Kinkos has has public telepresence rooms in some Kinkos outlets for years. They're not used much.
But the coolest telepresence system is the Telectroscope. This was very impressive.
Especially because it was installed in public locations in New York and London, turned on, and
left running 24 hours a day with no explanation.
The info now is that one of the air data units produced a bad inertial reference. There are three such units in an Airbus, and the flight control computers should have been able to vote the bad data out of the consensus for a single failure. That didn't happen, and it's important to understand why. That's the real problem. Single failures of inertial units should not produce a loss of control.
Apparently the failed inertial unit correctly produced a fault indication. Then, two minutes after the fault indication, it started producing bad pitch data. This resulted in a pitch-down command from the flight control system, which was trying to stabilize the aircraft but running off bad data. Maximum pitch down was 8.5 degrees and the aircraft only lost 650 feet of altitude. But at the tail end of the aircraft, the accelerations were high. The injured passengers were probably not belted in.
The air data units themselves are made by either Honeywell or Litton (now Northrup-Grumman). So far, the manufacturer hasn't been identified publicly.
Loss of inertial reference is serious. The pilot's artificial horizon display was also producing wrong data. In clouds, the pilot can't reliably tell which way is up. But
at least an Airbus is basically stable. In unstable aircraft that require active control to fly at all, like most of the stealthed aircraft, this is an eject situation.
(I've dealt with inertial problems in robot ground vehicles. Our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle worked badly because we had about 4 degrees of heading noise in the inertial system. We tried to compensate for that in software, but never got the compensation to work well enough. We needed to upgrade to a far more expensive fibre optic gyro. After we donated the vehicle to UC Santa Cruz, they got a FOG gyro and are currently installing it.)
I asked some basic business questions, like "What is your business plan?" and "Is your company profitable?", and got canned, clueless answers, no better than Eliza. "What magazines do you read?" yielded "You are probably on TV much of the time. Well, I'm in the Internet!".
"Do you have life insurance?" (there's apparently a plan to build an automated insurance sales rep) yielded "What a lovely verb have is."
I can't even find a subject area in which the thing sounds like it has a clue. Sports? This is a German system, so I tried "What is the best soccer team in Europe?", which yielded "The best? Aren't they all equal in the end?" D'oh. Celebrities? "What do you think of Franka Potente?" (a leading German actress) yielded "The way to a robot's heart is through careful use of physical strength. Don't you agree?". After that, I tried "What do you think of Big Dog?", and got "But I wouldn't say that any dog could be big."
As far as I can tell, the thing is totally stateless; it doesn't seem to use anything other than the current question as input. Nor does it even try to guide the conversation into an area about which it has information.
I'm so not impressed.
For a better chatterbot, try the GTA IV's web site. Go to "Goods and Services", then "Goldberg, Ligner, and Shyster", then "Legal advice".
This is the second debt clock. The first version could only count upward, and when the
budget had a surplus back in the Clinton years, and the debt began to decrease, the debt clock was shut down. After a year or so, it was then replaced with the current version, which has the ability to count both upward and downward. The downward capability has not been used during the Bush years.
The major key to fuel economy is not to brake much. That's when you're throwing energy away.
Unless you have something like a Prius, with regenerative braking. Pay attention to traffic
lights ahead of you, and coast up to red lights without braking if possible. Pay attention
to traffic light synchronization. Many lights are synchronized, at least for a few adjacent
lights, for a specific speed. Often, you can drive through a whole set of lights at
a fixed speed without stopping. Allow extra space ahead of you and use it to avoid
as much braking as possible.
For an amusing example of this, see the Great Highway in
San Francisco, which runs for several miles along the beach with no place to turn off,
but frequent traffic lights at pedestrian crossings. The traffic lights are all synchronized,
and if you drive exactly at the speed limit, you should never have to stop. But watch driver behavior there. Even in this ideal case, people are speeding up and slowing down.
For internal combustion engines at low speeds, heat loss, the "idling cost", within the engine dominates. This is not true of electric motors, which have no idling cost This is why electrics do so well at low speeds.
At a fixed speed, rolling resistance and air resistance dominate. Tire pressure matters far more at higher speeds. Air resistance goes up with the square of the speed; below 30MPH or so, it barely matters; at Formula I speeds, it dominates everything. (Formula I racing cars are using maybe half their energy in the airfoils used to push the car down into the road to get more traction.
However, a spoiler on a passenger car is a lose below 90MPH or so.)
The problem with most uncooled imagers isn't insufficient sensitivity any more. It's thermal noise. Unless this improves the S/N ratio, it won't help for uncooled imagers. That's
why digital cameras which increase sensitivity in darkness show more and more noise as less
light is received.
Cooled imagers, though, as in astronomy and fancier night vision equipment, might benefit.
Cooling is done to reduce the random photons from heat within the imager. So cooled imagers
do run into the sensitivity limitations of silicon, and might benefit.
But that's an exotic application. Cooled imagers are found mostly in military, space, and astronomy. Some require liquid nitrogen. It's not a mainstream technology.
Get a clue about how stuff is made
on
3D Printing On Demand
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For those of you who have no idea how real, physical stuff is made, there's an entire industry of small "job shops" that will take your design and make a part for you. If you're anywhere near a industrial city, there's probably one in your neighborhood. Most will use machine tools, but ones with stereolithography machines aren't that rare.
If you're in Silicon Valley and want to use a stereolithography machine, check out TechShop, which has one of the better ones. It won't be busy when you visit.
Traditionally, computing is taught "bottom up". Courses used to start with binary arithmetic and go on to NAND gates and flip-flops. Now, there's a trend towards "top down" instructions, where you start with something like using JavaScript to modify a web page, or PHP to create one.
Most people don't need to go very far down. Down to the first level of code probably covers most programmers today. Some still need to understand C. Fewer need to understand assembler. Fewer still need to understand what the CPU is really doing (do you know what a CPU's "retirement unit" does?). Still fewer will ever wire logic gates together, write VHDL, or deal with timing constraints in IC layout.
A bit of understanding of what goes on behind the screen is a help, though. A reasonable place to start might be PHP, followed by some MySQL to give a sense of how data is stored and looked up.
That makes sense.
Those grids of small ventilating/audio holes may well be laser-punched. The image shown has holes with a diameter of maybe 0.4mm, in stock that looks like
it's about 1.5mm-2mm thick. That's tough to do. A pin roller can't go through stock that thick.
A vertical punch with many long, tiny pins is too fragile.
Mechanical drilling would be slow, with all those holes. Chemical etching that deep is tough. But tiny round holes are the best case for laser drilling.
It's a very Jobs sort of thing. Most devices with ventilating or speaker holes have ones that big enough to admit foreign objects. But with laser drilling, you can make holes so small a staple or pin can't get through.
So now you have your l33t math skills. What do you do with them? Engineering has been offshored. There's now a glut of unemployed Wall Street rocket scientists. Defense spending has to decline, what with the bailout eating up the Government budget. And don't even talk about NASA.
Few programmers do that much math any more. Even game programmers don't do as much as they used to;
most of the hard stuff is embedded in packages now.
(I'm not complaining personally; I've done very well. But I can't recommend this to young people who have to go into debt to learn.)
Your comment suggests that you've seen this stuff in the flesh. Do you work with/for them...
No. I was at one of the meetings in Silicon Valley where companies go for VC funding, and had a chance to fold some of the plates by hand. They really do bend and snap together like they're supposed to.
What they're really selling is a CAD system that designs parts and stamping dies so this works.
If Microsoft only allowed products to show any kind of Windows logo if they complied with the security rules, this wouldn't be a problem. Microsoft loosened up on the logo program because developers weren't willing to bother.
This happened to Apple when they went to the PowerPC, and were dumped by many major software vendors. Apple wasn't in a position to order developers around, and they hadn't realized that. It took years to recover from that.
Right. Nobody makes mass-produced items by machining them out of solid metal. It's too slow, and you waste too much metal. That's what die-casting, drawing, and stamping are for. Laptop cases are thin enough that die-casting is probably overkill. Drawing or stamping is more likely, followed by a punching step.
There might be a role for a laser if very small holes have to be made or some surface
engraving is desired.
The NextCube case was a magnesium casting, which was sort of silly for a desktop device.
A cute idea for the case modding crowd would be industrial origami. This little-known technology works much better than you'd expect. It's a fun experience to take a flat, prepunched plate and hand-fold it into an electrical outlet box.
TrustE, in their early days, used to have several seals that indicated the level of privacy policy in use. So the TrustE seal actually meant something.
Then, in response to advertiser pressure, TrustE caved in. All a TrustE means now is that the site agrees to abide by its own privacy policy. It doesn't matter how intrusive the policy is; the site can still get a TrustE seal.
TrustE enforcement has been very weak. Here's a study of TrustE enforcement actions. "Their privacy standards are low to begin with, but even these rules are simply not enforced against large, paying members." In the entire history of TrustE, they have terminated only one paying seal-holder: Gratis Internet, the "free iPod" scammer.
Thomas is an external front end to the Congressional bill management system.
The actual bill source is maintained within the back end system that Thomas queries.
It's a web front end to a legacy database system, which is why it didn't have stable URLs. It's a bit painful to use because it has nothing like PageRank to move the "important" stuff to the top of results. But that's as it should be, because you don't want your source code control system deciding what's "important".
It's something into which investigators are looking. It's not even a likely cause.
Aircraft system interference from personal electronics has been observed a few times related to navigational signals, but those are weak RF signals from the outside. The control signals for the flight control system go over redundant networks, and there are multiple computers driving them. The Airbus primary and backup control systems are on different kinds of processors with different software in different languages developed by different teams.
I suspect they're looking really hard at the sensors for the pitch damper. Like most large aircraft, the Airbus has an automatic pitch damping system, to keep the tail from oscillating up and down, which is annoying to passengers in the back. An unexplained excursion in pitch will draw attention to that system.
A review, by an associate of the author, of an obscure product, with a picture of the book plastered on the front page of Slashdot. Who was paid off for that?
This is equivalent, in a security sense, to SSH/TLS with self-signed certs. There's no protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, but there is some protection against passive eavesdroppers.
Unfortunately, man-in-the-middle attacks are most likely in the same situation that allows easy passive eavesdropping - public WiFi access points.
Also, they've chosen completely different cryptographic standards than SSH/TLS uses, with different key handling. Until many qualified people have gone over exactly how that all works, it can't be trusted. There's a long history of botched crypto schemes. Is this, for example, subject to playback attacks? We don't know. Worse, it involves putting more trust in DNS, which is already a problem.
If something like this is desirable, it might be worthwhile to have a version of Apache that generated a random self-signed SSH/TLS cert for every hosted domain, and a version of Firefox which tried to use an SSH connection for every connection and accepted self-signed certs, but displayed a weaker icon than the "lock" icon; perhaps a picture of a knot. That would use existing technology and wouldn't be hard to do.
Actually, Google's point was that they wanted motherboards that ran on 12 VDC only. PC
power supplies are still providing +12, -12, +5, -5, and +3.3v. Most of those voltages are there
for legacy purposes, and DC-DC converters on the motherboard are doing further conversions anyway.
So there's no reason not to make motherboards that only need 12 VDC. Disks are already 12 VDC only,
so this gets everything on one voltage. This simplifies the power supply considerably, and avoids losses in producing some voltages that aren't used much.
But Google wasn't talking about using 12 VDC distribution within the data center. The busbars required would be huge at such a low voltage. They were talking about using 12 VDC within each rack. Distribution within the data center would still be 110 or 220 VAC.
Slashdot Mirror
It's at the "sole discretion" of Google. There's no provision for binding arbitration or litigation. So "whim" is correct.
If you want openness, get OpenMoko.
Kinkos has has public telepresence rooms in some Kinkos outlets for years. They're not used much.
But the coolest telepresence system is the Telectroscope. This was very impressive. Especially because it was installed in public locations in New York and London, turned on, and left running 24 hours a day with no explanation.
It's still too early to tell what happened.
The info now is that one of the air data units produced a bad inertial reference. There are three such units in an Airbus, and the flight control computers should have been able to vote the bad data out of the consensus for a single failure. That didn't happen, and it's important to understand why. That's the real problem. Single failures of inertial units should not produce a loss of control.
Apparently the failed inertial unit correctly produced a fault indication. Then, two minutes after the fault indication, it started producing bad pitch data. This resulted in a pitch-down command from the flight control system, which was trying to stabilize the aircraft but running off bad data. Maximum pitch down was 8.5 degrees and the aircraft only lost 650 feet of altitude. But at the tail end of the aircraft, the accelerations were high. The injured passengers were probably not belted in.
The air data units themselves are made by either Honeywell or Litton (now Northrup-Grumman). So far, the manufacturer hasn't been identified publicly.
Loss of inertial reference is serious. The pilot's artificial horizon display was also producing wrong data. In clouds, the pilot can't reliably tell which way is up. But at least an Airbus is basically stable. In unstable aircraft that require active control to fly at all, like most of the stealthed aircraft, this is an eject situation.
(I've dealt with inertial problems in robot ground vehicles. Our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle worked badly because we had about 4 degrees of heading noise in the inertial system. We tried to compensate for that in software, but never got the compensation to work well enough. We needed to upgrade to a far more expensive fibre optic gyro. After we donated the vehicle to UC Santa Cruz, they got a FOG gyro and are currently installing it.)
I asked some basic business questions, like "What is your business plan?" and "Is your company profitable?", and got canned, clueless answers, no better than Eliza. "What magazines do you read?" yielded "You are probably on TV much of the time. Well, I'm in the Internet!". "Do you have life insurance?" (there's apparently a plan to build an automated insurance sales rep) yielded "What a lovely verb have is."
I can't even find a subject area in which the thing sounds like it has a clue. Sports? This is a German system, so I tried "What is the best soccer team in Europe?", which yielded "The best? Aren't they all equal in the end?" D'oh. Celebrities? "What do you think of Franka Potente?" (a leading German actress) yielded "The way to a robot's heart is through careful use of physical strength. Don't you agree?". After that, I tried "What do you think of Big Dog?", and got "But I wouldn't say that any dog could be big."
As far as I can tell, the thing is totally stateless; it doesn't seem to use anything other than the current question as input. Nor does it even try to guide the conversation into an area about which it has information.
I'm so not impressed.
For a better chatterbot, try the GTA IV's web site. Go to "Goods and Services", then "Goldberg, Ligner, and Shyster", then "Legal advice".
This is the second debt clock. The first version could only count upward, and when the budget had a surplus back in the Clinton years, and the debt began to decrease, the debt clock was shut down. After a year or so, it was then replaced with the current version, which has the ability to count both upward and downward. The downward capability has not been used during the Bush years.
The major key to fuel economy is not to brake much. That's when you're throwing energy away. Unless you have something like a Prius, with regenerative braking. Pay attention to traffic lights ahead of you, and coast up to red lights without braking if possible. Pay attention to traffic light synchronization. Many lights are synchronized, at least for a few adjacent lights, for a specific speed. Often, you can drive through a whole set of lights at a fixed speed without stopping. Allow extra space ahead of you and use it to avoid as much braking as possible.
For an amusing example of this, see the Great Highway in San Francisco, which runs for several miles along the beach with no place to turn off, but frequent traffic lights at pedestrian crossings. The traffic lights are all synchronized, and if you drive exactly at the speed limit, you should never have to stop. But watch driver behavior there. Even in this ideal case, people are speeding up and slowing down.
For internal combustion engines at low speeds, heat loss, the "idling cost", within the engine dominates. This is not true of electric motors, which have no idling cost This is why electrics do so well at low speeds.
At a fixed speed, rolling resistance and air resistance dominate. Tire pressure matters far more at higher speeds. Air resistance goes up with the square of the speed; below 30MPH or so, it barely matters; at Formula I speeds, it dominates everything. (Formula I racing cars are using maybe half their energy in the airfoils used to push the car down into the road to get more traction. However, a spoiler on a passenger car is a lose below 90MPH or so.)
The problem with most uncooled imagers isn't insufficient sensitivity any more. It's thermal noise. Unless this improves the S/N ratio, it won't help for uncooled imagers. That's why digital cameras which increase sensitivity in darkness show more and more noise as less light is received.
Cooled imagers, though, as in astronomy and fancier night vision equipment, might benefit. Cooling is done to reduce the random photons from heat within the imager. So cooled imagers do run into the sensitivity limitations of silicon, and might benefit.
But that's an exotic application. Cooled imagers are found mostly in military, space, and astronomy. Some require liquid nitrogen. It's not a mainstream technology.
For those of you who have no idea how real, physical stuff is made, there's an entire industry of small "job shops" that will take your design and make a part for you. If you're anywhere near a industrial city, there's probably one in your neighborhood. Most will use machine tools, but ones with stereolithography machines aren't that rare.
If you're in Silicon Valley and want to use a stereolithography machine, check out TechShop, which has one of the better ones. It won't be busy when you visit.
Geeks will inherit the earth my ass.
Well, the geek who started Various, Inc., which runs "alt.com", "adultfriendfinder.com", and "friendfinder.com", recently bought Penthouse.
Traditionally, computing is taught "bottom up". Courses used to start with binary arithmetic and go on to NAND gates and flip-flops. Now, there's a trend towards "top down" instructions, where you start with something like using JavaScript to modify a web page, or PHP to create one.
Most people don't need to go very far down. Down to the first level of code probably covers most programmers today. Some still need to understand C. Fewer need to understand assembler. Fewer still need to understand what the CPU is really doing (do you know what a CPU's "retirement unit" does?). Still fewer will ever wire logic gates together, write VHDL, or deal with timing constraints in IC layout.
A bit of understanding of what goes on behind the screen is a help, though. A reasonable place to start might be PHP, followed by some MySQL to give a sense of how data is stored and looked up.
Wireless networks with all the infrastructure running and no users have really great bandwidth. What's it going to be like under load?
Somebody finally found a use for simulated annealing.
That's mostly one of those AI ideas from the 1980s that turned out not to be too useful. It's a very slow approach to hill-climbing.
It was cooler 20 years ago or so, when Playboy Magazine did a cover which had an image tiled from all the previous covers.
The very small holes angle may be it.
That makes sense. Those grids of small ventilating/audio holes may well be laser-punched. The image shown has holes with a diameter of maybe 0.4mm, in stock that looks like it's about 1.5mm-2mm thick. That's tough to do. A pin roller can't go through stock that thick. A vertical punch with many long, tiny pins is too fragile. Mechanical drilling would be slow, with all those holes. Chemical etching that deep is tough. But tiny round holes are the best case for laser drilling.
It's a very Jobs sort of thing. Most devices with ventilating or speaker holes have ones that big enough to admit foreign objects. But with laser drilling, you can make holes so small a staple or pin can't get through.
So now you have your l33t math skills. What do you do with them? Engineering has been offshored. There's now a glut of unemployed Wall Street rocket scientists. Defense spending has to decline, what with the bailout eating up the Government budget. And don't even talk about NASA.
Few programmers do that much math any more. Even game programmers don't do as much as they used to; most of the hard stuff is embedded in packages now.
(I'm not complaining personally; I've done very well. But I can't recommend this to young people who have to go into debt to learn.)
Your comment suggests that you've seen this stuff in the flesh. Do you work with/for them...
No. I was at one of the meetings in Silicon Valley where companies go for VC funding, and had a chance to fold some of the plates by hand. They really do bend and snap together like they're supposed to.
What they're really selling is a CAD system that designs parts and stamping dies so this works.
If Microsoft only allowed products to show any kind of Windows logo if they complied with the security rules, this wouldn't be a problem. Microsoft loosened up on the logo program because developers weren't willing to bother.
This happened to Apple when they went to the PowerPC, and were dumped by many major software vendors. Apple wasn't in a position to order developers around, and they hadn't realized that. It took years to recover from that.
Right. Nobody makes mass-produced items by machining them out of solid metal. It's too slow, and you waste too much metal. That's what die-casting, drawing, and stamping are for. Laptop cases are thin enough that die-casting is probably overkill. Drawing or stamping is more likely, followed by a punching step. There might be a role for a laser if very small holes have to be made or some surface engraving is desired.
The NextCube case was a magnesium casting, which was sort of silly for a desktop device.
A cute idea for the case modding crowd would be industrial origami. This little-known technology works much better than you'd expect. It's a fun experience to take a flat, prepunched plate and hand-fold it into an electrical outlet box.
TrustE, in their early days, used to have several seals that indicated the level of privacy policy in use. So the TrustE seal actually meant something.
Then, in response to advertiser pressure, TrustE caved in. All a TrustE means now is that the site agrees to abide by its own privacy policy. It doesn't matter how intrusive the policy is; the site can still get a TrustE seal.
TrustE enforcement has been very weak. Here's a study of TrustE enforcement actions. "Their privacy standards are low to begin with, but even these rules are simply not enforced against large, paying members." In the entire history of TrustE, they have terminated only one paying seal-holder: Gratis Internet, the "free iPod" scammer.
Thomas is an external front end to the Congressional bill management system. The actual bill source is maintained within the back end system that Thomas queries. It's a web front end to a legacy database system, which is why it didn't have stable URLs. It's a bit painful to use because it has nothing like PageRank to move the "important" stuff to the top of results. But that's as it should be, because you don't want your source code control system deciding what's "important".
It's something into which investigators are looking. It's not even a likely cause.
Aircraft system interference from personal electronics has been observed a few times related to navigational signals, but those are weak RF signals from the outside. The control signals for the flight control system go over redundant networks, and there are multiple computers driving them. The Airbus primary and backup control systems are on different kinds of processors with different software in different languages developed by different teams.
I suspect they're looking really hard at the sensors for the pitch damper. Like most large aircraft, the Airbus has an automatic pitch damping system, to keep the tail from oscillating up and down, which is annoying to passengers in the back. An unexplained excursion in pitch will draw attention to that system.
A review, by an associate of the author, of an obscure product, with a picture of the book plastered on the front page of Slashdot. Who was paid off for that?
As soon as this sort of works, it will take over first level tech support. If it hasn't already.
This is equivalent, in a security sense, to SSH/TLS with self-signed certs. There's no protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, but there is some protection against passive eavesdroppers.
Unfortunately, man-in-the-middle attacks are most likely in the same situation that allows easy passive eavesdropping - public WiFi access points.
Also, they've chosen completely different cryptographic standards than SSH/TLS uses, with different key handling. Until many qualified people have gone over exactly how that all works, it can't be trusted. There's a long history of botched crypto schemes. Is this, for example, subject to playback attacks? We don't know. Worse, it involves putting more trust in DNS, which is already a problem.
If something like this is desirable, it might be worthwhile to have a version of Apache that generated a random self-signed SSH/TLS cert for every hosted domain, and a version of Firefox which tried to use an SSH connection for every connection and accepted self-signed certs, but displayed a weaker icon than the "lock" icon; perhaps a picture of a knot. That would use existing technology and wouldn't be hard to do.
Probable cause required after 24 hours? No. Probable cause must be required before search.
Google developed their own power supply
Actually, Google's point was that they wanted motherboards that ran on 12 VDC only. PC power supplies are still providing +12, -12, +5, -5, and +3.3v. Most of those voltages are there for legacy purposes, and DC-DC converters on the motherboard are doing further conversions anyway. So there's no reason not to make motherboards that only need 12 VDC. Disks are already 12 VDC only, so this gets everything on one voltage. This simplifies the power supply considerably, and avoids losses in producing some voltages that aren't used much.
But Google wasn't talking about using 12 VDC distribution within the data center. The busbars required would be huge at such a low voltage. They were talking about using 12 VDC within each rack. Distribution within the data center would still be 110 or 220 VAC.