Seriously I think the greatest invention of the 21st C could be silent fans.
The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.
This has been tried before. It's called a ground level power supply. Trams in Bordeaux use it. The sections are powered on and off in 8-meter sections. When a section is off, it's grounded. For safety, there are two levels of switching. The 8-meter sections each have their own power control box, and there's a second level of control which monitors a number of sections and will cut power for many sections if something is live that shouldn't be. The trams have battery backup so they can get through dead sections. Bordeaux only uses the system in their scenic historic area. Once out of that area, the trams raise pantographs to connect to overhead wire. Two other small cities in France have installed that system, but only short sections in the city center use that system. Dubai is putting in 14km of a similar system.
Drainage, water, and ice are big problems. (Not in Dubai, though.) So is cost. There's a lot of high-voltage switchgear involved.
There are encrypted GSM phones with end-to-end encryption when talking to a similar phone. They're overpriced and hard to buy, but available. The source code is available so you can see how it works. It's classic Diffie-Hellman 4096-bit key exchange to establish a session key, followed by 256-bit AES encryption for the data.
It's too bad OpenMoko tanked. That was a totally open source phone down to the hardware level. That plus Cryptophone-compatible code would have been trustworthy.
There's a 1942s book, "Television, Today and Tomorrow", about the Baird and other rotating disk systems. At the end, there's a chapter about "electronic television", but it's dismissed as too complex and expensive. All those tubes!
Yes, I know about Zworklin and Farnsworth and Sarnoff and the progression from the iconoscope and the image dissector to the image orthicon. Then came color, which meant three of everything, including camera tubes.
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.
That creates some interesting issues. When someone "forks" something, what rights do they have?
I suspect that many people not specifying a license for what they put on GitHub just assume GitHub owns everything.
Underwater hotels have been proposed many times, but no significant ones have actually been built. The Poseidon Underwater Resorts has a web site that looks real, but it's total vaporware. Atlantis Palm Hotel in Dubai was going to build one to go with their water park, but it didn't get built either.
We need fully automatic driving so that people can be on social networks while in motion. At least that's coming.
There are certain patterns of impairment to watch for in people using cell phones. There's a tendency to under-brake when coming to a stop at a stop sign or traffic light. So the vehicle's nose ends up out in the intersecting street. Turns tend to be too wide, since the driver only has one hand on the wheel. Left turns may cut through the stop area of the cross street.
Nuclear power is useful, but as a technology, it's frustrating. The power reactor technology that works is basically a simple water-cooled device with a lot of external plumbing. It's a mediocre approach, but everything else is worse.
Many fancier reactor designs have been tried - sodium cooling, pebble bed, gas cooling, breeders, etc. The track record of alternative designs is very poor. Anything with moving parts inside the reactor, which is a very hostile environment, tends to fail. Sodium cooled systems have sodium fires. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. Gas cooled reactors leak. Breeders have trouble with the fuel changing mechanism. Anything that fails inside the reactor means a complete cold shutdown or worse. The failed German pebble bed reactor which had a pebble jam can't even be fully decommissioned.
That's why we're stuck with big, dumb water-cooled reactors.
Only in recent years has it become clear how much loose rock is floating around this solar system. Big hits are rare, but near misses of objects in the multi-ton range are not.
The summary suggests that the "performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor", but nothing in the article, or anything released about this chip so far, supports that. It's all just guesswork until we see some actual benchmarks from the chip.
If they're just cranking up the clock speed of an existing design, the performance should be quite predictable. The difficult-to-predict thing is the lifespan of the part. Atoms migrate faster as heat and voltage go up.
The limit on clock speed today is from heat dissipation. AMD got 8GHz out of a CPU a few years ago by cooling with liquid helium, but it's not worth the trouble.
Yesterday, Firefox made a "major announcement" - curved tab graphics. Today, Apple announces removing the 3D icons. Oh, and multiple monitors are now supported using a new cable.
Yawn. By the way, where are we in the black/white/beige/gray cycle this year?
There was a program for the original Mac line which found every icon on the system and displayed it as one huge grid on the home screen. This was a joke, not a feature. Then came the iPhone and Metro. Now it's just annoying, scrolling through pages of icons. Can we have menus back?
Apple is definitely having an idea shortage. Nothing comparable to Google Glass (which may or may not be a success, but at least is an advance in some direction). Nothing comparable to Microsoft's new-generation Kinect (which is a significant technical development, even if it needs an off switch). Not even a ruggedized iPhone (something several competing vendors now offer).
There have been quite a few of these things. MantaRobot, Vgo, Anybot, and Texai/Suitable, all have commercial, mobile, telepresence robots available now. They all shove a videophone in someone's face.
Vgo probably has the best use case. They sell it to medical facilities, so doctors don't have to move around as much. This is an indication of the market.
Telepresence only works if the person operating the device is someone the listeners have to suck up to.
The atoms don't physically spin. Spin is just a word used, in the absence of a more appropriate one, to communicate an inherent quantum mechanical property of atoms.
Angular momentum at the subatomic level is the same thing as angular momentum at the macro level. Conservation applies. It's weird, it's not intuitive, but it's physical reality. It has commercial applications, too, such as NMR and MRI. Feinman's "QED" has a good explanation.
There are packages for this, like UltiCam. But the real problem is numbering and labeling. Telcos have been doing this for a century. Everything has a number. There are pair numbers, cable numbers, rack numbers, tray numbers, terminal numbers... Everything has labels or color coding. So there's an ID string for everything, and an end to end connection is a sequence of ID strings. Each change is tied to a work order. Since many people are constantly modifying a telco's cable plant, this is essential.
Cable databases are a revision control system. Each change has a work order, and all the history is retained. Some systems let you extract a drawing of selected connections, but giant wiring diagrams are not too useful.
Some of what they're doing with resource guarantees is like QNX's "sporadic scheduling". The idea is that you can guarantee a thread something like 1ms of CPU time every 10ms. This is useful for near-real-time tasks which need a bounded guarantee of responsiveness but don't need to preempt everything else immediately. Most UI activity is in this category. With lots of UI devices, including ones like vision systems that need serious compute resources, you need either something like this, or dedicated hardware for each device.
On top of sporadic scheduling there should be a resource allocator which doesn't let you overcommit resources. So if something is allowed to run, it will run at the required speed.
This is very useful in industrial process control and robotics. The use case for human interfaces is less convincing.
...is a post incident review with support people involved, and their management teams, along with directors and executive involvement
There are some useful training materials from Homeland Security on this. See the National Infrastructure Protection Plan One of the key points there is to focus not only on prevention, but fast recovery. You may want to have spare control units on site which can be swapped in if the main ones are corrupted, for example.
It would have been a better movie if the guys ended up in the ad sales side of Google. Most Google employees are ad sales reps. That side of the company is more like Mad Men.
Read "Drugstore Cowboy", which has more of the story about how an FBI sting operation caught Google accepting ads from drug dealers. Google paid $500 million (yes, half a billion dollars) to avoid criminal prosecution for that. It wasn't about Canadian pharmacies. It was about a Mexican drug dealer selling steroids (sometimes fake steroids) using Google ads. The FBI caught the dealer. Then they put him to work as an informant, getting Google ad sales reps to accept more and more outrageously illegal ads. An IRS agent designed a site intended to look as sketchy as possible.
"Whitaker recorded a phone conversation with his California Google rep, walking them through the website in real time while explaining how the scam worked. He deliberately showed how PVD was a conduit for the rogue online pharmacies, confirming that his rep was following him every step of the way. At one point, the rep asked if the rogue sites had been approved by PharmacyChecker. Of course Whitaker admitted that they hadnâ(TM)t been, but it didnâ(TM)t matter; PVD never lost its approval, and the illegal sites were allowed to continue to operate."
Now that this information is known to be collected, it should be subject to subpoena. One application is to detect bribery of politicians by correlating who they talk to, who they get contributions from, and their voting records. It should be possible to statistically demonstrate corruption with a specific confidence level using Bayesian statistics.
Microsoft still has a good business - servicing business desktops. That's not going away, because business needs to get work done. The problem Microsoft has is that Windows 7 is pretty good. It does what it's supposed to do, doesn't crash much, and doesn't take too much attention. There is no reason for businesses to "upgrade" to Windows 8.
Business desktops are now a business like heavy trucks. Companies buy and use lots of heavy trucks. They use them for their useful life, then buy new ones. Building heavy trucks is a profitable, successful, and important industry. But nobody trades in a heavy truck on a new model because the new model is slightly better.
The tablet industry is fighting to keep prices up. They're not going to succeed. You can get a basic Android tablet for under $70 on Amazon or WalMart, and for $30 in Shenzhen. Apple is still charging as much as $800, but market share has declined from 60% a year ago to 40% now and Apple is feeling pricing pressure. Microsoft isn't going to make much money in tablets.
Moving into "social" would be a big mistake for Microsoft. Nobody is making money in "social". Zynga just laid off a quarter of their workforce. Facebook traffic and revenue peaked a year ago. (Facebook is now increasing ad density to increase revenue per user. That worked for Myspace, right?) Everybody else is doing worse.
Microsoft just has to realize that its job is to service business, and do it better. Windows 8 is not helping. What business might go for is a much more secure OS.
This has nothing to do with sales taxes. That's a few percent. It's all about efficient warehouse and distribution operations. Doing that wrong can double operating costs.
WebVan was a popular service during the dot-com boom. They just had an operating cost problem. They had about 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. So their order processing and delivery costs were too high.
One of WebVan's former executives realized that order processing had to be much more automated for this concept to work. So he founded Kiva Robotics. Upwards of 15% of online orders are handled by Kiva robots. If you've ordered from a major online retailer, (Acumen Brands, Drugstore.com, Gap, Toys-R-Us, Walgreens...) a Kiva robot probably handled the order.
Last year, Amazon bought Kiva Robotics. The whole company. Then they started building warehouses near major US cities and talking about same-day delivery. Those warehouses will have a lot of Kiva robots and not too many humans.
While some grocery chains like Safeway do delivery, they're not very good at it. They're picking from store shelves. So they don't know, when the order is taken, if the item is in stock. Safeway tends to deliver with some items missing. Automated warehousing operations know what they have in stock when the system takes the order.
It's going to be like Webvan again. But this time, it will be profitable. The retailers who see this coming are very afraid.
I have simulation programs trapped in Working Model for Mac format. I have 3D animation projects trapped in Softimage 3D for Windows NT. Neither is easily convertible to anything else. (Worse, they're on DAT tapes.)
Images, video, audio, and text documents are easy to convert because there are modern formats that directly correspond to them. But some things don't translate well.
Mining Bitcoins is over. Doing it with an ordinary CPU is hopeless. Doing it with a GPU barely pays for the power consumption. Doing it with FPGA hardware still sort of works, but not for much longer. Doing it with ASICs requires dealing with slimeballs who insist you pre-pay for hardware and deliver months later, if at all.
Remember, more than half the Bitcoins that can exist have already been mined, and it gets steadily harder.
"Agile" techniques are useful when the problem can be treated as a large number of decoupled features. This is the case for many web-based systems. (Especially since the database system does most of the the stuff that really needs to work right.). It's not too useful if the problem isn't like that.
This is part of the curse of open source, which tends to turn into a set of features in search of an architecture. Some open source projects have a strong architecture, but they tend to have a "little tin god" problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously I think the greatest invention of the 21st C could be silent fans.
The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.
This has been tried before. It's called a ground level power supply. Trams in Bordeaux use it. The sections are powered on and off in 8-meter sections. When a section is off, it's grounded. For safety, there are two levels of switching. The 8-meter sections each have their own power control box, and there's a second level of control which monitors a number of sections and will cut power for many sections if something is live that shouldn't be. The trams have battery backup so they can get through dead sections. Bordeaux only uses the system in their scenic historic area. Once out of that area, the trams raise pantographs to connect to overhead wire. Two other small cities in France have installed that system, but only short sections in the city center use that system. Dubai is putting in 14km of a similar system.
Drainage, water, and ice are big problems. (Not in Dubai, though.) So is cost. There's a lot of high-voltage switchgear involved.
There are encrypted GSM phones with end-to-end encryption when talking to a similar phone. They're overpriced and hard to buy, but available. The source code is available so you can see how it works. It's classic Diffie-Hellman 4096-bit key exchange to establish a session key, followed by 256-bit AES encryption for the data.
It's too bad OpenMoko tanked. That was a totally open source phone down to the hardware level. That plus Cryptophone-compatible code would have been trustworthy.
There's a 1942s book, "Television, Today and Tomorrow", about the Baird and other rotating disk systems. At the end, there's a chapter about "electronic television", but it's dismissed as too complex and expensive. All those tubes!
Yes, I know about Zworklin and Farnsworth and Sarnoff and the progression from the iconoscope and the image dissector to the image orthicon. Then came color, which meant three of everything, including camera tubes.
Here's what GitHub says in their terms of service:
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.
That creates some interesting issues. When someone "forks" something, what rights do they have?
I suspect that many people not specifying a license for what they put on GitHub just assume GitHub owns everything.
Underwater hotels have been proposed many times, but no significant ones have actually been built. The Poseidon Underwater Resorts has a web site that looks real, but it's total vaporware. Atlantis Palm Hotel in Dubai was going to build one to go with their water park, but it didn't get built either.
But there are some really good renderings.
Hang up and drive, already.
We need fully automatic driving so that people can be on social networks while in motion. At least that's coming.
There are certain patterns of impairment to watch for in people using cell phones. There's a tendency to under-brake when coming to a stop at a stop sign or traffic light. So the vehicle's nose ends up out in the intersecting street. Turns tend to be too wide, since the driver only has one hand on the wheel. Left turns may cut through the stop area of the cross street.
Nuclear power is useful, but as a technology, it's frustrating. The power reactor technology that works is basically a simple water-cooled device with a lot of external plumbing. It's a mediocre approach, but everything else is worse.
Many fancier reactor designs have been tried - sodium cooling, pebble bed, gas cooling, breeders, etc. The track record of alternative designs is very poor. Anything with moving parts inside the reactor, which is a very hostile environment, tends to fail. Sodium cooled systems have sodium fires. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. Gas cooled reactors leak. Breeders have trouble with the fuel changing mechanism. Anything that fails inside the reactor means a complete cold shutdown or worse. The failed German pebble bed reactor which had a pebble jam can't even be fully decommissioned.
That's why we're stuck with big, dumb water-cooled reactors.
Only in recent years has it become clear how much loose rock is floating around this solar system. Big hits are rare, but near misses of objects in the multi-ton range are not.
The summary suggests that the "performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor", but nothing in the article, or anything released about this chip so far, supports that. It's all just guesswork until we see some actual benchmarks from the chip.
If they're just cranking up the clock speed of an existing design, the performance should be quite predictable. The difficult-to-predict thing is the lifespan of the part. Atoms migrate faster as heat and voltage go up.
The limit on clock speed today is from heat dissipation. AMD got 8GHz out of a CPU a few years ago by cooling with liquid helium, but it's not worth the trouble.
Yesterday, Firefox made a "major announcement" - curved tab graphics. Today, Apple announces removing the 3D icons. Oh, and multiple monitors are now supported using a new cable. Yawn. By the way, where are we in the black/white/beige/gray cycle this year?
There was a program for the original Mac line which found every icon on the system and displayed it as one huge grid on the home screen. This was a joke, not a feature. Then came the iPhone and Metro. Now it's just annoying, scrolling through pages of icons. Can we have menus back?
Apple is definitely having an idea shortage. Nothing comparable to Google Glass (which may or may not be a success, but at least is an advance in some direction). Nothing comparable to Microsoft's new-generation Kinect (which is a significant technical development, even if it needs an off switch). Not even a ruggedized iPhone (something several competing vendors now offer).
There have been quite a few of these things. MantaRobot, Vgo, Anybot, and Texai/Suitable, all have commercial, mobile, telepresence robots available now. They all shove a videophone in someone's face.
Vgo probably has the best use case. They sell it to medical facilities, so doctors don't have to move around as much. This is an indication of the market. Telepresence only works if the person operating the device is someone the listeners have to suck up to.
The atoms don't physically spin. Spin is just a word used, in the absence of a more appropriate one, to communicate an inherent quantum mechanical property of atoms.
Angular momentum at the subatomic level is the same thing as angular momentum at the macro level. Conservation applies. It's weird, it's not intuitive, but it's physical reality. It has commercial applications, too, such as NMR and MRI. Feinman's "QED" has a good explanation.
There are packages for this, like UltiCam. But the real problem is numbering and labeling. Telcos have been doing this for a century. Everything has a number. There are pair numbers, cable numbers, rack numbers, tray numbers, terminal numbers... Everything has labels or color coding. So there's an ID string for everything, and an end to end connection is a sequence of ID strings. Each change is tied to a work order. Since many people are constantly modifying a telco's cable plant, this is essential.
Cable databases are a revision control system. Each change has a work order, and all the history is retained. Some systems let you extract a drawing of selected connections, but giant wiring diagrams are not too useful.
Some of what they're doing with resource guarantees is like QNX's "sporadic scheduling". The idea is that you can guarantee a thread something like 1ms of CPU time every 10ms. This is useful for near-real-time tasks which need a bounded guarantee of responsiveness but don't need to preempt everything else immediately. Most UI activity is in this category. With lots of UI devices, including ones like vision systems that need serious compute resources, you need either something like this, or dedicated hardware for each device.
On top of sporadic scheduling there should be a resource allocator which doesn't let you overcommit resources. So if something is allowed to run, it will run at the required speed.
This is very useful in industrial process control and robotics. The use case for human interfaces is less convincing.
...is a post incident review with support people involved, and their management teams, along with directors and executive involvement
There are some useful training materials from Homeland Security on this. See the National Infrastructure Protection Plan One of the key points there is to focus not only on prevention, but fast recovery. You may want to have spare control units on site which can be swapped in if the main ones are corrupted, for example.
It would have been a better movie if the guys ended up in the ad sales side of Google. Most Google employees are ad sales reps. That side of the company is more like Mad Men.
Read "Drugstore Cowboy", which has more of the story about how an FBI sting operation caught Google accepting ads from drug dealers. Google paid $500 million (yes, half a billion dollars) to avoid criminal prosecution for that. It wasn't about Canadian pharmacies. It was about a Mexican drug dealer selling steroids (sometimes fake steroids) using Google ads. The FBI caught the dealer. Then they put him to work as an informant, getting Google ad sales reps to accept more and more outrageously illegal ads. An IRS agent designed a site intended to look as sketchy as possible. "Whitaker recorded a phone conversation with his California Google rep, walking them through the website in real time while explaining how the scam worked. He deliberately showed how PVD was a conduit for the rogue online pharmacies, confirming that his rep was following him every step of the way. At one point, the rep asked if the rogue sites had been approved by PharmacyChecker. Of course Whitaker admitted that they hadnâ(TM)t been, but it didnâ(TM)t matter; PVD never lost its approval, and the illegal sites were allowed to continue to operate."
Now that would be a cool movie.
PHP running with high privileges is an exploit waiting to happen.
Now that this information is known to be collected, it should be subject to subpoena. One application is to detect bribery of politicians by correlating who they talk to, who they get contributions from, and their voting records. It should be possible to statistically demonstrate corruption with a specific confidence level using Bayesian statistics.
Politicians need to be informed of this option.
Microsoft still has a good business - servicing business desktops. That's not going away, because business needs to get work done. The problem Microsoft has is that Windows 7 is pretty good. It does what it's supposed to do, doesn't crash much, and doesn't take too much attention. There is no reason for businesses to "upgrade" to Windows 8.
Business desktops are now a business like heavy trucks. Companies buy and use lots of heavy trucks. They use them for their useful life, then buy new ones. Building heavy trucks is a profitable, successful, and important industry. But nobody trades in a heavy truck on a new model because the new model is slightly better.
The tablet industry is fighting to keep prices up. They're not going to succeed. You can get a basic Android tablet for under $70 on Amazon or WalMart, and for $30 in Shenzhen. Apple is still charging as much as $800, but market share has declined from 60% a year ago to 40% now and Apple is feeling pricing pressure. Microsoft isn't going to make much money in tablets.
Moving into "social" would be a big mistake for Microsoft. Nobody is making money in "social". Zynga just laid off a quarter of their workforce. Facebook traffic and revenue peaked a year ago. (Facebook is now increasing ad density to increase revenue per user. That worked for Myspace, right?) Everybody else is doing worse.
Microsoft just has to realize that its job is to service business, and do it better. Windows 8 is not helping. What business might go for is a much more secure OS.
This has nothing to do with sales taxes. That's a few percent. It's all about efficient warehouse and distribution operations. Doing that wrong can double operating costs.
WebVan was a popular service during the dot-com boom. They just had an operating cost problem. They had about 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. So their order processing and delivery costs were too high.
One of WebVan's former executives realized that order processing had to be much more automated for this concept to work. So he founded Kiva Robotics. Upwards of 15% of online orders are handled by Kiva robots. If you've ordered from a major online retailer, (Acumen Brands, Drugstore.com, Gap, Toys-R-Us, Walgreens...) a Kiva robot probably handled the order.
Last year, Amazon bought Kiva Robotics. The whole company. Then they started building warehouses near major US cities and talking about same-day delivery. Those warehouses will have a lot of Kiva robots and not too many humans.
While some grocery chains like Safeway do delivery, they're not very good at it. They're picking from store shelves. So they don't know, when the order is taken, if the item is in stock. Safeway tends to deliver with some items missing. Automated warehousing operations know what they have in stock when the system takes the order.
It's going to be like Webvan again. But this time, it will be profitable. The retailers who see this coming are very afraid.
The new big feature is rounded tabs. Really. I'm so impressed.
I have simulation programs trapped in Working Model for Mac format. I have 3D animation projects trapped in Softimage 3D for Windows NT. Neither is easily convertible to anything else. (Worse, they're on DAT tapes.)
Images, video, audio, and text documents are easy to convert because there are modern formats that directly correspond to them. But some things don't translate well.
Mining Bitcoins is over. Doing it with an ordinary CPU is hopeless. Doing it with a GPU barely pays for the power consumption. Doing it with FPGA hardware still sort of works, but not for much longer. Doing it with ASICs requires dealing with slimeballs who insist you pre-pay for hardware and deliver months later, if at all.
Remember, more than half the Bitcoins that can exist have already been mined, and it gets steadily harder.
Stealing other people's GPU cycles has a track record of success. But it's hard to do that from JavaScript.
"Agile" techniques are useful when the problem can be treated as a large number of decoupled features. This is the case for many web-based systems. (Especially since the database system does most of the the stuff that really needs to work right.). It's not too useful if the problem isn't like that.
This is part of the curse of open source, which tends to turn into a set of features in search of an architecture. Some open source projects have a strong architecture, but they tend to have a "little tin god" problem.