The multiple-flash light source thing is a good idea. Someone did that about seven years ago with a modified Canon PowerShot. They had four flash units, one at each corner of the case, and it would take four pictures, one with each flash. The paper shows the test setup, but later they built a camera with the four flash units built in.
This Kickstarter project doesn't really produce a 3D model by itself. You need an external stitching program to put multiple images together into a model, they say.
Programs for building a model from multiple 3D images have been around for 15 years or so. Much of the early work was done at U.C. Berkeley. A Stanford group did a lot of high-res work, including imaging parts of the Vatican. Autodesk 123Catch, can build a 3D model from a collection of images without a special camera.
Yes, I was in an airport recently, and there were power outlets with both AC and USB. The future is here.
Yes, but how do you know it only provides power? It might also read or write whatever is plugged into it, install malware, steal your info, or whatever.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer.Downside
Wait a second, there are cement barriers in the center along much of Highway 17.
It's not a limited access highway.
There are driveways and road intersections. Some intersections have breaks in the barrier and left turn lanes, without signals. That's a big source of accidents. Locals complain if they have to drive too far to cross the road, which is why the barrier has breaks. There's only one overpass in the mountain area, at Summit Road. Locals complain about proposals to build more overpasses. They're a "freeway facility".
Great place to live if you like to surf. I have a surfer friend there. She lives three blocks from the beach. But it's not a high-tech place.
Highway 17, which connects San Jose to Santa Cruz, isn't a freeway. There are non-interchange intersections all along its length. This is because of opposition at the Santa Cruz end. Caltrans would like to make it a freeway, and put in a center barrier to reduce collisions. Even that was opposed. "The barrier makes residents and his business feel isolated", whined the owner of a motel. (Cars can no longer make left turns across traffic to get to his motel.)
According to the article, the biggest private employer in Santa Cruz is Plantronics, which makes headsets. 500 employees. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is an amusement park, has about 600, but it's seasonal. Santa Cruz is a seaside resort town. There's just not much industry there.
Then there's the mind-set, which is way too laid back to get much done. It's also very retro. There are towns near Santa Cruz which are still stuck in the hippie '60s, flower-print granny dresses and all.
The big industrial growth area near Silicon Valley is Fremont. It's hot and boring, but Tesla is there. So is Gillig, the bus maker. There's serious manufacturing in Fremont. There are jobs available now in Fremont for CNC machine operators, robot assemblers, automatic screw machine maintainers, master mechanics, and vacuum manufacturing technicians. Current Santa Cruz job openings: school crossing guard, dental receptionist, social worker, pool attendant, dog companion.
One of the big problems the EFF has had suing the NSA is that of "standing" - they have a hard time showing actual harm. This guy has standing to sue. He can show actual harm from unauthorized surveillance.
This is fascinating, but hard to understand. It's not clear how broad a result this is.
This seems to apply to "circuits", which are loop-free arrangements of AND, OR and NOT gates. These take in some bit string with a fixed number of bits and emit another bit string with a fixed (but possibly different) number of bits. Many computations can be encoded into this form, but the "circuits" are typically very deep, since this is sort of like loop unwinding. Although this seems kind of limited, you could, for example, make a reasonably sized "circuit" to compute DES, which is a static pattern of Boolean operations.
"Obfuscation" here means taking in some "circuit" and producing a bit for bit equivalent "circuit" from which little information can be extracted. The obfuscated circuit may be (will be?) more complex than the original, because additional logic has been inserted in a somewhat random way.
The contribution in this paper seems to be that this might be useful for "functional encryption". This is where you have some values, such as A and B, which are encrypted and are to be protected, but the result of some function f(A,B) is not protected. The idea is to have an implementation of f which combines the decryption and the desired function, an implementation which cannot be reverse engineered to return decrypted versions of A or B. While this has been suggested as a possible feature for databases, it's hard to apply to useful functions, and so far, it's mostly a research idea there. It's been suggested for some complex access control schemes involving mutual mistrust, but that too is a research topic.
Anyway, this doesn't mean you're going to be able to run your big executable program through some kind of magic obfuscator that will prevent someone from figuring out how it works. Not yet, anyway.
I don't think it is a 'command-line crowd' thing. I thing such petty but extremely annoying glitches get passed over because it's a 'volunteer crowd'. no one is eager to chase such minor bugs because it's minor and not fun or cool and there's PHB standing over them yelling 'Fix this or be fired!'
Good point. Notice how many open source projects get stuck at the 0.9 level, "almost finished" but not solidly usable.
If you can't figure out LIbre Office you shouldn't have your job.
LibreOffice just isn't very good. I've used StarOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. I haven't used Microsoft Word since Word 97. And I still think LibreOffice sucks. It's usable, but amateurish.
Open source just can't get user interfaces right. LibreOffice has subtle problems, such as spelling correction that insists on making a change even after you've undone the change. Microsoft Word will yield to the user in that situation. The command-line crowd will never get fine details like that. I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu machines side by side on my desk, but the Ubuntu machine is used only for robotics software development.
I've watched Linux blow it on the desktop for fifteen years. There was an opportunity when XP was late. Linux blew it. There was an opportunity when everybody hated Vista. Linux blew it. There's an opportunity now when nobody wants to go to Windows 8. Linux is blowing it.
There are a few problems which keep being rediscovered. In many cases, the "new" solution is worse than the original one.
Flattened representations of trees Fairly often, you want to ship a flattened representation of a tree around. LISP had a text representation of S-expressions for that. XML managed to make a mess of the problem, by viewing it as "markup". JSON is essentially S-expressions again.
Concurrency primitives This goes back to Dijkstra, who got the basic primitives right. We had to suffer through decades of bad UNIX/POSIX/Linux locking primitives. The Go language touts as their big advantage the rediscovery of bounded buffers.
Virtualization IBM had that in 1967. IBM mainframes got it right - you can run VM on VM on VM... X86 virtualization can't quite create the illusion of a bare machine.
Someone else mentioned that space gun orbits intersect Earth. Why couldn't you fire it off at the Moon for a slingshot course correction that way?
Would it work in Kerbal Space Program? It might, but you'd have a orbit that went out to lunar distance from the earth. It could have a low perigee, but the apogee has to be somewhere near lunar range. You can have a free-return trajectory that loops around the moon, grazes the atmosphere for aerobraking, then re-enters. That was one of the emergency abort modes for Apollo.
There are more advanced tricks. There's a way to exploit the earth-moon-sun system to get into a ballistic capture orbit. While a single body can't make captures, two and three body systems can. There's a small entry window in both position and velocity through which the spacecraft must pass, but it exists.
Right. What they have now as a demo underperforms most handguns in muzzle velocity. What they propose to build with Kickstarter funding has the performance of a low-end artillery piece and is an order of magnitude below what's needed to get to orbit.
Unless they can show that their idea scales better than the various space gun schemes, this is a lose. The HARP space gun reached about half of the necessary velocity in the 1960s. A space gun is quite possible, but can't put something in orbit directly without a second stage rocket for course correction.
"The Machine Stops", by E. M. Forster. Covers the collapse of a technological society. Written in 1909, 12,000 words, copyright expired, and still relevant, readable, and worrisome.
Doug Engelbart's demo, 1968" Today, you can do this on your phone. This is where it all began - point and click, editing, search engines, the first mouse, hyperlinks, networks, online collaboration.
Do not want your creeping salespeople shadowing me.
That's why I, and everybody else, gave up shopping at Best Buy. Their combination of annoying and incompetent was just too much.
Do not want your club card / loyalty program tracking me.
That made me switch from Walgreens to CVS. Walgreens' pricing on many items is more than doubled unless you sign up with their tracking card. At CVS, they'll scan a generic card at checkout and you get the "card" price.
If making a gun out of ABS plastic worked, someone would be punching them out by the millions on injection-molding machines. Any material you can run through a hot-nozzle 3D printer will make a lousy gun barrel. If you want a cheap gun, buy a cheap mass-produced gun. There are plenty of them around.
Selective laser sintering, though... With that, you can make parts out of steel and titanium.
Read through the review. Not impressed. It has the requisite references to Nietzsche and Focault found in too many pretentious philosophy papers. There's obsession over the movie's presentation of zero-g and rotating space station issues, as if those had great philosophical import. In reality, they're severely practical - 2001 was the first movie with the budget to show space realistically. (And one of the last to try.)
There's a long analysis of Hal 9000's motivations, with much emphasis on Hal's growing "self awareness". This misses one of the big points of the movie - Hal had been ordered to make the mission succeed, and that goal had a higher priority than keeping the crew alive. To academics today, that's an alien concept. It wasn't alien in the 1960s, when there were still many WWII veterans around. See "Twelve O-Clock High" for a clear expression of the "mission comes first" mentality. Or "633 Squadron", which is even clearer about the need to send men to their death just to advance the tactical position slightly. Or, if you're in a hurry, read "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", which is a five-line poem. Those were understood concepts for those who lived and fought through the first half of the twentieth century.
The paper has yet another attempt to explain the ending. Clarke himself once did, and that's probably the only explanation worth reading. Realistically, the ending looks like a writer getting stuck. Some writers and directors have a real problem with endings. Woody Allen was famous for that. Good writers try to avoid pat endings, but alternatives may just lose the audience. That's 2001.
Anyway, that long review is much less profound than it would like to think it is.
Here's the
technical article mentioned. Open source, peer reviewed, incidentally. The Navy gets a mouth swab from every new recruit (all services), and shipped to a lab for analysis. This is done so they catch contagious diseases early. It also gives the military something it's hard to get today - samples from a sizable healthy population. So they have good baseline data for people who aren't sick, to compare against.
One valuable result of that study is that detection and sequencing of a broad-range of influenza-like viruses may lead to a vaccine that blocks all of them. There's now more understanding of what's common to all flu-like viruses.
I have a real one, and it does the same thing. In fact all of them I have had (including the old flying saucer style from the TiBook era) do that. It's the inrush current, not a defect.
Crap switching power supplies from China are a huge problem. You not only have to look for a UL logo, but check the logo in the UL database. UL even has special rules for China about where the UL stickers come from.
Tests of computer power supplies have shown that the UL-certified ones will consistently deliver their rated current. That makes sense, because that's how UL tests them. Others, loaded up to their rated load, overheat, shut down, burn out, or in a few cases, catch fire. The really bad ones lack key safety components, like a fuse.
I bought some laptop-type switching power supplies on Amazon which showed a UL logo in the picture, but the delivered power supply looked different and lacked a UL logo. I raised hell with Amazon over that, and they kicked that seller off.
This isn't a new area of law. It's been litigated thoroughly by the third-party auto parts industry, which routinely makes copies of auto parts. Some auto companies have applied for design patents on some body parts, but to get a design patent, there has to be a significant difference over any other existing object. There are maybe 400 auto part design patents a year, and design patents are only good for 14 years.
It's different for decorative objects. Those can be copyrighted. But functional parts, no.
Can a scan of a real-world object be copyrighted when the scanned object is not? Not in the US. See Meshwerks vs. Toyota. A scan is not a creative work. It doesn't matter that it takes effort to create, and work to clean up. It's still not a creative work. The court followed the same line of reasoning as in Bridgeman vs. Corel, which established that photos of public domain 2D pictures cannot be copyrighted. (Despite much grumbling from the museum community, that decision has held up. Wikipedia relies on that. The National Portrait Gallery (UK) once threatened to sue Wikipedia. Wikipedia didn't back down. The National Portrait Gallery did.) That decision in turn relied on the famous Supreme Court case Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which established that phone books are not copyrightable as a constitutional matter. "The threshold for originality is low, but it exists". That's why everybody has phone book data, map data, and similar databases now.
Once consumer-grade 3D printers get good enough that they're used for something more than turning out plastic game pieces, this problem will decrease.
Slashdot Mirror
Good result.
Yes, it's expensive now. It's a prototype. Aluminum once cost more than gold.
The multiple-flash light source thing is a good idea. Someone did that about seven years ago with a modified Canon PowerShot. They had four flash units, one at each corner of the case, and it would take four pictures, one with each flash. The paper shows the test setup, but later they built a camera with the four flash units built in.
This Kickstarter project doesn't really produce a 3D model by itself. You need an external stitching program to put multiple images together into a model, they say.
Programs for building a model from multiple 3D images have been around for 15 years or so. Much of the early work was done at U.C. Berkeley. A Stanford group did a lot of high-res work, including imaging parts of the Vatican. Autodesk 123Catch, can build a 3D model from a collection of images without a special camera.
Back in 2009, I wrote on Slashdot
Yes, I was in an airport recently, and there were power outlets with both AC and USB. The future is here.
Yes, but how do you know it only provides power? It might also read or write whatever is plugged into it, install malware, steal your info, or whatever.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer. Downside
Wait a second, there are cement barriers in the center along much of Highway 17.
It's not a limited access highway. There are driveways and road intersections. Some intersections have breaks in the barrier and left turn lanes, without signals. That's a big source of accidents. Locals complain if they have to drive too far to cross the road, which is why the barrier has breaks. There's only one overpass in the mountain area, at Summit Road. Locals complain about proposals to build more overpasses. They're a "freeway facility".
Great place to live if you like to surf. I have a surfer friend there. She lives three blocks from the beach. But it's not a high-tech place.
Highway 17, which connects San Jose to Santa Cruz, isn't a freeway. There are non-interchange intersections all along its length. This is because of opposition at the Santa Cruz end. Caltrans would like to make it a freeway, and put in a center barrier to reduce collisions. Even that was opposed. "The barrier makes residents and his business feel isolated", whined the owner of a motel. (Cars can no longer make left turns across traffic to get to his motel.)
According to the article, the biggest private employer in Santa Cruz is Plantronics, which makes headsets. 500 employees. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is an amusement park, has about 600, but it's seasonal. Santa Cruz is a seaside resort town. There's just not much industry there.
Then there's the mind-set, which is way too laid back to get much done. It's also very retro. There are towns near Santa Cruz which are still stuck in the hippie '60s, flower-print granny dresses and all.
The big industrial growth area near Silicon Valley is Fremont. It's hot and boring, but Tesla is there. So is Gillig, the bus maker. There's serious manufacturing in Fremont. There are jobs available now in Fremont for CNC machine operators, robot assemblers, automatic screw machine maintainers, master mechanics, and vacuum manufacturing technicians. Current Santa Cruz job openings: school crossing guard, dental receptionist, social worker, pool attendant, dog companion.
One of the big problems the EFF has had suing the NSA is that of "standing" - they have a hard time showing actual harm. This guy has standing to sue. He can show actual harm from unauthorized surveillance.
The next step will be video ads where
Note that the new XBox is fully equipped to do that.
This is fascinating, but hard to understand. It's not clear how broad a result this is.
This seems to apply to "circuits", which are loop-free arrangements of AND, OR and NOT gates. These take in some bit string with a fixed number of bits and emit another bit string with a fixed (but possibly different) number of bits. Many computations can be encoded into this form, but the "circuits" are typically very deep, since this is sort of like loop unwinding. Although this seems kind of limited, you could, for example, make a reasonably sized "circuit" to compute DES, which is a static pattern of Boolean operations.
"Obfuscation" here means taking in some "circuit" and producing a bit for bit equivalent "circuit" from which little information can be extracted. The obfuscated circuit may be (will be?) more complex than the original, because additional logic has been inserted in a somewhat random way.
The contribution in this paper seems to be that this might be useful for "functional encryption". This is where you have some values, such as A and B, which are encrypted and are to be protected, but the result of some function f(A,B) is not protected. The idea is to have an implementation of f which combines the decryption and the desired function, an implementation which cannot be reverse engineered to return decrypted versions of A or B. While this has been suggested as a possible feature for databases, it's hard to apply to useful functions, and so far, it's mostly a research idea there. It's been suggested for some complex access control schemes involving mutual mistrust, but that too is a research topic.
Anyway, this doesn't mean you're going to be able to run your big executable program through some kind of magic obfuscator that will prevent someone from figuring out how it works. Not yet, anyway.
I don't think it is a 'command-line crowd' thing. I thing such petty but extremely annoying glitches get passed over because it's a 'volunteer crowd'. no one is eager to chase such minor bugs because it's minor and not fun or cool and there's PHB standing over them yelling 'Fix this or be fired!'
Good point. Notice how many open source projects get stuck at the 0.9 level, "almost finished" but not solidly usable.
If you can't figure out LIbre Office you shouldn't have your job.
LibreOffice just isn't very good. I've used StarOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. I haven't used Microsoft Word since Word 97. And I still think LibreOffice sucks. It's usable, but amateurish.
Open source just can't get user interfaces right. LibreOffice has subtle problems, such as spelling correction that insists on making a change even after you've undone the change. Microsoft Word will yield to the user in that situation. The command-line crowd will never get fine details like that. I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu machines side by side on my desk, but the Ubuntu machine is used only for robotics software development.
I've watched Linux blow it on the desktop for fifteen years. There was an opportunity when XP was late. Linux blew it. There was an opportunity when everybody hated Vista. Linux blew it. There's an opportunity now when nobody wants to go to Windows 8. Linux is blowing it.
For a good laugh, look at what it takes to create a shortcut to a program in Ubuntu.
There are a few problems which keep being rediscovered. In many cases, the "new" solution is worse than the original one.
Someone else mentioned that space gun orbits intersect Earth. Why couldn't you fire it off at the Moon for a slingshot course correction that way?
Would it work in Kerbal Space Program? It might, but you'd have a orbit that went out to lunar distance from the earth. It could have a low perigee, but the apogee has to be somewhere near lunar range. You can have a free-return trajectory that loops around the moon, grazes the atmosphere for aerobraking, then re-enters. That was one of the emergency abort modes for Apollo.
There are more advanced tricks. There's a way to exploit the earth-moon-sun system to get into a ballistic capture orbit. While a single body can't make captures, two and three body systems can. There's a small entry window in both position and velocity through which the spacecraft must pass, but it exists.
Right. What they have now as a demo underperforms most handguns in muzzle velocity. What they propose to build with Kickstarter funding has the performance of a low-end artillery piece and is an order of magnitude below what's needed to get to orbit.
Unless they can show that their idea scales better than the various space gun schemes, this is a lose. The HARP space gun reached about half of the necessary velocity in the 1960s. A space gun is quite possible, but can't put something in orbit directly without a second stage rocket for course correction.
Do not want your creeping salespeople shadowing me.
That's why I, and everybody else, gave up shopping at Best Buy. Their combination of annoying and incompetent was just too much.
Do not want your club card / loyalty program tracking me.
That made me switch from Walgreens to CVS. Walgreens' pricing on many items is more than doubled unless you sign up with their tracking card. At CVS, they'll scan a generic card at checkout and you get the "card" price.
Really do not want your tracking app.
Yes.
Take a look at this year's Black Hat presentations. These are just the ones on vulnerabilities in embedded systems.
If making a gun out of ABS plastic worked, someone would be punching them out by the millions on injection-molding machines. Any material you can run through a hot-nozzle 3D printer will make a lousy gun barrel. If you want a cheap gun, buy a cheap mass-produced gun. There are plenty of them around.
Selective laser sintering, though... With that, you can make parts out of steel and titanium.
Read through the review. Not impressed. It has the requisite references to Nietzsche and Focault found in too many pretentious philosophy papers. There's obsession over the movie's presentation of zero-g and rotating space station issues, as if those had great philosophical import. In reality, they're severely practical - 2001 was the first movie with the budget to show space realistically. (And one of the last to try.)
There's a long analysis of Hal 9000's motivations, with much emphasis on Hal's growing "self awareness". This misses one of the big points of the movie - Hal had been ordered to make the mission succeed, and that goal had a higher priority than keeping the crew alive. To academics today, that's an alien concept. It wasn't alien in the 1960s, when there were still many WWII veterans around. See "Twelve O-Clock High" for a clear expression of the "mission comes first" mentality. Or "633 Squadron", which is even clearer about the need to send men to their death just to advance the tactical position slightly. Or, if you're in a hurry, read "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", which is a five-line poem. Those were understood concepts for those who lived and fought through the first half of the twentieth century.
The paper has yet another attempt to explain the ending. Clarke himself once did, and that's probably the only explanation worth reading. Realistically, the ending looks like a writer getting stuck. Some writers and directors have a real problem with endings. Woody Allen was famous for that. Good writers try to avoid pat endings, but alternatives may just lose the audience. That's 2001.
Anyway, that long review is much less profound than it would like to think it is.
This sounds like an ad. Right now, you can't get a reservation there because they're "closing for remodeling" on August 12th.
If you want garlic quail (State Bird Provisions' big dish) in SF, try Manora's Thai Cuisine at 12th and Folsom.
Here's the technical article mentioned. Open source, peer reviewed, incidentally. The Navy gets a mouth swab from every new recruit (all services), and shipped to a lab for analysis. This is done so they catch contagious diseases early. It also gives the military something it's hard to get today - samples from a sizable healthy population. So they have good baseline data for people who aren't sick, to compare against.
One valuable result of that study is that detection and sequencing of a broad-range of influenza-like viruses may lead to a vaccine that blocks all of them. There's now more understanding of what's common to all flu-like viruses.
I have a real one, and it does the same thing. In fact all of them I have had (including the old flying saucer style from the TiBook era) do that. It's the inrush current, not a defect.
That's a defect. There's supposed to be an inrush current limiter.
Crap switching power supplies from China are a huge problem. You not only have to look for a UL logo, but check the logo in the UL database. UL even has special rules for China about where the UL stickers come from.
Tests of computer power supplies have shown that the UL-certified ones will consistently deliver their rated current. That makes sense, because that's how UL tests them. Others, loaded up to their rated load, overheat, shut down, burn out, or in a few cases, catch fire. The really bad ones lack key safety components, like a fuse.
I bought some laptop-type switching power supplies on Amazon which showed a UL logo in the picture, but the delivered power supply looked different and lacked a UL logo. I raised hell with Amazon over that, and they kicked that seller off.
According to the post the actual value of bitcoins has climbed at about 1% per day
Depends on when you bought. There was a run-up to 15 to 260 earlier this year, but it's been mostly downhill since then. Today, 87.
From the article:
"Only a few years ago, GNOME was at the centre of the creative world. Remember Maemo and the N700?"
No.
This isn't a new area of law. It's been litigated thoroughly by the third-party auto parts industry, which routinely makes copies of auto parts. Some auto companies have applied for design patents on some body parts, but to get a design patent, there has to be a significant difference over any other existing object. There are maybe 400 auto part design patents a year, and design patents are only good for 14 years.
It's different for decorative objects. Those can be copyrighted. But functional parts, no.
Can a scan of a real-world object be copyrighted when the scanned object is not? Not in the US. See Meshwerks vs. Toyota. A scan is not a creative work. It doesn't matter that it takes effort to create, and work to clean up. It's still not a creative work. The court followed the same line of reasoning as in Bridgeman vs. Corel, which established that photos of public domain 2D pictures cannot be copyrighted. (Despite much grumbling from the museum community, that decision has held up. Wikipedia relies on that. The National Portrait Gallery (UK) once threatened to sue Wikipedia. Wikipedia didn't back down. The National Portrait Gallery did.) That decision in turn relied on the famous Supreme Court case Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which established that phone books are not copyrightable as a constitutional matter. "The threshold for originality is low, but it exists". That's why everybody has phone book data, map data, and similar databases now.
Once consumer-grade 3D printers get good enough that they're used for something more than turning out plastic game pieces, this problem will decrease.