All the co-sponsors have major NASA operations in their states. Rep. Rob Bishop has repeatedly tried to save ATK Technology in Promontory, UT, the exclusive manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters used in the space shuttle program and the biggest employer in his district.
Apple is selling pretty much every iPhone they can make.
Apple does not make the iPhone. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd's Foxconn subsidiary makes the iPhone. They're adding capacity in Brazil, having outgrown their Shenzhen facility.
A big problem with "3D movies" is Disney "Real3D(tm)", which is Disney Fake3D. The image was delaminated in postprocessing, and reassembled with shifts to simulate depth. That stuff sucks, and it sucks worse if the 3D producer overdoes it. (Ref "Pirahna 3D").
"Avatar" is good 3D. It was really shot and animated in 3D, and Cameron put a lot of effort into getting it right and not overdoing it. At no time in Avatar is something positioned in front of the screen plane. Few other directors are that good.
Even so, film 3D is inherently fake, because of the scaling issue. In the real world, there's no noticeable stereoscopy beyond a few meters of range. Our eyes are too close together. 3D distant shots with wide separation are a cinematic convention, not visual reality.
TV 3D is far worse, It can't be watched casually. If you're off-axis, or lying on your side, the effect is totally wrong. Having to wear glasses or sit in the correct position is too restrictive. I'm curious to see how 3D sports bars work out.
My guess is that after a while, 3D will be scaled back, and it will only be used for content worth showing in Imax.
Google probably shreds them so that they don't get bought by some low-rent operator and show up in "new" machines.
They're low-end drives, incidentally. Google uses cheap parts and redundancy, accepting that hardware will fail regularly. I'm surprised they even bother to test failed drives.
Asimov published who-knows-how-many books, and virtually all of them are (sic) excelent.
Not really. Much of his awful stuff has been forgotten. "Norby, the Mixed-up Robot" (and its sequels, including "Norby and the Lost Princes"), "Young Mutants", "Cosmic Knights", "Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids", "Still More Lecherous Limericks", "The Subatomic Monster " and "Why Does Litter Cause Problems?" are, rightfully, forgotten. Asimov wrote over 300 books, of which maybe 30 are still read. 30 good books is a decent record for an author, but "virtually all are excellent" exaggerates his average quality.
Here's the real deal. Mailing a DVD cheaply is hard. There's a huge price differential, about 4x, between the postage for a "flat", such as a DVD in a reasonably sturdy cardboard envelope, and 1 ounce USPS first class letter postage. First class letter postage is only available to mail pieces which meet certain size criteria which allow them to go through automatic sorting machines.
Netflix developed a package which, with DVD inside, weighs under 1 ounce, and sort of meets the criteria for first class letter postage. "Sort of" means that it sometimes jams up or gets broken in the machinery. However, the USPS allowed Netflix to get the first class rate, and then manually pulled most returning Netflix mailers from the mail stream for manual processing. (Returns are the problem - on the outgoing side, Netflix is sending uniform pieces in bulk, pre-sorted, to get the best rate. Returns just come in from mailboxes, unsorted.)
GameFly rents game disks by mail. They tried Netflix type-mailers, but the USPS wouldn't hand-sort their returns, so they tended to get broken going through sorting machines. Worse, USPS employees were stealing the games, in large enough quantities that it mattered. GameFly was using bright orange mailers at the time, and on the advice of the US Postal Inspection Service (the Post Office's cops), they went to a heavier mailer that wasn't prominent enough to be stolen and was handled as a "flat", which is tracked better than a first class item.
So now GameFly's disks were getting through, but at 4x the cost of what Netflix is paying. That's what GameFly was mad about.
The settlement is that there will be two stated rates for mailing DVDs - a 1oz rate (weak packaging) and a 2oz rate (heavier packaging), and the 2oz rate will only be 2x the 1oz rate. This cuts GameFly's postage costs roughly in half, but they're still paying twice what NetFlix pays.
Google has a problem with provenance. They can detect that sites A and B have identical or similar text, but have trouble telling who originated the content. Google should at least have reliable techniques to tell who posted it first. Google now scrapes sites so frequently that they should be able to tell from their own timestamps who was first.
Maybe Google should have a "page changed" API that publishing systems could call with a URL, so that after new content goes up, Google gets the first look, before the scrapers find and copy it. Or some kind of signed timestamp scheme.
At the end of the day Zuckerberg was right it is all about exclusivity, it's the same reason people hang out at certain places but when every one shows up at your hangout and you can't kick them out you eventually find a better spot for yourself.
I've made that observation before. Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Myspace, etc. all had their day.
That may have changed, though, with mobile integration. When Helio tied in Myspace and GPS tracking on their phones, I thought that integrating social networking with mobile was going to be the next big thing. It was, but not with Helio. There's more of a lock-in with phone integration. Nobody seems to be threatening Facebook right now.
Normally, cold shutdown takes a few days. At Three Mile Island, it took two weeks. Six months is worrisome. Too many more things can go wrong during that period.
They still have so little information about what's going on inside the reactors. Check the latest JAIF status report. Pressure is unknown. Temperature is unknown. Water level is unknown. "Fuel rods exposed partially or fully". Reactors 1 and 3 are buried under piles of rubble. And they have to fix the plumbing under that debris.
I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event.
Me too. After 9/11, there were robots on scene in under 2 days. The iRobot unit being used here is a standard PackBot, of which about 20,000 have been manufactured for the US military.
The worst aspect of this disaster for the future of nuclear power is that it all came merely from a loss of cooling. The plant survived the earthquake. The reactor's cooling system survived the tsunami and continued to function until the battery backups were drained. Loss of cooling caused heat buildup, hydrogen release, and the hydrogen explosions. All the damage you're seeing is from the hydrogen explosiions, not the natural disaster.
A total loss of cooling power could happen for other reasons - a fire, tornado, hurricane, or act of terrorism. There's been a design assumption that no disaster would result in the loss of all power sources. That turns out to be a bad assumption.
Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.'
I know. It irks me that computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. Each new generation of computer technology produces less significant applications. New CS graduates want to work for Google or Facebook, (or worse, Zynga or Groupon) not iRobot or Autodesk.
Better advertising technology doesn't lead anywhere. Yes, there's progress on classifier systems, but that technology came from robotics. It's inherently a zero-sum game. There are only so many ad dollars out there to chase.
The point of Mars is: it is the only planet in the Solar System we can easy reach and basically terraform for free with our current technology.
Terraform Mars. Yeah, right. Mars barely has an atmosphere, less than 1% of Earth's pressure. It's mostly CO2. Enough to blow sand around, not enough to be useful.
I'm not understanding why you belive (sic) a payment processing gateway should be responsible for anything other than reasonable diligence against outright fraud.
Because Apple is acting as a merchant here, not as an agent of the app developer. Apple, not the app developer, even collects sales tax. See the Uniform Commercial Code, Article 2.
I've been putting my video on blip.tv instead of YouTube. It's strictly a hosting and streaming service - no one will find your video on blip.tv unless it's linked from elsewhere. It streams nicely, though.
EMI is for sale, as of three days ago. They're owned by Citicorp, the bank. A venture capital firm defaulted on their debt, and Citicorp ended up with EMI. Citicorp wants to unload that unwanted asset for cash.
There was talk of Warner buying EMI, but Warner has financing problems of their own. Either Google or Apple could easily pick up EMI right now.
Yes there is, because with an in-app purchase the consumer is saying they wish to give the app writer money in exchange for something.
But they're saying it to Apple. As the complaint points out, the app developer never sees the customer's payment data.
Now, if Apple's system let third parties collect payments directly, there would be a contractual relationship between the end user and the app developer. But Apple doesn't allow that. All the money passes through Apple's hands, and they take a cut. So they get hit with the liability if the transaction is illegal.
From the complaint: "The sale of an App and/or Game Currency is a transaction between Apple and the consumer. There is no privity between the user and the developer of the App...."
They're so right. Remember how Apple won't approve apps which do transactions that don't go through Apple? This is where that bites Apple. Apple is the seller, and the developers are its suppliers. There's no contractual relationship between the consumer and the developer. ("Privity" refers to the legal concept that if A has a contract with B, and B has a contract with C, A does not have a contract with C.)
I was around for the period when Autodesk owned Xanadu, and met all the players. Nelson talked a good game, but didn't have the right idea.
The big problem with Xanadu, in retrospect, is that it was more of a payment system than an information-distribution system. Nelson had attracted a number of "the solution to everything is a market" people, and they'd designed a complex system of multi-way micropayments. Xanadu was set up as a pay per view source-code management system. You paid to read, and if you checked something in, you'd get paid for your contribution if others read it. Many people could edit the same thing and create forks, there was a merging process, and it was all very complicated.
This seemed reasonable at the time. Lexis, Nexis, and Mead Data Central were all successful centralized high-end pay per view document retrieval systems. Xanadu was a fancier version of such systems.
The envisioned pricing was very high. People were talking about documents costing $20 to $100 and upwards. The initial application was seen as a distribution system for financial newsletters. (There's a whole world of expensive financial newsletters that investors buy. For maybe $100 a month you get a few pages of financial advice. Some newsletters are worth it.)
Also, Nelson was very text-focused. Xanadu didn't do images, let alone streaming audio or video. How would you price an edit to an image?
The basic flaw in the Xanadu concept was simply that user attention, not content creation, turned out to be the scarce resource. We thus have a mostly free / ad supported information economy, rather than a pay-per-view one.
"In the near future, it will be possible to take off from Paris at 8 a.m. for a breakfast meeting in Manhattan....
A new approach to supersonic design makes all this possible. It is like nothing that has come before, but may well herald the shape of business travel for decades into the future. It is the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet. Welcome aboard."
There are other systems which do this, though. This looks like an improvement on the LK tracker in OpenCV.
This could be used to handle focus follow in video cameras. Many newer video cameras recognize faces as focus targets, but don't stay locked onto the same face. A better lock-on mechanism would help.
Slashdot Mirror
All the co-sponsors have major NASA operations in their states. Rep. Rob Bishop has repeatedly tried to save ATK Technology in Promontory, UT, the exclusive manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters used in the space shuttle program and the biggest employer in his district.
Apple is selling pretty much every iPhone they can make.
Apple does not make the iPhone. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd's Foxconn subsidiary makes the iPhone. They're adding capacity in Brazil, having outgrown their Shenzhen facility.
A big problem with "3D movies" is Disney "Real3D(tm)", which is Disney Fake3D. The image was delaminated in postprocessing, and reassembled with shifts to simulate depth. That stuff sucks, and it sucks worse if the 3D producer overdoes it. (Ref "Pirahna 3D").
"Avatar" is good 3D. It was really shot and animated in 3D, and Cameron put a lot of effort into getting it right and not overdoing it. At no time in Avatar is something positioned in front of the screen plane. Few other directors are that good.
Even so, film 3D is inherently fake, because of the scaling issue. In the real world, there's no noticeable stereoscopy beyond a few meters of range. Our eyes are too close together. 3D distant shots with wide separation are a cinematic convention, not visual reality.
TV 3D is far worse, It can't be watched casually. If you're off-axis, or lying on your side, the effect is totally wrong. Having to wear glasses or sit in the correct position is too restrictive. I'm curious to see how 3D sports bars work out.
My guess is that after a while, 3D will be scaled back, and it will only be used for content worth showing in Imax.
Google probably shreds them so that they don't get bought by some low-rent operator and show up in "new" machines.
They're low-end drives, incidentally. Google uses cheap parts and redundancy, accepting that hardware will fail regularly. I'm surprised they even bother to test failed drives.
Asimov published who-knows-how-many books, and virtually all of them are (sic) excelent.
Not really. Much of his awful stuff has been forgotten. "Norby, the Mixed-up Robot" (and its sequels, including "Norby and the Lost Princes"), "Young Mutants", "Cosmic Knights", "Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids", "Still More Lecherous Limericks", "The Subatomic Monster " and "Why Does Litter Cause Problems?" are, rightfully, forgotten. Asimov wrote over 300 books, of which maybe 30 are still read. 30 good books is a decent record for an author, but "virtually all are excellent" exaggerates his average quality.
As a final act, will Microsoft release an update to XP systems that just disables it, or turns off key functionality?
Remember when Tivo did that? Remember when Sony did that? Do you have a contractual guarantee that Microsoft won't do that?
Here's the real deal. Mailing a DVD cheaply is hard. There's a huge price differential, about 4x, between the postage for a "flat", such as a DVD in a reasonably sturdy cardboard envelope, and 1 ounce USPS first class letter postage. First class letter postage is only available to mail pieces which meet certain size criteria which allow them to go through automatic sorting machines.
Netflix developed a package which, with DVD inside, weighs under 1 ounce, and sort of meets the criteria for first class letter postage. "Sort of" means that it sometimes jams up or gets broken in the machinery. However, the USPS allowed Netflix to get the first class rate, and then manually pulled most returning Netflix mailers from the mail stream for manual processing. (Returns are the problem - on the outgoing side, Netflix is sending uniform pieces in bulk, pre-sorted, to get the best rate. Returns just come in from mailboxes, unsorted.)
GameFly rents game disks by mail. They tried Netflix type-mailers, but the USPS wouldn't hand-sort their returns, so they tended to get broken going through sorting machines. Worse, USPS employees were stealing the games, in large enough quantities that it mattered. GameFly was using bright orange mailers at the time, and on the advice of the US Postal Inspection Service (the Post Office's cops), they went to a heavier mailer that wasn't prominent enough to be stolen and was handled as a "flat", which is tracked better than a first class item.
So now GameFly's disks were getting through, but at 4x the cost of what Netflix is paying. That's what GameFly was mad about.
The settlement is that there will be two stated rates for mailing DVDs - a 1oz rate (weak packaging) and a 2oz rate (heavier packaging), and the 2oz rate will only be 2x the 1oz rate. This cuts GameFly's postage costs roughly in half, but they're still paying twice what NetFlix pays.
Really.That's a decision Ronald Reagan made in 1982, when he shut down efforts to convert the US to the metric system.
Now, of course, the US has trouble exporting to a world where nobody has Imperial-sized tools or fasteners.
you'll find copied content ahead of mine.
Google has a problem with provenance. They can detect that sites A and B have identical or similar text, but have trouble telling who originated the content. Google should at least have reliable techniques to tell who posted it first. Google now scrapes sites so frequently that they should be able to tell from their own timestamps who was first.
Maybe Google should have a "page changed" API that publishing systems could call with a URL, so that after new content goes up, Google gets the first look, before the scrapers find and copy it. Or some kind of signed timestamp scheme.
Didn't Google have a thing about two years ago where people could photograph storefronts, send them in to Google, and get paid?
They have a "submit your content" thing now, but of course Google doesn't actually pay for the content.
Now that Google, following Blekko's lead, is hammering the well-known "content farm" sites, expect Demand Media to respond by spreading their content across large numbers of junk domains. Demand Media owns eNom, the spammer's registrar.
needs months of "braking" to stop,
Wrong. Normal cold shutdown time for a GE Mark I reactor is less than a day. Some newer BWRs can reach cold shutdown even faster. It's not supposed to take months.
If they'd had 24 hours of battery backup, or one well-located engine generator, this never would have happened.
At the end of the day Zuckerberg was right it is all about exclusivity, it's the same reason people hang out at certain places but when every one shows up at your hangout and you can't kick them out you eventually find a better spot for yourself.
I've made that observation before. Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Myspace, etc. all had their day.
That may have changed, though, with mobile integration. When Helio tied in Myspace and GPS tracking on their phones, I thought that integrating social networking with mobile was going to be the next big thing. It was, but not with Helio. There's more of a lock-in with phone integration. Nobody seems to be threatening Facebook right now.
Normally, cold shutdown takes a few days. At Three Mile Island, it took two weeks. Six months is worrisome. Too many more things can go wrong during that period.
They still have so little information about what's going on inside the reactors. Check the latest JAIF status report. Pressure is unknown. Temperature is unknown. Water level is unknown. "Fuel rods exposed partially or fully". Reactors 1 and 3 are buried under piles of rubble. And they have to fix the plumbing under that debris.
I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event.
Me too. After 9/11, there were robots on scene in under 2 days. The iRobot unit being used here is a standard PackBot, of which about 20,000 have been manufactured for the US military.
The worst aspect of this disaster for the future of nuclear power is that it all came merely from a loss of cooling. The plant survived the earthquake. The reactor's cooling system survived the tsunami and continued to function until the battery backups were drained. Loss of cooling caused heat buildup, hydrogen release, and the hydrogen explosions. All the damage you're seeing is from the hydrogen explosiions, not the natural disaster.
A total loss of cooling power could happen for other reasons - a fire, tornado, hurricane, or act of terrorism. There's been a design assumption that no disaster would result in the loss of all power sources. That turns out to be a bad assumption.
Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.'
I know. It irks me that computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. Each new generation of computer technology produces less significant applications. New CS graduates want to work for Google or Facebook, (or worse, Zynga or Groupon) not iRobot or Autodesk.
Better advertising technology doesn't lead anywhere. Yes, there's progress on classifier systems, but that technology came from robotics. It's inherently a zero-sum game. There are only so many ad dollars out there to chase.
The point of Mars is: it is the only planet in the Solar System we can easy reach and basically terraform for free with our current technology.
Terraform Mars. Yeah, right. Mars barely has an atmosphere, less than 1% of Earth's pressure. It's mostly CO2. Enough to blow sand around, not enough to be useful.
I'm not understanding why you belive (sic) a payment processing gateway should be responsible for anything other than reasonable diligence against outright fraud.
Because Apple is acting as a merchant here, not as an agent of the app developer. Apple, not the app developer, even collects sales tax. See the Uniform Commercial Code, Article 2.
I've been putting my video on blip.tv instead of YouTube. It's strictly a hosting and streaming service - no one will find your video on blip.tv unless it's linked from elsewhere. It streams nicely, though.
EMI is for sale, as of three days ago. They're owned by Citicorp, the bank. A venture capital firm defaulted on their debt, and Citicorp ended up with EMI. Citicorp wants to unload that unwanted asset for cash.
There was talk of Warner buying EMI, but Warner has financing problems of their own. Either Google or Apple could easily pick up EMI right now.
Yes there is, because with an in-app purchase the consumer is saying they wish to give the app writer money in exchange for something.
But they're saying it to Apple. As the complaint points out, the app developer never sees the customer's payment data.
Now, if Apple's system let third parties collect payments directly, there would be a contractual relationship between the end user and the app developer. But Apple doesn't allow that. All the money passes through Apple's hands, and they take a cut. So they get hit with the liability if the transaction is illegal.
From the complaint: "The sale of an App and/or Game Currency is a transaction between Apple and the consumer. There is no privity between the user and the developer of the App...."
They're so right. Remember how Apple won't approve apps which do transactions that don't go through Apple? This is where that bites Apple. Apple is the seller, and the developers are its suppliers. There's no contractual relationship between the consumer and the developer. ("Privity" refers to the legal concept that if A has a contract with B, and B has a contract with C, A does not have a contract with C.)
I was around for the period when Autodesk owned Xanadu, and met all the players. Nelson talked a good game, but didn't have the right idea.
The big problem with Xanadu, in retrospect, is that it was more of a payment system than an information-distribution system. Nelson had attracted a number of "the solution to everything is a market" people, and they'd designed a complex system of multi-way micropayments. Xanadu was set up as a pay per view source-code management system. You paid to read, and if you checked something in, you'd get paid for your contribution if others read it. Many people could edit the same thing and create forks, there was a merging process, and it was all very complicated.
This seemed reasonable at the time. Lexis, Nexis, and Mead Data Central were all successful centralized high-end pay per view document retrieval systems. Xanadu was a fancier version of such systems.
The envisioned pricing was very high. People were talking about documents costing $20 to $100 and upwards. The initial application was seen as a distribution system for financial newsletters. (There's a whole world of expensive financial newsletters that investors buy. For maybe $100 a month you get a few pages of financial advice. Some newsletters are worth it.)
Also, Nelson was very text-focused. Xanadu didn't do images, let alone streaming audio or video. How would you price an edit to an image?
The basic flaw in the Xanadu concept was simply that user attention, not content creation, turned out to be the scarce resource. We thus have a mostly free / ad supported information economy, rather than a pay-per-view one.
"In the near future, it will be possible to take off from Paris at 8 a.m. for a breakfast meeting in Manhattan. ...
A new approach to supersonic design makes all this possible. It is like nothing that has come before, but may well herald the shape of business travel for decades into the future. It is the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet. Welcome aboard."
Soon, only the little people will fly subsonic.
Very nice.
There are other systems which do this, though. This looks like an improvement on the LK tracker in OpenCV.
This could be used to handle focus follow in video cameras. Many newer video cameras recognize faces as focus targets, but don't stay locked onto the same face. A better lock-on mechanism would help.