Crap article, from a crap blog, copied from a press release. It's so Slashdot.
Here's the actual paper on the research. The physics is interesting. It's a way to make optical gyros better. Currently, good fiber-optic gyros have drift rates around 1 degree per hour. Ring laser gyros can do better, and mechanical gyros still beat the optical systems on long-term drift. This proposal is to develop a way to get a few more orders of magnitude less drift out of optical gyros.
Low-end MEMS gyros have drift rates of several degrees per minute, but there's steady progress, and degrees-per-hour MEMS gyros now exist.
First, three blogs down, here's the actual court order. It's worth reading. A key point in this decision is what it has to say about agreements which allow one party to change the terms of the agreement. Such agreements were held to be "illusory" and non-binding:
Here, the Terms of Use gives Zappos the right to change the
Terms of Use, including the Arbitration Clause, at any time without
notice to the consumer.
On one side, the Terms of Use purportedly
binds any user of the Zappos.com website to mandatory arbitration.
However, if a consumer sought to invoke arbitration pursuant to the
Terms of Use, nothing would prevent Zappos from unilaterally
changing the Terms and making those changes applicable to that
pending dispute if it determined that arbitration was no longer in
its interest.
In effect, the agreement allows Zappos to hold its
customers and users to the promise to arbitrate while reserving its
own escape hatch.
By the terms of the Terms of Use, Zappos is free
at any time to require a consumer to arbitrate and/or litigate
anywhere it sees fit, while consumers are required to submit to
arbitration in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Because the Terms of Use binds
consumers to arbitration while leaving Zappos free to litigate or
arbitrate wherever it sees fit, there exists no mutuality of
obligation.
We join those other federal courts that find such
arbitration agreements illusory and therefore unenforceable.
This is an example of the classic "an agreement to agree is not an agreement".
An example of a site that's now in trouble is WePay. See Paragraph 50 of the contract.
And Microsoft has shown on several occasions in the past that they're willing to pull the plug on various developer technologies if they're falling behind, or just if the business strategy has changed.
Ah, yes. Softimage, PlaysForSure, Silverlight, Zune... On each, the plug was pulled suddenly; they weren't slowly phased out.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft backs off from desktop Metro. Enterprise customers hate it and want it to just go away.
I can kind of live with the self-interest part. But the short-term orientation is killing us.
One solution to that is to put back some of the old features which forced businesses to think longer-term. Longer lock-in periods for stock options. (That used to be 2 years; now it's 6 months or less) Taxing short-term capital gains at much higher rates than long-term gains. (Warren Buffet keeps mentioning this.) Bringing back Glass-Stegall, so commercial banks and investment companies are separate industries and trouble on the investment side can't take down the depository institutions. Bring back some of the old bank regulations which kept banks more local and tied to their own loans, so they don't make bad ones.
More radically, tax dividends, interest paid, stock buybacks, and executive compensation at the same corporate tax rate. There's a bias in favor of debt in current tax law, and this fuels the "private equity" industry. Level that out, and companies will pay dividends rather than boost their stock.
Make pension funds no longer "qualified investors", so they can't invest in hedge funds. Regulate hedge funds like other mutual funds. Don't allow traders to deduct short-term capital losses from capital gains, which would end high-speed trading.
Give stockholders control over executive compensation. Not advisory votes, but each stockholder puts down the total compensation of the top 5 employees on the proxy, and the share-weighted median is used. Make voting rights pass through as far as the tax break does, so mutual funds and pension funds pass that decision through to their shareholders.
Now that's financial conservatism and solid American values, circa the Eisenhower administration.
And now for the reality check. The power grid for the northeastern US is run by PJM, from a control center in Valley Forge, PA (and a backup center elsewhere). Their public PJM Dashboard shows what's going on in the generation system and high-voltage transmission grids. (Retail power distribution is handled by local power companies.)
So what's going on? Just normal stuff. Load right now is 89 gigawatts, just 1% above forecast. No storm-related emergencies. A few routine problems - the 138KV line between Jay and DeSoto is out, and system voltage is running slightly high, so some switching actions were taken. No alerts from FERC or DHS. Spinning and standby reserves are above normal, in case of trouble. Some substations that normally run unattended have been staffed and sandbagged. About 3 gigawatts of extra power plant capacity are idling on standby, just in case, with another 6GW standing by to start. Wind power is looking good today. Right now, there's far more generation capacity available than load to use it, which is typical for mid-day in fall. (The peak is during the summer air-conditioning season.)
PJM's public statement notes that some nuclear plants might shut down due to high winds, but they expect to have enough reserves to deal with that.
Most trouble is on the distribution side, from trees falling on power lines in residential areas. Tornadoes can take out high tension towers, but the wind speeds for this hurricane aren't high enough to do much of that. This is mostly a coastal flooding problem.
If you're in Greece and don't already have your money out of the country, you're an idiot. This isn't about taxes. It's about Greece threatening to leave the euro area, switch to a local currency (bring back the drachma!), and printing money to get out of their financial disaster. People in Greece, as EU residents, have no obligation to participate in this. The EU encourages cross-border banking. So everybody with any significant cash is moving it to German, French, or Swiss banks in case the axe falls.
No, they haven't "developed a surveillance system". The paper is two psychologists blithering about the potential architecture of one. It reminds me of the awful papers that came from the "expert systems" community in the 1980s. There's been some progress; it mentions Bayesian statistics. But it's fundamentally an approach based on parsing visual data into something that looks like predicate calculus and grinding on that. There's a long history of that not working.
It's an idea in the right direction, though. A key component of intelligence is prediction. Knowing what is likely to happen is a basic component of common sense, an area in which AI systems have historically been weak. With prediction comes the ability to ask "what if" questions, essential to deciding what to do next without doing something stupid.
There's been real progress in that area, but not from the expert systems people. Adobe Photoshop's content-aware fill is an example of a successful system which has a form of "common sense" - it fills in plausible-looking areas to replace sections deleted from photos. Related technologies exist for videos, and are used for motion compression and 2D to fake 3D conversion. Systems which look at video and guess "what happens next" may be the next step.
Just use Artistic Style for C and its derivatives C++, C#, and Java. I usually set it for "--style=ansi", but that's a project preference. External code is run through Artistic Style before use. This way, everyone knows the indentation is consistent.
For Python, of course, there are few formatting options, so this isn't an issue. Dreamweaver will indent HTML. Javascript remains a problem.
Actually, Windows NT 3.51 was in good shape on the security front. It was intended to run 32-bit programs only. The 16-bit subsystem, which was an optional add-on (you could install NT without it), was intended as a short-term conversion aid for legacy code. It didn't support many of the vagaries of Windows 95.
The Intel Pentium Pro had a similar problem. It was a good 32-bit CPU, able to run 16-bit x86 code as well, but not with full performance. Reviewers gave it bad reviews running Windows 95 with 16-bit applications. Both Microsoft and Intel overestimated how rapidly the industry would convert to 32-bit applications.
Recovery from this was done by dumping vast amounts of Windows 95 code into the NT line, to the detriment of security. This resulted in NT 4 (a turkey) and, after a huge effort, Windows 2000 (reasonably good). That's where the effort went.
Also, remember, Microsoft went into the game console business. That cost them a lot more than they expected. The original Xbox was a PC. It ran a version of Windows 2000, and you could run XBox games on Windows 2000 (if you were a developer, had the development kit, and were developing your own game; the DRM prevented running the games of others). It lost money from launch to discontinuation. The XBox 360 was a new design, was incompatible with Windows, required much new software, and finally made money for Microsoft. It sucked up a lot of talent.
(Not as bad as the PS3, though. Developing tools to deal with the Cell architecture sucked up all the talent in SCEA's R&D operation for years. Sony is dumping the Cell for the next round.)
Most countries have been slow to develop drones and medium-range cruise missiles. The combination of a German V-1 design and a smartphone is enough to make a cruise missile that can hit a target. (The original V-1 could not reliably hit a target smaller than the entire city of London. If it had been able to hit air bases, the Battle of Britain might have come out differently.)
A better launch system than the V-1's long fixed ramp with pusher cylinder would be needed, but a RATO bottle or a set of wheels discarded at launch would work.
I suspect Apple's dismissal of vertical touch screen usage has to do with muscle fatigue. Try holding your arms out in front of you without resting your hands on anything for 5-10 minutes, and I think you'll see what he's getting at.
That was a real problem with light pens, but then came the Kinect.
How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Yes. I think Wikipedia should have a Popular Culture Division, where most music, TV, and movie/video articles would be dumped. That's what Wikia, with the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, ended up as, a repository for fancruft. The Wikipedia notability threshold for popular culture is low; any CD every issued by a major label qualifies, and there are over 3 million of those in CD databases.
Wikipedia has the wrong structure for performers, groups, and works. Wikipedia has manually maintained lists of all works by a performer, all performers on a work, all songs on an album, and other things which should be looked up with an SQL SELECT statement. When all you have is a wiki, everything looks like an article, even when it should be a database row.
Wikipedia also doesn't handle location-based information well. Items like "State Route 42" belong in a map-driven geographical database, not wiki articles. A map-driven system could handle far more local points of interest, because you can zoom. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place.
"Swipe or scroll through a continuous collage of all your photos, dynamically generated as you browse. The layout is different every time, bringing your attention to new photos each time you browse a folder."
Even a 'simple' telepresence robot with the dexterity to operate a vehicle and perform various manual tasks would be incredibly useful in hazardous environments - including battlefields. I can see why DARPA doesn't mind it being human operated.
It's not a teleoperator. DARPA will limit bandwidth and add delay to prevent direct teleoperation. Balance, slip control, locomotion, and fine manipulation have to be autonomous or it won't work. Human control will probably look like video games - click on where to go or what to work on, select verb from menu.
"OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich."
It seems to be mostly a Python-based automated system administration tool set for managing big machine farms. But the documentation is so buzzword-compliant it's hard to tell what actually works. The goal seems to be to have something like an open-source version of Amazon Web Services. Allocate real or virtual machine instances, load them up with executable images, hook them to some stored data sets, tell the network where the instances are and what they can talk to, and go. That's reasonable enough, and it would help if they'd just say that. And be clear about what actually works.
That's routine for anything that's a fermentation process. California's biggest cheese factory has a sizable ethanol output. Anheuser-Busch is trying to find some way to turn brewery waste into something useful.
It's a marginal business, You start with huge volumes of soggy biomass and try to extract something useful without using too much energy. Then you're left with a smaller amount of soggy biomass that's even less useful than what came in. That has to go somewhere.
There's a vast amount of agricultural waste available at low, low prices if you can find some way to use it. Straw, bagasse (the leftover part of sugar cane), nut hulls, brewers's mash, corn husks, cobs, and stalks - it's out there in bulk. The hope of cellulostic ethanol conversion was to convert some of the cellulose into fuel. So far, it doesn't pay, and it's hard to even get out more energy than goes in. Work continues.
They put a reflective film on a LCD monitor and aimed a projector at it. If you're almost perpendicular to the display, you see the projected image; otherwise you see the LCD image. The setup is that the display sits flat on a table and the projector is overhead, pointing down. If you lean over the display, the image changes. The room lighting has to be dim for this to work.
It's cute, but the applications are limited.
If you really wanted many people to see different things on the same screen, the various tricks used for 3D (shutter glasses, polarization) would be more effective.
It costs under $5 per month to avoid the "free" services. I have a low-end $9/month HostGator account for my minor web sites. This allows multiple domains. If I want to publish a picture, it goes in a directory there. Another domain has Wordpress loaded for a blog.
Mail comes into my own domains, is filtered, and dumps to an IMAP server at sonic.net, which I can access from all my devices. Sonic DSL has no ads, no filtering, no caching, no "deep packet inspection", no data caps, and no nonsense.
The only time I log into Google is to update my Google Chrome add-ons in their "web store". I declined to accept the new terms when Google bought Youtube, and my newer videos are hosted on Blip, which is more of a pro service. I can put videos on the Hostgator site, too, although they have to play out from beginning to end, not stream randomly.
This demonstrates how low-value the "free" services really are.
Such programmable calculators have 10 digits of *precision* plus an exponent. In other words, they store floating point numbers. The analytical engine was fixed-point, so far more digits were required for many calculations.
Mechanical desk calculators usually had about 10 or 12 digits of precision, with a double-length product register on the carriage. They were fixed-point devices. Babbage was familiar with early versions of such devices, his writings discuss fixed point scaling, and his machine has a decimal shift capability.
That project is starting to sound like a boondoggle. Lots of PR and fundraising, no hardware. They have a contribution system, a mailing list, a Twitter feed, and press coverage. They've been blithering about this for two years now. But they haven't built so much as one single demo part.
We know what the Analytical Engine was supposed to do computationally. There's a simulator. It's a rather straightforward machine. It's roughly comparable to a programmable calculator of the 1970s. There are 1000 memory locations, each of which stores a 50-digit decimal number. These are separate from the program and data, which are on chains of punched cards. It can add, subtract, multiply, divide, shift, and compare, which is all you need.
There's no good reason for the 50-digit precision, and 1000 memory locations is too much for the compute power available (about 1 IPS). Like programmable calculators, 10 digits and 100 memory locations would have been enough for most problems. Babbage's own trial model of the "mill" (the ALU) has only 25 digits. Building a memory of 50,000 wheels about 3 inches in diameter means building something the size of a locomotive, most of which will just sit there. Trimming it down to 25 digits and 100 locations would make for a large desk-sized machine.
A question I once asked of the project was "how many part numbers"? That is, how many different parts are required? They didn't know. I suspect not that many. The existing model of the mill doesn't have a high part number count. The "store" (the memory unit) is inherently repetitive. Most of the parts can be die-cast and finish-machined, which is the most economical way to produce good metal parts in medium quantity. Many of the lever-type parts are cut from flat sheets of brass. Those you make with a CNC mill or a water jet cutter. 3D printing isn't really appropriate as a way to make brass parts, and making a plastic copy of the Analytical Engine would be rather tacky.
I thought it essentially made it legal for a Kickstarter type site, to now offer not only 'prizes' etc...but could legally offer $$ returns on investments by individuals that plunk down some money, and not have to worry about all the SEC filings, etc....
That's not quite how it works. First, the JOBS act allows "funding portals" like Kickstarter, and they have to register with the SEC. Issuers then work through the "funding portal". Issuers still have to file and publicize certain statements, including financial statements. Issuers up to $100K only have to provide signed financial statements certified as true by the officers of the company. Up to $500K, "reviewed" financials. Above $500K, audited financials. There are also tight restrictions on how such investments can be marketed. Ads have to go through the "funding portal"; you can't pay some third party to promote your investment. (Remember all those old stock spams like "XLPI is headed straight up!" You don't see those much any more, since the SEC cracked down on that type of pump and dump. If you see one, send it to "enforcement@sec.gov". They do take action.)
"An investor can sue an issuer, as well as its directors, partners and officers, for making an untrue statement of a material fact or omitting to state a material fact". And no, that can't be waived via an EULA.
In other words, Kickstarter is going to be able to fund investments, but it's not open season on small investors.
The actual paper, which I need to read a few more times, proposes at least two mechanisms. One problem with TCP is that, when ICMP Source Quench went away in the 1980s, the assumption was made that a lost packet indicated congestion. So a lost packet means slow down. This is a problem for systems with high packet loss rates and no link level retransmit, like WiFi. Also, with TCP, packets need not arrive in order, but if one is missing, all later packets have to be retransmitted, because the ACK scheme has no way to describe which byte ranges are missing, just the last good sequence number. So losing one packet when there are many in flight costs multiple retransmits.
Their solution involves addressing both of those issues. Then they add the "algebra", which is a simple form of forward error correction. They send M linear combinations of N packets, M > N, from which all N packets can be reconstructed provided that not more than K packets are lost where K
Why is that? This is a link layer problem and ought to be dealt with at the link layer. FEC at the WiFi link layer is apparently not as effective as it should be.
Because the biggest return you can get is a refund on your ticket purchase, it's not an "investment". If you could get back more if the event was a big success, it would be a public offering of a security. There are some short form public offering arrangements available under SEC rules, but you still have to file a basic offering statement and financial statements.
"Crowdfunding" schemes have to be careful of this. If the pitch is that you can make money, it's a securities offering. If the pitch is that you get a product if some funding threshold is reached, the Mail Order Rule applies and there has to be a refund, without your asking for it, if the product isn't delivered by the stated date, or 30 days if not stated. If the pitch is that you're donating as a charity, the laws about charity frauds apply.
In the early days of the Internet, many small companies were fined under the Mail Order Rule because they had online ordering that didn't stop taking orders even though the manufacturing and delivery end of the business couldn't keep up. (Now, everybody with a clue has the shopping cart system hooked to inventory control, so the order isn't accepted unless it can be filled.) Companies don't get to hold onto the money until they get around to filling the order. They can beg the customer for more time, but must, by default, refund if they don't hear from the customer.
That's because their North Sea natural gas supply has been used up. Output peaked in 2000. With gas fields, production increases rapidly after drilling, much faster than with oil. At the end of a field's life, it falls off rapidly, much faster than with oil. For oil, there are "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl a day as crude slowly seeps through cracks in the rock. The US has about a million of those, and it adds up. Gas doesn't work that way; it can be extracted at high speed, but when it's gone, it's gone for good.
Slashdot Mirror
Crap article, from a crap blog, copied from a press release. It's so Slashdot.
Here's the actual paper on the research. The physics is interesting. It's a way to make optical gyros better. Currently, good fiber-optic gyros have drift rates around 1 degree per hour. Ring laser gyros can do better, and mechanical gyros still beat the optical systems on long-term drift. This proposal is to develop a way to get a few more orders of magnitude less drift out of optical gyros.
Low-end MEMS gyros have drift rates of several degrees per minute, but there's steady progress, and degrees-per-hour MEMS gyros now exist.
First, three blogs down, here's the actual court order. It's worth reading. A key point in this decision is what it has to say about agreements which allow one party to change the terms of the agreement. Such agreements were held to be "illusory" and non-binding:
Here, the Terms of Use gives Zappos the right to change the Terms of Use, including the Arbitration Clause, at any time without notice to the consumer. On one side, the Terms of Use purportedly binds any user of the Zappos.com website to mandatory arbitration. However, if a consumer sought to invoke arbitration pursuant to the Terms of Use, nothing would prevent Zappos from unilaterally changing the Terms and making those changes applicable to that pending dispute if it determined that arbitration was no longer in its interest. In effect, the agreement allows Zappos to hold its customers and users to the promise to arbitrate while reserving its own escape hatch. By the terms of the Terms of Use, Zappos is free at any time to require a consumer to arbitrate and/or litigate anywhere it sees fit, while consumers are required to submit to arbitration in Las Vegas, Nevada. Because the Terms of Use binds consumers to arbitration while leaving Zappos free to litigate or arbitrate wherever it sees fit, there exists no mutuality of obligation. We join those other federal courts that find such arbitration agreements illusory and therefore unenforceable.
This is an example of the classic "an agreement to agree is not an agreement".
An example of a site that's now in trouble is WePay. See Paragraph 50 of the contract.
And Microsoft has shown on several occasions in the past that they're willing to pull the plug on various developer technologies if they're falling behind, or just if the business strategy has changed.
Ah, yes. Softimage, PlaysForSure, Silverlight, Zune... On each, the plug was pulled suddenly; they weren't slowly phased out.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft backs off from desktop Metro. Enterprise customers hate it and want it to just go away.
I can kind of live with the self-interest part. But the short-term orientation is killing us.
One solution to that is to put back some of the old features which forced businesses to think longer-term. Longer lock-in periods for stock options. (That used to be 2 years; now it's 6 months or less) Taxing short-term capital gains at much higher rates than long-term gains. (Warren Buffet keeps mentioning this.) Bringing back Glass-Stegall, so commercial banks and investment companies are separate industries and trouble on the investment side can't take down the depository institutions. Bring back some of the old bank regulations which kept banks more local and tied to their own loans, so they don't make bad ones.
More radically, tax dividends, interest paid, stock buybacks, and executive compensation at the same corporate tax rate. There's a bias in favor of debt in current tax law, and this fuels the "private equity" industry. Level that out, and companies will pay dividends rather than boost their stock.
Make pension funds no longer "qualified investors", so they can't invest in hedge funds. Regulate hedge funds like other mutual funds. Don't allow traders to deduct short-term capital losses from capital gains, which would end high-speed trading.
Give stockholders control over executive compensation. Not advisory votes, but each stockholder puts down the total compensation of the top 5 employees on the proxy, and the share-weighted median is used. Make voting rights pass through as far as the tax break does, so mutual funds and pension funds pass that decision through to their shareholders.
Now that's financial conservatism and solid American values, circa the Eisenhower administration.
And now for the reality check. The power grid for the northeastern US is run by PJM, from a control center in Valley Forge, PA (and a backup center elsewhere). Their public PJM Dashboard shows what's going on in the generation system and high-voltage transmission grids. (Retail power distribution is handled by local power companies.)
So what's going on? Just normal stuff. Load right now is 89 gigawatts, just 1% above forecast. No storm-related emergencies. A few routine problems - the 138KV line between Jay and DeSoto is out, and system voltage is running slightly high, so some switching actions were taken. No alerts from FERC or DHS. Spinning and standby reserves are above normal, in case of trouble. Some substations that normally run unattended have been staffed and sandbagged. About 3 gigawatts of extra power plant capacity are idling on standby, just in case, with another 6GW standing by to start. Wind power is looking good today. Right now, there's far more generation capacity available than load to use it, which is typical for mid-day in fall. (The peak is during the summer air-conditioning season.)
PJM's public statement notes that some nuclear plants might shut down due to high winds, but they expect to have enough reserves to deal with that.
Most trouble is on the distribution side, from trees falling on power lines in residential areas. Tornadoes can take out high tension towers, but the wind speeds for this hurricane aren't high enough to do much of that. This is mostly a coastal flooding problem.
If you're in Greece and don't already have your money out of the country, you're an idiot. This isn't about taxes. It's about Greece threatening to leave the euro area, switch to a local currency (bring back the drachma!), and printing money to get out of their financial disaster. People in Greece, as EU residents, have no obligation to participate in this. The EU encourages cross-border banking. So everybody with any significant cash is moving it to German, French, or Swiss banks in case the axe falls.
No, they haven't "developed a surveillance system". The paper is two psychologists blithering about the potential architecture of one. It reminds me of the awful papers that came from the "expert systems" community in the 1980s. There's been some progress; it mentions Bayesian statistics. But it's fundamentally an approach based on parsing visual data into something that looks like predicate calculus and grinding on that. There's a long history of that not working.
It's an idea in the right direction, though. A key component of intelligence is prediction. Knowing what is likely to happen is a basic component of common sense, an area in which AI systems have historically been weak. With prediction comes the ability to ask "what if" questions, essential to deciding what to do next without doing something stupid.
There's been real progress in that area, but not from the expert systems people. Adobe Photoshop's content-aware fill is an example of a successful system which has a form of "common sense" - it fills in plausible-looking areas to replace sections deleted from photos. Related technologies exist for videos, and are used for motion compression and 2D to fake 3D conversion. Systems which look at video and guess "what happens next" may be the next step.
Just use Artistic Style for C and its derivatives C++, C#, and Java. I usually set it for "--style=ansi", but that's a project preference. External code is run through Artistic Style before use. This way, everyone knows the indentation is consistent.
For Python, of course, there are few formatting options, so this isn't an issue. Dreamweaver will indent HTML. Javascript remains a problem.
Actually, Windows NT 3.51 was in good shape on the security front. It was intended to run 32-bit programs only. The 16-bit subsystem, which was an optional add-on (you could install NT without it), was intended as a short-term conversion aid for legacy code. It didn't support many of the vagaries of Windows 95.
The Intel Pentium Pro had a similar problem. It was a good 32-bit CPU, able to run 16-bit x86 code as well, but not with full performance. Reviewers gave it bad reviews running Windows 95 with 16-bit applications. Both Microsoft and Intel overestimated how rapidly the industry would convert to 32-bit applications.
Recovery from this was done by dumping vast amounts of Windows 95 code into the NT line, to the detriment of security. This resulted in NT 4 (a turkey) and, after a huge effort, Windows 2000 (reasonably good). That's where the effort went.
Also, remember, Microsoft went into the game console business. That cost them a lot more than they expected. The original Xbox was a PC. It ran a version of Windows 2000, and you could run XBox games on Windows 2000 (if you were a developer, had the development kit, and were developing your own game; the DRM prevented running the games of others). It lost money from launch to discontinuation. The XBox 360 was a new design, was incompatible with Windows, required much new software, and finally made money for Microsoft. It sucked up a lot of talent.
(Not as bad as the PS3, though. Developing tools to deal with the Cell architecture sucked up all the talent in SCEA's R&D operation for years. Sony is dumping the Cell for the next round.)
Most countries have been slow to develop drones and medium-range cruise missiles. The combination of a German V-1 design and a smartphone is enough to make a cruise missile that can hit a target. (The original V-1 could not reliably hit a target smaller than the entire city of London. If it had been able to hit air bases, the Battle of Britain might have come out differently.)
A better launch system than the V-1's long fixed ramp with pusher cylinder would be needed, but a RATO bottle or a set of wheels discarded at launch would work.
I suspect Apple's dismissal of vertical touch screen usage has to do with muscle fatigue. Try holding your arms out in front of you without resting your hands on anything for 5-10 minutes, and I think you'll see what he's getting at.
That was a real problem with light pens, but then came the Kinect.
How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Yes. I think Wikipedia should have a Popular Culture Division, where most music, TV, and movie/video articles would be dumped. That's what Wikia, with the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, ended up as, a repository for fancruft. The Wikipedia notability threshold for popular culture is low; any CD every issued by a major label qualifies, and there are over 3 million of those in CD databases.
Wikipedia has the wrong structure for performers, groups, and works. Wikipedia has manually maintained lists of all works by a performer, all performers on a work, all songs on an album, and other things which should be looked up with an SQL SELECT statement. When all you have is a wiki, everything looks like an article, even when it should be a database row.
Wikipedia also doesn't handle location-based information well. Items like "State Route 42" belong in a map-driven geographical database, not wiki articles. A map-driven system could handle far more local points of interest, because you can zoom. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place.
"Swipe or scroll through a continuous collage of all your photos, dynamically generated as you browse. The layout is different every time, bringing your attention to new photos each time you browse a folder."
Nobody is going to miss that.
Even a 'simple' telepresence robot with the dexterity to operate a vehicle and perform various manual tasks would be incredibly useful in hazardous environments - including battlefields. I can see why DARPA doesn't mind it being human operated.
It's not a teleoperator. DARPA will limit bandwidth and add delay to prevent direct teleoperation. Balance, slip control, locomotion, and fine manipulation have to be autonomous or it won't work. Human control will probably look like video games - click on where to go or what to work on, select verb from menu.
"OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich."
It seems to be mostly a Python-based automated system administration tool set for managing big machine farms. But the documentation is so buzzword-compliant it's hard to tell what actually works. The goal seems to be to have something like an open-source version of Amazon Web Services. Allocate real or virtual machine instances, load them up with executable images, hook them to some stored data sets, tell the network where the instances are and what they can talk to, and go. That's reasonable enough, and it would help if they'd just say that. And be clear about what actually works.
That's routine for anything that's a fermentation process. California's biggest cheese factory has a sizable ethanol output. Anheuser-Busch is trying to find some way to turn brewery waste into something useful.
It's a marginal business, You start with huge volumes of soggy biomass and try to extract something useful without using too much energy. Then you're left with a smaller amount of soggy biomass that's even less useful than what came in. That has to go somewhere.
There's a vast amount of agricultural waste available at low, low prices if you can find some way to use it. Straw, bagasse (the leftover part of sugar cane), nut hulls, brewers's mash, corn husks, cobs, and stalks - it's out there in bulk. The hope of cellulostic ethanol conversion was to convert some of the cellulose into fuel. So far, it doesn't pay, and it's hard to even get out more energy than goes in. Work continues.
"A Subway Named Mobius", from 1950.
They put a reflective film on a LCD monitor and aimed a projector at it. If you're almost perpendicular to the display, you see the projected image; otherwise you see the LCD image. The setup is that the display sits flat on a table and the projector is overhead, pointing down. If you lean over the display, the image changes. The room lighting has to be dim for this to work.
It's cute, but the applications are limited.
If you really wanted many people to see different things on the same screen, the various tricks used for 3D (shutter glasses, polarization) would be more effective.
It costs under $5 per month to avoid the "free" services. I have a low-end $9/month HostGator account for my minor web sites. This allows multiple domains. If I want to publish a picture, it goes in a directory there. Another domain has Wordpress loaded for a blog.
Mail comes into my own domains, is filtered, and dumps to an IMAP server at sonic.net, which I can access from all my devices. Sonic DSL has no ads, no filtering, no caching, no "deep packet inspection", no data caps, and no nonsense.
The only time I log into Google is to update my Google Chrome add-ons in their "web store". I declined to accept the new terms when Google bought Youtube, and my newer videos are hosted on Blip, which is more of a pro service. I can put videos on the Hostgator site, too, although they have to play out from beginning to end, not stream randomly.
This demonstrates how low-value the "free" services really are.
Such programmable calculators have 10 digits of *precision* plus an exponent. In other words, they store floating point numbers. The analytical engine was fixed-point, so far more digits were required for many calculations.
Mechanical desk calculators usually had about 10 or 12 digits of precision, with a double-length product register on the carriage. They were fixed-point devices. Babbage was familiar with early versions of such devices, his writings discuss fixed point scaling, and his machine has a decimal shift capability.
That project is starting to sound like a boondoggle. Lots of PR and fundraising, no hardware. They have a contribution system, a mailing list, a Twitter feed, and press coverage. They've been blithering about this for two years now. But they haven't built so much as one single demo part.
We know what the Analytical Engine was supposed to do computationally. There's a simulator. It's a rather straightforward machine. It's roughly comparable to a programmable calculator of the 1970s. There are 1000 memory locations, each of which stores a 50-digit decimal number. These are separate from the program and data, which are on chains of punched cards. It can add, subtract, multiply, divide, shift, and compare, which is all you need.
Parts of the Analytical Engine have been built, and there's a working Difference Engine. So the components are understood.
There's no good reason for the 50-digit precision, and 1000 memory locations is too much for the compute power available (about 1 IPS). Like programmable calculators, 10 digits and 100 memory locations would have been enough for most problems. Babbage's own trial model of the "mill" (the ALU) has only 25 digits. Building a memory of 50,000 wheels about 3 inches in diameter means building something the size of a locomotive, most of which will just sit there. Trimming it down to 25 digits and 100 locations would make for a large desk-sized machine.
A question I once asked of the project was "how many part numbers"? That is, how many different parts are required? They didn't know. I suspect not that many. The existing model of the mill doesn't have a high part number count. The "store" (the memory unit) is inherently repetitive. Most of the parts can be die-cast and finish-machined, which is the most economical way to produce good metal parts in medium quantity. Many of the lever-type parts are cut from flat sheets of brass. Those you make with a CNC mill or a water jet cutter. 3D printing isn't really appropriate as a way to make brass parts, and making a plastic copy of the Analytical Engine would be rather tacky.
I thought it essentially made it legal for a Kickstarter type site, to now offer not only 'prizes' etc...but could legally offer $$ returns on investments by individuals that plunk down some money, and not have to worry about all the SEC filings, etc....
That's not quite how it works. First, the JOBS act allows "funding portals" like Kickstarter, and they have to register with the SEC. Issuers then work through the "funding portal". Issuers still have to file and publicize certain statements, including financial statements. Issuers up to $100K only have to provide signed financial statements certified as true by the officers of the company. Up to $500K, "reviewed" financials. Above $500K, audited financials. There are also tight restrictions on how such investments can be marketed. Ads have to go through the "funding portal"; you can't pay some third party to promote your investment. (Remember all those old stock spams like "XLPI is headed straight up!" You don't see those much any more, since the SEC cracked down on that type of pump and dump. If you see one, send it to "enforcement@sec.gov". They do take action.)
"An investor can sue an issuer, as well as its directors, partners and officers, for making an untrue statement of a material fact or omitting to state a material fact". And no, that can't be waived via an EULA.
In other words, Kickstarter is going to be able to fund investments, but it's not open season on small investors.
The actual paper, which I need to read a few more times, proposes at least two mechanisms. One problem with TCP is that, when ICMP Source Quench went away in the 1980s, the assumption was made that a lost packet indicated congestion. So a lost packet means slow down. This is a problem for systems with high packet loss rates and no link level retransmit, like WiFi. Also, with TCP, packets need not arrive in order, but if one is missing, all later packets have to be retransmitted, because the ACK scheme has no way to describe which byte ranges are missing, just the last good sequence number. So losing one packet when there are many in flight costs multiple retransmits.
Their solution involves addressing both of those issues. Then they add the "algebra", which is a simple form of forward error correction. They send M linear combinations of N packets, M > N, from which all N packets can be reconstructed provided that not more than K packets are lost where K Why is that? This is a link layer problem and ought to be dealt with at the link layer. FEC at the WiFi link layer is apparently not as effective as it should be.
Because the biggest return you can get is a refund on your ticket purchase, it's not an "investment". If you could get back more if the event was a big success, it would be a public offering of a security. There are some short form public offering arrangements available under SEC rules, but you still have to file a basic offering statement and financial statements.
"Crowdfunding" schemes have to be careful of this. If the pitch is that you can make money, it's a securities offering. If the pitch is that you get a product if some funding threshold is reached, the Mail Order Rule applies and there has to be a refund, without your asking for it, if the product isn't delivered by the stated date, or 30 days if not stated. If the pitch is that you're donating as a charity, the laws about charity frauds apply.
In the early days of the Internet, many small companies were fined under the Mail Order Rule because they had online ordering that didn't stop taking orders even though the manufacturing and delivery end of the business couldn't keep up. (Now, everybody with a clue has the shopping cart system hooked to inventory control, so the order isn't accepted unless it can be filled.) Companies don't get to hold onto the money until they get around to filling the order. They can beg the customer for more time, but must, by default, refund if they don't hear from the customer.
In the UK prices have doubled in under a decade
That's because their North Sea natural gas supply has been used up. Output peaked in 2000. With gas fields, production increases rapidly after drilling, much faster than with oil. At the end of a field's life, it falls off rapidly, much faster than with oil. For oil, there are "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl a day as crude slowly seeps through cracks in the rock. The US has about a million of those, and it adds up. Gas doesn't work that way; it can be extracted at high speed, but when it's gone, it's gone for good.