In Joel's world, Apple would have never scrapped Mac OS Classic and launched OS X. And Microsoft would have never scrapped the old DOS underpinnings and started over with the NT kernel.
OS X is a hack on NeXT's OS, which is a hack on Mach, which is a CMU hack on BSD, which is a hack on UNIX 32V (AT&T's VAX UNIX), which is a hack on UNIX System 7 for the PDP-11.
There are original, new operating systems, but they're rare, IBM VM, QNX, AT&T Plan 9, and PenPoint come to mind. Windows NT really was a fresh start, but it wasn't backwards compatible with the DOS/Windows 3/Windows 95 sequence. Those were merged, painfully, in Windows NT 4, 2000 and XP. I can't think of any recent, successful examples.
There are lots of little single-board computers at low price points. It's not just Arduno and Basic Stamp machines any more. The BeagleBone, at $89, is available now. Runs Linux on an ARM chip.
The Raspberry PI $25 price is vaporware until they ship in quantity. Remember OLPC. They never made their $100 price point.
One of the important rules is "If the data subject's consent is to be given in the context of a written declaration
which also concerns another matter, the requirement to give consent must be
presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter." In other words, merely consenting to a long EULA that involves transference of data isn't enough. There has to be a separate checkbox to allow redistributing data. EULAs that allow one party to change the terms at any time won't qualify, either.
Here's what the PJM Control Center (which controls the electricity grid for the Northeastern US) has to say:
74015 Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning 01/23/2012
17:55 PJM - RTO As of 17:50 hours, an SMD warning of K-indices of 6-9 possible or greater is in effect beginning at 07:00 and will continue for the next 24-36 hours after arrival hours. PJM will issue any SMD events or extended warnings posted on the RCIS by MISO St. Paul via the PJM All-Call.
Additional Comments: NYISO has posted an RCIS message indicating expected intensity levels of K6 - K9, however, NOAA has only issued an alert of level K4. PJM will continue to monitor NOAA's alerts and update as necessary.
So PJM is aware of the problem, but they're not seeing any effects yet, and they haven't issued any contingency or emergency actions.
The K scale is semi-logarithmic, and it's strange to see such a huge variation in predicted values. They can handle up to a K-7 without much problem, and a K-8 with preparation. A K-9 may cause real trouble.
Here's PJM's training presentation on solar storms. The basic effect is that DC voltages are induced into transmission lines, which causes resistive heating in transformers (worst case, melting them, as happened in 1989). Where trouble occurs is affected by geology and ground conduction, and the trouble areas are known.
There are preventive steps that can be taken. It's an interesting read, although if you're totally unfamiliar with where electricity comes from, you may need to go to the PJM training site and read "PJM 101" first.
It's interesting. The language has a lot of features I've suggested for years, such as language support for single-ownership and reference-counted pointers. One of the two basic problems with C is that programming requires obsessing over who owns what, and the language provides zero help in dealing with that problem. (C++ papers the problem over with collection classes, but the mold always seeps through the wallpaper when a raw pointer is needed.)
The immutable-by-default concept and local scoping with "let" is a win. It moves the language in the direction of single-assignment programming, which has most of the advantages of functional programming without the heavy nesting.
The declaration syntax is better. With
name : type the syntax can be context-independent, which means you can reliably parse program text without reading include files to get the names of all types first. You can't parse C or C++ reliably without knowing what's a type name, which requires reading all the include files. This makes it much easier to write tools which take in source code and do useful analysis or cleanup.
Downsides include the typical negatives of the open source world - the name "Rust" is lame, and the Windows version has to be built by the end user.
There's no copyright issue for functional parts under US law. That's why there's a third-party auto parts industry.
I wish 3D printing was more useful. It's currently at "fast, good, cheap - pick one". The consumer-grade machines make little things from ABS, with visible row lines, slowly. The really good machines make working parts from titanium, cost millions, and take forever. The midrange machines cost about $50K and make OK plastic parts, slowly, with a high consumables cost.
Milling machines can do many of the same jobs. The main advantage of 3D printing is that the work-holding problem isn't so bad. Most of the headaches in machining come from having to hold the part on surfaces that aren't being machined in the currrent operation, then having to re-clamp the part and precisely align it.
Railroad signalling used to be all special purpose hardware. Not any more. Here's the "VitalNetâ Wayside
Message Server". Runs Red Hat Linux. Talks "Interoperable Train Control Messaging" protocol.
It gets worse. Here's a General DataComm unit for railroad signal control. "SC-ADT ports configured for Telnet/ SSH sessions, for bypass transport (port forwarding),
and to convert async PPP data to IP for transport over a cellular data network.
SC-ADT managed via Telnet, SSH, SNMP, FTP, TFTP and HTTP from the Dispatch Facility. "
TFTP? FTP? Telnet? What's wrong with this picture?
That was unexpected. But then, his automatic driving work had already moved to Google.
He turned around the Stanford CS department, which was embarrassingly bad for years. (I have a degree from there; I know.) It was being run by the mathematical logic people, who were trying to make AI work through predicate calculus and expert systems. That turned out to be a dead end, but the existing faculty didn't want to admit it. Thrun reoriented the department towards statistical methods for AI, and things got moving again.
"... we've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they arenâ(TM)t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away."
They're right. That applies to Google search results, too. For some popular searches (try "new movies" or "dvd player") the top of the page is full of Google ads, Google shopping, and Google categories. The right column is all ads. The first screen sometimes contains no actual search results at all.
So we fixed it. Our new Ad Limiter browser add-on limits Google (and Bing, Yahoo, etc.) search results to one ad per page.
Why one ad? All things in moderation. Sometimes an ad is useful, while a page of ads in your face is just annoying. Advertisers complain about ad blocking, and try to evade it. Limiting pages to one ad is a reasonable compromise.
Google's ad count per page has been steadily creeping up over the last few years. That's not good for users, advertisers, or Google. Remember what happened to Myspace, which reached new heights in ad clutter shortly before tanking.
Check it out and tell us what you think. Currently available for Firefox and Chrome.
(If you really want to block all ads, AdRater has a preferences option for that. You're in charge.)
US law on campaign contributions is very favorable to contributors, but there is a line beyond which a campaign contribution becomes bribery. Dodd probably just crossed it. The relevant Supreme Court decision reads "[A]ccepting a campaign contribution does not equal taking a bribe unless the payment is made in exchange for an explicit promise to perform or not perform an official act." It's one of those laws that requires proving criminal intent. Dodd's statement on national television probably provides that proof.
The conventional wisdom is that it's not possible to take down a major religion. The US, though, did it once - after WWII, the US Army took down State Shinto in Japan.
It's worth understanding how that was done. It took not only a military victory, but a determined large-scale occupation, with far more occupying troops than the US used in Iraq. It didn't prohibit worship. It pulled the plug on public funding of Shinto. It eliminated any political power wielded by religious figures. Separation of church and state was forcibly imposed on Japan. It worked.
A big part of the problem isn't working conditions. It's loss of supplier infrastructure. The article mentions "The screw factory is down the street". That's typical of major manufacturing centers. Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Trenton ("Trenton makes, the world takes") used to be like that - if you needed some part for your product, there was a local supplier.
The US is no longer set up like that. With good roads and reliable delivery, manufacturing of parts was consolidated. You can order screws from Amazon's "small parts" unit and resistors from Digi-Key, and get them in a day. But that's for prototyping. If you need to talk to the suppliers about a production item, they're all over the country, and often too big to talk to you about a custom item.
This matters for consumer electronics, where cost reduction involves using the minimal custom part for the job, not the off-the-shelf part which costs more.
The Internet has had an effect on this - companies don't answer the phone any more. Many don't answer e-mails. You can order stock items on line, and fill out forms.
Killing the music labels is quite feasible. They don't do much. They don't manufacture records - that's outsourced, and anybody can have a CD manufactured. They don't run the download systems - Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do that. They don't run recording studios - those are mostly independent, and anybody can book studio time. Their relationships with record stores (what record stores?) hardly matter any more.
The music labels have two remaining functions, one of which is attackable under antitrust law. They pay payola to radio stations for airplay and make deals with concert venues. Both have been the subject of antitrust investigations. They also do promotion. That's their real function.
The one remaining function of record labels is venture capital. They "sign" bands and put in startup capital. Others can do that. YCombinator could do that. Venture capital firms might fund a company to do that. Myspace briefly did that. That's where the labels are vulnerable.
"Own your own stuff" - Joan Jett, to new musicians.
Peter Vogel is co-founder of Plink, a Facebook Credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook members for dining and making purchases at their favorite restaurants and stores.
"Facebook credits" are just another gift card scheme. You can't cash them out. You can't invest them. You can't convert them to another currency. You can't transfer them to another individual. And Facebook takes a 30% cut off the top.
The only virtual currency that comes close to behaving like a currency is Linden Dollars, the monetary unit of Second Life. Those, you can transfer and convert.
Bitcoin had potential, but it turned into a pyramid scheme.
What he's saying, as a marine salvage expert (the term is "salvor", incidentally) is that there's no way to recover and repair the vessel that he can think of. This job has been given to Smit Salvage, which has a long list of successful salvage jobs. They already have 35 people on site and are getting ready to remove the fuel oil.
It's a tough business. The usual deal is "No cure, no pay", following a long-standing standard contract, the Lloyds Open Form. There are a long list of tricks in marine salvage, developed over the last century. Some require huge equipment, here for the USS Cole.
There are techniques for dealing with big ships.
There's underwater patching, giant pontoons, and filling interior spaces with inflatable bladders or even ping-pong balls. Worst case, the ship has to be cut up.
As salvage jobs go, this one is big, but not all that bad. It's in a good climate, near land, in the Mediterranean Sea. (Not the Arctic, not a war zone, not winter North Atlantic.) The ship is unoccupied, not on fire, and mostly above water. It's not blocking an important waterway, so there's no rush. Could be worse.
The first steps are underway - figuring out the buoyancy and stability situation, and preparing to remove the fuel oil. Then there will be a decision - refloat, or cut up in place?
After engineering something, then it has to be manufactured. This works better if the engineers are near the production facility. American industry used to know this.
Who in the US studies production engineering today? How many people here even know what it is?
Normally, everybody who hangs wires on poles pays a share of the pole cost. But Google negotiated a contract where they don't have to pay if the fiber optic cable is close to power lines, instead of further down where telephone and TV cable lines go. Working near power lines is dangerous and slow, and when it's done (which is rare) the work has to be done by people trained to work on power lines. Usually, nobody does that unless there's some spot where there's no good alternative. Google thought they could do a lot of it and save money. Wrong.
Here's a summary of the subject. Doing this without getting someone killed is not easy. There are major headaches associated with hanging fiber in the power line space. It may be necessary to cut off power on the power lines during installation. While the fiber is non conductive, the messenger wire which supports it is usually steel, so it cannot be pulled into place in the power line space while the power is on. Electricity customers hate having their power cut off for installation work.
Besides, for "last mile" connections it doesn't help much. Any electrical boxes or pole-mounted equipment have to be down in the communication space on the pole, and the drop to the house has to come from down there. Only for long runs without drops is there any win for hanging fiber in the power line space. On rural lines, where long runs are likely, there's usually not that much wire on the poles, so there's no reason to do that.
Somebody at Google had too cute an idea, and they've run into the real world.
It's time for some serious pushback. The computer industry needs to propose the "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", which would bring US copyright law into conformance with the WTO TRIPS agreement. The TRIPS agreement only requires WTO members to offer a 50 year copyright term. The US goes beyond that. It's time to cut back to 50 years from first publication. That would deal with most of the "orphan works" problem.
The MPAA wouldn't care all that much. Revenue from 50 year old movies is tiny. (Except for Disney, but even there, they're mostly pushing remakes now, not re-releases of their original Cinderella.) The RIAA would scream. All the 50s and 60s music would go public domain, and record companies are still making money from 60s recordings.
Also, the FTC should be directed to resume their antitrust inquiry into record company pricing and payola.
Commercial render farms have been around for years, long before "cloud" computing. Search for "render farm" to find some of them. They compete on price, so the pricing is good. The concurrency generally consists of running one frame on each machine, so the intercommunication during rendering is zero. Pixar was doing this by 1995, using a set of shell scripts called "Ringmaster" to push the data around. If the CEO of an animation house just discovered this, he's way behind.
Rendering isn't the bottleneck on cinema projects. People are. Look at the full credits at the end of any modern animated production, and watch as a thousand names scroll by. There's an army of people drawing background objects, landscapes, crowds, and fine detail. That's where the cost goes.
It hasn't improved much in the last decade, either. A decade ago I knew a director who'd done some feature films with mixed animation/live action, and he was hoping the technology would get the cost down, so he could do a feature for
$20 million instead of $80 million. A decade later, budgets for A pictures are up, not down. "Tangled" came in at $260 million. Which is why what gets green-lighted is usually a known franchise.
If you're willing to drop to video game levels of quality, animation can be really cheap. See Next Media Animation. Fastest production house in the world.
The short and simple of it is that there is a cash grab by MLK's heirs based in copyright law.
This is what happens when someone is a major public figure, and their kids are nobodies. The heirs have been trying to monetize King's legacy. The heirs have a corporation ("King, Inc.") to manage the assets, and have used Intellectual Property Management, Inc. to handle licensing deals. The head of the Elvis Presley operation, who'd been consulted by King's heirs on marketing strategy, said
"There's a distinct difference in the role Martin Luther King played in society and Elvis the entertainer. But the basic mechanisms of protecting, guarding and nurturing the value of the name, image and likeness are the same.":
The heirs have been fighting over the assets for years. There's a long litigation record. The whole thing is embarrassing.
Slashdot Mirror
In Joel's world, Apple would have never scrapped Mac OS Classic and launched OS X. And Microsoft would have never scrapped the old DOS underpinnings and started over with the NT kernel.
OS X is a hack on NeXT's OS, which is a hack on Mach, which is a CMU hack on BSD, which is a hack on UNIX 32V (AT&T's VAX UNIX), which is a hack on UNIX System 7 for the PDP-11.
There are original, new operating systems, but they're rare, IBM VM, QNX, AT&T Plan 9, and PenPoint come to mind. Windows NT really was a fresh start, but it wasn't backwards compatible with the DOS/Windows 3/Windows 95 sequence. Those were merged, painfully, in Windows NT 4, 2000 and XP. I can't think of any recent, successful examples.
There are lots of little single-board computers at low price points. It's not just Arduno and Basic Stamp machines any more. The BeagleBone, at $89, is available now. Runs Linux on an ARM chip.
The Raspberry PI $25 price is vaporware until they ship in quantity. Remember OLPC. They never made their $100 price point.
One of the important rules is "If the data subject's consent is to be given in the context of a written declaration which also concerns another matter, the requirement to give consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter." In other words, merely consenting to a long EULA that involves transference of data isn't enough. There has to be a separate checkbox to allow redistributing data. EULAs that allow one party to change the terms at any time won't qualify, either.
Here's what the PJM Control Center (which controls the electricity grid for the Northeastern US) has to say:
74015 Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning 01/23/2012
17:55 PJM - RTO As of 17:50 hours, an SMD warning of K-indices of 6-9 possible or greater is in effect beginning at 07:00 and will continue for the next 24-36 hours after arrival hours. PJM will issue any SMD events or extended warnings posted on the RCIS by MISO St. Paul via the PJM All-Call.
Additional Comments: NYISO has posted an RCIS message indicating expected intensity levels of K6 - K9, however, NOAA has only issued an alert of level K4. PJM will continue to monitor NOAA's alerts and update as necessary.
So PJM is aware of the problem, but they're not seeing any effects yet, and they haven't issued any contingency or emergency actions. The K scale is semi-logarithmic, and it's strange to see such a huge variation in predicted values. They can handle up to a K-7 without much problem, and a K-8 with preparation. A K-9 may cause real trouble.
Here's PJM's training presentation on solar storms. The basic effect is that DC voltages are induced into transmission lines, which causes resistive heating in transformers (worst case, melting them, as happened in 1989). Where trouble occurs is affected by geology and ground conduction, and the trouble areas are known. There are preventive steps that can be taken. It's an interesting read, although if you're totally unfamiliar with where electricity comes from, you may need to go to the PJM training site and read "PJM 101" first.
It's interesting. The language has a lot of features I've suggested for years, such as language support for single-ownership and reference-counted pointers. One of the two basic problems with C is that programming requires obsessing over who owns what, and the language provides zero help in dealing with that problem. (C++ papers the problem over with collection classes, but the mold always seeps through the wallpaper when a raw pointer is needed.)
The immutable-by-default concept and local scoping with "let" is a win. It moves the language in the direction of single-assignment programming, which has most of the advantages of functional programming without the heavy nesting.
The declaration syntax is better. With name : type the syntax can be context-independent, which means you can reliably parse program text without reading include files to get the names of all types first. You can't parse C or C++ reliably without knowing what's a type name, which requires reading all the include files. This makes it much easier to write tools which take in source code and do useful analysis or cleanup.
Downsides include the typical negatives of the open source world - the name "Rust" is lame, and the Windows version has to be built by the end user.
There's no copyright issue for functional parts under US law. That's why there's a third-party auto parts industry.
I wish 3D printing was more useful. It's currently at "fast, good, cheap - pick one". The consumer-grade machines make little things from ABS, with visible row lines, slowly. The really good machines make working parts from titanium, cost millions, and take forever. The midrange machines cost about $50K and make OK plastic parts, slowly, with a high consumables cost.
Milling machines can do many of the same jobs. The main advantage of 3D printing is that the work-holding problem isn't so bad. Most of the headaches in machining come from having to hold the part on surfaces that aren't being machined in the currrent operation, then having to re-clamp the part and precisely align it.
Railroad signalling used to be all special purpose hardware. Not any more. Here's the "VitalNetâ Wayside Message Server". Runs Red Hat Linux. Talks "Interoperable Train Control Messaging" protocol.
It gets worse. Here's a General DataComm unit for railroad signal control. "SC-ADT ports configured for Telnet/ SSH sessions, for bypass transport (port forwarding), and to convert async PPP data to IP for transport over a cellular data network. SC-ADT managed via Telnet, SSH, SNMP, FTP, TFTP and HTTP from the Dispatch Facility. "
TFTP? FTP? Telnet? What's wrong with this picture?
There's even a hobbyist program for listening in on signal control traffic, some of which is passed around on unencrypted radio links.
Actually, I got a MS from Stanford. The problem was the expert system guys, Feigenbaum and company. They were claiming that expert systems would yield strong AI Real Soon Now. Feigenbaum's 1983 book "The Fifth Generation" shows that optimism at its height. It did not end well. The next decade is referred to as the "AI Winter".
That was unexpected. But then, his automatic driving work had already moved to Google.
He turned around the Stanford CS department, which was embarrassingly bad for years. (I have a degree from there; I know.) It was being run by the mathematical logic people, who were trying to make AI work through predicate calculus and expert systems. That turned out to be a dead end, but the existing faculty didn't want to admit it. Thrun reoriented the department towards statistical methods for AI, and things got moving again.
From the article:
"... we've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they arenâ(TM)t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away."
They're right. That applies to Google search results, too. For some popular searches (try "new movies" or "dvd player") the top of the page is full of Google ads, Google shopping, and Google categories. The right column is all ads. The first screen sometimes contains no actual search results at all.
So we fixed it. Our new Ad Limiter browser add-on limits Google (and Bing, Yahoo, etc.) search results to one ad per page.
Why one ad? All things in moderation. Sometimes an ad is useful, while a page of ads in your face is just annoying. Advertisers complain about ad blocking, and try to evade it. Limiting pages to one ad is a reasonable compromise.
Google's ad count per page has been steadily creeping up over the last few years. That's not good for users, advertisers, or Google. Remember what happened to Myspace, which reached new heights in ad clutter shortly before tanking.
Check it out and tell us what you think. Currently available for Firefox and Chrome.
(If you really want to block all ads, AdRater has a preferences option for that. You're in charge.)
US law on campaign contributions is very favorable to contributors, but there is a line beyond which a campaign contribution becomes bribery. Dodd probably just crossed it. The relevant Supreme Court decision reads "[A]ccepting a campaign contribution does not equal taking a bribe unless the payment is made in exchange for an explicit promise to perform or not perform an official act." It's one of those laws that requires proving criminal intent. Dodd's statement on national television probably provides that proof.
The conventional wisdom is that it's not possible to take down a major religion. The US, though, did it once - after WWII, the US Army took down State Shinto in Japan.
It's worth understanding how that was done. It took not only a military victory, but a determined large-scale occupation, with far more occupying troops than the US used in Iraq. It didn't prohibit worship. It pulled the plug on public funding of Shinto. It eliminated any political power wielded by religious figures. Separation of church and state was forcibly imposed on Japan. It worked.
How many of you have heard of the working oil fields underneath Los Angeles?
LA used to be famous for that. (Look at 03:00) There were oil rigs all over town. Beverly Hills High School still has a rig. It brings in about $1 million a year. There used to be hundreds of pumps between LAX and Venice Beach.
The LA basin is mostly pumped out now, and most pumps have been removed. Most of the remaining ones are concealed.
A big part of the problem isn't working conditions. It's loss of supplier infrastructure. The article mentions "The screw factory is down the street". That's typical of major manufacturing centers. Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Trenton ("Trenton makes, the world takes") used to be like that - if you needed some part for your product, there was a local supplier.
The US is no longer set up like that. With good roads and reliable delivery, manufacturing of parts was consolidated. You can order screws from Amazon's "small parts" unit and resistors from Digi-Key, and get them in a day. But that's for prototyping. If you need to talk to the suppliers about a production item, they're all over the country, and often too big to talk to you about a custom item. This matters for consumer electronics, where cost reduction involves using the minimal custom part for the job, not the off-the-shelf part which costs more.
The Internet has had an effect on this - companies don't answer the phone any more. Many don't answer e-mails. You can order stock items on line, and fill out forms.
Killing the music labels is quite feasible. They don't do much. They don't manufacture records - that's outsourced, and anybody can have a CD manufactured. They don't run the download systems - Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do that. They don't run recording studios - those are mostly independent, and anybody can book studio time. Their relationships with record stores (what record stores?) hardly matter any more.
The music labels have two remaining functions, one of which is attackable under antitrust law. They pay payola to radio stations for airplay and make deals with concert venues. Both have been the subject of antitrust investigations. They also do promotion. That's their real function.
The one remaining function of record labels is venture capital. They "sign" bands and put in startup capital. Others can do that. YCombinator could do that. Venture capital firms might fund a company to do that. Myspace briefly did that. That's where the labels are vulnerable.
"Own your own stuff" - Joan Jett, to new musicians.
UrchinTracker let advertisers track what users were doing, but didn't let Google track them. So it had to go. Big Brother doesn't like competition.
From the article:
Peter Vogel is co-founder of Plink, a Facebook Credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook members for dining and making purchases at their favorite restaurants and stores.
"Facebook credits" are just another gift card scheme. You can't cash them out. You can't invest them. You can't convert them to another currency. You can't transfer them to another individual. And Facebook takes a 30% cut off the top.
The only virtual currency that comes close to behaving like a currency is Linden Dollars, the monetary unit of Second Life. Those, you can transfer and convert.
Bitcoin had potential, but it turned into a pyramid scheme.
What he's saying, as a marine salvage expert (the term is "salvor", incidentally) is that there's no way to recover and repair the vessel that he can think of. This job has been given to Smit Salvage, which has a long list of successful salvage jobs. They already have 35 people on site and are getting ready to remove the fuel oil.
It's a tough business. The usual deal is "No cure, no pay", following a long-standing standard contract, the Lloyds Open Form. There are a long list of tricks in marine salvage, developed over the last century. Some require huge equipment, here for the USS Cole.
There are techniques for dealing with big ships. There's underwater patching, giant pontoons, and filling interior spaces with inflatable bladders or even ping-pong balls. Worst case, the ship has to be cut up.
As salvage jobs go, this one is big, but not all that bad. It's in a good climate, near land, in the Mediterranean Sea. (Not the Arctic, not a war zone, not winter North Atlantic.) The ship is unoccupied, not on fire, and mostly above water. It's not blocking an important waterway, so there's no rush. Could be worse.
The first steps are underway - figuring out the buoyancy and stability situation, and preparing to remove the fuel oil. Then there will be a decision - refloat, or cut up in place?
Youtube does a fairly impressive job of detecting that automatically.
Only for parties who cut a deal with Google. And it doesn't work all that well.
After engineering something, then it has to be manufactured. This works better if the engineers are near the production facility. American industry used to know this.
Who in the US studies production engineering today? How many people here even know what it is?
Youtube may be next. Once they started putting ads on pirated content, they became an active participant.
Normally, everybody who hangs wires on poles pays a share of the pole cost. But Google negotiated a contract where they don't have to pay if the fiber optic cable is close to power lines, instead of further down where telephone and TV cable lines go. Working near power lines is dangerous and slow, and when it's done (which is rare) the work has to be done by people trained to work on power lines. Usually, nobody does that unless there's some spot where there's no good alternative. Google thought they could do a lot of it and save money. Wrong.
Here's a summary of the subject. Doing this without getting someone killed is not easy. There are major headaches associated with hanging fiber in the power line space. It may be necessary to cut off power on the power lines during installation. While the fiber is non conductive, the messenger wire which supports it is usually steel, so it cannot be pulled into place in the power line space while the power is on. Electricity customers hate having their power cut off for installation work.
Besides, for "last mile" connections it doesn't help much. Any electrical boxes or pole-mounted equipment have to be down in the communication space on the pole, and the drop to the house has to come from down there. Only for long runs without drops is there any win for hanging fiber in the power line space. On rural lines, where long runs are likely, there's usually not that much wire on the poles, so there's no reason to do that.
Somebody at Google had too cute an idea, and they've run into the real world.
It's time for some serious pushback. The computer industry needs to propose the "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", which would bring US copyright law into conformance with the WTO TRIPS agreement. The TRIPS agreement only requires WTO members to offer a 50 year copyright term. The US goes beyond that. It's time to cut back to 50 years from first publication. That would deal with most of the "orphan works" problem.
The MPAA wouldn't care all that much. Revenue from 50 year old movies is tiny. (Except for Disney, but even there, they're mostly pushing remakes now, not re-releases of their original Cinderella.) The RIAA would scream. All the 50s and 60s music would go public domain, and record companies are still making money from 60s recordings.
Also, the FTC should be directed to resume their antitrust inquiry into record company pricing and payola.
Commercial render farms have been around for years, long before "cloud" computing. Search for "render farm" to find some of them. They compete on price, so the pricing is good. The concurrency generally consists of running one frame on each machine, so the intercommunication during rendering is zero. Pixar was doing this by 1995, using a set of shell scripts called "Ringmaster" to push the data around. If the CEO of an animation house just discovered this, he's way behind.
Rendering isn't the bottleneck on cinema projects. People are. Look at the full credits at the end of any modern animated production, and watch as a thousand names scroll by. There's an army of people drawing background objects, landscapes, crowds, and fine detail. That's where the cost goes.
It hasn't improved much in the last decade, either. A decade ago I knew a director who'd done some feature films with mixed animation/live action, and he was hoping the technology would get the cost down, so he could do a feature for $20 million instead of $80 million. A decade later, budgets for A pictures are up, not down. "Tangled" came in at $260 million. Which is why what gets green-lighted is usually a known franchise.
If you're willing to drop to video game levels of quality, animation can be really cheap. See Next Media Animation. Fastest production house in the world.
The short and simple of it is that there is a cash grab by MLK's heirs based in copyright law.
This is what happens when someone is a major public figure, and their kids are nobodies. The heirs have been trying to monetize King's legacy. The heirs have a corporation ("King, Inc.") to manage the assets, and have used Intellectual Property Management, Inc. to handle licensing deals. The head of the Elvis Presley operation, who'd been consulted by King's heirs on marketing strategy, said "There's a distinct difference in the role Martin Luther King played in society and Elvis the entertainer. But the basic mechanisms of protecting, guarding and nurturing the value of the name, image and likeness are the same.":
The heirs have been fighting over the assets for years. There's a long litigation record. The whole thing is embarrassing.