When Google offered me a job, I could not believe how little they wanted to pay me. 67% of what I was making at a megabank
Er, you could probably replace "Google" in that sentence with any company. You're comparing your salary to one at a fucking bank, companies so famous for absurd compensation packages that it triggered street protests....
Street protests were over compensation of executives. I never heard any suggestion that the lower level workers were overpaid.
Fusion reactors capable of producing net power are big, or seem to be being as we haven't actually built one yet.
However, if you just want to produce tritium for a boosted fission bomb, you don't need to generate net power. A farnsworth fusor will do and they are small and inconspicuous.
I know, one more USB connector to have an adaptor for... But this is how the mini/micro and even old USB 'A' should have been from the beginning.
There's nothing worse than having to blind mate USB, and having to flip it four bloody times before it works. (except maybe blind mating 'F' connectors, or sometimes D sub..)
I can think of a few things that are worse, including:
1) Arriving at your destination needing to charge your phone and finding that, although you have the charger and the phone, you forgot the adapter. 2) Having to mate and secure two connections instead of just one. 3) Unplugging phone cable from adapter leaving converter behind. This already happens with car adapters where you can easily walk off with the cable and phone, leaving the 12V adapter behind. 4) Arriving at far off destination to find that you have a new style power adapter (for another device) but old style microusb on your phone with no converter and you may not even be able to get a converter at any price because everyone assumes that people migrate old to new and not the other way.
but throwing a ball is use full like all other? if useless means you can earn a living doing it, is it still useless?
Even if you don't manage to make money at it, throwing a real ball around is a good way to stay in shape which is important for overall health. Throwing a virtual ball? Not so much and you are even more likely to need a day job which also will not give you the exercise that you need to stay healthy.
But the last I knew The Doctor preferred/will prefer to use cell phones. It probably isn't important the device use Skype. It may not even be important that the device be turned on.
Here's an open FPGA design: Put a buttload of OR gates in parallel. Follow them with a buttload of AND gates
There just isn't that much design in a basic FPGA to open up, not that I can see.
Said the blind man.. What you describe is the end user description of a PAL. FPGA's are completely different and PALs are not actually designed that way either. It is just the end user description, much like knowing the x86 instruction set doesn't mean you know how to design a modern x86 processor.
An Altera or Xillinx FPGA is predominately a sea of small SRAM's but there are also many many muxes, complicated interconnects, configurable special function blocks (like multiply/accumulators, IO cells, and Ethernet interfaces). There is also a great deal of logic just to efficiently move configuration bitstreams into the chip. The complexity per unit area is less than a typical ASIC, which makes FPGA's good subjects for bringing up on new process flows but it is definitely not trivial work. Much is low level and structural rather than logical but that doesn't make it easy.
That said, an open FPGA design would be pretty useless. The hardest part is that low level process dependent optimization and that is just not repeatable without an army of engineers, expensive closed source tools, and access to bleeding edge foundries.
What people want, though, isn't to be able to make their own FPGA's. They just want an FPGA that is fully documented. Xilinx and Altera like to keep certain details secret. You have to use their tools because they won't tell you want you need to write your own and, even if you figure it out, they will sue you.
The Dumbarton (the closest route from PA) jams up. 237/880 (The route from further South on Peninsula and the South Bay) is a parking lot. It is simply not possible for a single location to be an easy drive from both Palo Alto and Fremont. If Tesla wants their employees meaningfully closer to the factory, they are going to have to put them on the factory's side of the Bay. I.e., Fremont or Union City.
I love my Tivo, but - I also owned a VCR for the twenty years prior to my first Tivo. Time shifting has been around for 40+ years now.
True, but limited device intelligence and limited tape capacity made time shifting an exception rather than the rule. Most VCR owners, even those who used the time shifting feature, still watched most of their TV programs at the time that they aired.
With Tivo and other DVRs time-shifting becomes the norm and real-time an exception generally to be avoided.
Did you check to see if any of the these phones were still available?
I searched for sliders with displays of 960x540 and up, i.e., anything with more more pixels that my nearly 4 year old Mytouch 4G. There were four hits: all of them 960x540 and all of them discontinued.
I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.
A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who want keyboards. However, they will buy a new phone anyway, even if there is nothing available with a keyboard so the manufacturers have little incentive to cater to them. The same is true for small smart phones. Almost certainly more people want a small phone than want a slide out keyboard and they still get ignored. Manufacturers get more marketing buzz by pumping out giant keyboardless phones frequently than they would if they slowed down the upgrade cycle to spread their development efforts across niches.
When people stop buying new phones because manufacturers are not giving them what they want then maybe we will see some changes. My phone is 3.5 years old because I can't find a suitable (i.e., modern and not huge) replacement but I don't think there are enough people like me yet to catch the attention of the manufacturers.
Would an advanced race actually do something so illogical?
By "advanced", I assume the summary meant "technologically advanced". How would any civilization reach a high level of technology without going through industrialization? It's not like anyone enjoys living downwind of a coal plant, but the messier forms of energy production are convenient, cheap, and don't require any advanced materials or science. Try to imagine an alternate history where we emerged from the industrial revolution with effective, sustainable fusion and solar power without ever polluting the planet.
The thing is, fossil fuels run out rather quickly on the cosmic scale. A few centuries and the consequences of pollution become apparent quickly too. A civilization must quickly move to something cleaner or it dies. Either way, the pollution stops. What are the odds that our telescopes will find a planet inhabited by a civilization that just happens to be going through a (likely) one-time few century window of time?
If they exist at all, the average of civilization out there is probably tens to hundreds of million years old. It is unthinkable that a civilization that old would still be producing significant pollution (at least of a type that we are familiar). Maybe we should be looking for efforts to dump excessive waste heat.
This is why it is infrurriating when low importance sites require high complexity passwords. They create unnecessary exposure for the limited pool of high complexity passwords I can remember. Meanwhile, the bank will take anything.
Perhaps not creepy but, by itself, not foolproof. I have a tendency toward Bradycardia (slow heart-rate). My normal is in the 50's and at times will slow even down to the mid-40's while fully alert and functional. I don't know whether the system in mind incudes other input in order to determine impairment - the article doesn't really say - but heart-rate alone would be far from reliable.
To be universally useful, I think that a "fatigue detector" needs more than just one parameter.
Lane departure should be a good combination. Calibration for the driver would be helpful, too because you are right, heart rate varies significantly from person to person. Conditioned athletes often have resting heart rates below 50, even below 40. On the other hand, a couch potato may start wavering at 80.
Suuntu Ambit2 is a 100m water resistant GPS sport watch that you can run apps on to custom process the data. It doesn't do things that smart phones do but it does not require a smart phone to function and it operates in environments where smart phones can't. It is heavy, expensive, and there are Linux compatibility issues. That is why I don't own one yet. But it is the right direction.
The results, surprisingly, are mixed: while some, such as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, have gone on to far greater success, it doesn't always work out that way
This might be a surprise to people who know nothing about startups or business but it should not be to anyone else. Here's the reality: Startups often fail. In fact, the overwhelming majority of startups fail. Being an "auteur" may improve the odds of a soft landing significantly but it does not remotely guarantee success because there is no way to guarantee success.
The reasons for failure are many including poor business skills (there is more to running a company than running a project) and unconstrained egos. The usual bad luck and mayhem that sink projects can also sink companies that only have one project.
You you really want them to average in tech workers without degrees, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg?
Why not? High income dropouts are so few that they make little difference in the result, especially if you do your statistics right and report the median rather than arithmetic mean.
Why are you comparing a specialty dive watch to a smart watch.
It would be like me saying I would buy a Dive watch, but there don't have a phone and I can check my airline reservation from one.
Because anything less than a dive watch is a device that I have to be careful with around water. It isn't about the dive functions (made largely obsolete in recent years by wrist mounted dive computers) and there is very little "Special" about a dive watch. It is just an exceptionally robust watch. This is the kind of watch that people who wear watches for function tend to wear, as opposed to those where watches are jewelry.
I wear a shock resistant dive watch. Quite unlike my smart phone, I don't worry about dropping it, hitting it against solid objects, or getting it wet because it shrugs these things off like it was nothing. I don't worry about losing it because it comfortably resides on my wrist regardless of what I am wearing.
I want a smart watch that is like that.
However, much of that advantage is lost if I still have to carry around a cumbersome, unattached, and fragile smart phone. It is fine to augment the smart phone when the two devices are together but if the smart watch is non-functional on it's own than I don't want one.
If the technology is not up to these challenges (And, frankly, I don't think it is) then it is not up to creating practical smart watches. Come back in 10 years and there may be a smart watch worth wearing. The battery problem may be solved by that time too.
Not the first farmers. Early European civilization certainly arrived by sea from the Middle East and invasion/colonization from the sea was repeated many times. It is not terribly shocking to think that agriculture could also have arrived initially by sea. However, that is a very different thing than claiming that the first farmers in the Middle East were also sailors. A thousand years or more could have passed between the beginning of farming in the Middle East and the transmission of that technology to Europe.
Because this is a concern for a sports car, when most parking places are designed for vans.
they don't stop you from putting a roof-rack on it
Also a big problem for sports cars, I'm sure.
Crossover SUV != sports car. They are bigger, taller and commonly used to carry bicycles, skis, and other sporting equipment on their roofs. Crossover SUV's are highly utilitarian which is very unlike sports cars.
Hardware is Silicon Valley's new religion. Bits and atoms aren't so different after all, the creed goes; just as the cost and complexity of starting a software company has drastically declined over the last decade, it's now becoming much cheaper and easier to start companies that make physical things. But talk to almost any real hardware company, and you'll discover that the promised land is still some distance away.
No. Hardware is Silicon Valley's founding religion. Software came later and now real hardware startups can not get funding. Sparce's experience shows that even if your development is trivial (no significant R&D) and you don't do any of the manufacturing yourself, it can still be a bumpy road to selling product.
I see no evidence that this is improving. All that has happened is that ambitious hardware startups no longer happen and people are getting excited over hobby scale development that didn't use to make the news. Well, to be fair, Kickstarter has allowed "super hobby" scale developments to take off that used to fall into a no-man's land. They were too small to form a viable business around and yet too big for a couple of guys to pull off in their spare time. Still, this is nowhere near a hardware renaissance. The promise land is not just some distance away. There is little evidence that we are going there.
No. We don't know *how*, but we know it can be done and is done every minute of every day by biological processes.
The knowing how is the problem. While there is little down that a human level AI could be built if we knew what to build, it is not clear that we are smart enough to come up with a design in any kind of directed fashion.
“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World
This is conjecture, of course but there is scant evidence against it. Some AI researchers have taken this philosophy or something similar to heart and propose that the only way to make real progress in AI is to reproduce the processes that lead to the human brain: random changes and selection pressure. The trouble is, even if it works and a human AI comes out of it (and it is no clear that we are even smart enough to provide the right selection process), it seems we would have little control and less understanding of the result. Benign but useless seems the most likely outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, you could probably replace "Google" in that sentence with any company. You're comparing your salary to one at a fucking bank, companies so famous for absurd compensation packages that it triggered street protests ....
Street protests were over compensation of executives. I never heard any suggestion that the lower level workers were overpaid.
Fusion reactors capable of producing net power are big, or seem to be being as we haven't actually built one yet.
However, if you just want to produce tritium for a boosted fission bomb, you don't need to generate net power. A farnsworth fusor will do and they are small and inconspicuous.
As for deuterium: Deuterium is produced for industrial, scientific and military purposes, by starting with ordinary water—a small fraction of which is naturally-occurring heavy water—and then separating out the heavy water by the Girdler sulfide process, distillation, or other methods.
So, no point in securing your fusion reactor because the bad guys don't have any real motivation to break in. At least, not to steal anything.
I know, one more USB connector to have an adaptor for... But this is how the mini/micro and even old USB 'A' should have been from the beginning.
There's nothing worse than having to blind mate USB, and having to flip it four bloody times before it works. (except maybe blind mating 'F' connectors, or sometimes D sub..)
I can think of a few things that are worse, including:
1) Arriving at your destination needing to charge your phone and finding that, although you have the charger and the phone, you forgot the adapter.
2) Having to mate and secure two connections instead of just one.
3) Unplugging phone cable from adapter leaving converter behind. This already happens with car adapters where you can easily walk off with the cable and phone, leaving the 12V adapter behind.
4) Arriving at far off destination to find that you have a new style power adapter (for another device) but old style microusb on your phone with no converter and you may not even be able to get a converter at any price because everyone assumes that people migrate old to new and not the other way.
And we know how well that worked the last time.
Nah. They've re-invented Ada.
Ada is when they re-invented PL/1.
Hmm. What comes after strike 2?
but throwing a ball is use full like all other? if useless means you can earn a living doing it, is it still useless?
Even if you don't manage to make money at it, throwing a real ball around is a good way to stay in shape which is important for overall health. Throwing a virtual ball? Not so much and you are even more likely to need a day job which also will not give you the exercise that you need to stay healthy.
But the last I knew The Doctor preferred/will prefer to use cell phones. It probably isn't important the device use Skype. It may not even be important that the device be turned on.
Here's an open FPGA design:
Put a buttload of OR gates in parallel.
Follow them with a buttload of AND gates
There just isn't that much design in a basic FPGA to open up, not that I can see.
Said the blind man.. What you describe is the end user description of a PAL. FPGA's are completely different and PALs are not actually designed that way either. It is just the end user description, much like knowing the x86 instruction set doesn't mean you know how to design a modern x86 processor.
An Altera or Xillinx FPGA is predominately a sea of small SRAM's but there are also many many muxes, complicated interconnects, configurable special function blocks (like multiply/accumulators, IO cells, and Ethernet interfaces). There is also a great deal of logic just to efficiently move configuration bitstreams into the chip. The complexity per unit area is less than a typical ASIC, which makes FPGA's good subjects for bringing up on new process flows but it is definitely not trivial work. Much is low level and structural rather than logical but that doesn't make it easy.
That said, an open FPGA design would be pretty useless. The hardest part is that low level process dependent optimization and that is just not repeatable without an army of engineers, expensive closed source tools, and access to bleeding edge foundries.
What people want, though, isn't to be able to make their own FPGA's. They just want an FPGA that is fully documented. Xilinx and Altera like to keep certain details secret. You have to use their tools because they won't tell you want you need to write your own and, even if you figure it out, they will sue you.
The Dumbarton (the closest route from PA) jams up. 237/880 (The route from further South on Peninsula and the South Bay) is a parking lot. It is simply not possible for a single location to be an easy drive from both Palo Alto and Fremont. If Tesla wants their employees meaningfully closer to the factory, they are going to have to put them on the factory's side of the Bay. I.e., Fremont or Union City.
I love my Tivo, but - I also owned a VCR for the twenty years prior to my first Tivo. Time shifting has been around for 40+ years now.
True, but limited device intelligence and limited tape capacity made time shifting an exception rather than the rule. Most VCR owners, even those who used the time shifting feature, still watched most of their TV programs at the time that they aired.
With Tivo and other DVRs time-shifting becomes the norm and real-time an exception generally to be avoided.
Its much bigger than a megafactory, that's all I can tell you.
Yes, but is it 1000 times bigger or 1024 times bigger? That's the important part!
Did you check to see if any of the these phones were still available?
I searched for sliders with displays of 960x540 and up, i.e., anything with more more pixels that my nearly 4 year old Mytouch 4G. There were four hits: all of them 960x540 and all of them discontinued.
I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.
A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who want keyboards. However, they will buy a new phone anyway, even if there is nothing available with a keyboard so the manufacturers have little incentive to cater to them. The same is true for small smart phones. Almost certainly more people want a small phone than want a slide out keyboard and they still get ignored. Manufacturers get more marketing buzz by pumping out giant keyboardless phones frequently than they would if they slowed down the upgrade cycle to spread their development efforts across niches.
When people stop buying new phones because manufacturers are not giving them what they want then maybe we will see some changes. My phone is 3.5 years old because I can't find a suitable (i.e., modern and not huge) replacement but I don't think there are enough people like me yet to catch the attention of the manufacturers.
Would an advanced race actually do something so illogical?
By "advanced", I assume the summary meant "technologically advanced". How would any civilization reach a high level of technology without going through industrialization? It's not like anyone enjoys living downwind of a coal plant, but the messier forms of energy production are convenient, cheap, and don't require any advanced materials or science. Try to imagine an alternate history where we emerged from the industrial revolution with effective, sustainable fusion and solar power without ever polluting the planet.
The thing is, fossil fuels run out rather quickly on the cosmic scale. A few centuries and the consequences of pollution become apparent quickly too. A civilization must quickly move to something cleaner or it dies. Either way, the pollution stops. What are the odds that our telescopes will find a planet inhabited by a civilization that just happens to be going through a (likely) one-time few century window of time?
If they exist at all, the average of civilization out there is probably tens to hundreds of million years old. It is unthinkable that a civilization that old would still be producing significant pollution (at least of a type that we are familiar). Maybe we should be looking for efforts to dump excessive waste heat.
The emotional state of the player is influenced by what he sees on the screen.
This is why it is infrurriating when low importance sites require high complexity passwords. They create unnecessary exposure for the limited pool of high complexity passwords I can remember. Meanwhile, the bank will take anything.
Perhaps not creepy but, by itself, not foolproof. I have a tendency toward Bradycardia (slow heart-rate). My normal is in the 50's and at times will slow even down to the mid-40's while fully alert and functional. I don't know whether the system in mind incudes other input in order to determine impairment - the article doesn't really say - but heart-rate alone would be far from reliable.
To be universally useful, I think that a "fatigue detector" needs more than just one parameter.
Lane departure should be a good combination. Calibration for the driver would be helpful, too because you are right, heart rate varies significantly from person to person. Conditioned athletes often have resting heart rates below 50, even below 40. On the other hand, a couch potato may start wavering at 80.
Suuntu Ambit2 is a 100m water resistant GPS sport watch that you can run apps on to custom process the data. It doesn't do things that smart phones do but it does not require a smart phone to function and it operates in environments where smart phones can't. It is heavy, expensive, and there are Linux compatibility issues. That is why I don't own one yet. But it is the right direction.
The results, surprisingly, are mixed: while some, such as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, have gone on to far greater success, it doesn't always work out that way
This might be a surprise to people who know nothing about startups or business but it should not be to anyone else. Here's the reality: Startups often fail. In fact, the overwhelming majority of startups fail. Being an "auteur" may improve the odds of a soft landing significantly but it does not remotely guarantee success because there is no way to guarantee success.
The reasons for failure are many including poor business skills (there is more to running a company than running a project) and unconstrained egos. The usual bad luck and mayhem that sink projects can also sink companies that only have one project.
You you really want them to average in tech workers without degrees, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg?
Why not? High income dropouts are so few that they make little difference in the result, especially if you do your statistics right and report the median rather than arithmetic mean.
Why are you comparing a specialty dive watch to a smart watch.
It would be like me saying I would buy a Dive watch, but there don't have a phone and I can check my airline reservation from one.
Because anything less than a dive watch is a device that I have to be careful with around water. It isn't about the dive functions (made largely obsolete in recent years by wrist mounted dive computers) and there is very little "Special" about a dive watch. It is just an exceptionally robust watch. This is the kind of watch that people who wear watches for function tend to wear, as opposed to those where watches are jewelry.
I wear a shock resistant dive watch. Quite unlike my smart phone, I don't worry about dropping it, hitting it against solid objects, or getting it wet because it shrugs these things off like it was nothing. I don't worry about losing it because it comfortably resides on my wrist regardless of what I am wearing.
I want a smart watch that is like that.
However, much of that advantage is lost if I still have to carry around a cumbersome, unattached, and fragile smart phone. It is fine to augment the smart phone when the two devices are together but if the smart watch is non-functional on it's own than I don't want one.
If the technology is not up to these challenges (And, frankly, I don't think it is) then it is not up to creating practical smart watches. Come back in 10 years and there may be a smart watch worth wearing. The battery problem may be solved by that time too.
Not the first farmers. Early European civilization certainly arrived by sea from the Middle East and invasion/colonization from the sea was repeated many times. It is not terribly shocking to think that agriculture could also have arrived initially by sea. However, that is a very different thing than claiming that the first farmers in the Middle East were also sailors. A thousand years or more could have passed between the beginning of farming in the Middle East and the transmission of that technology to Europe.
No worries about clearance above the car
Because this is a concern for a sports car, when most parking places are designed for vans.
they don't stop you from putting a roof-rack on it
Also a big problem for sports cars, I'm sure.
Crossover SUV != sports car. They are bigger, taller and commonly used to carry bicycles, skis, and other sporting equipment on their roofs. Crossover SUV's are highly utilitarian which is very unlike sports cars.
Hardware is Silicon Valley's new religion. Bits and atoms aren't so different after all, the creed goes; just as the cost and complexity of starting a software company has drastically declined over the last decade, it's now becoming much cheaper and easier to start companies that make physical things. But talk to almost any real hardware company, and you'll discover that the promised land is still some distance away.
No. Hardware is Silicon Valley's founding religion. Software came later and now real hardware startups can not get funding. Sparce's experience shows that even if your development is trivial (no significant R&D) and you don't do any of the manufacturing yourself, it can still be a bumpy road to selling product.
I see no evidence that this is improving. All that has happened is that ambitious hardware startups no longer happen and people are getting excited over hobby scale development that didn't use to make the news. Well, to be fair, Kickstarter has allowed "super hobby" scale developments to take off that used to fall into a no-man's land. They were too small to form a viable business around and yet too big for a couple of guys to pull off in their spare time. Still, this is nowhere near a hardware renaissance. The promise land is not just some distance away. There is little evidence that we are going there.
No. We don't know *how*, but we know it can be done and is done every minute of every day by biological processes.
The knowing how is the problem. While there is little down that a human level AI could be built if we knew what to build, it is not clear that we are smart enough to come up with a design in any kind of directed fashion.
“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World
This is conjecture, of course but there is scant evidence against it. Some AI researchers have taken this philosophy or something similar to heart and propose that the only way to make real progress in AI is to reproduce the processes that lead to the human brain: random changes and selection pressure. The trouble is, even if it works and a human AI comes out of it (and it is no clear that we are even smart enough to provide the right selection process), it seems we would have little control and less understanding of the result. Benign but useless seems the most likely outcome.