Web browsers are still around, but they're used only to look at junk sites. All commercial content is locked into "applications" for phones, tablets, and TVs. The content provider has complete control - the user can't skip ads, can't prevent the content owner from knowing what they're looking at, and can't save the content.
Bots run by the MPAA, the RIAA, News Corp., Apple, and Google constantly troll the remnants of the free web, searching for commercial content and sending out goon squads to take it down.
Bolting a GUI on top of something that generates UNIX commands is usually disappointing, for the usual reason - the output from UNIX commands is semi-random error messages.
The EeePC's Linux environment suffered badly from this. There's a pretty GUI for setting up networking, but if anything goes wrong, you have to look at an incredible mess of command line commands being driven by the GUI program. Many of the commands return errors in normal operation.
I still think that one of the basic design errors of UNIX was that programs return only an integer status code. You get to send command line parameters and environment variables in a reasonably structured way, but you get back just one integer. If commands had returned environment variables, and there had been reasonable standards for what came back from the earliest days, the whole concept of "scripting" might have worked quite differently. Programs would be viewed more like subroutines.
It's good to see the Department of Labor putting some teeth into labor law again. During the Bush years, too many regulatory agencies were out to lunch. The SEC, of course, we know about. Less well known was the attitude at the Labor Department. Now they're catching crooks again.
Also, Obama just made two recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB was down to two members, and couldn't do anything. Now the NLRB is back in business. It's going to be easier to unionize.
US wage and hour law, as enacted by Congress decades ago, is quite pro-labor. It's the enforcement that's been weak. Looks like that's changing.
Forcing the e-brochure-like HTML-based browsers to act like desktop/CRUD GUI's is like trying to roll Pluto up Mt. Everest: people have kept trying to pull it off with AJAX and whatnot for more than a decade, but it's still kludgy, bloated, buggy, security-challenged, and version-sensitive. It's time to throw in the towel and start a new tool and markup language.
Many print newspapers carry "legal notices", of D/B/A names, incorporations, and such. As non-searchable information, that's almost useless. But it's a big profit center for many newspapers, which are fighting to keep it.(Google cache of Michigan Press Association, whose web site is down)
On the other hand, if governments don't require that information to be published, they should maintain the database (which they will have anyway for internal purposes) and offer free access. D/B/A names in the United States are handled at the county level, and that data can be hard to obtain on line. There are commercial services that collect it, expensively. Considering that the amount of data is small by modern standards (all the data for the US will fit on a DVD), it's not a high-cost item.
Too much bloat and churn. The Linux kernel should have settled down by now. After using QNX (80% of the functionality of the Linux kernel with 1% of the code size), I see the Linux kernel as just being too big. One of the side effects of open source development is that you get a slightly different driver for every device, instead of generic drivers. Why? Because no one Linux developer has, for example, every device in a category. Windows has WHQL and hardware standards. Apple has a limited set of supported devices. Android is struggling with "write once, debug everywhere".
All the action is on mobile devices, and Linux on a mobile device is like pounding a screw.
The Linux GUI is still ugly. There's still a "non-graphical mindset" in the Linux community. This is totally alien to anybody under 30 (40? 50?)
Linux failed on the desktop. (There was a real opportunity when Windows XP was late.) Linux failed in netbooks. (Remember Linux netbooks? Try to buy one now.) Only on servers is it a real success. And who wants to work on server architecture? It's like becoming a plumber. (What with the renewed interest in data center water cooling, it is becoming a plumber.)
There are still a few transatlantic liners.
If you're stuck in Europe, the Queen Mary 2 sails from Southampton to New York in four days. There's already a waiting list, but it's quite possible that some people planning to take the trip as a cruise can't get to Southampton, and space may open up.
Some Spanish airports are now open again. Madrid is open The ash cloud has moved north. But the volcano is still erupting, ejecting ash to a height of 4Km. The northwestern part of Europe is going to be grounded for a while.
I'm impressed that their phone can focus that close. The original iPhone has a minimum focusing distance of about 1 meter. Later autofocus versions get down to 10cm. Does the Kim camera have autofocus? They don't mention it.
The Kim site says "pictures are simulated". Right.
Why is Amazon allowing outgoing SIP connections? That's just asking for trouble. Amazon probably shouldn't allow instances to open outgoing connections to external IP addresses (outside Amazon's "cloud") at all unless the customer signs up for that service. Most don't need it, and the ones that do need to be monitored more closely.
No problem, just cost and fuel economy.
on
At Last, Flying Cars?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There's no fundamental problem in building a modest-size VTOL craft. Many have been built. The fuel consumption and cost will be high, but for the military, that's OK.
The big problem back in the 1950s was stability. Now that unstable aircraft are routinely computer-stabilized, that's far less of a problem. It's going to need a jet engine. Piston engines don't have the power to weight ratio needed. That's what runs up the cost. A basic problem with jet engines is that they don't get much cheaper below small bizjet size. That's why general aviation is still piston-powered, despite Williams, etc.
It's not going to be a pure-thrust VTOL, like the Harrier. That takes so much engine power that it's only feasible for fighters, which are mostly engine anyway. Ducted fans, maybe. Successful ducted-fan aircraft have been built, and with modern stabilization, there are several robotic ducted-fan craft. With better stablization, the fans can be pulled in closer to the body, making for a much more compact craft.
There's a new Israeli ducted-fan craft, the AirMule, which is currently in early flight test and can hover tethered.
A big problem with single-engine VTOL aircraft is that they fall like a rock if they lose engine power. Aircraft can glide and helicopters can autorotate, but VTOLs can do neither. Ejection seats are indicated.
It's painfully simple. Industrial civilizations run out of resources in only a few hundred years.
Industrial civilization on this planet is only about 200 years old. Until the industrial revolution, humans couldn't really make a serious dent in the earth's resources. Now, most of the easy to extract resources have been extracted. Almost everything runs out in the next 200 years. Some things run out much sooner.
Recycling helps, but each time around the cycle, you lose some.
There hasn't been a new energy source in 50 years. Nuclear power was working 50 years ago, and since then, nothing better has come along.
Science itself is not a renewable resource; most of the easy discoveries have been made. The resources required for a new discovery keep increasing. This is why companies no longer have pure science R&D departments. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that was profitable.
About fifty years ago, the advanced countries finally were able to make enough stuff for everybody. That was new; it had never been achieved before in all of history. People living today will see the end of that. There will be wars over the remaining scraps. Nobody will win.
Space travel won't help. Within the solar system, the real estate off Earth is worse than the worst real estate on Earth. Interstellar travel is hopeless.
The last 25 years were the high water mark of industrial civilization. From here on, it's all downhill.
I've seen this before, and with less clunky head trackers.
The tracker update rate has to be really fast, and the lag very low, or the effect breaks down. The fact that it's not stereoscopic, though, doesn't matter for distant scenes, like the Golden Gate Bridge shown. For the "aquarium", though, that will be a problem.
Clearly this guy has no clue. Developers have been downloading the iPad simulator for months. There's a debugger. If it were a PowerPC machine, someone would have noticed. You can build executables that run on both the iPhone and the iPad. The iPad is a big iPhone.
I looked in on the Apple store in Palo Alto today, and it wasn't that busy. They had plenty of iPads on display. I think everybody who wanted one early already has one.
The first spyware for the iPad has already been deployed: "Our engineering team has devised a workaround to Safari on the iPad's rejection of any and all 3rd-party cookies."
Given that almost everything in the technology industry came directly or indirectly as a result of NASA and the space program, it's value is obvious. Most of us who read Slashdot owe the effort that went into the Apollo program for our jobs. The microprocessor, for example, was invented by Intel FOR the space program.
That's NASA FUD. Microprocessors were not invented for the space program. Apollo and the Shuttle both predate Intel, and both had non-integrated CPUs. Microprocessors were invented to make it cheaper to build desktop calculators. The USAF had a major role in developing lightweight and reliable electronics, computers and missile guidance, but that's not NASA.
The space program did not create Teflon. Or Velcro. Or even Tang.
NASA's biggest contribution to commercial technology was probably NASTRAN, the finite element analysis program.
It's not a silly idea. Russia is positioning itself as an "energy power", and energy projects need heavy industrial infrastructure. The USSR was good at that.
Fusion would be a good goal. Or thorium reactors. That's a problem that may yield to organized, determined effort and money. The USSR still has a big nuclear program, and resources to draw upon.
It turns out that switching between address spaces is relatively expensive, and so to save on switching address spaces, the kernel is actually mapped into every process's address space, and the kernel just runs in the address space of whichever process was last executing.
So a CPU design bug propagated its way into OS architecture, leading to a security hole.
Intel never really got the crossing of privilege domains right. Context switching is too slow, call gates aren't very useful, and the segmented memory architecture in the 32-bit machines never really caught on. Yet domain-crossing is one of the most likely places for security holes.
You can't copyright a "useful article". That's the domain of design patents.
It's hard to get an enforceable design patent on apparel. Someone will go into the fashion library (a giant closet of famous garments) at the Fashion Institute of Technology and demonstrate that Coco Chanel did the same thing in 1931. Fashion is cyclical, not original. This is what resulted in the emphasis on exclusive "logos".
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the worst case.
Web browsers are still around, but they're used only to look at junk sites. All commercial content is locked into "applications" for phones, tablets, and TVs. The content provider has complete control - the user can't skip ads, can't prevent the content owner from knowing what they're looking at, and can't save the content.
Bots run by the MPAA, the RIAA, News Corp., Apple, and Google constantly troll the remnants of the free web, searching for commercial content and sending out goon squads to take it down.
Bolting a GUI on top of something that generates UNIX commands is usually disappointing, for the usual reason - the output from UNIX commands is semi-random error messages.
The EeePC's Linux environment suffered badly from this. There's a pretty GUI for setting up networking, but if anything goes wrong, you have to look at an incredible mess of command line commands being driven by the GUI program. Many of the commands return errors in normal operation.
I still think that one of the basic design errors of UNIX was that programs return only an integer status code. You get to send command line parameters and environment variables in a reasonably structured way, but you get back just one integer. If commands had returned environment variables, and there had been reasonable standards for what came back from the earliest days, the whole concept of "scripting" might have worked quite differently. Programs would be viewed more like subroutines.
Anyone else getting an Intellectual Property vibe from this?
That comes under the "Scènes à faire" doctrine.
It's good to see the Department of Labor putting some teeth into labor law again. During the Bush years, too many regulatory agencies were out to lunch. The SEC, of course, we know about. Less well known was the attitude at the Labor Department. Now they're catching crooks again.
Also, Obama just made two recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB was down to two members, and couldn't do anything. Now the NLRB is back in business. It's going to be easier to unionize.
US wage and hour law, as enacted by Congress decades ago, is quite pro-labor. It's the enforcement that's been weak. Looks like that's changing.
Forcing the e-brochure-like HTML-based browsers to act like desktop/CRUD GUI's is like trying to roll Pluto up Mt. Everest: people have kept trying to pull it off with AJAX and whatnot for more than a decade, but it's still kludgy, bloated, buggy, security-challenged, and version-sensitive. It's time to throw in the towel and start a new tool and markup language.
Right. Java applets!
Many print newspapers carry "legal notices", of D/B/A names, incorporations, and such. As non-searchable information, that's almost useless. But it's a big profit center for many newspapers, which are fighting to keep it.(Google cache of Michigan Press Association, whose web site is down)
On the other hand, if governments don't require that information to be published, they should maintain the database (which they will have anyway for internal purposes) and offer free access. D/B/A names in the United States are handled at the county level, and that data can be hard to obtain on line. There are commercial services that collect it, expensively. Considering that the amount of data is small by modern standards (all the data for the US will fit on a DVD), it's not a high-cost item.
There are still a few transatlantic liners. If you're stuck in Europe, the Queen Mary 2 sails from Southampton to New York in four days. There's already a waiting list, but it's quite possible that some people planning to take the trip as a cruise can't get to Southampton, and space may open up.
Some Spanish airports are now open again. Madrid is open The ash cloud has moved north. But the volcano is still erupting, ejecting ash to a height of 4Km. The northwestern part of Europe is going to be grounded for a while.
I'm impressed that their phone can focus that close. The original iPhone has a minimum focusing distance of about 1 meter. Later autofocus versions get down to 10cm. Does the Kim camera have autofocus? They don't mention it.
The Kim site says "pictures are simulated". Right.
Why is Amazon allowing outgoing SIP connections? That's just asking for trouble. Amazon probably shouldn't allow instances to open outgoing connections to external IP addresses (outside Amazon's "cloud") at all unless the customer signs up for that service. Most don't need it, and the ones that do need to be monitored more closely.
There's no fundamental problem in building a modest-size VTOL craft. Many have been built. The fuel consumption and cost will be high, but for the military, that's OK.
The big problem back in the 1950s was stability. Now that unstable aircraft are routinely computer-stabilized, that's far less of a problem. It's going to need a jet engine. Piston engines don't have the power to weight ratio needed. That's what runs up the cost. A basic problem with jet engines is that they don't get much cheaper below small bizjet size. That's why general aviation is still piston-powered, despite Williams, etc.
It's not going to be a pure-thrust VTOL, like the Harrier. That takes so much engine power that it's only feasible for fighters, which are mostly engine anyway. Ducted fans, maybe. Successful ducted-fan aircraft have been built, and with modern stabilization, there are several robotic ducted-fan craft. With better stablization, the fans can be pulled in closer to the body, making for a much more compact craft.
There's a new Israeli ducted-fan craft, the AirMule, which is currently in early flight test and can hover tethered.
A big problem with single-engine VTOL aircraft is that they fall like a rock if they lose engine power. Aircraft can glide and helicopters can autorotate, but VTOLs can do neither. Ejection seats are indicated.
It's painfully simple. Industrial civilizations run out of resources in only a few hundred years.
Industrial civilization on this planet is only about 200 years old. Until the industrial revolution, humans couldn't really make a serious dent in the earth's resources. Now, most of the easy to extract resources have been extracted. Almost everything runs out in the next 200 years. Some things run out much sooner.
Recycling helps, but each time around the cycle, you lose some. There hasn't been a new energy source in 50 years. Nuclear power was working 50 years ago, and since then, nothing better has come along. Science itself is not a renewable resource; most of the easy discoveries have been made. The resources required for a new discovery keep increasing. This is why companies no longer have pure science R&D departments. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that was profitable.
About fifty years ago, the advanced countries finally were able to make enough stuff for everybody. That was new; it had never been achieved before in all of history. People living today will see the end of that. There will be wars over the remaining scraps. Nobody will win.
Space travel won't help. Within the solar system, the real estate off Earth is worse than the worst real estate on Earth. Interstellar travel is hopeless.
The last 25 years were the high water mark of industrial civilization. From here on, it's all downhill.
Read iCon the bio of Jobs that Jobs hated so much that he banned all Wiley books from Apple stores.
iCon is available for the Kindle. Some Kindle books are available for the iPad. "iCon" does not appear to be one of them.
I've seen this before, and with less clunky head trackers.
The tracker update rate has to be really fast, and the lag very low, or the effect breaks down. The fact that it's not stereoscopic, though, doesn't matter for distant scenes, like the Golden Gate Bridge shown. For the "aquarium", though, that will be a problem.
Clearly this guy has no clue. Developers have been downloading the iPad simulator for months. There's a debugger. If it were a PowerPC machine, someone would have noticed. You can build executables that run on both the iPhone and the iPad. The iPad is a big iPhone.
I looked in on the Apple store in Palo Alto today, and it wasn't that busy. They had plenty of iPads on display. I think everybody who wanted one early already has one.
The first spyware for the iPad has already been deployed: "Our engineering team has devised a workaround to Safari on the iPad's rejection of any and all 3rd-party cookies."
Given that almost everything in the technology industry came directly or indirectly as a result of NASA and the space program, it's value is obvious. Most of us who read Slashdot owe the effort that went into the Apollo program for our jobs. The microprocessor, for example, was invented by Intel FOR the space program.
That's NASA FUD. Microprocessors were not invented for the space program. Apollo and the Shuttle both predate Intel, and both had non-integrated CPUs. Microprocessors were invented to make it cheaper to build desktop calculators. The USAF had a major role in developing lightweight and reliable electronics, computers and missile guidance, but that's not NASA.
The space program did not create Teflon. Or Velcro. Or even Tang.
NASA's biggest contribution to commercial technology was probably NASTRAN, the finite element analysis program.
It's not a silly idea. Russia is positioning itself as an "energy power", and energy projects need heavy industrial infrastructure. The USSR was good at that.
Fusion would be a good goal. Or thorium reactors. That's a problem that may yield to organized, determined effort and money. The USSR still has a big nuclear program, and resources to draw upon.
it's about changing address spaces, which is a costly operation in any architecture.
Not necessarily. On some of the SPARC machines, it's relatively cheap, because there's a separate set of registers for each protection level.
It turns out that switching between address spaces is relatively expensive, and so to save on switching address spaces, the kernel is actually mapped into every process's address space, and the kernel just runs in the address space of whichever process was last executing.
So a CPU design bug propagated its way into OS architecture, leading to a security hole.
Intel never really got the crossing of privilege domains right. Context switching is too slow, call gates aren't very useful, and the segmented memory architecture in the 32-bit machines never really caught on. Yet domain-crossing is one of the most likely places for security holes.
It's sort of like a Blackberry for young people. Or the Hasbro/Tiger Clueless Organizer, version 2.0.
It's about time for the toy companies to move into the phone space.
Er no, designs are copyrighted.
You can't copyright a "useful article". That's the domain of design patents.
It's hard to get an enforceable design patent on apparel. Someone will go into the fashion library (a giant closet of famous garments) at the Fashion Institute of Technology and demonstrate that Coco Chanel did the same thing in 1931. Fashion is cyclical, not original. This is what resulted in the emphasis on exclusive "logos".
That's currently true, but the fashion industry has been trying to get Congress to create a kind of copyright on fashion designs.
They've been trying that since 1976. And the auto industry has been trying to get copyrights on sheet metal parts. So far, neither has succeeded.
Read the actual report. The big "piracy" problem is fake copies of shoes and handbags. That isn't even a copyright issue; that's a trademark issue.
You can legally copy garments; the only legal protection is for logos. So it's not even about the design.