That included engineering development cost. Manufacturing a duplicate would be much cheaper.
Re:2d treadmills, motion sickness and Redirection
on
Walking In A VR Future
·
· Score: 1
The 2D treadmills are all mechanical nightmares.
Reminds me of the '80s fad for holonomic robots, which led to some very complicated wheel designs.
And if you move fast, the illusion breaks down. Usually, you fall down. Not good. The tiles have the same problem.
Flight simulators for transport aircraft have motion platforms. But that works only because transport aircraft only make gentle motions.
Flight simulators for fighters are on fixed bases.
A bad illusion of motion is worse than no illusion for fighter training.
That "redirection" scheme is cute. But they're pushing the turn illusion very hard, turning the visual world 150 degrees when the person has only turned 90 degrees. That has to be noticeable. After all, you can walk fifty feet in a straight line in the dark with only a few feet of deviation. Messing with vestibular/visual coordination could mess up the user's perception in the real world. With a big enough space, and less drastic illusions, it might be tolerable.
The military has tried a system where you stand in a ring, so you can't go very far or fall, but you run in place, to move. It's like Dance Dance Revolution. Turns are real, but linear motion is fake and everybody knows it. This is at least tolerable as a training aid.
Gloves-and-goggles VR isn't fun after the first hour, actually.
Here's more info from the manufacturer. This isn't a free-flying robot. It's an end effector for the Canada Arm on the Shuttle. So it still takes a shuttle flight. Probably still takes astronaut EVAs, too.
Like the arm, it's a teleoperator, controlled by somebody with joysticks.
Given how much a shuttle flight costs, it would probably be cheaper to just run off another copy of the Hubble and launch that.
On the Kerry side, the issue is Kerry's book from the 1970s, The New Soldier. It's out of print, and now selling used on Amazon.com for over $500.
There are some excerpts from it here, including small versions of the cover and some of the illustrations. Another site which had a copy of the cover (which has a picture of Kerry with an upside-down American flag) claims to have received this letter., insisting that they take the picture down or be sued for a DMCA violation by a photographer who claims to have taken the picture.
The photographer, George Butler, is listed as an editor of "The New Soldier". The Library of Congress entry for George Butler shows only his "muscle pictures". George Butler produced and directed "Pumping Iron", wrote a biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990, and took the photos for several exercise books.
At some point, customers get fed up.
Lollapolloza - dead. Comdex -dead. United Airlines - near bankrupcy. Now, the Olympics.
Re:If I was in prison I would WANT jailcam
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
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· Score: 1
If I was in prison I would WANT jailcam all over the prison and in my cell.
Good point. Prisons tend to have cameras all over the place anyway. Better that they be monitored from the outside. I'd like to see prison cams archived by the ACLU, archive.org, and the International Red Cross.
That makes sense. Roxio's tools have become harder and harder to use for any purpose other than music piracy. They keep trying to install all sorts of crap irrelevant to making data CD-ROMs.
Admittedly, those of us using CD-ROMs to make backups, beta product CDs, boot disks for embedded machines, and prepress separations are outnumbered by the zillions of kiddies pirating music.
Microsoft WAS willing to write for Copland - but it was cancelled because it was way over budget and behind schedule.
Actually. Copland made it to an early developer release, and it wasn't too bad - for apps built for Copeland. Backwards compatibility wasn't a priority.
That was the big problem. Historically, Apple had told its developers what to do and when to do it. But Apple no longer had that kind of clout, because market share had declined too much.
The NeXT acquisition put Apple years behind. The original claim was that because NeXT already had a working system, it would take only a year to bring it out on the Mac. Instead, it took four years (1997-2001) and cost $400 million for the NeXT acquisition.
"NeXT saved Apple" is the Jobs Reality Distortion Field in operation.
Re:We need to fix this on the pay side
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 1
A key point ignored above that in some states (California being one), individuals do have the ability to bring private lawsuits under consumer protection laws.
"In California, any individual activist or consumer-protection group can become a "private attorney general" who carries the full power of the law." (Business and Professions Code, sections 17200, et seq. and 17500, et seq.) Class actions are allowed. This has real teeth. And it's not overridden by the CAN-SPAM act - that applies to the sender, not the seller.
First, just to point out a basic error, Apple did license its operating system at one point. There were non-Apple PowerPC machines that ran the MacOS. Jobs pulled the plug on that. Motorola was quite annoyed with Jobs for that, since it cut into PowerPC sales. That had an impact; Motorola reduced their PowerPC effort. With only one customer, why bother?
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines.
(Anybody remember the AT&T PC?)
In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system.
The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC.
All the engineering applications stopped working.
(Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.)
The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
Cugnot's was steam-powered.
Didn't work very well, either.
The Age of Steam didn't really get going until Watt.
Newcomen steam engines had been around for almost a century before Watt, but the approach was terrible. In a Newcomen engine, the cylinder was heated and cooled on every cycle. This is horrendously inefficient, but nobody knew that then. It took a huge engine to produce very modest power outputs. (Typical specs: 60-inch cylinder, 15HP)
Watt built a Newcomen engine and started making measurements of the properties of steam and the heat capacity of the materials in the engine.
Once he had some numbers to work with, he realized that a much simpler cycle would work much better.
Then the problem was making an engine that didn't lose all the pressure through leaks. It took until 1782 before Boulton and Watt built something that could rotate a shaft. By 1788, they finally had a good engine.
They also had a patent extension from 1775 to 1800, given them directly by Parlament. Boulton and Watt used this to become a big company.
That's how the Industrial Revolution started.
Visit the Kensington Science Museum in London, and you'll see many of the earliest steam engines.
Oh, yes. We used Visimag when tapes were in strange formats we had trouble reading, and when the drive that wrote them had been misaligned. There was also a hand-held tape viewer, with a particle-filled liquid in suspension between a Mylar bottom and a glass window top. This could be placed against tapes. ("Aha, it's 1000 BPI 10 track phase-modulated, from a Uniservo IIIC").
I was so glad when tape tracks became self-clocking.
Outsourcing isn't the end. Outsourcing is an intermediate step to losing the business to competitors from low-cost countries.
Once manufacturing and engineering are in a low-cost country, the need for high-cost management starts to disappear. US-sized CEO salaries become a drag on competitiveness.
Local management has an advantage.
A nice example of this is the $29 DVD player available at Best Buy. Made by
CIS Technology, Inc in Taiwan.
There are further steps. One is when the low-cost countries develop their own intellectual property. In the VCR era, Japanese companies developed the technology and owned the basic patents.
In the DVD era, Chinese companies are now doing that. When a replacement for the current DVD standard comes, it will probably be from China.
Yes, it's always worth remembering that the people behind Slashdot were responsible for the biggest first-day runup in the history of the NASDAQ, followed by a 99% drop to penny-stock levels.
What's to stop them for lying about their real name and address?
Because this makes banks responsible for validating their real name and address. Banks are already required to do that in the US, for tax reasons. This just works to ensure that the address they tell the bank matches the address they tell their customers.
Technically, I'd like to see a setup where, to accept a credit card, the relevant web page has to have an SSL certificate signed by the receiving bank. then, if you can't find the merchant, you go after the bank. Any break in the authentication chain should mean that the transaction is null and void at the consumer end,
and the consumer doesn't have to pay. That would make banks tighten up on merchant accounts.
Re:We need to fix this on the pay side
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 1
Some of them are just collecting credit card numbers for resale, but those are a minority. Banks go after those people. The ones operating semi-legitimate businesses anonymously (usually porno sites) can be targeted through the payment system.
We need to fix this on the pay side
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We need to fix this on the pay side, where the spammers make their money.
In many US states, it's a criminal offense to operate an anonymous business. California has a specific requirement that a business selling on the Internet must disclose their actual name and address before accepting a credit card number. Few spammers do that. We need to put teeth into that law by making the bank that processes the credit card transaction an accessory to that offense. It's aiding and abbetting money-laundering.
On a state level, make it illegal for a bank to charge a consumer's account for an Internet transaction unless the web site complies with that requirement.
That would work as a state law, because it applies to the in-state bank that has the consumer's credit card account.
The card-issuing banks would push the requirement back through the system to avoid liability. They would force banks to insist that MasterCard and Visa International issue rules which require merchant banks to change their merchant agreement to prevent anonymous merchants.
With penalties applied through the banking system, spammers would find their ability to collect money much reduced. They'd be kicked out of banks the way they used to be kicked off ISPs.
It's hard to believe it now, but there was a period in the 1960s when the ocean was talked about as a great frontier, as important as space. Undersea habitats were built, and undersea cities were discussed. Men went to the deepest place in the ocean and came back.
Today, the romance of the ocean is dead. You can work on a containership or an oil rig, but nobody dreams of a career as an "aquanaut". Jacques Costeau seems dated.
This isn't a "3D" stacking technology. The chips that communicate have to be mounted face to face. See the illustration in Sun's technical paper.
For an example of true 3D chip stacking, see
Infineon's SOLID technology. Infineon announced that in 2002. Intel and Sharp have also played around with similar approaches.
The Infineon approach is interesting because it
puts a layer of copper between the chips. Getting heat out of the middle of the stack is a major problem with all stacking schemes. Infineon claims to address this, but it's not clear how well. You're probably not going to stack up a pile of 50 watt CPUs with this technology. RAM, maybe. Low-duty-cycle flash memory, no problem.
Music players are the obvious application.
Not much seems to have come from that technology since the 2002 announcement.
So far, none of these stacking schemes have been useful. They're smaller, but not cheaper.
"Sun is not "coming out with new chips without connectors". Sun has demonstrated a new kind of interconnect in a lab. They might use it in a DoD funded supercomputer project. Maybe.
You're not going to "stack chips like Scrabble tiles". The unpackaged chips have to be aligned within a few microns and held in position. That's going to be done in an IC packaging facility. The result will be a multi-chip module, a single package containing several chips."
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like a way to unload a glut of small CRT displays. CRT displays smaller than 17" now have negative value. Try to sell one.
That included engineering development cost. Manufacturing a duplicate would be much cheaper.
Flight simulators for transport aircraft have motion platforms. But that works only because transport aircraft only make gentle motions. Flight simulators for fighters are on fixed bases. A bad illusion of motion is worse than no illusion for fighter training.
That "redirection" scheme is cute. But they're pushing the turn illusion very hard, turning the visual world 150 degrees when the person has only turned 90 degrees. That has to be noticeable. After all, you can walk fifty feet in a straight line in the dark with only a few feet of deviation. Messing with vestibular/visual coordination could mess up the user's perception in the real world. With a big enough space, and less drastic illusions, it might be tolerable.
The military has tried a system where you stand in a ring, so you can't go very far or fall, but you run in place, to move. It's like Dance Dance Revolution. Turns are real, but linear motion is fake and everybody knows it. This is at least tolerable as a training aid.
Gloves-and-goggles VR isn't fun after the first hour, actually.
Like the arm, it's a teleoperator, controlled by somebody with joysticks.
Given how much a shuttle flight costs, it would probably be cheaper to just run off another copy of the Hubble and launch that.
There are some excerpts from it here, including small versions of the cover and some of the illustrations. Another site which had a copy of the cover (which has a picture of Kerry with an upside-down American flag) claims to have received this letter., insisting that they take the picture down or be sued for a DMCA violation by a photographer who claims to have taken the picture.
The photographer, George Butler, is listed as an editor of "The New Soldier". The Library of Congress entry for George Butler shows only his "muscle pictures". George Butler produced and directed "Pumping Iron", wrote a biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990, and took the photos for several exercise books.
At some point, customers get fed up. Lollapolloza - dead. Comdex -dead. United Airlines - near bankrupcy. Now, the Olympics.
Good point. Prisons tend to have cameras all over the place anyway. Better that they be monitored from the outside. I'd like to see prison cams archived by the ACLU, archive.org, and the International Red Cross.
Admittedly, those of us using CD-ROMs to make backups, beta product CDs, boot disks for embedded machines, and prepress separations are outnumbered by the zillions of kiddies pirating music.
The NeXT acquisition put Apple years behind. The original claim was that because NeXT already had a working system, it would take only a year to bring it out on the Mac. Instead, it took four years (1997-2001) and cost $400 million for the NeXT acquisition.
"NeXT saved Apple" is the Jobs Reality Distortion Field in operation.
A key point ignored above that in some states (California being one), individuals do have the ability to bring private lawsuits under consumer protection laws. "In California, any individual activist or consumer-protection group can become a "private attorney general" who carries the full power of the law." (Business and Professions Code, sections 17200, et seq. and 17500, et seq.) Class actions are allowed. This has real teeth. And it's not overridden by the CAN-SPAM act - that applies to the sender, not the seller.
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
The Age of Steam didn't really get going until Watt. Newcomen steam engines had been around for almost a century before Watt, but the approach was terrible. In a Newcomen engine, the cylinder was heated and cooled on every cycle. This is horrendously inefficient, but nobody knew that then. It took a huge engine to produce very modest power outputs. (Typical specs: 60-inch cylinder, 15HP) Watt built a Newcomen engine and started making measurements of the properties of steam and the heat capacity of the materials in the engine. Once he had some numbers to work with, he realized that a much simpler cycle would work much better.
Then the problem was making an engine that didn't lose all the pressure through leaks. It took until 1782 before Boulton and Watt built something that could rotate a shaft. By 1788, they finally had a good engine.
They also had a patent extension from 1775 to 1800, given them directly by Parlament. Boulton and Watt used this to become a big company. That's how the Industrial Revolution started.
Visit the Kensington Science Museum in London, and you'll see many of the earliest steam engines.
I was so glad when tape tracks became self-clocking.
Even Linux hasn't achieved that. If that problem were solved, there would be far fewer sysadmins.
Exactly the same problem exists at the application level.
This makes sense for companies that sell slightly customized versions of their packages. That really is an assembly line operation.
Once manufacturing and engineering are in a low-cost country, the need for high-cost management starts to disappear. US-sized CEO salaries become a drag on competitiveness. Local management has an advantage.
A nice example of this is the $29 DVD player available at Best Buy. Made by CIS Technology, Inc in Taiwan.
There are further steps. One is when the low-cost countries develop their own intellectual property. In the VCR era, Japanese companies developed the technology and owned the basic patents. In the DVD era, Chinese companies are now doing that. When a replacement for the current DVD standard comes, it will probably be from China.
It's funny reading Roberts' latest columns. He sounds like a liberal now.
Yes, it's always worth remembering that the people behind Slashdot were responsible for the biggest first-day runup in the history of the NASDAQ, followed by a 99% drop to penny-stock levels.
Because this makes banks responsible for validating their real name and address. Banks are already required to do that in the US, for tax reasons. This just works to ensure that the address they tell the bank matches the address they tell their customers.
Technically, I'd like to see a setup where, to accept a credit card, the relevant web page has to have an SSL certificate signed by the receiving bank. then, if you can't find the merchant, you go after the bank. Any break in the authentication chain should mean that the transaction is null and void at the consumer end, and the consumer doesn't have to pay. That would make banks tighten up on merchant accounts.
Some of them are just collecting credit card numbers for resale, but those are a minority. Banks go after those people. The ones operating semi-legitimate businesses anonymously (usually porno sites) can be targeted through the payment system.
In many US states, it's a criminal offense to operate an anonymous business. California has a specific requirement that a business selling on the Internet must disclose their actual name and address before accepting a credit card number. Few spammers do that. We need to put teeth into that law by making the bank that processes the credit card transaction an accessory to that offense. It's aiding and abbetting money-laundering.
On a state level, make it illegal for a bank to charge a consumer's account for an Internet transaction unless the web site complies with that requirement. That would work as a state law, because it applies to the in-state bank that has the consumer's credit card account.
The card-issuing banks would push the requirement back through the system to avoid liability. They would force banks to insist that MasterCard and Visa International issue rules which require merchant banks to change their merchant agreement to prevent anonymous merchants.
With penalties applied through the banking system, spammers would find their ability to collect money much reduced. They'd be kicked out of banks the way they used to be kicked off ISPs.
Today, the romance of the ocean is dead. You can work on a containership or an oil rig, but nobody dreams of a career as an "aquanaut". Jacques Costeau seems dated.
For an example of true 3D chip stacking, see Infineon's SOLID technology. Infineon announced that in 2002. Intel and Sharp have also played around with similar approaches.
The Infineon approach is interesting because it puts a layer of copper between the chips. Getting heat out of the middle of the stack is a major problem with all stacking schemes. Infineon claims to address this, but it's not clear how well. You're probably not going to stack up a pile of 50 watt CPUs with this technology. RAM, maybe. Low-duty-cycle flash memory, no problem. Music players are the obvious application.
Not much seems to have come from that technology since the 2002 announcement. So far, none of these stacking schemes have been useful. They're smaller, but not cheaper.
You're not going to "stack chips like Scrabble tiles". The unpackaged chips have to be aligned within a few microns and held in position. That's going to be done in an IC packaging facility. The result will be a multi-chip module, a single package containing several chips."
I thought it died with the dot-com boom, along with SFgirl.com.