We use some blacklist info, and this isn't the first problem we've had like that.
PhishTank updates their blacklist file every hour or so. But they don't do it as an
atomic operation. It's possible for the file to change while someone is reading it.
We've seen this happen. We've received zero-length files, and files with a break in
the middle. We now read the file twice, thirty seconds apart, and compare. If they
disagree, we reread every 30 seconds until we get two copies that match.
We have another periodic process that reads the SEC filing index and the NASDAQ ticker
symbol list daily. About once a month, there's some kind of problem, other than a network error, with at least one of the files.
These are all public data files intended for machine processing and accessed with FTP, not ordinary web pages. You have to expect major data quality problems with these things.
Recently, we found a mail forwarder which was bouncing mail with the SMTP error "550 This message does not comply with required standards". That message is generated by a spam blocking program which is looking in the body of the message for things it doesn't like. One thing it didn't like was the URL "http://www.readthestimulus.org", a political site with a searchable copy of the U.S. economic stimulus bill. We and the people at the other end spent hours figuring this out. The deceptive error message didn't help.
So you have to sanity check blacklist data. There are serious data quality problems.
Now that's security theater. Elaborate "incident management" systems tend to be overkill. This sounds like something Microsoft dreamed up, not something a big-city fire chief or a SWAT team commander would ask for.
The US was the first country where credit card verification machines were widely deployed, and that infrastructure seems to satisfy most needs. There's also a tradition that the merchant eats the credit card fees, and law that the bank and merchant are responsible for errors. So from a consumer perspective, it's a good system.
Redwood City, CA just installed a parking meter system which accepts payment via text messages from cell phones. You can even extend your parking time remotely. But there's a $0.35 "convenience fee" for this, because the mobile operator and the payment system operator both want a cut. That kind of thing seems to be typical for US phone-based payment schemes.
When the payment processor is a telco, rather than a bank, they're not subject to bank-type regulation, which means fixing errors is more of a hassle.
We may see more US regulation in this area under the new administration. More "bank-like entities", like hedge funds and "non-bank banks" are being brought under banking and securities regulation, for obvious reasons. That trend may sweep up PayPal, eGold, and other money-handling systems. It used to be expected that entities that handled other people's money were regulated, but over the last two decades or so, ways around this were devised. That didn't work out too well.
You don't get it. This is how Microsoft will destroy the RIAA.
This isn't even version 1.0. It's maybe 0.5 (sounds open source, doesn't it.) Of course it sucks. Most new Microsoft products suck at version 1.0. By version 3.0, they rule the world.
Remember how US music law works. Anybody can parody anybody else for free (hence the legions of Elvis impersonators) and anybody can make a new recording of an old song by paying a fixed royalty limited by law. That royalty goes to composers and songwriters, not the RIAA.
The maker and user of this program owe nothing to the RIAA.
That's the key to this. As this technology gets better, there will be programs that listen to the repertory of a musician or a singer and build vocal tract and style models. There will be programs that take in a song recording and extract the music, lyrics, and expression, reducing it to something like MIDI with more annotations. Then the synthesis program will put them together, perhaps producing a "cover recording" indistinguishable from the original, at least when heard in a car. Plus you can have fun running combining different songs and musicians.
At that point, musicianship has been automated. Microsoft can dictate terms to the RIAA.
Don't laugh. I'll bet that in a few years, most videogame soundtracks will come from something like this. Then commercial soundtracks. Actual musical recordings will take longer, because there's a heavy "branding" factor. But it will come.
It's a tough problem. Ceramic-package ICs were hermetically sealed, but plastic ones are not, and there's a long-term corrosion problem. Storage in shrink wrap, using dry air, heat-sealed plastic, and a "desiccant pack" inside to absorb any remaining moisture, will at least keep the corrosion problem down. That's easy to do.
I'd suggest packing at least three of everything, so that people in the future can
swap parts around if they have to. And include plenty of the consumables - blank disks, etc.
I don't know if ink-jet ink would last, but laser toner probably would.
Older equipment is easier to restore. I'm currently restoring a Teletype Model 15, produced from 1930 through 1958. This unit was built during WWII. It hadn't been powered up in many years. I put on a modern power plug and cranked it up, and it started turning. Many parts were sluggish; the oil had congealed. At first, the main clutch wouldn't release. But after a few minutes of warmup, it was running again. I'm now cleaning it up and will do a proper lube job.
But a Teletype Model 15 has hundreds of oiling points, dozens of screwdriver adjustments, a cast-iron base, and weighs over 50 pounds. Nobody will put up with that in modern equipment to get a machine that can easily last a century.
We're still not doing congestion control very well. DOCSIS 3.0, the new cable modem/hub standard, has many congestion management features, but they're a collection of features, not an integrated strategy.
Realistically, there are two QoS options a congestion strategy for general IP-based networks can deliver:
Low latency, low bandwidth. This is what you want for VoIP and for the low-latency channel of games. For this to work, the network has to enforce the "low bandwidth" requirement by limiting the number of packets in flight. "Fair queueing" can do that on the network side. If you only have one packet in flight (i.e. you wait until each packet is delivered before sending the next one), you shouldn't see any packet loss. If you send more than that, you lose packets. TCP already plays well with fair queueing. UDP-based VoIP protocols that don't do adaptive congestion control need to be fixed.
High latency, high bandwidth For everything else.
There are fancier reservation schemes, where you can reserve bandwidth, but they only work when all the players in the path cooperate, which tends not to happen. But there's no reason not to get the simple mechanisms above right.
The US already has more households with broadband than with cable TV. About 20% of the population can barely read, let alone type. Why expect broadband penetration to go much higher.
The countries with higher broadband penetration than the US are all either tiny or very cold. Except for South Korea, where most of the population lives in big apartment buildings.
Some history. Back in the 1980s, when Guliani's people and the FBI were investigating the New York Mafia, they had lots of wiretaps. New York Telephone billed them for each one as a dedicated line. The phone bill was over $1 million per year. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay the bill, and the automated billing system then billed the person being wiretapped.
Back then, wiretapping wasn't built into the US phone system. It took manual wiring in the central office to patch in. So it wasn't done casually; there was paperwork and billing, and the wiring involved had to go into the cable database. The FBI lobbied for the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which required carriers to build remote wiretapping capability into phone switches.
The FBI had also, on a few occasions, used the ALIT (Automatic Line Insulation Testing) system for wiretapping. This was a hardware setup in central offices which could connect to any line and checked for opens, shorts, resistance to ground, and such. Normally, it connected to idle lines for about a quarter-second, ran some tests, and disconnected. It could be used to listen in, though, which got the FBI the idea for dial-up wiretapping. Each switch had only two or three single-line ALIT units, (early versions had two racks of HP test equipment connected via HP-IB) and a wiretap tied up all that gear for long periods, interfering with its normal
wire testing job, so telcos hated it when the FBI wanted to use it.
First, go to the real story, bypassing an intermediate blog and two interstitial ads.
Second, the article says the performance of the newer OSs is worse than XP. "In fact, during extensive multiprocess benchmark testing, Windows 7 essentially mirrored Vista in almost every scenario. Database tasks? Roughly 118 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 92 percent slower) and 19 percent slower than XP on quad-core (identical to Vista). Workflow? A respectable 38 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 98 percent slower) and 59 percent slower on quad-core (Vista was 66 percent slower)."
Third, there are no tables or graphs anywhere in these articles, and very few numbers. As a benchmarking article, this is awful.
The problem that Microsoft has to face is that it's no longer about More Computer Per Computer. (Detroit used to call this concept More Car Per Car.) It's about Same Computer for Less Money. The new price point for a computer is $299. That's retail; wholesale is under $200. Microsoft wants about $50 of that, which isn't going to happen. They can get maybe $10 to $15 per unit.
If Linux on the desktop didn't suck so bad, it could take over on price alone. Even purpose-built Linux systems like the Eee PC look amateurish.
The weird thing about this is that there's such an emphasis on pictures. Penalties for live acts are much lower. A club in Dallas had a 12-year old working as a stripper, and nothing happened to them. No charges at all.
A 14 year old stripping in Kentucky resulted in no penalties for the club owner; the kid's aunt, who was driving the girl to work at the strip club, got 60 days in jail.
Live acts are only subject to municipal regulations, apparently. Many jurisdictions don't regulate this at all.
This is a child labor issue, and the Bush Administration didn't want to "unduly impact businesses" by actually enforcing child labor laws.
12:00:00 Bush web site still up.
12:01:00 Bush web site still up.
12:01:09 Site down
12:03:00 Vice President web site has switched to Biden, but content not loading.
12:04:11 White House web site still not responding.
12:05:00 White House web site has switched to Obama. Site now using cookies.
The new site runs on ASP.NET. And it uses Webtrends tracking. There's a link to "http://statse.webtrendslive.com".
The hard job today belongs to the moving crew. Bush just left the White House for the last time (whew!). As soon as the limos roll out the White House gates, the moving vans roll in. During the next two hours, all of Bush's stuff is packed, and the moving vans roll out. There's some quick carpet replacement and paint touch-up. The Oval Office gets some minor redecoration. Some art moves out, different art moves in. Then Obama's stuff is moved in and unpacked.
By 5 PM, it's all supposed to be done.
It's the advertisers who are unhappy with Google. Google is approaching a monopoly in targeted online advertising; they bought DoubleClick, which got them up to 70%, and if they picked up Yahoo, they'd hit 90%. Advertisers are not happy about that. It's as if there were only one TV station or one newspaper nationally. (RCA, in the 1930s, once proposed a system by which the entire US would have one nationwide radio station, broadcast over three giant AM transmitters. That ran into antitrust problems.)
Remember, Google is an ad agency. That's where the money comes from. Search is just a traffic builder for the ads.
This coronation-like ceremony is getting out of hand. A quiet ceremony in the Capitol, broadcast on TV, would be sufficient. That's what was done during WWII, when there were concerns about
an attack on FDR.
This is the first time an inauguration has shut down Washington, DC for two days. All the Potomac River bridges out to the Beltway are closed Monday and Tuesday. That's well beyond the impact of previous inaugurations.
The new Economist just came out, with "Less is Moore - technology in the recession. "Many companies, it seems, would also prefer computers to get cheaper rather than more powerful."... "The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop.... They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm."
Detroit faced the same problem when buyers stopped falling for "more car per car".
No offense to DARPA, not all of the navigation and vision algorithms in those cars with a whole set of high speed computers are really practical for use on smaller home service robots.
Vision works better on home service robots that it does outdoors.
Outdoors, getting a long enough baseline for a stereo pair is hard, except through motion vision. Humans only have stereo out to a few meters, anyway. SLAM (Simultaneous Location and Mapping) for mobile robots is getting quite good. Willow Robotics demoed their system at RoboDevelopment a few months ago, and the latest issue of IEEE Trans. on Robotics, a special issue on SLAM, indicates how good that's become.
But machine learning is facing some strong limitations when compared with the abilities of biological systems in coping with unsupervised learning in uncertain and dynamic environments.
I recently went over to Stanford to see the CS229 project presentations, and it's very impressive what small teams of students are getting done in one quarter. Self-guiding robot helicopters, for example. The field has moved away from neural nets; Bayesian statistics, with real theory underneath, works better.
the balance and slip control of Big Dog, applies to quadrupeds with the similar mechanical characteristics. If you are trying to imply that the results are relevant to humanoids, I suggest you read up on the loads of material on everything from 3d linear inverted pendulum model to spin angular momentum regulation and control for humanoids.
Been there, done that, own the patent on legged slip control.
For systems which really use dynamic balance, the number of legs doesn't matter all that much from an algorithm standpoint. In fact, most real progress has been made by first getting the one-legged case to work. Key insights: 1) balance has priority over movement, 2) slip/traction control has priority over balance, 3) legs need three joints, not two, so you can play with the force vector at ground contact independent of foot position, and 4) legs are viewed as assets to be deployed to manage traction, balance, and propulsion. "Gaits" are an emergent behavior, the state into which things settle down when movement is not disrupted.
The price point for a computer is now $299. Dell is actively promoting a $299 Linux netbook. The top ad in Google for "netbook" today leads to a Dell Linux machine.
HP's low-end entry is currently at $329, but that's list price; look for discounts. HP is even selling a $299 mini-tower desktop to businesses. The entry-level Asus Eee PC can be purchased for under $250 now. Netbooks are going to be in bubble-packs in drugstores soon.
Microsoft has to deal with that. They have to fit into the "China price" structure. On a netbook, Microsoft can get maybe $10 for their software component. And that's Windows XP; Windows 7 will have to be cheaper to get onto netbooks.
Very nice. If you haven't been paying attention to Japanese hobbyist robotics, you may not have realized how far things have come. They're way beyond Lego Mindstorms. Humanoid toy-sized robots are going through obstacle courses. The robotic toys in the $100-$200 range are becoming quite good, too. WowWee Toys has a line of advanced robotic toys, including the first production fembot.
At the high end, there's Big Dog, of course. The successor to Big Dog is the Legged Squad Support System, now in the bidding stage at DARPA. LS3 is "Big Dog on steroids". Big Dog was an experimental machine; the LS3 will be a combat-ready prototype. The specs for LS3 call for military temperature requirements, a quieter engine, more payload, faster running, longer range, operation in snow, sandstorms, and rain, and the ability to ford a rushing stream three feet deep. LS3 is intended to haul the heavy weapons of a squad just about anywhere an infantry squad can go.
All the technology is falling into place. The navigation and vision from the DARPA Grand Challenge, the success of the newer algorithms in machine learning, the balance and slip control of Big Dog, and the cost structure of the toy industry are coming together. We have not yet seen the "killer app", but I think that robotics is now where personal computers were in about 1976, after the Apple I but before the Apple II.
I agree about needing to weed out the bottom feeders, but I remember reading that Google still makes a pretty penny out of them, so I doubt they'll ban them
The "bottom feeders" are mostly into ad arbitrage. They're not selling anything; they're just sending users to pages with more ads. The advertisers whose ads appear on those pages didn't ask to be there; they were stuck there by Google. And they don't like paying for those useless clicks.
"Targeted advertising" has real problems. Ads on search results pages are valuable, because they're presented at the point that the user is actively looking for something.
Vaguely relevant ads on other pages (the "Google Content Network" comes to mind) are a distraction, and far less valuable. Clicks on such ads are mostly from the 10% of web users who make 50% of the clicks, but don't buy much. Many advertisers have opted out of the Google Content Network (read Search Engine Watch). As we point out, about 36% of Google Content Network advertisers are "bottom-feeders", junk sites with no verifiable business behind them. There's been a slow decline in contextual advertising, and I expect that to continue, and maybe accelerate. Ad-supported sites will feel the squeeze.
Targeted advertising is effective if the advertiser has the user's buying history. Amazon exploits this successfully; they know exactly what you've bought. But spreading that information around creates privacy problems and loud objections. Merchants aren't keen about letting their competitors know who their best customers are. Payment companies like Visa and PayPay could in theory take that role, but they've been reluctant to do so for fear of regulatory backlash. Payment companies don't currently know what you bought, just who you bought it from. They'd need merchant cooperation to profile their customer base.
What this may mean is a network effect for broad-based online merchants like Amazon. The bigger they get, the better their targeted advertising becomes. Customers don't object, because they're dealing with one company which legitimately knows what they've bought.
Amazon may take up the slack as brick-and-mortar stores go under. In consumer electronics, Circuit City, The Good Guys, CompUSA, etc. have all gone under, and Amazon is taking up much of the slack.
IR access points have been around for years, and they work OK. They can even be made to work through diffuse reflections, so you don't have to have a clear line of sight. But you need a lot of access points to cover a space.
One wonders what CMI has to hide. The software shouldn't be that complicated. The thing uses a Z80, after all. It's not like they have Windows CE in there. Yet CMI has accepted over $2 million in fines rather than disclose the source code.
Somebody should buy one, read out the ROM, and disassemble the code.
Slashdot Mirror
We use some blacklist info, and this isn't the first problem we've had like that.
PhishTank updates their blacklist file every hour or so. But they don't do it as an atomic operation. It's possible for the file to change while someone is reading it. We've seen this happen. We've received zero-length files, and files with a break in the middle. We now read the file twice, thirty seconds apart, and compare. If they disagree, we reread every 30 seconds until we get two copies that match.
We have another periodic process that reads the SEC filing index and the NASDAQ ticker symbol list daily. About once a month, there's some kind of problem, other than a network error, with at least one of the files.
These are all public data files intended for machine processing and accessed with FTP, not ordinary web pages. You have to expect major data quality problems with these things.
Recently, we found a mail forwarder which was bouncing mail with the SMTP error "550 This message does not comply with required standards". That message is generated by a spam blocking program which is looking in the body of the message for things it doesn't like. One thing it didn't like was the URL "http://www.readthestimulus.org", a political site with a searchable copy of the U.S. economic stimulus bill. We and the people at the other end spent hours figuring this out. The deceptive error message didn't help.
So you have to sanity check blacklist data. There are serious data quality problems.
Now that's security theater. Elaborate "incident management" systems tend to be overkill. This sounds like something Microsoft dreamed up, not something a big-city fire chief or a SWAT team commander would ask for.
The US was the first country where credit card verification machines were widely deployed, and that infrastructure seems to satisfy most needs. There's also a tradition that the merchant eats the credit card fees, and law that the bank and merchant are responsible for errors. So from a consumer perspective, it's a good system.
Redwood City, CA just installed a parking meter system which accepts payment via text messages from cell phones. You can even extend your parking time remotely. But there's a $0.35 "convenience fee" for this, because the mobile operator and the payment system operator both want a cut. That kind of thing seems to be typical for US phone-based payment schemes.
When the payment processor is a telco, rather than a bank, they're not subject to bank-type regulation, which means fixing errors is more of a hassle.
We may see more US regulation in this area under the new administration. More "bank-like entities", like hedge funds and "non-bank banks" are being brought under banking and securities regulation, for obvious reasons. That trend may sweep up PayPal, eGold, and other money-handling systems. It used to be expected that entities that handled other people's money were regulated, but over the last two decades or so, ways around this were devised. That didn't work out too well.
You don't get it. This is how Microsoft will destroy the RIAA.
This isn't even version 1.0. It's maybe 0.5 (sounds open source, doesn't it.) Of course it sucks. Most new Microsoft products suck at version 1.0. By version 3.0, they rule the world.
Remember how US music law works. Anybody can parody anybody else for free (hence the legions of Elvis impersonators) and anybody can make a new recording of an old song by paying a fixed royalty limited by law. That royalty goes to composers and songwriters, not the RIAA. The maker and user of this program owe nothing to the RIAA.
That's the key to this. As this technology gets better, there will be programs that listen to the repertory of a musician or a singer and build vocal tract and style models. There will be programs that take in a song recording and extract the music, lyrics, and expression, reducing it to something like MIDI with more annotations. Then the synthesis program will put them together, perhaps producing a "cover recording" indistinguishable from the original, at least when heard in a car. Plus you can have fun running combining different songs and musicians.
At that point, musicianship has been automated. Microsoft can dictate terms to the RIAA.
Don't laugh. I'll bet that in a few years, most videogame soundtracks will come from something like this. Then commercial soundtracks. Actual musical recordings will take longer, because there's a heavy "branding" factor. But it will come.
It's a tough problem. Ceramic-package ICs were hermetically sealed, but plastic ones are not, and there's a long-term corrosion problem. Storage in shrink wrap, using dry air, heat-sealed plastic, and a "desiccant pack" inside to absorb any remaining moisture, will at least keep the corrosion problem down. That's easy to do. I'd suggest packing at least three of everything, so that people in the future can swap parts around if they have to. And include plenty of the consumables - blank disks, etc. I don't know if ink-jet ink would last, but laser toner probably would.
Older equipment is easier to restore. I'm currently restoring a Teletype Model 15, produced from 1930 through 1958. This unit was built during WWII. It hadn't been powered up in many years. I put on a modern power plug and cranked it up, and it started turning. Many parts were sluggish; the oil had congealed. At first, the main clutch wouldn't release. But after a few minutes of warmup, it was running again. I'm now cleaning it up and will do a proper lube job.
But a Teletype Model 15 has hundreds of oiling points, dozens of screwdriver adjustments, a cast-iron base, and weighs over 50 pounds. Nobody will put up with that in modern equipment to get a machine that can easily last a century.
We're still not doing congestion control very well. DOCSIS 3.0, the new cable modem/hub standard, has many congestion management features, but they're a collection of features, not an integrated strategy.
Realistically, there are two QoS options a congestion strategy for general IP-based networks can deliver:
There are fancier reservation schemes, where you can reserve bandwidth, but they only work when all the players in the path cooperate, which tends not to happen. But there's no reason not to get the simple mechanisms above right.
The US already has more households with broadband than with cable TV. About 20% of the population can barely read, let alone type. Why expect broadband penetration to go much higher.
The countries with higher broadband penetration than the US are all either tiny or very cold. Except for South Korea, where most of the population lives in big apartment buildings.
Some history. Back in the 1980s, when Guliani's people and the FBI were investigating the New York Mafia, they had lots of wiretaps. New York Telephone billed them for each one as a dedicated line. The phone bill was over $1 million per year. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay the bill, and the automated billing system then billed the person being wiretapped.
Back then, wiretapping wasn't built into the US phone system. It took manual wiring in the central office to patch in. So it wasn't done casually; there was paperwork and billing, and the wiring involved had to go into the cable database. The FBI lobbied for the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which required carriers to build remote wiretapping capability into phone switches.
The FBI had also, on a few occasions, used the ALIT (Automatic Line Insulation Testing) system for wiretapping. This was a hardware setup in central offices which could connect to any line and checked for opens, shorts, resistance to ground, and such. Normally, it connected to idle lines for about a quarter-second, ran some tests, and disconnected. It could be used to listen in, though, which got the FBI the idea for dial-up wiretapping. Each switch had only two or three single-line ALIT units, (early versions had two racks of HP test equipment connected via HP-IB) and a wiretap tied up all that gear for long periods, interfering with its normal wire testing job, so telcos hated it when the FBI wanted to use it.
That, plus Bush I, got us built-in wiretapping.
First, go to the real story, bypassing an intermediate blog and two interstitial ads.
Second, the article says the performance of the newer OSs is worse than XP. "In fact, during extensive multiprocess benchmark testing, Windows 7 essentially mirrored Vista in almost every scenario. Database tasks? Roughly 118 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 92 percent slower) and 19 percent slower than XP on quad-core (identical to Vista). Workflow? A respectable 38 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 98 percent slower) and 59 percent slower on quad-core (Vista was 66 percent slower)."
Third, there are no tables or graphs anywhere in these articles, and very few numbers. As a benchmarking article, this is awful.
The problem that Microsoft has to face is that it's no longer about More Computer Per Computer. (Detroit used to call this concept More Car Per Car.) It's about Same Computer for Less Money. The new price point for a computer is $299. That's retail; wholesale is under $200. Microsoft wants about $50 of that, which isn't going to happen. They can get maybe $10 to $15 per unit.
If Linux on the desktop didn't suck so bad, it could take over on price alone. Even purpose-built Linux systems like the Eee PC look amateurish.
The weird thing about this is that there's such an emphasis on pictures. Penalties for live acts are much lower. A club in Dallas had a 12-year old working as a stripper, and nothing happened to them. No charges at all. A 14 year old stripping in Kentucky resulted in no penalties for the club owner; the kid's aunt, who was driving the girl to work at the strip club, got 60 days in jail.
Live acts are only subject to municipal regulations, apparently. Many jurisdictions don't regulate this at all.
This is a child labor issue, and the Bush Administration didn't want to "unduly impact businesses" by actually enforcing child labor laws.
The Obama White House site has a single-pixel GIF web bug:
<img alt="DCSIMG" id="DCSIMG" width="1" height="1" src="http://statse.webtrendslive.com/dcs0l9nq800000ctek411lue6_2c8b/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No&DCS.dcscfg=1&WT.tv=8.6.0"/>
This seems to be the tracking method for non-Javascript users. For Javascript clients, it creates a WebTrends() object from Javascript.
Supposedly, Government sites aren't supposed to link to or draw assets from non-Government sites.
12:00:00 Bush web site still up.
12:01:00 Bush web site still up.
12:01:09 Site down
12:03:00 Vice President web site has switched to Biden, but content not loading.
12:04:11 White House web site still not responding.
12:05:00 White House web site has switched to Obama. Site now using cookies.
The new site runs on ASP.NET. And it uses Webtrends tracking. There's a link to "http://statse.webtrendslive.com".
Watch the White House site for the changeover at noon EST.
The hard job today belongs to the moving crew. Bush just left the White House for the last time (whew!). As soon as the limos roll out the White House gates, the moving vans roll in. During the next two hours, all of Bush's stuff is packed, and the moving vans roll out. There's some quick carpet replacement and paint touch-up. The Oval Office gets some minor redecoration. Some art moves out, different art moves in. Then Obama's stuff is moved in and unpacked. By 5 PM, it's all supposed to be done.
It's the advertisers who are unhappy with Google. Google is approaching a monopoly in targeted online advertising; they bought DoubleClick, which got them up to 70%, and if they picked up Yahoo, they'd hit 90%. Advertisers are not happy about that. It's as if there were only one TV station or one newspaper nationally. (RCA, in the 1930s, once proposed a system by which the entire US would have one nationwide radio station, broadcast over three giant AM transmitters. That ran into antitrust problems.)
Remember, Google is an ad agency. That's where the money comes from. Search is just a traffic builder for the ads.
This coronation-like ceremony is getting out of hand. A quiet ceremony in the Capitol, broadcast on TV, would be sufficient. That's what was done during WWII, when there were concerns about an attack on FDR.
This is the first time an inauguration has shut down Washington, DC for two days. All the Potomac River bridges out to the Beltway are closed Monday and Tuesday. That's well beyond the impact of previous inaugurations.
The new Economist just came out, with "Less is Moore - technology in the recession. "Many companies, it seems, would also prefer computers to get cheaper rather than more powerful." ... "The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. ... They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm."
Detroit faced the same problem when buyers stopped falling for "more car per car".
No offense to DARPA, not all of the navigation and vision algorithms in those cars with a whole set of high speed computers are really practical for use on smaller home service robots.
Vision works better on home service robots that it does outdoors. Outdoors, getting a long enough baseline for a stereo pair is hard, except through motion vision. Humans only have stereo out to a few meters, anyway. SLAM (Simultaneous Location and Mapping) for mobile robots is getting quite good. Willow Robotics demoed their system at RoboDevelopment a few months ago, and the latest issue of IEEE Trans. on Robotics, a special issue on SLAM, indicates how good that's become.
But machine learning is facing some strong limitations when compared with the abilities of biological systems in coping with unsupervised learning in uncertain and dynamic environments.
I recently went over to Stanford to see the CS229 project presentations, and it's very impressive what small teams of students are getting done in one quarter. Self-guiding robot helicopters, for example. The field has moved away from neural nets; Bayesian statistics, with real theory underneath, works better.
the balance and slip control of Big Dog, applies to quadrupeds with the similar mechanical characteristics. If you are trying to imply that the results are relevant to humanoids, I suggest you read up on the loads of material on everything from 3d linear inverted pendulum model to spin angular momentum regulation and control for humanoids.
Been there, done that, own the patent on legged slip control. For systems which really use dynamic balance, the number of legs doesn't matter all that much from an algorithm standpoint. In fact, most real progress has been made by first getting the one-legged case to work. Key insights: 1) balance has priority over movement, 2) slip/traction control has priority over balance, 3) legs need three joints, not two, so you can play with the force vector at ground contact independent of foot position, and 4) legs are viewed as assets to be deployed to manage traction, balance, and propulsion. "Gaits" are an emergent behavior, the state into which things settle down when movement is not disrupted.
The price point for a computer is now $299. Dell is actively promoting a $299 Linux netbook. The top ad in Google for "netbook" today leads to a Dell Linux machine. HP's low-end entry is currently at $329, but that's list price; look for discounts. HP is even selling a $299 mini-tower desktop to businesses. The entry-level Asus Eee PC can be purchased for under $250 now. Netbooks are going to be in bubble-packs in drugstores soon.
Microsoft has to deal with that. They have to fit into the "China price" structure. On a netbook, Microsoft can get maybe $10 for their software component. And that's Windows XP; Windows 7 will have to be cheaper to get onto netbooks.
Very nice. If you haven't been paying attention to Japanese hobbyist robotics, you may not have realized how far things have come. They're way beyond Lego Mindstorms. Humanoid toy-sized robots are going through obstacle courses. The robotic toys in the $100-$200 range are becoming quite good, too. WowWee Toys has a line of advanced robotic toys, including the first production fembot.
At the high end, there's Big Dog, of course. The successor to Big Dog is the Legged Squad Support System, now in the bidding stage at DARPA. LS3 is "Big Dog on steroids". Big Dog was an experimental machine; the LS3 will be a combat-ready prototype. The specs for LS3 call for military temperature requirements, a quieter engine, more payload, faster running, longer range, operation in snow, sandstorms, and rain, and the ability to ford a rushing stream three feet deep. LS3 is intended to haul the heavy weapons of a squad just about anywhere an infantry squad can go.
All the technology is falling into place. The navigation and vision from the DARPA Grand Challenge, the success of the newer algorithms in machine learning, the balance and slip control of Big Dog, and the cost structure of the toy industry are coming together. We have not yet seen the "killer app", but I think that robotics is now where personal computers were in about 1976, after the Apple I but before the Apple II.
I agree about needing to weed out the bottom feeders, but I remember reading that Google still makes a pretty penny out of them, so I doubt they'll ban them
The "bottom feeders" are mostly into ad arbitrage. They're not selling anything; they're just sending users to pages with more ads. The advertisers whose ads appear on those pages didn't ask to be there; they were stuck there by Google. And they don't like paying for those useless clicks.
"Targeted advertising" has real problems. Ads on search results pages are valuable, because they're presented at the point that the user is actively looking for something. Vaguely relevant ads on other pages (the "Google Content Network" comes to mind) are a distraction, and far less valuable. Clicks on such ads are mostly from the 10% of web users who make 50% of the clicks, but don't buy much. Many advertisers have opted out of the Google Content Network (read Search Engine Watch). As we point out, about 36% of Google Content Network advertisers are "bottom-feeders", junk sites with no verifiable business behind them. There's been a slow decline in contextual advertising, and I expect that to continue, and maybe accelerate. Ad-supported sites will feel the squeeze.
Targeted advertising is effective if the advertiser has the user's buying history. Amazon exploits this successfully; they know exactly what you've bought. But spreading that information around creates privacy problems and loud objections. Merchants aren't keen about letting their competitors know who their best customers are. Payment companies like Visa and PayPay could in theory take that role, but they've been reluctant to do so for fear of regulatory backlash. Payment companies don't currently know what you bought, just who you bought it from. They'd need merchant cooperation to profile their customer base.
What this may mean is a network effect for broad-based online merchants like Amazon. The bigger they get, the better their targeted advertising becomes. Customers don't object, because they're dealing with one company which legitimately knows what they've bought. Amazon may take up the slack as brick-and-mortar stores go under. In consumer electronics, Circuit City, The Good Guys, CompUSA, etc. have all gone under, and Amazon is taking up much of the slack.
1996 called. It wants its HP NetBeamIR Infrared Ethernet Access Point back.
IR access points have been around for years, and they work OK. They can even be made to work through diffuse reflections, so you don't have to have a clear line of sight. But you need a lot of access points to cover a space.
One wonders what CMI has to hide. The software shouldn't be that complicated. The thing uses a Z80, after all. It's not like they have Windows CE in there. Yet CMI has accepted over $2 million in fines rather than disclose the source code.
Somebody should buy one, read out the ROM, and disassemble the code.