No. Taxpayer money was put at risk for the benefit of a company in Finland. If the product and the company were plainly viable, there would be far more than the half billion dollars in US tax money racing to them from private investors all over the world.
I thought that was the point of these government loans -- to back new technologies that aren't yet mainstream enough to attract private funding. Just because something isn't "plainly viable" doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Even $90K electric cars can help drive innovation in the electric car space and new technologies and designs will trickle down into more affordable cars.
Or, we could sit back and wait for the Chinese to do the innovation and use their manufacturing prowess to sell us cheap electric cars.
To summarize: A draft treaty (with only 2 of 5 planned meetings to draft the treaty having been completed) and not expected to become final for 2 years, is not complete. Is there any reason to believe that the exception for vaccine preservatives won't be present in the final treaty?
Consumer-focused, one-size-fits-all operating systems are terrible for control applications (timing problems, bulkware, etc) and don't really give you anything in return. It's a bit like handing your wallet to a hooker and watching them walk away.
But if you only need a hundred units rather than 100,000, using a Consumer-focused, one-size-fits-all operating system on existing off-the-shelf software is more like paying the hooker on the corner $100 for a night of sex than in investing $10,000 custom molding a lifelike latex doll.
The latex doll may meet your needs perfectly and may do exactly what you designed her to do, but if you get tired of her in a year, you need to spend another $10,000 designing a new one, whereas if you just used commonly available hookers, you could upgrade to a newer improved one dozens of times and still pay less than your custom latex doll. And if you become wildly successful, you can always build the doll later when you have enough volume to justify the expense.
Agreed, though it seems like this thing is a little too easy to "unlock". How would you build a train when a small nudge can make it change alignment?
It's not clear how much force he was using to change the orientation of the puck, but since the puck can support itself while upside down, its appears to exert at least as much force as it takes to support the weight of the puck. So a 100 ton train may require 100 tons of force to lift it from the track.
From the demo, it's hard to see if it would have enough force to keep the train on the track, or if the pucks would have to surround the track to keep the train centered -- like conventional maglev trains. (or wheels as a backup if its a rare case when the train does stray from center)
The US does have the declared capability to turn off satellites when they orbit over particular world regions. More to the point, they have the capability to encrypt, and could sell decryption cards to individual users. Oh, and the satellites broadcast a lot more than just a time signal; the receiver needs to know the position of the satellite and its health status too.
How does that work, unless they turn it off over an entire hemisphere? My GPS see satellites from horizon to horizon, so to keep me from getting a signal they'd have to turn off satellites when they are anywhere over my half of the earth.
Or does a GPS satellite have a bunch of directional antennas that let them selectively turn off coverage in certain areas?
Also, they moved the "cached" search results inside the website preview.
Now you can't get cached results if you have javascript disabled, and you still have to wait for that lame thumbnail to pop up in order to hit google's cache.
So that's where the cache link went! I assumed they stopped providing cached pages at all.
I really don't care to see the thumbnails that are so tiny that the text is unreadable, I wish they'd bring the cache link back to the search results page.
Other than the fact that current RIM users had their service go down for no explainable reason for 3 days. With Apple and AT&T, their new phone isn't activated instantly when they wanted. They might have to wait a few hours.
I don't know how RIM users in other countries fared, but I had blackberry email delays for about 4 hours before it cleared up. Annoying, but not enough to make me move from Blackberry for corporate use.
Until then, I understand they could use their current phone.
Except, of course, those people that bought a new phone rather than a replacement.
Or, a better idea, they could just not have activation. Like every other phone in existence.
Yes, I'll take a cheque.
What cell phone doesn't have activation? My Verizon phone had to be activated. My T-Mobile prepaid phone had to be activated.
Is there some carrier that ships a phone already activated and ready to go with no activation required? What happens if you order a replacement phone? How do they know when you're ready to deactivate the old phone and activate the new one?
Then you're doing it very wrong. Firs and foremost, most of these customers were already identified ahead of time (because they preordered the phone), so you could have *easily* extracted their information beforehand and copied it to the "local mysql database". Additionally, writing back to the "central database" could be also easily offloaded to a background job that performed the work asynchronously. There's no need to have this information instantly available in the central.
While the customers may have been preidentified, their phones IMEI/SIM's weren't assigned until the phone was shipped. And until you link a customer account to a phone, you can't activate the phone. In any case, even if you prestaged the data somewhere, you still need to flip the switch at the appropriate time to make the new phone active, and that's probably the heavyweight transaction, not the act of entering the new data into the database. I imagine that a phone activation means replicating the data across many regional sites. Even though I called it a "database", it may not even be a database in the traditional sense, it may be a custom cell phone controller with a complicated API with high latency for updates.
Since in many (most? all?) of these cases, the old phone was replaced by the new phone, customers don't want to activate it online, then find at some random time in the future (minutes? Hours? Days?), their old phone stops working and they have to switch to the new phone - they want it activated immediately so they can turn off their old phone and turn on the new phone and have it up and running immediately.
I imagine that the transaction monitor on their transaction processing system allocated a limited number of transaction slots to the activation servers - they don't want to take down their entire network due to high activation demand.
"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...
Sure, it's easy to write a standalone server to take requests and put them into your local MySQL database, but you're stuffing it into the same database that the data for 75 million other customers are using and probably traversing several layers of API and who knows how many network hops to get to that database.
Think of the type of people who work at NASA. Now think of the type of people who work around you.
Realize that NASA's people are somewhere between slightly more intelligent then the people you work with, to massively more intelligent then the people you work with. Realize that NASA's people are probably smarter then most of the people reading this comment. Realize what works in NASA's environment likely won't work in the vast majority of the world, not to mention America.
First, I don't think that the general employee base at NASA is any intelligent than at any other large government organization.
Second, I work at an organization that has many very smart people - from very bright grad students to PhD's at the top of their field. And they are the ones that need the most hand holding when it comes to IT.
It depends on the site, at my previous job I wasn't allowed to make any changes to the software and could have been disciplined if I was caught doing so.
He's not suggesting that you delete your Outlook profile and recreate it before calling, but when you call to say that your computer won't turn on, take a couple seconds and see that it's plugged into the wall. If you're feeling adventurous, see if the monitor cable is still plugged into the back of the computer. If you're feeling *really* adventurous, make sure that the power strip that you inadvertently turned off last week hasn't been turned off *again*.
But don't file a helpdesk ticket saying "I haven't been able to access my network drives for the past 2 weeks. I have to finish a report this afternoon so you *have* to fix it right now"
Most of the time I know HOW to fix my problem. When I call the corporate help desk, it's not because I don't know how to fix the problem, it's because I don't have permissions to do it because the box is locked down.
Otherwise it's some networking issue which I don't have access to the equipment to fix.
In many cases, IT is not allowed to give you the permissions to fix the problem due to regulatory requirements. Developers in particular may have access to sensitive data so their machines have to be locked down, with associated documentation and logging to show that they meet corporate build standards.
In our organization, we give local admin to most people that ask for it -- I've found that about half of the people that think they know how to take care of problems on their own, actually know just enough to get themselves into more trouble.
Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,'
If that's true, then why do people keep calling and visiting my helpdesk for help with their mobile device!? "My email isn't syncing" "This thing is too slow" "This java-required website won't work on my phone, but it works on my desktop" "I reset the device like I read on Google and now I lost all of my files and applications"
I wonder just how many of us have come across such idiocies.
I came across one long ago, back when the internet was more open and trusting - a discovered that a remote server had its root filesystem opened to the world via an NFS export. I emailed the administrator for the server and he said "No worries, you may be able to mount it but file permissions prevent you from doing anything unless you have an account on that server". So I emailed back and said that *any* root user on any server could get full access (this was before the root user was routinely mapped to uid nobody). He said "No, if you're not root on my server you can't get access". So I mounted it read-write from my computer, did a "touch/etc/i_have_access" and told him to look at the file I just created.
He thanked me and stopped exporting the filesystem. If I did that nowadays, I'd likely be facing charges for hacking.
When you have no real weight or energy concerns, anything is possible.
Well, not quite. Obviously, this is POC, but I bemoan that since systems like Di2 work very well, but few use them because they add too much extra weight.
Not quite what? The designers of this system weren't trying to build a workable wireless brake system for bikes, they were only interested in the wireless control system, hence they had no constraints at all for the actuator motor - they could have used an 15 pound ABS actuator from a car powered by a 20 lb car battery and still met their design goals.
From TFA:
In this paper we are looking at a very tiny control problem of precisely that sort. It is safety-critical, has hard real- time requirements and does not have an obvious fail-safe state.
Your brake may be able to break extremely fast but as a human you can't. 250ms can be often faster then a human reaction especially if not prepared to break (surprised event).
Yes, it can take a human 250ms to react to a situation, but after I squeeze the brake lever, I don't want my braking system to take *another* 250ms to react.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately most Japanese tend to ride their bikes at about 10km/h, so speed won't be an issue for this robot.....
Given that they tend to ride on crowded sidewalks, riding slowly is a good thing.
only 6.2 miles /H
But he appears to be only around 1 foot/30cm high, so he's around 1/5 the size of a human rider, he'd ride much faster if he was full size.
No. Taxpayer money was put at risk for the benefit of a company in Finland. If the product and the company were plainly viable, there would be far more than the half billion dollars in US tax money racing to them from private investors all over the world.
I thought that was the point of these government loans -- to back new technologies that aren't yet mainstream enough to attract private funding. Just because something isn't "plainly viable" doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Even $90K electric cars can help drive innovation in the electric car space and new technologies and designs will trickle down into more affordable cars.
Or, we could sit back and wait for the Chinese to do the innovation and use their manufacturing prowess to sell us cheap electric cars.
I think it's only being phased out in wealthy, first-world countries that can deal with the reduced shelf-life of non Thiomersol preserved vaccines.
To summarize: A draft treaty (with only 2 of 5 planned meetings to draft the treaty having been completed) and not expected to become final for 2 years, is not complete. Is there any reason to believe that the exception for vaccine preservatives won't be present in the final treaty?
Consumer-focused, one-size-fits-all operating systems are terrible for control applications (timing problems, bulkware, etc) and don't really give you anything in return. It's a bit like handing your wallet to a hooker and watching them walk away.
But if you only need a hundred units rather than 100,000, using a Consumer-focused, one-size-fits-all operating system on existing off-the-shelf software is more like paying the hooker on the corner $100 for a night of sex than in investing $10,000 custom molding a lifelike latex doll.
The latex doll may meet your needs perfectly and may do exactly what you designed her to do, but if you get tired of her in a year, you need to spend another $10,000 designing a new one, whereas if you just used commonly available hookers, you could upgrade to a newer improved one dozens of times and still pay less than your custom latex doll. And if you become wildly successful, you can always build the doll later when you have enough volume to justify the expense.
Agreed, though it seems like this thing is a little too easy to "unlock". How would you build a train when a small nudge can make it change alignment?
It's not clear how much force he was using to change the orientation of the puck, but since the puck can support itself while upside down, its appears to exert at least as much force as it takes to support the weight of the puck. So a 100 ton train may require 100 tons of force to lift it from the track.
From the demo, it's hard to see if it would have enough force to keep the train on the track, or if the pucks would have to surround the track to keep the train centered -- like conventional maglev trains. (or wheels as a backup if its a rare case when the train does stray from center)
The US does have the declared capability to turn off satellites when they orbit over particular world regions. More to the point, they have the capability to encrypt, and could sell decryption cards to individual users. Oh, and the satellites broadcast a lot more than just a time signal; the receiver needs to know the position of the satellite and its health status too.
How does that work, unless they turn it off over an entire hemisphere? My GPS see satellites from horizon to horizon, so to keep me from getting a signal they'd have to turn off satellites when they are anywhere over my half of the earth.
Or does a GPS satellite have a bunch of directional antennas that let them selectively turn off coverage in certain areas?
That should be good enough, right?
Is this a good for Google, doing the right thing story, or is there more to it than meets the eye?
It's better than nothing, which is all that Google is obligated to give them.
Also, they moved the "cached" search results inside the website preview.
Now you can't get cached results if you have javascript disabled, and you still have to wait for that lame thumbnail to pop up in order to hit google's cache.
So that's where the cache link went! I assumed they stopped providing cached pages at all.
I really don't care to see the thumbnails that are so tiny that the text is unreadable, I wish they'd bring the cache link back to the search results page.
What is Wifi Proxy Support?
Yes. Shouldn't the explanation have come out before the findings?
If they've really discovered FTL travel and can send information into the past, then the findings should have come out before the experiment.
Other than the fact that current RIM users had their service go down for no explainable reason for 3 days. With Apple and AT&T, their new phone isn't activated instantly when they wanted. They might have to wait a few hours.
I don't know how RIM users in other countries fared, but I had blackberry email delays for about 4 hours before it cleared up. Annoying, but not enough to make me move from Blackberry for corporate use.
Until then, I understand they could use their current phone.
Except, of course, those people that bought a new phone rather than a replacement.
Or, a better idea, they could just not have activation. Like every other phone in existence.
Yes, I'll take a cheque.
What cell phone doesn't have activation? My Verizon phone had to be activated. My T-Mobile prepaid phone had to be activated.
Is there some carrier that ships a phone already activated and ready to go with no activation required? What happens if you order a replacement phone? How do they know when you're ready to deactivate the old phone and activate the new one?
Then you're doing it very wrong. Firs and foremost, most of these customers were already identified ahead of time (because they preordered the phone), so you could have *easily* extracted their information beforehand and copied it to the "local mysql database". Additionally, writing back to the "central database" could be also easily offloaded to a background job that performed the work asynchronously. There's no need to have this information instantly available in the central.
While the customers may have been preidentified, their phones IMEI/SIM's weren't assigned until the phone was shipped. And until you link a customer account to a phone, you can't activate the phone. In any case, even if you prestaged the data somewhere, you still need to flip the switch at the appropriate time to make the new phone active, and that's probably the heavyweight transaction, not the act of entering the new data into the database. I imagine that a phone activation means replicating the data across many regional sites. Even though I called it a "database", it may not even be a database in the traditional sense, it may be a custom cell phone controller with a complicated API with high latency for updates.
Since in many (most? all?) of these cases, the old phone was replaced by the new phone, customers don't want to activate it online, then find at some random time in the future (minutes? Hours? Days?), their old phone stops working and they have to switch to the new phone - they want it activated immediately so they can turn off their old phone and turn on the new phone and have it up and running immediately.
I imagine that the transaction monitor on their transaction processing system allocated a limited number of transaction slots to the activation servers - they don't want to take down their entire network due to high activation demand.
"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...
Sure, it's easy to write a standalone server to take requests and put them into your local MySQL database, but you're stuffing it into the same database that the data for 75 million other customers are using and probably traversing several layers of API and who knows how many network hops to get to that database.
Think of the type of people who work at NASA. Now think of the type of people who work around you.
Realize that NASA's people are somewhere between slightly more intelligent then the people you work with, to massively more intelligent then the people you work with. Realize that NASA's people are probably smarter then most of the people reading this comment.
Realize what works in NASA's environment likely won't work in the vast majority of the world, not to mention America.
First, I don't think that the general employee base at NASA is any intelligent than at any other large government organization.
Second, I work at an organization that has many very smart people - from very bright grad students to PhD's at the top of their field. And they are the ones that need the most hand holding when it comes to IT.
To some users all the following are meaningless:
These users will always need a help desk.
But any well-run corporate help desk will already know the answers to these questions.
It depends on the site, at my previous job I wasn't allowed to make any changes to the software and could have been disciplined if I was caught doing so.
He's not suggesting that you delete your Outlook profile and recreate it before calling, but when you call to say that your computer won't turn on, take a couple seconds and see that it's plugged into the wall. If you're feeling adventurous, see if the monitor cable is still plugged into the back of the computer. If you're feeling *really* adventurous, make sure that the power strip that you inadvertently turned off last week hasn't been turned off *again*.
But don't file a helpdesk ticket saying "I haven't been able to access my network drives for the past 2 weeks. I have to finish a report this afternoon so you *have* to fix it right now"
Most of the time I know HOW to fix my problem. When I call the corporate help desk, it's not because I don't know how to fix the problem, it's because I don't have permissions to do it because the box is locked down.
Otherwise it's some networking issue which I don't have access to the equipment to fix.
In many cases, IT is not allowed to give you the permissions to fix the problem due to regulatory requirements. Developers in particular may have access to sensitive data so their machines have to be locked down, with associated documentation and logging to show that they meet corporate build standards.
In our organization, we give local admin to most people that ask for it -- I've found that about half of the people that think they know how to take care of problems on their own, actually know just enough to get themselves into more trouble.
Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,'
If that's true, then why do people keep calling and visiting my helpdesk for help with their mobile device!? "My email isn't syncing" "This thing is too slow" "This java-required website won't work on my phone, but it works on my desktop" "I reset the device like I read on Google and now I lost all of my files and applications"
I wonder just how many of us have come across such idiocies.
I came across one long ago, back when the internet was more open and trusting - a discovered that a remote server had its root filesystem opened to the world via an NFS export. I emailed the administrator for the server and he said "No worries, you may be able to mount it but file permissions prevent you from doing anything unless you have an account on that server". So I emailed back and said that *any* root user on any server could get full access (this was before the root user was routinely mapped to uid nobody). He said "No, if you're not root on my server you can't get access". So I mounted it read-write from my computer, did a "touch /etc/i_have_access" and told him to look at the file I just created.
He thanked me and stopped exporting the filesystem. If I did that nowadays, I'd likely be facing charges for hacking.
Why not actually put a decent camera in there?
No reason at all -- you can buy sensors and lenses of nearly any quality off the shelf.
Looking forward to seeing your new and improved pictures! Let us know when you're done.
When you have no real weight or energy concerns, anything is possible.
Well, not quite. Obviously, this is POC, but I bemoan that since systems like Di2 work very well, but few use them because they add too much extra weight.
Not quite what? The designers of this system weren't trying to build a workable wireless brake system for bikes, they were only interested in the wireless control system, hence they had no constraints at all for the actuator motor - they could have used an 15 pound ABS actuator from a car powered by a 20 lb car battery and still met their design goals.
From TFA:
In this paper we are looking at a very tiny control problem
of precisely that sort. It is safety-critical, has hard real-
time requirements and does not have an obvious fail-safe
state.
Your brake may be able to break extremely fast but as a human you can't. 250ms can be often faster then a human reaction especially if not prepared to break (surprised event).
Yes, it can take a human 250ms to react to a situation, but after I squeeze the brake lever, I don't want my braking system to take *another* 250ms to react.