Some major APIs have slowly become less open. Google once offered a SOAP search API. Then they backed down to their "AJAX API", which could only be used with Google display widgets. Even that's now being shut down. All that's left is "Google Custom Search", which does not allow a general web search.
Twitter once encouraged third party Twitter clients. They no longer do, and they have an authentication system that validates both app and user, so they can yank the credentials of any app they don't like.
The Yahoo search API used to be free, then went to a pay system.
The lesson from this is, don't use an external service API for anything important unless you have a contractual agreement that guarantees that it will stay around.
Apple might do better to just automate the manufacturing process. Putting together things like the Sony Walkman and cell phones has been automated by others for years. Apple makes so many identical units and has so few product variants that they're the classic case for hard automation. Most of the other cell phone makers have far more product variants.
Apple, though, may no longer have in-house manufacturing expertise. They also may be out of touch with their supply chain
Vaccine refusal for standard childhood vaccines could be considered child neglect.
There are parents who don't want their children to have the chicken pox vaccine and then expose them to chicken pox. That's child abuse. The vaccine is far lower risk than actually getting the disease.
I always liked the comment from a Canadian official asked about hot water discharge from a nuclear plant melting river ice: "Up here, we view heat as a resource".
Tradehill was probably the best-run Bitcoin exchange. They didn't steal customer funds, like some of the other defunct Bitcoin services. They didn't go down much. They didn't have a monthly crisis like Mt. Gox. (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange. Really.) If Tradehill does in fact return all customer funds, at least they shut down honestly.
A basic problem with Bitcoin is that the ability to irrevocably transfer funds to anonymous parties is the scammer's dream. Bitcoin is thus a scammer magnet. Just about every known financial scam was replicated in the tiny Bitcoin world, from fake banks to fake stock exchanges to Ponzi schemes.
Yeah, right. Arc fault circuit interrupters have been required in new construction the US since 2005. These circuit breakers detect not just current leakage to ground like a GFCI, but noisy current draw that indicates arcing. No need for an Internet connection.
The real threat to kids is the Catholic Church. They have a whole system designed to put repressed gay guys in contact with little kids, and a hierarchy willing to help cover up the results and pay for the damages. As of 2004, the Catholic Church itself had reports of 10,667 victims of clergy sexual abuse. 4% of US priests were involved.
We need surveillance cams in churches, not monitoring of the Internet.
The Mozilla people have this strange desire to turn the browser into an operating system. Unfortunately, they're not very good at it. Firefox is still single thread, and the effort to run add-ons in separate processes, a basic part of being an operating system. (the "Electrolysis" project) has been indefinitely postponed.
XUL seems to be more trouble than it's worth. As someone who has developed add-ons for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I can say that Google Chrome works far better from the add-on standpoint.
So trying to turn Gecko into an OS might not work out well. Owning the original Netscape code base may not be a win here.
The big news is that the $25 board won't ship until Q3 2012, if then. You have to buy the "educational version", with documentation and a case, and maybe a cable or two.
Maybe they can get Monster Cable to bundle the board with their $180 HDMI cable.
He's railing aginst what, in the industry, is called a "track ride". The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way. At one time, that was due to technical limitations; building a big free-play world was out of reach. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. Good large-scale free-play worlds like the GTA series have been very successful even as single user games.
MMORPG games are big open worlds by necessity.
To some extent track rides are coming back, because of the tiny screens on mobile. Angry Birds is a track ride.
Big, open worlds are expensive to build, because a big, interesting world has to be built and populated. Track rides can be cheaper, because there's no need to build the parts of the world that aren't on the track. This may be more about economics than story.
Most of the companies they're funding aren't in Detroit. And they mostly seem to be social media phone apps. No manufacturing, automotive, or heavy industrial startups.
(We need to get past "social media" and do something else.)
Suppose commercial web tracking was absolutely prohibited unless you were explicitly using a single company's site. Third party ads could not be personalized. What would the Web look like?
Many of the useful sites on the Internet are actual stores, from Amazon to Grainger to Digi-Key. Their revenue doesn't come from advertising. It comes from selling real stuff. They'd barely notice.
There are major paid services like Netflix. They provide a service for money. No problem there.
Google was profitable before they had ad personalization. Search ads don't need to be "personalized" - the user tells you what they're looking for, so it's straightforward to present relevant ads. Running a search engine isn't that expensive. AltaVista was a demo for DEC Alpha computers, not a business. Cuil was a flop, but demonstrated that you could do a search engine for about $25 million. Blekko and DuckDuckGo are funded at about that level.
The only business that desperately needs the anal-probe level of intrusive personal monitoring is Facebook.
Santorum's problem is not that Dan Savage's page has too high a ranking. It's that "ricksantorum.com" has too low a ranking.
They're quite close. Both have PageRank of 6. Both have about 1500 inbound links. Both have Alexa traffic ranks around 35,000. A little bit more press and Santorum's own site should move up.
NASA still has a big data center in Slidell, Louisiana. They're hiring. With the mainframes gone, one would expect they'd close down Slidell, but no. Instead, they're building a big museum and PR center there.
NASA seems to spend money at a relatively constant rate, independent of whether they're flying anything.
Open protocol**
** Contact us for further information
Software SDK**
** Contact us for further information
In other words, the protocol it uses is proprietary.
This has some robotics potential. It's supposed to support cameras, servo outputs,4 digital inputs, and 4 digital outputs, and 1 analog voltage input, in a compact package.
Right. Mod parent up. The low point in telco CO space needs came after 5ESS replaced #5 crossbar.
Telephony systems today have more than switchgear. Many of the newer servers require server farms. You probably get a hosting and mail account with your DSL line. If a telco offers video, there's probably local caching. Telcos are now in the colocation business - Akamai often has caching servers in a central office. Netflix (which is 22% of Internet traffic and climbing) has caching servers, and the telco itself will have them as well.
I deeply desire to have a Symbolics machine of my own some dayâ"or at least a version of OpenGenera that boots properly.
At one time, in the early 1980s, having a Symbolics 3600, a single-user computer the size of a refrigerator, was something of a corporate status symbol. Interest declined after people discovered that 1) expert system weren't very useful, 2) UNIX workstations could do a better job running LISP, and 3) Symbolics hardware reliability was very poor.
Slashdot Mirror
Some major APIs have slowly become less open. Google once offered a SOAP search API. Then they backed down to their "AJAX API", which could only be used with Google display widgets. Even that's now being shut down. All that's left is "Google Custom Search", which does not allow a general web search.
Twitter once encouraged third party Twitter clients. They no longer do, and they have an authentication system that validates both app and user, so they can yank the credentials of any app they don't like.
The Yahoo search API used to be free, then went to a pay system.
The lesson from this is, don't use an external service API for anything important unless you have a contractual agreement that guarantees that it will stay around.
If "cloning" open-source hardware is considered "bad", what's the point of open-source hardware?
Apple might do better to just automate the manufacturing process. Putting together things like the Sony Walkman and cell phones has been automated by others for years. Apple makes so many identical units and has so few product variants that they're the classic case for hard automation. Most of the other cell phone makers have far more product variants.
Apple, though, may no longer have in-house manufacturing expertise. They also may be out of touch with their supply chain
You should be able to ask for a print of your scan to take with you. Like roller coasters.
At least it's a break for the watchers. A job where you look at body outlines of mostly fat people all day must be very depressing.
Vaccine refusal for standard childhood vaccines could be considered child neglect.
There are parents who don't want their children to have the chicken pox vaccine and then expose them to chicken pox. That's child abuse. The vaccine is far lower risk than actually getting the disease.
I always liked the comment from a Canadian official asked about hot water discharge from a nuclear plant melting river ice: "Up here, we view heat as a resource".
A phone plan that filters all ads at the central office end would cut way down on over-the-air bandwidth.
Tradehill was probably the best-run Bitcoin exchange. They didn't steal customer funds, like some of the other defunct Bitcoin services. They didn't go down much. They didn't have a monthly crisis like Mt. Gox. (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange. Really.) If Tradehill does in fact return all customer funds, at least they shut down honestly.
A basic problem with Bitcoin is that the ability to irrevocably transfer funds to anonymous parties is the scammer's dream. Bitcoin is thus a scammer magnet. Just about every known financial scam was replicated in the tiny Bitcoin world, from fake banks to fake stock exchanges to Ponzi schemes.
the breaker tripped when they unplugged the vacuum without first turning it off.
That's what's supposed to happen. Get the cleaning service a clue.
Yeah, right. Arc fault circuit interrupters have been required in new construction the US since 2005. These circuit breakers detect not just current leakage to ground like a GFCI, but noisy current draw that indicates arcing. No need for an Internet connection.
The real threat to kids is the Catholic Church. They have a whole system designed to put repressed gay guys in contact with little kids, and a hierarchy willing to help cover up the results and pay for the damages. As of 2004, the Catholic Church itself had reports of 10,667 victims of clergy sexual abuse. 4% of US priests were involved.
We need surveillance cams in churches, not monitoring of the Internet.
The Mozilla people have this strange desire to turn the browser into an operating system. Unfortunately, they're not very good at it. Firefox is still single thread, and the effort to run add-ons in separate processes, a basic part of being an operating system. (the "Electrolysis" project) has been indefinitely postponed. XUL seems to be more trouble than it's worth. As someone who has developed add-ons for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I can say that Google Chrome works far better from the add-on standpoint.
So trying to turn Gecko into an OS might not work out well. Owning the original Netscape code base may not be a win here.
It's like owning the copyright in information about you, even if someone else collected it.
The big news is that the $25 board won't ship until Q3 2012, if then. You have to buy the "educational version", with documentation and a case, and maybe a cable or two.
Maybe they can get Monster Cable to bundle the board with their $180 HDMI cable.
This is a Catholic school system in Ontario. Maybe they're terrified some pedophile priest will be recorded on video and streamed to the Internet. Ontario Catholic schools are home to the "largest case of non-residential school sex abuse by a Roman Catholic priest in North America".
Apple will make the new model white, or grey, or matte black, or give it a chrome bezel, or something.
He's railing aginst what, in the industry, is called a "track ride". The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way. At one time, that was due to technical limitations; building a big free-play world was out of reach. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. Good large-scale free-play worlds like the GTA series have been very successful even as single user games. MMORPG games are big open worlds by necessity.
To some extent track rides are coming back, because of the tiny screens on mobile. Angry Birds is a track ride.
Big, open worlds are expensive to build, because a big, interesting world has to be built and populated. Track rides can be cheaper, because there's no need to build the parts of the world that aren't on the track. This may be more about economics than story.
Most of the companies they're funding aren't in Detroit. And they mostly seem to be social media phone apps. No manufacturing, automotive, or heavy industrial startups.
(We need to get past "social media" and do something else.)
Suppose commercial web tracking was absolutely prohibited unless you were explicitly using a single company's site. Third party ads could not be personalized. What would the Web look like?
Many of the useful sites on the Internet are actual stores, from Amazon to Grainger to Digi-Key. Their revenue doesn't come from advertising. It comes from selling real stuff. They'd barely notice. There are major paid services like Netflix. They provide a service for money. No problem there.
Google was profitable before they had ad personalization. Search ads don't need to be "personalized" - the user tells you what they're looking for, so it's straightforward to present relevant ads. Running a search engine isn't that expensive. AltaVista was a demo for DEC Alpha computers, not a business. Cuil was a flop, but demonstrated that you could do a search engine for about $25 million. Blekko and DuckDuckGo are funded at about that level.
The only business that desperately needs the anal-probe level of intrusive personal monitoring is Facebook.
Santorum's problem is not that Dan Savage's page has too high a ranking. It's that "ricksantorum.com" has too low a ranking.
They're quite close. Both have PageRank of 6. Both have about 1500 inbound links. Both have Alexa traffic ranks around 35,000. A little bit more press and Santorum's own site should move up.
Algorithms are DISCOVERED, not invented.
Er, no.
NASA still has a big data center in Slidell, Louisiana. They're hiring. With the mainframes gone, one would expect they'd close down Slidell, but no. Instead, they're building a big museum and PR center there.
NASA seems to spend money at a relatively constant rate, independent of whether they're flying anything.
Open protocol**
** Contact us for further information
Software SDK**
** Contact us for further information
In other words, the protocol it uses is proprietary.
This has some robotics potential. It's supposed to support cameras, servo outputs,4 digital inputs, and 4 digital outputs, and 1 analog voltage input, in a compact package.
Right. Mod parent up. The low point in telco CO space needs came after 5ESS replaced #5 crossbar.
Telephony systems today have more than switchgear. Many of the newer servers require server farms. You probably get a hosting and mail account with your DSL line. If a telco offers video, there's probably local caching. Telcos are now in the colocation business - Akamai often has caching servers in a central office. Netflix (which is 22% of Internet traffic and climbing) has caching servers, and the telco itself will have them as well.
I deeply desire to have a Symbolics machine of my own some dayâ"or at least a version of OpenGenera that boots properly.
At one time, in the early 1980s, having a Symbolics 3600, a single-user computer the size of a refrigerator, was something of a corporate status symbol. Interest declined after people discovered that 1) expert system weren't very useful, 2) UNIX workstations could do a better job running LISP, and 3) Symbolics hardware reliability was very poor.