Don't sign up for iCloud. They'll probably drop that, too.
"Cloud" services have short lifespans. About two to four years from startup to shutdown seems typical. Google and Microsoft have both dumped many of their online services already. Telco "cloud" services, like Sprint's PictureMail, have been dumped. Many online music services from PlaysForSure to WalMart Music collapsed. Cloud APIs don't last too long, either; Yahoo Search, Yahoo Boss, Google SOAP search, and Hoover's business search are all gone or on the way out.
The shutdowns are getting faster, too. Now, 30 days from announcement to "all your data is gone" is apparently acceptable. Don't put something in the "cloud" and go on a long trip.
There's been some success with floating power plants. But those are built for developing countries, and they're installed along a shore. It's a way to move a power plant from where it was built to a destination location where construction is difficult. Building a power plant in a shipyard is convenient. A shipyard already has the equipment for moving and assembling very heavy components, and people who know how to use it.
Molycorp, which owns a big rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, is back on line. That mine used to supply 100% of US demand, plus exports. It was shut down in 2002 due to cheaper rare earths from China. Now it's back.
Rare earths aren't that rare. They're just present in small concentrations. So mining produces huge volumes of waste for small amounts of product. The big rare earths mine in China is an environmental disaster area. The one in California had to comply with US and California regulations. At current rare earths prices, that's not a problem. (They do, however, ship some of the sludge to Nevada through a 20 mile pipeline. Really).
A year from now, rare earth supplies won't be a problem. Then people will be bitching about the Molycorp monopoly.
I don't think this is a cert issuer trusted by major browsers. Unless some "toolbar" or a corporate installation has managed to put this cert into your browser (which happens), this attack may be ineffective against browsers.
The RepRap and other low-end 3D printers are toys. I see those things at TechShop all the time, but they're rarely used. All they can do is produce plastic trinkets.
Around $50K, the machines start to get good.
Shapeways makes usable plastic parts. What the industry needs is a $2000 machine that really works. There's slow progress in the industry; 30 years ago the high-end machines were as crappy as the RepRap.
All these processes are incredibly slow. As in hours for one small part. It's inherent in laying down a 3D part in thin layers that it will take time. That's why Shapeways charges about $50 for a 1 ounce part. Injection molding is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. This technology is not going to replace mass production.
If you're a superhero driver who can drift reliably, knows when he's about to lose traction, and has a cool enough head to back off the brakes to just the right amount for maximum stopping power and maneuverability,
Automatic systems are already better at that. See Stanford's autonomous sliding parking and autonomous drifting demos. Auto stability control systems already manage individual wheel braking, power, and steering, but this takes it to a whole new level.
now there's going to be a slew of pads in their lilac bushes.
That's a suburban problem. In urban areas, infrastructure equipment is installed in underground vaults, basements, tunnels, and leased space in buildings. In rural areas, infrastructure is installed on small plots of leased or purchased land.
In denser parts of suburbia, there's no good place to put the stuff. People bitch if a big green box has to go in their yard. (And, between the cell, cable, and phone industries, there are a lot more big boxes to place than there used to be.)
I'm just outside a city line. At the end of my driveway is 1) an AT&T underground controlled environment vault the size of a shipping container, with fans, A/C, and a backup generator, 2) a transformer enclosure with about 3 square meters of pad, 3) a power pole with a high voltage disconnect switch, and 4) an underground sewerage lift station with an above-ground control and metering pedestal. If I could get a water pressure booster station and a cell site, life would be complete.
The next step, once there's terahertz scanning capability in a hand-held device, is to add an accurate short-range location system to the device. Then it becomes possible to do most of the job of a CT scanner, building up a 3D image, with a hand-held device and a lot of compute power. This will be a big win for medicine.
It might be sufficient to put a 6-axis IMU chip in the device and use SLAM to correct for cumulative error. Then you could reference to the body being scanned, not the world coordinate system, and get clean scans even if the patient moves a little.
A useful marketing strategy would be to deploy this first for veterinarians. This avoids many of the regulatory issues.
It's interesting them doing at-rest-encryption - now I wonder where the keys are stored and who has access to them?
That is exactly the right question. If the encrypted data is worked on in the "cloud", the encryption keys have to be accessible to Google's servers. It's possible to have a remote backup service where the service doesn't have the keys. (iDrive claims to be such a service.) But if the data is processed in the "cloud", the keys are in there somewhere.
" It's my expectation that in three to five years it will actually look unusual and awkward when we view someone holding an object in their hand and looking down at it. Wearable computing will become the norm."
So Google really is coming out with an anal probe.
With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.
Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay, a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla, which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.
Look at the picture. There are wires with screw lugs being attached by hand. Why aren't all the parts on one board? Whatever happened to "design for manufacturing" and "vertical assembly", which is how Sony built Walkmans cheaply with expensive labor.
(What probably happened is that nobody at Google ever worked in a big production plant.)
Can't help but think that RIM's current situation is a lot like what Apple faced with Copland back in the mid-90s. After several years of trying to build their own next-gen system they gave up and purchased NeXT, which we now know as OS X.
Actually, Copeland made it to an alpha release, and it wasn't that bad. Jobs' Reality Distortion Field convinced Apple management that buying NeXT (and bailing Jobs out of a $400 million hole) would produce an OS sooner. In fact, it took years longer than Jobs said it would.
The big problem with Copland was that it wasn't fully backwards compatible with the previous System 7. Historically, Apple hadn't seen that as an issue; when a new OS came out, developers were expected to convert their applications. They'd done that when Apple went from System 6 to System 7. ("Upgrade your application or we'll move it to a folder where no one will ever see it again.") But by the time Copland was coming out, Apple no longer had enough clout to force that. Their biggest application developer was Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't want to convert.
Jobs' biggest contribution in that era was getting Microsoft to keep supporting Office on the Mac. That led to the infamous presentation where Bill Gates appeared on a giant screen above Steve Jobs.
If fat clients are dead, why do smartphones need so much compute power? Smartphones now have 4 cores on the main CPU, a GPU, and several auxiliary microcontrollers.
It's not well known, but Minitel, the French system, was deployed in the US. Local dial-up ports were available in most US cities. The system was run by Telecom France, and gave access to both lightly used US services and the full network in France. I used to have an account on it.
There was no extra charge for communicating across the Atlantic, so the service was useful to anyone who had people to talk to in France.
Minitel had a delightful culture in some ways. People wrote poetry on the dating services.
This is from Applied Energetics. It's not yet clear if it's militarily useful. Range is going to be a problem. It has potential as "something to shoot at a potential IED that causes less damage than an IED".
Unless it becomes a more generally useful weapon, though, it will probably suffer the fate of most overspecialized weapons.
So this guy is going to send a 20 inch long model boat across the Atlantic. Right.
The Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders already travel around the world's oceans autonomously. Liquid Robotics sent Wave Gliders from Hawaii to California, then up to Alaska and back. The Wave Glider looks like a surfboard, and trails an underwater "glider". As wave action moves the surfboard up and down, the gliders's spring-loaded vanes pull it forward. The glider has a powered rudder, the only moving part. The surfboard has solar panels, a computer, a GPS, a compass, and an Iridium satellite phone. Wave gliders have been through major storms without problems. Control is good enough that they generally stay within 50 meters of the programmed track. The U.S.Coast Guard classifies them as "floating debris", so they don't have to show lights. They're no more of a threat to ships than a loose surfboard.
The "Rasberry PI", after all, is simply a board which takes a quite good IC and brings out the pins to connectors. It's not like the Rasberry PI people developed the Broadcom BCM2835.
This is just a preliminary ruling. Netflix tried to have the suit dismissed, that didn't work, and now it gets tried on the merits.
At some point, the ADA runs into the First Amendment, which prohibits "forced speech".
(Broadcast TV is a special case, because it involves publicly owned RF spectrum.) Book publishers aren't required to produce audio or Braille editions, or translations to another language.
You can run MySQL Cluster on two machines. It's somewhat complex to set up. And your POS terminals have to be able to connect to either server. But it's available.
If you're getting more than one crash a year, you have hardware problems. Commodity hardware may be unsuitable for a restaurant environment. You may need an industrial-grade PC, with a broad operating temperature range and resistance to dirt, dust, grease, and water. There are PCs and enclosures for restaurants, and the fast-food industry uses them extensively. Every McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC outlet uses industrial-quality POS systems.
You wouldn't use a home-quality stove or a home-quality coffee maker in a restaurant. It wouldn't hold up. The same goes for a computer.
Kids who grow up around horses tend to be more independent.
I was struck by this when I was visiting some endurance rider friends camped in a mountain park. Some of the parents had teenage kids. Three of the kids, around age 12, went off to ride in the hills. No adult. They all had cell phones, water, food, hoof picks, and first aid kits. The parents were fine with this; it was just a routine ride. With three kids, someone could come back if there was an emergency.
For that group, the parents were all serious riders. I've seen the helicopter parent problem with riding kids and non-riding parents. That doesn't work out as well. In fact, for early riding lessons, it works better if somebody gets the non-riding parent out of sight so the kid can focus on the horse and the instructor.
There are risks. The kids are seldom seriously injured, but there are exceptions. I saw one girl grow up over the years, from age 13, always on horseback. She went off to Harvard, and was killed during her senior year in a riding accident while exercising a horse for the Harvard polo team. We have a plaque in her memory at our barn.
CMU's vehicle in 2004 did not get tripped up by a moved object, but rather by a GPS being 5 feet (or so) off.
Nah. Here's the
detailed postmortem. Actually, they smashed through one fence (see photo), but the vehicle (a HUMMV) kept going. Then (per DARPA), ""At mile 7.4, on switchbacks in a mountainous section, vehicle went off course, got caught on a berm and rubber on the front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished. Vehicle was command-disabled."
There was a lot of spin after the fact from Red Whittaker on how it wasn't their fault.
All of the vehicles in 2005 that got to the semifinals had sensing good enough to avoid mistakes like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I give you... http://cubify.com/
Oh, great. A 3D printer with DRM copy protection. "We have a very robust and advanced security and anti-fraud system that protects your creations at all times."
Don't sign up for iCloud. They'll probably drop that, too.
"Cloud" services have short lifespans. About two to four years from startup to shutdown seems typical. Google and Microsoft have both dumped many of their online services already. Telco "cloud" services, like Sprint's PictureMail, have been dumped. Many online music services from PlaysForSure to WalMart Music collapsed. Cloud APIs don't last too long, either; Yahoo Search, Yahoo Boss, Google SOAP search, and Hoover's business search are all gone or on the way out.
The shutdowns are getting faster, too. Now, 30 days from announcement to "all your data is gone" is apparently acceptable. Don't put something in the "cloud" and go on a long trip.
There's been some success with floating power plants. But those are built for developing countries, and they're installed along a shore. It's a way to move a power plant from where it was built to a destination location where construction is difficult. Building a power plant in a shipyard is convenient. A shipyard already has the equipment for moving and assembling very heavy components, and people who know how to use it.
None of this applies to a data center.
Molycorp, which owns a big rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, is back on line. That mine used to supply 100% of US demand, plus exports. It was shut down in 2002 due to cheaper rare earths from China. Now it's back.
Rare earths aren't that rare. They're just present in small concentrations. So mining produces huge volumes of waste for small amounts of product. The big rare earths mine in China is an environmental disaster area. The one in California had to comply with US and California regulations. At current rare earths prices, that's not a problem. (They do, however, ship some of the sludge to Nevada through a 20 mile pipeline. Really).
A year from now, rare earth supplies won't be a problem. Then people will be bitching about the Molycorp monopoly.
I don't think this is a cert issuer trusted by major browsers. Unless some "toolbar" or a corporate installation has managed to put this cert into your browser (which happens), this attack may be ineffective against browsers.
The RepRap and other low-end 3D printers are toys. I see those things at TechShop all the time, but they're rarely used. All they can do is produce plastic trinkets.
Around $50K, the machines start to get good. Shapeways makes usable plastic parts. What the industry needs is a $2000 machine that really works. There's slow progress in the industry; 30 years ago the high-end machines were as crappy as the RepRap.
All these processes are incredibly slow. As in hours for one small part. It's inherent in laying down a 3D part in thin layers that it will take time. That's why Shapeways charges about $50 for a 1 ounce part. Injection molding is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. This technology is not going to replace mass production.
If you're a superhero driver who can drift reliably, knows when he's about to lose traction, and has a cool enough head to back off the brakes to just the right amount for maximum stopping power and maneuverability,
Automatic systems are already better at that. See Stanford's autonomous sliding parking and autonomous drifting demos. Auto stability control systems already manage individual wheel braking, power, and steering, but this takes it to a whole new level.
Machine learning of control is getting very good. See the autonomous helicopter aerobatics from four years ago.
now there's going to be a slew of pads in their lilac bushes.
That's a suburban problem. In urban areas, infrastructure equipment is installed in underground vaults, basements, tunnels, and leased space in buildings. In rural areas, infrastructure is installed on small plots of leased or purchased land.
In denser parts of suburbia, there's no good place to put the stuff. People bitch if a big green box has to go in their yard. (And, between the cell, cable, and phone industries, there are a lot more big boxes to place than there used to be.)
I'm just outside a city line. At the end of my driveway is 1) an AT&T underground controlled environment vault the size of a shipping container, with fans, A/C, and a backup generator, 2) a transformer enclosure with about 3 square meters of pad, 3) a power pole with a high voltage disconnect switch, and 4) an underground sewerage lift station with an above-ground control and metering pedestal. If I could get a water pressure booster station and a cell site, life would be complete.
The next step, once there's terahertz scanning capability in a hand-held device, is to add an accurate short-range location system to the device. Then it becomes possible to do most of the job of a CT scanner, building up a 3D image, with a hand-held device and a lot of compute power. This will be a big win for medicine.
It might be sufficient to put a 6-axis IMU chip in the device and use SLAM to correct for cumulative error. Then you could reference to the body being scanned, not the world coordinate system, and get clean scans even if the patient moves a little.
A useful marketing strategy would be to deploy this first for veterinarians. This avoids many of the regulatory issues.
It's interesting them doing at-rest-encryption - now I wonder where the keys are stored and who has access to them?
That is exactly the right question. If the encrypted data is worked on in the "cloud", the encryption keys have to be accessible to Google's servers. It's possible to have a remote backup service where the service doesn't have the keys. (iDrive claims to be such a service.) But if the data is processed in the "cloud", the keys are in there somewhere.
" It's my expectation that in three to five years it will actually look unusual and awkward when we view someone holding an object in their hand and looking down at it. Wearable computing will become the norm."
So Google really is coming out with an anal probe.
Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.
Of which a sizable fraction are spambots.
With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.
Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay, a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla, which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.
Look at the picture. There are wires with screw lugs being attached by hand. Why aren't all the parts on one board? Whatever happened to "design for manufacturing" and "vertical assembly", which is how Sony built Walkmans cheaply with expensive labor.
(What probably happened is that nobody at Google ever worked in a big production plant.)
I'll never buy another Linksys product. I don't want remote administration from the public internet side of a router.
I already use Sonic.net DSL, one of the last of the independent ISPs - no filtering, no proxying, net-neutral, no quotas. Just bits.
Can't help but think that RIM's current situation is a lot like what Apple faced with Copland back in the mid-90s. After several years of trying to build their own next-gen system they gave up and purchased NeXT, which we now know as OS X.
Actually, Copeland made it to an alpha release, and it wasn't that bad. Jobs' Reality Distortion Field convinced Apple management that buying NeXT (and bailing Jobs out of a $400 million hole) would produce an OS sooner. In fact, it took years longer than Jobs said it would.
The big problem with Copland was that it wasn't fully backwards compatible with the previous System 7. Historically, Apple hadn't seen that as an issue; when a new OS came out, developers were expected to convert their applications. They'd done that when Apple went from System 6 to System 7. ("Upgrade your application or we'll move it to a folder where no one will ever see it again.") But by the time Copland was coming out, Apple no longer had enough clout to force that. Their biggest application developer was Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't want to convert.
Jobs' biggest contribution in that era was getting Microsoft to keep supporting Office on the Mac. That led to the infamous presentation where Bill Gates appeared on a giant screen above Steve Jobs.
If fat clients are dead, why do smartphones need so much compute power? Smartphones now have 4 cores on the main CPU, a GPU, and several auxiliary microcontrollers.
It's not well known, but Minitel, the French system, was deployed in the US. Local dial-up ports were available in most US cities. The system was run by Telecom France, and gave access to both lightly used US services and the full network in France. I used to have an account on it. There was no extra charge for communicating across the Atlantic, so the service was useful to anyone who had people to talk to in France.
Minitel had a delightful culture in some ways. People wrote poetry on the dating services.
This is from Applied Energetics. It's not yet clear if it's militarily useful. Range is going to be a problem. It has potential as "something to shoot at a potential IED that causes less damage than an IED".
Unless it becomes a more generally useful weapon, though, it will probably suffer the fate of most overspecialized weapons.
So this guy is going to send a 20 inch long model boat across the Atlantic. Right.
The Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders already travel around the world's oceans autonomously. Liquid Robotics sent Wave Gliders from Hawaii to California, then up to Alaska and back. The Wave Glider looks like a surfboard, and trails an underwater "glider". As wave action moves the surfboard up and down, the gliders's spring-loaded vanes pull it forward. The glider has a powered rudder, the only moving part. The surfboard has solar panels, a computer, a GPS, a compass, and an Iridium satellite phone. Wave gliders have been through major storms without problems. Control is good enough that they generally stay within 50 meters of the programmed track. The U.S.Coast Guard classifies them as "floating debris", so they don't have to show lights. They're no more of a threat to ships than a loose surfboard.
The "Rasberry PI", after all, is simply a board which takes a quite good IC and brings out the pins to connectors. It's not like the Rasberry PI people developed the Broadcom BCM2835.
This is just a preliminary ruling. Netflix tried to have the suit dismissed, that didn't work, and now it gets tried on the merits.
At some point, the ADA runs into the First Amendment, which prohibits "forced speech". (Broadcast TV is a special case, because it involves publicly owned RF spectrum.) Book publishers aren't required to produce audio or Braille editions, or translations to another language.
Not only did Facebook change my address, the "Choose Different Address" button doesn't do anything.
You can run MySQL Cluster on two machines. It's somewhat complex to set up. And your POS terminals have to be able to connect to either server. But it's available.
If you're getting more than one crash a year, you have hardware problems. Commodity hardware may be unsuitable for a restaurant environment. You may need an industrial-grade PC, with a broad operating temperature range and resistance to dirt, dust, grease, and water. There are PCs and enclosures for restaurants, and the fast-food industry uses them extensively. Every McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC outlet uses industrial-quality POS systems.
You wouldn't use a home-quality stove or a home-quality coffee maker in a restaurant. It wouldn't hold up. The same goes for a computer.
Kids who grow up around horses tend to be more independent. I was struck by this when I was visiting some endurance rider friends camped in a mountain park. Some of the parents had teenage kids. Three of the kids, around age 12, went off to ride in the hills. No adult. They all had cell phones, water, food, hoof picks, and first aid kits. The parents were fine with this; it was just a routine ride. With three kids, someone could come back if there was an emergency.
For that group, the parents were all serious riders. I've seen the helicopter parent problem with riding kids and non-riding parents. That doesn't work out as well. In fact, for early riding lessons, it works better if somebody gets the non-riding parent out of sight so the kid can focus on the horse and the instructor.
There are risks. The kids are seldom seriously injured, but there are exceptions. I saw one girl grow up over the years, from age 13, always on horseback. She went off to Harvard, and was killed during her senior year in a riding accident while exercising a horse for the Harvard polo team. We have a plaque in her memory at our barn.
CMU's vehicle in 2004 did not get tripped up by a moved object, but rather by a GPS being 5 feet (or so) off.
Nah. Here's the detailed postmortem. Actually, they smashed through one fence (see photo), but the vehicle (a HUMMV) kept going. Then (per DARPA), ""At mile 7.4, on switchbacks in a mountainous section, vehicle went off course, got caught on a berm and rubber on the front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished. Vehicle was command-disabled." There was a lot of spin after the fact from Red Whittaker on how it wasn't their fault.
All of the vehicles in 2005 that got to the semifinals had sensing good enough to avoid mistakes like that.