When Bill Gates first discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he spent three hours on line, and wrote in a memo "I didn't see a single Microsoft file format". Microsoft's dominance has relied heavily on proprietary file formats. But now, if it won't work on a tablet or phone, it's useless. This reduces Microsoft's control.
Check out Lynxmotion products. They have a whole line of hobbyist-level mobile robots, arms, controllers, components, and software, all of which work together.
The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow's world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now -- only cooler.
He's right about that. Schmidt's vision of the future is indeed banal. People still wear suits, go to offices, and make presentations. But they get there in self-driving cars and the presentation technology is better. That's the "vision" in his book. It's rather 1950s.
If you want a generic portable computer with an ARM CPU, buy an Allwinner-based tablet. Those use the Allwinnner system on a chip, which has an ARM core and costs about $7 in quantity. They're under $70 in the US, around $30 in Shenzhen.
ISDN voice is great. No lag beyond speed of light lag. No jitter. No dropouts. No analog noise. True full duplex. End to end digital. It's telephony perfected. Switzerland has residential ISDN, and when I get calls from Switzerland, they're so clear.
Far, far better than cellular or VoIP. I'm really tired of voice cell conversations with a full second of lag in them. Sometimes there's so much lag the echo suppressors can't cope.
Why are we putting up with crap voice quality on telephones?
Neither the Chicago Tribune nor the Chicago Sun-Times has any significant local pictures on their web site today. There's a mug shot (both papers have the same one) and a picture of some stolen merchandise (from the cops). Both are just feeds from police agencies.
Here's a local story in its entirety: "Three people have been charged in the wake of a fatal shooting at a party in the South Side Avalon Park neighborhood. Three uninvited guests were asked to leave a family party in the 8400 block of South Constance Avenue about 10:45 p.m., Chicago Police said." That's just an entry from the police blotter. They probably have a feed for that and don't even have to send a reporter.
There's some video of a speech, and it might have been taken with an iPhone. There's a picture of a parking meter, taken earlier this month before they fired the photographers. Nowhere are there any pictures taken of news events.
The author has a point. A shorter version is from Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." I've been to venture capital presentations, and too many of them are for incredibly banal applications. I've heard a pitch for a social network for cats. (It wasn't funded.) Even venture capitalists are unhappy with this situation.
As the social networking boom collapses (Facebook traffic and ad revenue peaked a year ago, and everybody else is in worse shape) we'll see a change in that. But it's not clear what comes next.
RS232 to Ethernet devices have a big security problem - they can expose your RS-232 device directly to the Internet. Many RS232 to Ethernet devices will talk to anything that tries to talk to them. Some have built-in minimal web servers for configuration, and those make it easy for attackers to find the device.
Industrial automation people try to have isolated Ethernets for these devices. But then something comes along that needs to be on the isolated net and also needs to talk to something in the outside world. Then someone reconfigures the isolated net to connect to the outside world. Everything still works fine, until somebody breaks in.
This used to be more of a theoretical attack, but there are now search systems out there finding and cataloging control devices reachable on the Internet.
Now, at last you can contribute to something we've all wanted - a new FreeDOS distro. You can support his 20-line BBS via Telnet. Read his web comic. Play his text adventure game. And there's an "app creator" program.
JWZ on this: "I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. "
JWZ has given up fighting the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model. Instead, he profits from it. He now runs an all-ages nightclub.
Differential equations are really important in CS now. They didn't used to be. I have a MSCS from Stanford from 1985, and there was almost no continuous math in CS back then. I got lots of discrite math - number theory, automata theory, formal methods, proof of correctness - all the stuff you need for Vols 1-3 of Knuth. Things have changed since then.
Today, we have machine learning, which is all continuous math, statistics, and differential equations. If you do anything with robotics or advanced game development, you'll need differential equations. A game physics engine is all differential equations. Vision and navigation systems need differential equations. Modern control theory requires so much math that control theory PhDs are struggling. Yet that's how they get those quadrotors zooming around like they're on rails. Search engines, ad engines, and machine translation all have differential equations inside.
However, almost all the differential equation work needed for computer science can be visualized. It's not like abstract algebra, where it's all symbol manipulation. You can usually draw pictures, or get your computer to draw them, to see what's going on. At least for the low-dimensional cases. Often in machine learning, you can see what's going on for the 2D case, but the real work is happening in some space with 50 or so dimensions.
If you're just going to put business systems together, you don't need much of that, but you don't really need a MSCS either.
I can live with copyrighted Javascript. It's obfusicated Javascript that looks like hostile code that I object to.
Have you looked at Google's home page lately? For a page that appears to do almost nothing, there's a vast amount of obfusicated Javascript involved. Some of it:
This isn't a new issue to people in the industry. Here's a more useful article from last year: "Is the cost reduction associated with IC scaling over?" "Clearly, dimensional scaling is no longer associated with lower average cost per transistor."
The cost of wafer fabs has been going up with each generation. Intel says that a cutting-edge fab now costs upwards of $10 billion, twice the previous generation. That's why higher densities no longer reduce cost. The upper limits of optical lithography are being reached because light, even "deep ultraviolet" light, is too coarse a tool. "Extreme ultraviolet" (soft X-rays, really) are being tried to get down to 10nm or so, but the processes are currently slow and barely work. Electron beam machines, which can go below 10nm, have been around since the 1980s, but they work by writing the chip with an electron beam, not with a mask, which is very slow for a production process.
This is for mostly-static memory. For active transistors, as in CPUs, heat dissipation is already limiting density. CPU clock speed maxed out between 3 and 4 GHz several years ago. (Yes, 8GHz has been achieved with an AMD CPU running in liquid helium. So?)
With the upper limits of speed and density in sight, work is now focusing on reducing cost and power consumption. Hence the push to use ARM CPUs in more applications.
The same thing happened to special effects on TV shows and in movies
True. Visual effects have become good, but not cheap. We no longer have movies with a "cast of thousands", we have animation staffs of thousands. Look at the credits.
About a decade ago, I was talking to a Hollywood director about this. He'd done some films that had live and animated characters interacting. The cost of doing that was high. He was hoping that, in a few years, he'd be able to make $100 million movies for $20 million. It's not working out that way.
There was hope for that in games. Procedural generation was going to make it possible to have huge cities without huge teams of artists building them. Didn't work out. SpeedTree can generate huge forests and outdoor scenes cheaply and well, so you can have a huge, mostly empty natural world like Red Dead Redemption. Cities, not so much. There was much interest in procedural city generation around 2009, but what comes out is usually only good enough to fly over.
The rules say that "Payment is paid out through a verified PayPal account, once the bug is fixed." It's not required to have a PayPal account to win. That's just the payment mechanism eBay prefers. Once someone has won, PayPal owes them money. PayPal is a debtor here.
Debtors do not. in general, get to require that their creditor jump through hoops to get paid.
Whether eBay is entitled to require payment via their own system is a legal issue which eBay would probably lose. Any collection lawyer or collection agency should be able to take this case and win.
On top of that, this is a "contest", and in the US, contests are regulated by the FTC's Contest Rule. Federal law limits what a contest operator can require after they've told someone they've "won".
Nature used to be a prestigious, tightly edited scientific journal. Now, it's like the Weekly World News of science. Especially in computing and materials science.
This isn't an article published in Nature. It's a blurb for an reference in Applied Physics Letters to an announcement that's scheduled to be made at the Lasers and Electro-Optics Conference next month. Then we'll find out if this really works. Maybe.
You can't store much energy in a single sheet of atoms. This may generate very weak femtosecond pulses.
There are lots of interesting uses for very short laser pulses in imaging. A nanosecond pulse is a foot long.
The problem was the CEO, Shai Agassi. I heard him speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco once. He came across as a con man. He's good looking, a good speaker, and talks total bullshit. He was talking about expanding his company by a factor of 10 every year. Nobody does that in a business which requires substantial real-world infrastructure or a large number of employees. This was after five years in which the most his company had actually accomplished was a 3-taxi demo in Tokyo that only ran for three months.
Battery swapping was never a good idea to begin with. It was a bet against improved battery technology - a bet which required a huge infrastructure to make work at all. A full-scale battery swap system would require as many battery swap stations as gas stations. Each would be big, more like a car wash than a pump island.
The battery swap stations Better Place built in Israel are single-lane stations that require about five minutes for a battery swap. So they correspond to a one-pump gas station, but cost much more.
I mean, they're still reporting that NIF is some sort of power source. It's not, and likely can't be developed into one.
Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.
Or, much more likely, that they're simply measuring the current incorrectly.
Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.
Slashdot Mirror
When Bill Gates first discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he spent three hours on line, and wrote in a memo "I didn't see a single Microsoft file format". Microsoft's dominance has relied heavily on proprietary file formats. But now, if it won't work on a tablet or phone, it's useless. This reduces Microsoft's control.
Check out Lynxmotion products. They have a whole line of hobbyist-level mobile robots, arms, controllers, components, and software, all of which work together.
This is not a story. It's an ad for one of the older energy drinks.
The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow's world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now -- only cooler.
He's right about that. Schmidt's vision of the future is indeed banal. People still wear suits, go to offices, and make presentations. But they get there in self-driving cars and the presentation technology is better. That's the "vision" in his book. It's rather 1950s.
I warned about that in 2009.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer.
If you want a generic portable computer with an ARM CPU, buy an Allwinner-based tablet. Those use the Allwinnner system on a chip, which has an ARM core and costs about $7 in quantity. They're under $70 in the US, around $30 in Shenzhen.
ISDN voice is great. No lag beyond speed of light lag. No jitter. No dropouts. No analog noise. True full duplex. End to end digital. It's telephony perfected. Switzerland has residential ISDN, and when I get calls from Switzerland, they're so clear.
Far, far better than cellular or VoIP. I'm really tired of voice cell conversations with a full second of lag in them. Sometimes there's so much lag the echo suppressors can't cope.
Why are we putting up with crap voice quality on telephones?
It seems pretty clear to me that circuit switched networks will be phased out in the next 10 years.
They're coming back. They're just called "software defined networks" now. Look at what OpenFlow really does.
Neither the Chicago Tribune nor the Chicago Sun-Times has any significant local pictures on their web site today. There's a mug shot (both papers have the same one) and a picture of some stolen merchandise (from the cops). Both are just feeds from police agencies.
Here's a local story in its entirety: "Three people have been charged in the wake of a fatal shooting at a party in the South Side Avalon Park neighborhood. Three uninvited guests were asked to leave a family party in the 8400 block of South Constance Avenue about 10:45 p.m., Chicago Police said." That's just an entry from the police blotter. They probably have a feed for that and don't even have to send a reporter.
There's some video of a speech, and it might have been taken with an iPhone. There's a picture of a parking meter, taken earlier this month before they fired the photographers. Nowhere are there any pictures taken of news events.
The author has a point. A shorter version is from Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." I've been to venture capital presentations, and too many of them are for incredibly banal applications. I've heard a pitch for a social network for cats. (It wasn't funded.) Even venture capitalists are unhappy with this situation.
As the social networking boom collapses (Facebook traffic and ad revenue peaked a year ago, and everybody else is in worse shape) we'll see a change in that. But it's not clear what comes next.
Now that's a nice robot controller.
RS232 to Ethernet devices have a big security problem - they can expose your RS-232 device directly to the Internet. Many RS232 to Ethernet devices will talk to anything that tries to talk to them. Some have built-in minimal web servers for configuration, and those make it easy for attackers to find the device.
Industrial automation people try to have isolated Ethernets for these devices. But then something comes along that needs to be on the isolated net and also needs to talk to something in the outside world. Then someone reconfigures the isolated net to connect to the outside world. Everything still works fine, until somebody breaks in.
This used to be more of a theoretical attack, but there are now search systems out there finding and cataloging control devices reachable on the Internet.
Now, at last you can contribute to something we've all wanted - a new FreeDOS distro. You can support his 20-line BBS via Telnet. Read his web comic. Play his text adventure game. And there's an "app creator" program.
Not sure whether this is cute or pathetic.
JWZ on this: "I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. "
JWZ has given up fighting the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model. Instead, he profits from it. He now runs an all-ages nightclub.
Differential equations are really important in CS now. They didn't used to be. I have a MSCS from Stanford from 1985, and there was almost no continuous math in CS back then. I got lots of discrite math - number theory, automata theory, formal methods, proof of correctness - all the stuff you need for Vols 1-3 of Knuth. Things have changed since then.
Today, we have machine learning, which is all continuous math, statistics, and differential equations. If you do anything with robotics or advanced game development, you'll need differential equations. A game physics engine is all differential equations. Vision and navigation systems need differential equations. Modern control theory requires so much math that control theory PhDs are struggling. Yet that's how they get those quadrotors zooming around like they're on rails. Search engines, ad engines, and machine translation all have differential equations inside.
However, almost all the differential equation work needed for computer science can be visualized. It's not like abstract algebra, where it's all symbol manipulation. You can usually draw pictures, or get your computer to draw them, to see what's going on. At least for the low-dimensional cases. Often in machine learning, you can see what's going on for the 2D case, but the real work is happening in some space with 50 or so dimensions.
If you're just going to put business systems together, you don't need much of that, but you don't really need a MSCS either.
The typical "bug fixing" strategy for open source seems to be
I can live with copyrighted Javascript. It's obfusicated Javascript that looks like hostile code that I object to.
Have you looked at Google's home page lately? For a page that appears to do almost nothing, there's a vast amount of obfusicated Javascript involved. Some of it:
(function(){ window.google={kEI:"a62mUcucJYHQiwKgx4DwDw",getEI:function(a){for(var b;a&&(!a.getAttribute||!(b=a.getAttribute("eid")));)a=a.parentNode;return b||google.kEI},https:function(){return"https:"==window.location.protocol},kEXPI:"17259,4000116,4001351,4001947,4003714,4003921,4004320,4004334,4004702,4004788,4004844,4004897,4004943,4004949,4004953,4004971,4005031,4005198,4005731,4005817,4005987,4006191,4006374,4006426,4006442,4006448,4006466,4006541,4006578,4006727,4006806,4006974,4007007,4007009,4007020,4007040,4007055,4007060,4007073,4007077,4007080,4007117,4007118,4007131,4007140,4007158,4007217,4007231", kCSI:{e:"17259,4000116,4001351,4001947,4003714,4003921,4004320,4004334,4004702,4004788,4004844,4004897,4004943,4004949,4004953,4004971,4005031,4005198,4005731,4005817,4005987,4006191,4006374,4006426,4006442,4006448,4006466,4006541,4006578,4006727,4006806,4006974,4007007,4007009,4007020,4007040,4007055,4007060,4007073,4007077,4007080,4007117,4007118,4007131,4007140,4007158,4007217,4007231", ei:"a62mUcucJYHQiwKgx4DwDw"},authuser:0,ml:function(){}, kHL:"en",time:function() {return(new Date).getTime()},log:function(a,b,c,h){var d=new Image,f=google.lc,e=google.li,g="";d.onerror=d.onload=d.onabort=function() {delete f[e]};f[e]=d;!c&&-1==b.search("&ei=")&&(g="&ei="+google.getEI(h));c=c||"/gen_204?atyp=i&ct="+a+"&cad="+b+g+"&zx="+google.time();a=/^http:/i; a.test(c)&&google.https()?(google.ml(Error("GLMM"),!1,{src:c}),delete f[e]):(d.src=c,google.li=e+1)},lc:[],li:0,j:{en:1,b:!!location.hash&&!!location.hash.match("[#&]((q|fp)=|tbs=simg|tbs=sbi)"),bv:21,cf:"",pm:"p",u:"c9c918f0"},Toolbelt:{},y:{},x:function(a,b){google.y[a.id]=[a,b];return!1},load:function(a,b){google.x({id:a+k++},function(){google.load(a,b)})}};var k=0;window.onpopstate=function(){google.j.psc=1}; window.chrome||(window.chrome={});window.chrome.sv=2.00;window.chrome.searchBox||(window.chrome.searchBox={});window.chrome.searchBox.onsubmit=function(){google.x({id:"psyapi"},function(){var a=encodeURIComponent(window.chrome.searchBox.value);google.nav.search({q:a,sourceid:"chrome-psyapi2"})})};})(); (function(){var d=!1;google.sn="webhp";google.timers={};google.startTick=function(a,b){google.timers[a]={t:{start:google.time()},bfr:!!b}};google.tick=function(a,b,h){google.timers[a]||google.startTick(a);google.timers[a].t[b]=h||google.time()};google.startTick("load",!0); try{google.pt=window.gtbExternal&&window.gtbExternal.pageT();}catch(e){}})();
Google's home page was once just HTML with a form. It did about what it does now.
It could be worse. Google didn't add "sponsored emails".
This isn't a new issue to people in the industry. Here's a more useful article from last year: "Is the cost reduction associated with IC scaling over?" "Clearly, dimensional scaling is no longer associated with lower average cost per transistor."
The cost of wafer fabs has been going up with each generation. Intel says that a cutting-edge fab now costs upwards of $10 billion, twice the previous generation. That's why higher densities no longer reduce cost. The upper limits of optical lithography are being reached because light, even "deep ultraviolet" light, is too coarse a tool. "Extreme ultraviolet" (soft X-rays, really) are being tried to get down to 10nm or so, but the processes are currently slow and barely work. Electron beam machines, which can go below 10nm, have been around since the 1980s, but they work by writing the chip with an electron beam, not with a mask, which is very slow for a production process.
This is for mostly-static memory. For active transistors, as in CPUs, heat dissipation is already limiting density. CPU clock speed maxed out between 3 and 4 GHz several years ago. (Yes, 8GHz has been achieved with an AMD CPU running in liquid helium. So?)
With the upper limits of speed and density in sight, work is now focusing on reducing cost and power consumption. Hence the push to use ARM CPUs in more applications.
The same thing happened to special effects on TV shows and in movies
True. Visual effects have become good, but not cheap. We no longer have movies with a "cast of thousands", we have animation staffs of thousands. Look at the credits.
About a decade ago, I was talking to a Hollywood director about this. He'd done some films that had live and animated characters interacting. The cost of doing that was high. He was hoping that, in a few years, he'd be able to make $100 million movies for $20 million. It's not working out that way.
There was hope for that in games. Procedural generation was going to make it possible to have huge cities without huge teams of artists building them. Didn't work out. SpeedTree can generate huge forests and outdoor scenes cheaply and well, so you can have a huge, mostly empty natural world like Red Dead Redemption. Cities, not so much. There was much interest in procedural city generation around 2009, but what comes out is usually only good enough to fly over.
The rules say that "Payment is paid out through a verified PayPal account, once the bug is fixed." It's not required to have a PayPal account to win. That's just the payment mechanism eBay prefers. Once someone has won, PayPal owes them money. PayPal is a debtor here.
Debtors do not. in general, get to require that their creditor jump through hoops to get paid. Whether eBay is entitled to require payment via their own system is a legal issue which eBay would probably lose. Any collection lawyer or collection agency should be able to take this case and win.
On top of that, this is a "contest", and in the US, contests are regulated by the FTC's Contest Rule. Federal law limits what a contest operator can require after they've told someone they've "won".
Nature used to be a prestigious, tightly edited scientific journal. Now, it's like the Weekly World News of science. Especially in computing and materials science.
This isn't an article published in Nature. It's a blurb for an reference in Applied Physics Letters to an announcement that's scheduled to be made at the Lasers and Electro-Optics Conference next month. Then we'll find out if this really works. Maybe.
You can't store much energy in a single sheet of atoms. This may generate very weak femtosecond pulses. There are lots of interesting uses for very short laser pulses in imaging. A nanosecond pulse is a foot long.
The problem was the CEO, Shai Agassi. I heard him speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco once. He came across as a con man. He's good looking, a good speaker, and talks total bullshit. He was talking about expanding his company by a factor of 10 every year. Nobody does that in a business which requires substantial real-world infrastructure or a large number of employees. This was after five years in which the most his company had actually accomplished was a 3-taxi demo in Tokyo that only ran for three months.
Battery swapping was never a good idea to begin with. It was a bet against improved battery technology - a bet which required a huge infrastructure to make work at all. A full-scale battery swap system would require as many battery swap stations as gas stations. Each would be big, more like a car wash than a pump island.
The battery swap stations Better Place built in Israel are single-lane stations that require about five minutes for a battery swap. So they correspond to a one-pump gas station, but cost much more.
I mean, they're still reporting that NIF is some sort of power source. It's not, and likely can't be developed into one.
Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.
Or, much more likely, that they're simply measuring the current incorrectly.
Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.