We had something like that here in Silicon Valley a year ago, at Alan Pinel Realtors in Palo Alto. Big touch screen inside the front window, yet able to detect
touches on the outside. You could check their house inventory. This being Palo Alto, the price categories went to "$5,000,000 and up".
It wasn't obvious how the touch sending worked. Some kind of sensing bar
hung above the display, inside the window. The window glass itself seemed totally standard.
The big problem with open source, once you get past the major projects like Linux and Apache, is that projects get 80% done and then run into trouble. The classic troubled Sourceforge project is stuck at version 0.9 for years. The fun stuff has been done, and nobody wants to do the boring work of making it usable and maintainable, fixing the hard bugs, cleaning up the messy parts, and writing readable documentation.. Which, in commercial software, is 50% to 80% of the job.
The problem is not open source, but volunteer projects.
Which is where companies like RedHat come in. They take the stuff that's almost done and put paid people on doing the boring but essential work. Which pays off for them.
In California, bars can swipe driver's licenses, but can't keep the data:
Civil Code 1798.90.1. (a)
(1) Any business may swipe a driver's license or
identification card issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles in any
electronic device for the following purposes:
(A) To verify age or the authenticity of the driver's license or
identification card.
(B) To comply with a legal requirement to record, retain, or
transmit that information.
(C) To transmit information to a check service company for the
purpose of approving negotiable instruments, electronic funds
transfers, or similar methods of payments, provided that only the
name and identification number from the license or the card may be
used or retained by the check service company.
(D) To collect or disclose personal information that is required
for reporting, investigating, or preventing fraud, abuse, or material
misrepresentation.
(2) A business may not retain or use any of the information
obtained by that electronic means for any purpose other than as
provided herein. (b) As used in this section, "business" means a proprietorship,
partnership, corporation, or any other form of commercial enterprise.
(c) A violation of this section constitutes a misdemeanor
punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for no more than one
year, or by a fine of no more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or
by both.
Margaret Hamilton. In charge of the NASA Apollo Flight Software from 1963-72. Coined the term "software engineering". Created the field of high-reliability software. "No software bug was ever found on any manned space flight Apollo mission."
This needs to be expressed as a TV commercial. An entire business shut down because something went wrong with Vista licensing, with people on the phone to Microsoft support. Listening to music on hold.
Or some guy in a strange city with a laptop that won't work, unable to get help. He calls Microsoft and gets the "visit us on the web at www.microsoft.com" pitch, and he's frantically getting coins from a cafe owner to feed into a pay phone while on hold.
Low-end solid state accelerometers aren't that good. Accuracy is only 1% or so. You can't really get position by integrating them twice; you'll get huge amounts of drift as false velocity builds up. If you have some external reality check, even an odometer, you do much better.
Low-end rate gyros aren't that good either. We did badly in the DARPA Grand Challenge because our heading measurements were about +-3 degrees off, which was enough to mess up the maps being built up from the laser rangefinder. We should have spent the $20,000 for a fibre optic rate gyro, like the more successful teams. (Today, they're down to around $2000-$3000).
No, no, you do NOT want yet another scheme for letting "content owners" run stuff on your machine. We have enough of those now: Java applets, Active-X controls, Macromedia Director programs, Microsoft's latest downloading DRM controls, etc.
Executable content has many downsides. First, all you can do is run it. It's really tough to do anything else with the content. Even resizing it for a device the content owner didn't intend can be tough. Try to reformat a PostScript file (PostScript is an executable language) for a small screen. Originally, repurposing HTML content was easy. With the mess we have today, it's tough to even archive it usefully.
Then there's the hostile code problem. This has essentially killed Active-X (which is hopeless), it's hurt Java applets (which were supposed to be secure, but weren't quite), and we're still having trouble keeping JavaScript in its cage. There are even Flash exploits.
Then there's the "Now everybody can do things their own way" problem. Every piece of content has its very own user interface, and usually not a very good one.
More fundamentally, executable content puts the content, not the user, in control.
With declarative content, the user has control. With executable content, the content owner is in control, and can restrict the user as much as they want to. Which, as we know by now, will be as restrictive as they can get away with. You WILL watch the ad for twenty seconds before you get to the real page.
What we need is more descriptive power in HTML, so you don't need so much executable content. There are about ten things people do all the time with Javascript, and those should be supported with declarative code in HTML. We need more stuff like WebForms.
If you want the Web of the Future, try Second Life. Now that's a real "feature rich interactive networked application". It's a great toy, but a terrible way to deal with large quantities of information.
MacOS-only CD-ROMs. (Could be read on a Mac, if I still had one.)
4mm DAT-II tapes from NT systems compressed with HP's hardware compression. (I still have a drive for this.)
1600BPI 9 track open reel magnetic tape, UNIX TAR format. (I managed to get that copied before the last 9 track drives at Stanford died.)
8" floppies for the IBM Series/1 minicomputer controller for the IBM RS-1 industrial robot. (Not really very useful at this point, but it would be nice to look at that work again.)
IBM PC/AT 5.25" high-density floppies in compressed Fastback backup format for DOS.
(Years of DOS work, now obsolete)
8" floppies for the Marinchip 9900 (A small theorem prover, in Pascal)
UNIVAC UNISERVO steel tape, 8 tracks, 200bpi, written on an UNIVAC UNISERVO IIA on a UNIVAC 1107. (A compiler I wrote as an undergraduate, plus some very early 3D graphics software.)
12408 PS3 systems on sale on eBay. And 20574 Wii systems. Way too many. Many of those speculators are going to lose money.
Actual selling prices on eBay are around $350 for the Wii and $750-$800 for the base PS3 today. That's today; there have been significant drops since yesterday. There are still many excessive "buy it now" prices on auctions, and high reserve prices, but those are just asking prices, and are meaningless. Those auctions fail, while the lower priced ones end in a transaction. "Reserve reduced" is now showing for many auctions.
Prices are dropping faster than they did for the Xbox 360.
PS3 prices on eBay already in screaming dive.
on
Video of Fedora On PS3
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The PS3 speculators are already in trouble. Sure, a few idiots paid $10,000 on day zero, but that's over. Auctions of unsold PS3 systems at bloated prices are now getting zero bids. There are "Buy it Now" prices of $3000, but reality is that units are going unsold at $1100. A sale of the 20GB unit just just occured at $925. Then at $840. One seller writes "I waited over 30 hours in walmart so you don't have to!" He got $780.
The original poster should hang onto his PS3. He's not going to make much money selling it.
If you want a PS3, one will be available tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. At a modest premium over retail.
This reads like something from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
I never thought we'd get real systems vulnerable to attacks with 3D visual components as an integral part of the attack. This is much closer to SF than expected.
It's straightforward to do this for 3D games, because the system has real depth information. Just use shutter glasses and render alternate frames with the viewpoint shifted by one eye separation distance. That's easy, and looks good if the system can render upwards of 70 fps.
But any scheme for converting existing 2D content to "3D" will probably fall somewhere between "looks stupid" and "generates splitting headaches".
Stereo vision doesn't do anything useful for objects more than a few meters away. It's most useful for close work, which is rare in games. It's more useful for mechanical CAD, medical imaging data, and similar stuff you need to view close up. Which is why 3D movies, TV, games, etc. never really caught on.
Notice the "everything will be covered in cobblestones" part. Bumpy roads as traffic control - that's a brutal solution to the problem. Coming up next, artificial potholes.
Simple solution: if you sell liquor, you have to provide public restrooms.
The JCDecaux line of Automated Public Conveniences are fine, but too expensive. Most US cities insist on installing the giant self-cleaning wheelchair-accessable unit, which is the size of a parking space and costs about $65,000 per year, with maintenance. European installations usually have the smaller "pillar" unit.
The JCDecaux units work OK, but they're not designed for volume production. I've seen the internals of the machinery, and it's made out of standard Telemecanique industrial automation components. There's nothing wrong with that for a one-off design, but if you built a washing machine from that product line, it would cost at least $5000 and be twice as big as it should be.
New York City is going with a Cemusa design, from Italy. That's entirely advertising-supported.
IT employees aren't the problem.
The real problem is that Bush's appointees aren't skilled enough. There have been some real duds. Michael Brown, the FEMA director, was previously head judge of the Arabian Horse Association. Bush's early chief economic adviser, Lawrence Linsay, came from Enron.
So did the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert B. Zoellick, and the secretary of the Army, Thomas White Jr. And then there's the Attorney General, Albert Gonzales, "Mr. Torture" himself, formerly Bush's lawyer.
We could probably get better people from offshore. Certainly we could find better people in the financial and trade areas. Bring in some smart financial people from Singapore or Dubai as economic and trade advisers and get the country moving.
I went to a talk by the V.P. of Yahoo search R&D last Thursday, who had something to say about this. The current new thing in search is recognizing certain classes of common queries and understanding them at a deeper level than word matching. The main examples were performers, for which the search engine offers ways to view, listen, and buy their works, and cities, which brings up map and location related information. Sports related queries bring up current sports scores. There are a few tens of special cases like this in Yahoo now. That's about the level at which "semantics" are currently understood. Yahoo would like to make this more general.
There's much interest in "search personalization", but other than for ads, nobody really has a good idea on how to make that work without making it too annoying. There's search history use, where the recent history of your searches influences the results of your next search. But that has the downside that searches become nonrepeatable; the same search done twice can produce different results, depending on what happened in the interim.
Ever-smarter ad targeting, though, is coming. The user's history can be used profitably for selecting ads, and that's the most likely near-term application.
So that's the Yahoo perspective on "Web 3.0", and no, the Yahoo speaker didn't use the term.
Moving an asteroid means landing an engine on the thing and firing it. That doesn't require people. If you send people, you have to send all that extra mass for life support, a return vehicle, and return fuel. Which cuts into the fuel for moving the asteroid. So sending people is a lose.
This is normal for Microsoft. The first release of a new product never does well. Windows 1 was terrible. Early versions of Excel weren't competitive with Lotus 1-2-3. The original Internet Explorer was lame. It took three years before ".NET" made any sense.
Direct-X was terrible in its early versions. The original Xbox worked but was a huge money drain on Microsoft.
Then Microsoft fixes the problem. Each new release gets better. In time, the competition is crushed.
The original article has a link to the "games program" at Colorado State. This is just a proposal within the school, not an established program. In other words, it's a pre-release beta. In fact, it's not really a "games program", it's really just a list of existing courses being repackaged as a "games program"
One thing I can say, as the person who first made ragdoll physics work - if you want to work at that level, you need math. Far more math than most CS majors. Not just the ordinary math for graphics, but the math for dynamics, control, and modern AI as well. Nonlinear differential equations. Computational geometry. Linear and nonlinear control theory. Classifier systems. Bayesian statistics.
On the programming side, you need to understand things down to the bit level. You're liable to have to do something awful like make a computational algorithm work on a GPU that's all wrong for the job.
If you're not good at heavy math, you'll be shunted off into maintaining the level editor or similar low-level programming work. For which the hours and pay are both lousy. Too many low-level programmers want to get into the game industry.
It also helps to have some artistic talent. You won't be doing the real artwork, but you need to be able to sketch, just to talk intelligently to the artists.
The FBI has an office in Moscow. And smaller offices in most of the capitals of the former Soviet sphere, including Bucharest, Kiev, Prague, and Tbilisi. They have to work through the local authorities, which they routinely do, with moderate success.
Those guys shouldn't be that hard to find with enough law enforcement effort. Get a credit card from a cooperating bank. Put a trace on it. Buy some Viagra from a spam. Watch where the money goes, which is probably some bank in a high-crime country. Visit the bank and talk to them. Threaten to have their abilty to process credit cards cut off. Pry the actual payee out of them. Discover that it's another intermediary and start over.
This is what we pay the FBI for. This is why the FBI has field offices outside the US.
This is why the Financial Crimes Information Network exists.
The FBI's Internet-related criminal enforcement unit has gotten soft. They sit up in Baltimore and send out child pornography, then go after the people they've entrapped.
The process is even mostly automated now. That's an easy way to get their stats up, and fits the Bush administration's "regulate sex, not business" mindset, but doesn't solve crimes that have victims.
Something to push on after Jan. 20, when the Democrats take Congress and can start asking hard questions of the executive branch.
Nobody has mentioned that all of YouTube has been down for "scheduled downtime" for "new concoctions and formulas" for about 24 hours now. Something drastic is happening over there. That's far too long for a simple site update.
A frantic purge of copyrighted content may be underway. They already had one purge, right after the acquisition. They were down for most of a day for that one, too. This downtime is already much longer than the last one.
Slashdot Mirror
We had something like that here in Silicon Valley a year ago, at Alan Pinel Realtors in Palo Alto. Big touch screen inside the front window, yet able to detect touches on the outside. You could check their house inventory. This being Palo Alto, the price categories went to "$5,000,000 and up".
It wasn't obvious how the touch sending worked. Some kind of sensing bar hung above the display, inside the window. The window glass itself seemed totally standard.
The big problem with open source, once you get past the major projects like Linux and Apache, is that projects get 80% done and then run into trouble. The classic troubled Sourceforge project is stuck at version 0.9 for years. The fun stuff has been done, and nobody wants to do the boring work of making it usable and maintainable, fixing the hard bugs, cleaning up the messy parts, and writing readable documentation.. Which, in commercial software, is 50% to 80% of the job.
The problem is not open source, but volunteer projects. Which is where companies like RedHat come in. They take the stuff that's almost done and put paid people on doing the boring but essential work. Which pays off for them.
Civil Code 1798.90.1. (a)
(1) Any business may swipe a driver's license or identification card issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles in any electronic device for the following purposes:
- (A) To verify age or the authenticity of the driver's license or
identification card.
- (B) To comply with a legal requirement to record, retain, or
transmit that information.
- (C) To transmit information to a check service company for the
purpose of approving negotiable instruments, electronic funds
transfers, or similar methods of payments, provided that only the
name and identification number from the license or the card may be
used or retained by the check service company.
- (D) To collect or disclose personal information that is required
for reporting, investigating, or preventing fraud, abuse, or material
misrepresentation.
(2) A business may not retain or use any of the information obtained by that electronic means for any purpose other than as provided herein.(b) As used in this section, "business" means a proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or any other form of commercial enterprise.
(c) A violation of this section constitutes a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for no more than one year, or by a fine of no more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or by both.
Margaret Hamilton. In charge of the NASA Apollo Flight Software from 1963-72. Coined the term "software engineering". Created the field of high-reliability software. "No software bug was ever found on any manned space flight Apollo mission."
Good-looking, too; I met her once.
Where are the ads for gyms, adventure travel, hiking gear, and "cut your own Xmas tree" places? This guy is selling the stuff he preaches against.
This needs to be expressed as a TV commercial. An entire business shut down because something went wrong with Vista licensing, with people on the phone to Microsoft support. Listening to music on hold.
Or some guy in a strange city with a laptop that won't work, unable to get help. He calls Microsoft and gets the "visit us on the web at www.microsoft.com" pitch, and he's frantically getting coins from a cafe owner to feed into a pay phone while on hold.
Low-end solid state accelerometers aren't that good. Accuracy is only 1% or so. You can't really get position by integrating them twice; you'll get huge amounts of drift as false velocity builds up. If you have some external reality check, even an odometer, you do much better.
Low-end rate gyros aren't that good either. We did badly in the DARPA Grand Challenge because our heading measurements were about +-3 degrees off, which was enough to mess up the maps being built up from the laser rangefinder. We should have spent the $20,000 for a fibre optic rate gyro, like the more successful teams. (Today, they're down to around $2000-$3000).
No, no, you do NOT want yet another scheme for letting "content owners" run stuff on your machine. We have enough of those now: Java applets, Active-X controls, Macromedia Director programs, Microsoft's latest downloading DRM controls, etc.
Executable content has many downsides. First, all you can do is run it. It's really tough to do anything else with the content. Even resizing it for a device the content owner didn't intend can be tough. Try to reformat a PostScript file (PostScript is an executable language) for a small screen. Originally, repurposing HTML content was easy. With the mess we have today, it's tough to even archive it usefully.
Then there's the hostile code problem. This has essentially killed Active-X (which is hopeless), it's hurt Java applets (which were supposed to be secure, but weren't quite), and we're still having trouble keeping JavaScript in its cage. There are even Flash exploits.
Then there's the "Now everybody can do things their own way" problem. Every piece of content has its very own user interface, and usually not a very good one.
More fundamentally, executable content puts the content, not the user, in control. With declarative content, the user has control. With executable content, the content owner is in control, and can restrict the user as much as they want to. Which, as we know by now, will be as restrictive as they can get away with. You WILL watch the ad for twenty seconds before you get to the real page.
What we need is more descriptive power in HTML, so you don't need so much executable content. There are about ten things people do all the time with Javascript, and those should be supported with declarative code in HTML. We need more stuff like WebForms.
If you want the Web of the Future, try Second Life. Now that's a real "feature rich interactive networked application". It's a great toy, but a terrible way to deal with large quantities of information.
12408 PS3 systems on sale on eBay. And 20574 Wii systems. Way too many. Many of those speculators are going to lose money.
Actual selling prices on eBay are around $350 for the Wii and $750-$800 for the base PS3 today. That's today; there have been significant drops since yesterday. There are still many excessive "buy it now" prices on auctions, and high reserve prices, but those are just asking prices, and are meaningless. Those auctions fail, while the lower priced ones end in a transaction. "Reserve reduced" is now showing for many auctions.
Prices are dropping faster than they did for the Xbox 360.
The PS3 speculators are already in trouble. Sure, a few idiots paid $10,000 on day zero, but that's over. Auctions of unsold PS3 systems at bloated prices are now getting zero bids. There are "Buy it Now" prices of $3000, but reality is that units are going unsold at $1100. A sale of the 20GB unit just just occured at $925. Then at $840. One seller writes "I waited over 30 hours in walmart so you don't have to!" He got $780.
The original poster should hang onto his PS3. He's not going to make much money selling it. If you want a PS3, one will be available tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. At a modest premium over retail.
This reads like something from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
I never thought we'd get real systems vulnerable to attacks with 3D visual components as an integral part of the attack. This is much closer to SF than expected.
Is there a video?
It's straightforward to do this for 3D games, because the system has real depth information. Just use shutter glasses and render alternate frames with the viewpoint shifted by one eye separation distance. That's easy, and looks good if the system can render upwards of 70 fps.
But any scheme for converting existing 2D content to "3D" will probably fall somewhere between "looks stupid" and "generates splitting headaches".
Stereo vision doesn't do anything useful for objects more than a few meters away. It's most useful for close work, which is rare in games. It's more useful for mechanical CAD, medical imaging data, and similar stuff you need to view close up. Which is why 3D movies, TV, games, etc. never really caught on.
Notice the "everything will be covered in cobblestones" part. Bumpy roads as traffic control - that's a brutal solution to the problem. Coming up next, artificial potholes.
You're not supposed to look at the keyboard. It slows down your typing.
Learn to type on a blank keyboard.
Simple solution: if you sell liquor, you have to provide public restrooms.
The JCDecaux line of Automated Public Conveniences are fine, but too expensive. Most US cities insist on installing the giant self-cleaning wheelchair-accessable unit, which is the size of a parking space and costs about $65,000 per year, with maintenance. European installations usually have the smaller "pillar" unit.
The JCDecaux units work OK, but they're not designed for volume production. I've seen the internals of the machinery, and it's made out of standard Telemecanique industrial automation components. There's nothing wrong with that for a one-off design, but if you built a washing machine from that product line, it would cost at least $5000 and be twice as big as it should be.
New York City is going with a Cemusa design, from Italy. That's entirely advertising-supported.
IT employees aren't the problem. The real problem is that Bush's appointees aren't skilled enough. There have been some real duds. Michael Brown, the FEMA director, was previously head judge of the Arabian Horse Association. Bush's early chief economic adviser, Lawrence Linsay, came from Enron. So did the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert B. Zoellick, and the secretary of the Army, Thomas White Jr. And then there's the Attorney General, Albert Gonzales, "Mr. Torture" himself, formerly Bush's lawyer.
We could probably get better people from offshore. Certainly we could find better people in the financial and trade areas. Bring in some smart financial people from Singapore or Dubai as economic and trade advisers and get the country moving.
I went to a talk by the V.P. of Yahoo search R&D last Thursday, who had something to say about this. The current new thing in search is recognizing certain classes of common queries and understanding them at a deeper level than word matching. The main examples were performers, for which the search engine offers ways to view, listen, and buy their works, and cities, which brings up map and location related information. Sports related queries bring up current sports scores. There are a few tens of special cases like this in Yahoo now. That's about the level at which "semantics" are currently understood. Yahoo would like to make this more general.
There's much interest in "search personalization", but other than for ads, nobody really has a good idea on how to make that work without making it too annoying. There's search history use, where the recent history of your searches influences the results of your next search. But that has the downside that searches become nonrepeatable; the same search done twice can produce different results, depending on what happened in the interim.
Ever-smarter ad targeting, though, is coming. The user's history can be used profitably for selecting ads, and that's the most likely near-term application.
So that's the Yahoo perspective on "Web 3.0", and no, the Yahoo speaker didn't use the term.
Moving an asteroid means landing an engine on the thing and firing it. That doesn't require people. If you send people, you have to send all that extra mass for life support, a return vehicle, and return fuel. Which cuts into the fuel for moving the asteroid. So sending people is a lose.
This is normal for Microsoft. The first release of a new product never does well. Windows 1 was terrible. Early versions of Excel weren't competitive with Lotus 1-2-3. The original Internet Explorer was lame. It took three years before ".NET" made any sense. Direct-X was terrible in its early versions. The original Xbox worked but was a huge money drain on Microsoft.
Then Microsoft fixes the problem. Each new release gets better. In time, the competition is crushed.
The original article has a link to the "games program" at Colorado State. This is just a proposal within the school, not an established program. In other words, it's a pre-release beta. In fact, it's not really a "games program", it's really just a list of existing courses being repackaged as a "games program"
There are some well-respected games programming degrees but this isn't one of them. Maybe in a few years.
One thing I can say, as the person who first made ragdoll physics work - if you want to work at that level, you need math. Far more math than most CS majors. Not just the ordinary math for graphics, but the math for dynamics, control, and modern AI as well. Nonlinear differential equations. Computational geometry. Linear and nonlinear control theory. Classifier systems. Bayesian statistics.
On the programming side, you need to understand things down to the bit level. You're liable to have to do something awful like make a computational algorithm work on a GPU that's all wrong for the job.
If you're not good at heavy math, you'll be shunted off into maintaining the level editor or similar low-level programming work. For which the hours and pay are both lousy. Too many low-level programmers want to get into the game industry.
It also helps to have some artistic talent. You won't be doing the real artwork, but you need to be able to sketch, just to talk intelligently to the artists.
The FBI has an office in Moscow. And smaller offices in most of the capitals of the former Soviet sphere, including Bucharest, Kiev, Prague, and Tbilisi. They have to work through the local authorities, which they routinely do, with moderate success.
Those guys shouldn't be that hard to find with enough law enforcement effort. Get a credit card from a cooperating bank. Put a trace on it. Buy some Viagra from a spam. Watch where the money goes, which is probably some bank in a high-crime country. Visit the bank and talk to them. Threaten to have their abilty to process credit cards cut off. Pry the actual payee out of them. Discover that it's another intermediary and start over.
This is what we pay the FBI for. This is why the FBI has field offices outside the US. This is why the Financial Crimes Information Network exists.
The FBI's Internet-related criminal enforcement unit has gotten soft. They sit up in Baltimore and send out child pornography, then go after the people they've entrapped. The process is even mostly automated now. That's an easy way to get their stats up, and fits the Bush administration's "regulate sex, not business" mindset, but doesn't solve crimes that have victims. Something to push on after Jan. 20, when the Democrats take Congress and can start asking hard questions of the executive branch.
YouTube is back up, and there's definitely been a purge.
Nobody has mentioned that all of YouTube has been down for "scheduled downtime" for "new concoctions and formulas" for about 24 hours now. Something drastic is happening over there. That's far too long for a simple site update.
A frantic purge of copyrighted content may be underway. They already had one purge, right after the acquisition. They were down for most of a day for that one, too. This downtime is already much longer than the last one.
Cuban might be right.