OK, it's time for some people near the big users of H1B visas, but not employees of them, to ask to see those H1B files
available for public access. Bring your laptop and scanner and let's get those on line. Bring two people, one with a camcorder, so if you're turned down for access, there's video of that.
"Tree shakers" have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big
arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the
fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Assuming it turns out to be worthwhile to make web pages that work well on Apple's multi-touch screens, there are two big issues. On the one hand, multiple touches are possible. On the other, fingers are blunt instruments and the user can't see through them. Targets have to be big. Look at any touch screen in retail. The buttons there are huge.
Rearranging playlists and changing channels should work fine, but anything that needs real input will be tough.
They should have used the official U.S. Government Youth Fitness Song. This was composed for and distributed by the President's Council on Youth Fitness during the 1960s, as an official U.S. Government activity. Every school in the United States got a vinyl copy. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library redistributes this as a Presidential document.
Some horsey friends of mine are spending this week in a campsite in a moderately remote park in the hills between Silicon Valley and the ocean. There's no cell phone coverage there. And it bugs them. Yesterday I went out to visit them, and we rode endurance Arabians up to the ridge line so one of them could get a connection and retrieve her voicemail.
They'd sighted what looked like a cell phone tower, and we headed for it. But it was a relay station for county emergency communications, with a microwave dish and VHF antennas but no cell site gear. Finally we got to an overlook at a high enough elevation that they could get a weak connection to a cell site miles away.
None of her voicemail messages really needed answering. Nice ride up the mountain, though.
That's because the SourceForge CEO liked to give talks boasting about how many projects they hosted.
Most of the dead projects ought to be moved to something like "SourceForge archive", where they remain as a historical record and are searchable, but can no longer be updated and are just static pages.
The technology is straightforward. They had line of sight, used 1 meter dishes at each end, and aligned them with telescopes. Point to point microwave links have been doing that since the 1950s. After all, you can get a signal to and from geosync orbit with a dish of that size.
The most interesting thing about this is that they found two points on the earth's surface 273 miles apart with a clear line of sight between them.
Low energy efficiency, high cost
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I once did see something like this that was actually useful. One year, California had a serious drought, and alfalfa for horses was hard to get. So one company sold a hydroponic grass factory. This was a shipping container with a stack of trays and grow lights. Each day you removed and "mowed" one tray, did some maintenance on it, and put it back in the stack to grow new grass. The grow cycle was about three weeks. Not very energy efficient, but needed little water, which was what mattered that year.
You see smaller trays like that full of alfalfa sprouts at Jamba Juice outlets. Same concept, smaller scale.
There are some huge indoor farms in Saudi Arabia, where they have sun, space, energy, and money, but limited water and poor soil.
There's some grumbling in the "eco" community about the "3000 mile salad", and how much energy is used shipping produce around. But in fact, the biggest transportation fuel cost is the SUV trip to the grocery store. If the customer drives further, to the farmer's market, it's even worse. What's actually happening in transportation is that railroads are making a comeback, simply because their energy costs are lower.
First, it's not anything like the European Privacy Directive. It has nothing to do with privacy. It's about leaks of information useful for identity theft and about credit reporting. It's actually another one of those bills designed to remove state consumer protections. The key provisions are 1) it overrides all state laws on that subject, and 2) it doesn't provide for any private right of action. Only the Federal Trade Commission, which seldom does anything really punitive, can enforce it.
In computing, you can be successful as #2, but the #3 player usually loses out and disappears. (Remember Amiga? Commodore? DEC? Ask Jeeves?) If Apple wants their browser to have any commercial significance, they have to pass Firefox.
"Trespasser", the Jurassic Park game produced by DreamWorks. Now there was an embarrassment. Big budget, great franchise, years of development (1995-1998), botched physics engine. Seamus Blackley tried to write a rigid body physics engine and totally underestimated the problem. Reviews had comments like "worst game I ever played". The disaster was so great that DreamWorks sold the remains of their interactive division to EA.
Note that Trend Micro never uses the word "Microsoft". That's deceptive. How does Microsoft manage that? This attack depends entirely on vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Media Player. It does try to attack Firefox and Opera browsers by sending them Windows Media files, but doesn't have a direct attack on either browser.
So:
Use Firefox.
Go to Tools->Options->Content->Manage File Types. Go down the list, and remove or change all entries that automatically invoke Microsoft applications. (Use OpenOffice for.doc,.xls, and.ppt, maybe QuickTime for video files.)
This is really a split based on the needed qualifications of the divisional executives:
"Games" division - needs an actual game producer in charge. Most R&D in this unit.
"Sports" division - needs a jock, who hires other jocks, to make games jocks like. Ongoing updates and upgrades, but not much innovation needed.
Technology comes from games division and outside suppliers.
"Casual" division - needs a sales type good at sucking up to cell phone companies. For mobile games, the market is the cell phone company, not the end user.
"Sims" division - whoever was running that project at Maxis.
If we had a decent launch capability, nobody would be spending that long up there. Things like this happen because of launch delays, not because anybody is supposed to spend that long on a mission.
The record is held by Valeriy Polyakov, who spent 431 days on Mir. He had the unfortunate experience of being up while the USSR was coming apart.
The cool thing would be to use sapphire or diamond on the screen surface. Not only would it be great for bragging rights, it isn't that expensive. Supermarket scanner glasses are often coated with sapphire or diamond; otherwise they have to be replaced every few months. Twelve hours a day of canned goods being dragged across the scanner glass is worse than anything that happens to a
PDA-like device. Sapphire coated scanner glass even holds up at Home Depot.
From the article:
I saw a real opportunity for my site to reach a large new audience without a big marketing expense.
In other words, this guy had figured out a way to spam via Facebook. And he's complaining that they didn't process his application for a developer ID fast enough.
Painting robots are getting smarter. I've seen some R&D work where a LIDAR scanner looks at the thing to be painted, the software builds a 3D model, a painting plan is generated, and a robot paints the thing, moving around to get all the surfaces and crevices. You just hang whatever needs to be painted on a conveyor chain going into the paint booth, and the robot does the rest.
We need more technology like that to stop the downward wage spiral.
I'm always amazed at what people will download. I used to have a plug-in for Softimage|3D, the high-end animation system, on my web site. To download it, you even had to fill out a form. Yet thousands of people downloaded it, more than could possibly use it for anything. Even after I added large type warnings that you must have Softimage|3D to use this thing, there were still people downloading it. Even after Softimage|3D was discontinued.
It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
The assembly line for the Macintosh IIci was more automated than this one. Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down. Seiko and Sony developed some beautiful technologies for making small consumer electronics items untouched by human hands.
Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
Printed circuit boards are normally washed in something like a dishwasher after soldering. A few components can't tolerate that, mainly some speakers, and they have to go on after the washing step.
But you have to use water with low dissolved solids, since, when the water evaporates, it's going to leave solids behind. Leaving streaks of iron behind is definitely a Bad Thing. So use distilled or de-ionized water.
Where will all the CPU time go on desktops with these highly parallel processors?
Virus scanning. Multiple objects can be virus scanned in parallel.
Adware/spyware. The user impact from adware and spyware will be reduced since attacks will be able to use their own processor. Adware will be scanning all your files and running classifiers to figure out what to sell you.
Ad display. Run all those Flash ads simultaneously. Ads can get more CPU-intensive. Next frontier: automatic image editing that puts you in the ad.
Indexing You'll have local search systems indexing your stuff, probably at least one from Microsoft and one from Google.
Spam One CPU for filtering the spam coming in, one CPU for the bot sending it out.
DRM One CPU for the RIAA's piracy searcher, one for the MPAA, one for Homeland Security...
Interpreters Visualize a Microsoft Office emulator written in Javascript. Oh, wait.
Actually, it would be better if Google could remove all moving objects from their images. Often, StreetView images of storefronts are blocked by traffic.
I've seen a section where most of a block consists of a side view of a UPS van.
This is quite feasible. I went to a talk by some of the CGI guys who did "Tokyo Drift", and they described how they got good background pictures of a major intersection in downtown Tokyo. They sent someone there with instructions to take a large number of pictures of the intersection from many different viewpoints, and stitched those together into panoramas. Multiple panoramas were merged, aligned, and empty street combined until an empty panorama of the intersection was obtained and mapped onto a 3D model.
The actual driving action was then filmed in a parking lot in Pasadena, and CG pedestrians were inserted.
Google can do this more automatically, because they have depth data. Their van is carrying a line-scanning LIDAR, scanning vertically.
They're clearly still debugging the process. The West Coast van has more resolution than the East Coast van. But they're having trouble with picture alignment. They need to get a fibre optic heading gyro. That's probably what's causing the seam errors that show up frequently in Google StreetView.
That was our big omission with our DARPA Grand Challenge entry - the +=2 degrees of error from the inertial/magnetic compass unit was enough to throw off the LIDAR map building, and the thing had to keep stopping and rescanning. We should have spent the $20K for a FOG gyro, like the more successful teams. There's progress; those things are only $6K now, as opposed to $20K three years ago. A GPS/INS/odometry system that can give location to within a few centimeters and heading to within 15 minutes of arc, even in urban environments, was $140K four years ago and needed 4U of air-conditioned rack space. Now it's under $20K and dropping. And other approaches (SLAM) that correct heading info using camera data are starting to work reliably. So Google should actually be able to do this.
I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send mail to twice a week.
Bulk distribution is what RSS feeds are for. If people really want your stuff, they'll subscribe to the feed. Then the recipient is in control.
I'm not impressed by people who claim that people need to receive their newsletter / e-mail spam.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, it's time for some people near the big users of H1B visas, but not employees of them, to ask to see those H1B files available for public access. Bring your laptop and scanner and let's get those on line. Bring two people, one with a camcorder, so if you're turned down for access, there's video of that.
"Tree shakers" have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets to sort produce by size and color.
Assuming it turns out to be worthwhile to make web pages that work well on Apple's multi-touch screens, there are two big issues. On the one hand, multiple touches are possible. On the other, fingers are blunt instruments and the user can't see through them. Targets have to be big. Look at any touch screen in retail. The buttons there are huge.
Rearranging playlists and changing channels should work fine, but anything that needs real input will be tough.
They should have used the official U.S. Government Youth Fitness Song. This was composed for and distributed by the President's Council on Youth Fitness during the 1960s, as an official U.S. Government activity. Every school in the United States got a vinyl copy. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library redistributes this as a Presidential document.
Drop and give me twenty. Now!
Some horsey friends of mine are spending this week in a campsite in a moderately remote park in the hills between Silicon Valley and the ocean. There's no cell phone coverage there. And it bugs them. Yesterday I went out to visit them, and we rode endurance Arabians up to the ridge line so one of them could get a connection and retrieve her voicemail.
They'd sighted what looked like a cell phone tower, and we headed for it. But it was a relay station for county emergency communications, with a microwave dish and VHF antennas but no cell site gear. Finally we got to an overlook at a high enough elevation that they could get a weak connection to a cell site miles away.
None of her voicemail messages really needed answering. Nice ride up the mountain, though.
That's because the SourceForge CEO liked to give talks boasting about how many projects they hosted.
Most of the dead projects ought to be moved to something like "SourceForge archive", where they remain as a historical record and are searchable, but can no longer be updated and are just static pages.
The technology is straightforward. They had line of sight, used 1 meter dishes at each end, and aligned them with telescopes. Point to point microwave links have been doing that since the 1950s. After all, you can get a signal to and from geosync orbit with a dish of that size.
The most interesting thing about this is that they found two points on the earth's surface 273 miles apart with a clear line of sight between them.
I once did see something like this that was actually useful. One year, California had a serious drought, and alfalfa for horses was hard to get. So one company sold a hydroponic grass factory. This was a shipping container with a stack of trays and grow lights. Each day you removed and "mowed" one tray, did some maintenance on it, and put it back in the stack to grow new grass. The grow cycle was about three weeks. Not very energy efficient, but needed little water, which was what mattered that year.
You see smaller trays like that full of alfalfa sprouts at Jamba Juice outlets. Same concept, smaller scale.
There are some huge indoor farms in Saudi Arabia, where they have sun, space, energy, and money, but limited water and poor soil.
There's some grumbling in the "eco" community about the "3000 mile salad", and how much energy is used shipping produce around. But in fact, the biggest transportation fuel cost is the SUV trip to the grocery store. If the customer drives further, to the farmer's market, it's even worse. What's actually happening in transportation is that railroads are making a comeback, simply because their energy costs are lower.
The author of the original article clearly didn't read the S.1178, "A bill to strengthen data protection and safeguards, require data breach notification, and further prevent identity theft", the bill they're citing. And nobody else here seems to have read it either.
First, it's not anything like the European Privacy Directive. It has nothing to do with privacy. It's about leaks of information useful for identity theft and about credit reporting. It's actually another one of those bills designed to remove state consumer protections. The key provisions are 1) it overrides all state laws on that subject, and 2) it doesn't provide for any private right of action. Only the Federal Trade Commission, which seldom does anything really punitive, can enforce it.
In computing, you can be successful as #2, but the #3 player usually loses out and disappears. (Remember Amiga? Commodore? DEC? Ask Jeeves?) If Apple wants their browser to have any commercial significance, they have to pass Firefox.
"Trespasser", the Jurassic Park game produced by DreamWorks. Now there was an embarrassment. Big budget, great franchise, years of development (1995-1998), botched physics engine. Seamus Blackley tried to write a rigid body physics engine and totally underestimated the problem. Reviews had comments like "worst game I ever played". The disaster was so great that DreamWorks sold the remains of their interactive division to EA.
Note that Trend Micro never uses the word "Microsoft". That's deceptive. How does Microsoft manage that? This attack depends entirely on vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Media Player. It does try to attack Firefox and Opera browsers by sending them Windows Media files, but doesn't have a direct attack on either browser.
So:
This is really a split based on the needed qualifications of the divisional executives:
If we had a decent launch capability, nobody would be spending that long up there. Things like this happen because of launch delays, not because anybody is supposed to spend that long on a mission.
The record is held by Valeriy Polyakov, who spent 431 days on Mir. He had the unfortunate experience of being up while the USSR was coming apart.
The cool thing would be to use sapphire or diamond on the screen surface. Not only would it be great for bragging rights, it isn't that expensive. Supermarket scanner glasses are often coated with sapphire or diamond; otherwise they have to be replaced every few months. Twelve hours a day of canned goods being dragged across the scanner glass is worse than anything that happens to a PDA-like device. Sapphire coated scanner glass even holds up at Home Depot.
The Nokia 8800 has a sapphire window.
From the article: I saw a real opportunity for my site to reach a large new audience without a big marketing expense.
In other words, this guy had figured out a way to spam via Facebook. And he's complaining that they didn't process his application for a developer ID fast enough.
Painting robots are getting smarter. I've seen some R&D work where a LIDAR scanner looks at the thing to be painted, the software builds a 3D model, a painting plan is generated, and a robot paints the thing, moving around to get all the surfaces and crevices. You just hang whatever needs to be painted on a conveyor chain going into the paint booth, and the robot does the rest.
We need more technology like that to stop the downward wage spiral.
I'm always amazed at what people will download. I used to have a plug-in for Softimage|3D, the high-end animation system, on my web site. To download it, you even had to fill out a form. Yet thousands of people downloaded it, more than could possibly use it for anything. Even after I added large type warnings that you must have Softimage|3D to use this thing, there were still people downloading it. Even after Softimage|3D was discontinued.
It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
The assembly line for the Macintosh IIci was more automated than this one. Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down. Seiko and Sony developed some beautiful technologies for making small consumer electronics items untouched by human hands.
Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
Printed circuit boards are normally washed in something like a dishwasher after soldering. A few components can't tolerate that, mainly some speakers, and they have to go on after the washing step.
But you have to use water with low dissolved solids, since, when the water evaporates, it's going to leave solids behind. Leaving streaks of iron behind is definitely a Bad Thing. So use distilled or de-ionized water.
Where will all the CPU time go on desktops with these highly parallel processors?
It's not going to dent the Blackberry market. Typing on a touch screen is misery. The iPhone is a mostly-output device, like the iPod.
Actually, it would be better if Google could remove all moving objects from their images. Often, StreetView images of storefronts are blocked by traffic. I've seen a section where most of a block consists of a side view of a UPS van.
This is quite feasible. I went to a talk by some of the CGI guys who did "Tokyo Drift", and they described how they got good background pictures of a major intersection in downtown Tokyo. They sent someone there with instructions to take a large number of pictures of the intersection from many different viewpoints, and stitched those together into panoramas. Multiple panoramas were merged, aligned, and empty street combined until an empty panorama of the intersection was obtained and mapped onto a 3D model. The actual driving action was then filmed in a parking lot in Pasadena, and CG pedestrians were inserted.
Google can do this more automatically, because they have depth data. Their van is carrying a line-scanning LIDAR, scanning vertically.
They're clearly still debugging the process. The West Coast van has more resolution than the East Coast van. But they're having trouble with picture alignment. They need to get a fibre optic heading gyro. That's probably what's causing the seam errors that show up frequently in Google StreetView.
That was our big omission with our DARPA Grand Challenge entry - the +=2 degrees of error from the inertial/magnetic compass unit was enough to throw off the LIDAR map building, and the thing had to keep stopping and rescanning. We should have spent the $20K for a FOG gyro, like the more successful teams. There's progress; those things are only $6K now, as opposed to $20K three years ago. A GPS/INS/odometry system that can give location to within a few centimeters and heading to within 15 minutes of arc, even in urban environments, was $140K four years ago and needed 4U of air-conditioned rack space. Now it's under $20K and dropping. And other approaches (SLAM) that correct heading info using camera data are starting to work reliably. So Google should actually be able to do this.
Skipping the ad-heavy page linked in the article, here's the FBI press release.
As usual, no mention of Microsoft.
I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send mail to twice a week.
Bulk distribution is what RSS feeds are for. If people really want your stuff, they'll subscribe to the feed. Then the recipient is in control. I'm not impressed by people who claim that people need to receive their newsletter / e-mail spam.