A real win would be a floor cleaning robot with some smarts. Enough smarts to vacuum carpets, wash and dry hard floors, work around obstacles, use reaching tools to get into corners and crevices, notice when it finds something it can't clean and report it, recover small lost objects,
stay out of the way of humans, recharge itself, clean itself, and replenish its supplies.
That's as it should be. If you're doing something dangerous, you need to take responsibility for it.
When I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team, we took out a really good commercial liability policy. We had hardware stall timers, an electromagnet in the accelerator system that had to be energized to get out of idle, a separate battery and relay system which slammed on the brakes if the stall timer tripped, a backup anti-collision radar system, and a separate emergency stop radio link which had to send a signal once a second to keep the thing going. Unlike some teams, we never hit anything. (There was one team which had their vehicle run away when they filled their disk with log files and their application crashed. Not good.)
cloned animals are known to suffer from compromised immune function and generally short lifespans.
The technology has progressed. Some cloned sheep have already lived beyond the decade mark. As a demo, Campbell recently cranked out four more copies of Dolly, the sheep.
Those were very easily amused ravers. That looks like a rave at the high-school gym level. They didn't even have good lighting, let alone naked girls in cages.
NASA still has 10 "Centers". NASA still has all the "centers" it had in the Apollo era.
With the end of the shuttle program, that needs to come way down. NASA Ames should be trimmed down to just the wind tunnel. The centers in Slidell LA and Cleveland OH should be closed. One of Langley and Dryden should be closed. One of Huntsville and Houston should be closed. And NASA HQ should be downsized to about half its current size.
If someone's looking for information or something else for free, then you need a different criteria.
Right. Recognizing "commercial intent" is tough. SiteTruth's current implementation is simplistic. SiteTruth considers all domains in ".com" to be commercial, and any domain with an ad from any of the major ad services causes a site to be treated as commercial. Put up a blog with no ads in some other TLD, and it's treated as non-commercial.
This is hard on anonymous ad-supported blogs, but at this point, most anonymous ad-supported blogs are spam.
The SiteTruth demo shows what happens if you take a hard-ass attitude towards spam. The major search engines have been too soft on spammers, content farms, spam blogs, ad-heavy pages, and similar junk. The result was a massive increase in web junk. We took a hard line. There's far less spam, and although there's some collateral damage, it appears to be acceptable.
One of the amusing bits of collateral damage can be seen in SiteTruth's rating of Google. Google gets a red "Do Not Enter" sign today. Why? Because they're hosting some phishing sites. Scroll down past Larry Page's SEC filings (when we say "know who you're dealing with", we mean it) to the red "Phony site reported" list. Google Spreadsheets is hosting some phony login pages. Crooks can abuse Google Spreadsheets for phishing purposes, and reporting them to Google doesn't seem to help. So Google is now second from the top in our list of "Major domains being exploited by active phishing scams". We down-rate the whole domain for that. About 25 to 75 domains are on the list on any given day, but only 16 have been on the list for more than 3 months. That's a quantitative indication of an ineffective abuse department.
For about the first half of 2008, Yahoo search was better than Google search.
Yahoo introduced specialized subengines - stocks, weather, movies, celebrities - which were triggered by matching queries. Each subengine had a special case for that class of information. Yahoo had about fifty such subengines.
Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share didn't move. I only knew about this because I went to a talk by the head of Yahoo R&D at the time.
Bing's strategy seems to be mostly to follow Google. Google put Google Places into web search (a big mistake, because Places is so easy to spam), and Bing followed within days.
This week, everybody from Techdirt to CNN is dumping on Google for their spam problem. Even Paul Krugman at the New York Times mentioned it. There's much blog talk of "human powered search" or "curated search" to stop the spam but the failure of Wikia Search, and the lack of interest in ChaCha, Swicki, and Rollyo, indicates that's a dead end. (Mahalo started as human-powered search and ended up as a content farm, which is a hint that "human powered" doesn't equate to "better". No complaints from search users about that, though.)
(Note: I have a position in this; I run SiteTruth. There, we try to find the business behind the web site, and rate that, using data from the SEC, BBB, D&B, and other hard data sources about businesses. This works well at eliminating spam. Too well for some sites; we get complaints about our hard-ass "when in doubt, rate it down" approach.)
That's an interesting claim. Most of the DNA molecules would somehow have to be in sync to get audio-frequency waveforms out.
How's that supposed to happen?
I can't speak for the physics, but the experimental setup seems bogus. See Fig. 1. They have a coil with a test tube inside it. The coil is connected to an audio amplifier and then to the audio input on a laptop, where some frequency analysis takes place.
They claim that a solution of DNA in water emits signals which can be read by that setup.
A setup like that is enormously sensitive to any electric or magnetic fields in the vicinity, mechanical vibration, and even mechanical motion of conductive objects, like fan blades. Like most low-level RF experiments, something like that has to be conducted in a electrically and mechanically quiet area. (RF engineers use either RF-shielded rooms or wooden boxes/sheds in open fields.)
The history of "polywater" is relevant here. There, it was for a while thought that water could somehow polymerize and change properties. It turned out to be a contamination problem. Here, the authors talk about previously unknown "nanostructures" in water.
There's already the
Intel Science Talent Search, which used to be the Westinghouse Science Talent Search back when Westinghouse mattered.
Google's people are working on cool stuff. Sudoku solving for Android. Trying to acquire Groupon. Buying a yacht. Meanwhile, Google search quality is slipping. Google needs to focus.
I don't have Java installed on my Windows 7 machine. I'd removed it during Firefox install, and never needed it. A few functions in OpenOffice don't work; that's about it.
This is one of the requirements of a B2 level system in the old Orange Book model, and you'll see if it as a requirement if you need to provide systems for most countries' military or intelligence organizations. It's rarely used elsewhere because more or less noone else is willing to pay the staffing costs.
Right. I developed an OS for that model many years ago.
The key to this is a mandatory security/integrity model. At a given privilege level, you can only run programs trusted at that privilege level. So, if you're running as some kind of administrator, you can only run trusted administrator tools. You can't use a text editor on the password file, for example.
Then you have compartments, and some tools are accessible only in some compartments. For example, the person or program that makes backups needs the ability to read almost everything, but to write almost nothing. (Restoring from backups, which is done less often, requires different privileges.) The security officer can add and delete users, but can't install programs. All this is enforced by the OS, looking at privileges associated with files, users, and programs, not by the applications themselves. A few applications are trusted, and they have to go through an elaborate approval process, which means they're usually rather dumb apps.
The "control panels" used by hosting services are a step in this direction. Users can do some things, and first-line tech support people can do others.
Currently, the big hole is program installation. Installers typically demand far more privileges than they should. In a mandatory security model, installation of an ordinary "application" should mean that the installer has write permission for the vendor's compartment and nothing else.
Pretty much every commercial is a random dude saying more or less 'buy this' and millions are likely to. All because some random dude told them 'buy this.
Recommendations mean much more when they come from people who actually bought the product. Amazon and eBay have that property, because the recommendation system and the payment system are connected. Yelp, Citysearch, and their imitators do not. If recommendations are made to work, it will be by someone in the payment chain.
If it's to be treated as a medical treatment, it should be moved to Schedule II or III, prescribed by doctors, and distributed through pharmacies. Some people need to be on full-time pain relievers, but not that many. And in real treatment, you try to get people off medication.
So far attempts to build hybrid locomotives have failed because of the massive power requirements involved.
Most locomotives are Diesel-electric (if not entirely electric) so they're already "hybrid". Electric motors have driven locomotives for over a century. Trains running into Grand Central Station in New York use true hybrids, locomotives which can run either electrically from third-rail power or in Diesel-electric mode when they leave the third-rail system.
While you might get Motorola's proposal to work at the edge, the backbone will not have the memory to identify ALL the flows and compare them.
Right. Which is why the Internet backbone is somewhat over-provisioned, to push congestion to the edge. We really don't know what to do about congestion in the middle of general pure datagram networks.
The extent to which that's still the case is a real question. 40% of Internet traffic now comes from the top 10 sites, they all have backbone connections, and they can probably saturate their outgoing paths.
The big players, though, have their own transport networks. They can dedicate a pipe between, say, YouTube and the NYC cable headend, so that the congestion occurs at pipe entry and again at the cable segment, but not in the middle.
It gets 99% of it's mass from the AIR. It's pretty basic.
Actually, trees are about 50% water. The rest is mostly cellulose (C6H10O5). The carbon comes from the air; the hydrogen and some of the oxygen come from water. 6CO2 + 6H2O -> C6H12O6 + 6O2.
This was covered in 7th grade when I was in school.
There's nothing inherently wrong with big in-transit buffers for TCP streams. The real question is not which packets get dropped; it's which packets get sent next. That's what "fair queuing" and some other quality of service algorithms are about. Unfortunately,
most routers are basically FIFO devices with some packet drop algorithm. If the router is FIFO, dumb, and has big buffers, there's trouble.
Back in the 1980s, when I was working on this, I was applying fair queuing at choke points. My basic thinking was that the network should not drop packets for congestion unless a sender is badly behaved and isn't obeying the congestion avoidance rules. This is well-behaved, and will work well when bandwidth is a scarce resource. But for years, the Internet had more bandwidth than was needed, and so people stopped worrying about congestion. Now that everybody is trying to stream high-definition video, it's a big problem again.
The problem used to be that the CPU overhead for fair queuing was too high.
Today we can afford enough transistors in ASICs and FPGAs to do queuing right, even in fast routers. That's already happened.
The big players have already put the necessary hardware into their newer routers.
Cisco supports weighted fair queuing in their current DOCSIS cable routers. So does Motorola. But it has to be set up and configured. Motorola has a very clear management level presentation on the need for fair queuing on their DOCSIS cable routers. That short piece of PowerPoint is a must read for anybody involved in managing a cable Internet system. Read the slides staring with "If RED is not good enough, what is?". A key point for managers: "There are no parameters to set". There are other parts of DOCSIS routers that have way too many tuning knobs. That's not true of fair queuing.
So, if your cable system is showing this problem, they probably have older routers, or misconfigured routers, or routers from some clueless vendor, or need a software upgrade. Cisco only supported this fully in DOCSIS routers starting in 2008. Earlier cable routers tended to be rather dumb. If you're in the industry, pass around that Motorola PowerPoint.
This has nothing to do with "buffer bloat". It's a queuing problem.
Facebook may be maxing out on number of customers. They have 500 million accounts. Tencent's QZone, in China, is slightly larger; Facebook isn't going to take over China.
If they're near max growth, they have to be priced as an ongoing concern, and should have a P/E around 15 to 20. (Microsoft's P/E is around 12, Apple is around 21, Google is around 25.) So if net income is $355 million, market cap should be around $7 billion.
We're discovering that data centers can be run WAY warmer than that with no ill effect, provided you still have good airflow.
Not really. You're using up the lifespan of the semiconductors faster. You need to look at the cumulative effect of temperature on semiconductor electromigration. This is a real issue, because current high-density ICs don't have a big safety margin in this area. There's a straightforward relationship, Black's equation from which this can be computed. Notice that mean time to failure declines exponentially with junction temperature, measured from absolute zero.
Also note that you will get transient failures before you get total failures.
From a security perspective, securing the smart grid is a complex endeavor. When you combined this with a public that is oblivious to the security and privacy issues, it gets worrisome quite fast.
If residential end users have to worry about the security of the power grid, the "smart grid" is a bad idea.
This seems like a gimmick, but I have a fantasy that might actually be feasible - not for me, but for truly rich people. The idea would be to convert old railroad cars into luxury traveling apartments.
That's called "Private varnish". Some people own luxuriously fitted out private railroad cars.
Many of them can be rented, because they're not used much. Amtrak will tow private card around on existing passengers trains for a fee, but you're limited to existing train schedules. It usually takes weeks to set up a car movement, so this is more of a recreational activity than a mode of transportation.
Corporate outings to major sports events are popular.
Renting a private car costs about $1200 to $7500 per day.
Moving a private car costs $2.10 per mile on Amtrak, plus some other fees.
Parking a private railroad car at a major railroad terminal costs $200 to $400 per day.
Slashdot Mirror
A real win would be a floor cleaning robot with some smarts. Enough smarts to vacuum carpets, wash and dry hard floors, work around obstacles, use reaching tools to get into corners and crevices, notice when it finds something it can't clean and report it, recover small lost objects, stay out of the way of humans, recharge itself, clean itself, and replenish its supplies.
Why have robots to move paper around an office? Get rid of the paper.
That's as it should be. If you're doing something dangerous, you need to take responsibility for it.
When I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team, we took out a really good commercial liability policy. We had hardware stall timers, an electromagnet in the accelerator system that had to be energized to get out of idle, a separate battery and relay system which slammed on the brakes if the stall timer tripped, a backup anti-collision radar system, and a separate emergency stop radio link which had to send a signal once a second to keep the thing going. Unlike some teams, we never hit anything. (There was one team which had their vehicle run away when they filled their disk with log files and their application crashed. Not good.)
cloned animals are known to suffer from compromised immune function and generally short lifespans.
The technology has progressed. Some cloned sheep have already lived beyond the decade mark. As a demo, Campbell recently cranked out four more copies of Dolly, the sheep.
Those were very easily amused ravers. That looks like a rave at the high-school gym level. They didn't even have good lighting, let alone naked girls in cages.
NASA still has 10 "Centers". NASA still has all the "centers" it had in the Apollo era. With the end of the shuttle program, that needs to come way down. NASA Ames should be trimmed down to just the wind tunnel. The centers in Slidell LA and Cleveland OH should be closed. One of Langley and Dryden should be closed. One of Huntsville and Houston should be closed. And NASA HQ should be downsized to about half its current size.
This is the point at which you organize a union.
This boss probably has no clue, so his startup probably isn't going to succeed. Most don't. What you make in this phase is all you're going to get.
If someone's looking for information or something else for free, then you need a different criteria.
Right. Recognizing "commercial intent" is tough. SiteTruth's current implementation is simplistic. SiteTruth considers all domains in ".com" to be commercial, and any domain with an ad from any of the major ad services causes a site to be treated as commercial. Put up a blog with no ads in some other TLD, and it's treated as non-commercial. This is hard on anonymous ad-supported blogs, but at this point, most anonymous ad-supported blogs are spam.
The SiteTruth demo shows what happens if you take a hard-ass attitude towards spam. The major search engines have been too soft on spammers, content farms, spam blogs, ad-heavy pages, and similar junk. The result was a massive increase in web junk. We took a hard line. There's far less spam, and although there's some collateral damage, it appears to be acceptable.
One of the amusing bits of collateral damage can be seen in SiteTruth's rating of Google. Google gets a red "Do Not Enter" sign today. Why? Because they're hosting some phishing sites. Scroll down past Larry Page's SEC filings (when we say "know who you're dealing with", we mean it) to the red "Phony site reported" list. Google Spreadsheets is hosting some phony login pages. Crooks can abuse Google Spreadsheets for phishing purposes, and reporting them to Google doesn't seem to help. So Google is now second from the top in our list of "Major domains being exploited by active phishing scams". We down-rate the whole domain for that. About 25 to 75 domains are on the list on any given day, but only 16 have been on the list for more than 3 months. That's a quantitative indication of an ineffective abuse department.
(Oops, the line "No complaints from search users about that, though." was supposed to go in the last paragraph, not the one about Mahalo.)
For about the first half of 2008, Yahoo search was better than Google search.
Yahoo introduced specialized subengines - stocks, weather, movies, celebrities - which were triggered by matching queries. Each subengine had a special case for that class of information. Yahoo had about fifty such subengines.
Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share didn't move. I only knew about this because I went to a talk by the head of Yahoo R&D at the time.
Bing's strategy seems to be mostly to follow Google. Google put Google Places into web search (a big mistake, because Places is so easy to spam), and Bing followed within days.
This week, everybody from Techdirt to CNN is dumping on Google for their spam problem. Even Paul Krugman at the New York Times mentioned it. There's much blog talk of "human powered search" or "curated search" to stop the spam but the failure of Wikia Search, and the lack of interest in ChaCha, Swicki, and Rollyo, indicates that's a dead end. (Mahalo started as human-powered search and ended up as a content farm, which is a hint that "human powered" doesn't equate to "better". No complaints from search users about that, though.)
(Note: I have a position in this; I run SiteTruth. There, we try to find the business behind the web site, and rate that, using data from the SEC, BBB, D&B, and other hard data sources about businesses. This works well at eliminating spam. Too well for some sites; we get complaints about our hard-ass "when in doubt, rate it down" approach.)
Probably already smarter than the average call center employee.
That's an interesting claim. Most of the DNA molecules would somehow have to be in sync to get audio-frequency waveforms out. How's that supposed to happen?
I can't speak for the physics, but the experimental setup seems bogus. See Fig. 1. They have a coil with a test tube inside it. The coil is connected to an audio amplifier and then to the audio input on a laptop, where some frequency analysis takes place. They claim that a solution of DNA in water emits signals which can be read by that setup.
A setup like that is enormously sensitive to any electric or magnetic fields in the vicinity, mechanical vibration, and even mechanical motion of conductive objects, like fan blades. Like most low-level RF experiments, something like that has to be conducted in a electrically and mechanically quiet area. (RF engineers use either RF-shielded rooms or wooden boxes/sheds in open fields.)
The history of "polywater" is relevant here. There, it was for a while thought that water could somehow polymerize and change properties. It turned out to be a contamination problem. Here, the authors talk about previously unknown "nanostructures" in water.
There's already the Intel Science Talent Search, which used to be the Westinghouse Science Talent Search back when Westinghouse mattered.
Google's people are working on cool stuff. Sudoku solving for Android. Trying to acquire Groupon. Buying a yacht. Meanwhile, Google search quality is slipping. Google needs to focus.
I don't have Java installed on my Windows 7 machine. I'd removed it during Firefox install, and never needed it. A few functions in OpenOffice don't work; that's about it.
This is one of the requirements of a B2 level system in the old Orange Book model, and you'll see if it as a requirement if you need to provide systems for most countries' military or intelligence organizations. It's rarely used elsewhere because more or less noone else is willing to pay the staffing costs.
Right. I developed an OS for that model many years ago.
The key to this is a mandatory security/integrity model. At a given privilege level, you can only run programs trusted at that privilege level. So, if you're running as some kind of administrator, you can only run trusted administrator tools. You can't use a text editor on the password file, for example.
Then you have compartments, and some tools are accessible only in some compartments. For example, the person or program that makes backups needs the ability to read almost everything, but to write almost nothing. (Restoring from backups, which is done less often, requires different privileges.) The security officer can add and delete users, but can't install programs. All this is enforced by the OS, looking at privileges associated with files, users, and programs, not by the applications themselves. A few applications are trusted, and they have to go through an elaborate approval process, which means they're usually rather dumb apps.
The "control panels" used by hosting services are a step in this direction. Users can do some things, and first-line tech support people can do others.
Currently, the big hole is program installation. Installers typically demand far more privileges than they should. In a mandatory security model, installation of an ordinary "application" should mean that the installer has write permission for the vendor's compartment and nothing else.
Pretty much every commercial is a random dude saying more or less 'buy this' and millions are likely to. All because some random dude told them 'buy this.
Recommendations mean much more when they come from people who actually bought the product. Amazon and eBay have that property, because the recommendation system and the payment system are connected. Yelp, Citysearch, and their imitators do not. If recommendations are made to work, it will be by someone in the payment chain.
"Medical marijuana" is just a scam. 60 "grow facilities" in Boulder, Colorado? Four times as many "dispensaries" in San Jose as 7-11s?.
If it's to be treated as a medical treatment, it should be moved to Schedule II or III, prescribed by doctors, and distributed through pharmacies. Some people need to be on full-time pain relievers, but not that many. And in real treatment, you try to get people off medication.
So far attempts to build hybrid locomotives have failed because of the massive power requirements involved.
Most locomotives are Diesel-electric (if not entirely electric) so they're already "hybrid". Electric motors have driven locomotives for over a century. Trains running into Grand Central Station in New York use true hybrids, locomotives which can run either electrically from third-rail power or in Diesel-electric mode when they leave the third-rail system.
While you might get Motorola's proposal to work at the edge, the backbone will not have the memory to identify ALL the flows and compare them.
Right. Which is why the Internet backbone is somewhat over-provisioned, to push congestion to the edge. We really don't know what to do about congestion in the middle of general pure datagram networks.
The extent to which that's still the case is a real question. 40% of Internet traffic now comes from the top 10 sites, they all have backbone connections, and they can probably saturate their outgoing paths. The big players, though, have their own transport networks. They can dedicate a pipe between, say, YouTube and the NYC cable headend, so that the congestion occurs at pipe entry and again at the cable segment, but not in the middle.
It gets 99% of it's mass from the AIR. It's pretty basic.
Actually, trees are about 50% water. The rest is mostly cellulose (C6H10O5). The carbon comes from the air; the hydrogen and some of the oxygen come from water. 6CO2 + 6H2O -> C6H12O6 + 6O2.
This was covered in 7th grade when I was in school.
There's nothing inherently wrong with big in-transit buffers for TCP streams. The real question is not which packets get dropped; it's which packets get sent next. That's what "fair queuing" and some other quality of service algorithms are about. Unfortunately, most routers are basically FIFO devices with some packet drop algorithm. If the router is FIFO, dumb, and has big buffers, there's trouble.
Back in the 1980s, when I was working on this, I was applying fair queuing at choke points. My basic thinking was that the network should not drop packets for congestion unless a sender is badly behaved and isn't obeying the congestion avoidance rules. This is well-behaved, and will work well when bandwidth is a scarce resource. But for years, the Internet had more bandwidth than was needed, and so people stopped worrying about congestion. Now that everybody is trying to stream high-definition video, it's a big problem again.
The problem used to be that the CPU overhead for fair queuing was too high. Today we can afford enough transistors in ASICs and FPGAs to do queuing right, even in fast routers. That's already happened. The big players have already put the necessary hardware into their newer routers. Cisco supports weighted fair queuing in their current DOCSIS cable routers. So does Motorola. But it has to be set up and configured. Motorola has a very clear management level presentation on the need for fair queuing on their DOCSIS cable routers. That short piece of PowerPoint is a must read for anybody involved in managing a cable Internet system. Read the slides staring with "If RED is not good enough, what is?". A key point for managers: "There are no parameters to set". There are other parts of DOCSIS routers that have way too many tuning knobs. That's not true of fair queuing.
So, if your cable system is showing this problem, they probably have older routers, or misconfigured routers, or routers from some clueless vendor, or need a software upgrade. Cisco only supported this fully in DOCSIS routers starting in 2008. Earlier cable routers tended to be rather dumb. If you're in the industry, pass around that Motorola PowerPoint.
This has nothing to do with "buffer bloat". It's a queuing problem.
Facebook may be maxing out on number of customers. They have 500 million accounts. Tencent's QZone, in China, is slightly larger; Facebook isn't going to take over China.
If they're near max growth, they have to be priced as an ongoing concern, and should have a P/E around 15 to 20. (Microsoft's P/E is around 12, Apple is around 21, Google is around 25.) So if net income is $355 million, market cap should be around $7 billion.
$50 billion, no way.
We're discovering that data centers can be run WAY warmer than that with no ill effect, provided you still have good airflow.
Not really. You're using up the lifespan of the semiconductors faster. You need to look at the cumulative effect of temperature on semiconductor electromigration. This is a real issue, because current high-density ICs don't have a big safety margin in this area. There's a straightforward relationship, Black's equation from which this can be computed. Notice that mean time to failure declines exponentially with junction temperature, measured from absolute zero.
Also note that you will get transient failures before you get total failures.
From a security perspective, securing the smart grid is a complex endeavor. When you combined this with a public that is oblivious to the security and privacy issues, it gets worrisome quite fast.
If residential end users have to worry about the security of the power grid, the "smart grid" is a bad idea.
This seems like a gimmick, but I have a fantasy that might actually be feasible - not for me, but for truly rich people. The idea would be to convert old railroad cars into luxury traveling apartments.
That's called "Private varnish". Some people own luxuriously fitted out private railroad cars. Many of them can be rented, because they're not used much. Amtrak will tow private card around on existing passengers trains for a fee, but you're limited to existing train schedules. It usually takes weeks to set up a car movement, so this is more of a recreational activity than a mode of transportation. Corporate outings to major sports events are popular.
Renting a private car costs about $1200 to $7500 per day. Moving a private car costs $2.10 per mile on Amtrak, plus some other fees. Parking a private railroad car at a major railroad terminal costs $200 to $400 per day.