Most people get the market case for automatic driving wrong. It's not for driving on freeways. It's for driving your car without you, to and from parking. You drive to where you want to go, and then your car goes off and parks somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it, and it comes to you. Malls, airports, and downtowns equipped for this will be very popular.
Parking gets cheaper, because it can be further away, stacked higher, and not on high-value land. Automatic cars aren't bothered by having to drive to level 14 of the parking structure.
It should be straightforward to detect protest activity that organizes people going to a physical location. There will be people not otherwise related who communicate and have interests associated with some physical place. Location information from smartphones will detect groups moving towards a specific place. False alarms related to commercial events can be filtered by correlating with ticketing activity.
If I remember my dot.com history correctly it was the picking and packing aspect of the business that killed on-line grocery WebVan.
Kiva Systems was founded by a former WebVan exec. He saw that Webvan was very popular with customers, but they couldn't deliver the service at a low enough cost. If they could eliminate the people...
Webvan's real problem was botched expansion. They had 3% market share in 30 cities, when they needed 30% market share in 3 cities. Too much truck mileage per shipment.
Safeway does grocery delivery now, but not very well. They just use order pickers picking from retail store shelves. So their systems don't really know what's in stock. Most orders thus lack some items ordered. A more automated system knows what's in stock, so the customer gets to decide when ordering how to handle out-of-stock conditions. (Ordering a different brand or size or item is an option then. Safeway doesn't do that.)
Delivery uses less energy than shopping. There's some whining about the "thousand mile salad", but moving a 45,000 pound truckload of lettuce a thousand miles uses less energy per head of lettuce than the 5 mile trip in the 2 ton SUV that moves 20 pounds of groceries.
A few more years, and automatic driving will meet up with automated warehouses.
Assume that your carrier, cloud provider, and handset manufacturer all have access to everything on the phone.
With Blackberry, you could run your own server, and nothing in the public infrastructure had access to unencrypted data. With Android, Google has a direct tap into your data. Encryption won't help when the layer that reads the keys is under the control of the provider.
If they give you any runaround, take'm to small claims court.
I did that with freelancer.com last week. They owed me a few hundred dollars, and were being difficult about transferring the funds through standard banking channels.
They're in Australia, and New South Wales allows on-line filing of small claims cases. After a disappointing go-round with customer support, I spent about 20 minutes filing a case. Once the case is filed, the court's system generates a PDF file with all the info. I sent a copy of that to Freelancer.com with no other comments.
Within four hours, they'd agreed to send a wire transfer to my bank. Two days later (the 4th of July slowed things down) the funds were in my bank in the US.
The idea here is to define the ampere as N electrons per second. This may make that possible. The number is around 6.241 Ã-- 10^18 electrons per second. Direct counts of electrons allow a precise, repeatable way to define an amp.
The goal is to define the fundamental units from measurable properties of the universe, so that reproduceable standards can be constructed. That's been achieved for time and length, but not mass. You can buy an atomic clock that gets its time measurement from the definition of the second. (HP used to make those, but that business was sold off from Agilent in 2006.) There's a method with a Kr-86 light source and interferometers to count out a meter in wavelengths of light. But there's no corresponding standard for mass. Mass is tied to a physical 1Kg weight stored in France, and everything has to be traced back to that, with each successive derived standard kilogram a little less accurate.
A kilogram ought to be defined as N atoms of something, but atom counting isn't quite good enough yet. There's a plan to define mass through the Planck constant, which means tying the standard of mass to the standard of current.
Three fundamental units are sufficient to lock down all the other units, and this is a step towards doing that.
There's been enthusiasm for underground tunnels in science fiction since at least the 1920s. Tunnels, though, are hard to build. Read a few issues of "Tunnels and Tunneling" to get a sense of the problems.
Solid ground isn't really that solid. Tunnel projects encounter sand, silt, water, oil, natural gas, shale, coal, and salt. Each requires different techniques, and most can't support an open in space in them. Tunneling often involves building a structure able to hold the tunnel bore open. Support rings, props, rock bolts, shotcrete, and steel are used when necessary. A single long tunnel job may encounter all of those.
As a construction project, a tunnel has a major logistical problem - most of the work is at the cutting face. So there's not much parallelism. Major tunnels are bored from both ends. In some cases, shafts are dug to intermediate points to allow advancing from multiple locations.
That option is possible on land, but slow and expensive for deep tunnels. It was used for the 57km Gotthard Base Tunnel, and required digging two access shafts around a kilometer long. That job took 14 years of tunneling.
Underwater tunnel projects are usually limited to working from both ends. In a few cases, existing islands, or even artificial ones, have been used to gain access points. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line has an artificial island.
Large tunnel projects today seem to run about US$0.2bn to $1bn/kilometer. It's much more expensive in urban areas or earthquake-prone areas. Hard rock tunnel projects are slow, but not overly expensive. Tunnels in difficult ground get very expensive.
This sounds good. A device that can detect explosive compounds at a distance. That addresses the real problem. No more need to examine laptops, check documents, or pat people down.
I wonder if there is verbiage in consumer's contracts that allow them to end it early with no fee due to an adverse change
Yes. You can get out for $15.
(d) Our Programming Changes. Many factors affect the availability, cost and quality of programming and may influence the decision to raise prices and the amount of any increase. These include, among others, programming and other costs, consumer demand, market and shareholder expectations, and changing business conditions. Accordingly, we must reserve the unrestricted right to change, rearrange, add or delete our programming packages, the selections in those packages, our prices, and any other Service we offer, at any time. We will endeavor to notify you of any change that is within our reasonable control and its effective date. In most cases this notice will be about one month in advance. You always have the right to cancel your Service, in whole or in part, if you do not accept the change (see Section 5). If you cancel your Service, a deactivation fee (described in Sections 2 & 5(b)) or other charges may apply. Credits, if any, to your account will be posted as described in Section 5. If you do not cancel, your continued receipt of our Service will constitute acceptance.
We need controls to prevent kids from overdosing on religion. There's a maximum safe dose of religion, maybe around an hour a day. Kids who substantially exceed that dose may turn into cult members, Jesus freaks, non-working yeshiva students, or Islamic militants. It's not the brand of religion that matters as much as the dosage.
Remember Sony? Remember when Sony was cool? Remember when there were "Sony Style" stores? Remember their cute little robot dogs, their cute cell phones, their audio players? Sony was known for their cool design and loyal users.
Ever see an Xperia? No? That's Sony's latest smartphone. Who won in game consoles? Microsoft. Sony has lost money for the last four years, and the losses are getting bigger, not smaller. $5.7 billion last year.
Good product design didn't save Sony. Further back, it didn't save Olivetti, maker of some of the most beautiful typewriters and calculators of the 1970s. You'll see them on display in museums.
Microsoft does well at hardware. Their big weakness is online services.
For an industry which used to (and for all I know still does) prohibit artificial insemination, that cloning should even be considered seems crazy.
That's just a Jockey Club rule for thoroughbred racehorses. For other breeds, artificial insemination is common. Horse breeding involves only a small number of stallions; most stallions are gelded and never bred.
OK, somebody built a stretch-limo electric supercar. Those are fun, but not too useful. A stretch-limo version of a Ferrari has been built.
The dual rear axles steer, so the turning circle is reasonable. (Many tour buses have that feature.) The limited ground clearance is going to be a problem on a long vehicle. It would have trouble with many driveways and all speed bumps. They should have put in a suspension that allows lifting the vehicle when necessary.
The demo vehicle has lead-acid batteries and limited range. The designer talks about going to a more advanced battery technology. They also talk about battery swapping, but they'd need a network of battery-swap stations sized for this thing.
"When you sign a Business Associate agreement, there's a level of liability that the business associate accepts. They openly acknowledge they have to operate within the HIPAA security rule like any covered entity. Understandably, none of the current cloud providers are willing to do that."
That says it all. The major cloud providers won't accept responsibility for security in their own systems.
Mod parent up. "The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings." That's rather lame. Exactly how do they search for "C", anyway? Do Sesame Street episodes brought to you by the letter C count?
The decline in C++ is probably real. It's on the way out as an application-level programming language. Big, complex applications with serious performance requirements and elaborate internal data structures, like 3D CAD, benefit from being written in C++. But there's no reason to write a routine desktop business app in it any more. Just moving windows and menus around and talking to the database can be done far more easily by other means.
I have a Stanford MSCS degree from the 1980s. Frankly, the teaching wasn't all that great. Other than Zohar Manna's class on mathematical logic, none of the lecturers had really good presentations. Having the chance to argue with John McCarthy was fun, though. I know things have improved since then. (CS was moved from Arts and Sciences to Engineering and given adult supervision. That helped.)
More recently, I've struggled through the original online Stanford machine learning course (pre-Udacity) starring Andrew Ng. Hacker Dojo offered it as a class, with meetings, two years ago. There he is, writing semi-legible math on a chalkboard (not even a whiteboard) for an hour at a time. The handouts don't quite match the videos, the motivation for much of the math is lacking, and the notation in the field is awful. (Sometimes a subscript is an exponent, and sometimes it's an index, depending on context. The precedence of operators is non-obvious and unstated. And everything, of course, is written with minimal parentheses.) Most of the concepts in that field have a geometrical interpretation, but there weren't enough pictures to give an intuitive understanding of what's the math is doing. What's actually going on is often not that complicated, but you don't get that impression from the lectures.
Some of the big-name universities work only because their students are so good they can make sense out of mediocre instruction. It's really the labs and the other students that make it worthwhile.
Sounds like a bargaining chip as they negotiate for colo space in switching centers. It might be useful in some special situations where you can terminate dark fiber into your own box and save on backbone costs, then have a short distance link into some other facility.
I would have expected this from Comcast or Verizon. If a local box held a few thousand hours of video cache, including recent TV and movies, most requests might be satisfied locally, unloading the upstream network.
If you're in a place that's buying new computers and loading Windows XP on them, you're not the problem.
The final date for new Windows XP OEM installs was October 22, 2010. There are still people running Windows XP, but you shouldn't be installing it on new hardware at this late date.
So the book can't decide whether it's an introduction to programming or a language guide for people who already know how to program.
Why do all these programming books have to be so fat? The original Algol-60 report was 17 pages. "Pascal - User Manual and Report" was 283 pages. "The C Programming Language" ("K&R") is 274 pages. This thing is over 400 pages. Python isn't a big language.
I'd like to see more pocket reference books and big plastic cards (like those ones for "Calculus" and "Physics" sold to students) rather than these doorstops.
These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants.
Exactly.
The US is in the process of reducing living standards to the level of Shenzen. Already the 40 hour week is a memory. Then there's the "internship" work-for-free racket. Now, overcrowded dorms. Public housing projects provided more living space per person than that. Even SRO hotels rent you an individual room.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people get the market case for automatic driving wrong. It's not for driving on freeways. It's for driving your car without you, to and from parking. You drive to where you want to go, and then your car goes off and parks somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it, and it comes to you. Malls, airports, and downtowns equipped for this will be very popular.
Parking gets cheaper, because it can be further away, stacked higher, and not on high-value land. Automatic cars aren't bothered by having to drive to level 14 of the parking structure.
It should be straightforward to detect protest activity that organizes people going to a physical location. There will be people not otherwise related who communicate and have interests associated with some physical place. Location information from smartphones will detect groups moving towards a specific place. False alarms related to commercial events can be filtered by correlating with ticketing activity.
Big Brother is always watching.
If I remember my dot.com history correctly it was the picking and packing aspect of the business that killed on-line grocery WebVan.
Kiva Systems was founded by a former WebVan exec. He saw that Webvan was very popular with customers, but they couldn't deliver the service at a low enough cost. If they could eliminate the people...
Webvan's real problem was botched expansion. They had 3% market share in 30 cities, when they needed 30% market share in 3 cities. Too much truck mileage per shipment.
Safeway does grocery delivery now, but not very well. They just use order pickers picking from retail store shelves. So their systems don't really know what's in stock. Most orders thus lack some items ordered. A more automated system knows what's in stock, so the customer gets to decide when ordering how to handle out-of-stock conditions. (Ordering a different brand or size or item is an option then. Safeway doesn't do that.)
Delivery uses less energy than shopping. There's some whining about the "thousand mile salad", but moving a 45,000 pound truckload of lettuce a thousand miles uses less energy per head of lettuce than the 5 mile trip in the 2 ton SUV that moves 20 pounds of groceries.
A few more years, and automatic driving will meet up with automated warehouses.
US Car sales are down. House sales are down. Employment is flat. Why should PC sales be different?
Assume that your carrier, cloud provider, and handset manufacturer all have access to everything on the phone.
With Blackberry, you could run your own server, and nothing in the public infrastructure had access to unencrypted data. With Android, Google has a direct tap into your data. Encryption won't help when the layer that reads the keys is under the control of the provider.
If they give you any runaround, take'm to small claims court.
I did that with freelancer.com last week. They owed me a few hundred dollars, and were being difficult about transferring the funds through standard banking channels.
They're in Australia, and New South Wales allows on-line filing of small claims cases. After a disappointing go-round with customer support, I spent about 20 minutes filing a case. Once the case is filed, the court's system generates a PDF file with all the info. I sent a copy of that to Freelancer.com with no other comments.
Within four hours, they'd agreed to send a wire transfer to my bank. Two days later (the 4th of July slowed things down) the funds were in my bank in the US.
The idea here is to define the ampere as N electrons per second. This may make that possible. The number is around 6.241 Ã-- 10^18 electrons per second. Direct counts of electrons allow a precise, repeatable way to define an amp.
The goal is to define the fundamental units from measurable properties of the universe, so that reproduceable standards can be constructed. That's been achieved for time and length, but not mass. You can buy an atomic clock that gets its time measurement from the definition of the second. (HP used to make those, but that business was sold off from Agilent in 2006.) There's a method with a Kr-86 light source and interferometers to count out a meter in wavelengths of light. But there's no corresponding standard for mass. Mass is tied to a physical 1Kg weight stored in France, and everything has to be traced back to that, with each successive derived standard kilogram a little less accurate.
A kilogram ought to be defined as N atoms of something, but atom counting isn't quite good enough yet. There's a plan to define mass through the Planck constant, which means tying the standard of mass to the standard of current.
Three fundamental units are sufficient to lock down all the other units, and this is a step towards doing that.
There's been enthusiasm for underground tunnels in science fiction since at least the 1920s. Tunnels, though, are hard to build. Read a few issues of "Tunnels and Tunneling" to get a sense of the problems.
Solid ground isn't really that solid. Tunnel projects encounter sand, silt, water, oil, natural gas, shale, coal, and salt. Each requires different techniques, and most can't support an open in space in them. Tunneling often involves building a structure able to hold the tunnel bore open. Support rings, props, rock bolts, shotcrete, and steel are used when necessary. A single long tunnel job may encounter all of those.
As a construction project, a tunnel has a major logistical problem - most of the work is at the cutting face. So there's not much parallelism. Major tunnels are bored from both ends. In some cases, shafts are dug to intermediate points to allow advancing from multiple locations.
That option is possible on land, but slow and expensive for deep tunnels. It was used for the 57km Gotthard Base Tunnel, and required digging two access shafts around a kilometer long. That job took 14 years of tunneling.
Underwater tunnel projects are usually limited to working from both ends. In a few cases, existing islands, or even artificial ones, have been used to gain access points. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line has an artificial island.
Large tunnel projects today seem to run about US$0.2bn to $1bn/kilometer. It's much more expensive in urban areas or earthquake-prone areas. Hard rock tunnel projects are slow, but not overly expensive. Tunnels in difficult ground get very expensive.
This sounds good. A device that can detect explosive compounds at a distance. That addresses the real problem. No more need to examine laptops, check documents, or pat people down.
I wonder if there is verbiage in consumer's contracts that allow them to end it early with no fee due to an adverse change
Yes. You can get out for $15.
(d) Our Programming Changes. Many factors affect the availability, cost and quality of programming and may influence the decision to raise prices and the amount of any increase. These include, among others, programming and other costs, consumer demand, market and shareholder expectations, and changing business conditions. Accordingly, we must reserve the unrestricted right to change, rearrange, add or delete our programming packages, the selections in those packages, our prices, and any other Service we offer, at any time. We will endeavor to notify you of any change that is within our reasonable control and its effective date. In most cases this notice will be about one month in advance. You always have the right to cancel your Service, in whole or in part, if you do not accept the change (see Section 5). If you cancel your Service, a deactivation fee (described in Sections 2 & 5(b)) or other charges may apply. Credits, if any, to your account will be posted as described in Section 5. If you do not cancel, your continued receipt of our Service will constitute acceptance.
We need controls to prevent kids from overdosing on religion. There's a maximum safe dose of religion, maybe around an hour a day. Kids who substantially exceed that dose may turn into cult members, Jesus freaks, non-working yeshiva students, or Islamic militants. It's not the brand of religion that matters as much as the dosage.
A grad student at Stanford at the Center for Design Research did this in the mid-1980s. It had to be connected to a workstation back then, of course.
Remember Sony? Remember when Sony was cool? Remember when there were "Sony Style" stores? Remember their cute little robot dogs, their cute cell phones, their audio players? Sony was known for their cool design and loyal users.
Ever see an Xperia? No? That's Sony's latest smartphone. Who won in game consoles? Microsoft. Sony has lost money for the last four years, and the losses are getting bigger, not smaller. $5.7 billion last year.
Good product design didn't save Sony. Further back, it didn't save Olivetti, maker of some of the most beautiful typewriters and calculators of the 1970s. You'll see them on display in museums.
Microsoft does well at hardware. Their big weakness is online services.
For an industry which used to (and for all I know still does) prohibit artificial insemination, that cloning should even be considered seems crazy.
That's just a Jockey Club rule for thoroughbred racehorses. For other breeds, artificial insemination is common. Horse breeding involves only a small number of stallions; most stallions are gelded and never bred.
OK, somebody built a stretch-limo electric supercar. Those are fun, but not too useful. A stretch-limo version of a Ferrari has been built.
The dual rear axles steer, so the turning circle is reasonable. (Many tour buses have that feature.) The limited ground clearance is going to be a problem on a long vehicle. It would have trouble with many driveways and all speed bumps. They should have put in a suspension that allows lifting the vehicle when necessary.
The demo vehicle has lead-acid batteries and limited range. The designer talks about going to a more advanced battery technology. They also talk about battery swapping, but they'd need a network of battery-swap stations sized for this thing.
From the article:
"When you sign a Business Associate agreement, there's a level of liability that the business associate accepts. They openly acknowledge they have to operate within the HIPAA security rule like any covered entity. Understandably, none of the current cloud providers are willing to do that."
That says it all. The major cloud providers won't accept responsibility for security in their own systems.
Mod parent up. "The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings." That's rather lame. Exactly how do they search for "C", anyway? Do Sesame Street episodes brought to you by the letter C count?
The decline in C++ is probably real. It's on the way out as an application-level programming language. Big, complex applications with serious performance requirements and elaborate internal data structures, like 3D CAD, benefit from being written in C++. But there's no reason to write a routine desktop business app in it any more. Just moving windows and menus around and talking to the database can be done far more easily by other means.
If you want to kill the PC, you need to kill the room first. If you figure out how to kill the room, I'd love to hear it.
That's what's happening. First, cubicles. Then, offices at home. Then hoteling and hot desks. Then, Starbucks.
My thought is why somebody else wouldn't just pick up the ball and run with it.
Probably because nobody wants to deal with the legacy Mozilla code base. If you want to work on a browser today, you can start with WebKit.
I have a Stanford MSCS degree from the 1980s. Frankly, the teaching wasn't all that great. Other than Zohar Manna's class on mathematical logic, none of the lecturers had really good presentations. Having the chance to argue with John McCarthy was fun, though. I know things have improved since then. (CS was moved from Arts and Sciences to Engineering and given adult supervision. That helped.)
More recently, I've struggled through the original online Stanford machine learning course (pre-Udacity) starring Andrew Ng. Hacker Dojo offered it as a class, with meetings, two years ago. There he is, writing semi-legible math on a chalkboard (not even a whiteboard) for an hour at a time. The handouts don't quite match the videos, the motivation for much of the math is lacking, and the notation in the field is awful. (Sometimes a subscript is an exponent, and sometimes it's an index, depending on context. The precedence of operators is non-obvious and unstated. And everything, of course, is written with minimal parentheses.) Most of the concepts in that field have a geometrical interpretation, but there weren't enough pictures to give an intuitive understanding of what's the math is doing. What's actually going on is often not that complicated, but you don't get that impression from the lectures.
Some of the big-name universities work only because their students are so good they can make sense out of mediocre instruction. It's really the labs and the other students that make it worthwhile.
Sounds like a bargaining chip as they negotiate for colo space in switching centers. It might be useful in some special situations where you can terminate dark fiber into your own box and save on backbone costs, then have a short distance link into some other facility.
I would have expected this from Comcast or Verizon. If a local box held a few thousand hours of video cache, including recent TV and movies, most requests might be satisfied locally, unloading the upstream network.
Maybe they could open source it so it could still be maintained.
Oh, right.
If you're in a place that's buying new computers and loading Windows XP on them, you're not the problem. The final date for new Windows XP OEM installs was October 22, 2010. There are still people running Windows XP, but you shouldn't be installing it on new hardware at this late date.
So the book can't decide whether it's an introduction to programming or a language guide for people who already know how to program.
Why do all these programming books have to be so fat? The original Algol-60 report was 17 pages. "Pascal - User Manual and Report" was 283 pages. "The C Programming Language" ("K&R") is 274 pages. This thing is over 400 pages. Python isn't a big language.
I'd like to see more pocket reference books and big plastic cards (like those ones for "Calculus" and "Physics" sold to students) rather than these doorstops.
These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants.
Exactly.
The US is in the process of reducing living standards to the level of Shenzen. Already the 40 hour week is a memory. Then there's the "internship" work-for-free racket. Now, overcrowded dorms. Public housing projects provided more living space per person than that. Even SRO hotels rent you an individual room.
This is pathetic.