My hometown (Thessaloniki, Greece) has had robo-parking for at about 2-3 years now: PDF; I think it can hold 100-200 cars and works pretty well: takes a minute or two to "park" the car on the receptor and generally 5 minutes or so to retrieve it. Faster than actually walking up a parking deck, finding the car and driving out (never mind safer and with less potential damage to the vehicle).
Most late-model Nokia phones do this already: the Nokia phone becomes a shell extension and you can access the phone memory/flash card/sim card as folders. Drag and drop works too. I am not saying it's perfect or bug free, but it's here, now, on pretty inexpensive phones (say the 6xxx series).
The point of Python is not to be blazingly fast. There are other languages (C, C++, pick your poison) if you want speed. The point of Python (and Ruby and even Perl) is to write code faster, especially for code pieces that are supposed to change often or have multiple versions (e.g. customized code for clients). And because Python is so readable/hackable, it's an excellent tool for that particular job.
And if you want speed, I have two words: Boost.Python. It makes wrapping C++ code into Python near-trivial; I just wish they had some sort of quick-start documentation. I was intimidated by Boost.Python until I sat down to work with it. Sample (cleaned up) fragment from production code:
That little snippet exposes the Loader class to Python. Boost will take care of wrapping the code up into a Python shared library (.pyd), exposing the interface, converting between standard Python types and STL types, even converting C++ exceptions to Python exceptions.
And if you don't want to go there, you could also use ctypes (part of the std Python distribution) and drive any win32 DLL using Python, unchanged.
Sure, but if the demand cannot be fulfilled profitably, does it really matter? Because, long-temr, if no-one is looking to meet that demand, then how's that different from what we have now, other than the overall size of the market?
(I am not arguing, just genuinely trying to understand if there's something I am missing here...)
I think this Long Tail business is just another way of verbalizing The Innovator's Dilemma: we are at the point where a disruptive technology has been deployed (the Web), but the market hasn't caught up yet.
Example: Lets' say that Anderson's correct and Amazon makes a disproportionate amount of profit from low-sellers. Why is that? probably because the prices of the low-sellers have already accounted for *higher costs* than Amazon is incurring. I.e. those low-selling books still had to be edited, marketed, printed, distributed, sold and returned. Those costs are either reflected in the price of the book, or the book has already been marked down to clear the stock. So, now because Amazon has lower distribution costs than say your local bookstore, they can get rid of that book and still make a profit. But that's the case *now*. Sooner or later, the market will adapt by removing a chunk of the book's cost so that the upstream (author, publisher) can take a cut of Amazon's higher profit. For example, niche publishers may start selling books *only* online, getting rid of the return costs. Or they can print on-demand, or go to e-book only.
When the market will adapt, two things will happen: more goods will enter the market (as they will become profitable at the new margins) skewing the "long tail", and prices will come down, increasing the cutoff percentile of those items that make a profit and removing this "Long Tail" nonsense.
None of this is bad: prices come down and consumers get more choice. But the retailers will still have to fight the old battle of picking products that can bring in high margins and organizing their (now infinite) shelves to attract consumers to items that may become hits.
Just because you now have infinite shelf space and reduced supply chain costs (at only a portion of the business), doesn't mean we got some new economy of "more of less".
One possibility that no-one has mentioned is p2p streaming. I can (vaguely) appreciate the technical problems of such an approach, but: a) it would definitely be something that you wouldn't mind getting on a p2p network for, as more nodes mean better performance, b) they could offer "supernodes" strategically located to speed up paid content, and that is a true value-add, c) if anyone has the technical chops to try it, the Skype guys do.
I am guessing that the most popular RFID implementations are probably transportation passes, like London's Oyster card and Hongkong's Octapus card. And there are toll-passes as well, but not quite as wide-spread.
Hear, hear. Add to the lack of power ports (which is mostly business class only, and then only on some aircraft), the lack of any real elbow room or enough tray room on most economy class seats. On most flights I cannot open a 14" or 15" laptop enough to make the screen visible at a comfortable angle. In fact I think that use case is the only decent argument for Tablet PCs yet.
Boeing could probably increase revenue by just renting out Nokia 770s or other similar WiFi Web tablets that can actually be *used* in an airliner...
I think TFA has a very narrow view of the rest of the world. Yes, the US has succeeded brilliantly in creating and fostering a start-up culture (where everyone else has failed) but his reasons, are well, mis-informed and a bit narrow-minded.
Let me put in my $.02 and €0,02 as well:
Immigration: The US has a great immigration policy, but it's not really that much different from a lot of advanced Western countries, esp. when it comes to skilled workers (researchers, college graduates, etc). E.g., the UK has a much larger talent pool it can draw from for immigrants (esp. Commonwealth citizens) yet there have been very few successful UK startups. Same could be said for Germany, the Nordic countries, and most of Southern Europe.
The US is a rich country: so is most of Western Europe, Australia, NZ, Southeast Asia, Japan, etc. Arguably the latter regions have even better infrastructure than the US.
The US is not a police state: again, neither is any EU member or the rest of Western Europe. Still, the only big European startup as of late has been Skype, and even that was US-funded.
American Universities are better: absolutely, but not for the reasons stated. American universities are just more free to make money from their R&D, unlike most say European ones. Since they can run research for profit they can also hire the best professors and researchers they can find and that creates a virtuous cycle. In Europe for example, most research schools are state institutions and thus professor salaries are set to a nationwide scale. Plus it's much harder to profit from R&D.
You can fire people in America: labor mobility is not a US invention. If you are faced with stifling labor laws, you can work around them. You can use contractors, bankruptcy law, subsidies, the list goes on. Plus, Anglo-Saxon countries with liberal labor laws (UK, Australia), still haven't fostered startups that well.
The rest of the list is even more wooly than these bits. Here's my take as to why the US does startups better:
Failure is an option: there is less if any stigma associated with failure, making the option of going to work for a startup a much less negative one.
The market does not favor incumbents: unless you are trying to create a new market, it's much harder to compete with incumbent competitors outside the US, as they are usually politically protected (for fear of loss of jobs, political gains, what-have-you). If you think AT&T has a strong lobby in DC, consider what would happen if say the Ministry of Communications was the one running AT&T. That still is (directly or indirectly, through equity stakes) the case in most of Europe.
There's no history of startups: nothing attracts people like success and when you don't have your local Netscape or Yahoo or Google to draw inspiration from and try to immitate their success, you are that much less likely to try to start up a company.
So, what does this mean for the potential of a Mac Mini running Windows XP Media Center Edition? will the remote work?
I'd like a mini as a media center, but so far it looks like Front Row can only play codecs that can be hosted by Quicktime, which AFAIK excludes XVid and friends... right?
AFAIK, the reason most modern GSM phones don't default to saving contact details to the SIM card is that the SIM standard only allows one (or is it two?) phone numbers per contact, and that's it. Most new GSM phones allow you to save multiple (or unlimited) phone numbers per contact, plus e-mail, postal address, etc --plus things like custom profiles and voice tags. It's just a case of the standard falling behind the times...
Speed of development. That's it; nothing more, nothing less. But, you have to keep in mind that most code out there is *client* code, i.e. code that calls other libraries, someone-else's-code, etc and never gets called itself (and if it does, it's mostly by code of the same author(s)). So, if you can develop client code much faster, and still use a more "robust" (really, another word for "strict") language/framework for your platform code you have the best of both worlds.
Tell me about it (T42 owner here). At some point in October, Package Manager sent me updated Lenovo WLAN drivers *and* updated Access Connections (IBM's network profile software I can't live without) which prompty messed each other up. Not only that but the updated Lenovo software ripped out utilities that other (older, IBM-) software was looking for giving me dozens of "Can't find such-and-such.exe" errors. And this was with every single package updated straight from the ThinkPad site; in the end I had to rebuilt, something I haven't done to any machine I've owned in 6+ years.
I wasn't worried about the Lenovo take-over (and actually I bought two R51s even after this mess), but Lenovo needs to get their QA straightened out. Until then, my advice: create Restore Points before any Lenovo update, and do them one at a time if possible.
I agree; the article is (bad) speculation... Let's see:
Slate has a much more plausible explanation for Google's secondary offering.
Google Talk's Developers' Page both explicitly says that GTalk will move over to SIP for VoIP services, and makes a big deal out of "Client Choice" and "Service" choice, which apparently they plan to accomplish through inter-connecting to SIP providers.
Skype itself released an SDK for third parties to hook up to its own network. That doesn't sound like a good move from a company that's in talks to be acquired by an IM operator.
It's probably more likely that Skype will be acquired by a phone company (probably a mobile one that's not afraid to undercut PSTN, Vodafone would be a good choice), and that Google plans to use SIP to reach Skype-scale quickly, without paying Skype prices...
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
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NASA's Shuttle Plans
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· Score: 1
What happened was that the design in the NYT article retains some of the infrastructure of the STS, meaning a lot of the jobs that are associated with that massive pork barrel that also goes into orbit.
The NYT article is basically a PR exercise by Thiokol to get the inside track for an STS replacement and it may very well work. However, look out for what Boeing and Lockheed will come up with as they too stand to lose a lot of subsidies contracts with a potential STS replacement. Having said that, the DC-X does merit a second chance...
Well, IIRC, Ringo (and other CF systems of the time) was person-to-person collaborative filtering. Amazon is item-to-item. The difference is not just a question of perspective (which dimension you aggregate first) but also one of insight: one the Web, a person-to-person collaborative system (like my newsbot; see sig) has to be "trained" on what individual users like.
Essentially, the user has to somehow give the system enough implicit or explicit "ratings" so that a large enough sample is created and the user can be clustered with other similar users. Sounds awesome, but there's an initialization problem: in order for a user to be "hooked" on the recommendations, they have to train the system. Amazon instead said, forget about users and let's focus on items instead: what items have been "rated" together? cluster those. So, when a new user enters the site and starts browsing, our already pre-computed item relations can tell him what other products to look at. It's a pretty great insight.
Now, I'd think that the initialization problem will hold for item-to-item filtering as well: meaning, what happens when you introduce a new item on the site that doesn't have historical purchasing behavior? that one stumps me, but Greg Linden's (the lead name on this patent) Findory somehow manages that trick for news items which are by definition new all the time (my newsbot went with person-to-person filtering instead for that reason alone).
As a dabbler in collaborative filtering (memigo predated Findory), I got to agree: item-to-item collaborative filtering was neither that obvious nor that easy to implement. I hope that Findory doesn't get in to trouble over this, as they are doing some really neat stuff...
Re:Then how is the production funded?
on
P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
Well, you're right. But... the same argument could have been made against Google, or the Web itself: "if all content can be made available for free online, who would pay for textbooks/encyclopedias/magazines/etc"?
The issue here is that p2p or Web distribution is so much cheaper and easier that the game is changed: the costs and incoveniences of TV/Movie/Music distribution can be reduced so much that in the end, consumers will abandon the old way. That's just the free market (or evolution, pick your competitive paradigm of choice) at work...
Same way that Middle Ages monks just had to realize that the printing press was the end of hand-written books, p2p is the end of making money off media based on the inefficiencies of the media supply-chain: Movies had to be delivered physically around the globe to only a few locations, and therefore it was possible to charge people for admission to those locations. That just can't work anymore; media creators will have to find a new business model.
And as impolite and off-cuff as that sounds, look at history: every time media reproduction was made easier, creators ended up making more money, not less: the printing press created mass-paperbacks, cinematography made movie stars, TV sitcom/talk-show stars, etc.
So what will the new business model be? I got no clue. But in the end, we can't expect people to go en masse back to old, incovenient and more expensive technologies --i.e. make worse choices-- because it's incovenient to the interests of others. Adam Smith would agree.
Customers are naive about prices period. Discriminatory pricing (what this article talks about) is prevalent in retail: coupons, special codes, AAA rates, frequent flyer miles, all are ways of charging some people less for the same product or service that others are paying more for. In the end it's all psychology: if Amazon or Dell gives customer A an "instant rebate" on the TV she just purchased, that's perceived as being a good retailer, but if they charge customer B more than customer A w/o any coupons or gimmicks, that's perceived as unfair.
Discriminatory pricing is here to stay, shops just have to get smarter about practicing it...
Hm, Ajax as these guys mean it, is centered around XmlHttpRequest which IE (6, I think) introduced first (meaning it was a non-standard API). Mozilla actually copied MS, which then made XmlHttpRequest "cool" and we now have this Ajax buzzword business. Never mind that there have been libraries that have been enabling asynchronous DOMServer communication for much longer than Google Maps or GMail...
Has anybody tried/implemented distributing.torrents (not the payload, the.torrent file itself) over Usenet? It seems that with trackerless torrents, Usenet would be the perfect distribution medium for the torrents themselves, just as decentralized as BitTorrent itelf... TorreNTSP so to speak...
Well, this is (half) a shameless plug but my newsbot has been ranking news sources and referring meta-news sources according to "trust" for over 3 yrs now. Findory (no affiliation) does something similar by ranking each individual news story.
Slashdot Mirror
My hometown (Thessaloniki, Greece) has had robo-parking for at about 2-3 years now: PDF; I think it can hold 100-200 cars and works pretty well: takes a minute or two to "park" the car on the receptor and generally 5 minutes or so to retrieve it. Faster than actually walking up a parking deck, finding the car and driving out (never mind safer and with less potential damage to the vehicle).
Most late-model Nokia phones do this already: the Nokia phone becomes a shell extension and you can access the phone memory/flash card/sim card as folders. Drag and drop works too. I am not saying it's perfect or bug free, but it's here, now, on pretty inexpensive phones (say the 6xxx series).
And if you want speed, I have two words: Boost.Python. It makes wrapping C++ code into Python near-trivial; I just wish they had some sort of quick-start documentation. I was intimidated by Boost.Python until I sat down to work with it. Sample (cleaned up) fragment from production code:That little snippet exposes the Loader class to Python. Boost will take care of wrapping the code up into a Python shared library (.pyd), exposing the interface, converting between standard Python types and STL types, even converting C++ exceptions to Python exceptions.
And if you don't want to go there, you could also use ctypes (part of the std Python distribution) and drive any win32 DLL using Python, unchanged.
Sure, but if the demand cannot be fulfilled profitably, does it really matter? Because, long-temr, if no-one is looking to meet that demand, then how's that different from what we have now, other than the overall size of the market?
(I am not arguing, just genuinely trying to understand if there's something I am missing here...)
I think this Long Tail business is just another way of verbalizing The Innovator's Dilemma: we are at the point where a disruptive technology has been deployed (the Web), but the market hasn't caught up yet.
Example: Lets' say that Anderson's correct and Amazon makes a disproportionate amount of profit from low-sellers. Why is that? probably because the prices of the low-sellers have already accounted for *higher costs* than Amazon is incurring. I.e. those low-selling books still had to be edited, marketed, printed, distributed, sold and returned. Those costs are either reflected in the price of the book, or the book has already been marked down to clear the stock. So, now because Amazon has lower distribution costs than say your local bookstore, they can get rid of that book and still make a profit. But that's the case *now*. Sooner or later, the market will adapt by removing a chunk of the book's cost so that the upstream (author, publisher) can take a cut of Amazon's higher profit. For example, niche publishers may start selling books *only* online, getting rid of the return costs. Or they can print on-demand, or go to e-book only.
When the market will adapt, two things will happen: more goods will enter the market (as they will become profitable at the new margins) skewing the "long tail", and prices will come down, increasing the cutoff percentile of those items that make a profit and removing this "Long Tail" nonsense.
None of this is bad: prices come down and consumers get more choice. But the retailers will still have to fight the old battle of picking products that can bring in high margins and organizing their (now infinite) shelves to attract consumers to items that may become hits.
Just because you now have infinite shelf space and reduced supply chain costs (at only a portion of the business), doesn't mean we got some new economy of "more of less".
One possibility that no-one has mentioned is p2p streaming. I can (vaguely) appreciate the technical problems of such an approach, but: a) it would definitely be something that you wouldn't mind getting on a p2p network for, as more nodes mean better performance, b) they could offer "supernodes" strategically located to speed up paid content, and that is a true value-add, c) if anyone has the technical chops to try it, the Skype guys do.
I am guessing that the most popular RFID implementations are probably transportation passes, like London's Oyster card and Hongkong's Octapus card. And there are toll-passes as well, but not quite as wide-spread.
Hear, hear. Add to the lack of power ports (which is mostly business class only, and then only on some aircraft), the lack of any real elbow room or enough tray room on most economy class seats. On most flights I cannot open a 14" or 15" laptop enough to make the screen visible at a comfortable angle. In fact I think that use case is the only decent argument for Tablet PCs yet.
Boeing could probably increase revenue by just renting out Nokia 770s or other similar WiFi Web tablets that can actually be *used* in an airliner...
- Immigration: The US has a great immigration policy, but it's not really that much different from a lot of advanced Western countries, esp. when it comes to skilled workers (researchers, college graduates, etc). E.g., the UK has a much larger talent pool it can draw from for immigrants (esp. Commonwealth citizens) yet there have been very few successful UK startups. Same could be said for Germany, the Nordic countries, and most of Southern Europe.
- The US is a rich country: so is most of Western Europe, Australia, NZ, Southeast Asia, Japan, etc. Arguably the latter regions have even better infrastructure than the US.
- The US is not a police state: again, neither is any EU member or the rest of Western Europe. Still, the only big European startup as of late has been Skype, and even that was US-funded.
- American Universities are better: absolutely, but not for the reasons stated. American universities are just more free to make money from their R&D, unlike most say European ones. Since they can run research for profit they can also hire the best professors and researchers they can find and that creates a virtuous cycle. In Europe for example, most research schools are state institutions and thus professor salaries are set to a nationwide scale. Plus it's much harder to profit from R&D.
- You can fire people in America: labor mobility is not a US invention. If you are faced with stifling labor laws, you can work around them. You can use contractors, bankruptcy law, subsidies, the list goes on. Plus, Anglo-Saxon countries with liberal labor laws (UK, Australia), still haven't fostered startups that well.
The rest of the list is even more wooly than these bits. Here's my take as to why the US does startups better:So, what does this mean for the potential of a Mac Mini running Windows XP Media Center Edition? will the remote work?
I'd like a mini as a media center, but so far it looks like Front Row can only play codecs that can be hosted by Quicktime, which AFAIK excludes XVid and friends... right?
AFAIK, the reason most modern GSM phones don't default to saving contact details to the SIM card is that the SIM standard only allows one (or is it two?) phone numbers per contact, and that's it. Most new GSM phones allow you to save multiple (or unlimited) phone numbers per contact, plus e-mail, postal address, etc --plus things like custom profiles and voice tags. It's just a case of the standard falling behind the times...
I am no tower expert, but those bolts concerned me too: they are holding the entire weight of the tower *in shear*.
Speed of development. That's it; nothing more, nothing less. But, you have to keep in mind that most code out there is *client* code, i.e. code that calls other libraries, someone-else's-code, etc and never gets called itself (and if it does, it's mostly by code of the same author(s)). So, if you can develop client code much faster, and still use a more "robust" (really, another word for "strict") language/framework for your platform code you have the best of both worlds.
Tell me about it (T42 owner here). At some point in October, Package Manager sent me updated Lenovo WLAN drivers *and* updated Access Connections (IBM's network profile software I can't live without) which prompty messed each other up. Not only that but the updated Lenovo software ripped out utilities that other (older, IBM-) software was looking for giving me dozens of "Can't find such-and-such.exe" errors. And this was with every single package updated straight from the ThinkPad site; in the end I had to rebuilt, something I haven't done to any machine I've owned in 6+ years.
I wasn't worried about the Lenovo take-over (and actually I bought two R51s even after this mess), but Lenovo needs to get their QA straightened out. Until then, my advice: create Restore Points before any Lenovo update, and do them one at a time if possible.
A view as to why.
Slate has a much more plausible explanation for Google's secondary offering.
Google Talk's Developers' Page both explicitly says that GTalk will move over to SIP for VoIP services, and makes a big deal out of "Client Choice" and "Service" choice, which apparently they plan to accomplish through inter-connecting to SIP providers.
Skype itself released an SDK for third parties to hook up to its own network. That doesn't sound like a good move from a company that's in talks to be acquired by an IM operator.
It's probably more likely that Skype will be acquired by a phone company (probably a mobile one that's not afraid to undercut PSTN, Vodafone would be a good choice), and that Google plans to use SIP to reach Skype-scale quickly, without paying Skype prices...
What happened was that the design in the NYT article retains some of the infrastructure of the STS, meaning a lot of the jobs that are associated with that massive pork barrel that also goes into orbit.
The NYT article is basically a PR exercise by Thiokol to get the inside track for an STS replacement and it may very well work. However, look out for what Boeing and Lockheed will come up with as they too stand to lose a lot of subsidies contracts with a potential STS replacement. Having said that, the DC-X does merit a second chance...
Well, IIRC, Ringo (and other CF systems of the time) was person-to-person collaborative filtering. Amazon is item-to-item. The difference is not just a question of perspective (which dimension you aggregate first) but also one of insight: one the Web, a person-to-person collaborative system (like my newsbot; see sig) has to be "trained" on what individual users like.
Essentially, the user has to somehow give the system enough implicit or explicit "ratings" so that a large enough sample is created and the user can be clustered with other similar users. Sounds awesome, but there's an initialization problem: in order for a user to be "hooked" on the recommendations, they have to train the system. Amazon instead said, forget about users and let's focus on items instead: what items have been "rated" together? cluster those. So, when a new user enters the site and starts browsing, our already pre-computed item relations can tell him what other products to look at. It's a pretty great insight.
Now, I'd think that the initialization problem will hold for item-to-item filtering as well: meaning, what happens when you introduce a new item on the site that doesn't have historical purchasing behavior? that one stumps me, but Greg Linden's (the lead name on this patent) Findory somehow manages that trick for news items which are by definition new all the time (my newsbot went with person-to-person filtering instead for that reason alone).
I don't find any of this obvious at all...
As a dabbler in collaborative filtering (memigo predated Findory), I got to agree: item-to-item collaborative filtering was neither that obvious nor that easy to implement. I hope that Findory doesn't get in to trouble over this, as they are doing some really neat stuff...
Well, you're right. But... the same argument could have been made against Google, or the Web itself: "if all content can be made available for free online, who would pay for textbooks/encyclopedias/magazines/etc"?
The issue here is that p2p or Web distribution is so much cheaper and easier that the game is changed: the costs and incoveniences of TV/Movie/Music distribution can be reduced so much that in the end, consumers will abandon the old way. That's just the free market (or evolution, pick your competitive paradigm of choice) at work...
Same way that Middle Ages monks just had to realize that the printing press was the end of hand-written books, p2p is the end of making money off media based on the inefficiencies of the media supply-chain: Movies had to be delivered physically around the globe to only a few locations, and therefore it was possible to charge people for admission to those locations. That just can't work anymore; media creators will have to find a new business model.
And as impolite and off-cuff as that sounds, look at history: every time media reproduction was made easier, creators ended up making more money, not less: the printing press created mass-paperbacks, cinematography made movie stars, TV sitcom/talk-show stars, etc.
So what will the new business model be? I got no clue. But in the end, we can't expect people to go en masse back to old, incovenient and more expensive technologies --i.e. make worse choices-- because it's incovenient to the interests of others. Adam Smith would agree.
Customers are naive about prices period. Discriminatory pricing (what this article talks about) is prevalent in retail: coupons, special codes, AAA rates, frequent flyer miles, all are ways of charging some people less for the same product or service that others are paying more for. In the end it's all psychology: if Amazon or Dell gives customer A an "instant rebate" on the TV she just purchased, that's perceived as being a good retailer, but if they charge customer B more than customer A w/o any coupons or gimmicks, that's perceived as unfair.
Discriminatory pricing is here to stay, shops just have to get smarter about practicing it...
Oops, this is the correct link and I meant DOM<->Server comm...
Hm, Ajax as these guys mean it, is centered around XmlHttpRequest which IE (6, I think) introduced first (meaning it was a non-standard API). Mozilla actually copied MS, which then made XmlHttpRequest "cool" and we now have this Ajax buzzword business. Never mind that there have been libraries that have been enabling asynchronous DOMServer communication for much longer than Google Maps or GMail...
Has anybody tried/implemented distributing .torrents (not the payload, the .torrent file itself) over Usenet? It seems that with trackerless torrents, Usenet would be the perfect distribution medium for the torrents themselves, just as decentralized as BitTorrent itelf... TorreNTSP so to speak...
Well, this is (half) a shameless plug but my newsbot has been ranking news sources and referring meta-news sources according to "trust" for over 3 yrs now. Findory (no affiliation) does something similar by ranking each individual news story.