I've been using Sumatra PDF for the last year. It's rather clunky and uses too much memory on long documents, but it's adequate for most viewing.
Its renderer is rather slow, though. And when you zoom, it renders the document first zoomed in X, then, seconds later, in Y as well. That's just stupid.
The nature of programming has changed. When 40+ year olds were going to college or studying, OOP was in its infancy, and even functional programming was more about clever algorithms on limited hardware, where optimization mattered, rather than programming interfaces and patching together APIs with a zillion features, connecting with some database somewhere else, etc.
Yes. It's been a long time since I needed to look in Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms" for an algorithm. All the standard algorithms have been coded now, and you can find an implementation easily. Because of this, the underlying math a programmer needs has changed. Statistics and number-crunching are more important; logic and combinatorics are less important.
Does Google not want Microsoft to scoop them on their new blacksploitation search engine?
Ask's parent, IAC, tried that. It was called "RushmoreDrive.com". The search results returned were Ask results interspersed with marginally relevant black-related results. The home page took at least 7 seconds to load, every time, being heavily loaded with both ads and video. The business lasted less than a year.
Interesting concept, but like most IAC online businesses, badly executed.
This is encouraging, because there's plenty of cellulose available as agricultural waste. Corncobs, corn husks, straw, bagasse (sugar cane after sugar extraction), and similar trash are all mostly cellulose.
There's more trouble on the supply side than on the consumption side.
The problem with news is that the pundit/reporter ratio has swung way too far in the pundit direction. There are too few people out digging up info, and too many people analyzing it. "News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity." With so much incoming free information, willingness to pay people to go out and dig up real news has declined substantially.
It takes minutes to rewrite a paragraph from a press release. It takes days of work to get the information for a real story.
Look at the front page of Google News. How many of those stories started as a press release? Most of them. Sometimes, all of them.
In the heyday of newspapers (say, 1880 to 1950), the printing process was far more labor-intensive. As a result, reporters were a small fraction of the payroll, and keeping head count down on the reporting side wasn't top priority. Most newspapers had reporting, editing, composing, and printing all in the same building or adjacent buildings. The big part of the business was printing and distribution.
Today, printing plants are remote, have few people, and may be outsourced. Composing is automated. Editorial is mostly automated; text goes from reporter to printed page without much editing. So reporting is the big labor cost. And it's so easy to just tap into some feed and pump it out to the printing plant.
Blogging isn't helping. It's mostly punditry and self-publicity.
That's where information overload is hurting. Information wants to be free, but free information is self-serving.
I get very little junk mail and very few promotional calls. This despite living in a good neighborhood in Silicon Valley.
It may be because I don't have any debt. The big source of personal data is credit-reporting agencies, and since I have nothing but a bank credit card, they don't know much about me. I've obtained a copy of my credit report; they see my bank credit card and my cash bank account only. They have no info about brokerage accounts and mutual funds.
I use a local ISP, Sonic, for DSL. They don't seem to give out any info about their customers. I don't have TV cable.
I don't have any "affinity cards", other then a Costco membership. I belong to a few organizations, none of which
seem to send junk mail. I have AdBlock and FlashBlock installed in Firefox.
But I make no attempt to hide. My phone number is listed (and on the Do Not Call list). I'm registered to vote. My web sites have valid, non-anonymous WHOIS information. Yet I get almost no targeted advertising.
So I think that much of the targeted information is coming via credit-reporting agencies.
Spend less than you earn, and life will be good to you.
Actually, most bugs that survive initial testing are not shallow. If they were, they'd have been caught early.
A key point of the article is that almost nobody in the open source world is really looking hard at old code. An experiment was run to encourage code review, but nobody really wants to do that. This is related to the phenomenon that many open source projects stall out at version 0.x. The basic functionality is in, the fun part has been done, and the boring grind of making the last bits work isn't getting done.
Some bugs are so deep the open source process can't fix them. Search Google for "prune_one_dentry oops". The Linux kernel is known to crash when all free memory has been taken over as file cache, a process needs memory, and due to some lock being set, file cache space can't be released. Bugs of this type have been reported steadily since 2004, and it's still not fixed. It will probably take a redesign of some fragile code to fix that, and nobody wants to take that on.
Peter Lynch, of Fidelity Investments, once wrote that he usually regarded a company name change as a sell signal. If the brand has value, why change the name? If the brand doesn't have value, why own the stock?
Suspicious name change of the month: ENVIRONMENTAL CREDITS, LTD. (FORMERLY BOYSTOYS.COM, INC.) "Prior to September 12, 2002 and through its wholly-owned subsidiary, RMA of San Francisco, Inc., a California corporation ("RMA"), we owned and operated an upscale gentlemen's club in San Francisco, California (the "Club") under the name, "Boys Toys Club.... While our stockholders on March 7, 2008 approved the change in our name to "Environmental Credits, Ltd.," the exact form and nature of any business that we may pursue has not been determined. Our plans are in the conceptual stage only and we may or may not pursue any specific investments or business activity."
I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google.
Interesting. One big complaint about Google's mapping is that the street number data is usually a linear interpolation of the number range for the block. There are better data sources available for some areas. USC has an experimental geocoder which uses parcel map data; when you put in an address, you get the centroid of the parcel from land ownership records. They have full coverage for Los Angeles, and are adding other areas.
(Incidentally, how is geocoding for Japan coming along? Japan tends to assign house numbers as serial numbers, not by position, so interpolation won't work. Somebody must have collected that data for at least Tokyo and Osaka by now.)
I'd known that the whole XBox operation was struggling to break even, but I hadn't looked at the numbers for the online sector in a few years. They're losing big in that area.
Note that the Windows Division includes "Windows Live", which includes Hotmail and Messenger. "Online services" is the ad-supported part of the operation, including Bing and MSN portals, plus Microsoft's dying dial-up service, Microsoft Access.
Ad revenue is way down for Q4 2009: "Online advertising revenue decreased $32 million or 3%, to $934 million, primarily reflecting a decrease in display advertising and advertiser and publisher tools revenue."
The robot arm is straightforward. It looks like it's built out of Dynamixel servos, which are good little programmable servomotors used for the better end of hobbyist robotics. (After 25 years, finally something better than one-way pulse code modulation for hobby servo control. These things use a 1mb/s bidirectional multidrop serial bus.) There are standard brackets for making robot arms and legs, and it looks like they just bolted the thing together from the stock parts kit.
It's not clear how much the software knows about faces. That's the important part. Considerable work has been done on facial feature detection. There are commercialproducts available. Most of them ignore hairstyle, though, since they're aimed at face recognition.
Going back to the moon on chemical rockets was a stupid idea. If we had a better technology that allowed, say, a permanent base with a hundred people, it might be worth doing. But just repeating Apollo is pointless.
Worse, it would probably fail. Apollo had top people, including many experienced aircraft engineers who'd designed many successful aircraft, and, of course, the best German rocket engineers. That pool of people is gone. As Ben Rich, once head of Lockheed's "Skunk Works" (SR-71, stealth aircraft, etc.), wrote, "I worked on 22 airplanes in my career. Today's engineer is lucky to work on one."
Bear in mind that Google runs Gmail so they can read your emails automatically and profile you. That's why Gmail is offered for free.
Think about that. Google has profiling data on Ivy League students, many of whom will grow up to be business leaders and political figures. (Ford, Clinton and both Bushes went to Yale.) That data will be politically valuable in the future.
Google has the information to figure out a GMail user's social network. They can tell who responds to whom, and how fast, which allows figuring out the social hierarchy. Google can easily detect discussions of criminal activity and drugs. They have real name data, so they can correlate mail accounts with other information, like criminal records. So they're acquiring the data that will tell them where pressure should be applied to coerce people.
For most people, that data is barely worth collecting. But for Yale students, it's golden.
Finally, I took all the flowcharts and spread them out on the main computer room floor, a-la A Beautiful Mind, and go crawling around on them with a big fat red marker.
Many years ago, I actually had to do that with a painful piece of FORTRAN. I took over a conference room with a very long table for the job. Got it all straightened out in about two days once I could see it all at once.
Haven't coded a GOTO since the end of the FORTRAN era.
First, bypassing the "story" and a layer of blogs, is the actual report.
What's really happened in Silicon Valley is that it's been hollowed out. Silicon Valley used to be a major manufacturing center. San Jose once had the highest percentage of manufacturing employees of the major US cities, something like 54%. Today, the assembly plants are gone. Most of the fabs are gone. Much of the engineering is gone. This is what happens when you "outsource". Eventually, everything moves to where the production is, including management and finance.
Part of the problem was the "dot com boom", with its fake companies and fake prosperity. That caused a major change in the culture, away from engineering and towards marketing. When the bottom fell out of the dot-com boom, most of the marketing types left. The number of twentysomethings in San Francisco dropped by half. (A friend in the club business says "and the other half are working their butts off and don't go out much.") The big name in Silicon Valley now is not HP or Intel or IBM or National Semiconductor or Fairchild. It's Google, which is an ad agency. That's a huge change in emphasis.
The innovation culture is declining. Portola Valley (a rich suburb) used to have the highest percentage of patent holders of any US community. That's dropped. There's not that much exciting innovation going on. I go to venture capital meetings, and the ideas being presented are just not very exciting. (I've heard a pitch for a social network for cats. And that
made it through two rounds of filtering before I heard it.)
People are still struggling to get semiconductor line widths down, solar fab costs down, and such. But that's a grind. Mobile devices are not a fun area in which to work - the weight budget, the cost budget, the power budget, and the time budget are all very tight. The manufacturing is in Asia, anyway, and the engineering is going there. New areas aren't
appearing.
There's noise about "green tech", but realistically, "green tech" is either vaporware, like the "smart grid", silly, like small windmills, or something that requires massive manufacturing, like big windmills. Five years ago, the noise was about "biotech", which doesn't employ
many people.
Fewer young people in the US are going into engineering, and that's a rational decision. It's hard, it's expensive to study, your job may be outsourced, and it's now a low-status field. In 1970, lawyers and electrical engineers made about the same amount of money. That was a long time ago. On the other hand, in Asia, an EE degree puts you in the top few percent of the population in terms of income and status.
US government polices haven't really had much of an effect one way or the other on Silicon Valley, except that allowing the runup in real estate increased living costs substantially and that free trade has made outsourcing so easy.
One of the weirder bits of right-wing belief is that U.S. Constitution was "divinely inspired". This is an official Mormon position, and some of the more right-wing Christian groups have picked up on it.
What's so weird about this is that we have the Federalist Paper and the debates of the Constitutional Convention. There's not much mystery about how it was put together. The major players all wrote about their thinking.
The basic parameters of the U.S. Constitution came from the constraints the authors faced. They already had the Articles of Confederation of the Continental Congress in force, which set up a confederation of states, somewhat like the United Nations or the European Union. This was a weak federation, and it ran into the problems of most weak federations - too many decisions required unanimity. so it was hard to get things done. So they needed something with more central authority.
Britain was still a threat. "We must hang together, or we will assuredly all hang separately". The key point to remember about the Constitutional Convention was that the delegates knew that if their new government broke down, they'd end up being hung for treason by British soldiers. (This was not a theoretical risk. See War of 1812.)
But the states didn't want too much central authority. Almost everyone agreed that a king was a bad idea. (Well, Hamilton wanted a king. He wanted to be king. Didn't fly.) Direct democracy was considered, but the French Revolution was getting underway at the time (the storming of the Bastille occurred during the convention), and that wasn't looking too good. Especially since many of the delegates were aristocrats. Most of the states already had a two-house legislature and a governor, so that looked like an acceptable model to follow. So that was the basic model.
Once it became clear that a strong president was needed, the problem was making sure he didn't become a dictator. All the players knew what had happened to Rome. This led to some basic safeguards. Congress can impeach the President, but the President cannot dissolve Congress. There are also some subtle safeguards not often mentioned; the President has a fixed term of office and it runs out at noon on inauguration day. It's the clock, not the swearing in, that makes the new President. So an outgoing president can't stall. (Nixon's cronies once considered that option.) So when the time comes, the old guy has to leave, like it or not.
On the rights side, the debates are well known. Again, existing models were followed; the Bill of Rights looks a lot like the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The notion of an established religion was rejected; Britain had that, and it led to several civil wars. So the delegates agreed on a "hands off" approach to religion.
All this stuff was argued out. What made it work was that the delegates all knew that if they screwed up and a divided
nation resulted, Britain would move in. The knowledge that one is to be hanged at dawn concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Marketing is one of the defining features of an advanced economy. It isn't some temporary stage that you shrug off as you get to the next stage of development. So far there is no next stage of development.... We are no where near a post-marketing society.
That's an insightful remark. The cost of marketing many products and services now exceeds the cost of providing them. Long-distance phone service, for example. Note that there's very little marketing of long-distance phone service now, while it was once heavily promoted. Now, it's typically bundled with something else, to cut the marketing cost. It's worth asking what other products and services may go through that transition.
Read "Natural Born Clickers, the ComScore study referenced in the article. "Only 8% of Internet users now account for 85% of all clicks". And that 8% has lower than average income and doesn't buy much on line.
The basic problem with Google's business model is not a killer problem for Google. It's for all those sites sucking off the "Google Content Network" teat. Ads on search results have value because they're presented at when the user is looking for something. Random ads on web pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. Most advertisers run them because Google's AdWords systems bundles them with search ads. (Advertisers can opt out, but the opt-out checkbox is hidden and doesn't opt you out of everything.) Worse, Google charges the same price for a click on a search result ad and a Google ad on some random site, while studies show that the search result ad is worth maybe 20x the value of the ad on some random site.
The big advertisers have figured this out. Note how few Google ads on random web sites are for major brands. Google tries to keep advertisers from developing metrics to measure click-through value; the AdWords contract prohibits advertisers from sharing their click stats. But enough information has leaked out that advertisers are getting wise to this. There's now a
Content Network Cleanser product to kick bottom-feeder sites out of an advertiser's campaign. But it's retrospective; you pay for useless clicks, then find out about them and block those sites.
A shakeout is coming. As more advertisers get wise to the uselessness of the "Google Content Network", they'll opt out, while keeping their search ads. Google will have to cut the price for ads on third-party sites. This will put the screws on all the sites whose entire revenue stream comes from those ads. (Like Slashdot.)
This won't kill Google, but it may cut into their revenue.
Resistance is futile. You WILL upgrade to Windows 7 as instructed. We are in full control of your computer. Your computer will remain deactivated until you comply with our instructions. You have no alternative but to obey.
Can you even have a Windows machine without an Internet connection any more?
Windows machines on manufacturing equipment often have no external Internet connection. Nor should they. They don't need to talk to anything outside, ever. Many still run Windows 2000.
Machines as first-line managers. It might happen. The coordination is better than with humans. Already, it's common for fulfillment and shipping operations to essentially be run by their computers, while humans provide hands where necessary.
A lot of AI-related stuff that used to not work is more or less working now. OCR. Voice recognition. Automatic driving. Computer vision for simultaneous localization and mapping. Machine learning.
We're past the bogosity of neural nets and expert systems. (I went through Stanford when it was becoming clear that "expert systems" weren't going to be very smart, but many of the faculty were in denial.) Machine learning based on Bayesian statistics has a sound mathematical foundation and actually works. The same algorithms also work across a wide variety of fields, from separating voice and music to flying a helicopter. That level of generality is new.
There's also enough engine behind the systems now. AI used to need more CPU cycles than you could get. That's no longer true.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Sumatra PDF for the last year. It's rather clunky and uses too much memory on long documents, but it's adequate for most viewing.
Its renderer is rather slow, though. And when you zoom, it renders the document first zoomed in X, then, seconds later, in Y as well. That's just stupid.
The nature of programming has changed. When 40+ year olds were going to college or studying, OOP was in its infancy, and even functional programming was more about clever algorithms on limited hardware, where optimization mattered, rather than programming interfaces and patching together APIs with a zillion features, connecting with some database somewhere else, etc.
Yes. It's been a long time since I needed to look in Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms" for an algorithm. All the standard algorithms have been coded now, and you can find an implementation easily. Because of this, the underlying math a programmer needs has changed. Statistics and number-crunching are more important; logic and combinatorics are less important.
Does Google not want Microsoft to scoop them on their new blacksploitation search engine?
Ask's parent, IAC, tried that. It was called "RushmoreDrive.com". The search results returned were Ask results interspersed with marginally relevant black-related results. The home page took at least 7 seconds to load, every time, being heavily loaded with both ads and video. The business lasted less than a year.
Interesting concept, but like most IAC online businesses, badly executed.
This is encouraging, because there's plenty of cellulose available as agricultural waste. Corncobs, corn husks, straw, bagasse (sugar cane after sugar extraction), and similar trash are all mostly cellulose.
There's more trouble on the supply side than on the consumption side.
The problem with news is that the pundit/reporter ratio has swung way too far in the pundit direction. There are too few people out digging up info, and too many people analyzing it. "News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity." With so much incoming free information, willingness to pay people to go out and dig up real news has declined substantially. It takes minutes to rewrite a paragraph from a press release. It takes days of work to get the information for a real story.
Look at the front page of Google News. How many of those stories started as a press release? Most of them. Sometimes, all of them.
In the heyday of newspapers (say, 1880 to 1950), the printing process was far more labor-intensive. As a result, reporters were a small fraction of the payroll, and keeping head count down on the reporting side wasn't top priority. Most newspapers had reporting, editing, composing, and printing all in the same building or adjacent buildings. The big part of the business was printing and distribution.
Today, printing plants are remote, have few people, and may be outsourced. Composing is automated. Editorial is mostly automated; text goes from reporter to printed page without much editing. So reporting is the big labor cost. And it's so easy to just tap into some feed and pump it out to the printing plant.
Blogging isn't helping. It's mostly punditry and self-publicity.
That's where information overload is hurting. Information wants to be free, but free information is self-serving.
I get very little junk mail and very few promotional calls. This despite living in a good neighborhood in Silicon Valley.
It may be because I don't have any debt. The big source of personal data is credit-reporting agencies, and since I have nothing but a bank credit card, they don't know much about me. I've obtained a copy of my credit report; they see my bank credit card and my cash bank account only. They have no info about brokerage accounts and mutual funds.
I use a local ISP, Sonic, for DSL. They don't seem to give out any info about their customers. I don't have TV cable. I don't have any "affinity cards", other then a Costco membership. I belong to a few organizations, none of which seem to send junk mail. I have AdBlock and FlashBlock installed in Firefox.
But I make no attempt to hide. My phone number is listed (and on the Do Not Call list). I'm registered to vote. My web sites have valid, non-anonymous WHOIS information. Yet I get almost no targeted advertising.
So I think that much of the targeted information is coming via credit-reporting agencies.
Spend less than you earn, and life will be good to you.
Actually, most bugs that survive initial testing are not shallow. If they were, they'd have been caught early.
A key point of the article is that almost nobody in the open source world is really looking hard at old code. An experiment was run to encourage code review, but nobody really wants to do that. This is related to the phenomenon that many open source projects stall out at version 0.x. The basic functionality is in, the fun part has been done, and the boring grind of making the last bits work isn't getting done.
Some bugs are so deep the open source process can't fix them. Search Google for "prune_one_dentry oops". The Linux kernel is known to crash when all free memory has been taken over as file cache, a process needs memory, and due to some lock being set, file cache space can't be released. Bugs of this type have been reported steadily since 2004, and it's still not fixed. It will probably take a redesign of some fragile code to fix that, and nobody wants to take that on.
Peter Lynch, of Fidelity Investments, once wrote that he usually regarded a company name change as a sell signal. If the brand has value, why change the name? If the brand doesn't have value, why own the stock?
Suspicious name change of the month: ENVIRONMENTAL CREDITS, LTD. (FORMERLY BOYSTOYS.COM, INC.) "Prior to September 12, 2002 and through its wholly-owned subsidiary, RMA of San Francisco, Inc., a California corporation ("RMA"), we owned and operated an upscale gentlemen's club in San Francisco, California (the "Club") under the name, "Boys Toys Club. ... While our stockholders on March 7, 2008 approved the change in our name to "Environmental Credits, Ltd.," the exact form and nature of any business that we may pursue has not been determined. Our plans are in the conceptual stage only and we may or may not pursue any specific investments or business activity."
I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google.
Interesting. One big complaint about Google's mapping is that the street number data is usually a linear interpolation of the number range for the block. There are better data sources available for some areas. USC has an experimental geocoder which uses parcel map data; when you put in an address, you get the centroid of the parcel from land ownership records. They have full coverage for Los Angeles, and are adding other areas.
(Incidentally, how is geocoding for Japan coming along? Japan tends to assign house numbers as serial numbers, not by position, so interpolation won't work. Somebody must have collected that data for at least Tokyo and Osaka by now.)
The "article" does not contain a single info on where the data actually comes from.
It's public information, from Microsoft's 10Q filings with the SEC. See Note 17, "Segment revenue and operating income".
I'd known that the whole XBox operation was struggling to break even, but I hadn't looked at the numbers for the online sector in a few years. They're losing big in that area.
Note that the Windows Division includes "Windows Live", which includes Hotmail and Messenger. "Online services" is the ad-supported part of the operation, including Bing and MSN portals, plus Microsoft's dying dial-up service, Microsoft Access. Ad revenue is way down for Q4 2009: "Online advertising revenue decreased $32 million or 3%, to $934 million, primarily reflecting a decrease in display advertising and advertiser and publisher tools revenue."
The robot arm is straightforward. It looks like it's built out of Dynamixel servos, which are good little programmable servomotors used for the better end of hobbyist robotics. (After 25 years, finally something better than one-way pulse code modulation for hobby servo control. These things use a 1mb/s bidirectional multidrop serial bus.) There are standard brackets for making robot arms and legs, and it looks like they just bolted the thing together from the stock parts kit.
It's not clear how much the software knows about faces. That's the important part. Considerable work has been done on facial feature detection. There are commercial products available. Most of them ignore hairstyle, though, since they're aimed at face recognition.
Going back to the moon on chemical rockets was a stupid idea. If we had a better technology that allowed, say, a permanent base with a hundred people, it might be worth doing. But just repeating Apollo is pointless.
Worse, it would probably fail. Apollo had top people, including many experienced aircraft engineers who'd designed many successful aircraft, and, of course, the best German rocket engineers. That pool of people is gone. As Ben Rich, once head of Lockheed's "Skunk Works" (SR-71, stealth aircraft, etc.), wrote, "I worked on 22 airplanes in my career. Today's engineer is lucky to work on one."
Bear in mind that Google runs Gmail so they can read your emails automatically and profile you. That's why Gmail is offered for free.
Think about that. Google has profiling data on Ivy League students, many of whom will grow up to be business leaders and political figures. (Ford, Clinton and both Bushes went to Yale.) That data will be politically valuable in the future.
Google has the information to figure out a GMail user's social network. They can tell who responds to whom, and how fast, which allows figuring out the social hierarchy. Google can easily detect discussions of criminal activity and drugs. They have real name data, so they can correlate mail accounts with other information, like criminal records. So they're acquiring the data that will tell them where pressure should be applied to coerce people.
For most people, that data is barely worth collecting. But for Yale students, it's golden.
do these people WANT to work in a factory? I mean, it's great to have steel mills in your country, but they aren't very pleasant places to work.
It's kind of neat to work in an engineering operation attached to a factory. You get to see your designs turned into real products.
Finally, I took all the flowcharts and spread them out on the main computer room floor, a-la A Beautiful Mind, and go crawling around on them with a big fat red marker.
Many years ago, I actually had to do that with a painful piece of FORTRAN. I took over a conference room with a very long table for the job. Got it all straightened out in about two days once I could see it all at once.
Haven't coded a GOTO since the end of the FORTRAN era.
First, bypassing the "story" and a layer of blogs, is the actual report.
What's really happened in Silicon Valley is that it's been hollowed out. Silicon Valley used to be a major manufacturing center. San Jose once had the highest percentage of manufacturing employees of the major US cities, something like 54%. Today, the assembly plants are gone. Most of the fabs are gone. Much of the engineering is gone. This is what happens when you "outsource". Eventually, everything moves to where the production is, including management and finance.
Part of the problem was the "dot com boom", with its fake companies and fake prosperity. That caused a major change in the culture, away from engineering and towards marketing. When the bottom fell out of the dot-com boom, most of the marketing types left. The number of twentysomethings in San Francisco dropped by half. (A friend in the club business says "and the other half are working their butts off and don't go out much.") The big name in Silicon Valley now is not HP or Intel or IBM or National Semiconductor or Fairchild. It's Google, which is an ad agency. That's a huge change in emphasis.
The innovation culture is declining. Portola Valley (a rich suburb) used to have the highest percentage of patent holders of any US community. That's dropped. There's not that much exciting innovation going on. I go to venture capital meetings, and the ideas being presented are just not very exciting. (I've heard a pitch for a social network for cats. And that made it through two rounds of filtering before I heard it.)
People are still struggling to get semiconductor line widths down, solar fab costs down, and such. But that's a grind. Mobile devices are not a fun area in which to work - the weight budget, the cost budget, the power budget, and the time budget are all very tight. The manufacturing is in Asia, anyway, and the engineering is going there. New areas aren't appearing.
There's noise about "green tech", but realistically, "green tech" is either vaporware, like the "smart grid", silly, like small windmills, or something that requires massive manufacturing, like big windmills. Five years ago, the noise was about "biotech", which doesn't employ many people.
Fewer young people in the US are going into engineering, and that's a rational decision. It's hard, it's expensive to study, your job may be outsourced, and it's now a low-status field. In 1970, lawyers and electrical engineers made about the same amount of money. That was a long time ago. On the other hand, in Asia, an EE degree puts you in the top few percent of the population in terms of income and status.
US government polices haven't really had much of an effect one way or the other on Silicon Valley, except that allowing the runup in real estate increased living costs substantially and that free trade has made outsourcing so easy.
One of the weirder bits of right-wing belief is that U.S. Constitution was "divinely inspired". This is an official Mormon position, and some of the more right-wing Christian groups have picked up on it.
What's so weird about this is that we have the Federalist Paper and the debates of the Constitutional Convention. There's not much mystery about how it was put together. The major players all wrote about their thinking.
The basic parameters of the U.S. Constitution came from the constraints the authors faced. They already had the Articles of Confederation of the Continental Congress in force, which set up a confederation of states, somewhat like the United Nations or the European Union. This was a weak federation, and it ran into the problems of most weak federations - too many decisions required unanimity. so it was hard to get things done. So they needed something with more central authority. Britain was still a threat. "We must hang together, or we will assuredly all hang separately". The key point to remember about the Constitutional Convention was that the delegates knew that if their new government broke down, they'd end up being hung for treason by British soldiers. (This was not a theoretical risk. See War of 1812.)
But the states didn't want too much central authority. Almost everyone agreed that a king was a bad idea. (Well, Hamilton wanted a king. He wanted to be king. Didn't fly.) Direct democracy was considered, but the French Revolution was getting underway at the time (the storming of the Bastille occurred during the convention), and that wasn't looking too good. Especially since many of the delegates were aristocrats. Most of the states already had a two-house legislature and a governor, so that looked like an acceptable model to follow. So that was the basic model.
Once it became clear that a strong president was needed, the problem was making sure he didn't become a dictator. All the players knew what had happened to Rome. This led to some basic safeguards. Congress can impeach the President, but the President cannot dissolve Congress. There are also some subtle safeguards not often mentioned; the President has a fixed term of office and it runs out at noon on inauguration day. It's the clock, not the swearing in, that makes the new President. So an outgoing president can't stall. (Nixon's cronies once considered that option.) So when the time comes, the old guy has to leave, like it or not.
On the rights side, the debates are well known. Again, existing models were followed; the Bill of Rights looks a lot like the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The notion of an established religion was rejected; Britain had that, and it led to several civil wars. So the delegates agreed on a "hands off" approach to religion.
All this stuff was argued out. What made it work was that the delegates all knew that if they screwed up and a divided nation resulted, Britain would move in. The knowledge that one is to be hanged at dawn concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Marketing is one of the defining features of an advanced economy. It isn't some temporary stage that you shrug off as you get to the next stage of development. So far there is no next stage of development. ... We are no where near a post-marketing society.
That's an insightful remark. The cost of marketing many products and services now exceeds the cost of providing them. Long-distance phone service, for example. Note that there's very little marketing of long-distance phone service now, while it was once heavily promoted. Now, it's typically bundled with something else, to cut the marketing cost. It's worth asking what other products and services may go through that transition.
Read "Natural Born Clickers, the ComScore study referenced in the article. "Only 8% of Internet users now account for 85% of all clicks". And that 8% has lower than average income and doesn't buy much on line.
The basic problem with Google's business model is not a killer problem for Google. It's for all those sites sucking off the "Google Content Network" teat. Ads on search results have value because they're presented at when the user is looking for something. Random ads on web pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. Most advertisers run them because Google's AdWords systems bundles them with search ads. (Advertisers can opt out, but the opt-out checkbox is hidden and doesn't opt you out of everything.) Worse, Google charges the same price for a click on a search result ad and a Google ad on some random site, while studies show that the search result ad is worth maybe 20x the value of the ad on some random site.
Amusingly, Google offers a lower price for the "content network" ads, but they only tell advertisers about it when they try to opt out of the "content network" program.
The big advertisers have figured this out. Note how few Google ads on random web sites are for major brands. Google tries to keep advertisers from developing metrics to measure click-through value; the AdWords contract prohibits advertisers from sharing their click stats. But enough information has leaked out that advertisers are getting wise to this. There's now a Content Network Cleanser product to kick bottom-feeder sites out of an advertiser's campaign. But it's retrospective; you pay for useless clicks, then find out about them and block those sites.
A shakeout is coming. As more advertisers get wise to the uselessness of the "Google Content Network", they'll opt out, while keeping their search ads. Google will have to cut the price for ads on third-party sites. This will put the screws on all the sites whose entire revenue stream comes from those ads. (Like Slashdot.)
This won't kill Google, but it may cut into their revenue.
Resistance is futile. You WILL upgrade to Windows 7 as instructed. We are in full control of your computer. Your computer will remain deactivated until you comply with our instructions. You have no alternative but to obey.
Can you even have a Windows machine without an Internet connection any more?
Windows machines on manufacturing equipment often have no external Internet connection. Nor should they. They don't need to talk to anything outside, ever. Many still run Windows 2000.
We're coming up on the date for Manna 1.0.
Machines as first-line managers. It might happen. The coordination is better than with humans. Already, it's common for fulfillment and shipping operations to essentially be run by their computers, while humans provide hands where necessary.
Machines should think. People should work.
Stumbling around on six legs isn't very hard. Almost any vaguely reasonable leg movement strategy will work. Look at "Stiquito".
2010 is a little late to be doing a six-legged crawler. They're fun to build, but you don't issue a press release.
I dunno. But it's getting closer.
A lot of AI-related stuff that used to not work is more or less working now. OCR. Voice recognition. Automatic driving. Computer vision for simultaneous localization and mapping. Machine learning.
We're past the bogosity of neural nets and expert systems. (I went through Stanford when it was becoming clear that "expert systems" weren't going to be very smart, but many of the faculty were in denial.) Machine learning based on Bayesian statistics has a sound mathematical foundation and actually works. The same algorithms also work across a wide variety of fields, from separating voice and music to flying a helicopter. That level of generality is new.
There's also enough engine behind the systems now. AI used to need more CPU cycles than you could get. That's no longer true.
Google as an ISP: