Progress in laser weapons has been slow, but steady.
Each generation of laser weapon has more power in a smaller package. Shooting down small rockets and artillery shells has been demonstrated, but the laser system takes three semitrailers. Another two generations of that and it will be useful.
If a company has an idea for a weapon they think will be super-awesomes why don't they spend the cash to R&D it and when/if it is successful they can start offering it out.
The AllWinner, the $7 ARM system on a chip which powers most newer low-end tablets, runs Linux only. You can boot Android, or any of several other Linux variants. There is no Microsoft option.
Nice. AFMs have been imaging atoms for about two decades (and yes, they do look like spheres). Being able to see intermolecular bonds is a big step forward.
AFMs are amusing. The idea is so simple - mechanically scan atoms with a really sharp point. Everyone had assumed that you'd have to scan atoms with electron beams (as with electron microscopes) or X-rays (as with X-ray diffraction), using some particle much smaller than the atoms being scanned. Then Quate and Gerber figured out how to scan atoms mechanically. Which sounds like a really silly idea, but works.
An AFM works like a mechanical record player. It's a pointy needle on a positioner made using piezoelectric elements. Raster scan signals are applied to the positioners to get a classic TV-type scan, and the third axis has its position measured and is servoed until the point touches the sample. Height measurements come out. Basic AFMs aren't very complicated or very big.
It took a surprisingly long time to come up with this idea. It was invented in 1986. One probably could have been built in 1946, and certainly in 1966.
One school of thought on this is that the violence is an attempt by one of the more militant branches of Islam to get attention.
The real cause of riots in Egypt is a steadily declining standard of living since Egypt hit peak oil in 1996. Oil production has declined 45% since 1996.
PayPal is profitable. Space-X is profitable. Tesla just needs to get their production volume up.
(Why is the factory being described as "insane"? It looks like a modern auto factory, although on the small side. The Space-X factory is interesting, because it doesn't look like a NASA operation. It looks like an aircraft factory. Space-X boosters can be set on their side and don't need a clean room for the whole booster. They made a decision to have a little more weight to get a more rugged item, and it seems to be working out well. Very Russian, actually.)
It's certainly possible to build an anti-theft system that can't be bypassed without replacing major components.
But if it's too good, owners who lose the keys will have bricked their car. There's a tradeoff between repairability and security.
What are they doing wrong that results in a slow desktop? Re-rendering all text from HTML on every frame cycle of a drag?
The graphics power available in modern GPUs has orders of magnitude more power than needed to manipulate a set of flat windows and icons.
They're trying to show the film in its original form, not cleaned up as much as possible. The film was taken one frame at a time through a color wheel, but the projector was supposed to show three RGB frames at a time through a color wheel. At each frame advance, three frames are shown, but they were not all taken at the same time. So the R, G, and B frames don't line up if there's any action. That's why the weird color jitter.
It's possible to do far more cleanup. See "Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs", by Thea von Harbou (of Metropolis fame) which has been restored with funding from the European Union. Frame misalignment, dust and scratches, and frame to frame shutter timing variations have all been corrected. (Then they added a sepia tone, for some reason.)
Outside of computing, not much Star Trek technology works. Antigravity? We have no clue. Fusion or better power sources? Still struggling. Transporter? No clue.
In the 1960s, the previous 50 years had led to enormous gains at the high-power end of engineering. Aviation had gone from the Wright Brothers to the Saturn V. Power generation had gone from local steam plants to mammoth dams and nuclear reactors. Ships had gone from coal to nuclear power. The 1964 World's Fair had a General Electric nuclear fusion exhibit with actual brief bursts of fusion.
It was generally expected that such progress would continue in the next 50 years.
This reads like a car ad from the tailfin era of the 1950s. "Pontiac Steps Out Longer, Lower, Wider". This was such a big deal at the time that Pontiac, MI named their main street Wide Track Drive. In 1996, they changed it back to Woodward Avenue, after the Pontiac plant closed.
It's just a new model, with very minor changes over the old model. Does about the same stuff. Get over it.
Agreed. I took a TIG welding class once, using a standard mask. It didn't go well. I may try again with an auto-darkening mask, so I can see what I'm doing at the start. (Modern welding masks have light detection and glass that is darkened electrically, so you can see what you're doing with the arc both on and off.)
This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)
All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.
The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.)
Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.
It is doing it. This icebreaker is being ordered by Rosatomflot, not the Russian Navy. It's a commercial operation. They even run cruises to the North Pole on nuclear icebreakers to make extra revenue. A friend of mine went on one.
Russia has only a few seaports, and most of them are ice-choked. They need icebreakers.
This article is a pitch for the Qi standard.
The "widely accepted Qi standard" is still one of several competing technologies. Neither Apple nor Google is a member of the Wireless Power Consortium. There are 91 Qi compatible products, but most of them are chargers or add-on power receivers. Other than NTT DoCoMo, almost no manufacturer makes phones tablets with the Qi technology. Nobody seems to make a tablet or laptop with it built in.
One thing they got right is that there's minimal communication between power receiver and transmitter. There's just enough one-way communication for the power receiver to send "I want power" or "I don't want power". This shuts down the transmitter when the battery is fully charged. There is no data path from power transmitter to receiver, which avoids the use of this as an attack vector. That's been a problem with public USB charging ports.
Another thing NTT/Panasonic got right is that their Eluga Eluga V P-06D phone, which has Qi charging, is waterproof.
Outside of the NTT/Panasonic world, though, there are few devices with integral Qi charging. Panasonic has been getting charging pads into a few coffee shops in Japan, but widespread adoption by the big chains hasn't happened.
The US still has these Big Science centers left over from the glory years. There's Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and the Lawrence Livermore Senior Activity Center (er, "stockpile stewardship"), plus the NASA centers. Their original missions (designing bombs, sending people to the Moon) are long gone, but nobody turned off the money, so they keep looking for something, anything, to justify the pork.
The atomic centers are all located in the middle of nowhere. This was originally done for good reasons - their existence was originally secret, and something might blow up. (Well, Lawrence Livermore was in the middle of nowhere, but the Bay Area has grown to reach it.)
As a result, they're major employers in their states, so they have unusual political clout.
The question is whether this is a good way to do science. Should that funding go through NSF instead?
Pricer already has 80 million shelf price label units installed. The big issues there involve cost and battery life. Display devices that draw no power when static have advantages, but most of those have a grey-on-grey look, which retailers don't like.
Sending data through lamps at 15Hz hardly seems worth the trouble. It's also likely to be annoying. Humans can see 15Hz flicker. If the amplitude is so low that humans can't see it, ambient light will interfere with reception. They can't increase the modulation rate because the input device is supposed to be a 30Hz cell phone camera.
Did Intel get these projects from their science fair program?
It's a good idea, but $150 is too much. Generic 7 inch tablets are now down to $40-75 on Alibaba. This thing will probably drop below $100 on December 26th.
The future of computing is $79.95 tablets in blister packs at the convenience store. Intel, Microsoft, and Apple are desperately trying to stop this.
Since Wornick discontinued the civilian MIL-SPEC line, the commerclal MREs haven't been as good. The Eversafe ones are much worse, and run heavily to pasta. (Chicken-based MREs are OK cold. Pasta, no.)
Having taken Andrew Ng's online machine learning course (the Stanford version, not the Udacity version), I will say that one of the biggest problems with that crowd is notation. Machine learning has painful notation. Is this superscript an exponent or an index? What's the precedence of this new operator? Where was that operator defined/ The course desperately needs a one-page summary of the notation used.
it's too bad you can't actually buy the "$100" One Laptop Per Child machine. (Actually, you can, on eBay, and it costs around $200-$250.)
I don't see anything wrong with giving a kid a computer. One low-cost option is the Asus EeePC 1000, which is a Windows 7 or Linux 10" laptop with WiFi for about $200. A smartphone, though, I have some misgivings about, simply because so many kids are glued to the things. It makes them oblivious to their surroundings.
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Progress in laser weapons has been slow, but steady. Each generation of laser weapon has more power in a smaller package. Shooting down small rockets and artillery shells has been demonstrated, but the laser system takes three semitrailers. Another two generations of that and it will be useful.
If a company has an idea for a weapon they think will be super-awesomes why don't they spend the cash to R&D it and when/if it is successful they can start offering it out.
It's been tried. See the F-20.
So cancel the museum at Slidell, close Stennis, cut headquarters staff, and lay off most of the PR department.
The AllWinner, the $7 ARM system on a chip which powers most newer low-end tablets, runs Linux only. You can boot Android, or any of several other Linux variants. There is no Microsoft option.
Nice. AFMs have been imaging atoms for about two decades (and yes, they do look like spheres). Being able to see intermolecular bonds is a big step forward.
AFMs are amusing. The idea is so simple - mechanically scan atoms with a really sharp point. Everyone had assumed that you'd have to scan atoms with electron beams (as with electron microscopes) or X-rays (as with X-ray diffraction), using some particle much smaller than the atoms being scanned. Then Quate and Gerber figured out how to scan atoms mechanically. Which sounds like a really silly idea, but works.
An AFM works like a mechanical record player. It's a pointy needle on a positioner made using piezoelectric elements. Raster scan signals are applied to the positioners to get a classic TV-type scan, and the third axis has its position measured and is servoed until the point touches the sample. Height measurements come out. Basic AFMs aren't very complicated or very big.
It took a surprisingly long time to come up with this idea. It was invented in 1986. One probably could have been built in 1946, and certainly in 1966.
I can remember back in the 'old days' running X over a 28K dialup.
Right, when the only tools used were XTerm and XClock. XClock wasn't very useful, but at least it was "graphical".
One school of thought on this is that the violence is an attempt by one of the more militant branches of Islam to get attention.
The real cause of riots in Egypt is a steadily declining standard of living since Egypt hit peak oil in 1996. Oil production has declined 45% since 1996.
Google is showing some spine. Good.
I've seen the movie. It's not very well produced, but it's better than 80% of the non-pirated stuff on YouTube.
So far, none of his ventures have made money.
PayPal is profitable. Space-X is profitable. Tesla just needs to get their production volume up.
(Why is the factory being described as "insane"? It looks like a modern auto factory, although on the small side. The Space-X factory is interesting, because it doesn't look like a NASA operation. It looks like an aircraft factory. Space-X boosters can be set on their side and don't need a clean room for the whole booster. They made a decision to have a little more weight to get a more rugged item, and it seems to be working out well. Very Russian, actually.)
Then how come the newer iPhones have worse battery life than the old ones?
It's certainly possible to build an anti-theft system that can't be bypassed without replacing major components. But if it's too good, owners who lose the keys will have bricked their car. There's a tradeoff between repairability and security.
What are they doing wrong that results in a slow desktop? Re-rendering all text from HTML on every frame cycle of a drag? The graphics power available in modern GPUs has orders of magnitude more power than needed to manipulate a set of flat windows and icons.
They haven't.
They're trying to show the film in its original form, not cleaned up as much as possible. The film was taken one frame at a time through a color wheel, but the projector was supposed to show three RGB frames at a time through a color wheel. At each frame advance, three frames are shown, but they were not all taken at the same time. So the R, G, and B frames don't line up if there's any action. That's why the weird color jitter.
It's possible to do far more cleanup. See "Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs", by Thea von Harbou (of Metropolis fame) which has been restored with funding from the European Union. Frame misalignment, dust and scratches, and frame to frame shutter timing variations have all been corrected. (Then they added a sepia tone, for some reason.)
Outside of computing, not much Star Trek technology works. Antigravity? We have no clue. Fusion or better power sources? Still struggling. Transporter? No clue.
In the 1960s, the previous 50 years had led to enormous gains at the high-power end of engineering. Aviation had gone from the Wright Brothers to the Saturn V. Power generation had gone from local steam plants to mammoth dams and nuclear reactors. Ships had gone from coal to nuclear power. The 1964 World's Fair had a General Electric nuclear fusion exhibit with actual brief bursts of fusion. It was generally expected that such progress would continue in the next 50 years.
It didn't.
This reads like a car ad from the tailfin era of the 1950s. "Pontiac Steps Out Longer, Lower, Wider". This was such a big deal at the time that Pontiac, MI named their main street Wide Track Drive. In 1996, they changed it back to Woodward Avenue, after the Pontiac plant closed.
It's just a new model, with very minor changes over the old model. Does about the same stuff. Get over it.
Agreed. I took a TIG welding class once, using a standard mask. It didn't go well. I may try again with an auto-darkening mask, so I can see what I'm doing at the start. (Modern welding masks have light detection and glass that is darkened electrically, so you can see what you're doing with the arc both on and off.)
This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)
All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.
The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.) Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.
Private enterprise is just not going to do it.
It is doing it. This icebreaker is being ordered by Rosatomflot, not the Russian Navy. It's a commercial operation. They even run cruises to the North Pole on nuclear icebreakers to make extra revenue. A friend of mine went on one.
Russia has only a few seaports, and most of them are ice-choked. They need icebreakers.
This article is a pitch for the Qi standard. The "widely accepted Qi standard" is still one of several competing technologies. Neither Apple nor Google is a member of the Wireless Power Consortium. There are 91 Qi compatible products, but most of them are chargers or add-on power receivers. Other than NTT DoCoMo, almost no manufacturer makes phones tablets with the Qi technology. Nobody seems to make a tablet or laptop with it built in.
One thing they got right is that there's minimal communication between power receiver and transmitter. There's just enough one-way communication for the power receiver to send "I want power" or "I don't want power". This shuts down the transmitter when the battery is fully charged. There is no data path from power transmitter to receiver, which avoids the use of this as an attack vector. That's been a problem with public USB charging ports. Another thing NTT/Panasonic got right is that their Eluga Eluga V P-06D phone, which has Qi charging, is waterproof.
Outside of the NTT/Panasonic world, though, there are few devices with integral Qi charging. Panasonic has been getting charging pads into a few coffee shops in Japan, but widespread adoption by the big chains hasn't happened.
The US still has these Big Science centers left over from the glory years. There's Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and the Lawrence Livermore Senior Activity Center (er, "stockpile stewardship"), plus the NASA centers. Their original missions (designing bombs, sending people to the Moon) are long gone, but nobody turned off the money, so they keep looking for something, anything, to justify the pork.
The atomic centers are all located in the middle of nowhere. This was originally done for good reasons - their existence was originally secret, and something might blow up. (Well, Lawrence Livermore was in the middle of nowhere, but the Bay Area has grown to reach it.) As a result, they're major employers in their states, so they have unusual political clout.
The question is whether this is a good way to do science. Should that funding go through NSF instead?
Right.
Pricer already has 80 million shelf price label units installed. The big issues there involve cost and battery life. Display devices that draw no power when static have advantages, but most of those have a grey-on-grey look, which retailers don't like.
Sending data through lamps at 15Hz hardly seems worth the trouble. It's also likely to be annoying. Humans can see 15Hz flicker. If the amplitude is so low that humans can't see it, ambient light will interfere with reception. They can't increase the modulation rate because the input device is supposed to be a 30Hz cell phone camera.
Did Intel get these projects from their science fair program?
It's a good idea, but $150 is too much. Generic 7 inch tablets are now down to $40-75 on Alibaba. This thing will probably drop below $100 on December 26th.
The future of computing is $79.95 tablets in blister packs at the convenience store. Intel, Microsoft, and Apple are desperately trying to stop this.
Since Wornick discontinued the civilian MIL-SPEC line, the commerclal MREs haven't been as good. The Eversafe ones are much worse, and run heavily to pasta. (Chicken-based MREs are OK cold. Pasta, no.)
Any recommendations?
Having taken Andrew Ng's online machine learning course (the Stanford version, not the Udacity version), I will say that one of the biggest problems with that crowd is notation. Machine learning has painful notation. Is this superscript an exponent or an index? What's the precedence of this new operator? Where was that operator defined/ The course desperately needs a one-page summary of the notation used.
it's too bad you can't actually buy the "$100" One Laptop Per Child machine. (Actually, you can, on eBay, and it costs around $200-$250.)
I don't see anything wrong with giving a kid a computer. One low-cost option is the Asus EeePC 1000, which is a Windows 7 or Linux 10" laptop with WiFi for about $200. A smartphone, though, I have some misgivings about, simply because so many kids are glued to the things. It makes them oblivious to their surroundings.