First, copyright doesn't cover useful objects. Most of the "grey market" stuff is about brand labels, not the device itself. If you want a mechanical duplicate of a Rolex watch that doesn't say "Rolex", you can buy one legally. (You can even get the same movement made in the same Swiss factory. That's outsourced.)
There's a whole third-party auto parts industry, after all.
Second, stereolithography machines are a slow way to make copies of something. Manufacturing techniques for making stamped and molded parts are faster, cheaper, and more accurate. You only bother with stereolithography or machine shop work if you can't buy the thing.
Third, a CNC mill can do most of the things a stereolithography machine can do, and to a much wider range of materials. There are little desktop CNC mills. Laser cutters, though, can turn out flat parts quickly and cheaply. This is why, at TechShop locations, the laser cutters are constantly busy while the stereolithography machines mostly just sit there.
Most of the clueless enthusiasm for stereolithography comes from people who don't do machine shop work.
The next step, which the U. Penn people don't seem to have taken yet, is to solve this as a two-point boundary value problem. Then, instead of trying to maintain attitude during flight, you try to land at a specific time in a specific place with a specific attitude.
Doing that is rocket science. Rocket science is about control of underactuated systems, where the control system has fewer actuators than there are degrees of freedom to be controlled. You want to reach a specified point at a specified time at a specified velocity in a specified attitude. All you have available is the ability to thrust in one direction and to change attitude slowly. But this problem is solveable and there are known solutions. Applying that to robots leads to gymnastics.
The quadrotor people are already doing this kind of thing, but it hasn't been done much for legged machines yet.
f they'd publish their access log data from the bot hits, I bet someone out there can help track down the source.
Yes. Give us the top 100 IP addresses with timestamps. Where are they coming from? DSL lines? Tor exit proxies? Known compromised machines? Amazon server instances?
About 15 years from now, the ambassador of the People's Republic of China will solemnly return that flag to the President of the United States. Some of the original Apollo astronauts will still be alive to attend. The flag will be placed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, for future generations of Americans to admire.
On the other hand, there is *no* good reason for white space delimited blocks, other than that's the way Python was designed -- especially when mixing tabs and spaces can give one an aneurysm:-) [
That was finally fixed, a decade later that it should have been. Sequences of tabs and spaces which create ambiguity between what you see and what the parser understands are now syntax errors. For example, a line indented with tabs followed by a line indented with spaces is an error.
This is useful. There have been various other attempts at building a robot skin with sensors, but they haven't been very good. Arrays of pressure sensors, like a touch screen, have been built, but nothing has been good enough to be really useful.
Being able to sense shear forces is very useful when picking up something. One of the low-level reflexes in the body is the one that maintains contact with things you're holding, applying enough pressure to keep the object from slipping, but not much more than that. Robots need that, too.
The FDA's job is to require that drugs are "safe and effective". Most new drugs fail those tests during the development process. Some work in test tubes, but not in animals. Some work in animals, but not in humans. Some are unsafe for some fraction of the population. Some look useful in humans at first, but a few years downstream, haven't improved health or survival rates. Only about 13% of small-molecule drugs, and 32% of large-molecule drugs that start phase 1 clinical testing make it to actual use.
This is why there's a need for so much clinical testing, data collection, and feedback. Without that, nobody knows what really works, and there's no forward progress.
With the new increase in ads, and the fake "activity" postings which are really advertising, Facebook is definitely pulling a Myspace. Facebook was cool once. No longer.
I have Facebook apps turned off, every Zynga property blocked, "comments and likes" disabled for everybody but a few close friends, and Do Not Track Plus installed. And still, more than half the content on Facebook pages isn't about what my friends are actually doing.
(With Facebook tracking blocked, Facebook's ads go random and turn into generic spam. I'm getting spam-like subjects such as "Precious metals giveaway", dating ads aimed at men, a weight-loss ad aimed at women, and some cheap plastic iPad accessory. Blocking Facebook's tracking breaks their revenue model.)
Everybody with a clue knew the Facebook IPO was way overpriced. But the underwriters thought that retail investors and pension funds, not themselves,would end up holding the bag.
Right. As the value investment community has been saying since before the IPO, based on earnings, Facebook is worth maybe $6 per share.
Facebook traffic climbed steadily until mid-2011, but has been more or less flat for the last year. Revenue is down. The growth phase is over.
And that's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that Facebook is pulling a Myspace. Facebook is trying to increase revenue per user by showing more and bigger ads. That didn't work out well for Myspace or Yahoo.
Social networks are probably going to move to mobile devices, and Facebook has no clue how to make money in mobile. They even said that in their prospectus.
The complaints I heard from women in Silicon Valley aren't that they're being sexually harassed, but that they are overworked and have trouble getting promoted.
I know three young women who work in very male-dominated workplaces. One works for a startup in SF, and keeps getting stuck with "receptionist" as an additional duty. She's frustrated by that, but not sexually harassed. Another is a striking blue-eyed redhead who is in very good shape. She projects the personality of a cheerleader. She's a criminal lawyer, and finds it useful to be underestimated. To her, being harassed indicates a weakness of the opposition she can exploit.
The third works in the ocean rescue unit of a coastal fire department, which means going out in high surf, rappelling off cliffs, and driving small watercraft around in tough conditions. Most of the others who do that are male and macho. She comes across as a laid-back surfer (which she is) until challenged. Then she gets very competitive. She once described being hassled by some guy on the street. She was annoyed, but not threatened. Her only question was whether punching the guy out was going to be necessary.
"Google Voice" is just a rebranded Grand Central. Google hasn't done much with it since they bought it. Users have been screaming about the same bugs on the forums for years. The SMS side of Google Voice has been especially flaky. Google Voice gets their phone numbers from some low-end third party telco in Northern California that doesn't seem to be properly plugged in to the system that tells other telcos about the numbers and their properties (cell/landline, etc.).
Google Voice doesn't have an API. There's hack code to talk to Google Voice from programs. It doesn't work too well, because the interface to Voice is (perhaps by intent) API-hostile. If you're using Google Voice for anything serious, get a pay service like Twilio. You pay a few cents per message, but it actually works and there's customer support.
Amusingly, the Associated Press manual of style says to avoid jargon in news stories. They make one amusing exception: sports stories. Sports fans are expected to understand that jargon.
Read the Economist, which discusses subjects of considerable complexity with less financial jargon than Mad Money. They recently published one of the best explanations of the confirmation of the Higgs boson seen in the popular press. In inimitable Economist style, they point out that the neutron, discovered in 1932, was the last subatomic particle to have commercial applications.
There is more jargon in some unboxing videos than in Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms.
There are a LOT of people in Home Depot, and they don't look like professional carpenters, plumbers, etc.
It's a redneck thing. Recently I saw a mother and 9-year old son at a Home Depot. The kid was carrying the smallest size Husqvarna chainsaw. Aw, how cute. His first chainsaw.
plenty of other technologies exist in this market to make picking very efficient, for the purpose of minimizing employees.
True. The big win for Kiva is standardization and simplicity of installation. Conveyors, stacker cranes, and similar machinery have to be built as semi-custom products for each warehouse. All Kiva has to do for installation is put bar-code squares on the floor. Everything else is a standard product. Kiva systems thus require far less engineering expertise in the field. They don't even have to provide much field service; all the little robots are interchangeable, and you can just ship failed ones back for repairs. Kiva itself has only a few hundred employees.
In other words, there won't be jobs servicing the robots.
Amazon just bought Kiva Systems, which makes warehouse fulfillment system robots. Kiva already powers orders from major brands including Crate and Barrel, Soap.com, Dillards, Drugstore.com, Gap, Office Depot, Saks, Staples, Timberland, Toys-R-Us, and Walgreens.
This is what order fulfillment is like with those robots. It takes about two minutes to learn the job and there is no chance for advancement.
The people being "retrained" will be laid off soon.
The trouble with "single signon" is that it's usually a front for a Facebook or Google style tracking system. It usually comes with built-in privacy intrusion, ad targeting, and an overreaching EULA.
"Using Facebook for login provides you with all the information you need to create a social, personalized experience from the moment the user visits your site in their browser."
... most if not all the top tier titles have already been done at least once: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Avengers.
It's worse than that. Most of the second-tier titles have been done, too - Green Lantern, Tintin, The Phantom, The Green Hornet, Archie, Daredevil, Elektra, Punisher, Red Sonja, Richie Rich, Sheena, Supergirl, Vampirella, Wonder Woman, Judge Dredd. Almost all were flops. (Tintin and Judge Dredd may be worth seeing. Green Hornet is at least funny. The others, forget it.)
In the last decade, more good stuff has been coming out of teen novel franchises than comics. We got Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and Percy Jackson. (Also Twilight, for what that's worth. The vampire thing is probably over.) Those have, like, plots.
This happened during the first dot-com boom, too. Huge influx of twentysomethings. Then the dot-com boom collapsed, and the number of twentysomethings in SF dropped 40%. (A friend of mine who runs a hip hair salon and throws big parties said of this "and the ones who still have jobs are working their butts off.")
The first dot-com boom moved into existing real estate. This time, there's extensive new construction.
Silicon Valley may be in permanent decline. The last production wafer fab in the valley closed in 2008. With impressive systems on a chip like the Allwinner A10 from China selling for $7, the margins in semiconductors are far smaller than they used to be. That threatens Intel. HP is still a mess. Yahoo is collapsing. Microsoft just posted their first loss. Google and Apple continue to thrive, but
Facebook seems to be on track to be the next Myspace.
If each ad display has less value, maintaining revenue means being more agressive with advertisements.
Myspace tried that. That didn't end well. It didn't work out well for Yahoo, either.
Facebook is trying it now. That may not end well. One clear implication - Facebook stock is hugely overpriced. Based on current revenue, Facebook is worth about $7 per share. The stock price assumes a huge growth in revenue. Probably not going to happen. Even a slow decline in Facebook's revenue means the glory days are over.
Ads on search results are worth far more than ads on other media. Ads on search results are presented when someone is actively looking for something in the relevant category. Ads on content are irrelevant interruptions.
Connectors are obsolete on a device that has at least three radios in it. Charging should be inductive, video should be WiFi, and audio should be Bluetooth. Then the thing would be hole-free and could be made waterproof.
Now
this is what Apple should be shooting for in ruggedization.
Slashdot Mirror
This is bullshit.
First, copyright doesn't cover useful objects. Most of the "grey market" stuff is about brand labels, not the device itself. If you want a mechanical duplicate of a Rolex watch that doesn't say "Rolex", you can buy one legally. (You can even get the same movement made in the same Swiss factory. That's outsourced.) There's a whole third-party auto parts industry, after all.
Second, stereolithography machines are a slow way to make copies of something. Manufacturing techniques for making stamped and molded parts are faster, cheaper, and more accurate. You only bother with stereolithography or machine shop work if you can't buy the thing.
Third, a CNC mill can do most of the things a stereolithography machine can do, and to a much wider range of materials. There are little desktop CNC mills. Laser cutters, though, can turn out flat parts quickly and cheaply. This is why, at TechShop locations, the laser cutters are constantly busy while the stereolithography machines mostly just sit there.
Most of the clueless enthusiasm for stereolithography comes from people who don't do machine shop work.
Worked that out back in 1995. See this the "running on rough terrain video. Watch at 1:40.
The next step, which the U. Penn people don't seem to have taken yet, is to solve this as a two-point boundary value problem. Then, instead of trying to maintain attitude during flight, you try to land at a specific time in a specific place with a specific attitude.
Doing that is rocket science. Rocket science is about control of underactuated systems, where the control system has fewer actuators than there are degrees of freedom to be controlled. You want to reach a specified point at a specified time at a specified velocity in a specified attitude. All you have available is the ability to thrust in one direction and to change attitude slowly. But this problem is solveable and there are known solutions. Applying that to robots leads to gymnastics.
The quadrotor people are already doing this kind of thing, but it hasn't been done much for legged machines yet.
f they'd publish their access log data from the bot hits, I bet someone out there can help track down the source.
Yes. Give us the top 100 IP addresses with timestamps. Where are they coming from? DSL lines? Tor exit proxies? Known compromised machines? Amazon server instances?
About 15 years from now, the ambassador of the People's Republic of China will solemnly return that flag to the President of the United States. Some of the original Apollo astronauts will still be alive to attend. The flag will be placed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, for future generations of Americans to admire.
On the other hand, there is *no* good reason for white space delimited blocks, other than that's the way Python was designed -- especially when mixing tabs and spaces can give one an aneurysm :-) [
That was finally fixed, a decade later that it should have been. Sequences of tabs and spaces which create ambiguity between what you see and what the parser understands are now syntax errors. For example, a line indented with tabs followed by a line indented with spaces is an error.
This is useful. There have been various other attempts at building a robot skin with sensors, but they haven't been very good. Arrays of pressure sensors, like a touch screen, have been built, but nothing has been good enough to be really useful.
Being able to sense shear forces is very useful when picking up something. One of the low-level reflexes in the body is the one that maintains contact with things you're holding, applying enough pressure to keep the object from slipping, but not much more than that. Robots need that, too.
The FDA's job is to require that drugs are "safe and effective". Most new drugs fail those tests during the development process. Some work in test tubes, but not in animals. Some work in animals, but not in humans. Some are unsafe for some fraction of the population. Some look useful in humans at first, but a few years downstream, haven't improved health or survival rates. Only about 13% of small-molecule drugs, and 32% of large-molecule drugs that start phase 1 clinical testing make it to actual use.
This is why there's a need for so much clinical testing, data collection, and feedback. Without that, nobody knows what really works, and there's no forward progress.
This is potentially a felony under the "exceeds authorized access" part of 18 USC 1030. Have Homeland Security (CERT) and the FBI been notified?
With the new increase in ads, and the fake "activity" postings which are really advertising, Facebook is definitely pulling a Myspace. Facebook was cool once. No longer.
I have Facebook apps turned off, every Zynga property blocked, "comments and likes" disabled for everybody but a few close friends, and Do Not Track Plus installed. And still, more than half the content on Facebook pages isn't about what my friends are actually doing.
(With Facebook tracking blocked, Facebook's ads go random and turn into generic spam. I'm getting spam-like subjects such as "Precious metals giveaway", dating ads aimed at men, a weight-loss ad aimed at women, and some cheap plastic iPad accessory. Blocking Facebook's tracking breaks their revenue model.)
Zuckerberg beat Wall Street at their own game, and they can't stand it.
That's correct. Zuckerberg doesn't have a problem. Morgan Staley has a problem. UBS has a problem. Knight Capital Group has a problem. Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, the Carlyle Group, and the NASDAQ have a problem.
Everybody with a clue knew the Facebook IPO was way overpriced. But the underwriters thought that retail investors and pension funds, not themselves,would end up holding the bag.
Will iTunes run in the "sandbox"? QuickTime? Safari? Keynote? Numbers? FinalCut "Pro"?
the PE ratio is still 60
Right. As the value investment community has been saying since before the IPO, based on earnings, Facebook is worth maybe $6 per share.
Facebook traffic climbed steadily until mid-2011, but has been more or less flat for the last year. Revenue is down. The growth phase is over.
And that's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that Facebook is pulling a Myspace. Facebook is trying to increase revenue per user by showing more and bigger ads. That didn't work out well for Myspace or Yahoo.
Social networks are probably going to move to mobile devices, and Facebook has no clue how to make money in mobile. They even said that in their prospectus.
A real gun owner would know this.
1) The guy whose kids got into the lockbox was a cop.
2) The lockbox had been issued to him by his police department.
The complaints I heard from women in Silicon Valley aren't that they're being sexually harassed, but that they are overworked and have trouble getting promoted.
I know three young women who work in very male-dominated workplaces. One works for a startup in SF, and keeps getting stuck with "receptionist" as an additional duty. She's frustrated by that, but not sexually harassed. Another is a striking blue-eyed redhead who is in very good shape. She projects the personality of a cheerleader. She's a criminal lawyer, and finds it useful to be underestimated. To her, being harassed indicates a weakness of the opposition she can exploit.
The third works in the ocean rescue unit of a coastal fire department, which means going out in high surf, rappelling off cliffs, and driving small watercraft around in tough conditions. Most of the others who do that are male and macho. She comes across as a laid-back surfer (which she is) until challenged. Then she gets very competitive. She once described being hassled by some guy on the street. She was annoyed, but not threatened. Her only question was whether punching the guy out was going to be necessary.
"Google Voice" is just a rebranded Grand Central. Google hasn't done much with it since they bought it. Users have been screaming about the same bugs on the forums for years. The SMS side of Google Voice has been especially flaky. Google Voice gets their phone numbers from some low-end third party telco in Northern California that doesn't seem to be properly plugged in to the system that tells other telcos about the numbers and their properties (cell/landline, etc.).
Google Voice doesn't have an API. There's hack code to talk to Google Voice from programs. It doesn't work too well, because the interface to Voice is (perhaps by intent) API-hostile. If you're using Google Voice for anything serious, get a pay service like Twilio. You pay a few cents per message, but it actually works and there's customer support.
Amusingly, the Associated Press manual of style says to avoid jargon in news stories. They make one amusing exception: sports stories. Sports fans are expected to understand that jargon.
Read the Economist, which discusses subjects of considerable complexity with less financial jargon than Mad Money. They recently published one of the best explanations of the confirmation of the Higgs boson seen in the popular press. In inimitable Economist style, they point out that the neutron, discovered in 1932, was the last subatomic particle to have commercial applications.
There is more jargon in some unboxing videos than in Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms.
There are a LOT of people in Home Depot, and they don't look like professional carpenters, plumbers, etc.
It's a redneck thing. Recently I saw a mother and 9-year old son at a Home Depot. The kid was carrying the smallest size Husqvarna chainsaw. Aw, how cute. His first chainsaw.
plenty of other technologies exist in this market to make picking very efficient, for the purpose of minimizing employees.
True. The big win for Kiva is standardization and simplicity of installation. Conveyors, stacker cranes, and similar machinery have to be built as semi-custom products for each warehouse. All Kiva has to do for installation is put bar-code squares on the floor. Everything else is a standard product. Kiva systems thus require far less engineering expertise in the field. They don't even have to provide much field service; all the little robots are interchangeable, and you can just ship failed ones back for repairs. Kiva itself has only a few hundred employees.
In other words, there won't be jobs servicing the robots.
Amazon just bought Kiva Systems, which makes warehouse fulfillment system robots. Kiva already powers orders from major brands including Crate and Barrel, Soap.com, Dillards, Drugstore.com, Gap, Office Depot, Saks, Staples, Timberland, Toys-R-Us, and Walgreens. This is what order fulfillment is like with those robots. It takes about two minutes to learn the job and there is no chance for advancement.
The people being "retrained" will be laid off soon.
Probably gets you some doctor in a call center somewhere.
The trouble with "single signon" is that it's usually a front for a Facebook or Google style tracking system. It usually comes with built-in privacy intrusion, ad targeting, and an overreaching EULA.
"Using Facebook for login provides you with all the information you need to create a social, personalized experience from the moment the user visits your site in their browser."
... most if not all the top tier titles have already been done at least once: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Avengers.
It's worse than that. Most of the second-tier titles have been done, too - Green Lantern, Tintin, The Phantom, The Green Hornet, Archie, Daredevil, Elektra, Punisher, Red Sonja, Richie Rich, Sheena, Supergirl, Vampirella, Wonder Woman, Judge Dredd. Almost all were flops. (Tintin and Judge Dredd may be worth seeing. Green Hornet is at least funny. The others, forget it.)
In the last decade, more good stuff has been coming out of teen novel franchises than comics. We got Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and Percy Jackson. (Also Twilight, for what that's worth. The vampire thing is probably over.) Those have, like, plots.
This happened during the first dot-com boom, too. Huge influx of twentysomethings. Then the dot-com boom collapsed, and the number of twentysomethings in SF dropped 40%. (A friend of mine who runs a hip hair salon and throws big parties said of this "and the ones who still have jobs are working their butts off.")
The first dot-com boom moved into existing real estate. This time, there's extensive new construction.
Silicon Valley may be in permanent decline. The last production wafer fab in the valley closed in 2008. With impressive systems on a chip like the Allwinner A10 from China selling for $7, the margins in semiconductors are far smaller than they used to be. That threatens Intel. HP is still a mess. Yahoo is collapsing. Microsoft just posted their first loss. Google and Apple continue to thrive, but Facebook seems to be on track to be the next Myspace.
If each ad display has less value, maintaining revenue means being more agressive with advertisements.
Myspace tried that. That didn't end well. It didn't work out well for Yahoo, either.
Facebook is trying it now. That may not end well. One clear implication - Facebook stock is hugely overpriced. Based on current revenue, Facebook is worth about $7 per share. The stock price assumes a huge growth in revenue. Probably not going to happen. Even a slow decline in Facebook's revenue means the glory days are over.
Ads on search results are worth far more than ads on other media. Ads on search results are presented when someone is actively looking for something in the relevant category. Ads on content are irrelevant interruptions.
Connectors are obsolete on a device that has at least three radios in it. Charging should be inductive, video should be WiFi, and audio should be Bluetooth. Then the thing would be hole-free and could be made waterproof.
Now this is what Apple should be shooting for in ruggedization.