Tablets are big phones, not small computers. Cramming consumer applications onto tiny phone screens was more successful than expected, but 3 to 4 inch screens were too limiting. Having about twice phone screen area made phone apps look very nice. 4x as much area as a phone screen wasn't all that much better, given that the same thing has to be usable on a phone screen.
Computer screens are too big for consumers, or at least those who market to them. Thus, the typical web page layout has ads at the top, left, bottom, and right, plus some menu bars. There are about 50 to 100 clickable items on most desktop/laptop screens showing a full screen web page, including all the browser and system menus. The useful content would usually fit on a 7 inch tablet screen, and that's what we're seeing.
Bigger screens are for applications that need more input. Most people have nothing useful to say to their computers, so they don't need that.
Of course it has a CPU in it. Something has to do the protocol conversion.
It's not clear that Apple's AirPlay protocol, which has HTTP connections in both directions, is involved. But the pictures indicate compression artifacts. The original article doesn't go into enough detail to determine whether image compression (like JPEG) or motion compression (like MPEG) is being used. An MPEG compressor would introduce visible lag between the master and slave screens.
They must be using underpowered ammo. Watch the video. There's only a slight pop as each round fires, and little recoil. Compare firing an AR-15 with standard ammo.
Ah, yes, "The High Frontier". Back when NASA thought they could build a shuttle that didn't cost $600 million per flight. The plan was to set up a big moon colony first, mine the moon, build a big catapult, and launch materials from the moon to a Kevlar "catcher" in Earth orbit. (What could possibly go wrong?)
The 1952 Colliers/Von Braun space program, with its plans for a big wheel-type space station from which Moon and Mars missions would be launched, was more realistic. What killed it was the Apollo "Man/Moon/Decade" goal. That was achieved, but with technologies useful for little else.
NASA still thinks that way. Their Mars Direct program would have sent a manned mission to Mars as a one-shot mission.
Space travel with chemical rockets is just too inefficient for big projects in space. Fusion still doesn't work. Fission would work but is rather messy. None of the big fancy hypersonic space plane things really work. (Remember Reagan's hypersonic space plane scheme? Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71's powerplant, refused to bid on that. "We used titanium (on the SR-71). You know of something stronger?")
Google's Kansas City project is mostly hype. They
only have 300 homes connected as of November 2012. Only 7000 people per-registered for the service. Also, you're not allowed to run servers, so having big uplink bandwidth isn't helpful.
Verizon has several million FIOS customers, but they're winding down deployment of that offering.
If you go to Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley, you can get enough cheap previous-generation stuff to build a data center.
1U rackmount servers, $50. Working, just obsolete by a few years.
Rack-mount networking gear. Working, just about 1/4 the density of current gear, and 100Mb/s, not gigabit Ethernet.
Rockwell 12-channel GPS module, $8.95. Nothing wrong with it, it's just 71mm across, which is huge by mobile standards. Good time standard.
That's all working stuff, not junk. It's kind of depressing. Most of the gear there was valuable only a few years ago.
There's a service in Oakland CA which takes discarded desktop systems. They check them out, try some board swaps to get them to work, clean them up, build them up to a minimally usable standard, wipe the hard drives, install Ubuntu Linux, and send them out to schools that need computers. That's about as good as recycling seems to get.
Something tells me this tech doesn't work as well as they say it does.
I handled and hand-folded some of their flattened-out parts when they were making a pitch for VC funding at a conference. It's quite striking. Things fold easily where they're supposed to, and click together neatly. It's easier than assembling cardboard boxes that come as flats.
If you wanted self-assembly, you could add sections of nitinol (the shape-memory metal) and use them to power the assembly.
Google has enough market power to make it work.
If Google had bought Groupon, it would be called "Google Deals" and would appear at the top of every search result page vaguely relevant to the query. It would be tied into Google Groups, Google Maps, Google+, Google Chrome, and Google Anal Probe. Businesses would sign up or else.
Industrial Origami, Inc. is way ahead here. They have a set of techniques for designing punched sheet metal parts which then bend to fold up neatly into boxes or other desired forms. The folded surfaces bend precisely, even when bent by hand. The edges meet and lock together. I've folded up one of their electrical boxes, which comes as a flat sheet ready for hand folding.
It's all done with clever design and finite element analysis to get the bend points to behave in a repeatable way. What they sell is design software for doing this.
Some of the strange-looking code comes from using C++ to serialize a sequence of parameters into a byte stream for message passing. The idea, I think, is that you write something that looks like a function call with parameters. Instead of pushing the parameters on the stack for a function call, the compiler turns them into a byte stream and sends them to a message passing interface. That makes sense, although it looks weird.
They're making progress. The system now runs on bare hardware. For a while, it ran on top of Linux, more of a demo than an OS. Now it can run directly on ARM machines. That's useful. It should run on the Allwinner ARM parts from China ($7 each in bulk) and we may see products from China using it.
It's interesting to read over the documentation, what there is of it. The "API reference" is links to C++.h files which make heavy use of templates. Like this:
Google probably puts more effort into publicizing their tiny Kansas City gigabit Internet project than actually doing it. Sonic.net, on the other hand, is quietly deploying gigabit fiber to the home in Northern California. Sonic says it costs them about $500 per house they pass to install fiber; if they sell to 1 in 3 houses, which is what they're getting, it's $1500 per house. Sonic charges $70 per month for a gigabit connection. It's only available in a few places, though - Sebastapol, CA and parts of the Sunset District in San Francisco. Elsewhere, they offer 20Mb/s down for $40/month, over lines leased from AT&T.
Sonic has no data caps.
Their CEO says that their upstream bandwidth is not a significant cost, and they don't need to throttle their users.
"In-browser popups?" On what pages?
Is Comcast tampering with web pages not their own to insert messages? Do they do MITM attacks on secure pages to break in there?
Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. If you can partition your problem spatially, it gets easier. You have to be able to handle interaction across boundaries, though. This is OK as long as you don't have interaction across multiple boundaries. Grid systems have trouble at corners where four grid squares meet.. (There's an argument for using hexes, because you never have more than three hexes meeting at a point.
Hard cases include fast moving objects, big objects, and groups of connected objects that cross multiple boundaries. Back when I did physics engines, I was talking to some people developing a planet-sized MMORPG, and said "Now let us all join hands across the world". Big groan.
Facebook hit this problem. They were college-based originally, and assumed that most interaction would be with people who were physically nearby. As Facebook scaled up, that was no longer true. They needed a lot more bandwidth between their data centers.
I could make more comments on this, but I'm going to go outside and ride my horse at the beach instead.
I suspect he's just fed up with the state of software security, which is appallingly bad. We now have patch-and-release on everything. This turns out to be a failed strategy against competent attackers.
I used to work on secure microkernels in the 1980s. I thought that by now we'd have provably secure microkernels in ROM with a mandatory security model enforced. Systems like that have been built a few times for the three-letter agencies, but never went mainstream. Instead, we have bloated operating systems with a high churn rate, and far too much trusted software per system.
Ballmer used to call this "strategic complexity". As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows, "If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business".
Most applications should be running with far less privileges than they have. But if they are locked down properly, their ad tracking, update checking, and self-modification won't work. The user would actually be in charge.
Cryptography only provides a secure way to communicate between secure regions. If there are few or no secure regions, it doesn't help much.
More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.
We're going to see semi-autonomous fighter aircraft. The F-35, at $236 million per unit, is just too expensive to deploy in quantity. Autonomous landing and autonomous refueling have already been demonstrated for the F-16. The F-16's targeting system is already partly automatic. It's not far away. Even if manned aircraft are better in combat, there won't be enough of them.
There will be a remote operator, but their job will be to decide what to kill. They'll turn on Master Arm, select a target, and pull a trigger. Then the computers will take over.
Another possibility is the autonomous wingman. Some planes have pilots, but they're the squadron leaders. The rest are autonomous. This is very likely to happen soon, since DoD has been testing it for about ten years.
What fuels "going private" are two things - low interest rates, and that interest paid by companies is deductible. "Going private" really means "leveraged buyout".
Companies can pay for their capital through dividends to stockholders through stock buybacks which push up the stock price (or compensate for dilution through stock options), or by paying interest. Only the first is taxable.
Tax policy and "quantitative easing" (i.e. central banks lending money at very low rates) fuel leveraged buyouts. Without those factors, "going private" would be a very rare event.
First they came for the record stores, and I said nothing because I didn't go to record stores. Then they came for the video rental stores, and I said nothing because I didn't own a video rental store. Then they came for the bookstores, and I said nothing because it was hopeless.
I had no idea wind power produced that little power.
Biggest single wind farm in the world: Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project, 320 wind turbines, 36 km^2 area, 800 MW. That's 800MW for 36 million square meters, or 22W/m^2. That's peak power, though; yearly average for most wind sites runs about a quarter of peak.
A real problem with wind power is that it's like water power - there are a limited number of good sites. There are four really good wind power sites on shore in California, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Anywhere else is less cost-effective.
There's good wind from the Texas panhandle north to the Canadian border, but not much there to use the power. (Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there.)
And, of course, there's the intermittency problem. Here's California's wind power graph for today. Note that total statewide wind output went up by a factor of 7 in 2 hours, after dropping by a factor of 4 in 5 hours.
California buffers some of this by using the dams and pumps of the California Water Project as energy storage, but still, that's a huge variation. Extra generating plants have to be on standby for when the wind dies down. Up to about 15% wind, there's enough slack in the system to handle that. Beyond that, somebody has to build extra plants or energy storage.
Solar is more predictable. Solar energy and peak air conditioning load track closely. A reasonable goal is to get most of the world's air conditioning load onto solar power.
This is not an ATM. It's a vending machine. It's like one of those machines that adds value to a transit card, or a gift card vending machine.
If you could show it a QR code representing a Bitcoin on your cell phone screen, and it then dispensed currency, it would be an ATM. If people could do transactions in both directions, it would be taken more seriously. That would demonstrate that Bitcoins are worth something. As a one-way device, it's just another money-sucker.
It isn't even a deployable vending machine. It's a wooden prototype of one. Anything that takes $20 to $100 bills needs to be built up to money safe level.
Slashdot Mirror
Tablets are big phones, not small computers. Cramming consumer applications onto tiny phone screens was more successful than expected, but 3 to 4 inch screens were too limiting. Having about twice phone screen area made phone apps look very nice. 4x as much area as a phone screen wasn't all that much better, given that the same thing has to be usable on a phone screen.
Computer screens are too big for consumers, or at least those who market to them. Thus, the typical web page layout has ads at the top, left, bottom, and right, plus some menu bars. There are about 50 to 100 clickable items on most desktop/laptop screens showing a full screen web page, including all the browser and system menus. The useful content would usually fit on a 7 inch tablet screen, and that's what we're seeing.
Bigger screens are for applications that need more input. Most people have nothing useful to say to their computers, so they don't need that.
Of course it has a CPU in it. Something has to do the protocol conversion.
It's not clear that Apple's AirPlay protocol, which has HTTP connections in both directions, is involved. But the pictures indicate compression artifacts. The original article doesn't go into enough detail to determine whether image compression (like JPEG) or motion compression (like MPEG) is being used. An MPEG compressor would introduce visible lag between the master and slave screens.
They must be using underpowered ammo. Watch the video. There's only a slight pop as each round fires, and little recoil. Compare firing an AR-15 with standard ammo.
Ah, yes, "The High Frontier". Back when NASA thought they could build a shuttle that didn't cost $600 million per flight. The plan was to set up a big moon colony first, mine the moon, build a big catapult, and launch materials from the moon to a Kevlar "catcher" in Earth orbit. (What could possibly go wrong?)
The 1952 Colliers/Von Braun space program, with its plans for a big wheel-type space station from which Moon and Mars missions would be launched, was more realistic. What killed it was the Apollo "Man/Moon/Decade" goal. That was achieved, but with technologies useful for little else.
NASA still thinks that way. Their Mars Direct program would have sent a manned mission to Mars as a one-shot mission.
Space travel with chemical rockets is just too inefficient for big projects in space. Fusion still doesn't work. Fission would work but is rather messy. None of the big fancy hypersonic space plane things really work. (Remember Reagan's hypersonic space plane scheme? Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71's powerplant, refused to bid on that. "We used titanium (on the SR-71). You know of something stronger?")
Google's Kansas City project is mostly hype. They only have 300 homes connected as of November 2012. Only 7000 people per-registered for the service. Also, you're not allowed to run servers, so having big uplink bandwidth isn't helpful.
Verizon has several million FIOS customers, but they're winding down deployment of that offering.
If you go to Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley, you can get enough cheap previous-generation stuff to build a data center.
That's all working stuff, not junk. It's kind of depressing. Most of the gear there was valuable only a few years ago.
There's a service in Oakland CA which takes discarded desktop systems. They check them out, try some board swaps to get them to work, clean them up, build them up to a minimally usable standard, wipe the hard drives, install Ubuntu Linux, and send them out to schools that need computers. That's about as good as recycling seems to get.
Something tells me this tech doesn't work as well as they say it does.
I handled and hand-folded some of their flattened-out parts when they were making a pitch for VC funding at a conference. It's quite striking. Things fold easily where they're supposed to, and click together neatly. It's easier than assembling cardboard boxes that come as flats.
If you wanted self-assembly, you could add sections of nitinol (the shape-memory metal) and use them to power the assembly.
Google has enough market power to make it work. If Google had bought Groupon, it would be called "Google Deals" and would appear at the top of every search result page vaguely relevant to the query. It would be tied into Google Groups, Google Maps, Google+, Google Chrome, and Google Anal Probe. Businesses would sign up or else.
Industrial Origami, Inc. is way ahead here. They have a set of techniques for designing punched sheet metal parts which then bend to fold up neatly into boxes or other desired forms. The folded surfaces bend precisely, even when bent by hand. The edges meet and lock together. I've folded up one of their electrical boxes, which comes as a flat sheet ready for hand folding.
It's all done with clever design and finite element analysis to get the bend points to behave in a repeatable way. What they sell is design software for doing this.
This is probably being driven by online gambling. Satoshi Dice is now doing more Bitcoin transactions than all other users combined.
Some of the strange-looking code comes from using C++ to serialize a sequence of parameters into a byte stream for message passing. The idea, I think, is that you write something that looks like a function call with parameters. Instead of pushing the parameters on the stack for a function call, the compiler turns them into a byte stream and sends them to a message passing interface. That makes sense, although it looks weird.
This is an astroturfing job. At "code.org", you can sign up to support what they want, but you can't vote against it, or even comment on it.
They're making progress. The system now runs on bare hardware. For a while, it ran on top of Linux, more of a demo than an OS. Now it can run directly on ARM machines. That's useful. It should run on the Allwinner ARM parts from China ($7 each in bulk) and we may see products from China using it.
It's interesting to read over the documentation, what there is of it. The "API reference" is links to C++ .h files which make heavy use of templates. Like this:
typedef Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_create_thread,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_utcb,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_kill_thread,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_set_pager,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_start,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_pause,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_resume,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_cancel_blocking,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_set_state,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_get_state,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_exception_handler,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_single_step,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_num_cpus,
Meta::Type_tuple<Rpc_affinity,
Meta::Empty>
> > > > > > > > > > > > > > Rpc_functions;
Better for security to do it at compile time than at run time.
Google probably puts more effort into publicizing their tiny Kansas City gigabit Internet project than actually doing it. Sonic.net, on the other hand, is quietly deploying gigabit fiber to the home in Northern California. Sonic says it costs them about $500 per house they pass to install fiber; if they sell to 1 in 3 houses, which is what they're getting, it's $1500 per house. Sonic charges $70 per month for a gigabit connection. It's only available in a few places, though - Sebastapol, CA and parts of the Sunset District in San Francisco. Elsewhere, they offer 20Mb/s down for $40/month, over lines leased from AT&T.
Sonic has no data caps. Their CEO says that their upstream bandwidth is not a significant cost, and they don't need to throttle their users.
"In-browser popups?" On what pages? Is Comcast tampering with web pages not their own to insert messages? Do they do MITM attacks on secure pages to break in there?
Yes, looking at a smartphone while doing something else makes you look like a dweeb. Hanging the screen in front of your face won't help.
Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. If you can partition your problem spatially, it gets easier. You have to be able to handle interaction across boundaries, though. This is OK as long as you don't have interaction across multiple boundaries. Grid systems have trouble at corners where four grid squares meet.. (There's an argument for using hexes, because you never have more than three hexes meeting at a point.
Hard cases include fast moving objects, big objects, and groups of connected objects that cross multiple boundaries. Back when I did physics engines, I was talking to some people developing a planet-sized MMORPG, and said "Now let us all join hands across the world". Big groan.
Facebook hit this problem. They were college-based originally, and assumed that most interaction would be with people who were physically nearby. As Facebook scaled up, that was no longer true. They needed a lot more bandwidth between their data centers.
I could make more comments on this, but I'm going to go outside and ride my horse at the beach instead.
SMS is the most expensive way to send data to mobiles by orders of magnitude. Not sure this solves much of a problem.
I suspect he's just fed up with the state of software security, which is appallingly bad. We now have patch-and-release on everything. This turns out to be a failed strategy against competent attackers.
I used to work on secure microkernels in the 1980s. I thought that by now we'd have provably secure microkernels in ROM with a mandatory security model enforced. Systems like that have been built a few times for the three-letter agencies, but never went mainstream. Instead, we have bloated operating systems with a high churn rate, and far too much trusted software per system.
Ballmer used to call this "strategic complexity". As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows, "If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business".
Most applications should be running with far less privileges than they have. But if they are locked down properly, their ad tracking, update checking, and self-modification won't work. The user would actually be in charge.
Cryptography only provides a secure way to communicate between secure regions. If there are few or no secure regions, it doesn't help much.
More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.
We're going to see semi-autonomous fighter aircraft. The F-35, at $236 million per unit, is just too expensive to deploy in quantity. Autonomous landing and autonomous refueling have already been demonstrated for the F-16. The F-16's targeting system is already partly automatic. It's not far away. Even if manned aircraft are better in combat, there won't be enough of them.
There will be a remote operator, but their job will be to decide what to kill. They'll turn on Master Arm, select a target, and pull a trigger. Then the computers will take over.
Another possibility is the autonomous wingman. Some planes have pilots, but they're the squadron leaders. The rest are autonomous. This is very likely to happen soon, since DoD has been testing it for about ten years.
What fuels "going private" are two things - low interest rates, and that interest paid by companies is deductible. "Going private" really means "leveraged buyout".
Companies can pay for their capital through dividends to stockholders through stock buybacks which push up the stock price (or compensate for dilution through stock options), or by paying interest. Only the first is taxable.
Tax policy and "quantitative easing" (i.e. central banks lending money at very low rates) fuel leveraged buyouts. Without those factors, "going private" would be a very rare event.
First they came for the record stores, and I said nothing because I didn't go to record stores. Then they came for the video rental stores, and I said nothing because I didn't own a video rental store. Then they came for the bookstores, and I said nothing because it was hopeless.
I had no idea wind power produced that little power.
Biggest single wind farm in the world: Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project, 320 wind turbines, 36 km^2 area, 800 MW. That's 800MW for 36 million square meters, or 22W/m^2. That's peak power, though; yearly average for most wind sites runs about a quarter of peak.
A real problem with wind power is that it's like water power - there are a limited number of good sites. There are four really good wind power sites on shore in California, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Anywhere else is less cost-effective. There's good wind from the Texas panhandle north to the Canadian border, but not much there to use the power. (Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there.)
And, of course, there's the intermittency problem. Here's California's wind power graph for today. Note that total statewide wind output went up by a factor of 7 in 2 hours, after dropping by a factor of 4 in 5 hours. California buffers some of this by using the dams and pumps of the California Water Project as energy storage, but still, that's a huge variation. Extra generating plants have to be on standby for when the wind dies down. Up to about 15% wind, there's enough slack in the system to handle that. Beyond that, somebody has to build extra plants or energy storage.
Solar is more predictable. Solar energy and peak air conditioning load track closely. A reasonable goal is to get most of the world's air conditioning load onto solar power.
This is not an ATM. It's a vending machine. It's like one of those machines that adds value to a transit card, or a gift card vending machine. If you could show it a QR code representing a Bitcoin on your cell phone screen, and it then dispensed currency, it would be an ATM. If people could do transactions in both directions, it would be taken more seriously. That would demonstrate that Bitcoins are worth something. As a one-way device, it's just another money-sucker.
It isn't even a deployable vending machine. It's a wooden prototype of one. Anything that takes $20 to $100 bills needs to be built up to money safe level.