Trying to enforce Fabrication Rights Management seems like it'll be even more of a comical failure - not to mention far more likely to raise the ire of the general public.
Cubify already has a DRM-crippled 3D printer. They have an "app store", from which you can download designs you can only print once.
Back when people finding security holes had to beg to get vendors to fix them, the patch-and-release approach had a chance of working. Now that there's an active market in security holes, someone who finds one can make more money selling it to the attack side.
Digg just sold for $500K. Also tanked or tanking: Tribe, Salon, Myspace... Tribe and Digg started to tank after they did a "Web 2.0" site redesign which users hated.
With "social", just because you have "clicks" doesn't mean you make money.
About 10 years ago, I came across, in a surplus store, a little box designed to limit TV viewing. It was a simple motor-driven timer in a box with a power cord. The user set the maximum number of viewing hours per day, plugged the TV's power cord into it, and closed the lid. The lid permanently latched, and could be only be opened by destroying the device.
It didn't sell well,which is why I found a case of them in a surplus store.
Desktops will live on for many decades, but may not be of widespread use. The main use for desktops will be for people who have to input and manipulate graphically complex stuff. Engineers, animators, graphic designers, architects, building contractors - people who can start with a blank screen and fill it up.
Tablets and phones (there's not much of a distinction any more) are mostly output devices. Touch-screen typing is mediocre at best, and touch-screen drawing is awful. I suspect that tablets which optionally work with pens may make a comeback.
The future of desk jobs where everything comes in and out through the computer is bleak. More and more of that will be automated. The call center industry is leveling off and will drop.
Methinks the law enforcement agencies which investigate cybercrime have realized that they are incapable of hiring qualified computer experts who can find the culprits of such crimes, so they decided to get back to the basics.
That's not why the FBI is ineffective in this area. Their manpower allocation on the computer side is 50% "national security", 40% kiddie porn, and 9% investigating fraud complaints from citizens.
If you want a low-end tablet, get one. They start at around $45 now. By the time you get this thing, a Rasberry Pi, and all the necessary cables and connectors, you'll have spent more, and you'll have an underpowered laptop.
And if you want an "entertainment device", you can get Allwinner-based set-top boxes for about $75, with case and connectors. They usually come with Android, and you can load other Linux distros if you want.
If you're doing homebrew embedded work, one of the ARM boards in the Auduno form factor is probably more useful.
The link mentioned above, to "http://4domfay.mrslove.com/", is to a multi-frame document which tries to load "http://www.etehadiyeamlak.ir/components/com_media/helpers/media/www/index.php", which tries to download a plug-in. Although the domain is in the Iranian ccTLD, it's actually hosted by "webhostbox.net".
This project is from Avro (A.V. Roe, a respected Canadian aircraft manufacturer in the 1950s) and is clearly a follow-on to the Avrocar. The Avrocar, of course, really was a flying saucer. But it could barely fly.
The Avrocar was an interesting idea, but presented control problems that couldn't be solved in the 1950s. Like all thrust-based VTOL craft, it was unstable. It turned out to be really unstable at the transition from ground effect to thrust lift. Getting it out of ground effect without crashing was very hard. Forward motion made the stability problem worse. Despite several redesigns, it remained unflyable.
A design like that probably could be made to work today, with computers, gyros, and control jets fighting to keep the thing stable. Toy-sized quadrotors are widely available now, and they have many of the same stability problems. It's not clear there's any advantage to a disc shape other than coolness, though.
Bear in mind why this was built. Nobody knew what a supersonic aircraft needed to look like, so lots of things were tried. The opposite extreme from the Avrocar was the X-3 Stilleto, probably the pointiest-nose aircraft ever built. It flew, but couldn't go supersonic. Flying wings were tried - they had stability problems not solveable with 1950s technology. Finally, it was figured out that swept-back wings could be made to behave at both subsonic and supersonic speeds, and that became the standard form for supersonic aircraft.
Apparently someone discovered a way to do an instant "kill everything" attack and published it. Enough players then used it to kill everything in entire cities.
Management has announced that they are doing "rolling restarts" on each realm today. It's not clear if characters will be re-animated, or what.
Properly, once they fix the bug that allowed a "kill everything" attack, they should resolve the matter in-game. Send in disaster recovery crews with healers, security, carts to haul away the dead...
"For example, when waking up a on a summer day, wouldn't it be nice to have an app that tells you what beach is sunniest?"
What about that requires the "Internet of Things"? If you wanted to implement that right now, you'd fetch the National Weather Service's XML structured weather data for the points of interest. Given a latitude and longitude, the NWS server will compute their weather model for any desired point in the US on request. For beaches, there are already sites with current surf reports, and the major surf spots have webcams.
There are applications for low-powered devices that talk IPv6, but this isn't one of them. Most of the useful applications are industrial.
Everything you're shipping has been on a container ship or equivalent before, when it was shipped from China to you. Don't over think it.
Exactly. Pack it like it was packed when you bought it.
When you got it new, it was in a heat-sealed plastic bag, in a cardboard box with some styrofoam around it, and that got it across the ocean last time. The only special precaution is to wrap everything in plastic bags with some silica gel inside.
The US hit max vehicle miles in 2007. What seems to be happening is that 1) driving for social and communications purposes is down due to online social and working from home, and 2) driving for shopping purposes is down due to online shopping. Young people are getting their drivers licenses later. Higher gas prices are also an issue.
China, though, still has a lot of road building to do. They're building their inter-provincial expressway system rapidly. The interior provinces will benefit.
Sonic.net, one of the few remaining independent ISPs, annoys the rest of the industry by insisting that data caps are unnecessary. They offer service only in parts of northern California, but I've had them in Silicon Valley for a decade. In a few areas, they offer gigabit fiber to the home for $70 per month. And they throw in phone service. Their main offering is 20mb/s for $40/month, which they offer anywhere they can lease a copper pair from the telco. Outside of that range, they offer $6mb/s.
None of these have service caps. There is no caching. There is no censorship. The EFF approves of their privacy policy. They just deliver the bits.
The reason for this is simple - they don't sell cable TV. So they have no incentive to force people to sign up for "programming". (They do resell DirecTV as a sideline, but that comes in via a satellite dish, not over the Internet.)
Sonic's CEO says that, while per-user data consumption is going up, wholesale network connectivity rates are going down faster. So they're not worried about user data consumption.
It's actually a rather impressive setup. Some Facebook architects gave a talk in EE380 at Stanford a few years back.
Originally, Facebook's architecture assumed that most "friends" would be regionally local, reflecting Facebook's college-campus origin. That's not how it worked out after some growth. So they have to assemble pages across regions and data centers. There's caching, but there's also active cache invalidation, which they can do because they control both sides of the cache. There's extensive inter-process communication, and it's not HTTP. There's a lot of PHP for the user-facing stuff, but it's compiled with their in-house compiler, not interpreted.
Facebook's purpose is banal, but the technology behind it is non-trivial.
Everybody seems to miss this, but many of Jobs' successes were because he was a movie studio head. He was also CEO of Pixar.
Jobs didn't really run Pixar; Lassiter did. Jobs had the sense to leave the moviemakers alone. But being a studio head gave him enormous clout in Hollywood. This is what make the iTunes store possible.
A successful music-delivery service required deals with the music industry. Others, notably Napster, had tried to put deals together, without success. But Jobs had a big advantage.
Hollywood is very hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy are studio heads. Everybody in Hollywood will take a call from a studio head. Including the music industry, which is outranked by the film industry. Jobs was in a position to call up the heads of record labels and talk to them as an equal, if not a superior.
When iTunes started, Apple was nowhere; under 10% market share in computers and unknown in consumer electronics. It wasn't Apple's clout that made iTunes happen. It was Jobs' status as head of Pixar.
Everything since then has been a logical extension of Apple's entry into the entertainment industry. The iPod provided a smaller unit for delivering iTunes content. The iPhone added features in the iPod form factor. Movies, then apps, were fitted into the distribution chain designed for music.
It surprised me how much labor goes into iPhone manufacture at Foxconn. Cell phone assembly was automated years ago by Motorola, Nokia, and Sony. The iPhone form factor doesn't change much from year to year, and the volume per model is high. That's the ideal case for automation. Only very low salaries make it possible to do the job cost-effectively with humans.
A lot. Formula 1 cars have rather high drag, and generate enough downforce that they could be driven upside down. Formula 1 cars need it for cornering. Land speed record cars need it to avoid becoming airborne at the slightest bump or crosswind.
For those of you who are too young to remember talking on a 20th century circuit-switching copper landline telephone system, I will describe the experience: it was like talking to another person in real life. You talk and they talk, sometimes simultaneously, and both parties could hear and understand everything... in real time.
The engine isn't the problem. There are many aircraft engines powerful enough. The problem is keeping the "car" stably in contact with the ground. Really, anything going that fast is an aircraft. The aerodynamic forces dominate.
Finding a long enough flat area to run the thing is getting hard. The Bonneville Salt Flats aren't big enough any more. The last few land speed record efforts moved to Black Rock Desert, and this one is planned for the Hakskeen Pan dry lake bed in South Africa.
Rails work better than salt flats. Holloman USAF Base has a 10-mile high speed test rail track for rocket sled tests. The speed record there is 6,481 MPH.
Remember what happened here. Google tried to rewrite copyright law through litigation so that Google would have the exclusive right to digitize and resell works in copyright, subject to paying fees through some clearinghouse. The judge didn't go for that. The agreement now just affects material controlled by members of the Association of American Publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to enforce Fabrication Rights Management seems like it'll be even more of a comical failure - not to mention far more likely to raise the ire of the general public.
Cubify already has a DRM-crippled 3D printer. They have an "app store", from which you can download designs you can only print once.
Back when people finding security holes had to beg to get vendors to fix them, the patch-and-release approach had a chance of working. Now that there's an active market in security holes, someone who finds one can make more money selling it to the attack side.
NHTSA testing showed consistent malfunctioning ranging from non-deployment of the air bag to the expulsion of metal shrapnel during deployment.
Digg just sold for $500K. Also tanked or tanking: Tribe, Salon, Myspace... Tribe and Digg started to tank after they did a "Web 2.0" site redesign which users hated.
With "social", just because you have "clicks" doesn't mean you make money.
About 10 years ago, I came across, in a surplus store, a little box designed to limit TV viewing. It was a simple motor-driven timer in a box with a power cord. The user set the maximum number of viewing hours per day, plugged the TV's power cord into it, and closed the lid. The lid permanently latched, and could be only be opened by destroying the device.
It didn't sell well,which is why I found a case of them in a surplus store.
Desktops will live on for many decades, but may not be of widespread use. The main use for desktops will be for people who have to input and manipulate graphically complex stuff. Engineers, animators, graphic designers, architects, building contractors - people who can start with a blank screen and fill it up.
Tablets and phones (there's not much of a distinction any more) are mostly output devices. Touch-screen typing is mediocre at best, and touch-screen drawing is awful. I suspect that tablets which optionally work with pens may make a comeback.
The future of desk jobs where everything comes in and out through the computer is bleak. More and more of that will be automated. The call center industry is leveling off and will drop.
Methinks the law enforcement agencies which investigate cybercrime have realized that they are incapable of hiring qualified computer experts who can find the culprits of such crimes, so they decided to get back to the basics.
That's not why the FBI is ineffective in this area. Their manpower allocation on the computer side is 50% "national security", 40% kiddie porn, and 9% investigating fraud complaints from citizens.
If you want a low-end tablet, get one. They start at around $45 now. By the time you get this thing, a Rasberry Pi, and all the necessary cables and connectors, you'll have spent more, and you'll have an underpowered laptop.
And if you want an "entertainment device", you can get Allwinner-based set-top boxes for about $75, with case and connectors. They usually come with Android, and you can load other Linux distros if you want.
If you're doing homebrew embedded work, one of the ARM boards in the Auduno form factor is probably more useful.
The link mentioned above, to "http://4domfay.mrslove.com/", is to a multi-frame document which tries to load "http://www.etehadiyeamlak.ir/components/com_media/helpers/media/www/index.php", which tries to download a plug-in. Although the domain is in the Iranian ccTLD, it's actually hosted by "webhostbox.net".
We're already there. Most sysadmins are effectively blue-collar workers. So are most PHP and web coders. Wages continue to decline.
It might work out better with formal apprenticeships and unions.
This project is from Avro (A.V. Roe, a respected Canadian aircraft manufacturer in the 1950s) and is clearly a follow-on to the Avrocar. The Avrocar, of course, really was a flying saucer. But it could barely fly.
The Avrocar was an interesting idea, but presented control problems that couldn't be solved in the 1950s. Like all thrust-based VTOL craft, it was unstable. It turned out to be really unstable at the transition from ground effect to thrust lift. Getting it out of ground effect without crashing was very hard. Forward motion made the stability problem worse. Despite several redesigns, it remained unflyable.
A design like that probably could be made to work today, with computers, gyros, and control jets fighting to keep the thing stable. Toy-sized quadrotors are widely available now, and they have many of the same stability problems. It's not clear there's any advantage to a disc shape other than coolness, though.
Bear in mind why this was built. Nobody knew what a supersonic aircraft needed to look like, so lots of things were tried. The opposite extreme from the Avrocar was the X-3 Stilleto, probably the pointiest-nose aircraft ever built. It flew, but couldn't go supersonic. Flying wings were tried - they had stability problems not solveable with 1950s technology. Finally, it was figured out that swept-back wings could be made to behave at both subsonic and supersonic speeds, and that became the standard form for supersonic aircraft.
Space-X has launched one commercial satellite so far, and has at least 5 more launches scheduled for 2013.
I find it hard to believe that NASA isn't capable of designing and lauching its own launch vehicle.
They've failed on the last three tries, and are trying to get Congress to fund #4.
Apparently someone discovered a way to do an instant "kill everything" attack and published it. Enough players then used it to kill everything in entire cities. Management has announced that they are doing "rolling restarts" on each realm today. It's not clear if characters will be re-animated, or what.
Properly, once they fix the bug that allowed a "kill everything" attack, they should resolve the matter in-game. Send in disaster recovery crews with healers, security, carts to haul away the dead...
"For example, when waking up a on a summer day, wouldn't it be nice to have an app that tells you what beach is sunniest?"
What about that requires the "Internet of Things"? If you wanted to implement that right now, you'd fetch the National Weather Service's XML structured weather data for the points of interest. Given a latitude and longitude, the NWS server will compute their weather model for any desired point in the US on request. For beaches, there are already sites with current surf reports, and the major surf spots have webcams.
There are applications for low-powered devices that talk IPv6, but this isn't one of them. Most of the useful applications are industrial.
Everything you're shipping has been on a container ship or equivalent before, when it was shipped from China to you. Don't over think it.
Exactly. Pack it like it was packed when you bought it. When you got it new, it was in a heat-sealed plastic bag, in a cardboard box with some styrofoam around it, and that got it across the ocean last time. The only special precaution is to wrap everything in plastic bags with some silica gel inside.
The US hit max vehicle miles in 2007. What seems to be happening is that 1) driving for social and communications purposes is down due to online social and working from home, and 2) driving for shopping purposes is down due to online shopping. Young people are getting their drivers licenses later. Higher gas prices are also an issue.
China, though, still has a lot of road building to do. They're building their inter-provincial expressway system rapidly. The interior provinces will benefit.
Sonic.net, one of the few remaining independent ISPs, annoys the rest of the industry by insisting that data caps are unnecessary. They offer service only in parts of northern California, but I've had them in Silicon Valley for a decade. In a few areas, they offer gigabit fiber to the home for $70 per month. And they throw in phone service. Their main offering is 20mb/s for $40/month, which they offer anywhere they can lease a copper pair from the telco. Outside of that range, they offer $6mb/s.
None of these have service caps. There is no caching. There is no censorship. The EFF approves of their privacy policy. They just deliver the bits.
The reason for this is simple - they don't sell cable TV. So they have no incentive to force people to sign up for "programming". (They do resell DirecTV as a sideline, but that comes in via a satellite dish, not over the Internet.)
Sonic's CEO says that, while per-user data consumption is going up, wholesale network connectivity rates are going down faster. So they're not worried about user data consumption.
It's actually a rather impressive setup. Some Facebook architects gave a talk in EE380 at Stanford a few years back. Originally, Facebook's architecture assumed that most "friends" would be regionally local, reflecting Facebook's college-campus origin. That's not how it worked out after some growth. So they have to assemble pages across regions and data centers. There's caching, but there's also active cache invalidation, which they can do because they control both sides of the cache. There's extensive inter-process communication, and it's not HTTP. There's a lot of PHP for the user-facing stuff, but it's compiled with their in-house compiler, not interpreted.
Facebook's purpose is banal, but the technology behind it is non-trivial.
Everybody seems to miss this, but many of Jobs' successes were because he was a movie studio head. He was also CEO of Pixar.
Jobs didn't really run Pixar; Lassiter did. Jobs had the sense to leave the moviemakers alone. But being a studio head gave him enormous clout in Hollywood. This is what make the iTunes store possible.
A successful music-delivery service required deals with the music industry. Others, notably Napster, had tried to put deals together, without success. But Jobs had a big advantage.
Hollywood is very hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy are studio heads. Everybody in Hollywood will take a call from a studio head. Including the music industry, which is outranked by the film industry. Jobs was in a position to call up the heads of record labels and talk to them as an equal, if not a superior.
When iTunes started, Apple was nowhere; under 10% market share in computers and unknown in consumer electronics. It wasn't Apple's clout that made iTunes happen. It was Jobs' status as head of Pixar.
Everything since then has been a logical extension of Apple's entry into the entertainment industry. The iPod provided a smaller unit for delivering iTunes content. The iPhone added features in the iPod form factor. Movies, then apps, were fitted into the distribution chain designed for music.
It surprised me how much labor goes into iPhone manufacture at Foxconn. Cell phone assembly was automated years ago by Motorola, Nokia, and Sony. The iPhone form factor doesn't change much from year to year, and the volume per model is high. That's the ideal case for automation. Only very low salaries make it possible to do the job cost-effectively with humans.
I wonder what percent of power goes to downforce.
A lot. Formula 1 cars have rather high drag, and generate enough downforce that they could be driven upside down. Formula 1 cars need it for cornering. Land speed record cars need it to avoid becoming airborne at the slightest bump or crosswind.
For those of you who are too young to remember talking on a 20th century circuit-switching copper landline telephone system, I will describe the experience: it was like talking to another person in real life. You talk and they talk, sometimes simultaneously, and both parties could hear and understand everything... in real time.
Declining standards:
Sprint "Hear a pin drop" commercial, 1986
Verizon "can you hear me now?" commercial, 2002.
Even better are ISDN home phones. These are rare in the US but common in Switzerland. 64kb/s uncompressed digitized voice, in sync end to end.
The engine isn't the problem. There are many aircraft engines powerful enough. The problem is keeping the "car" stably in contact with the ground. Really, anything going that fast is an aircraft. The aerodynamic forces dominate.
Finding a long enough flat area to run the thing is getting hard. The Bonneville Salt Flats aren't big enough any more. The last few land speed record efforts moved to Black Rock Desert, and this one is planned for the Hakskeen Pan dry lake bed in South Africa.
Rails work better than salt flats. Holloman USAF Base has a 10-mile high speed test rail track for rocket sled tests. The speed record there is 6,481 MPH.
Remember what happened here. Google tried to rewrite copyright law through litigation so that Google would have the exclusive right to digitize and resell works in copyright, subject to paying fees through some clearinghouse. The judge didn't go for that. The agreement now just affects material controlled by members of the Association of American Publishers.