"Acoustic zoom" beam-forming microphones have been available since 2010. Their main commercial product is an "acoustic camera" with 128 microphones on an 0.4 meter disk. They have other surveillance products, but they are "not approved for unlicensed users". This is already in use at FCI Otisville, a US prison. "This technology allows an operator to listen to various locations within the range of the system without any movement of the equipment.... (T)his ability means the operator does not have to move about in order to "point" the equipment at his target and thereby draw attention to him potentially compromising the investigation."
With these systems, if you have enough recording bandwidth, you can record all the microphones and do the beam-forming later. So it's possible to pick the target at playback time. Squarehead is partnering with Galleon Embedded Computing, which makes 8 terabyte recorders full of flash devices capable of recording at gigabit Ethernet rates, so that's presumably what they're doing.
There are several other vendors now. This isn't really that hard to do.
So this technology is already out there, listening to crowds and pulling out single conversations.
This is just making mandatory the Common External Power Supply EU standard. That's been a voluntary standard since 2009, and most cell phone vendors in Europe have been on board for years. It's simple enough - phones use a MicroUSB B connector, and chargers use a USB-A connector if they have a connector at the charger end.
China standardized on MicroUSB-B back in 2007. The GSM consortium standardized on MicroUSB-B in 2009.
Now it just remains to be seen if drivers will continue to pay attention to the road, or if it becomes so autonomous that people start slacking (more) behind the wheel.
That's a big problem with "driver assistance systems". With both lane-keeping and "adaptive cruise control" installed, the driver can take their hands off the wheel. Once that's possible, some drivers will stop paying attention to the road. That won't end well, because those two functions are only sufficient for good freeway conditions. They don't handle attempts by other drivers to change into your lane, for example.
Audi has an "adaptive cruise control" system in test which also handles stop and go traffic. That will tempt people to use it in cities with pedestrians. But its systems aren't good enough to handle a crowded city. That's probably why Audi isn't shipping it yet. That also seems to be about where Tesla is aiming.
This Nissan thing sounds like lane-keeping plus adaptive cruise control plus a user control for "change lane right/left".
Real automatic driving means that the auto manufacturer takes responsibility for accidents. That's not unreasonable. It just means a lease package which includes insurance protecting both manufacturer and driver. Once automatic driving is statistically safer than manual driving, that will be financially feasible.
Games based on movies tend to have a "plot". With George Lucas interfering, that got completely out of hand. (Especially since Lucas sucks at plotting. What makes the Star Wars franchise go is production value, not plot or character development.)
A game is a place that you go and do things, not a story. Movie directors have a hard time with this. They want to lock the player into a track ride, like an amusement park.
The day may be approaching when some countries will have their own DNS roots and root servers. That's been threatened before, but now it's more likely to happen.
This is only an issue because there are five applicants for every job and more than half of college graduates move back in with their parents. Everybody now sends their resume to everybody, and HR departments are overwhelmed. The result is extensive filtering on easy to check, but not too useful, criteria by HR departments.
Slashdot has a habit of doing the same thing in a subtly different way: "Biofuel company producing diesel from trees." But when you read the article it is two guys and a tiny test tube of a precursor to a precursor to diesel that they produced at huge cost but "Plan on increasing efficiency."
It's not Slashdot. It's upstream from Slashdot.
Nature and MIT Technology Review have that problem. Somebody makes a minor advance in surface chemistry, which they call "nanotechnology", and it gets hyped into "now you can paint solar cells onto your house".
Mozilla barely has control of their own code base. The number of open bugs keeps increasing. Attempts to multi-thread the browser failed. The frantic release schedule results in things like the broken Firefox 23, where panels in add-ons just disappeared off screen. They have legacy code back to Netscape 1, and it's crushing them. Firefox market share is declining steadily. Not good.
Drive around in GTA V. Visit the beach. Go swimming and dive underwater. Check out the beach walk. Climb the mountains. Fly the blimp. There are about 20 square miles to explore, all with considerable detail.
No, the way to do Burning Man is to fly in. Burning Man has its own temporary airport, and six charter operators are authorized to use it. If you come in on a charter flight, fly in, or charter your own aircraft, you avoid the traffic jam. Not only that, the airport has its own VIP entrance gate with no line. Send your people on ahead with a truck, so your camp is all set up and operating when you get there. That's the way to do it.
Consider the advantages of fractional jet ownership.
There's a data link between the ISS and docking vehicles. A new version of that was developed recently. Here's the presentation on that. But it doesn't seem to be operational yet. NASA has been talking about the new C2V2 system for years, and commercial spacecraft were supposed to be designed to use it. But it's not ready yet.
So Space-X and Orbital Sciences had to also develop a temporary capability to use the old automated docking system, which, I think, is derived from the Soviet-era Kursk system.
Programs like "Mail" or "Messages" could be implemented in reprogrammable silicon.
You need how much compute power to read mail?
Most users just don't need that much power. Once everybody could play streaming HDTV, the couch potato market was covered. Rendering in gaming could still improve, and NPC behavior could get smarter, but really, GTA V pretty much has that nailed and it runs on last-generation consoles.
There are people who need more power, but they're running fluid dynamics simulations or rendering movies or simulating new ICs or something like that. I've run Autodesk Inventor on 24-CPU workstations. That's one of the few interactive programs that can usefully use a 24-CPU workstation. It's not a mass market product.
The applications that need vast amounts of additional compute power are there, but they're not high-volume applications. Nor are they "enthusiast" applications. There's not enough volume there to justify heavy investment in faster CPUs.
This may change as we have better robots or something like that. But speeding up existing desktop apps, no.
(Program load times are still ridiculous long, but mostly because of stupidity like phoning home for updates, waiting for the license server, fetching ads, or using virtual memory in a world where memory is cheap.)
"The NSA/CSS Memorial Wall lists the names of 171 cryptologists who have died in the line of duty since the Agency's inception in 1952," according to the letter.
This refers to members of the US military doing cryptographic duty who died in the line of duty. Here's the list. Most died during the Cold War or in Vietnam. In recent years, in Afghanistan or Iraq. Only one civilian, Alan M. Blue, who was on the USS Liberty when the Israelis attacked it.
That's too bad. I've met many of their people. They were doing good work.
"Suitable Technologies" is just another company producing those annoying "remote presence" robots with a video phone on top. There are four or five manufacturers of those things. They can't do anything; they have no manipulation capability. They just talk.
"Remote presence" is only useful if the person running it is someone who gets sucked up to. Like doctors. A number of health care vendors are trying the things.
A few years ago, I was involved in the conversion of the Stanford AI lab tape archive to modern media. This involved reading thousands of reels of 1/2" magnetic tape. It was a slow process. Volunteers were loading a tape onto a tape drive every 15 minutes for weeks. After each tape was loaded, its contents were sent over an Internet connection in under a minute. It took much longer to wind through the tapes than to transmit the data.
The data went to a server farm at IBM Almaden Research, where the file systems were reassembled (these were incremental dump tapes) and text files were converted from the Stanford AI lab's unique character set to Unicode.
The result was the SAIL DART archive. See the source code for EMACS, the early years.
Or take away their ability to block tracking as they can currently do with cookies?
That's the basic idea. CNET covered this a few days ago."The AdID would be transmitted to advertisers and ad networks that have agreed to basic guidelines, giving consumers more privacy and control over how they browse the Web,"
Expect meaningless, easy to evade "basic guidelines", like TrustE.
Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.
Take a look at Before VFX, which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.
This keeps coming up on Slashdot, and it's mostly a non-issue. The only reason it's an issue now is that hobbyist 3D printers are so crappy that they're used mostly to produce copies of game and movie related decorative items.
If you use one to make a dashboard knob for a '57 Chevy, there's no IP issue. Design patents are only for 14 years. You can't copyright a functional part, and most functional parts aren't original enough for a utility patent. There's a robust third-party auto parts industry because of this.
When 3D printing in metal really gets going, it's going to be a Joe Sixpack thing. The same people who own welders will own 3D printers. If you do not presently own at least one power tool, you will probably not have a 3D printer.
This is pathetic. They blew through $500K and they don't even have a demo. Reading through their stuff, it seems like all they really intended to do was a standard fighting game with a sword-like controller and better fighting mechanics. Nothing indicates that you'd feel a blow when you hit something, or when you got hit. A Kinect can do that. Even the old-model Kinect.
There's some handwaving about force feedback, but nothing about how to actually do it. It's not impossible, and you can do better than just putting a buzzer or vibrator in the sword. It would be amusing to put a gyro in a gimbal inside the sword. Normally, with the gimbals unlocked, the sword swings freely, but when you get a "hit", the gimbal clutches lock and you feel your wrist wrenched as the sword will no longer rotate.
And why the hell do they have a Tesla coil driving a Jacobs ladder in their video?
We need to be much less tolerant of things that "phone home" to some headquarters. Or accept remote patches. We now have to assume that anything with a remote patch capability can be exploited.
You might think open source would be better. It's not. Even the Mozilla Foundation has become squishy-soft on enforcing their own privacy rules. Check out BlockSite, a Firefox add-on which used to just block requested sites. It was bought up by a company called WIPS, which buys up abandoned apps and puts in back-door tracking of every site visited. After a year of pressure from WIPS, Jorge Villalobos at Mozilla caved in and let them install tracking in an existing add-on and auto update it.
For Linux, Ubuntu pushes an awful lot of updates to supposedly "stable" versions. Is there a back door in there? Is anybody looking?
"Medium.com" is one of those aggregator sites. Don't link to them. Link to the actual paper. Thank you.
They had to use the Palomar 200 inch telescope to make this work. There aren't many big telescopes in the world, and they're booked months in advance. They got a few hours of observing for one night, and good results. But they'd need a lot more observing time on big scopes to do their survey.
The way data centers are going, the "operating system" is migrating off the server farm. The trend is toward servers with a minimal OS that run a single application, probably in a VM. File systems are on other machines on a storage area network. Control of the server farm is on machines separate from the servers. Control machines tell server VMs what to run, what they can connect to (part of "software defined networking"), and their identity for security purposes. Logging, monitoring, and problem reporting is handled by machines other than the workers. Development takes place in a different environment than production. That's what Amazon AWS is like right now. That's what IBM needs to provide to their corporate customers.
Data center computing may not need Linux at all on the production machines. The more specialized machines which run the support systems of the cloud may use it, but they aren't the performance-critical machines. They're the security-critical machines. What we may need is a high-security OS for cloud support machines, accepting some loss in performance.
Slashdot Mirror
"Acoustic zoom" beam-forming microphones have been available since 2010. Their main commercial product is an "acoustic camera" with 128 microphones on an 0.4 meter disk. They have other surveillance products, but they are "not approved for unlicensed users". This is already in use at FCI Otisville, a US prison. "This technology allows an operator to listen to various locations within the range of the system without any movement of the equipment. ... (T)his ability means the operator does not have to move about in order to "point" the equipment at his target and thereby draw attention to him potentially compromising the investigation."
With these systems, if you have enough recording bandwidth, you can record all the microphones and do the beam-forming later. So it's possible to pick the target at playback time. Squarehead is partnering with Galleon Embedded Computing, which makes 8 terabyte recorders full of flash devices capable of recording at gigabit Ethernet rates, so that's presumably what they're doing.
There are several other vendors now. This isn't really that hard to do.
So this technology is already out there, listening to crowds and pulling out single conversations.
This is just making mandatory the Common External Power Supply EU standard. That's been a voluntary standard since 2009, and most cell phone vendors in Europe have been on board for years. It's simple enough - phones use a MicroUSB B connector, and chargers use a USB-A connector if they have a connector at the charger end.
China standardized on MicroUSB-B back in 2007. The GSM consortium standardized on MicroUSB-B in 2009.
Now it just remains to be seen if drivers will continue to pay attention to the road, or if it becomes so autonomous that people start slacking (more) behind the wheel.
That's a big problem with "driver assistance systems". With both lane-keeping and "adaptive cruise control" installed, the driver can take their hands off the wheel. Once that's possible, some drivers will stop paying attention to the road. That won't end well, because those two functions are only sufficient for good freeway conditions. They don't handle attempts by other drivers to change into your lane, for example.
Audi has an "adaptive cruise control" system in test which also handles stop and go traffic. That will tempt people to use it in cities with pedestrians. But its systems aren't good enough to handle a crowded city. That's probably why Audi isn't shipping it yet. That also seems to be about where Tesla is aiming. This Nissan thing sounds like lane-keeping plus adaptive cruise control plus a user control for "change lane right/left".
Real automatic driving means that the auto manufacturer takes responsibility for accidents. That's not unreasonable. It just means a lease package which includes insurance protecting both manufacturer and driver. Once automatic driving is statistically safer than manual driving, that will be financially feasible.
Games based on movies tend to have a "plot". With George Lucas interfering, that got completely out of hand. (Especially since Lucas sucks at plotting. What makes the Star Wars franchise go is production value, not plot or character development.)
A game is a place that you go and do things, not a story. Movie directors have a hard time with this. They want to lock the player into a track ride, like an amusement park.
That was the original idea for "cars.com". They were really going to sell cars online. But they ended up just being a lead-generation service.
The day may be approaching when some countries will have their own DNS roots and root servers. That's been threatened before, but now it's more likely to happen.
This is only an issue because there are five applicants for every job and more than half of college graduates move back in with their parents. Everybody now sends their resume to everybody, and HR departments are overwhelmed. The result is extensive filtering on easy to check, but not too useful, criteria by HR departments.
Slashdot has a habit of doing the same thing in a subtly different way: "Biofuel company producing diesel from trees." But when you read the article it is two guys and a tiny test tube of a precursor to a precursor to diesel that they produced at huge cost but "Plan on increasing efficiency."
It's not Slashdot. It's upstream from Slashdot. Nature and MIT Technology Review have that problem. Somebody makes a minor advance in surface chemistry, which they call "nanotechnology", and it gets hyped into "now you can paint solar cells onto your house".
OK, who rolled the Slashdot database back to 2013-09-18? This is at the top of Slashdot on 2013-09-24.
Mozilla barely has control of their own code base. The number of open bugs keeps increasing. Attempts to multi-thread the browser failed. The frantic release schedule results in things like the broken Firefox 23, where panels in add-ons just disappeared off screen. They have legacy code back to Netscape 1, and it's crushing them. Firefox market share is declining steadily. Not good.
Drive around in GTA V. Visit the beach. Go swimming and dive underwater. Check out the beach walk. Climb the mountains. Fly the blimp. There are about 20 square miles to explore, all with considerable detail.
That's the legacy of Myst.
No, the way to do Burning Man is to fly in. Burning Man has its own temporary airport, and six charter operators are authorized to use it. If you come in on a charter flight, fly in, or charter your own aircraft, you avoid the traffic jam. Not only that, the airport has its own VIP entrance gate with no line. Send your people on ahead with a truck, so your camp is all set up and operating when you get there. That's the way to do it.
Consider the advantages of fractional jet ownership.
There's a data link between the ISS and docking vehicles. A new version of that was developed recently. Here's the presentation on that. But it doesn't seem to be operational yet. NASA has been talking about the new C2V2 system for years, and commercial spacecraft were supposed to be designed to use it. But it's not ready yet.
So Space-X and Orbital Sciences had to also develop a temporary capability to use the old automated docking system, which, I think, is derived from the Soviet-era Kursk system.
From the article:
Programs like "Mail" or "Messages" could be implemented in reprogrammable silicon.
You need how much compute power to read mail?
Most users just don't need that much power. Once everybody could play streaming HDTV, the couch potato market was covered. Rendering in gaming could still improve, and NPC behavior could get smarter, but really, GTA V pretty much has that nailed and it runs on last-generation consoles.
There are people who need more power, but they're running fluid dynamics simulations or rendering movies or simulating new ICs or something like that. I've run Autodesk Inventor on 24-CPU workstations. That's one of the few interactive programs that can usefully use a 24-CPU workstation. It's not a mass market product.
The applications that need vast amounts of additional compute power are there, but they're not high-volume applications. Nor are they "enthusiast" applications. There's not enough volume there to justify heavy investment in faster CPUs.
This may change as we have better robots or something like that. But speeding up existing desktop apps, no. (Program load times are still ridiculous long, but mostly because of stupidity like phoning home for updates, waiting for the license server, fetching ads, or using virtual memory in a world where memory is cheap.)
"The NSA/CSS Memorial Wall lists the names of 171 cryptologists who have died in the line of duty since the Agency's inception in 1952," according to the letter.
This refers to members of the US military doing cryptographic duty who died in the line of duty. Here's the list. Most died during the Cold War or in Vietnam. In recent years, in Afghanistan or Iraq. Only one civilian, Alan M. Blue, who was on the USS Liberty when the Israelis attacked it.
That's too bad. I've met many of their people. They were doing good work.
"Suitable Technologies" is just another company producing those annoying "remote presence" robots with a video phone on top. There are four or five manufacturers of those things. They can't do anything; they have no manipulation capability. They just talk.
"Remote presence" is only useful if the person running it is someone who gets sucked up to. Like doctors. A number of health care vendors are trying the things.
A few years ago, I was involved in the conversion of the Stanford AI lab tape archive to modern media. This involved reading thousands of reels of 1/2" magnetic tape. It was a slow process. Volunteers were loading a tape onto a tape drive every 15 minutes for weeks. After each tape was loaded, its contents were sent over an Internet connection in under a minute. It took much longer to wind through the tapes than to transmit the data.
The data went to a server farm at IBM Almaden Research, where the file systems were reassembled (these were incremental dump tapes) and text files were converted from the Stanford AI lab's unique character set to Unicode.
The result was the SAIL DART archive. See the source code for EMACS, the early years.
Or take away their ability to block tracking as they can currently do with cookies?
That's the basic idea. CNET covered this a few days ago. "The AdID would be transmitted to advertisers and ad networks that have agreed to basic guidelines, giving consumers more privacy and control over how they browse the Web,"
Expect meaningless, easy to evade "basic guidelines", like TrustE.
Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.
Take a look at Before VFX, which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.
Now to get rid of the actors...
This keeps coming up on Slashdot, and it's mostly a non-issue. The only reason it's an issue now is that hobbyist 3D printers are so crappy that they're used mostly to produce copies of game and movie related decorative items.
If you use one to make a dashboard knob for a '57 Chevy, there's no IP issue. Design patents are only for 14 years. You can't copyright a functional part, and most functional parts aren't original enough for a utility patent. There's a robust third-party auto parts industry because of this.
When 3D printing in metal really gets going, it's going to be a Joe Sixpack thing. The same people who own welders will own 3D printers. If you do not presently own at least one power tool, you will probably not have a 3D printer.
This is pathetic. They blew through $500K and they don't even have a demo. Reading through their stuff, it seems like all they really intended to do was a standard fighting game with a sword-like controller and better fighting mechanics. Nothing indicates that you'd feel a blow when you hit something, or when you got hit. A Kinect can do that. Even the old-model Kinect.
There's some handwaving about force feedback, but nothing about how to actually do it. It's not impossible, and you can do better than just putting a buzzer or vibrator in the sword. It would be amusing to put a gyro in a gimbal inside the sword. Normally, with the gimbals unlocked, the sword swings freely, but when you get a "hit", the gimbal clutches lock and you feel your wrist wrenched as the sword will no longer rotate.
And why the hell do they have a Tesla coil driving a Jacobs ladder in their video?
We need to be much less tolerant of things that "phone home" to some headquarters. Or accept remote patches. We now have to assume that anything with a remote patch capability can be exploited.
You might think open source would be better. It's not. Even the Mozilla Foundation has become squishy-soft on enforcing their own privacy rules. Check out BlockSite, a Firefox add-on which used to just block requested sites. It was bought up by a company called WIPS, which buys up abandoned apps and puts in back-door tracking of every site visited. After a year of pressure from WIPS, Jorge Villalobos at Mozilla caved in and let them install tracking in an existing add-on and auto update it.
For Linux, Ubuntu pushes an awful lot of updates to supposedly "stable" versions. Is there a back door in there? Is anybody looking?
"Medium.com" is one of those aggregator sites. Don't link to them. Link to the actual paper. Thank you.
They had to use the Palomar 200 inch telescope to make this work. There aren't many big telescopes in the world, and they're booked months in advance. They got a few hours of observing for one night, and good results. But they'd need a lot more observing time on big scopes to do their survey.
Might as well announce that you're going to lower gravity...
That's his other company.
The way data centers are going, the "operating system" is migrating off the server farm. The trend is toward servers with a minimal OS that run a single application, probably in a VM. File systems are on other machines on a storage area network. Control of the server farm is on machines separate from the servers. Control machines tell server VMs what to run, what they can connect to (part of "software defined networking"), and their identity for security purposes. Logging, monitoring, and problem reporting is handled by machines other than the workers. Development takes place in a different environment than production. That's what Amazon AWS is like right now. That's what IBM needs to provide to their corporate customers.
Data center computing may not need Linux at all on the production machines. The more specialized machines which run the support systems of the cloud may use it, but they aren't the performance-critical machines. They're the security-critical machines. What we may need is a high-security OS for cloud support machines, accepting some loss in performance.