Re:Missing Two Very Important Points
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If I Had a Hammer
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Small business is where the growth in employment happens.
That's a common belief, but it's not really correct. Small business does more hiring actions, but they also do more firing and layoffs. On average, big companies employ people for much longer than small companies.
Re:Aaaaaand this is how it starts.
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If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 1
Right. One version of Big Dog can throw cinder blocks. Another version of Big Dog, the Legged Squad Support System, is fully militarized. Then there's the Atlas. And the Schaft. And the Raytheon powered exoskeleton. You do not want to argue with any of those.
The problem with Windows 8 is not entirely the UI. It's "apps". Microsoft has a vision of "apps", which they've outlined to developers. "Apps" don't cost much, don't do much, and Microsoft gets a cut of the revenue. "Apps" are usually written in Javascript/HTML/CSS. All core functionality is provided by Microsoft. It worked for Apple on the iPhone, after all.
"Apps" which have Big Data do the big data in the "cloud", preferably on Microsoft servers. This has gone further with businesses than one might expect. Many cash registers are now "cloud-based". This is the future if vendors have their way.
If it doesn't generate advertising revenue, Google will kill it.
Google's news archives recently went away. Google Scholar is a likely next candidate for the chopping block.
I'm worried about Google buying all those robotics companies. Profitability in advanced robotics is probably 5-10 years away. Google has not, in the past, demonstrated that kind of patience. "More wood behind fewer arrows" was their slogan for the first big round of cuts. Google could destroy the US robotics industry.
Right. Especially since the whole point of the Google buses is that they have WiFi, so people can work while on the bus. Google gets another hour a day out of their employees by busing them.
I'm surprised Google is bothering with a boat. The boat only takes people as far as Redwood City. They've only doing a little more than half the trip by boat. They'll have to take buses at both ends. It doesn't seem worth the trouble to change vehicles twice.
EETimes has a more useful article. This is more like a reversible fuel cell. The working fluid is pumped through the cell, where a chemical reaction occurs. The process is reversible. So there's a "charged" fuel tank, a "discharged" fuel tank, pumps, and plumbing. No info yet on the energy density of the "charged" fuel tank, which is the big question.
Many Linux distros in wide use still come with Python 2.6 as the stock Python. If you have some little program that needs to be portable, you write for Python 2.6 and test on 2.6 and 2.7.
People aren't converting to Python 3 for the same reason Perl users aren't converting to Perl 6 - it's different and incompatible. Many third party Python 2.x packages were never ported to Python 3. Some were replaced by new packages with different APIs, which means rewriting code and finding out what's broken in the new packages. Newly written programs tend to be written for Python 3, but much old stuff will never be ported.
This option is only available for US customers. There's no problem sending US dollars to Overstock. It would be more useful if they exported to China. But then they'd have to deal with inbound customs on the China end.
Digital Globe already offers 41cm resolution. Much of Google Earth imagery comes from their satellites. This new constellation will produce lower-res information, but more frequently. Useful for traffic studies and such, but the market isn't clear.
There's a straightforward solution. Lease autonomous vehicles on an operating lease, with insurance and maintenance included. I used to get a deal like that when I was a Ford employee, years ago. The manufacturer is partly in the insurance business; they cover little claims directly, and reinsure against big ones. Since they're reinsuring many cars, they get wholesale rates.
Now a single party is responsible regardless of whether the driver or the hardware is at fault. They can sort it out internally. Also, if maintenance is included, the manufacturer has control over maintenance quality, so they get to recheck the autonomous driving components on each scheduled service.
That's enough to handle the first stage of deployment. Once insurance companies see the automakers moving into their business area, they'll offer competitive rates.
Only the parts of the algorithm that have to go really fast need to be fully translated into hardware. Control, startup, debugging, and rarely used functions can be done in some minimal CPU on or off the chip. So, for sizing purposes, extract the core part of the code that uses most of the time and work only on that.
We're going to see more machines that look like clusters on a chip. We need new operating systems to manage such machines. Things that are more like cloud farm managers, parceling out the work to the compute farm.
Operating systems and languages will need to get better at interprocess and inter-machine communication. We're going to see more machines that don't have shared memory but do have fast interconnects.
Marshalling and interprocess calls need to get much faster and better. Languages will need compile-time code generation for marshalling. Programming for multiple machines has to be part of the language, not a library.
We're going to see more machines that look like clusters on a chip. We need new operating systems to manage such machines. Things that are more like cloud farm managers.
We'll probably see a few more "build it and they will come" architectures like the Cell. Most of them will fail. Maybe we'll see a win.
Basic truth: it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff any more.
In the US, 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 50 years ago, that number was around 40%. In the 19th century, around 90%. For most of history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Today, that's a solved problem. There are no significant shortages of anything in the developed world.
So what will people do? Here's US employment by sector.
For a few decades, additional employment in service industries took up much of the workforce. It still does in the US. That's where computers and the Internet have made a big dent. Much of the middle class was doing some form of manual "information processing". Computers do much of that now, faster and more cheaply. Paper pushing is a dying industry. (The paper industry itself is in deep trouble. We passed "max paper" a few years ago.)
That's only getting started. There are many legacy sectors which still employ large numbers of people, and they're being gradually knocked off by less-labor intensive approaches. Retail is the next to go - Amazon is replacing brick-and-mortar retail. No new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. Computers even sell now - that's what all the "ad targeting" and "recommendations" do.
Employment growth is mostly in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. Eventually, health care will solve its paper-pushing problem, which will downsize that sector. Most of the rest of the new jobs in those sectors are low-paying ones.
This is a great achievement. Our society has no clue how to deal with it. Where a market-based system takes us is a world with a few winners and a huge number of losers who can't generate enough wealth through work to buy much. France, Germany, and the Scandanavian countries are trying to develop policies to deal with it. Maybe they'll find something that works.
Most of the EU contries are signatories to the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) treaty. That sets a minimum copyright term of 50 years. Many EU countries now have longer copyright terms, after heavy lobbying from the US music industry.
So suggest that the EU should harmonize their nations' laws by using the 50 year TRIPS limit. The EU can do with without renegotiating any external treaties. Few works over 50 years old generate significant revenues, and longer terms just keep many works orphaned and forgotten, rather than in the public domain.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years. The US, with its much longer terms, would then be the major exception, and would be under pressure to reduce its copyright term.
It's a goal that's within reach. Whining about "copyright is evil" wiil get nowhere. Asking the EU to harmonize their laws with the WTO standard has a good chance of playing well in Brussels.
The FBI used to be the premier white collar crime enforcement agency. That hasn't continued into the Internet era. A few years ago, the FBI admitted that their Internet crime-fighting resources were allocated 50% to "national security", 40% to "child pornography", and 10% to dealing with reported crimes. The "child pornography" operation is mostly a group out of the Baltimore office that sends oult child porn and sees who bites. That mindset also drives the anti-terrorism operation. A big part of the FBI's anti-terrorism operation is running sting operations against wannabe "terrorists", mostly disgruntled losers.
As a result, too much of the FBI's Internet-related activities are self-generated work. That's bad for a law enforcement agency. Dealing with citizen complaints and solving reported crimes keeps a law enforcement agency effective and honest. They are performing a service function, and their effectiveness can be measured by the percentage of reported crimes they solve.
Self-generated work is bad for law enforcement. It leads to corrupt vice squads, anti-drug teams that operate more or less autonomously, "national security" squads digging for conspiracies that aren't there, and a culture of secrecy about what the law enforcement agency is doing all day.
Mod parent up. He's right. I thought this was one of Intel's experimental exotic machines. (Whatever happened to Intel's non-shared memory part built for academic research a few years ago?) But it's more vanilla, a big collection of x86 Atom CPUs on one chip.
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Small business is where the growth in employment happens.
That's a common belief, but it's not really correct. Small business does more hiring actions, but they also do more firing and layoffs. On average, big companies employ people for much longer than small companies.
Right. One version of Big Dog can throw cinder blocks. Another version of Big Dog, the Legged Squad Support System, is fully militarized. Then there's the Atlas. And the Schaft. And the Raytheon powered exoskeleton. You do not want to argue with any of those.
The problem with Windows 8 is not entirely the UI. It's "apps". Microsoft has a vision of "apps", which they've outlined to developers. "Apps" don't cost much, don't do much, and Microsoft gets a cut of the revenue. "Apps" are usually written in Javascript/HTML/CSS. All core functionality is provided by Microsoft. It worked for Apple on the iPhone, after all.
"Apps" which have Big Data do the big data in the "cloud", preferably on Microsoft servers. This has gone further with businesses than one might expect. Many cash registers are now "cloud-based". This is the future if vendors have their way.
All your base are belong to us.
This will go over really well in the Capitol of Panem.
If it doesn't generate advertising revenue, Google will kill it.
Google's news archives recently went away. Google Scholar is a likely next candidate for the chopping block.
I'm worried about Google buying all those robotics companies. Profitability in advanced robotics is probably 5-10 years away. Google has not, in the past, demonstrated that kind of patience. "More wood behind fewer arrows" was their slogan for the first big round of cuts. Google could destroy the US robotics industry.
Get a real mail account and get off Gmail/Hotmail/other free service. You get what you pay for.
Right. Especially since the whole point of the Google buses is that they have WiFi, so people can work while on the bus. Google gets another hour a day out of their employees by busing them.
When desktop displays get to be that big, they need to be curved. Here's Samsung's 105-inch curved display.
Ghash.io's press release indicates that they have some ideas on where they want Bitcoin to go. They now have enoug power to force changes in the system.
I'm surprised Google is bothering with a boat. The boat only takes people as far as Redwood City. They've only doing a little more than half the trip by boat. They'll have to take buses at both ends. It doesn't seem worth the trouble to change vehicles twice.
IBM is spending a billion dollars on AI. That's serious. IBM usually succeeds at making what they set out to make.
EETimes has a more useful article. This is more like a reversible fuel cell. The working fluid is pumped through the cell, where a chemical reaction occurs. The process is reversible. So there's a "charged" fuel tank, a "discharged" fuel tank, pumps, and plumbing. No info yet on the energy density of the "charged" fuel tank, which is the big question.
Many Linux distros in wide use still come with Python 2.6 as the stock Python. If you have some little program that needs to be portable, you write for Python 2.6 and test on 2.6 and 2.7.
People aren't converting to Python 3 for the same reason Perl users aren't converting to Perl 6 - it's different and incompatible. Many third party Python 2.x packages were never ported to Python 3. Some were replaced by new packages with different APIs, which means rewriting code and finding out what's broken in the new packages. Newly written programs tend to be written for Python 3, but much old stuff will never be ported.
This option is only available for US customers. There's no problem sending US dollars to Overstock. It would be more useful if they exported to China. But then they'd have to deal with inbound customs on the China end.
Digital Globe already offers 41cm resolution. Much of Google Earth imagery comes from their satellites. This new constellation will produce lower-res information, but more frequently. Useful for traffic studies and such, but the market isn't clear.
There's a straightforward solution. Lease autonomous vehicles on an operating lease, with insurance and maintenance included. I used to get a deal like that when I was a Ford employee, years ago. The manufacturer is partly in the insurance business; they cover little claims directly, and reinsure against big ones. Since they're reinsuring many cars, they get wholesale rates.
Now a single party is responsible regardless of whether the driver or the hardware is at fault. They can sort it out internally. Also, if maintenance is included, the manufacturer has control over maintenance quality, so they get to recheck the autonomous driving components on each scheduled service.
That's enough to handle the first stage of deployment. Once insurance companies see the automakers moving into their business area, they'll offer competitive rates.
You need a C to VHDL translator. Here's a tutorial for one.
Only the parts of the algorithm that have to go really fast need to be fully translated into hardware. Control, startup, debugging, and rarely used functions can be done in some minimal CPU on or off the chip. So, for sizing purposes, extract the core part of the code that uses most of the time and work only on that.
There's an free iPhone app to simulate a slit-scan camera. It doesn't take a "$50,000 camera".
Reuters coverage in 2011. Congressional testimony from 2011 describes a 13,000 foot tunnel.
Trenchless technology marches on. Microtunneling is getting easier. This gear is normally used to avoid digging up streets.
Some implications:
As I noted on Bitcontalk to someone who bought Bitcoins for over $1000 each, "Great! We need suckers like you to keep this thing going!".
Basic truth: it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff any more.
In the US, 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 50 years ago, that number was around 40%. In the 19th century, around 90%. For most of history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Today, that's a solved problem. There are no significant shortages of anything in the developed world.
So what will people do? Here's US employment by sector. For a few decades, additional employment in service industries took up much of the workforce. It still does in the US. That's where computers and the Internet have made a big dent. Much of the middle class was doing some form of manual "information processing". Computers do much of that now, faster and more cheaply. Paper pushing is a dying industry. (The paper industry itself is in deep trouble. We passed "max paper" a few years ago.)
That's only getting started. There are many legacy sectors which still employ large numbers of people, and they're being gradually knocked off by less-labor intensive approaches. Retail is the next to go - Amazon is replacing brick-and-mortar retail. No new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. Computers even sell now - that's what all the "ad targeting" and "recommendations" do.
Employment growth is mostly in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. Eventually, health care will solve its paper-pushing problem, which will downsize that sector. Most of the rest of the new jobs in those sectors are low-paying ones.
This is a great achievement. Our society has no clue how to deal with it. Where a market-based system takes us is a world with a few winners and a huge number of losers who can't generate enough wealth through work to buy much. France, Germany, and the Scandanavian countries are trying to develop policies to deal with it. Maybe they'll find something that works.
Most of the EU contries are signatories to the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) treaty. That sets a minimum copyright term of 50 years. Many EU countries now have longer copyright terms, after heavy lobbying from the US music industry.
So suggest that the EU should harmonize their nations' laws by using the 50 year TRIPS limit. The EU can do with without renegotiating any external treaties. Few works over 50 years old generate significant revenues, and longer terms just keep many works orphaned and forgotten, rather than in the public domain.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years. The US, with its much longer terms, would then be the major exception, and would be under pressure to reduce its copyright term.
It's a goal that's within reach. Whining about "copyright is evil" wiil get nowhere. Asking the EU to harmonize their laws with the WTO standard has a good chance of playing well in Brussels.
The FBI used to be the premier white collar crime enforcement agency. That hasn't continued into the Internet era. A few years ago, the FBI admitted that their Internet crime-fighting resources were allocated 50% to "national security", 40% to "child pornography", and 10% to dealing with reported crimes. The "child pornography" operation is mostly a group out of the Baltimore office that sends oult child porn and sees who bites. That mindset also drives the anti-terrorism operation. A big part of the FBI's anti-terrorism operation is running sting operations against wannabe "terrorists", mostly disgruntled losers.
As a result, too much of the FBI's Internet-related activities are self-generated work. That's bad for a law enforcement agency. Dealing with citizen complaints and solving reported crimes keeps a law enforcement agency effective and honest. They are performing a service function, and their effectiveness can be measured by the percentage of reported crimes they solve.
Self-generated work is bad for law enforcement. It leads to corrupt vice squads, anti-drug teams that operate more or less autonomously, "national security" squads digging for conspiracies that aren't there, and a culture of secrecy about what the law enforcement agency is doing all day.
Mod parent up. He's right. I thought this was one of Intel's experimental exotic machines. (Whatever happened to Intel's non-shared memory part built for academic research a few years ago?) But it's more vanilla, a big collection of x86 Atom CPUs on one chip.