The Commerce Department's numbers are old. Compare the Nielsen/NetRatings numbers for November 2004. 52.9% of US Internet users now have broadband. Broadband passed dialup last summer.
That number climbs steadily by about 12% per year. 40% back in late 2003, 53% this month, 80% around summer 2006. It's happening, and fast.
About 60% of US TV viewers have cable TV. It took the cable TV industry decades to reach that number, and they've been stuck there since the '80s. Broadband penetration will pass cable TV penetration next year.
More people in the US have Internet connections (75%) than read newspapers (41%).
There's no need for a public policy change to "encourage broadband". It's happening faster than any Government intervention could make it happen.
Where are programs that read these serial numbers? This could be helpful in many ways, such as tracing phony mail-in campaigns aimed at influencing legislation.
And is there a page on the web with the "uncopyable" pattern of little circles that identifies European money and prevents printing? That would make a useful background image for web sites.
It sounds like HP ran a free demo. But has anybody actually paid for their service?
There are commercial render farm services running right now. Over 400 machines. 440 frames are rendering right now. Over 6 million frames sold. On line. Self service. VISA/MC accepted.
The going rate is about $1/GHz/hour, before discounts.
And they never mention "grid computing".
Electric cars are easy. But the batteries...
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 1
It's not hard to build an electric car, even a high-performance one. There are even conversion kits. (Their conversion kit for the Porsche 914 is especially effective. That's because that little mid-engine car has both front and back trunks usable for battery space.) But the battery problem remains.
All this guy did was build a nice-looking platform around a ton or so of lithium-ion batteries. It's cute, but it doesn't represent a new solution to any problem. Price out a ton of laptop batteries and you get the picture.
GM had an EV1 with a lithium-ion battery option at one point, but that ran the cost through the roof.
The importance of understanding the business context for IT investment has never been more obvious than it is today. More organizations are recognizing the role of IT as a determining factor in the efficiency of their operations, and a bottleneck in their ability to innovate. I am spending a lot of time with customers who want to explore business alternatives, drive IT projects more directly from business needs with well established business goals and ROI, choreograph services to realize their business processes, and monitor those services in execution to relate operations to the needs of the business. Support for that flow (in its myriad variations) is essential. As we use the current generation of tools in this context we are seeing the emergence of new roles, usage scenarios, and support needs. The lessons from this work are leading to a complete refactoring of tooling capabilities.
Let's try that again, in a different context.
The importance of understanding the business context for office furnishing investment has never been more obvious than it is today. More organizations are recognizing the role of office furnishings as a determining factor in the efficiency of their operations, and a bottleneck in their ability to innovate. I am spending a lot of time with customers who want to explore business alternatives, drive office furnishing projects more directly from business needs with well established business goals and ROI, choreograph services to realize their business processes, and monitor those services in execution to relate operations to the needs of the business. Support for that flow (in its myriad variations) is essential. As we use the current generation of tools in this context we are seeing the emergence of new roles, usage scenarios, and support needs. The lessons from this work are leading to a complete refactoring of tooling capabilities.
That's part of what journalism is about - taking that risk.
Beating up journalists is hazardous to your health. Some crooks have tried. What happens then is that hundreds of other journalists start investigating the story. TV trucks start showing up in front of the bad guy's house. Stories like "Why isn't this guy in jail yet" appear. Soon, there's heavy police attention focused on the crook.
Few crooks survive heavy press coverage. It's hard to stay in the shadows when there's a TV light in your face.
You can get that. It's the Eaton VORAD radar
on
Spies Riding Shotgun
·
· Score: 1
The fact of the matter is that these are only good for people attacking you. If they added a camera that looked out the front window of the vehicle, and recorded the last 30 seconds of data from that as well, it would be good. Then, not only could the know what was done, but might have some clue as to why it was done. Knowing what happened without knowing why it happened...it's pretty much useless for things like this.
The Eaton VORAD anti-collision radar does just that. It tracks up to 20 targets in front of your vehicle.
The main purpose is to help prevent accidents; you get a loud alarm, and some versions will start braking on their own. But it also logs information. Range, range rate, and azimuth are captured, along with the vehicle's own data (speed, turning angles braking, etc.) Accidents can be reconstructed from that data. It's especially good for demonstrating that some other vehicle ran a stop sign.
There are about 20,000 of those units on the road, mostly on heavy trucks.
We use VORAD units here at Overbot, For test purposes, This is far more advanced than a speed gun; it's a true phased-array steerable radar. You get tracking data. I've had one pointed out a window overlooking an intersection, and have software that lets me watch the traffic go by. You can reliably see cars and motorcycles; bicycles and strollers are marginal targets.
Enforcement of privacy rules in the US is very weak, even where there are rules.
A good example of non-enforcement is TrustE, which claims to have an "enforcement" mechanism but no longer takes enforcement actions.
TrustE's Watchdog Reportsinvariably results in a decision of "Issue Handled with no changes necessary to the Privacy Statement nor the Site". They get about a hundred complaints per month, but don't do anything. The last time TrustE made a site change anything was in 2002.
In the early days of TrustE, their seal actually meant something. But they've totally sold out.
There's also the Commerce Department's "Safe Harbor" list. No enforcement action has ever been taken under that.
So don't believe any "privacy certifications" associated with RFID tag use. They're meaningless.
Or how much was he paid for this one? It sounds like an apology for the RFID industry.
It's not that hard to visit Chernoybl
on
A New Elena Story
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There are tours starting from Kiev. They're not even that expensive. Tours go to within 100m of the damaged reactor site.
The area isn't totally deserted, nor is it that hazardous for short vists with suitable precautions. Some old residents moved back into the area. Two of the Chernoybl power reactors were operated until 2000. Hundreds of cleanup workers still go in and out. A few vehicles are driven in the area.
So it's not that tightly closed an area.
It's not clear exactly how far Elena was able to take her bike. From the pictures, you see her bike in pictures up to the Dytyatky checkpoint, but not thereafter. Her pictures within the exclusion zone are very similar to those taken by others who've taken that tour. She appears in some of those pictures. So the most likely thing is that she rode her bike to the checkpoint and took the tour bus into Chernoybl.
For $39.95, you can buy XP Lite, a commercial product which uninstalls Internet Explorer and lots of other Microsoft crap you don't need or want. Once they can't run IE, life becomes far simpler.
Back in the old days, we had to run all the cards through the sorter to sort on the desired field. Then we'd wire a IBM 407 tabulator board to do a control break on the desired field, and print the total.
If someone wanted an average, we had to cable up the 519 summary punch to the 407, and wire a tabulator board to send the total and count to the punch. The 407 couldn't divide, so then we'd run the summary cards through the 602A multiplier to do the divide. The 602A would do A=B/C and punch A into the same card that contained B and C. Then the summary cards could be resorted into the desired report order and run through the 407 with yet another board to generate the report.
OK, here's the web site of Brittania, the company that's whining that they can't hire people. And here's what they're looking for.
Software Engineer
We are currently seeking a Software Engineer. Individual must be proficient with computer programming and knowledgeable about computer technology. Qualified candidate must be committed to producing quality work and work well with others. This is an extremely challenging position and requires commitment and perseverance. If you are a competent programmer and are looking for a rewarding challenge, we look forward to hearing from you. Please submit your resume and cover letter, including a sample of your programming ability, in any language.
According to their web site, they're only looking for one person, which contradicts what they're telling the press.
What Brittania actually sells is a bookkeeping application for small office-supply stores.
A computer-controlled Personal Rapid Transit system with four stations has been running in Morgantown,
West Virginia since 1975. It has true
routing; you punch a destination and it takes you there, bypassing other stations. The cars seat 8 people.
Take a good look at that, and you'll see what the trackwork for a real system looks like. It does take a bit more room than the optimistic drawings of this new scheme. You need dual tracks, sidings, and turnaround loops.
Dedicated lane automatic driving has been demonstrated repeatedly, from GM's Firebird III in the 1950s to the STARRcar in the 1960s to the CALTRANS PATH demo in the late 1990s. There's no market for it.
People don't mind driving fast on the freeway. It's the tangled situations in busy areas people hate.
Wasn't that article referenced on Slashdot previously?
As one of the Grand Challenge team leaders, I follow this subject rather closely.
It's actually a rather stupid article for EE Times.
They have canned pictures of MEMS accelerometers,
a picture of an ordinary SUV going through water lifted from early Grand Challenge materials, and the inevitable "car talking to satellite" drawing.
There's little mention of the real problems.
It's not about compute power.
Automatic driving needs either more intelligent visual processing than anything we have now, or better sensors than we have now. I think we'll get the sensors first.
Visual processing can detect big things like other cars, but detecting a pothole is tough. Stereo doesn't really profile ground all that well.
You need edges for the correlator to lock up.
True range sensors are more useful. Existing scanning laser rangefinder devices are marginal, but there's better stuff coming. The mechanically scanned devices are too clunky. All solid state devices do exist. I've seen some impressive demos on an optical bench, and that technology will be fieldable soon.
Submillimeter radar also has potential, but it's not here yet. Millimeter radar, however, works fine and is quite useful for seeing anything bigger than a bicycle.
Incidentally, although they don't publicize it, the CMU Grand Challenge vehicle didn't really use Itaniums. Yes, Intel donated Itaniums, and the press releases say they were used, but the Itaniums were damaged before the main event and were replaced with ordinary x86 machines.
Walnut Creek, CA, just had a digging disaster when a crew excavating for a water main hit an aviation fuel pipeline. Five people dead. 170 homes and two schools evacuated, Massive firefighting effort. Secondary flareups occured for two days. The drawing for the fuel pipeline apparently didn't show where the pipeline changed direction.
It's quite possible to have a CGI studio that doesn't do any R&D. Most don't. The off the shelf technology is good enough for Toy Story N+1.
And when they get stuck, they'll outsource to ILM, like everybody else does. (About half of ILM's revenue comes from bailing out productions in trouble.)
The Incredibles has really good hair and cloth dynamics, but Toy Story doesn't need that.
All the major systems have hair and cloth now anyway, although some of them don't work too well.
The Polar Express is struggling with the "it almost looks human, but not quite" problem.
But that's more of a style issue; it wasn't supposed to be photorealistic. (Actually, the Polar Express suffers from "everybody is played by Tom Hanks having an ego trip",
but that's not a technical problem.)
For that much trouble, they could have found a more visually interesting subject. There's less detail than you might hope, too.
You can zoom all the way in and read the Baltimore Air Coil logo on the heat exchanger on top of the power plant. But you can't read license plates.
Keyhole clearly has the largest stitched-together panorama. They have the whole planet.
This is one of those "rewritten in conference committee" bills. It passed the House in a completely different form, as the CREATE act (an annoying but minor change to patent law), and all this new copyright stuff was added in conference committee. This bypasses hearings.
But bills like this can be killed easily if there's opposition. This only works if nobody notices.
What this tells virus authors is that their viruses should not only detect that they're running in a virtual machine, but escape from it and take over the real machine.
Microsoft VM has to do all the wierd code-changing that VMware did, because the x86 can't be completely virtualized. And it has to emulate the I/O devices. There are probably bugs in the VM that can be exploited, most likely in the I/O area. Try wierd DMA operations, and poke around in device address space, until the real machine crashes. Then you know where to look for a vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
That number climbs steadily by about 12% per year. 40% back in late 2003, 53% this month, 80% around summer 2006. It's happening, and fast.
About 60% of US TV viewers have cable TV. It took the cable TV industry decades to reach that number, and they've been stuck there since the '80s. Broadband penetration will pass cable TV penetration next year. More people in the US have Internet connections (75%) than read newspapers (41%).
There's no need for a public policy change to "encourage broadband". It's happening faster than any Government intervention could make it happen.
And is there a page on the web with the "uncopyable" pattern of little circles that identifies European money and prevents printing? That would make a useful background image for web sites.
There are commercial render farm services running right now. Over 400 machines. 440 frames are rendering right now. Over 6 million frames sold. On line. Self service. VISA/MC accepted. The going rate is about $1/GHz/hour, before discounts.
And they never mention "grid computing".
All this guy did was build a nice-looking platform around a ton or so of lithium-ion batteries. It's cute, but it doesn't represent a new solution to any problem. Price out a ton of laptop batteries and you get the picture.
GM had an EV1 with a lithium-ion battery option at one point, but that ran the cost through the roof.
-
The importance of understanding the business context for IT investment has never been more obvious than it is today. More organizations are recognizing the role of IT as a determining factor in the efficiency of their operations, and a bottleneck in their ability to innovate. I am spending a lot of time with customers who want to explore business alternatives, drive IT projects more directly from business needs with well established business goals and ROI, choreograph services to realize their business processes, and monitor those services in execution to relate operations to the needs of the business. Support for that flow (in its myriad variations) is essential. As we use the current generation of tools in this context we are seeing the emergence of new roles, usage scenarios, and support needs. The lessons from this work are leading to a complete refactoring of tooling capabilities.
Let's try that again, in a different context.-
The importance of understanding the business context for office furnishing investment has never been more obvious than it is today. More organizations are recognizing the role of office furnishings as a determining factor in the efficiency of their operations, and a bottleneck in their ability to innovate. I am spending a lot of time with customers who want to explore business alternatives, drive office furnishing projects more directly from business needs with well established business goals and ROI, choreograph services to realize their business processes, and monitor those services in execution to relate operations to the needs of the business. Support for that flow (in its myriad variations) is essential. As we use the current generation of tools in this context we are seeing the emergence of new roles, usage scenarios, and support needs. The lessons from this work are leading to a complete refactoring of tooling capabilities.
See? It's a totally generic statement.Beating up journalists is hazardous to your health. Some crooks have tried. What happens then is that hundreds of other journalists start investigating the story. TV trucks start showing up in front of the bad guy's house. Stories like "Why isn't this guy in jail yet" appear. Soon, there's heavy police attention focused on the crook.
Few crooks survive heavy press coverage. It's hard to stay in the shadows when there's a TV light in your face.
The Eaton VORAD anti-collision radar does just that. It tracks up to 20 targets in front of your vehicle. The main purpose is to help prevent accidents; you get a loud alarm, and some versions will start braking on their own. But it also logs information. Range, range rate, and azimuth are captured, along with the vehicle's own data (speed, turning angles braking, etc.) Accidents can be reconstructed from that data. It's especially good for demonstrating that some other vehicle ran a stop sign.
There are about 20,000 of those units on the road, mostly on heavy trucks.
We use VORAD units here at Overbot, For test purposes, This is far more advanced than a speed gun; it's a true phased-array steerable radar. You get tracking data. I've had one pointed out a window overlooking an intersection, and have software that lets me watch the traffic go by. You can reliably see cars and motorcycles; bicycles and strollers are marginal targets.
TrustE's Watchdog Reports invariably results in a decision of "Issue Handled with no changes necessary to the Privacy Statement nor the Site". They get about a hundred complaints per month, but don't do anything. The last time TrustE made a site change anything was in 2002.
In the early days of TrustE, their seal actually meant something. But they've totally sold out.
There's also the Commerce Department's "Safe Harbor" list. No enforcement action has ever been taken under that.
So don't believe any "privacy certifications" associated with RFID tag use. They're meaningless.
Or how much was he paid for this one? It sounds like an apology for the RFID industry.
The area isn't totally deserted, nor is it that hazardous for short vists with suitable precautions. Some old residents moved back into the area. Two of the Chernoybl power reactors were operated until 2000. Hundreds of cleanup workers still go in and out. A few vehicles are driven in the area.
So it's not that tightly closed an area.
It's not clear exactly how far Elena was able to take her bike. From the pictures, you see her bike in pictures up to the Dytyatky checkpoint, but not thereafter. Her pictures within the exclusion zone are very similar to those taken by others who've taken that tour. She appears in some of those pictures. So the most likely thing is that she rode her bike to the checkpoint and took the tour bus into Chernoybl.
For $39.95, you can buy XP Lite, a commercial product which uninstalls Internet Explorer and lots of other Microsoft crap you don't need or want. Once they can't run IE, life becomes far simpler.
You guys have it easy.
We are currently seeking a Software Engineer. Individual must be proficient with computer programming and knowledgeable about computer technology. Qualified candidate must be committed to producing quality work and work well with others. This is an extremely challenging position and requires commitment and perseverance. If you are a competent programmer and are looking for a rewarding challenge, we look forward to hearing from you. Please submit your resume and cover letter, including a sample of your programming ability, in any language.
According to their web site, they're only looking for one person, which contradicts what they're telling the press.
What Brittania actually sells is a bookkeeping application for small office-supply stores.
Take a good look at that, and you'll see what the trackwork for a real system looks like. It does take a bit more room than the optimistic drawings of this new scheme. You need dual tracks, sidings, and turnaround loops.
People don't mind driving fast on the freeway. It's the tangled situations in busy areas people hate.
Ah, defining the market to be What Your Product Does.
As one of the Grand Challenge team leaders, I follow this subject rather closely. It's actually a rather stupid article for EE Times. They have canned pictures of MEMS accelerometers, a picture of an ordinary SUV going through water lifted from early Grand Challenge materials, and the inevitable "car talking to satellite" drawing. There's little mention of the real problems. It's not about compute power.
Automatic driving needs either more intelligent visual processing than anything we have now, or better sensors than we have now. I think we'll get the sensors first.
Visual processing can detect big things like other cars, but detecting a pothole is tough. Stereo doesn't really profile ground all that well. You need edges for the correlator to lock up.
True range sensors are more useful. Existing scanning laser rangefinder devices are marginal, but there's better stuff coming. The mechanically scanned devices are too clunky. All solid state devices do exist. I've seen some impressive demos on an optical bench, and that technology will be fieldable soon.
Submillimeter radar also has potential, but it's not here yet. Millimeter radar, however, works fine and is quite useful for seeing anything bigger than a bicycle.
Incidentally, although they don't publicize it, the CMU Grand Challenge vehicle didn't really use Itaniums. Yes, Intel donated Itaniums, and the press releases say they were used, but the Itaniums were damaged before the main event and were replaced with ordinary x86 machines.
Is Arnold still getting payments from AM General for promoting the Hummer?
Walnut Creek, CA, just had a digging disaster when a crew excavating for a water main hit an aviation fuel pipeline. Five people dead. 170 homes and two schools evacuated, Massive firefighting effort. Secondary flareups occured for two days. The drawing for the fuel pipeline apparently didn't show where the pipeline changed direction.
It's about time for the cheap, generic PVRs from China to start appearing. Pure product, no service, price around $79 and dropping.
The Incredibles has really good hair and cloth dynamics, but Toy Story doesn't need that. All the major systems have hair and cloth now anyway, although some of them don't work too well.
The Polar Express is struggling with the "it almost looks human, but not quite" problem. But that's more of a style issue; it wasn't supposed to be photorealistic. (Actually, the Polar Express suffers from "everybody is played by Tom Hanks having an ego trip", but that's not a technical problem.)
Keyhole clearly has the largest stitched-together panorama. They have the whole planet.
But bills like this can be killed easily if there's opposition. This only works if nobody notices.
So write your member of Congress today.
Although Megatokyo sometimes loses the threads of their subplots. They had Seraphim tied to a post for six months.
Microsoft VM has to do all the wierd code-changing that VMware did, because the x86 can't be completely virtualized. And it has to emulate the I/O devices. There are probably bugs in the VM that can be exploited, most likely in the I/O area. Try wierd DMA operations, and poke around in device address space, until the real machine crashes. Then you know where to look for a vulnerability.