Here's the original
Associated Press article without the annoying Physorg ads. (Google finally cut out the middlemen and started hosting Associated Press content themselves.)
Blu-Ray and HD don't have enough capacity to store really good HDTV without overcompression. Everything still blurs during motion and pans. Then, when motion stops, enough data comes in for the decompressor to catch up. Yuck. That's why the demo content in the stores is either near-static scenes without camera pans, or something with so much action that you can't see the artifacts. Long, slow pans still suck. They suck for 24FPS film, too, but we have the technology to do better now.
Right now, the displays are better than the storage medium. You can buy 1080p flat screens without any problem. Some of them can even do 60FPS. We need 4x to 8x as much data on the storage medium to feed those big, fast screens properly.
This will probably happen after the NFL figures out some way to transmit football at 60FPS.
There's much misplaced enthusiasm for stereolithography machines. They're useful and fun, but not a panacea. It's inherently a slow process, and far more expensive than injection moulding if you're making many copies. The amateur stereolithography machine from this latest Popular Mechanics article is neither novel nor particularly good; I've seen similar machines before. Pushing some viscous liquid out of a syringe isn't one of the better approaches.
If you want to try a stereolithography machine, and you're in the SF Bay Area, there's one available at TechShop in Menlo Park. Rates are very reasonable if you join TechShop. That machine makes hard ABS plastic objects with smooth surfaces, tough enough to be used as working parts. The machine probably won't be in use.
This has become a standard way to make prototypes of product designs, but it's not a production technology.
"The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability."
That's common in consumer electronics. DVD players are usually twice as wide as they should be. Audio components, too, tend to be mostly empty space inside. "Mini" versions have been marketed many times, but they're perceived as being "cheap".
Amusingly, although it's hard to get many chemicals today, you can buy gunpowder without any hassle. Search for "reloading supplies". Under US law, you can buy up to 50 pounds of gunpowder before you need a license.
where the player pretty much is in control, but only in a way that pigeon holes them into one set of actions, such as only being able to move in one direction and all other controls are disabled or even forcing all controls to do the same thing.
In the industry this is called a "track ride". As in an amusement park.
Reason for deletion: "Non-notable, in-universe only subject. Unlikely reliable sources can be found to indicate notability. Fails [[WP:FICT]]."
That's correct. [[WP:FICT]], the Wikipedia Policy on Fiction, is what keeps Wikipedia from drowning in fancruft. A published book or movie gets an article. Minor plot elements and minor characters do not get their own articles, unless they themselves are notable enough to have writeups in significant published sources. Yoda and Gandalf have articles of their own. Below that level of notability, auxiliary articles for components of fictional works should be avoided. Usually, a line or two in the main article is sufficient.
Remember, others have to check and maintain this stuff. Every new article adds to the load. Cleanup, linking, categorization, translation, and other tasks have large backlogs due to all the incoming junk.
If you want to write fancruft, go over to Wikia. That's their business.
Wikia, Jimbo's for-profit wiki company, is the "Trivipedia" system. They host the Star Wars wiki, the World of Warcraft wiki, the Everquest wiki, the Star Trek wiki (plus a second wiki for fan fiction) the Marvel Comics database, and even a Muppet wiki. Ten of the top twelve wikis on Wikia are fancruft. That's their market niche.
Right. I heard the same thing from an Applied Materials VP.
Besides, the serious players in the solar business are now making solar cells five square meters at a time, using gear based on LCD panel fab technology. Solar panel production has gone way beyond using recycled IC wafers.
We normally answer complaints on the SiteTruth blog (www.sitetruth.net), but since this was posted here...
The street address,
CoreCodec, Inc.
10 Larkspur Way
Palm Coast
Florida
USA
32137
wasn't recognized because it's not a valid USPS address. See the USPS Postal Addressing Standards. The last line in all US addresses should be "City State ZIP". Try:
CoreCodec, Inc.
10 Larkspur Way
Palm Coast, Florida 32137
USA
As for the SSL cert, if you connect to https://www.corecodec.com, the site sends back an SSL cert for "services.corecodec.com". Browsers complain about that. We ignore the certificate as a mismatch. That's equivalent to having no SSL cert, as far as we're concerned. There's no penalty; it's just ignored.
Most of the privacy advocates are referring to the European Directive on Privacy. That only applies to individuals not engaged in business. For businesses, the The European Electronic Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) applies. And it's very clear. Any "natural or legal person providing an information society service" must disclose name, real-world address, and E-mail address. No exceptions.
California has a similar law. It's more narrowly drawn, only applying to sites that take credit cards, but it's a criminal law - six months in jail for not disclosing the "actual name and address" of the business.
WHOIS policy should take that into account. There's a legal obligation to disclose name and address information for businesses. It's not optional.
Our SiteTruth system is based on these laws. If a web site is selling or advertising something, and we can't find a business name and address for it, its rating is toast. We scan each site for human-readable postal addresses (some people would call this "semantic web" technology). We check commercial business databases. We check SSL certificates. We look at Open Directory. If we can't find a business name and address after doing all that, the site's rating is a red "do not enter" sign, and we kick them down to the bottom of search results.
Once we have a business name and address, we have something to look up in business databases,
corporation records, business license records, credit ratings, criminal records, etc. Plenty of data is available about businesses once you have a name and address. No more "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog". We know.
We haven't found WHOIS data very useful in doing this. WHOIS data quality is awful. Many entries are phony. Mailing addresses on the web site itself tend to be more accurate. Using a phony business address is felony fraud in most jurisdictions, so that's relatively rare, and mostly shows up on phishing sites. So we cross-check with anti-phishing databases to kick those sites out.
It's quite possible to use this approach to check WHOIS information in bulk. If ICANN actually cared about WHOIS data quality, they'd check the data against postal databases and business databases. They don't.
For many decades, IBM only rented machines; they didn't sell them. Not until they lost an antitrust case did they sell hardware. Rented machines came with IBM service, which was excellent. Now that was "hardware as a service".
What Amazon is offering is called "time-sharing".
Remember Sun's "grid computing"? Big dud. The number of people who want to pay to run huge batch jobs but don't want to buy their own hardware just isn't that big.
There are two players in this space who are known to make money: Akamai and ResPower Render Farm.
Browsers are incredibly forgiving of bad HTML. Worse, the definition of "acceptable HTML" is undocumented, both for IE and Firefox. We discovered this writing Sitetruth's parser. We started out with BeautifulSoup, which is supposed to be a "forgiving" HTML parser. By browser standards, it's not; we had to make some improvements. Here are some things that show up in real-world HTML:
Incorrectly terminated HTML comments These are so widespread that you have to handle them, or entire web pages are sucked into unterminated comments.
Unescaped spaces in URLs Spaces in URLs are supposed to be escaped, but there are A tags out there using URLs with spaces.
Unescaped CR/LF within a URLThis is rare, and invalid, but multiline URLs are out there. Usually in hostile code.
Unicode URLs I've seen a Unicode "Pi" symbol, unescaped, in a URL in a UTF8 document. This was on a phishing site, so it was probably there because it broke some security product.
Part of the reason for the growth in bad HTML is that Adobe seems incapable of making a version of Dreamweaver that consistently generates correct HTML for anything later than HTML 3.2. (Create a moderately complex page in Dreamweaver 8 in HTML 4.x or XHTML mode, and run it through a validator. It will fail.) If the best tools can't get it right, why should anybody else?
Since real world HTML parsing is ambiguous, and bad HTML is widespread, differences between browser parsers and other tools can be exploited as security holes.
What's needed is a rule like the one the US Army has: If your superior rewrites your report, you have the right to attach a copy of the original when the report goes up to a higher command. This discourages internal coverups.
(External coverups are another matter, but the Army tries reasonably hard to insure that bad news makes it to higher commanders. Historically, when it doesn't, battles are lost.)
I looked at the Twine web site, and I can't figure out what they're actually doing. It's all buzzwords. There's a video of the Twine guy speaking at the "Web 2.0 Summit". The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.
Apparently the "natural language recognition" seems to consist of recognizing names of people, products, and companies. The examples were "Tim Bernars-Lee" and "Google", which are so unique that they're easy. But would it work for "Robert Smith" and "Joe's Plumbing"? There was no indication that it uses context to disambiguate the non-trivial cases. It still requires manual tagging for most data.
There's a scheme for tracking document changes. There's a system that builds up a profile of the user based on what they store, which sounds like a targeted advertising engine. There's a personalized search engine. There are "collaboration features". There are contact lists.
But from the available information, it's not yet possible to tell if this is useful.
The current maintenance load for the ISS is about 2.5 people. The Soyuz capsule used for emergency crew return limits the ISS population to 3, except when another spacecraft is docked. So most of the crew time is tied up just keeping the thing working. The original concept was to have a permanent crew of 6, maybe more, and a "crew return vehicle", but that was abandoned around 2002.
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Eaton VORAD units, which are a phased-array anti-collision radar for trucks, have been used to provide evidence in favor of the truck driver. The VORAD units track individual car-sized targets, and provide range, range rate, and azimuth. Range and range rate are quite good; azimuth isn't that accurate. The control unit keeps track of recent events ten minutes before a collision, and also has speed info available. The latest versions can interface with GPS and other vehicle systems. This allows detailed accident reconstruction.
One of the major side effects of the DARPA Grand Challenge series is that the supporting hardware has become much better. You can now buy most of the major components off the shelf. GPS/INS/compass/odometer navigation units are a few thousand dollars, rugged, and work well. When the first Grand Challenge was announced, the off-the-shelf solution cost about $170K and required 4U of rackmount space, with air conditioning. CMU actually used that in the first round.
LIDAR units have improved enormously in the last two years. Last time around, everybody just had single-beam line scanner LIDARs, usually from SICK, except for Team DAD, who built a multibeam scanner that worked but wasn't rugged enough. This time, the major players have multibeam LIDAR units from Velodyne or Ibeo. Velodyne's unit has 64 lasers on a spinning drum. Now you can image your entire environment in 3D at 5Hz.
Controlling the vehicle is easier, too. There are now cars available with electrical power steering and brakes, and one can tap into those systems to drive. And there are at least three vendors selling gear for remote/autonomous driving of existing cars.
So now it's almost entirely a software problem. You don't burn so much time and effort building sensor and actuator systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the original Associated Press article without the annoying Physorg ads. (Google finally cut out the middlemen and started hosting Associated Press content themselves.)
Blu-Ray and HD don't have enough capacity to store really good HDTV without overcompression. Everything still blurs during motion and pans. Then, when motion stops, enough data comes in for the decompressor to catch up. Yuck. That's why the demo content in the stores is either near-static scenes without camera pans, or something with so much action that you can't see the artifacts. Long, slow pans still suck. They suck for 24FPS film, too, but we have the technology to do better now.
Right now, the displays are better than the storage medium. You can buy 1080p flat screens without any problem. Some of them can even do 60FPS. We need 4x to 8x as much data on the storage medium to feed those big, fast screens properly.
This will probably happen after the NFL figures out some way to transmit football at 60FPS.
There's much misplaced enthusiasm for stereolithography machines. They're useful and fun, but not a panacea. It's inherently a slow process, and far more expensive than injection moulding if you're making many copies. The amateur stereolithography machine from this latest Popular Mechanics article is neither novel nor particularly good; I've seen similar machines before. Pushing some viscous liquid out of a syringe isn't one of the better approaches.
If you want to try a stereolithography machine, and you're in the SF Bay Area, there's one available at TechShop in Menlo Park. Rates are very reasonable if you join TechShop. That machine makes hard ABS plastic objects with smooth surfaces, tough enough to be used as working parts. The machine probably won't be in use.
This has become a standard way to make prototypes of product designs, but it's not a production technology.
"The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability."
That's common in consumer electronics. DVD players are usually twice as wide as they should be. Audio components, too, tend to be mostly empty space inside. "Mini" versions have been marketed many times, but they're perceived as being "cheap".
Amusingly, although it's hard to get many chemicals today, you can buy gunpowder without any hassle. Search for "reloading supplies". Under US law, you can buy up to 50 pounds of gunpowder before you need a license.
where the player pretty much is in control, but only in a way that pigeon holes them into one set of actions, such as only being able to move in one direction and all other controls are disabled or even forcing all controls to do the same thing.
In the industry this is called a "track ride". As in an amusement park.
Reason for deletion: "Non-notable, in-universe only subject. Unlikely reliable sources can be found to indicate notability. Fails [[WP:FICT]]."
That's correct. [[WP:FICT]], the Wikipedia Policy on Fiction, is what keeps Wikipedia from drowning in fancruft. A published book or movie gets an article. Minor plot elements and minor characters do not get their own articles, unless they themselves are notable enough to have writeups in significant published sources. Yoda and Gandalf have articles of their own. Below that level of notability, auxiliary articles for components of fictional works should be avoided. Usually, a line or two in the main article is sufficient.
Remember, others have to check and maintain this stuff. Every new article adds to the load. Cleanup, linking, categorization, translation, and other tasks have large backlogs due to all the incoming junk.
If you want to write fancruft, go over to Wikia. That's their business.
Wikia, Jimbo's for-profit wiki company, is the "Trivipedia" system. They host the Star Wars wiki, the World of Warcraft wiki, the Everquest wiki, the Star Trek wiki (plus a second wiki for fan fiction) the Marvel Comics database, and even a Muppet wiki. Ten of the top twelve wikis on Wikia are fancruft. That's their market niche.
Right. I heard the same thing from an Applied Materials VP.
Besides, the serious players in the solar business are now making solar cells five square meters at a time, using gear based on LCD panel fab technology. Solar panel production has gone way beyond using recycled IC wafers.
There's been commercial wafer recycling for years.
We normally answer complaints on the SiteTruth blog (www.sitetruth.net), but since this was posted here...
The street address,
wasn't recognized because it's not a valid USPS address. See the USPS Postal Addressing Standards. The last line in all US addresses should be "City State ZIP". Try:As for the SSL cert, if you connect to https://www.corecodec.com, the site sends back an SSL cert for "services.corecodec.com". Browsers complain about that. We ignore the certificate as a mismatch. That's equivalent to having no SSL cert, as far as we're concerned. There's no penalty; it's just ignored.
Your Sun's "grid computing" link has nothing to with Sun or grid computing.
Oops, sorry. Pasted in a link from something I was doing in another window.
The actual ICANN report, shows they're deadlocked, all right. See this timeline.
Most of the privacy advocates are referring to the European Directive on Privacy. That only applies to individuals not engaged in business. For businesses, the The European Electronic Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) applies. And it's very clear. Any "natural or legal person providing an information society service" must disclose name, real-world address, and E-mail address. No exceptions.
California has a similar law. It's more narrowly drawn, only applying to sites that take credit cards, but it's a criminal law - six months in jail for not disclosing the "actual name and address" of the business.
WHOIS policy should take that into account. There's a legal obligation to disclose name and address information for businesses. It's not optional.
Our SiteTruth system is based on these laws. If a web site is selling or advertising something, and we can't find a business name and address for it, its rating is toast. We scan each site for human-readable postal addresses (some people would call this "semantic web" technology). We check commercial business databases. We check SSL certificates. We look at Open Directory. If we can't find a business name and address after doing all that, the site's rating is a red "do not enter" sign, and we kick them down to the bottom of search results. Once we have a business name and address, we have something to look up in business databases, corporation records, business license records, credit ratings, criminal records, etc. Plenty of data is available about businesses once you have a name and address. No more "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog". We know.
We haven't found WHOIS data very useful in doing this. WHOIS data quality is awful. Many entries are phony. Mailing addresses on the web site itself tend to be more accurate. Using a phony business address is felony fraud in most jurisdictions, so that's relatively rare, and mostly shows up on phishing sites. So we cross-check with anti-phishing databases to kick those sites out.
It's quite possible to use this approach to check WHOIS information in bulk. If ICANN actually cared about WHOIS data quality, they'd check the data against postal databases and business databases. They don't.
For many decades, IBM only rented machines; they didn't sell them. Not until they lost an antitrust case did they sell hardware. Rented machines came with IBM service, which was excellent. Now that was "hardware as a service".
What Amazon is offering is called "time-sharing".
Remember Sun's "grid computing"? Big dud. The number of people who want to pay to run huge batch jobs but don't want to buy their own hardware just isn't that big.
There are two players in this space who are known to make money: Akamai and ResPower Render Farm.
People pay money for those things? I'd always assumed they were advertising throwaways, and that if you bought games, you started getting game mags.
Browsers are incredibly forgiving of bad HTML. Worse, the definition of "acceptable HTML" is undocumented, both for IE and Firefox. We discovered this writing Sitetruth's parser. We started out with BeautifulSoup, which is supposed to be a "forgiving" HTML parser. By browser standards, it's not; we had to make some improvements. Here are some things that show up in real-world HTML:
Part of the reason for the growth in bad HTML is that Adobe seems incapable of making a version of Dreamweaver that consistently generates correct HTML for anything later than HTML 3.2. (Create a moderately complex page in Dreamweaver 8 in HTML 4.x or XHTML mode, and run it through a validator. It will fail.) If the best tools can't get it right, why should anybody else?
Since real world HTML parsing is ambiguous, and bad HTML is widespread, differences between browser parsers and other tools can be exploited as security holes.
What's needed is a rule like the one the US Army has: If your superior rewrites your report, you have the right to attach a copy of the original when the report goes up to a higher command. This discourages internal coverups.
(External coverups are another matter, but the Army tries reasonably hard to insure that bad news makes it to higher commanders. Historically, when it doesn't, battles are lost.)
I looked at the Twine web site, and I can't figure out what they're actually doing. It's all buzzwords. There's a video of the Twine guy speaking at the "Web 2.0 Summit". The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.
Apparently the "natural language recognition" seems to consist of recognizing names of people, products, and companies. The examples were "Tim Bernars-Lee" and "Google", which are so unique that they're easy. But would it work for "Robert Smith" and "Joe's Plumbing"? There was no indication that it uses context to disambiguate the non-trivial cases. It still requires manual tagging for most data.
There's a scheme for tracking document changes. There's a system that builds up a profile of the user based on what they store, which sounds like a targeted advertising engine. There's a personalized search engine. There are "collaboration features". There are contact lists.
But from the available information, it's not yet possible to tell if this is useful.
That's only a $150 device. $79 refurbished. Do they load it up with ads?
The current maintenance load for the ISS is about 2.5 people. The Soyuz capsule used for emergency crew return limits the ISS population to 3, except when another spacecraft is docked. So most of the crew time is tied up just keeping the thing working. The original concept was to have a permanent crew of 6, maybe more, and a "crew return vehicle", but that was abandoned around 2002.
to be honest, space agencies have trouble finding astronauts enough stuff to do to keep them busy anyway
Unfortunately, no. The ISS requires far too much hands-on maintenance.
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Eaton VORAD units, which are a phased-array anti-collision radar for trucks, have been used to provide evidence in favor of the truck driver. The VORAD units track individual car-sized targets, and provide range, range rate, and azimuth. Range and range rate are quite good; azimuth isn't that accurate. The control unit keeps track of recent events ten minutes before a collision, and also has speed info available. The latest versions can interface with GPS and other vehicle systems. This allows detailed accident reconstruction.
It's most useful where an accident resulted when someone drove in front of a truck. The VORAD record shows not just what the VORAD-equipped vehicle was doing, but what the other vehicles were doing.
Anyone have the full headers from this e-mail? It would be interesting to see the details of who sent it.
One of the major side effects of the DARPA Grand Challenge series is that the supporting hardware has become much better. You can now buy most of the major components off the shelf. GPS/INS/compass/odometer navigation units are a few thousand dollars, rugged, and work well. When the first Grand Challenge was announced, the off-the-shelf solution cost about $170K and required 4U of rackmount space, with air conditioning. CMU actually used that in the first round.
LIDAR units have improved enormously in the last two years. Last time around, everybody just had single-beam line scanner LIDARs, usually from SICK, except for Team DAD, who built a multibeam scanner that worked but wasn't rugged enough. This time, the major players have multibeam LIDAR units from Velodyne or Ibeo. Velodyne's unit has 64 lasers on a spinning drum. Now you can image your entire environment in 3D at 5Hz.
Controlling the vehicle is easier, too. There are now cars available with electrical power steering and brakes, and one can tap into those systems to drive. And there are at least three vendors selling gear for remote/autonomous driving of existing cars.
So now it's almost entirely a software problem. You don't burn so much time and effort building sensor and actuator systems.
As the IEEE frequently points out, if there were a shortage of engineers, salaries would be going up.