's video of Stanford's autonomous vehicle doing a power slide into a parking space. Repeatably.
Easy-cases-only automatic driving is a recipe for disaster. If you have lane-keeping and vehicle spacing, which is what's being talked about here, you have the illusion of automatic driving. Most of the time, it will work fine. Most of the time.
Expecting the driver to sit there, not steering but being alert, for hours on end, is unrealistic. When something bad happens, they won't react quickly enough.
At launch last October, the set-top console and HD camera cost a whopping $599, with a $24.99 monthly service charge (now $99 yearly). While that price has since been reduced to $499 - and a $399, 720p unit introduced, it's still absurdly expensive when compared to the video calling alternatives.
"Absurdly expensive"?
An unlocked iPhone 4 costs $599. (Yes, there are iPhone discounts if you agree to pay about $1000 a year to the cellular carrier for a few years.)
Until salaries start going up, there's no programmer shortage.
The business whining about a programmer shortage comes from companies who want a pool of people who know exactly the stuff they're using, require no training, are immediately available, will relocate, and can be fired at the end of the project.
I see Tesla roadsters on the road almost every day. I live in Silicon Valley on a hilly, winding road which leads to a lightly used road along a lake. It's about the only place in Silicon Valley where driving a sports car is a fun experience. The Silicon Valley Tesla dealership is nearby . So I see the little roadsters go quietly swooshing by as the dealership demos them.
There are enough Teslas in Silicon Valley that I see them around, being driven, parked in parking lots, and just routinely being used. Only once have I seen one on a flatbed truck, being hauled into the shop.
Not having anything to sell for a year seems a business mistake. Even if they're not making much money on the roadsters, keeping some product on the market seems necessary to retain attention. There are competing electric sedans, after all. The Tesla Roadster was unique, and finally killed the image of the electric car as wussy.
Crap article. You'd think there would be a picture of all the logos on something, followed by a close-up picture of each logo and its explanation . But no. It's pure did not do the research.
This looks like Demand Media content for a made-for-Adsense page. Probably paid the author about $10.
The days when you only had to special case for IE and Netscape now seem nostalgic.
I'll use some exotic features on my fun sites, like the Aetheric Message Machine Company, which makes heavy use of downloadable fonts. (This requires making the fonts available in four different formats.) But if it has to work, it's back to vanilla XHTML 1.1.
This reads like it was written before the peak, the first crash, the Mt.Gox break-in and shutdown, and the second crash.
A sizable fraction of the Bitcoins in existence are now trapped at Mt. Gox (formerly Magic, The Gathering Online Exchange) which turns out to be two guys in Tokyo who are in way over their heads. Mt. Gox is trying to re-establish who owns which account. Since the names, email addresses, and hashed passwords of their customers have been published, this is difficult. No date has been given when trapped funds will be available. One thing that's now clear: don't keep any significant funds in any of these "exchanges". They're not banks. They are unregulated non-bank depository institutions.
Meanwhile, another exchange in Chile has taken up some of the slack, and the price of a Bitcoin has settled down around $14-15. At the beginning of June, it was around $8, and last week it spiked up to $30.
It's worth bearing in mind that the entire Bitcoin economy has less volume than a typical US supermarket. There's not much you can actually buy. Unless the volatility drops below 1%/day, there won't be. Merchants can't set prices in Bitcoins yet without a big exchange rate risk.
Bitcoins are a reasonable idea, but the Bitcoin financial ecosystem is far too flaky to take seriously.
That's Princess Maker 2. Teaches child micromanagement. Also proper spreadsheet usage. There are a huge number of statistics which have to be delicately balanced. It's one of those games where actions add to one stat while subtracting from another. Considered very frustrating.
It was a static display at the Paris Air Show. If it really flew, they could have arranged to fly it there. That would have impressed potential customers. If it worked.
Just looking at the picture, I have doubts it can even be fully powered up. They have unprotected loose wires hanging within inches of their turbine blades. They say they've done "extensive constrained flight tests", but that may mean that some of the support was provided by a crane while they debugged the blade-steering mechanism.
Of course, it suffers from the curse of all pure-thrust lifters - you need a huge engine and fuel consumption is high. The only useful examples of such machines have been VTOL fighters, which are mostly a huge engine anyway.
Google seems to be updating Chrome at a high rate because they want to control both the server side (all Google properties) and the client side. Google properties now use features that only work in Chrome. It's Microsoft's old "Embrace, extend, devour" applied to the Web. Microsoft tried this with Silverlight, with less success.
Whether Firefox should cooperate in this effort needs to be questioned. Whether Firefox users should go along is very questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
The Animation Guild. They represent animators and digital effects artists at almost all the Hollywood-based studios. They have an organizer and are actively trying to sign up the remaining non-union studios. Union animators get overtime. 1.5x pay after 40 hours. Double time after 6 days.
Hollywood accepts that there will be crunches during production, but by long tradition and union rules, management has to pay extra for them. That's why "film scheduling" is an accepted discipline in the film industry.
The Animation Guild makes an interesting point - the union studios stay in business longer than the non-union ones. Because the workers can push back against management idiocy, it tends not to go too far.
Mod parent up.
A conductive ink pen and a trace-cutter used to be standard equipment when debugging new PC boards. Today, you usually get it right the first time using CAD tools. Today's pin spacing is too close for hand drawing.
I'd heard of "Learn Python the Hard Way", but I thought it was a joke.
If you know any other programming language, Python is very easy.
Google needs to focus on improving search. Blekko is doing a better job in some areas, especially health.
Ads which appear in search results appear when the user is actually looking for something. This makes those ads valuable. On "social" systems, ads are annoying interference while talking to your friends. Facebook has a fraction of the ad revenue of Google.
Facebook's period of growth is over. Facebook, like all its predecessors from AOL to Myspace, has peaked on user count and is now shrinking. They should have gone public before that happened. Now their value is far less.
At least someone isn't giving up.
Still, the lessons of Fukushima Daiichi are serious. There are a sizable number of reactors out there which will melt down if they lose cooling pump power. (The reactors and the pumps at Fukushima survived the earthquake and tsunami. Cooling continued until the battery bank ran down, then stopped. All the damage shown in photos is from later hydrogen explosions.) That's unacceptable. There has to be backup passive cooling.
All plants should have catalytic hydrogen recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions. There's no excuse for not having those. That should have been fixed after TMI, decades ago.
Long term storage of used fuel rods on site has got to stop. After initial cooling, those need to go to dry cask storage.
The really tough issue is evacuation zones. Indian Point in New York has 19 million people within 50 miles.
Mathematica, from 1961. It's at the New York Hall of Science now.
Things are done like they are for a reason.
Right. The energy-efficient alternative is big, fixed base camps. The American military (especially the Marines) tries to avoid being tied to fixed base camps, because a base camp doesn't project power - it just sits there and has to be defended. To accomplish anything useful, troops have to go where the enemy is and put bullets in them.
Hence the need to air-condition tents in the middle of nowhere.
It's a browser, Firefox people. It doesn't need many new features. One new release every year or two is enough.
If so many new releases are needed for bug fixes, have longer betas. If the problem is security, beef up the sandbox design so that less of the code is security critical.
No keyboard, just mouse.
The original Macintosh could be usefully run that way.
That's a well-known early development in walking machines. Technically it's closer to being an exoskeleton than a robot. It's slaved to the limbs of the guy inside, and is dependent on his balance reflexes. That didn't work out too well.
It took a long time to get legged machines to work well. Most early work was about gait and foot coordination. It turns out that balance is more important than gait, and slip control is more important than balance. It finally all came together with BigDog. (BigDog demonstrates that the technology was finally far enough along that throwing $20 million at the problem was a win. Money alone is not enough; see the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which NASA blew over $200 million in the late 1980s. DARPA also funded a 6-legged walking truck in the 1980s, but it never got beyond a slow walk on easy terrain.)
The GE walker dates from an era when American industry tried to push the state of the art with ambitious internal research projects. That's rare in the US today. But in Germany, there's Festo. Every year, Festo does an impressive robotics project. They've done a flexible manta ray which swims through water; it's highly maneuverable and moves and looks like a real manta ray. Most recently, they built a robot bird, which flies around gracefully and under good control.
There's something to be said for this. Kids should be taught all the common scams in school. Every kid should know the classics - the shell game, the badger game, the big store, the Spanish prisoner, lottery scams, pyramid schemes, forced teaming, etc. See List of Confidence Tricks on Wikipedia.
Worse, they'll probably put eavesdropping in the audio path of the PC (where the DRM is now), so that no crypto software on the client end can bypass it.
The strangest thing about this law was that it was supported by Arnold Schwarzenegger .
Wikipedia has a page which tracks what n00bs are doing. Here are the last five edits by new editors in article space:
None of those added any value to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is mostly done. All the important topics were covered in the first million articles. Most new pages are junk. It's about cleanup and correction now. That's a detail-oriented job. It's not like posting to some forum.
Why would any "offer", obviously bulk mail, ever go into the "Priority inbox"? Even if you wanted it, it should go into the "Bulk" folder.
Semi-automatic driving is a bad idea.
I'm all in favor of full automatic driving. (I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team.) But it needs a full sensor suite and good situational awareness. This is quite possible now. With devices like the Velodyne scanner, you have a full real-time depth image of everything around the car. (Yes, the Velodyne thing is too bulky and too expensive. There are ways around that. Advanced Scientific Concepts needs to get their flash LIDAR out of the high-end military market, and you need to build up your model from multiple sensors to get rid of that huge scanner on the roof.)
Automatic driving needs to handle the hard cases. A child running in front of a car. Trash on the road. Ice. This is not only feasible, hardware has much better reaction times than humans, especially tired or distracted ones. Google's automatic cars have encountered deer and avoided them. They can even pull off maneuvers that humans can't. There's video of Stanford's autonomous vehicle doing a power slide into a parking space. Repeatably.
Easy-cases-only automatic driving is a recipe for disaster. If you have lane-keeping and vehicle spacing, which is what's being talked about here, you have the illusion of automatic driving. Most of the time, it will work fine. Most of the time.
Expecting the driver to sit there, not steering but being alert, for hours on end, is unrealistic. When something bad happens, they won't react quickly enough.
At launch last October, the set-top console and HD camera cost a whopping $599, with a $24.99 monthly service charge (now $99 yearly). While that price has since been reduced to $499 - and a $399, 720p unit introduced, it's still absurdly expensive when compared to the video calling alternatives.
"Absurdly expensive"? An unlocked iPhone 4 costs $599. (Yes, there are iPhone discounts if you agree to pay about $1000 a year to the cellular carrier for a few years.)
Until salaries start going up, there's no programmer shortage.
The business whining about a programmer shortage comes from companies who want a pool of people who know exactly the stuff they're using, require no training, are immediately available, will relocate, and can be fired at the end of the project.
I see Tesla roadsters on the road almost every day. I live in Silicon Valley on a hilly, winding road which leads to a lightly used road along a lake. It's about the only place in Silicon Valley where driving a sports car is a fun experience. The Silicon Valley Tesla dealership is nearby . So I see the little roadsters go quietly swooshing by as the dealership demos them.
There are enough Teslas in Silicon Valley that I see them around, being driven, parked in parking lots, and just routinely being used. Only once have I seen one on a flatbed truck, being hauled into the shop.
Not having anything to sell for a year seems a business mistake. Even if they're not making much money on the roadsters, keeping some product on the market seems necessary to retain attention. There are competing electric sedans, after all. The Tesla Roadster was unique, and finally killed the image of the electric car as wussy.
Crap article. You'd think there would be a picture of all the logos on something, followed by a close-up picture of each logo and its explanation . But no. It's pure did not do the research.
This looks like Demand Media content for a made-for-Adsense page. Probably paid the author about $10.
The days when you only had to special case for IE and Netscape now seem nostalgic.
I'll use some exotic features on my fun sites, like the Aetheric Message Machine Company, which makes heavy use of downloadable fonts. (This requires making the fonts available in four different formats.) But if it has to work, it's back to vanilla XHTML 1.1.
This reads like it was written before the peak, the first crash, the Mt.Gox break-in and shutdown, and the second crash.
A sizable fraction of the Bitcoins in existence are now trapped at Mt. Gox (formerly Magic, The Gathering Online Exchange) which turns out to be two guys in Tokyo who are in way over their heads. Mt. Gox is trying to re-establish who owns which account. Since the names, email addresses, and hashed passwords of their customers have been published, this is difficult. No date has been given when trapped funds will be available. One thing that's now clear: don't keep any significant funds in any of these "exchanges". They're not banks. They are unregulated non-bank depository institutions.
Meanwhile, another exchange in Chile has taken up some of the slack, and the price of a Bitcoin has settled down around $14-15. At the beginning of June, it was around $8, and last week it spiked up to $30.
It's worth bearing in mind that the entire Bitcoin economy has less volume than a typical US supermarket. There's not much you can actually buy. Unless the volatility drops below 1%/day, there won't be. Merchants can't set prices in Bitcoins yet without a big exchange rate risk.
Bitcoins are a reasonable idea, but the Bitcoin financial ecosystem is far too flaky to take seriously.
That's Princess Maker 2. Teaches child micromanagement. Also proper spreadsheet usage. There are a huge number of statistics which have to be delicately balanced. It's one of those games where actions add to one stat while subtracting from another. Considered very frustrating.
It was a static display at the Paris Air Show. If it really flew, they could have arranged to fly it there. That would have impressed potential customers. If it worked.
Just looking at the picture, I have doubts it can even be fully powered up. They have unprotected loose wires hanging within inches of their turbine blades. They say they've done "extensive constrained flight tests", but that may mean that some of the support was provided by a crane while they debugged the blade-steering mechanism.
Of course, it suffers from the curse of all pure-thrust lifters - you need a huge engine and fuel consumption is high. The only useful examples of such machines have been VTOL fighters, which are mostly a huge engine anyway.
Google seems to be updating Chrome at a high rate because they want to control both the server side (all Google properties) and the client side. Google properties now use features that only work in Chrome. It's Microsoft's old "Embrace, extend, devour" applied to the Web. Microsoft tried this with Silverlight, with less success.
Whether Firefox should cooperate in this effort needs to be questioned. Whether Firefox users should go along is very questionable.