Actually I think the long term solution looks to be holography. It is really quite phenomenal if you look into the physics of it, and it sounds like MagicLeap is making real progress in bringing something to market.
That being said, it is only a theory that the focus issue is what is causing the nausea. It may be something else, or a combination of factors, in which case the long term solution is likely to be a drug that inhibits whatever mechanism causes the sickness.
It can't. The ABS module is designed to be mechanically failsafe. Have a look at a design. The system can only modulate the pressure in the brake line. It does not have any ability to vent to the reservoir or lock out the pedal connection (the isolation valve is just for pedal feel). All it can do is dump a tiny amount of fluid into a small internal reservoir and then pump it back into the line. If the system fails, whether due to a stuck valve, electronics going crazy, or just loss of power, the worst you'll get is a pedal that moves a bit further and no ABS. Even if you could flash the firmware in the controller through the CAN bus (which you normally can't) to get full control of all the valves and pumps you can't 'cut the brakes'.
This is silly. The brake pedal on every car that currently leaves a production line is still physically connected to the master cylinder and wheel callipers. What they likely meant by 'disabled the brakes' is that they disabled the ABS or brake assist module. While troubling, these components are all designed with mechanical overrides for if the electronics goes hey-wire, so this is really scare mongering.
We have known for years about CAN bus insecurity and how you can control indicators and wipers once you get physical access. There was even a model of car where you could just snap a wing mirror off and plug directly into the CAN system through the exposed mirror connector. These people haven't done anything new and are just being intentionally sensationalist to get attention.
No, the reason there is increasing unemployment while also a shortage is because to become a tech worker you just have to collect a degree. To become a useful tech worker, you have to actually have some skills.
Lots of people want to become tech workers because of the promise of a quick fortune. A limited number will have actual skills (but without the passion) and might find a comfortable niche where they can charge out banker sort of rates for their services. A small number won't have any tech skills but will recognise this early and move into management before they are found out. A much larger number aren't even smart enough to figure out how little they know and get stuck complaining until they eventually attach themselves to a clueless corporation awash with money.
In the alternate world of people who work in tech because they enjoy it and can actually get things done, there is a huge shortage.
I know this is going to get a lot of hate, but JavaScript is really not as bad as people make out. There are some stupid design decisions (mostly around scoping and built-in type consistency) but once you know what these are it is pretty easy to work with them. The main problem I think most people have is that it does not really offer any sort of hand-holding in terms of how you should structure your program. But in a way it is quite beautiful how you can create usable frameworks for OO, imperative, or functional programming with the same language. The problem I mostly see is that people get stuck with a poor design decision, but rather than having to re-factor their object structure (like C# would force you to do), they can just hack in a solution that breaks basically every principle of good programming imaginable. They then dump this solution on the world and declare it is because JavaScript sucks. The real issue is that they are bad programmers who came up with a poor design and then used the (somewhat excessive) flexibility of JavaScript to get them out of a corner. Same thing has happened in C/C++ for years.
I really don't think JavaScript should have become the language of the web, but competent programmers shouldn't listen to all the hate that gets spread around. It is a decent way to introduce yourself to a lot of new programming concepts if you've come from a static OO language background. Once you understand some fundamentals CoffeeScript, TypeScript etc are pretty straight forward and their applicability is obvious.
For what it's worth, if you are doing large programs then something like TypeScript can be very useful. The problem it solves is really an issue with dynamic languages in general though, rather than JavaScript. There are ways to create large maintainable code bases with a dynamic prototypical language, but sometimes the classic OO model just fits a problem better.
You've got it back to front. The benefit here is that poor people won't all die because of famines/droughts/floods induced by climate change. It is not so they can have new electric tools and solar powered houses. The rich countries are the ones who will have the new stuff, while the poor will get the 'benefit' of not dying due to our voracious consumption of the earth's resources.
Yes, the life of poor people in developing countries really does suck that much.
Once the infrastructure is in place for censorship, that infrastructure will be used.
Sadly the average person really doesn't care. They could probably just announce that they are selling all your data to North Korea, and then release some photos of the dog posing with Kim Jong Un and everyone would be fine with it.
Insurance companies don't really make money from 'betting' against you having an accident. They make money from the fact that they end up holding huge accounts full of accumulated premiums which they then use to play in the global financial markets. There are still plenty of things that need insurance, so the industry won't exactly disappear, but I'm sure any displaced insurance industry workers will quickly find another way to play the global slot machines with your savings.
Munich is growing faster than any time in recent history. Yet, for the first time in 50 years, no subway is being built. Leaving aside the reasons for this (mainly the German obsession with public debt), this is simply wrong, the two parts don't fit.
It is pretty dumb. Germany is full of brilliant engineers but they are terrible at economics. They need to divert export capacity towards viable domestic projects like this, rather than continuing to run huge trade surpluses that they then do nothing with (or worse: lend to people who are never going to pay them back). A small export tax to fund domestic infrastructure projects would be a logical step right now, and would help to protect the country from another global slowdown. Alas I imagine proposing such a thing is political suicide.
Oh I agree. But very few companies have the luxury of being able to remain solvent in the face of an attack by short-term thinking competitors for long enough to get those long term benefits. Japan is also not a good comparison as it has a unique cultural makeup that supports semi-dynastic companies. Have a read about the Zaibatsu. The allies tried to dismantle these after the second world war, but they largely reformed anyway. Very different from western capitalism.
From the rough information I have about the appliance industry (I used to work for a company that had an appliances division) you go from around 80% efficiency with a cheap induction motor to around 90% for a brushless motor. However the controllability of the motors provides the really big benefits. For example, in a direct drive washing machine the motor can more efficiently change direction during agitation strokes, adjust speeds for things like load size, and implement more effective cleaning cycles (I have been assured there is real science behind wobbling the clothes back and forth different ways). In air conditioners and fridges the area of linear compressors is getting a lot of attention as you can remove substantial mechanical losses in the system. I don't know exactly how much these sorts of things add up too, but I'd say another 10% isn't unrealistic.
The 5% efficiency they are talking about refers to the losses in a typical cheap inverter, so you gain that as well.
I think the offsetting of the inverter costs is the real advantage though. Every bit helps towards making the economics stack up.
The growing trend for appliances is to move towards using brushless DC motors instead of traditional induction motors. These are more compact, more efficient, and variable speed in nature - which opens up new opportunities in some applications. The main problem is they cost more as they require a controller, unlike induction motors which will run directly off the AC supply.
The neat thing about this product is that it recognises that the DC to AC inverter in a solar power system is basically just a motor controller (a box of power electronics). So by moving that box of electronics into an area where it has an additional benefit, they have offset the inverter cost of a solar installation. This has potentially huge implications for the solar industry as inverter cost is becoming one of the dominate components of a solar power system as panel costs continue to reduce.
It would be interesting to see how the added efficiency of the brushless motors and extra abilities - such as being able to vary compressor output to match solar input - impact the overall economics. There are also new technologies such as linear motor compressors that could continue to tip the economics in favour of solar systems. Either way an interesting development.
This is true, but the problem is that our economy is not setup to care about compassion. Just look at the continuing problems in the Bangladeshi clothing industry. People are generally aware of what is going on, but in the end they still buy the clothes from Primark (that they don't even need). People just don't really care and so the company that skimps on worker compassion wins out in the end.
The only reason industries like technology are insulated from this sort of harsh reality is that there are still lots of tech companies that make obscene profits, so they can afford to pay workers good wages and absorb some inefficiency while keeping shareholders happy. However this does not characterise the whole tech market, and there are certainly areas now that are coming under ruthless competition.
Capitalism has always been a race to the bottom limited only by the extent to which society accounts for externalities, like paid vacation time or limited work hours. Otherwise you eventually just get the crazies on the margin dictating how the majority must work. It is really madness, especially now that the economy is largely generating pointless jobs through the whole legal/advertising/corporate industries.
Well, some people still don't think Motorsport is a real sport, but that hasn't stopped series like F1 from becoming (at one point) the second most televised sport in the world. Similarly Nascar and Indy have pretty major followings and the World Rally Championship did too when the drivers were still crazy.
Personally I don't get the whole e-sport thing, but I also don't think the fact that the competitors aren't training like athletes is any reason it can't become a massive global industry, with hundreds of millions of viewers and megastars earning stupid amounts of money.
If their goal is to try to kill you in a convoluted way they could just climb under your car with a set of pliers and cut through a couple of your brake lines.
If their goal is to break into your car they can smash a window.
If their goal is to steal your car they can do this with a flat bed truck, or just break into your house and steal the keys when you are asleep.
There are endless ways people can cause havoc in our modern world. Fortunately a surprisingly large majority of people don't bother engaging in this sort of gratuitous destruction. I really don't think people need to worry about some evil genius spending a few months so they can turn your ABS warning light on or shut down your engine so you have to pull over.
Mars is already a giant partially evacuated tube. Why would you want to use a Hyperloop system? You could just use a regular maglev system and avoid all the issues of having to pump away the pressure wave that builds in front of the train due to it being stuck in a pointless tube. The novel part of Hyperloop is not the maglev propulsion it is the use of a tube.
More likely you would just use a sub-orbital rocket plane system to blast your way to the next town anyway. Any early mars colony is going to have a surplus of used rocket boosters lying around, and a rather large deficit of steel and concrete production facilities.
...just hire people in each region to enter map data? This is a company that makes 50 billion in revenue. I just don't get how they can be so stingy with collecting data for their mapping service so they can spy on me. It's the same with Apple. How can they release a mapping platform and not even bother to hire someone in London to check that all the stations on the Northern line were there.
I mean, basically any western democracy where you don't need to have an army to protect your wealth is pretty awesome if you are rich. Other than tinfoil hat syndrome (e.g. James Cameron - moved to NZ) why would you limit yourself to a smaller place that you can visit, buy a mansions in, and even smuggle your dogs in on your private jet whenever you want to anyway?
Really the debate needs to change to asking why an Aussie, who enjoys arguable a better standard of living than the median American, can't reasonably freely immigrate to the USA if they feel like it and vice versa? They could just start with a one-in one-out system so that there is no uncontrolled effect on population size, and limiting access to social services is a no brainer. That is the problem with this immigration debate, it gets so fixated on countries full of impoverished unskilled people trying to get to the richer country, yet the only thing they seem to actually change (as in the UK for example) is to make immigration harder for the educated middle-class from countries you might actually want to exchange people with.
These books are basically the equivalent of a zoologist going out into the world of existing code bases, and trying to come up with a naming scheme for everything they find. Most of the OO patterns existed long before the Gang of Four formalised them. Many of them existed before we even had commercial OO languages. And I'm certain most of the patterns in this book have been used (where suitable) by web developers for a long time now. It can be useful to have some terms defined, but in the end you either have the mentality and skills to make easy to maintain, robust software, or you are a manager.
Basically looks like Varoufakis was pulling the strings, but in the end Tsipras blinked first. What else could he do though, I think Varoufakis didn't grasp until late in the piece that powerful parts of the EU were quite happy to call his bluff on a Grexit. Seems like his ego is now in repair mode after making that rather fatal miscalculation.
Monitoring driving habits doesn't sound all that draconian to me. Things like speed limit, weaving in and out of lanes, panic stops, tailgating, etc. are reasonable factors in deciding how big of a risk a driver is. Some people think they're such skillful drivers that the rules don't apply to them, and they're wrong.
True, but I suspect the reason we have not seen this yet is that current no-claims based insurance policies work almost as well. Despite the really big savings you get from not smashing into things, some people still do so reasonably regularly, and I don't see how a monitoring device is going to change that.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the insurance industry makes a large portion of its profits by investing the premiums it has collected between payout events. There is almost a perverse incentive to not make the system too efficient as then they would have lower premiums and less money that they can invest. If you took it to the extreme and removed all risk (maybe driverless cars) there would be no insurance industry, so the reality is that having a bit of room for obfuscation (essentially getting safe drivers to pay more than they should) is useful to them.
I particularly dislike the phrase 'internet of things', but I know I'll dislike any term that sees common adoption while the media/marketers have an interest in the field until that interest dies down and it no longer becomes fashionable for companies to shoehorn it into their message.
How about 'Consumer Oriented Connectivity & Knowledge Systems?
Slashdot Mirror
LMOL, ummm no thanks for playing. Nobody trusts Putin.
What about Steven Seagal?
http://www.theguardian.com/fil...
Actually I think the long term solution looks to be holography. It is really quite phenomenal if you look into the physics of it, and it sounds like MagicLeap is making real progress in bringing something to market.
That being said, it is only a theory that the focus issue is what is causing the nausea. It may be something else, or a combination of factors, in which case the long term solution is likely to be a drug that inhibits whatever mechanism causes the sickness.
It can't. The ABS module is designed to be mechanically failsafe. Have a look at a design. The system can only modulate the pressure in the brake line. It does not have any ability to vent to the reservoir or lock out the pedal connection (the isolation valve is just for pedal feel). All it can do is dump a tiny amount of fluid into a small internal reservoir and then pump it back into the line. If the system fails, whether due to a stuck valve, electronics going crazy, or just loss of power, the worst you'll get is a pedal that moves a bit further and no ABS. Even if you could flash the firmware in the controller through the CAN bus (which you normally can't) to get full control of all the valves and pumps you can't 'cut the brakes'.
This is silly. The brake pedal on every car that currently leaves a production line is still physically connected to the master cylinder and wheel callipers. What they likely meant by 'disabled the brakes' is that they disabled the ABS or brake assist module. While troubling, these components are all designed with mechanical overrides for if the electronics goes hey-wire, so this is really scare mongering.
We have known for years about CAN bus insecurity and how you can control indicators and wipers once you get physical access. There was even a model of car where you could just snap a wing mirror off and plug directly into the CAN system through the exposed mirror connector. These people haven't done anything new and are just being intentionally sensationalist to get attention.
No, the reason there is increasing unemployment while also a shortage is because to become a tech worker you just have to collect a degree. To become a useful tech worker, you have to actually have some skills.
Lots of people want to become tech workers because of the promise of a quick fortune. A limited number will have actual skills (but without the passion) and might find a comfortable niche where they can charge out banker sort of rates for their services. A small number won't have any tech skills but will recognise this early and move into management before they are found out. A much larger number aren't even smart enough to figure out how little they know and get stuck complaining until they eventually attach themselves to a clueless corporation awash with money.
In the alternate world of people who work in tech because they enjoy it and can actually get things done, there is a huge shortage.
I know this is going to get a lot of hate, but JavaScript is really not as bad as people make out. There are some stupid design decisions (mostly around scoping and built-in type consistency) but once you know what these are it is pretty easy to work with them. The main problem I think most people have is that it does not really offer any sort of hand-holding in terms of how you should structure your program. But in a way it is quite beautiful how you can create usable frameworks for OO, imperative, or functional programming with the same language. The problem I mostly see is that people get stuck with a poor design decision, but rather than having to re-factor their object structure (like C# would force you to do), they can just hack in a solution that breaks basically every principle of good programming imaginable. They then dump this solution on the world and declare it is because JavaScript sucks. The real issue is that they are bad programmers who came up with a poor design and then used the (somewhat excessive) flexibility of JavaScript to get them out of a corner. Same thing has happened in C/C++ for years.
I really don't think JavaScript should have become the language of the web, but competent programmers shouldn't listen to all the hate that gets spread around. It is a decent way to introduce yourself to a lot of new programming concepts if you've come from a static OO language background. Once you understand some fundamentals CoffeeScript, TypeScript etc are pretty straight forward and their applicability is obvious.
For what it's worth, if you are doing large programs then something like TypeScript can be very useful. The problem it solves is really an issue with dynamic languages in general though, rather than JavaScript. There are ways to create large maintainable code bases with a dynamic prototypical language, but sometimes the classic OO model just fits a problem better.
You've got it back to front. The benefit here is that poor people won't all die because of famines/droughts/floods induced by climate change. It is not so they can have new electric tools and solar powered houses. The rich countries are the ones who will have the new stuff, while the poor will get the 'benefit' of not dying due to our voracious consumption of the earth's resources.
Yes, the life of poor people in developing countries really does suck that much.
Once the infrastructure is in place for censorship, that infrastructure will be used.
Sadly the average person really doesn't care. They could probably just announce that they are selling all your data to North Korea, and then release some photos of the dog posing with Kim Jong Un and everyone would be fine with it.
Insurance companies don't really make money from 'betting' against you having an accident. They make money from the fact that they end up holding huge accounts full of accumulated premiums which they then use to play in the global financial markets. There are still plenty of things that need insurance, so the industry won't exactly disappear, but I'm sure any displaced insurance industry workers will quickly find another way to play the global slot machines with your savings.
Munich is growing faster than any time in recent history. Yet, for the first time in 50 years, no subway is being built. Leaving aside the reasons for this (mainly the German obsession with public debt), this is simply wrong, the two parts don't fit.
It is pretty dumb. Germany is full of brilliant engineers but they are terrible at economics. They need to divert export capacity towards viable domestic projects like this, rather than continuing to run huge trade surpluses that they then do nothing with (or worse: lend to people who are never going to pay them back). A small export tax to fund domestic infrastructure projects would be a logical step right now, and would help to protect the country from another global slowdown. Alas I imagine proposing such a thing is political suicide.
Oh I agree. But very few companies have the luxury of being able to remain solvent in the face of an attack by short-term thinking competitors for long enough to get those long term benefits. Japan is also not a good comparison as it has a unique cultural makeup that supports semi-dynastic companies. Have a read about the Zaibatsu. The allies tried to dismantle these after the second world war, but they largely reformed anyway. Very different from western capitalism.
From the rough information I have about the appliance industry (I used to work for a company that had an appliances division) you go from around 80% efficiency with a cheap induction motor to around 90% for a brushless motor. However the controllability of the motors provides the really big benefits. For example, in a direct drive washing machine the motor can more efficiently change direction during agitation strokes, adjust speeds for things like load size, and implement more effective cleaning cycles (I have been assured there is real science behind wobbling the clothes back and forth different ways). In air conditioners and fridges the area of linear compressors is getting a lot of attention as you can remove substantial mechanical losses in the system. I don't know exactly how much these sorts of things add up too, but I'd say another 10% isn't unrealistic.
The 5% efficiency they are talking about refers to the losses in a typical cheap inverter, so you gain that as well.
I think the offsetting of the inverter costs is the real advantage though. Every bit helps towards making the economics stack up.
The growing trend for appliances is to move towards using brushless DC motors instead of traditional induction motors. These are more compact, more efficient, and variable speed in nature - which opens up new opportunities in some applications. The main problem is they cost more as they require a controller, unlike induction motors which will run directly off the AC supply.
The neat thing about this product is that it recognises that the DC to AC inverter in a solar power system is basically just a motor controller (a box of power electronics). So by moving that box of electronics into an area where it has an additional benefit, they have offset the inverter cost of a solar installation. This has potentially huge implications for the solar industry as inverter cost is becoming one of the dominate components of a solar power system as panel costs continue to reduce.
It would be interesting to see how the added efficiency of the brushless motors and extra abilities - such as being able to vary compressor output to match solar input - impact the overall economics. There are also new technologies such as linear motor compressors that could continue to tip the economics in favour of solar systems. Either way an interesting development.
This is true, but the problem is that our economy is not setup to care about compassion. Just look at the continuing problems in the Bangladeshi clothing industry. People are generally aware of what is going on, but in the end they still buy the clothes from Primark (that they don't even need). People just don't really care and so the company that skimps on worker compassion wins out in the end.
The only reason industries like technology are insulated from this sort of harsh reality is that there are still lots of tech companies that make obscene profits, so they can afford to pay workers good wages and absorb some inefficiency while keeping shareholders happy. However this does not characterise the whole tech market, and there are certainly areas now that are coming under ruthless competition.
Capitalism has always been a race to the bottom limited only by the extent to which society accounts for externalities, like paid vacation time or limited work hours. Otherwise you eventually just get the crazies on the margin dictating how the majority must work. It is really madness, especially now that the economy is largely generating pointless jobs through the whole legal/advertising/corporate industries.
Well, some people still don't think Motorsport is a real sport, but that hasn't stopped series like F1 from becoming (at one point) the second most televised sport in the world. Similarly Nascar and Indy have pretty major followings and the World Rally Championship did too when the drivers were still crazy.
Personally I don't get the whole e-sport thing, but I also don't think the fact that the competitors aren't training like athletes is any reason it can't become a massive global industry, with hundreds of millions of viewers and megastars earning stupid amounts of money.
On top of this why would anyone want to do this?
If their goal is to try to kill you in a convoluted way they could just climb under your car with a set of pliers and cut through a couple of your brake lines.
If their goal is to break into your car they can smash a window.
If their goal is to steal your car they can do this with a flat bed truck, or just break into your house and steal the keys when you are asleep.
There are endless ways people can cause havoc in our modern world. Fortunately a surprisingly large majority of people don't bother engaging in this sort of gratuitous destruction. I really don't think people need to worry about some evil genius spending a few months so they can turn your ABS warning light on or shut down your engine so you have to pull over.
Do stories from the US have to be routed through the New Zealand media now?
Time, Huffingtonpost, even the Daily Mail are running this story, and the original press release is here:
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...
Mars is already a giant partially evacuated tube. Why would you want to use a Hyperloop system? You could just use a regular maglev system and avoid all the issues of having to pump away the pressure wave that builds in front of the train due to it being stuck in a pointless tube. The novel part of Hyperloop is not the maglev propulsion it is the use of a tube.
More likely you would just use a sub-orbital rocket plane system to blast your way to the next town anyway. Any early mars colony is going to have a surplus of used rocket boosters lying around, and a rather large deficit of steel and concrete production facilities.
...just hire people in each region to enter map data? This is a company that makes 50 billion in revenue. I just don't get how they can be so stingy with collecting data for their mapping service so they can spy on me. It's the same with Apple. How can they release a mapping platform and not even bother to hire someone in London to check that all the stations on the Northern line were there.
I mean, basically any western democracy where you don't need to have an army to protect your wealth is pretty awesome if you are rich. Other than tinfoil hat syndrome (e.g. James Cameron - moved to NZ) why would you limit yourself to a smaller place that you can visit, buy a mansions in, and even smuggle your dogs in on your private jet whenever you want to anyway?
Really the debate needs to change to asking why an Aussie, who enjoys arguable a better standard of living than the median American, can't reasonably freely immigrate to the USA if they feel like it and vice versa? They could just start with a one-in one-out system so that there is no uncontrolled effect on population size, and limiting access to social services is a no brainer. That is the problem with this immigration debate, it gets so fixated on countries full of impoverished unskilled people trying to get to the richer country, yet the only thing they seem to actually change (as in the UK for example) is to make immigration harder for the educated middle-class from countries you might actually want to exchange people with.
These books are basically the equivalent of a zoologist going out into the world of existing code bases, and trying to come up with a naming scheme for everything they find. Most of the OO patterns existed long before the Gang of Four formalised them. Many of them existed before we even had commercial OO languages. And I'm certain most of the patterns in this book have been used (where suitable) by web developers for a long time now. It can be useful to have some terms defined, but in the end you either have the mentality and skills to make easy to maintain, robust software, or you are a manager.
Also listen to Varoufakis's interview. It gives you quite a lot of insight into how Greece got to this point:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn...
Basically looks like Varoufakis was pulling the strings, but in the end Tsipras blinked first. What else could he do though, I think Varoufakis didn't grasp until late in the piece that powerful parts of the EU were quite happy to call his bluff on a Grexit. Seems like his ego is now in repair mode after making that rather fatal miscalculation.
Monitoring driving habits doesn't sound all that draconian to me. Things like speed limit, weaving in and out of lanes, panic stops, tailgating, etc. are reasonable factors in deciding how big of a risk a driver is. Some people think they're such skillful drivers that the rules don't apply to them, and they're wrong.
True, but I suspect the reason we have not seen this yet is that current no-claims based insurance policies work almost as well. Despite the really big savings you get from not smashing into things, some people still do so reasonably regularly, and I don't see how a monitoring device is going to change that.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the insurance industry makes a large portion of its profits by investing the premiums it has collected between payout events. There is almost a perverse incentive to not make the system too efficient as then they would have lower premiums and less money that they can invest. If you took it to the extreme and removed all risk (maybe driverless cars) there would be no insurance industry, so the reality is that having a bit of room for obfuscation (essentially getting safe drivers to pay more than they should) is useful to them.
I particularly dislike the phrase 'internet of things', but I know I'll dislike any term that sees common adoption while the media/marketers have an interest in the field until that interest dies down and it no longer becomes fashionable for companies to shoehorn it into their message.
How about 'Consumer Oriented Connectivity & Knowledge Systems?
Way too complicated. You can basically replace the current system with one line:
return (partyA.totalAssets > partyB.totalAssets) ? partyA : partyB;