Slowly these things get better. Automatically guided vehicles have been around for about 25 years, and they keep improving. Early ones were guided by wires buried in the floor, and essentially ran on tracks. Now they have much more flexibility.
About fifteen years ago there was a research project which used small forklift-like robots. These worked together to move loads too big for one to lift. Two such robots could pick up and move a couch. That idea needs to be revived.
Quietly, the machinery for moving containers around ports is becoming automated. Several ports now have large, autonomous machines moving containers around. Antwerp has had this for years, but there the container sits on top of the AGV. The new approach is automated straddle cranes, the same cranes normally driven by humans. The article points out that the robots drive better than people; fuel and tire consumption are down 30%. The big container cranes themselves have had vision systems and LIDAR units for years; many are now fully automated.
Facebook will probably lose in California with that. California has a right of publicity, enacted because California has so many celebrities that advertisers would like to use in ads.
The EULA says "for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof". But it doesn't cover the use of images in connection with advertising of third party products. That's a separate issue. California requires explicit prior consent "for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services". This is completely independent of copyright. Facebook may have the right to use the images, but doesn't have the right to use the individuals pictured in them for third-party advertising purposes.
In California, everybody has a minimum celebrity value of $750 for celebrity-rights purposes.
If anyone incurs costs as a result of this, they can sue Macrovision. Macrovision isn't protected by Microsoft's EULA. (Nor can it be; there's a legal concept called "privity" that applies to third party issues like this.) The end user has no contractual relationship with Macrovision. So there's nothing protecting them from a negligence lawsuit.
Macrovision is as vulnerable as Sony was.
SETI looks for obsolete technology
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
One serious problem with SETI is that it looks only for obsolete forms of modulation.
Almost all the SETI efforts are looking for "carriers", signals that are mostly wasted energy. AM and FM broadcast radio, and analog TV, have strong carriers. Almost nothing else does any more. There are more efficient ways to synch up the receiver. The strong-carrier systems are being phased out. In a few decades, nobody on Earth will be sending out strong carriers.
SETI is thus looking for civilizations in their first century of radio. The odds of finding an intelligent signal with current approaches is low.
The problem with looking for complex signals, like digital TV, is that they look like noise. Imagine some alien civilization receiving a DTV signal. It's quite possible that some of a a DTV signal might make it to a nearby star; terrestrial DTV is broadcast with megawatt power. But it will probably get there below the noise threshold. You can find a dumb carrier well below the noise threshold, because it's so repetitive. You may not be able to read the modulated information, but you can tell there's a carrier. But an encoded digital signal below the noise threshold just looks like noise.
There are digital signals designed for reception below the noise threshold; GPS is encoded for that. But the data rate is low and the redundancy is high. That's not true of DTV.
One can imagine an alien civilization finally figuring out they're getting something from Earth, building a big receiving antenna in their outer system to get a clean signal, and then trying to figure out how to decompress the thing. At least they don't have to crack DRM encryption first.
This is more of a stunt. It's relatively straightforward to design the control electronics for a display such that the electronics draws under a milliwatt in standby. The problem is how to get 1mW at 5V or so from the power line. Low-end switching power supplies don't even work right with no load, and better ones still draw a few percent of full-load current when unloaded. So you can't use the main power supply.
Transformers have the same problem.
What's really needed are low-cost power supplies for
obtaining something like a milliwatt from the power line without wasting more
power than they deliver. But they have to be attached to the power line, and need the the protection circuitry and isolation for that. It's not something that can be done with a single IC.
One could power the standby electronics from an ultracapacitor, and when it gets low, bring up the main power supply for a few seconds for a recharge.
It's interesting that these articles don't even mention that Microsoft's insistence on running executable content from the browser is at the heart of all these problems.
US copyright terms should simply be "harmonized" with the TRIPS agreement. The TRIPS treaty (a WTO thing pushed by the US) calls for a minimum copyright term of 50 years, and most countries have signed on. So let's take that as the US term - 50 years, maximum.
Call it the "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", and trim back US law to the minimums required by the TRIPS agreement. That's a good first step.
As part of this, provide that willfully publishing content with a false copyright date voids the copyright in the material. This punishes criminal copyright fraud (it's a crime now, but there have been no prosecutions), and will discourage re-stamping old content with new copyright dates. This provision should be retroactive.
Those are provisions one could probably get through Congress.
These beads are supposed to stick together, and so they have a water-activated glue on the surface. The toy concept is that kids build something in a supporting tray, spray it with water, and then can remove the whole design in one piece. There's no excuse for having anything even remotely toxic in a material intended for use like that.
The previous popular toy with little stick-together spheres was Magnetix, from Rose Art. That one was recalled after one death and 27 emergency surgeries for ingesting the conveniently candy-sized cobalt-neodymium magnets.
Get the kids Legos. That company has a clue about how to get parts to attach.
The ISS has an illegal modded "region-free" DVD player, purchased by NASA and shipped up in 2001.
Properly, the ISS should have a Region 8 player. Those are for aircraft, cruise ships, and "international venues". Airlines have to buy Region 8 players and discs for in-flight entertainment. Why isn't the MPAA pursuing this? It sets a bad example.
IBM's great adventure in architecture for programmers was IBM Santa Teresa, opened in 1977. They really tried to build a building optimized for programming work. The first priority was "a private, personal work area that permits intense concentration,
screens distractions, and discourages interruptions, with
connections for a computer terminal and adequate space to
lay out and store large quantities of paper goods".
Sounds like MIT's architect blew it there.
High end struggles to catch up with the low end
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 1
Some of the advanced technology used in food production plants is filtering down to the chef level. The commercial guys have to produce products that are storeable, transportable, and repeatable, so they have a tougher job. If you don't have to do that but have access to commercial technology, a whole range of interesting options open up. One of the newer ideas of interest is cryogenic grinding, where foods are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures before grinding. This reduces loss of volatile components (which carry most of the flavor) during grinding. Works well for nutmeg, and is being tried for other spices.
The bookbinding machine? That was mentioned on Slashdot previously. It's not that novel. Many of the bigger copiers/printers have a binder option. Larger Kinkos outlets can crank out perfect-bound books. The price and cost figures are vaporware; the bookbinding machine isn't actually in production. The Internet Archive has a printing and binding operation in a van (the "Internet Bookmobile"), and has for years. Uses a semi-auto binder.
The programmable water display is one of those cute one-off things. I've seen some similar gadgets, including a projection screen made of mist. That showed up at a venture capital conference in Silicon Valley a few months ago. Modulated water displays were done in Japan in the 1980s, and they've been tried in some US retail locations.
The "air car" has some grand claims. "For various reasons, one of which is industrial secrecy, we havent published all technical details on this site." Right. The thing is actually supposed to be a gasoline-powered hybrid - "The Series 34 CATs engines can be equipped with and run on dual energies - fossil fuels and compressed air". Plus, there's an electric motor and battery in there. "Parking manoeuvres are powered by the electric motor." It's not clear why they need both electrical and compressed air energy storage. The actual range they've achieved running on compressed air is only 7.2Km. All they actually have on the road is one prototype car made of welded tubes, with steel compressed air tanks driving an ordinary reciprocating compressor as an air motor. None of their claimed technology (the carbon fibre tanks, the wierd crankshaft linkage, the low-friction seals) is in use. They have a good Monster Garage project, but not a major invention.
The "40% more efficient gasoline engine" thing isn't new. See this 1979 article in Mother Earth News. Wikipedia has a good article on water injection, and there's a link to Crowder's engine. The general consensus today seems to be that turbos and intercoolers have made water injection obsolete. If you use water injection, you have to carry either a water tank about as big as the gas tank, or a condenser and oil/water separation system.
I'm not impressed with Time's selections. There must have been some better work this year, or we're in real trouble in technology.
You can look at the building (900 North Franklin, Chicago, IL 60610) in Google Street View. Older brick building with casement windows. Main entrance has wooden doors with big glass panels. No sign of external cameras. Rear of building has an external fire escape. Extensive graffiti on upper story doors leading to fire escape. Upper story windows easily reachable from fire escape.
Brick-like things with multi pin connectors are usually a headache. Either one side of the connector has to float, or you need a very rigid mounting system. Military systems tend to be built with boxes that you shove into a slot, and even with military grade components, heavy latching systems, and high insertion forces, those connectors are a trouble spot. That's why you don't often see things like that in consumer products.
Cute idea, though, if they get all the mechanical details right.
Phoenix is putting a hypervisor in ROM. The hypervisor is called HyperCore, and not much information is available on it yet. It does assume virtualization hardware, like Xen, rather than patching code like VMware.
This raises many big questions:
Does Windows run under the hypervisor? (Side issues include Vista TPM validation and Microsoft license provisions against running consumer Vista on a virtual machine.)
What's the hypervisor's interface? How do we program an app that runs on the hypervisor?
What does this mean for drivers? Do drivers still talk to the real hardware, or just to the hypervisor?
How does the hypervisor manage GPUs? (Minor issue for servers, but a really tough question on the desktop.)
'Cause he's an old hippie
And he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old
Should he grab on to the new.
He's an old hippie
This new life is just a bust
He ain't trying to change nobody
He's just trying real hard to adjust.
It's hit some people in Silicon Valley hard, the ones who don't keep up. Anyone who's been to the Hacker's Conference in the last decade will recognize this.
I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery.
Automatic ("dial") telephony dates from about 1890. So that's about when you could start to build a relay computer.
But the real problem is memory. Electromechanical accounting machines date back to Hollerith in 1890, but none of the electromechanical machines ever had more than a few registers worth of storage. All the data was on cards or paper tapes. Astanoff, in 1937, tried a rotating drum of capacitors, recharged as they passed the read station, just like a DRAM refresh. Right concept, too early.
Not until after WWII was there any real progress on memory. The first memory devices that worked were delay line systems (long latency), Williams tube storage CRT systems (big, high cost), magnetic drums (long latency, but more capacity), and magnetic tape (really long latency but good capacity). None of those could have been made to work prior to WWII. Electronics wasn't there yet.
First, the USPTO trademark database. "Simpledog" - no hits. "Simple AND dog" - three dead applications for long phrases containing those two words. Definitely not a registered trademark. File your own trademark application if you like. It's easy, the entire process is online, and the fee is a few hundred dollars.
Next, let's try DomainTools.. "GNO, Inc. owns about 22,379 other domains." "1,219,449 other sites hosted on this server." That's a web spammer.
Finally, couldn't resist running "simpledog.com" through our SiteTruth system. No street address on the site. No SSL cert. Not in any of the business databases. "Site ownership unknown or questionable."
Yes, that's a web spammer all right. No sign of anything that looks like a trademark or a legitimate business.
Yes. The article is typical blogodreck, and links to a blog.
The research itself has serious problems. These weren't samples from incoming mail. They were samples from Capitol Police files, which means they'd already been considered potential threats by at least three people.
Consider what happens to incoming e-mail at a congressional office. First, it's spam-filtered automatically, so any bulk threat e-mailed to every member of Congress probably was dumped at the filters. Then some junior person reads it and sorts it.
(The people who do that job for the White House are unpaid interns.)
The basic sort is "opinion", which is just tallied; "casework", constituents of that Congressman who want some specific help; "office matters", something that the office staff actually needs to deal with, and "threats". The threats may get a quick look by a more senior staffer, who decides whether they need to go to the Capitol Police.
Then, at the Capitol Police end, someone has to decide if it's worth opening a case file for the letter.
So a study based on Capitol Police files reflects what gets through the automatic and manual filtering. The study may say more about staff thinking than the incoming content.
The "Helium 3 on the moon" people have it backwards. As someone else pointed out, you have to mine a lot of dirt to get any useful amount of the stuff. On the other hand, deuterium is available at moderate prices. Heavy water costs about $300/Kg. If we ever get fusion to work as a power source (a big if, after half a century of failure), deuterium fusion will work first.
There's some grumbling about deuterium fusion producing radioactive waste products, but it's nowhere near as messy as fission. You get some tritium (which is a useful material; among other things, it decays into... Helium-3!) and the reactor components may become radioactive, but the isotopes are relatively short-lived; decades, not millennia, of decay time are required. The concrete and steel has already cooled off for many older decommissioned reactors.
Helium-3 fusion is potentially cleaner, though. If we ever get fusion to work, it's the fuel of choice for getting off the earth with fusion power, because you could dump the reaction products into the atmosphere without causing fallout.
So forget about mining the moon to power Earth. Dumb idea. Think about mining helium on Earth to power launch vehicles.
The trouble is, Microsoft has a point. Original HTML, up to, say HTML 3.1, was limited but a reasonable design. Most of the attempts to extend past that point have been disappointing. CSS is a collection of attributes in search of an architecture. Page layout with "float" and "clear" is too limited and doesn't work well. (The "three column problem" is well known, and workarounds using layers or absolute positioning often result in text on top of other text.) Javascript is a mediocre language. (Could have been worse; see TCL.) That's the current mess.
Papering over the problem with a layer of "toolkits" just resulted in a proliferation of incompatible toolkit layers. That wasn't the solution.
But Microsoft will try to "fix" the problem with a closed, ambiguous system that requires frequent updates. That's what they do with everything else.
I don't see a good way out of this. Who can provide leadership? Adobe? They can't even make Dreamweaver work right any more.
Agreed. "If you want a domain so you can sell something, you should be willing to let the world know who you really are." says it all.
Anonymous registration for individuals could be allowed in ".name", to satisfy the need for individual privacy. If you need to publish political rants anonymously, register, say, "china-dissident-99.name" But you can't pretend to be a business in ".name".
As the head of a team that lost in 2005, I don't think so. The 2005 competition was run fairly. The Marine colonel who ran the thing was tough, but fair. The only extra consideration I saw given to a team was that CMU got to have a Discovery Channel camera crew in the starting gate area, which, under the rules, was limited to two people per team.
In the Urban Challenge, if you hit a stationary object, you weren't ready to compete at that level. Back in 2004, 'bots were hitting stationary obstacles all over the place. Some went off road and rolled over. Oshkosh Truck/OSU not only hit a parked SUV, it pushed it for a while until someone hit the remote emergency stop. (That's why Oshkosh Truck dumped OSU, pulled the project in-house, and finished in 2005, using their huge truck.) CMU hit a fence placed by DARPA just before the event. CMU's vehicle, in 2004, wasn't really autonomous, just preprogrammed. They had a trailer full of people manually planning the route in the two hours before the event, using data obtained via overflights of the area with LIDAR-equipped aircraft. The 2004 Grand Challenge was embarrassing for everyone involved, including DARPA. The press reports made it look like a joke.
In 2005, everybody who made it to Fontana had something better than anybody had in 2004.
There were very few collisions. It was striking, being at the raceway in Fontana, and seeing 43 large, autonomous vehicles, all of which basically worked. There'd been enormous progress in a year and a half. Mobile robotics wasn't a joke any more. We were out of the Comedy Channel/Robot Wars era, and into the ESPN/NASCAR era. With NASCAR-sized budgets for some teams, but not all. Some small teams were successful. Although "small", in this game, means mid six figures to low seven figures.
This year, DARPA insists you not hit anything. Urban Challenge vehicles have to drive in traffic. There are cars with human drivers on the course. Complaining about being eliminated after a collision with a stationary barrier is just whining.
Digital cinema systems for theaters, at 1080 x 2048 pixels ("2K") at 24FPS, use about 300GB to store a movie. A typical movie server stores 2TB of uncompressed video. "4K" systems, which have 4x as many pixels, are now being deployed.
4K cameras and data recorders are already available. 16 bits per color channel. "In one shot Origin can handle both the naked flame of a candle and the delicate, nuanced shadows on candlelit faces. It can handle the full glare of the sun reflected from a window and still resolve the subtleties of the shadows below." 402MB/s output, delivered over four fibre optic strands using Infiniband.
Now we have to deliver all, or at least most, of that data to the living room.
Slashdot Mirror
Slowly these things get better. Automatically guided vehicles have been around for about 25 years, and they keep improving. Early ones were guided by wires buried in the floor, and essentially ran on tracks. Now they have much more flexibility.
About fifteen years ago there was a research project which used small forklift-like robots. These worked together to move loads too big for one to lift. Two such robots could pick up and move a couch. That idea needs to be revived.
Quietly, the machinery for moving containers around ports is becoming automated. Several ports now have large, autonomous machines moving containers around. Antwerp has had this for years, but there the container sits on top of the AGV. The new approach is automated straddle cranes, the same cranes normally driven by humans. The article points out that the robots drive better than people; fuel and tire consumption are down 30%. The big container cranes themselves have had vision systems and LIDAR units for years; many are now fully automated.
Facebook will probably lose in California with that. California has a right of publicity, enacted because California has so many celebrities that advertisers would like to use in ads.
The EULA says "for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof". But it doesn't cover the use of images in connection with advertising of third party products. That's a separate issue. California requires explicit prior consent "for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services". This is completely independent of copyright. Facebook may have the right to use the images, but doesn't have the right to use the individuals pictured in them for third-party advertising purposes.
In California, everybody has a minimum celebrity value of $750 for celebrity-rights purposes.
If anyone incurs costs as a result of this, they can sue Macrovision. Macrovision isn't protected by Microsoft's EULA. (Nor can it be; there's a legal concept called "privity" that applies to third party issues like this.) The end user has no contractual relationship with Macrovision. So there's nothing protecting them from a negligence lawsuit.
Macrovision is as vulnerable as Sony was.
One serious problem with SETI is that it looks only for obsolete forms of modulation. Almost all the SETI efforts are looking for "carriers", signals that are mostly wasted energy. AM and FM broadcast radio, and analog TV, have strong carriers. Almost nothing else does any more. There are more efficient ways to synch up the receiver. The strong-carrier systems are being phased out. In a few decades, nobody on Earth will be sending out strong carriers.
SETI is thus looking for civilizations in their first century of radio. The odds of finding an intelligent signal with current approaches is low.
The problem with looking for complex signals, like digital TV, is that they look like noise. Imagine some alien civilization receiving a DTV signal. It's quite possible that some of a a DTV signal might make it to a nearby star; terrestrial DTV is broadcast with megawatt power. But it will probably get there below the noise threshold. You can find a dumb carrier well below the noise threshold, because it's so repetitive. You may not be able to read the modulated information, but you can tell there's a carrier. But an encoded digital signal below the noise threshold just looks like noise.
There are digital signals designed for reception below the noise threshold; GPS is encoded for that. But the data rate is low and the redundancy is high. That's not true of DTV.
One can imagine an alien civilization finally figuring out they're getting something from Earth, building a big receiving antenna in their outer system to get a clean signal, and then trying to figure out how to decompress the thing. At least they don't have to crack DRM encryption first.
This is more of a stunt. It's relatively straightforward to design the control electronics for a display such that the electronics draws under a milliwatt in standby. The problem is how to get 1mW at 5V or so from the power line. Low-end switching power supplies don't even work right with no load, and better ones still draw a few percent of full-load current when unloaded. So you can't use the main power supply. Transformers have the same problem.
What's really needed are low-cost power supplies for obtaining something like a milliwatt from the power line without wasting more power than they deliver. But they have to be attached to the power line, and need the the protection circuitry and isolation for that. It's not something that can be done with a single IC.
One could power the standby electronics from an ultracapacitor, and when it gets low, bring up the main power supply for a few seconds for a recharge.
It's interesting that these articles don't even mention that Microsoft's insistence on running executable content from the browser is at the heart of all these problems.
Finer-grained privileges! Interprocess communication! Finally, Linux gets the stuff that's been missing from Unix since 1980 or so.
Maybe someday we'll get real exclusive use on files.
US copyright terms should simply be "harmonized" with the TRIPS agreement. The TRIPS treaty (a WTO thing pushed by the US) calls for a minimum copyright term of 50 years, and most countries have signed on. So let's take that as the US term - 50 years, maximum.
Call it the "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", and trim back US law to the minimums required by the TRIPS agreement. That's a good first step.
As part of this, provide that willfully publishing content with a false copyright date voids the copyright in the material. This punishes criminal copyright fraud (it's a crime now, but there have been no prosecutions), and will discourage re-stamping old content with new copyright dates. This provision should be retroactive.
Those are provisions one could probably get through Congress.
These beads are supposed to stick together, and so they have a water-activated glue on the surface. The toy concept is that kids build something in a supporting tray, spray it with water, and then can remove the whole design in one piece. There's no excuse for having anything even remotely toxic in a material intended for use like that.
The previous popular toy with little stick-together spheres was Magnetix, from Rose Art. That one was recalled after one death and 27 emergency surgeries for ingesting the conveniently candy-sized cobalt-neodymium magnets.
Get the kids Legos. That company has a clue about how to get parts to attach.
The ISS has an illegal modded "region-free" DVD player, purchased by NASA and shipped up in 2001.
Properly, the ISS should have a Region 8 player. Those are for aircraft, cruise ships, and "international venues". Airlines have to buy Region 8 players and discs for in-flight entertainment. Why isn't the MPAA pursuing this? It sets a bad example.
IBM's great adventure in architecture for programmers was IBM Santa Teresa, opened in 1977. They really tried to build a building optimized for programming work. The first priority was "a private, personal work area that permits intense concentration, screens distractions, and discourages interruptions, with connections for a computer terminal and adequate space to lay out and store large quantities of paper goods".
Sounds like MIT's architect blew it there.
In commercial food production, none of this is new. Here's a first course in food chemistry online. Read Sources of Flavor Volatiles in Food (PowerPoint).
Some of the advanced technology used in food production plants is filtering down to the chef level. The commercial guys have to produce products that are storeable, transportable, and repeatable, so they have a tougher job. If you don't have to do that but have access to commercial technology, a whole range of interesting options open up. One of the newer ideas of interest is cryogenic grinding, where foods are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures before grinding. This reduces loss of volatile components (which carry most of the flavor) during grinding. Works well for nutmeg, and is being tried for other spices.
The bookbinding machine? That was mentioned on Slashdot previously. It's not that novel. Many of the bigger copiers/printers have a binder option. Larger Kinkos outlets can crank out perfect-bound books. The price and cost figures are vaporware; the bookbinding machine isn't actually in production. The Internet Archive has a printing and binding operation in a van (the "Internet Bookmobile"), and has for years. Uses a semi-auto binder.
The programmable water display is one of those cute one-off things. I've seen some similar gadgets, including a projection screen made of mist. That showed up at a venture capital conference in Silicon Valley a few months ago. Modulated water displays were done in Japan in the 1980s, and they've been tried in some US retail locations.
The "air car" has some grand claims. "For various reasons, one of which is industrial secrecy, we havent published all technical details on this site." Right. The thing is actually supposed to be a gasoline-powered hybrid - "The Series 34 CATs engines can be equipped with and run on dual energies - fossil fuels and compressed air". Plus, there's an electric motor and battery in there. "Parking manoeuvres are powered by the electric motor." It's not clear why they need both electrical and compressed air energy storage. The actual range they've achieved running on compressed air is only 7.2Km. All they actually have on the road is one prototype car made of welded tubes, with steel compressed air tanks driving an ordinary reciprocating compressor as an air motor. None of their claimed technology (the carbon fibre tanks, the wierd crankshaft linkage, the low-friction seals) is in use. They have a good Monster Garage project, but not a major invention.
The "40% more efficient gasoline engine" thing isn't new. See this 1979 article in Mother Earth News. Wikipedia has a good article on water injection, and there's a link to Crowder's engine. The general consensus today seems to be that turbos and intercoolers have made water injection obsolete. If you use water injection, you have to carry either a water tank about as big as the gas tank, or a condenser and oil/water separation system.
I'm not impressed with Time's selections. There must have been some better work this year, or we're in real trouble in technology.
You can look at the building (900 North Franklin, Chicago, IL 60610) in Google Street View. Older brick building with casement windows. Main entrance has wooden doors with big glass panels. No sign of external cameras. Rear of building has an external fire escape. Extensive graffiti on upper story doors leading to fire escape. Upper story windows easily reachable from fire escape.
Brick-like things with multi pin connectors are usually a headache. Either one side of the connector has to float, or you need a very rigid mounting system. Military systems tend to be built with boxes that you shove into a slot, and even with military grade components, heavy latching systems, and high insertion forces, those connectors are a trouble spot. That's why you don't often see things like that in consumer products.
Cute idea, though, if they get all the mechanical details right.
Phoenix is putting a hypervisor in ROM. The hypervisor is called HyperCore, and not much information is available on it yet. It does assume virtualization hardware, like Xen, rather than patching code like VMware.
This raises many big questions:
'Cause he's an old hippie
And he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old
Should he grab on to the new.
He's an old hippie
This new life is just a bust
He ain't trying to change nobody
He's just trying real hard to adjust.
It's hit some people in Silicon Valley hard, the ones who don't keep up. Anyone who's been to the Hacker's Conference in the last decade will recognize this.
I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery.
Automatic ("dial") telephony dates from about 1890. So that's about when you could start to build a relay computer.
But the real problem is memory. Electromechanical accounting machines date back to Hollerith in 1890, but none of the electromechanical machines ever had more than a few registers worth of storage. All the data was on cards or paper tapes. Astanoff, in 1937, tried a rotating drum of capacitors, recharged as they passed the read station, just like a DRAM refresh. Right concept, too early.
Not until after WWII was there any real progress on memory. The first memory devices that worked were delay line systems (long latency), Williams tube storage CRT systems (big, high cost), magnetic drums (long latency, but more capacity), and magnetic tape (really long latency but good capacity). None of those could have been made to work prior to WWII. Electronics wasn't there yet.
OK, let's do some lookups.
First, the USPTO trademark database. "Simpledog" - no hits. "Simple AND dog" - three dead applications for long phrases containing those two words. Definitely not a registered trademark. File your own trademark application if you like. It's easy, the entire process is online, and the fee is a few hundred dollars.
Next, let's try DomainTools.. "GNO, Inc. owns about 22,379 other domains." "1,219,449 other sites hosted on this server." That's a web spammer.
Now let's check domain dispute decisions. Here's Panthers BRHC L.L.C. v. Gregg Ostrick/GNO, Inc. (re "bocaresorts.com" dispute). The owners of a resort hotel in Boca Raton challenged GNO for using "bocaresorts.com" against their trademark "Boca Raton Resort & Club" and domain "bocaresort.com". GNO lost.
Finally, couldn't resist running "simpledog.com" through our SiteTruth system. No street address on the site. No SSL cert. Not in any of the business databases. "Site ownership unknown or questionable."
Yes, that's a web spammer all right. No sign of anything that looks like a trademark or a legitimate business.
Yes. The article is typical blogodreck, and links to a blog.
The research itself has serious problems. These weren't samples from incoming mail. They were samples from Capitol Police files, which means they'd already been considered potential threats by at least three people.
Consider what happens to incoming e-mail at a congressional office. First, it's spam-filtered automatically, so any bulk threat e-mailed to every member of Congress probably was dumped at the filters. Then some junior person reads it and sorts it. (The people who do that job for the White House are unpaid interns.) The basic sort is "opinion", which is just tallied; "casework", constituents of that Congressman who want some specific help; "office matters", something that the office staff actually needs to deal with, and "threats". The threats may get a quick look by a more senior staffer, who decides whether they need to go to the Capitol Police. Then, at the Capitol Police end, someone has to decide if it's worth opening a case file for the letter.
So a study based on Capitol Police files reflects what gets through the automatic and manual filtering. The study may say more about staff thinking than the incoming content.
The "Helium 3 on the moon" people have it backwards. As someone else pointed out, you have to mine a lot of dirt to get any useful amount of the stuff. On the other hand, deuterium is available at moderate prices. Heavy water costs about $300/Kg. If we ever get fusion to work as a power source (a big if, after half a century of failure), deuterium fusion will work first.
There's some grumbling about deuterium fusion producing radioactive waste products, but it's nowhere near as messy as fission. You get some tritium (which is a useful material; among other things, it decays into ... Helium-3!) and the reactor components may become radioactive, but the isotopes are relatively short-lived; decades, not millennia, of decay time are required. The concrete and steel has already cooled off for many older decommissioned reactors.
Helium-3 fusion is potentially cleaner, though. If we ever get fusion to work, it's the fuel of choice for getting off the earth with fusion power, because you could dump the reaction products into the atmosphere without causing fallout.
So forget about mining the moon to power Earth. Dumb idea. Think about mining helium on Earth to power launch vehicles.
The trouble is, Microsoft has a point. Original HTML, up to, say HTML 3.1, was limited but a reasonable design. Most of the attempts to extend past that point have been disappointing. CSS is a collection of attributes in search of an architecture. Page layout with "float" and "clear" is too limited and doesn't work well. (The "three column problem" is well known, and workarounds using layers or absolute positioning often result in text on top of other text.) Javascript is a mediocre language. (Could have been worse; see TCL.) That's the current mess.
Papering over the problem with a layer of "toolkits" just resulted in a proliferation of incompatible toolkit layers. That wasn't the solution.
But Microsoft will try to "fix" the problem with a closed, ambiguous system that requires frequent updates. That's what they do with everything else.
I don't see a good way out of this. Who can provide leadership? Adobe? They can't even make Dreamweaver work right any more.
Agreed. "If you want a domain so you can sell something, you should be willing to let the world know who you really are." says it all.
Anonymous registration for individuals could be allowed in ".name", to satisfy the need for individual privacy. If you need to publish political rants anonymously, register, say, "china-dissident-99.name" But you can't pretend to be a business in ".name".
As the head of a team that lost in 2005, I don't think so. The 2005 competition was run fairly. The Marine colonel who ran the thing was tough, but fair. The only extra consideration I saw given to a team was that CMU got to have a Discovery Channel camera crew in the starting gate area, which, under the rules, was limited to two people per team.
In the Urban Challenge, if you hit a stationary object, you weren't ready to compete at that level. Back in 2004, 'bots were hitting stationary obstacles all over the place. Some went off road and rolled over. Oshkosh Truck/OSU not only hit a parked SUV, it pushed it for a while until someone hit the remote emergency stop. (That's why Oshkosh Truck dumped OSU, pulled the project in-house, and finished in 2005, using their huge truck.) CMU hit a fence placed by DARPA just before the event. CMU's vehicle, in 2004, wasn't really autonomous, just preprogrammed. They had a trailer full of people manually planning the route in the two hours before the event, using data obtained via overflights of the area with LIDAR-equipped aircraft. The 2004 Grand Challenge was embarrassing for everyone involved, including DARPA. The press reports made it look like a joke.
In 2005, everybody who made it to Fontana had something better than anybody had in 2004. There were very few collisions. It was striking, being at the raceway in Fontana, and seeing 43 large, autonomous vehicles, all of which basically worked. There'd been enormous progress in a year and a half. Mobile robotics wasn't a joke any more. We were out of the Comedy Channel/Robot Wars era, and into the ESPN/NASCAR era. With NASCAR-sized budgets for some teams, but not all. Some small teams were successful. Although "small", in this game, means mid six figures to low seven figures.
This year, DARPA insists you not hit anything. Urban Challenge vehicles have to drive in traffic. There are cars with human drivers on the course. Complaining about being eliminated after a collision with a stationary barrier is just whining.
Digital cinema systems for theaters, at 1080 x 2048 pixels ("2K") at 24FPS, use about 300GB to store a movie. A typical movie server stores 2TB of uncompressed video. "4K" systems, which have 4x as many pixels, are now being deployed.
4K cameras and data recorders are already available. 16 bits per color channel. "In one shot Origin can handle both the naked flame of a candle and the delicate, nuanced shadows on candlelit faces. It can handle the full glare of the sun reflected from a window and still resolve the subtleties of the shadows below." 402MB/s output, delivered over four fibre optic strands using Infiniband.
Now we have to deliver all, or at least most, of that data to the living room.
Then retrofit it to the surveillance cams.