It always seemed somewhat silly that Apple's products with cellular capability needed a connection to a desktop machine at all. Apple got into this because they started with the iPod, which was a slave to a PC. That it continued years into the cellular era was just annoying. It seemed mostly intended to get crapwere onto PCs.
The paper is from 2006, and describes a wave observed in 2000.
Satellite-based radar altimeters produce a lot of data about wave height world wide, but they don't, apparently, have quite enough resolution yet to see this kind of thing. A view of such waves from above, over a few minutes, would tell us a lot. Is it an intersection of two or more waves? How far does it travel? How long does it persist?
The U.S. Navy has put considerable effort into answering questions like that.
This isn't a new idea. "Lab on a disc" systems have been used for analysis for years. They use little disposable plastic discs with complex patterns of channels, some of which have been pre-filled with reagents. The disk is injected with a sample, and then placed in a machine which can rotate it (for mixing) and spin it fast (for centrifuging).
Even smaller are lab on a chip systems, where the device is made by IC fab techniques. These are usually mass-produced for medical applications.
The machines used with these consumable components are usually desktop devices, with hand-held portable ones becoming available.
These microfluidic systems are for analysis, and maybe some biosynthesis. They work on tiny amounts of fluid. Nobody is going to make a chemical manufacturing plant this way.
The new thing here is making such devices as one-offs for researchers, rather than in quantity.
Bear in mind that a significant fraction of the US population barely reads. 14% of the US adult population has "below basic literacy skills." They are not likely to find a computer very useful. Another 15% of Internet penetration and everyone who can read will be connected.
Measured by a different study, the most connected major countries are at 80%, +- 2%. The US and Japan are at 78%, Germany is at 80%, Korea is at 81%, and the UK is at 82%.
"Practically every single event, and a huge percentage of the online discussion about these events, revolves around binge drinking," Funduk writes. "The simple truth is all you can do is just opt out of going to these parties... or put another way, you can opt to exclude yourself."
I have not seen this. I've been in Silicon Valley for many years. I've been to parties in bars after major conferences from SIGGRAPH to GDC to RSA. I went to parties during the dot-com boom. I've seen very few drunks. Lots of exchanging business cards. Some flirting.
In the US, this issue was settled in Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which was about copyright in telephone directories. The US Supreme Court ruled that such collections of facts are not copyrightable on constitutional grounds.
In Canada, there's Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information, Inc, which covers much the same ground. "Labour alone not determinative of originality... Compilation so obvious, commonplace not meriting copyright protection."
I've been reading her PR. It looks like she did a small arts festival, and wants to do something else. She's tried being in a band, writing magazine articles, modeling, and organizing events. But no one is paying attention. There's little about her written by anyone else.
Sometimes she gets it right. Read her "John Galt is homeless", a brief reply to Ayn Rand. "We need to face the fact that Randian capitalism is no longer a way to advance oneself but a way to make oneself poor. The roles have now been reversed and it is no longer survival-of-the-fittest but survival-of-the-most-willing-to-please."
I've met so many people like that in the SF art scene. They're wild, crazy, fun, and can't quite make it. They tend to end up bitter by age 35.
A vague rumor of "Military vehicles in Beijing" is a bit much. At least one web site is pairing that rumor with a stock shot of Chinese tanks on parade.
The crackdown was a dumb move that gave the rumor credibility.
There is something big going on, though.
China is about to have a major change in leadership, but
China doesn't have an reliable way to pick its national leaders. There's a power struggle within the Party each time this happens. It's only happened three times since Mao, and the first two produced the Great Leap Forward disaster and the Cultural Revolution. The third, in 1992, went smoothly. Governments all over the world are watching this closely. Nobody knows who will be running China a year from now.
This year, seven of the nine Standing Committee members are retiring. One of the anointed successors, Bo Xilai, has been arrested on murder charges. This has thrown the succession process into confusion. The South China Morning Post (out of Hong Kong) says this was a "liberal coup". This followed rumors of a coup last month, a coup which didn't happen. (In general, coups that are predicted don't happen - they require surprise.)
The Chinese government is desperately trying to prevent public involvement in the succession process. China does not have real elections. So "public involvement" means riots or civil wars. Historically, those have changed governments. So the Party is trying to keep the lid on.
So the REAL problem is I have to hold the START button down for about 5 seconds before the engine stops.
Right. That's unacceptable. Vehicles with non-trivial engine shutdown sequences should be required to have a standard industrial red emergency stop button. (Larger trucks often have this.) Since auto companies would hate to have to mount a big red button in a car, this would encourage them to not get too creative about engine stop.
If my car were flying down the highway, accellerator jammed, I turn off the engine.
Which, on many cars, locks the steering wheel.
Now that was dumb design. There are steering column locks which engage when the key is removed, but many engage when the key is merely turned to OFF. Yes, there may be an intermediate accessory position between OFF and RUN, but it's easy to overrun it in an emergency.
There are very few "children who can't be vaccinated". They're immunosuppressed after a transplant, have a self-allergy problem, or have AIDS. Children in any of those situations are being kept alive only by extensive medical efforts. They're not normal, healthy kids.
The Department of Commerce is putting ICANN's contract out for re-bid partially because they think this is a bad idea.
Personally, I think that not only is adding new TLDs bad, some of the old ones should be wound down. ".biz" is a bad neighborhood. Nobody can figure out what ".info" is for. ".aero" never took off. And the entire domain list for ".museum" is about five pages long.
OK, what can we find out about ZionEyes?
The site tells us who the CEO is Carlos Becerra. He's an attorney. He's licensed to practice in California. He's been licensed for a little more than a year, and went to Hastings, UC's law school.
.. a negotiable LOCAL_ECHO mode. Then they invented ssh, and left away that LOCAL_ECHO and linebuffered flags, considered to be archaic.
And 15 years later, LOCAL_ECHO is back in mosh!
Right. Breaking local echo in Telnet was a Berkeley misfeature. It was in 3COM's UNET, which predated Berkley networking in UNIX. (Berkeley did not introduce networking in UNIX. Theirs was the third or fourth implementation, after ones from BBN, 3COM, and Phil Karn.) With UNET, circa 1983, Telnet had local echo until you used something like VI or the RAND full screen editor, at which point the server noticed the stty call which switched to "raw mode" and switched to remote echo.
Seamless transition from local echo to remote echo is even older. It was in Tymnet, which used markers called a "red ball" and a "green ball" to do the switch seamlessly.
I guess I just don't want a repeat of the collective embarrassment of the robotics community that happened in 2004.
Yes, the 2004 Grand Challenge was a disaster. I was there to watch. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, all 23 teams that made it to the California Motor Speedway had better systems than anyone had in 2004. I had a team there. Yes, the course in 2005 was easier, but some of the vehicles there could have completed the 2004 course.
I don't think the humanoid challenge will succeed on the first try, either, since the schedule is so tight. The first trial with real robots is only 15 months away. By try 2 or 3, though, a robot will probably complete the event.
DARPA really did get mobile robotics going. For years, there were all these little groups in academia, typically one professor and three to five grad students, turning out minor improvements and theses. Tony Tether kicked academia into high gear with the 2005 Grand Challenge, DARPA made it clear, quietly, that if the schools with DoD robotics funding didn't produce, the money would be turned off. DARPA had been funding Stanford and CMU since the 1960s without getting anything really useful. That's why entire CS departments were focused on the first Grand Challenge.
Sometimes somebody has to kick ass. As an example of the DARPA attitude, the 2005 Grand Challenge events were run by a Marine colonel. ("We're starting at 0600...")
The iPhone is a juicy target for attackers. One wonders what attacks on the iPhone are in the wild but not generally known. Especially attacks that target individuals of interest.
There are entire malls of big-box stores. I once drove into one in Fremont, CA. They have a Best Buy, a Lowes, an Office Max, a WalMart, a Babies R-Us, a Smart and Final, a Sports Authority, and a 25-screen theater. The parking lot is all SUV-sized parking spaces. Instead of shopping carts, they have industrial flat handtrucks.
There are no small stores other than chain restaurants. They'd just be in the way.
I'm suprised this monster has survived the recession.
Orbital mechanics? Old technology, no secrets there. Remote underwater vehicles? Used by oil companies from many nations.
At least China is doing useful stuff. The US is using its top brainpower in social networking and financial engineering. Who goes to a good college in the US to study production engineering, and then into industry to set up production lines in industry? That's a common career path in both Chinas, South Korea, and Japan.
AOL was the first big, successful social network. AOL pioneered in social networking, online virtual worlds (on a Commodore 64!), online gaming, online dating, and music downloads. They were there first, and they made it work. So they should have the key intellectual property for social.
Interesting point. I've been reading about Ultra WideBand - it's basically technically similar to Morse code
Aargh. Get an ARRL Handbook.
UWB and spark transmitters for Morse (1895 to 1920 or so) share the property of blithering over a big chunk of spectrum. That's about all they have in common.
The lifetime of entertainment media is surprisingly short. Most movies make at least 1/3 of their ultimate revenue in the first weekend. Perhaps the way to define "orphan works" is to expire copyright when 95% of the ultimate revenue has been extracted. The movie industry already makes that calculation to decide when to end theatrical release.
It's very similar to the basic models of the PDP-11. 64K of 16 bit words, two-address instructions, operands can be registers or memory. It should be possible to modify a PDP-11 C compiler to compile for the thing.
No indication of how I/O works, or if there are timers or interrupts. If you're supposed to control a spaceship with this, they're going to need those. PDP-11 I/O was done by putting devices on the same bus as memory, and storing into their device registers. But the spec here says that you have 64K words of memory; no portion of the address space is reserved for I/O. So they may use the unassigned opcodes for I/O.
Of the 6 teams that completed the challenge, all of them used the Velodyne 3D LIDAR as their primary vision sensor, in addition to several peripherial LIDARs. None of the teams who relied on vision primarily finished.
True. The Urban Challenge was a slow-speed run, within LIDAR range. The latest Velodyne units see out to 70 meters. Note that you can't profile the road (to see potholes, etc.) out that far; the angle is too oblique. But you can see cars, pedestrians, telephone poles, etc.
There are small short-range LIDAR devices, like the Swiss Ranger and photonic mixer devices, which have finally reached the Consumer Electronics Show level. For short ranges (a few meters), triangulation devices like the Kinect work. Longer range LIDARs without mechanical scanning do exist; Advanced Scientific Concepts makes them for DoD, at about $100K each. (The high price is not inherent in the technology; the manufacturer hand builds them in Santa Barbara, CA.)
Again, the assumptions of most classifiers are that the training data represent a stable underlying distribution. What happens if the road color changes? What happens if everything looks the same color, like in the desert or at night?
You slow down until the stopping distance is within the range of the near-range sensors. The Stanford vehicle's classifier was comparing the near road (out to 10-20m, and profiled by the LIDAR) image with the far road image. As the vehicle rolls forward, the far road becomes the near road, you find out if the far road was like the near road, and the classifier can be trained. After you've run on a reasonably uniform road for a while, you can speed up. All the vision system did in the 2005 Grand Challenge was to detect situations when the road was flat and smooth, allowing fast driving.
Google is a good search engine which is working hard to become a "portal". Look at the top line of a Google search result page now: "You+ Search Images Maps Play YouTube (not "video" now) News Gmail Documents Calendar More". 9 of the 11 lead to Google in-house services.
Yahoo and AOL were "portals". That didn't work out too well. Google seems to be trying hard to emulate them.
Slashdot Mirror
It always seemed somewhat silly that Apple's products with cellular capability needed a connection to a desktop machine at all. Apple got into this because they started with the iPod, which was a slave to a PC. That it continued years into the cellular era was just annoying. It seemed mostly intended to get crapwere onto PCs.
The paper is from 2006, and describes a wave observed in 2000.
Satellite-based radar altimeters produce a lot of data about wave height world wide, but they don't, apparently, have quite enough resolution yet to see this kind of thing. A view of such waves from above, over a few minutes, would tell us a lot. Is it an intersection of two or more waves? How far does it travel? How long does it persist?
The U.S. Navy has put considerable effort into answering questions like that.
This isn't a new idea. "Lab on a disc" systems have been used for analysis for years. They use little disposable plastic discs with complex patterns of channels, some of which have been pre-filled with reagents. The disk is injected with a sample, and then placed in a machine which can rotate it (for mixing) and spin it fast (for centrifuging).
Even smaller are lab on a chip systems, where the device is made by IC fab techniques. These are usually mass-produced for medical applications. The machines used with these consumable components are usually desktop devices, with hand-held portable ones becoming available.
These microfluidic systems are for analysis, and maybe some biosynthesis. They work on tiny amounts of fluid. Nobody is going to make a chemical manufacturing plant this way.
The new thing here is making such devices as one-offs for researchers, rather than in quantity.
Only 44% of the residences which can get cable TV actually buy it. In comparison, 68% of US households have broadband access. (3% are still on dialup.) That's impressive reach for an industry that barely existed a decade ago.
Bear in mind that a significant fraction of the US population barely reads. 14% of the US adult population has "below basic literacy skills." They are not likely to find a computer very useful. Another 15% of Internet penetration and everyone who can read will be connected.
Measured by a different study, the most connected major countries are at 80%, +- 2%. The US and Japan are at 78%, Germany is at 80%, Korea is at 81%, and the UK is at 82%.
"Practically every single event, and a huge percentage of the online discussion about these events, revolves around binge drinking," Funduk writes. "The simple truth is all you can do is just opt out of going to these parties ... or put another way, you can opt to exclude yourself."
I have not seen this. I've been in Silicon Valley for many years. I've been to parties in bars after major conferences from SIGGRAPH to GDC to RSA. I went to parties during the dot-com boom. I've seen very few drunks. Lots of exchanging business cards. Some flirting.
The frat-boy crowd is usually in sales.
In the US, this issue was settled in Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which was about copyright in telephone directories. The US Supreme Court ruled that such collections of facts are not copyrightable on constitutional grounds. In Canada, there's Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information, Inc, which covers much the same ground. "Labour alone not determinative of originality ... Compilation so obvious, commonplace not meriting copyright protection."
I'm surprised CanadaPost even raised the issue.
I've been reading her PR. It looks like she did a small arts festival, and wants to do something else. She's tried being in a band, writing magazine articles, modeling, and organizing events. But no one is paying attention. There's little about her written by anyone else.
Sometimes she gets it right. Read her "John Galt is homeless", a brief reply to Ayn Rand. "We need to face the fact that Randian capitalism is no longer a way to advance oneself but a way to make oneself poor. The roles have now been reversed and it is no longer survival-of-the-fittest but survival-of-the-most-willing-to-please."
I've met so many people like that in the SF art scene. They're wild, crazy, fun, and can't quite make it. They tend to end up bitter by age 35.
Used car dealers who assist in the reselling of stolen cars are routinely sent to jail. Pawn shop operators, ditto. Why not cell phone companies?
A vague rumor of "Military vehicles in Beijing" is a bit much. At least one web site is pairing that rumor with a stock shot of Chinese tanks on parade. The crackdown was a dumb move that gave the rumor credibility.
There is something big going on, though. China is about to have a major change in leadership, but China doesn't have an reliable way to pick its national leaders. There's a power struggle within the Party each time this happens. It's only happened three times since Mao, and the first two produced the Great Leap Forward disaster and the Cultural Revolution. The third, in 1992, went smoothly. Governments all over the world are watching this closely. Nobody knows who will be running China a year from now.
This year, seven of the nine Standing Committee members are retiring. One of the anointed successors, Bo Xilai, has been arrested on murder charges. This has thrown the succession process into confusion. The South China Morning Post (out of Hong Kong) says this was a "liberal coup". This followed rumors of a coup last month, a coup which didn't happen. (In general, coups that are predicted don't happen - they require surprise.)
The Chinese government is desperately trying to prevent public involvement in the succession process. China does not have real elections. So "public involvement" means riots or civil wars. Historically, those have changed governments. So the Party is trying to keep the lid on.
So the REAL problem is I have to hold the START button down for about 5 seconds before the engine stops.
Right. That's unacceptable. Vehicles with non-trivial engine shutdown sequences should be required to have a standard industrial red emergency stop button. (Larger trucks often have this.) Since auto companies would hate to have to mount a big red button in a car, this would encourage them to not get too creative about engine stop.
If my car were flying down the highway, accellerator jammed, I turn off the engine.
Which, on many cars, locks the steering wheel.
Now that was dumb design. There are steering column locks which engage when the key is removed, but many engage when the key is merely turned to OFF. Yes, there may be an intermediate accessory position between OFF and RUN, but it's easy to overrun it in an emergency.
children who can't be vaccinated
There are very few "children who can't be vaccinated". They're immunosuppressed after a transplant, have a self-allergy problem, or have AIDS. Children in any of those situations are being kept alive only by extensive medical efforts. They're not normal, healthy kids.
The Department of Commerce is putting ICANN's contract out for re-bid partially because they think this is a bad idea.
Personally, I think that not only is adding new TLDs bad, some of the old ones should be wound down. ".biz" is a bad neighborhood. Nobody can figure out what ".info" is for. ".aero" never took off. And the entire domain list for ".museum" is about five pages long.
OK, what can we find out about ZionEyes? The site tells us who the CEO is Carlos Becerra. He's an attorney. He's licensed to practice in California. He's been licensed for a little more than a year, and went to Hastings, UC's law school.
Their business location is a hacker space/business incubator in Seattle. Tiny, but not unreasonable.
I'm not seeing major red flags. This may have ended up as a flop, but it doesn't look like an outright scam.
.. a negotiable LOCAL_ECHO mode. Then they invented ssh, and left away that LOCAL_ECHO and linebuffered flags, considered to be archaic. And 15 years later, LOCAL_ECHO is back in mosh!
Right. Breaking local echo in Telnet was a Berkeley misfeature. It was in 3COM's UNET, which predated Berkley networking in UNIX. (Berkeley did not introduce networking in UNIX. Theirs was the third or fourth implementation, after ones from BBN, 3COM, and Phil Karn.) With UNET, circa 1983, Telnet had local echo until you used something like VI or the RAND full screen editor, at which point the server noticed the stty call which switched to "raw mode" and switched to remote echo.
Seamless transition from local echo to remote echo is even older. It was in Tymnet, which used markers called a "red ball" and a "green ball" to do the switch seamlessly.
I guess I just don't want a repeat of the collective embarrassment of the robotics community that happened in 2004.
Yes, the 2004 Grand Challenge was a disaster. I was there to watch. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, all 23 teams that made it to the California Motor Speedway had better systems than anyone had in 2004. I had a team there. Yes, the course in 2005 was easier, but some of the vehicles there could have completed the 2004 course.
I don't think the humanoid challenge will succeed on the first try, either, since the schedule is so tight. The first trial with real robots is only 15 months away. By try 2 or 3, though, a robot will probably complete the event.
DARPA really did get mobile robotics going. For years, there were all these little groups in academia, typically one professor and three to five grad students, turning out minor improvements and theses. Tony Tether kicked academia into high gear with the 2005 Grand Challenge, DARPA made it clear, quietly, that if the schools with DoD robotics funding didn't produce, the money would be turned off. DARPA had been funding Stanford and CMU since the 1960s without getting anything really useful. That's why entire CS departments were focused on the first Grand Challenge.
Sometimes somebody has to kick ass. As an example of the DARPA attitude, the 2005 Grand Challenge events were run by a Marine colonel. ("We're starting at 0600...")
The iPhone is a juicy target for attackers. One wonders what attacks on the iPhone are in the wild but not generally known. Especially attacks that target individuals of interest.
There are entire malls of big-box stores. I once drove into one in Fremont, CA. They have a Best Buy, a Lowes, an Office Max, a WalMart, a Babies R-Us, a Smart and Final, a Sports Authority, and a 25-screen theater. The parking lot is all SUV-sized parking spaces. Instead of shopping carts, they have industrial flat handtrucks. There are no small stores other than chain restaurants. They'd just be in the way.
I'm suprised this monster has survived the recession.
Orbital mechanics? Old technology, no secrets there. Remote underwater vehicles? Used by oil companies from many nations.
At least China is doing useful stuff. The US is using its top brainpower in social networking and financial engineering. Who goes to a good college in the US to study production engineering, and then into industry to set up production lines in industry? That's a common career path in both Chinas, South Korea, and Japan.
AOL was the first big, successful social network. AOL pioneered in social networking, online virtual worlds (on a Commodore 64!), online gaming, online dating, and music downloads. They were there first, and they made it work. So they should have the key intellectual property for social.
Interesting point. I've been reading about Ultra WideBand - it's basically technically similar to Morse code
Aargh. Get an ARRL Handbook.
UWB and spark transmitters for Morse (1895 to 1920 or so) share the property of blithering over a big chunk of spectrum. That's about all they have in common.
The lifetime of entertainment media is surprisingly short. Most movies make at least 1/3 of their ultimate revenue in the first weekend. Perhaps the way to define "orphan works" is to expire copyright when 95% of the ultimate revenue has been extracted. The movie industry already makes that calculation to decide when to end theatrical release.
It's very similar to the basic models of the PDP-11. 64K of 16 bit words, two-address instructions, operands can be registers or memory. It should be possible to modify a PDP-11 C compiler to compile for the thing.
No indication of how I/O works, or if there are timers or interrupts. If you're supposed to control a spaceship with this, they're going to need those. PDP-11 I/O was done by putting devices on the same bus as memory, and storing into their device registers. But the spec here says that you have 64K words of memory; no portion of the address space is reserved for I/O. So they may use the unassigned opcodes for I/O.
Of the 6 teams that completed the challenge, all of them used the Velodyne 3D LIDAR as their primary vision sensor, in addition to several peripherial LIDARs. None of the teams who relied on vision primarily finished.
True. The Urban Challenge was a slow-speed run, within LIDAR range. The latest Velodyne units see out to 70 meters. Note that you can't profile the road (to see potholes, etc.) out that far; the angle is too oblique. But you can see cars, pedestrians, telephone poles, etc.
There are small short-range LIDAR devices, like the Swiss Ranger and photonic mixer devices, which have finally reached the Consumer Electronics Show level. For short ranges (a few meters), triangulation devices like the Kinect work. Longer range LIDARs without mechanical scanning do exist; Advanced Scientific Concepts makes them for DoD, at about $100K each. (The high price is not inherent in the technology; the manufacturer hand builds them in Santa Barbara, CA.)
Again, the assumptions of most classifiers are that the training data represent a stable underlying distribution. What happens if the road color changes? What happens if everything looks the same color, like in the desert or at night?
You slow down until the stopping distance is within the range of the near-range sensors. The Stanford vehicle's classifier was comparing the near road (out to 10-20m, and profiled by the LIDAR) image with the far road image. As the vehicle rolls forward, the far road becomes the near road, you find out if the far road was like the near road, and the classifier can be trained. After you've run on a reasonably uniform road for a while, you can speed up. All the vision system did in the 2005 Grand Challenge was to detect situations when the road was flat and smooth, allowing fast driving.
Google is a good search engine which is working hard to become a "portal". Look at the top line of a Google search result page now: "You+ Search Images Maps Play YouTube (not "video" now) News Gmail Documents Calendar More". 9 of the 11 lead to Google in-house services.
Yahoo and AOL were "portals". That didn't work out too well. Google seems to be trying hard to emulate them.