Cell phone makers are using robotic names, and even imagery, for yet another brick with a display. It's getting late for that. Robotics is moving along rapidly now, and there are humanoid "androids" and worker "droids" in small-scale production.
These aren't one-off prototypes. The Kokoro Actroid Der2 is being used by Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty and other cuteness. Willow Robotics' mobile utility robot is just now going into small scale production.
A few years from now, robotic names for mere cell phones will sound stupid.
(A previous dumb step in that direction was "MicroPhone", a misnamed Macintosh modem program distributed before the Mac had much audio capability.)
When Showscan (which, after a 2002 bankruptcy and acquisition, now just does ride films) was developed, they did blind tests in theaters to find out how fast the frame rate had to be before people couldn't detect any improvement. The threshold turned out to be in the 75-100 FPS range.
"Peak emotional involvement" was around 72 FPS. Commercially, Showscan used 60FPS film, which was a compromise between indetectability and projector wear.
James Cameron, the director, talks about FPS in Variety. He knows 24FPS is too slow, and wants to get to at least 48. "Maybe on Avatar 2", he says. He points out that the NBA did the All-Star game at 60FPS (transmitted to theaters) and that was very well received. He points out that doubling theater resolution doesn't do much (only the first few rows are close enough to the screen to see the extra pixels) but increasing the frame rate is noticeable to everyone in the theater. With digital 3D, 24FPS strobing is now the weak point for the quality of the experience.
Cameron: "If every single digital theater was perceived by the audience as being equivalent to Imax or Showscan in image quality, which is readily achievable with off-the-shelf technology now, running at higher frame rates, then isn't that the same kind of marketing hook as 3-D itself? Something you can't get at home. An aspect of the film that you can't pirate."
With Cameron pushing for higher frame rates, it's going to happen. He'll figure out a way to use it, too; with high enough frame rates you can have fast, clean pans without strobing or blurring.
I have a MSCS from Stanford (1985), and the field has changed since then. Back then, it was all about discrite math - number theory, combinatorics, mathematical logic, computability, and proofs. There was no number-crunching at all in the curriculum. Of course, back then, an FPU was an extra-cost option on a PC. I've actually done automated program verification work. But outside of IC design (where formal methods are routinely used), there's not much of that going on now. Now, number-crunching has come to the fore.
In the 1990s, I spent several years on what turned into ragdoll physics for games. That's all about differential equations and number-crunching. I had a hard time switching over. But I finally got used to deterministic number-crunching. I have no mathematical intuition for it, though; I took it up too late in life.
Now, the leading edge of computer science is probabilistic number-crunching. Take a look at Stanford's CS229 - Machine Learning class. That's the technology that's driving AI now, and it's working across a broad range of domains. The logicians are out, and the statisticians are in.
The solution to wrong-way passenger traffic is known - big one-way powered three-leaf revolving doors. LAX has had those for decades. They're just very large revolving doors, big enough for several people or a cart, which rotate slowly and are powered by weak motors. But if somebody enters the wrong side, they stop moving, and if necessary back up a little to let the bozo out. Sometimes somebody gets trapped and alarms go off, although this takes some effort.
There are other revolving-door arrangements for employee entrances, some resembling full-height subway turnstiles.
An installation like that probably pays for itself if it prevents one incident which requires closing down an entire terminal.
How tall can a building be built before all the space gets eaten up by elevator shafts?
That's the real problem. The World Trade Center towers had "sky lobbies", with big express elevators to
intermediate floors, and local elevators from there. Local elevator shafts could then be above each other.
The World Trade Center was unique in that all the floors were the same size. Most other tall buildings are pointy, so the higher floors are smaller and traffic to the top is less. Burj Dubai is also residential on the higher floors, so the people density and traffic for the upper floors is low.
Elevator speeds are limited by the rate at which people can stand air pressure changes. Tapei 101 has pressurized elevators, so they can fine-tune the rate of pressure change. It's not clear if Burj Dubai does; if they don't, they'll probably have to slow down the higher elevators to reduce resident complaints.
This has been tried before. See the "Clean Slate" program at Stanford. Basically, it's a plan to redesign the Internet to put telcos more in control. The emphasis is on identifiable "flows", allowing the endpoints, bandwidth, duration, and traffic statistics of a flow to be identified. Visualize an Internet that allows cell-phone like billing and you have the telco dream.
Read the OpenFlow white paper. The basic idea is that, every time a new "flow" appears, the first packets are forwarded to Master Control, which decides what to do about them. Deny? Wiretap? Throttle? Report? It's all up to the "Controller". See page 3, col. 1. This is implemented by making ordinary routers "OpenFlow compatible". Most routers already have flow tables. Currently they're mostly caches for routing info. OpenFlow puts them under centralized control.
With relatively minor mods designed into existing router FPGAs, (or software - there's a Linux implementation for test purposes, and downloads for some Linux-based routers) they can be OpenFlow compatible. They can act like ordinary routers until a controller contacts them and takes them over.
The hype is about "enabling innovation in campus networks", but the reality is that it puts a central controller fully in charge of, and fully aware of, each user's connections.
It's an impressive achievement. I'm glad they got it finished before the economy tanked. Dubai is overbuilt, and many of the sillier projects there will never be completed, but Burj Dubai is a prestige location and will probably be rented out successfully. It's partly a hotel and residential building, not just an office tower.
The Empire State Building was built during the Great Depression and wasn't fully rented for years.
The Canadian RADARSAT-I and RADARSAT-2 satellites have better data. Resolution goes down to 3 meters if desired, and is 25 meters normally. That's much better than what NASA has.
Here's Ottawa seen by RADARSAT-II. Here's Paris.
They did it first, too; here's RADARSAT-I's first image from 1995. RADARSAT-I was launched from the US on a Delta booster back in 1995, but RADARSAT-II was launched from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz booster
They collect amplitude, phase, and range data, so they can do processing to get false-color images which bring out terrain features. Here's Washington after processing.
RADARSAT is a commercial service. You can order images. The base price for a custom image (taken at your request, not from the archive) is $5400CN. Wait time is a week or two. If you're in a real hurry, an additional $4,800CN rush charge gets your picture taken within about 12 hours. Archival data is much cheaper, and is available from MDA Corporation. MDA also has data from Ikonos, Quickbird, Landsat, etc. Much topo data comes from those archives already.
Unlike the NASA data, this data is good enough to easily tell land from water. Better radar systems return "first and last" returns, which, over wooded areas, return both ground height and tree height, so areas of vegetation can be detected. The Washington DC false-color image shows all this.
It doesn't take all the NASA overhead of putting people in space to do this. The private sector is doing it just fine.
It's quite possible to sell a company that just has a technology and a demo, but the timing has to be right Vermeer, which became Microsoft Front Page, sold only 400 copies before Microsoft bought them. They, though, had a working product at the right time.
You need something to sell. You need at least one of revenue, intellectual property, market share, or lead time. Preferably more than one of the above. All Vermeer had was lead time; anyone could write an HTML editor, but they happened to have one at the right time. This is unusual. Usually you need something more than that.
If they're anywhere near Silicon Valley, those guys should join SVASE, meet some venture capitalists, and learn how to pitch. Talking to VCs is useful, because everybody talks to them and they'll tell you who you should be talking to.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to be able to serve other types of administrative subpoenas.
As others have pointed out, the anti-netbook push is a desperate attempt by manufacturers to prevent the computer industry from migrating to $199 laptops. The EeePC was originally announced as a $199 laptop. Massive efforts have been expended to stop that trend, by both Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft, of course, frantically announced a life extension for Windows XP, with CPU speed and screen size restrictions designed to cripple "netbooks". Intel actually has a screen size restriction for Atom-based netbooks. (For a CPU manufacturer, that's sheer arrogance.) The netbook manufacturers were pressured to move away from Linux. (The first generation of netbooks ware all Linux-based.)
It's been successful. Since 2007, the price point for netbooks has moved up, not down. Try searching on Amazon.
(Hint: search "netbook computers -case -cover -sleeve -stickers -skins -adapter -keyboard -screen -charger -drive -speaker -phone -accessory -komputerbay -battery -cable -mouse", then use the "Sort by lowest price" option. Amazon doesn't make it easy to find the cheapest product.) The cheapest is a Visual Land 7" laptop at $149. EeePC units now start at $249.
The cheapest new newbook on Google Shopping (which seems to be mostly a rehash of Amazon) is $229. The cheapest netbook at WalMart is $278.
As I mentioned yesterday. the subpoena probably wasn't valid. Once one of the recipients announced he would challenge it in court, the TSA probably withdrew it because they were going to look even dumber when a Federal judge threw it out.
There are some real questions about a law enforcement organization having administrative subpoena power.
In criminal investigations, subpoenas should come from a judge.
Congress has repeatedly refused FBI requests for that power. I don't think that Homeland Security has it, either. But regulatory agencies with narrow remits often have it, so they can demand records relevant to whatever they regulate. The Department of Transportation had it for use in safety investigations and such. Typically they'd be asking for maintenance records.
When Homeland Security picked up the Transportation Safety Agency from the Department of Transportation, they got DoT's administrative subpoena authority in the transfer. That's what Homeland Security was trying to use here. That clearly went beyond Congressional intent. And in any case, the subpoena hadn't been approved by one of the short list of people authorized to approve it.
The real question is whether we need something other than read/write/seek to deal with the various forms of solid-state memory. The usual options are 1) treat it as disk, reading and writing in big blocks, and 2) treat it as another layer of RAM cache, in main memory space. Flash, etc. though have much faster "seek times" than hard drives, and the penalty for reading smaller blocks is thus much lower. Flash also has the property that writing is slower than reading, while for disk the two are about the same. For small I/O operations, the operating system overhead for the operation takes more time than the actual data access.
For most end users, permanent storage is for storing big sequential files, audio or video. There are interfaces that would make databases faster (one could have flash devices that implemented a key/value store, with onboard lookup), but nobody would notice when playing video. The trend in databases is already to get enough RAM to keep all the indices in RAM, so we're already doing the "read it in the morning" thing suggested in the article. So the payoff for building flash devices to help with that is modest.
There are interesting things to do in this space, but improving reliability in the RAID sense is probably more important than speeding up non-sequential small accesses.
That guy needs a lawyer. But looking at the authorities referenced in the "subpoena", there are some real questions. It's an "administrative subpoena", not one issued by a court. Some agencies can do that. (The FBI has been refused that authority by Congress). The Department of Transportation has subpoena authority for its hearings and investigations, and Homeland Security inheirited that authority when TSA was transferred from DOT to DHS. For all administrative subpoenas, the party served can file a motion to quash the subpoena with a District Court, and the court has to rule before anything happens.
But that section (49 USC 46104) refers to a "hearing or investigation", a formal proceeding presided over by a hearing officer. This is just some "special agent", and the subpoena is signed by someone with the title "Senior Counsel - Civil Enforcement". There's a list of people who can sign these things at 49 CFR 1503.303, and a "Senior Counsel" isn't high enough up the food chain to sign off. A Deputy Chief Counsel or the Chief Counsel is supposed to sign. This probably reflects who the TSA had in the office on December 26. A more senior official probably would have considered the political implications of doing something this embarrassing.
A big problem with DRM'd content is that it has a limited life, and not a very long one. When the DRM servers go away, and the readers wear out, the content is gone. This seems to take about five years. If you bought content from Circuit City's Divx (the disposable, encrypted DVD scheme), Microsoft PlayForSure, or WalMart Music, you've already been screwed. (Microsoft in 2004: "PlaysForSure is supported broadly by leading consumer device manufacturers including Audiovox Corp., Creative, D-Link Systems Inc., Dell Inc., HP, iRiver, Rio, Roku, Samsung Electronics and RCA-brand players from Thomson; by online music and video stores including CinemaNow, F.Y.E. For Your Entertainment, MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster LLC and Wal-Mart Music Downloads; and by retailers including Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Tower Records and Wal-Mart." And where are they now?)
There are now at least 5 different "e-reader" systems on the market, all with incompatible DRM. Most of those will lose out competitively and disappear. Guess wrong, and you're screwed. Yes, with some of those systems you can get content out of the DRM cage and into something else, but it's usually not easy. The Register has an article on what plays on what.
Five years is a short life for a book. With paper books, one can collect books over a lifetime, and institutions collect them over the centuries. That will be tough with "ebook-only" publications.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. - Orwell
It's not classified information. It's just called "sensitive" information under
49 CFR 1520. That's a federal regulation, not a criminal law, and it only applies to persons authorized to receive the information, not to the general public. If the TSA finds the authorized person who is the source of the leak, they can charge them a civil penalty, but a non-authorized recipient has no obligation to keep the material confidential.
There are criminal penalties associated with actual classified information, but they don't apply here. Homeland Security has the authority to create classified documents, but then they have to comply with all the requirements of accountability, marking, numbered copies, copying restrictions, approved containers, encrypted transmissions, burn bags, and security clearances. They can't send something to every airline gate agent and baggage handler and call it "classified", because those people aren't cleared for classified information.
In parts of Europe, voice phone service has been digital for a decade or more, using ISDN. ISDN voice is 64Kb/s uncompressed, so you get digital audio for the last mile in the same format as the rest of the phone network, and with no packetization lag.
ISDN was supposed to take voice digital. Unfortunately, US phone companies took it as an opportunity to switch from flat-rate local call pricing to per-minute pricing, so it never went anywhere.
The US did ISDN power wrong - Europe provides power over ISDN, but the US does not. So ISDN home equipment remains powered up as long as the central office has power. (There's a cute trick with ISDN power - normally, it's one DC polarity, and you can draw a fair amount of power, enough to run answering machines, wireless base stations, and ISDN phone displays. In emergencies, the central office reverses the DC polarity and lowers the current limit. You can still make calls, but the accessories power down.) Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark are about 1/3 voice ISDN.
Here are some modern ISDN phones. They have nice features, like a running display of call cost and SMS capability. ISDN and DSL can be run on the same wire pair, so using ISDN for voice and DSL for data works.
If you're going to do it, do it right. Check out VF Imagewear, the leading supplier of business uniforms. They even have a downloadable design tool.
There are several ways to go. One is a lab coat, like the ones doctors wear. Aerospace companies have used those for decades.
Another is auto-company style uniforms. Avoid ball caps unless you get the entire SWAT-team ensemble, which they offer.
There's nothing there which could possibly be a copyright violation of Apex's content. They're quoting from "Tunnel Rat" on "endh1b.com".
"...I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect''s of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc. The legalities of the agreement are convoluted,complex and can/will be used against you if you displease Apex technology Group Inc. So once you sign that document you are at the mercy of the employer and much worse than a bonded labour in India. Apart from above, employees don''t receive their salary at the end of the month. It is usually received @ a random date in the following month, provided you are lucky. Else you would have to chase HR/Accounting to get your pay check. This process helps Apex technology group inc to hold back pay incase you choose to accept employment at another location. The most important aspect of your transaction''s with Apex Technology Group Inc is that they tell you one thing before you transfer your H1B to their consulting firm and then later do not stick to what they say(aka lies & cheating). In other words once you file/transfer your H1B to them you more or less become their slave and you will get entangled in thier web of lies and legal documents..."
That sounds like a legitimate labor complaint. Some of those terms are probably illegal under U.S. labor law. See, for example, California law on prompt payment of wages.
If you look at the HTML source of Foundem, you find a set of meta keywords usually associated with webspam sites. Then there's a big block of ad-like links - Ipods, plasma TVs,"cheap flights", "fitness equipment online", etc. It looks like your typical junk link site.
The Register reported their troubles with Google back in 2006. What they were bitching about was not that "Foundem" disappeared from Google, but that all the pages of "price comparisons" they put up were pushed way down in search results. They were also hit with an AdWords penalty. This was written up as a case study in SEO fail.
However, at least they have a business address on the site.
Here's a better version of the story. This is a big deal. They're running 56 trains a day on that route. They're also the longest high speed trains running. So this is a high-volume people mover. Plans call for another 11,000 Km of high speed rail by 2012. That's only two years away.
Some of this is a consequence of the financial troubles and low interest rates in the US. The government of China had been putting excess cash into U.S. Treasury bills, but about a year ago they stopped buying more US debt and started spending on infrastructure and resources. China has been buying up mines and farms around the world to secure supplies of raw materials and food, while beefing up their infrastructure at home.
There's a plan to make interstate sales taxes work, from the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, which is an organization set up by multiple states to coordinate interstate sales taxes. The problem is that it doesn't have enough clout to get the states to standardize.
The basic idea is that the sales tax calculation software takes in the destination address and the commodity code, and comes up with the sales tax rate. But the organization doesn't have enough clout to make state legislatures standardize. Only about 25 states have signed up.
They've made some progress, though. Those 25 states have agreed that sales tax rates can only change quarterly, they've agreed to use a standard dictionary of classes of items, and they have uploaded boundary files of taxable areas.
For those states, rates and boundaries are available for FTP download.
Some states have trouble with the concept of "one sales tax rate per zip code", and the organization is struggling with this.
There are three "certified service providers" who can handle the sales tax payments for merchants. They plug into the shopping cart system, calculate the sales tax, and bill the merchant for total sales taxes collected. They then pay out sales taxes to all the states involved. So the merchant only has one bill.
So the machinery is in place to make this work. Sort of.
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
Blender, the animation system, is about to do this. All 3D animation systems are complex, but Blender has an unusually confused GUI, with changes in each release and out of sync documentation. So, in the next release, 2.5, Blender will support "themes", plus some scheme for custom Python code to rework the GUI. Now the developers can blame the user.
The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC. All the GUI gives you is success or failure. Errors are hidden in a text window with incredibly confusing blither from about six programs used to set up the connection, several of which produce error messages in normal operation.
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984, and it's still worth reading the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows", and "An alert box consists of a sentence explaining the problem, and a sentence suggesting what to do about it." The idea that you should never have to tell the computer something it already knows means that it's not acceptable to make the user copy information from one place to another. The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phone makers are using robotic names, and even imagery, for yet another brick with a display. It's getting late for that. Robotics is moving along rapidly now, and there are humanoid "androids" and worker "droids" in small-scale production.
These aren't one-off prototypes. The Kokoro Actroid Der2 is being used by Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty and other cuteness. Willow Robotics' mobile utility robot is just now going into small scale production. A few years from now, robotic names for mere cell phones will sound stupid.
(A previous dumb step in that direction was "MicroPhone", a misnamed Macintosh modem program distributed before the Mac had much audio capability.)
You just know that Microsoft will try to stick in some way to embed executable code, so SVG files can invoke "platform specific services".
Besides, without that, it won't be useful for viruses and trojans.
When Showscan (which, after a 2002 bankruptcy and acquisition, now just does ride films) was developed, they did blind tests in theaters to find out how fast the frame rate had to be before people couldn't detect any improvement. The threshold turned out to be in the 75-100 FPS range. "Peak emotional involvement" was around 72 FPS. Commercially, Showscan used 60FPS film, which was a compromise between indetectability and projector wear.
James Cameron, the director, talks about FPS in Variety. He knows 24FPS is too slow, and wants to get to at least 48. "Maybe on Avatar 2", he says. He points out that the NBA did the All-Star game at 60FPS (transmitted to theaters) and that was very well received. He points out that doubling theater resolution doesn't do much (only the first few rows are close enough to the screen to see the extra pixels) but increasing the frame rate is noticeable to everyone in the theater. With digital 3D, 24FPS strobing is now the weak point for the quality of the experience.
Cameron: "If every single digital theater was perceived by the audience as being equivalent to Imax or Showscan in image quality, which is readily achievable with off-the-shelf technology now, running at higher frame rates, then isn't that the same kind of marketing hook as 3-D itself? Something you can't get at home. An aspect of the film that you can't pirate."
With Cameron pushing for higher frame rates, it's going to happen. He'll figure out a way to use it, too; with high enough frame rates you can have fast, clean pans without strobing or blurring.
I have a MSCS from Stanford (1985), and the field has changed since then. Back then, it was all about discrite math - number theory, combinatorics, mathematical logic, computability, and proofs. There was no number-crunching at all in the curriculum. Of course, back then, an FPU was an extra-cost option on a PC. I've actually done automated program verification work. But outside of IC design (where formal methods are routinely used), there's not much of that going on now. Now, number-crunching has come to the fore.
In the 1990s, I spent several years on what turned into ragdoll physics for games. That's all about differential equations and number-crunching. I had a hard time switching over. But I finally got used to deterministic number-crunching. I have no mathematical intuition for it, though; I took it up too late in life.
Now, the leading edge of computer science is probabilistic number-crunching. Take a look at Stanford's CS229 - Machine Learning class. That's the technology that's driving AI now, and it's working across a broad range of domains. The logicians are out, and the statisticians are in.
The solution to wrong-way passenger traffic is known - big one-way powered three-leaf revolving doors. LAX has had those for decades. They're just very large revolving doors, big enough for several people or a cart, which rotate slowly and are powered by weak motors. But if somebody enters the wrong side, they stop moving, and if necessary back up a little to let the bozo out. Sometimes somebody gets trapped and alarms go off, although this takes some effort.
There are other revolving-door arrangements for employee entrances, some resembling full-height subway turnstiles.
An installation like that probably pays for itself if it prevents one incident which requires closing down an entire terminal.
How tall can a building be built before all the space gets eaten up by elevator shafts?
That's the real problem. The World Trade Center towers had "sky lobbies", with big express elevators to intermediate floors, and local elevators from there. Local elevator shafts could then be above each other.
The World Trade Center was unique in that all the floors were the same size. Most other tall buildings are pointy, so the higher floors are smaller and traffic to the top is less. Burj Dubai is also residential on the higher floors, so the people density and traffic for the upper floors is low.
Elevator speeds are limited by the rate at which people can stand air pressure changes. Tapei 101 has pressurized elevators, so they can fine-tune the rate of pressure change. It's not clear if Burj Dubai does; if they don't, they'll probably have to slow down the higher elevators to reduce resident complaints.
This has been tried before. See the "Clean Slate" program at Stanford. Basically, it's a plan to redesign the Internet to put telcos more in control. The emphasis is on identifiable "flows", allowing the endpoints, bandwidth, duration, and traffic statistics of a flow to be identified. Visualize an Internet that allows cell-phone like billing and you have the telco dream.
Read the OpenFlow white paper. The basic idea is that, every time a new "flow" appears, the first packets are forwarded to Master Control, which decides what to do about them. Deny? Wiretap? Throttle? Report? It's all up to the "Controller". See page 3, col. 1. This is implemented by making ordinary routers "OpenFlow compatible". Most routers already have flow tables. Currently they're mostly caches for routing info. OpenFlow puts them under centralized control.
With relatively minor mods designed into existing router FPGAs, (or software - there's a Linux implementation for test purposes, and downloads for some Linux-based routers) they can be OpenFlow compatible. They can act like ordinary routers until a controller contacts them and takes them over.
The hype is about "enabling innovation in campus networks", but the reality is that it puts a central controller fully in charge of, and fully aware of, each user's connections.
It's an impressive achievement. I'm glad they got it finished before the economy tanked. Dubai is overbuilt, and many of the sillier projects there will never be completed, but Burj Dubai is a prestige location and will probably be rented out successfully. It's partly a hotel and residential building, not just an office tower.
The Empire State Building was built during the Great Depression and wasn't fully rented for years.
The Canadian RADARSAT-I and RADARSAT-2 satellites have better data. Resolution goes down to 3 meters if desired, and is 25 meters normally. That's much better than what NASA has. Here's Ottawa seen by RADARSAT-II. Here's Paris. They did it first, too; here's RADARSAT-I's first image from 1995. RADARSAT-I was launched from the US on a Delta booster back in 1995, but RADARSAT-II was launched from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz booster
They collect amplitude, phase, and range data, so they can do processing to get false-color images which bring out terrain features. Here's Washington after processing.
RADARSAT is a commercial service. You can order images. The base price for a custom image (taken at your request, not from the archive) is $5400CN. Wait time is a week or two. If you're in a real hurry, an additional $4,800CN rush charge gets your picture taken within about 12 hours. Archival data is much cheaper, and is available from MDA Corporation. MDA also has data from Ikonos, Quickbird, Landsat, etc. Much topo data comes from those archives already.
Unlike the NASA data, this data is good enough to easily tell land from water. Better radar systems return "first and last" returns, which, over wooded areas, return both ground height and tree height, so areas of vegetation can be detected. The Washington DC false-color image shows all this.
It doesn't take all the NASA overhead of putting people in space to do this. The private sector is doing it just fine.
It's quite possible to sell a company that just has a technology and a demo, but the timing has to be right Vermeer, which became Microsoft Front Page, sold only 400 copies before Microsoft bought them. They, though, had a working product at the right time.
You need something to sell. You need at least one of revenue, intellectual property, market share, or lead time. Preferably more than one of the above. All Vermeer had was lead time; anyone could write an HTML editor, but they happened to have one at the right time. This is unusual. Usually you need something more than that.
If they're anywhere near Silicon Valley, those guys should join SVASE, meet some venture capitalists, and learn how to pitch. Talking to VCs is useful, because everybody talks to them and they'll tell you who you should be talking to.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to be able to serve other types of administrative subpoenas.
From FBI Director Muller's testimony before Congress. It didn't work; Congress said no.
As others have pointed out, the anti-netbook push is a desperate attempt by manufacturers to prevent the computer industry from migrating to $199 laptops. The EeePC was originally announced as a $199 laptop. Massive efforts have been expended to stop that trend, by both Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft, of course, frantically announced a life extension for Windows XP, with CPU speed and screen size restrictions designed to cripple "netbooks". Intel actually has a screen size restriction for Atom-based netbooks. (For a CPU manufacturer, that's sheer arrogance.) The netbook manufacturers were pressured to move away from Linux. (The first generation of netbooks ware all Linux-based.)
It's been successful. Since 2007, the price point for netbooks has moved up, not down. Try searching on Amazon. (Hint: search "netbook computers -case -cover -sleeve -stickers -skins -adapter -keyboard -screen -charger -drive -speaker -phone -accessory -komputerbay -battery -cable -mouse", then use the "Sort by lowest price" option. Amazon doesn't make it easy to find the cheapest product.) The cheapest is a Visual Land 7" laptop at $149. EeePC units now start at $249. The cheapest new newbook on Google Shopping (which seems to be mostly a rehash of Amazon) is $229. The cheapest netbook at WalMart is $278.
As I mentioned yesterday. the subpoena probably wasn't valid. Once one of the recipients announced he would challenge it in court, the TSA probably withdrew it because they were going to look even dumber when a Federal judge threw it out.
There are some real questions about a law enforcement organization having administrative subpoena power. In criminal investigations, subpoenas should come from a judge. Congress has repeatedly refused FBI requests for that power. I don't think that Homeland Security has it, either. But regulatory agencies with narrow remits often have it, so they can demand records relevant to whatever they regulate. The Department of Transportation had it for use in safety investigations and such. Typically they'd be asking for maintenance records.
When Homeland Security picked up the Transportation Safety Agency from the Department of Transportation, they got DoT's administrative subpoena authority in the transfer. That's what Homeland Security was trying to use here. That clearly went beyond Congressional intent. And in any case, the subpoena hadn't been approved by one of the short list of people authorized to approve it.
The New York Times reports that the TSA has dropped its subpoenas. Probably because someone with some political sense finally got involved.
The real question is whether we need something other than read/write/seek to deal with the various forms of solid-state memory. The usual options are 1) treat it as disk, reading and writing in big blocks, and 2) treat it as another layer of RAM cache, in main memory space. Flash, etc. though have much faster "seek times" than hard drives, and the penalty for reading smaller blocks is thus much lower. Flash also has the property that writing is slower than reading, while for disk the two are about the same. For small I/O operations, the operating system overhead for the operation takes more time than the actual data access.
For most end users, permanent storage is for storing big sequential files, audio or video. There are interfaces that would make databases faster (one could have flash devices that implemented a key/value store, with onboard lookup), but nobody would notice when playing video. The trend in databases is already to get enough RAM to keep all the indices in RAM, so we're already doing the "read it in the morning" thing suggested in the article. So the payoff for building flash devices to help with that is modest.
There are interesting things to do in this space, but improving reliability in the RAID sense is probably more important than speeding up non-sequential small accesses.
That guy needs a lawyer. But looking at the authorities referenced in the "subpoena", there are some real questions. It's an "administrative subpoena", not one issued by a court. Some agencies can do that. (The FBI has been refused that authority by Congress). The Department of Transportation has subpoena authority for its hearings and investigations, and Homeland Security inheirited that authority when TSA was transferred from DOT to DHS. For all administrative subpoenas, the party served can file a motion to quash the subpoena with a District Court, and the court has to rule before anything happens.
But that section (49 USC 46104) refers to a "hearing or investigation", a formal proceeding presided over by a hearing officer. This is just some "special agent", and the subpoena is signed by someone with the title "Senior Counsel - Civil Enforcement". There's a list of people who can sign these things at 49 CFR 1503.303, and a "Senior Counsel" isn't high enough up the food chain to sign off. A Deputy Chief Counsel or the Chief Counsel is supposed to sign. This probably reflects who the TSA had in the office on December 26. A more senior official probably would have considered the political implications of doing something this embarrassing.
This is a touchy area, related to the "National Security Letter" debacle. See this Congressional Research Service analysis. The FBI got in trouble for issuing demands for documents without statutory authority.
The Associated Press reports that the blogger is going to challenge the subpoena in court.
A big problem with DRM'd content is that it has a limited life, and not a very long one. When the DRM servers go away, and the readers wear out, the content is gone. This seems to take about five years. If you bought content from Circuit City's Divx (the disposable, encrypted DVD scheme), Microsoft PlayForSure, or WalMart Music, you've already been screwed. (Microsoft in 2004: "PlaysForSure is supported broadly by leading consumer device manufacturers including Audiovox Corp., Creative, D-Link Systems Inc., Dell Inc., HP, iRiver, Rio, Roku, Samsung Electronics and RCA-brand players from Thomson; by online music and video stores including CinemaNow, F.Y.E. For Your Entertainment, MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster LLC and Wal-Mart Music Downloads; and by retailers including Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Tower Records and Wal-Mart." And where are they now?)
There are now at least 5 different "e-reader" systems on the market, all with incompatible DRM. Most of those will lose out competitively and disappear. Guess wrong, and you're screwed. Yes, with some of those systems you can get content out of the DRM cage and into something else, but it's usually not easy. The Register has an article on what plays on what.
Five years is a short life for a book. With paper books, one can collect books over a lifetime, and institutions collect them over the centuries. That will be tough with "ebook-only" publications.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. - Orwell
It's not classified information. It's just called "sensitive" information under 49 CFR 1520. That's a federal regulation, not a criminal law, and it only applies to persons authorized to receive the information, not to the general public. If the TSA finds the authorized person who is the source of the leak, they can charge them a civil penalty, but a non-authorized recipient has no obligation to keep the material confidential.
There are criminal penalties associated with actual classified information, but they don't apply here. Homeland Security has the authority to create classified documents, but then they have to comply with all the requirements of accountability, marking, numbered copies, copying restrictions, approved containers, encrypted transmissions, burn bags, and security clearances. They can't send something to every airline gate agent and baggage handler and call it "classified", because those people aren't cleared for classified information.
In parts of Europe, voice phone service has been digital for a decade or more, using ISDN. ISDN voice is 64Kb/s uncompressed, so you get digital audio for the last mile in the same format as the rest of the phone network, and with no packetization lag. ISDN was supposed to take voice digital. Unfortunately, US phone companies took it as an opportunity to switch from flat-rate local call pricing to per-minute pricing, so it never went anywhere.
The US did ISDN power wrong - Europe provides power over ISDN, but the US does not. So ISDN home equipment remains powered up as long as the central office has power. (There's a cute trick with ISDN power - normally, it's one DC polarity, and you can draw a fair amount of power, enough to run answering machines, wireless base stations, and ISDN phone displays. In emergencies, the central office reverses the DC polarity and lowers the current limit. You can still make calls, but the accessories power down.) Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark are about 1/3 voice ISDN.
Here are some modern ISDN phones. They have nice features, like a running display of call cost and SMS capability. ISDN and DSL can be run on the same wire pair, so using ISDN for voice and DSL for data works.
If you're going to do it, do it right. Check out VF Imagewear, the leading supplier of business uniforms. They even have a downloadable design tool.
There are several ways to go. One is a lab coat, like the ones doctors wear. Aerospace companies have used those for decades. Another is auto-company style uniforms. Avoid ball caps unless you get the entire SWAT-team ensemble, which they offer.
See The Thugs At Apex Technology Group.
There's nothing there which could possibly be a copyright violation of Apex's content. They're quoting from "Tunnel Rat" on "endh1b.com".
"...I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect''s of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc. The legalities of the agreement are convoluted,complex and can/will be used against you if you displease Apex technology Group Inc. So once you sign that document you are at the mercy of the employer and much worse than a bonded labour in India. Apart from above, employees don''t receive their salary at the end of the month. It is usually received @ a random date in the following month, provided you are lucky. Else you would have to chase HR/Accounting to get your pay check. This process helps Apex technology group inc to hold back pay incase you choose to accept employment at another location. The most important aspect of your transaction''s with Apex Technology Group Inc is that they tell you one thing before you transfer your H1B to their consulting firm and then later do not stick to what they say(aka lies & cheating). In other words once you file/transfer your H1B to them you more or less become their slave and you will get entangled in thier web of lies and legal documents..."
That sounds like a legitimate labor complaint. Some of those terms are probably illegal under U.S. labor law. See, for example, California law on prompt payment of wages.
If you look at the HTML source of Foundem, you find a set of meta keywords usually associated with webspam sites. Then there's a big block of ad-like links - Ipods, plasma TVs,"cheap flights", "fitness equipment online", etc. It looks like your typical junk link site.
The Register reported their troubles with Google back in 2006. What they were bitching about was not that "Foundem" disappeared from Google, but that all the pages of "price comparisons" they put up were pushed way down in search results. They were also hit with an AdWords penalty. This was written up as a case study in SEO fail.
However, at least they have a business address on the site.
Here's a better version of the story. This is a big deal. They're running 56 trains a day on that route. They're also the longest high speed trains running. So this is a high-volume people mover. Plans call for another 11,000 Km of high speed rail by 2012. That's only two years away.
Some of this is a consequence of the financial troubles and low interest rates in the US. The government of China had been putting excess cash into U.S. Treasury bills, but about a year ago they stopped buying more US debt and started spending on infrastructure and resources. China has been buying up mines and farms around the world to secure supplies of raw materials and food, while beefing up their infrastructure at home.
There's a plan to make interstate sales taxes work, from the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, which is an organization set up by multiple states to coordinate interstate sales taxes. The problem is that it doesn't have enough clout to get the states to standardize.
The basic idea is that the sales tax calculation software takes in the destination address and the commodity code, and comes up with the sales tax rate. But the organization doesn't have enough clout to make state legislatures standardize. Only about 25 states have signed up.
They've made some progress, though. Those 25 states have agreed that sales tax rates can only change quarterly, they've agreed to use a standard dictionary of classes of items, and they have uploaded boundary files of taxable areas. For those states, rates and boundaries are available for FTP download. Some states have trouble with the concept of "one sales tax rate per zip code", and the organization is struggling with this.
There are three "certified service providers" who can handle the sales tax payments for merchants. They plug into the shopping cart system, calculate the sales tax, and bill the merchant for total sales taxes collected. They then pay out sales taxes to all the states involved. So the merchant only has one bill.
So the machinery is in place to make this work. Sort of.
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
Blender, the animation system, is about to do this. All 3D animation systems are complex, but Blender has an unusually confused GUI, with changes in each release and out of sync documentation. So, in the next release, 2.5, Blender will support "themes", plus some scheme for custom Python code to rework the GUI. Now the developers can blame the user.
The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC. All the GUI gives you is success or failure. Errors are hidden in a text window with incredibly confusing blither from about six programs used to set up the connection, several of which produce error messages in normal operation.
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984, and it's still worth reading the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows", and "An alert box consists of a sentence explaining the problem, and a sentence suggesting what to do about it." The idea that you should never have to tell the computer something it already knows means that it's not acceptable to make the user copy information from one place to another. The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.