This is the first big test for the Department of Homeland Security. They flunked.
With $80 billion a year going into "homeland security", it turns out that, three days after the event, DHS can't even get enough security troops into New Orleans to secure the hospitals, the convention center, and the Superdome.
DHS secretary Chertoff has no clue; when interviewed, it was clear he knew less than the average CNN viewer.
Disaster stockpiles don't seem to have been in place in New Orleans, even for the cheap stuff. A shipping container of water purification tablets would have been a huge help. Nobody seems to have thought to equip the Superdome, the designated disaster assembly point, with some basic water purification gear.
Congress and the voters need to ask some hard questions about where all that money goes and whether it's being spent properly.
For the size of the disaster, the number of casualties is small. There was plenty of warning, and evacuation routes had been prepared. Everybody who obeyed the order to evacuate go out in time.
The biggest weakness of the evacuation system is that it only worked if you had a car. This left poor people, elderly, and tourists trapped. The airlines cancelled flights too early, and buses weren't used for evacuation.
This "adaptive cruise control" stuff is scary. The basic idea is to have a lateral control system that keeps in lane, and a longitudinal control system that prevents tailgating. This is good enough for the driver to fall asleep, but not good enough to handle even minor emergency situations.
Experience with ABS systems is instructive. ABS systems definitely improve braking, but don't reduce accidents. Drivers with ABS use their shorter stopping distance to follow more closely, cancelling out the safety benefits.
I run one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, which requires somewhat better technology. The current Grand Challenge technology is clunky (everybody has huge, mechanically scanned LIDAR devices or weak vision systems), but true solid state eye-safe outdoor 3D LIDAR imaging devices are just becoming available. With that technology, doing this right is within reach.
Your software "just worked", albeit slightly slower.
Er, no. Reality distortion field alert.
68K floating point didn't work in the PPC's emulator. If you ported your engineering application to PPC, you had to go from 80-bit floats to 64-bit floats, making your data incompatible with the 68K program and the x86 version. Most engineering apps dropped the Mac at the PPC transition.
There was a third-party "SoftFPU", but it was slow and didn't work very well.
The 68K-PPC transition was only "successful" to those who live in the Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
In reality, Apple market share dropped substantially through the transition. Before the transition, Apple was a serious #2. After the transition, Apple was a niche player.
It's amusing to watch the Apple fanatics apologize for Apple's policy changes. This has been going on since Apple was late with color displays ("The Mac doesn't need color. It has resolution"), through the day Jobs bowed down to Gates on the big screen, and through the years during which Apple couldn't get a new OS out the door.
This isn't about spare parts for repair. For a consumer product, you handle that by running off extra boards while the product is still in production and storing them. Then you shut down the production line. This is more about keeping options open in case the Intel transition doesn't come off.
There are a number of ways this could go bad. For example, many Mac users still run Microsoft Office on the Mac. Microsoft isn't obligated to offer that on x86 for the Mac, now that the five year deal has expired. PPC emulation on x86 may not work all that well. Many Mac developers may just drop the Mac rather than switching to x86, which is what happened at the PPC transition.
That's not an "article". It's just a troll to drive traffic to the site.
'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity.
"Makes the gas more inert?"
Those guys should stick to writing about case mods.
Plasma panels have actually been around since the 1960s, as neon-red displays. The early concept was that a sustaining voltage applied to all pixels kept them lit if they were on, and an X/Y array of wires could be used to turn individual pixels on and off. Thus, the display itself had memory, back when having enough memory to refresh the display was expensive.
Color, intensity variation, and speed took a long time to achieve. Now there are transistor drivers behind every pixel, and the panel is built in what's effectively a big wafer fab. But that's not the toughest part of the manufacturing problem. All the electronics is on the back glass, while the phosphors are on the front. These two big pieces of glass have to be welded together with subpixel precision, held in contact only by millions of tiny ridges that have to match up. That's the most difficult step, and the one that limits display size.
WalMart is at 88 cents per song. Let's see how far the music industry gets by leaning on WalMart.
"The labels price things based on what they believe they can get -- a pricing philosophy a lot of industries have. But we like to price things as cheaply as we possibly can, rather than charge as much as we can get. It's a big difference in philosophy, and we try to help other people see that." - WalMart senior VP (entertainment) Gary Severson.
WalMart pushed the labels into a $9.97 retail price for CDs. Then they started signing deals with artists on their own. WalMart now has exclusive rights to Garth Brooks.
It's hard to cheer for either side here. But from the music industry's perspective, WalMart is scarier than Apple. Apple needs the music industry. For WalMart, audio CDs are a minor business. WalMart sometimes threatens to cut back on audio CDs and devote more shelf space to DVDs and games. And Apple doesn't care about content. WalMart imposes censorship on both music and cover art.
"Hi! Welcome to our online store. I'm Jim, your sales rep. We're having a sale today on generic Viagra. Would you like to order 100 capsules for only $249.95? Um? Oh, surely you want to improve your sex life. Um? How can you pass up this one-time offer at this amazingly low price. Um?
I'll throw in free shipping. Um?
I'll take that as a yes. We already have your credit card information, and you'll be receiving your product shortly. Have a nice day."
Cog was an embarassing bit of hubris on the part of Rod Brooks at MIT. Brooks did some excellent insect-level work in the 1980s, and then he got carried away and tried to jump to human-level AI. I once asked him "Why don't you try to do an artificial mouse. You might be able to make that work." He replied "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." And that's the problem.
What they ended up with was something that sort of fakes human interaction. That's been done before.
Remember Ananova?
Chatterbots? My Real Baby, from Hasbro? COG is basically similar, but with a bigger budget.
The COG web site apparently hasn't been updated since 2000. Like the Leg Lab, it seems to have reached the limits of the ideas used.
This is sad, because there were some good ideas there. But they weren't anywhere near enough to even consider going to human-level AI in one jump. This is a classic vice of AI researchers - they have a reasonably good idea, and then start claiming that human-level strong AI is right around the corner. We went though this with the "expert systems" crowd in the 1980s, and that was even more embarassing and expensive, because doomed startups were launched. AI as a field was dead for a decade after that.
A bit of history. Back in May, his company was shut down by court order. His assets and house were seized. An injunction was issued to stop him from further spamming. A court-appointed receiver took over the operation, paid off the employees, and shut the operation down. Meanwhile, a criminal indictment was in progress, but not yet completed.
So Smith went to the Dominican Republic and tried to restart spamming from there. On June 28th, a judge issued an arrest warrant for him. When he returned to the US, he was arrested, but released on bail, with home monitoring.
The prosecution then asked for a six-month criminal contempt sentence for trying to violate the injunction and fleeing prosecution. Smith had a court date for that in July, and lost.
So now he's in jail for six months.
This is somebody who just didn't get it when the court ordered him to stop.
This is just the first phase.
The felony case is just getting underway.
Start by saying "This conversation is being recorded for quality control purposes. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Please give your full name and location".
Oodle has a home page that looks like one of those stupid search pages that domain speculators dump traffic onto.
This for a search engine that only searches ads. Ads for which they do not get paid. So they have to sell more ads to finance the searching of the ads.
Is a better link to the story available? The NYT web site goes into a redirection loop if you have cookies disabled or are behind a firewall that stops cookies.
"Windows 95 - It sucks less" T- shirt
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Microsoft distributed "Windows 95 - It sucks less" T-shirts to Macintosh developers during the run-up to Windows 95.
Computer science is really about the understanding and development of algorithms. And there really aren't that many people who do that any more.
I'm one of the few. I've done proof of correctness systems, image analysis algorithms, operating system design, game physics algorithms, robotic control algorithms, and network congestion algorithms. I've been lucky enough to be able to do this without having to work in academia.
I do have an MSCS from Stanford, which is a great credential, although the education wasn't really that good.
But in most areas of computing, the basic algorithms already exist. (Some of them keep being reinvented; watching the XML fans reinvent LISP is amusing.) Not that many employers really need algorithm development people.
I have no idea where you'd go as a computer scientist today. All the old labs (DEC, HP, IBM, PARC) are dead or shadows of their former selves.
It's almost down to Microsoft, Google, or academia.
Actually, I'd recommend getting a strong background in numerical analysis and statistics. It's useful to know number-crunching cold. Engineering, financial, database, search, and game work all need number-crunching.
It's more useful than, say, combinatorics.
If you're really into theory, you might want to take a new look at proof of correctness. I headed a team to build a proof of correctness system in 1980-82, and it worked, but it was just too slow on a 1 MIPS VAX. 45-minute proof runs for 500 lines of code. Today, that would take one second.
It's time to work in that area again. There's some good proof of correctness work going on the hardware area, but not much for software.
(Incidentally, if you think proof of correctness is impossible for undecidability reasons, you're wrong.)
Big deal. I played "Computer Space", the first coin op video game, in 1972.
I've even played the Galaxy Game, the minicomputer based video game installed in the student union at Stanford in the 1970s.
Wired doesn't have "stories" of their own any more, since they laid off all their reporters. This story is from the Associated Press. So don't link to Tired.
If the developers are going to fork, they should probably rename the product. "Mambo" is too generic. Something containing "Portal" would be more appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Disaster stockpiles don't seem to have been in place in New Orleans, even for the cheap stuff. A shipping container of water purification tablets would have been a huge help. Nobody seems to have thought to equip the Superdome, the designated disaster assembly point, with some basic water purification gear.
Congress and the voters need to ask some hard questions about where all that money goes and whether it's being spent properly.
The biggest weakness of the evacuation system is that it only worked if you had a car. This left poor people, elderly, and tourists trapped. The airlines cancelled flights too early, and buses weren't used for evacuation.
What with global warming and rising ocean levels, cities below sea level just aren't feasible.
Experience with ABS systems is instructive. ABS systems definitely improve braking, but don't reduce accidents. Drivers with ABS use their shorter stopping distance to follow more closely, cancelling out the safety benefits.
I run one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, which requires somewhat better technology. The current Grand Challenge technology is clunky (everybody has huge, mechanically scanned LIDAR devices or weak vision systems), but true solid state eye-safe outdoor 3D LIDAR imaging devices are just becoming available. With that technology, doing this right is within reach.
Go to the Macromedia site and put in a support question about how to remove the Flash Player from your laptop so you can comply with the EULA.
Er, no. Reality distortion field alert.
68K floating point didn't work in the PPC's emulator. If you ported your engineering application to PPC, you had to go from 80-bit floats to 64-bit floats, making your data incompatible with the 68K program and the x86 version. Most engineering apps dropped the Mac at the PPC transition.
There was a third-party "SoftFPU", but it was slow and didn't work very well.
The 68K-PPC transition was only "successful" to those who live in the Jobs Reality Distortion Field. In reality, Apple market share dropped substantially through the transition. Before the transition, Apple was a serious #2. After the transition, Apple was a niche player.
This isn't about spare parts for repair. For a consumer product, you handle that by running off extra boards while the product is still in production and storing them. Then you shut down the production line. This is more about keeping options open in case the Intel transition doesn't come off.
There are a number of ways this could go bad. For example, many Mac users still run Microsoft Office on the Mac. Microsoft isn't obligated to offer that on x86 for the Mac, now that the five year deal has expired. PPC emulation on x86 may not work all that well. Many Mac developers may just drop the Mac rather than switching to x86, which is what happened at the PPC transition.
'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity.
"Makes the gas more inert?" Those guys should stick to writing about case mods.
Plasma panels have actually been around since the 1960s, as neon-red displays. The early concept was that a sustaining voltage applied to all pixels kept them lit if they were on, and an X/Y array of wires could be used to turn individual pixels on and off. Thus, the display itself had memory, back when having enough memory to refresh the display was expensive.
Color, intensity variation, and speed took a long time to achieve. Now there are transistor drivers behind every pixel, and the panel is built in what's effectively a big wafer fab. But that's not the toughest part of the manufacturing problem. All the electronics is on the back glass, while the phosphors are on the front. These two big pieces of glass have to be welded together with subpixel precision, held in contact only by millions of tiny ridges that have to match up. That's the most difficult step, and the one that limits display size.
What's the problem? Wall Street allows bots, and it works fine. You can even get packages with useful APIs for your trading system.
"The labels price things based on what they believe they can get -- a pricing philosophy a lot of industries have. But we like to price things as cheaply as we possibly can, rather than charge as much as we can get. It's a big difference in philosophy, and we try to help other people see that." - WalMart senior VP (entertainment) Gary Severson.
WalMart pushed the labels into a $9.97 retail price for CDs. Then they started signing deals with artists on their own. WalMart now has exclusive rights to Garth Brooks.
It's hard to cheer for either side here. But from the music industry's perspective, WalMart is scarier than Apple. Apple needs the music industry. For WalMart, audio CDs are a minor business. WalMart sometimes threatens to cut back on audio CDs and devote more shelf space to DVDs and games. And Apple doesn't care about content. WalMart imposes censorship on both music and cover art.
"Hi! Welcome to our online store. I'm Jim, your sales rep. We're having a sale today on generic Viagra. Would you like to order 100 capsules for only $249.95? Um? Oh, surely you want to improve your sex life. Um? How can you pass up this one-time offer at this amazingly low price. Um? I'll throw in free shipping. Um? I'll take that as a yes. We already have your credit card information, and you'll be receiving your product shortly. Have a nice day."
What they ended up with was something that sort of fakes human interaction. That's been done before. Remember Ananova? Chatterbots? My Real Baby, from Hasbro? COG is basically similar, but with a bigger budget.
The COG web site apparently hasn't been updated since 2000. Like the Leg Lab, it seems to have reached the limits of the ideas used.
This is sad, because there were some good ideas there. But they weren't anywhere near enough to even consider going to human-level AI in one jump. This is a classic vice of AI researchers - they have a reasonably good idea, and then start claiming that human-level strong AI is right around the corner. We went though this with the "expert systems" crowd in the 1980s, and that was even more embarassing and expensive, because doomed startups were launched. AI as a field was dead for a decade after that.
That's the price of overhyping a technology.
If you have a system that runs for years between crashes, you need people who've been around for a few years to deal with it. That's the problem.
So Smith went to the Dominican Republic and tried to restart spamming from there. On June 28th, a judge issued an arrest warrant for him. When he returned to the US, he was arrested, but released on bail, with home monitoring.
The prosecution then asked for a six-month criminal contempt sentence for trying to violate the injunction and fleeing prosecution. Smith had a court date for that in July, and lost. So now he's in jail for six months.
This is somebody who just didn't get it when the court ordered him to stop.
This is just the first phase. The felony case is just getting underway.
Start by saying "This conversation is being recorded for quality control purposes. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Please give your full name and location".
I don't think we have a winner here.
Is a better link to the story available? The NYT web site goes into a redirection loop if you have cookies disabled or are behind a firewall that stops cookies.
Microsoft distributed "Windows 95 - It sucks less" T-shirts to Macintosh developers during the run-up to Windows 95.
I'm one of the few. I've done proof of correctness systems, image analysis algorithms, operating system design, game physics algorithms, robotic control algorithms, and network congestion algorithms. I've been lucky enough to be able to do this without having to work in academia. I do have an MSCS from Stanford, which is a great credential, although the education wasn't really that good.
But in most areas of computing, the basic algorithms already exist. (Some of them keep being reinvented; watching the XML fans reinvent LISP is amusing.) Not that many employers really need algorithm development people. I have no idea where you'd go as a computer scientist today. All the old labs (DEC, HP, IBM, PARC) are dead or shadows of their former selves. It's almost down to Microsoft, Google, or academia.
Actually, I'd recommend getting a strong background in numerical analysis and statistics. It's useful to know number-crunching cold. Engineering, financial, database, search, and game work all need number-crunching. It's more useful than, say, combinatorics.
If you're really into theory, you might want to take a new look at proof of correctness. I headed a team to build a proof of correctness system in 1980-82, and it worked, but it was just too slow on a 1 MIPS VAX. 45-minute proof runs for 500 lines of code. Today, that would take one second. It's time to work in that area again. There's some good proof of correctness work going on the hardware area, but not much for software.
(Incidentally, if you think proof of correctness is impossible for undecidability reasons, you're wrong.)
Now, those are the roots of video gaming.
The dividing line for "life" is generally considered to be much lower. Prions, no. Viruses, maybe. Bacteria, yes.
That might have been worth "+5, Insightful" in 1985. Maybe 1992.
Wired doesn't have "stories" of their own any more, since they laid off all their reporters. This story is from the Associated Press. So don't link to Tired.
"Webportal" is not a registered trademark.