As soon as the first driver begins you can see that this test is flawed. The camera is positioned way too low and does not have a view of obstacles directly in front of the vehicle. The camera should be twice as high as it is in this demonstration. I'll bet the drivers would fare much better in that case.
There are a lot of tech hobbies that disappeared when personal computers arrived on the scene. That's a problem that's been around for some 20 years now.
But we're now at the point where computers are so ubiquitous, so commoditized, so commonplace... that for many people they have become downright boring.
So it's no surprise that there could be a resurgence of interest in other tech hobbies. Ham radio, building simple electronic devices from discrete components, etc.
Yes, I know, it's a Commodore in name only. However, it's about time that someone gave this venerable form factor another shot in the market. Why should I throw away a perfectly good monitor every couple of years just because the Macintosh inside it is obsolete? I've been saying for years that they should build the guts of the computer into the keyboard, not the monitor.
I'm ready to see this form factor start to get deployed again. Now that the typical desktop computer doesn't have quite as many cables coming out of it as it did a few years ago, it's time.
But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.
Ok then... I live in the United States, which is supposedly a democracy. How do I go about forking? I'd like to start my own fork of the United States that doesn't include yesterday's government takeover of health care.
Anyway, even if there were an operating system available today that is still capable of parsing the Xenix filesystem, you wouldn't be able to get to it because the disk is attached to the system I/O board using an ST506 controller. Good luck finding a modern computer with one of those in it.
You're going to have to move that data off the machine the way we did it back in the days when an Altos was a modern computer. Plug a null modem cable into that serial port and use UUCP to get the data moved. Or if the machine has rzsz installed, you might be able to get away with using Zmodem instead.
Back during the DOS 2.0 days, Microsoft intended for Xenix to be the successor to DOS. And the worst of Xenix was still preferable to the best of Windows.
Microsoft had several opportunities to ubiquitize a quality operating system, irrespective of their horrific business practices. They could have built their next-gen OS on top of Xenix. They could have finished the OS/2 project instead of stabbing IBM in the back and doing Windows on top of DOS. They could have even completed Dave Cutler's vision for Windows NT instead of MAKING THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE and top-loading all of their crap into the Win32 layer instead of building around the NT microkernel.
They could have done any of the above, and still practiced their bullshit monopolistic business practices, and they could have still taken over the market. In fact, if they had built Presentation Manager on top of Xenix, it's entirely possible that Linux would not exist today, and the X Window System would never have evolved past the days of TWM and Athena Widgets because all the unixheads would have happily moved to the commodity operating system.
But no. Aside from being monopolistic bullies in the marketplace, they also consistently deliver really bad products. There is a reason Linux has already overtaken Windows in the enterprise computing market, and has denied them a monopoly in this area. People who run back end data center applications don't want an operating system that has a GUI intertwined with the bottom layers of the OS. They don't want mouse clicks in the same event queue as disk and network I/O. Windows is a bullshit design and it will never be adequate.
I hate to sound unsympathetic here, but the Internet is a hostile place. If you have port 22 open to the world, you should expect to get pummelled with password cracking attempts more or less constantly.
Either learn to live with it, or at least take some steps to slow them down. I find that throttling back the number of connections any one IP address can make in a short time pretty much slows it down to a reasonable level. Alternatively, you can also put some "trap" logins on your system. Usernames like "admin" or "oracle" with the password set to the same as the username are good. When the login succeeds, you immediately drop the connection and lock the source IP address out using iptables.
Unless it's really causing a lot of pain, though, please don't harass the ISP from which the connection is originating. You're just going to make some overworked sysadmin's day a little more unpleasant. Chances are, they're already doing everything they can to keep rogues off their network.
What's stopping the cable companies from running fiber to the home?
Nothing at all. In fact, one of the particularly misleading advertisements the cable company here has been using is "Fiber is nothing special, we've been using fiber since 1991." Sure, but that's fiber to the (vastly oversubscribed) node, not fiber to the home. As consumers begin to expect more and more bandwidth, tv channels, and services, the cable company is going to have to keep doing node splits until they eventually find they would have been better served by running fiber to each subscriber.
Verizon FiOS uses the Actiontec MI424WR router to bridge Ethernet to coax using MoCA (Multimedia Over Cable Alliance) technology. This allows them to provide Internet access to your set top boxes without having to string Cat5 to the TV location.
Used MI424WR routers can be found cheap on eBay. Get a pair of them (or three or four or whatever), turn off the DHCP stuff, and you've got yourself a nice set of Ethernet-to-coax bridges.
As an extra benefit, these have wifi in them, so you're also going to get a whole-house wifi setup at no extra charge. And by the way, MoCA runs at >1000 MHz so you can run cable TV on the same wiring plant without interference.
If Verizon is now Skype-friendly, then the next thing I want to see is for them to allow Skype calls from their FiOS set-top boxes. These boxes have USB ports and are already connected to the Internet. It would be a great way for Verizon to really stick it to those cable companies (whose anti-FiOS advertising has been getting downright nasty lately) -- imagine being able to just plug a $20 webcam into your set-top box and effortlessly videoconference with Skype users anywhere.
C'mon Verizon, the infrastructure is already in place... a few weeks of development and you'd have a killer advantage.
It's ironic to see Bill Gates downplaying tablets. The "Tablet PC" was his pet project half a decade ago. Gates was convinced that tablets were the future, everyone would have one, and because it was his pet project it had all of the resources of Microsoft behind it.
Tablet PC's failed miserably.
Why? I think it was because Gates was bent on force-fitting it to be a PC. Gates wants everything to be a PC. He's incapable of even parsing the idea that non-PC devices exist.
Apple walked in with the idea that a tablet can be a "big iPod" or a "big iPhone" rather than a "small PC with a stylus." For that matter, that was essentially the same idea behind netbooks, except with a keyboard. Microsoft was successful in bullying the netbook manufacturers into larding up the hardware specs so that they eventually became "small laptops" instead, but that was easy because the netbook manufacturers were PC companies that Microsoft already had the ability to bend over a barrel.
The next generation of tablets, and the next generation of netbooks, are going to come from companies like Apple, Nokia, LG, Motorola, etc. who aren't already beholden to Microsoft for other product lines. And if Microsoft comes knocking and tells them "you're going to redesign this device so that it is a Windows PC" those companies will say "Fuck off, Bill. This device isn't a PC and it's not going to become one." They want ultimate portability, super long battery life, and other features that Ye Olde Windows PC just isn't going to enable.
There's a subtle negative feedback loop here, and I think it's a bit short sighted for Canonical to contribute to it.
Google is a huge advocate and supporter of Linux. Google helps to make Linux happen. Google helps to make the non-Microsoft ecosystem happen. By sending Ubuntu users to Yahoo search (which, as has been mentioned, is actually Bing), Canonical is helping Microsoft to chip away at Google's market share. This is not good! Google is the non-Microsoft world's single biggest chance of finally taking down the monopolist. If Google falls, Microsoft will make sure that the Web becomes a Windows-only experience. Do we really want that to happen?
Actually, I think that after Google finishes polishing up the Linux version of Chrome, they should pony up a few bucks to make Chrome (and Google search) the default web browser in Ubuntu. What's good for Google is good for Linux, and vice versa. Or as has been said here many times before: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Couldn't we just ditch Flash and use something less retarded?
Bite your tongue. If anything replaces Flash it will be Silverlight. Do you really want Microsoft controlling the non-HTML portion of the Web? Do you really want Microsoft turning the Web into a Windows-only experience? Because that's what's going to happen if Flash is supplanted. Be careful wht you wish for.
I work for a technology company that was started by a doctor. We actually do follow the hospital model. The on-call tech sleeps in a dormitory at the office, and gets paid for the shift. During that time he is expected to respond to the pager, the telephone, and the front door. He gets paid the same amount of money for the shift, regardless of whether he slept for eight hours or had a hellish night of one crisis after another (normally it's somewhere in between). It's not a perfect system, but it does seem to work pretty well.
it's the first time I've felt the simplicity and friendliness on an Internet forum that good old BBSes had back in the 80s.
You might also enjoy Citadel, which started life as a BBS package and is now popular as a groupware platform. People are still using it to run online communities, too.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as the first driver begins you can see that this test is flawed. The camera is positioned way too low and does not have a view of obstacles directly in front of the vehicle. The camera should be twice as high as it is in this demonstration. I'll bet the drivers would fare much better in that case.
There are a lot of tech hobbies that disappeared when personal computers arrived on the scene. That's a problem that's been around for some 20 years now.
... that for many people they have become downright boring.
But we're now at the point where computers are so ubiquitous, so commoditized, so commonplace
So it's no surprise that there could be a resurgence of interest in other tech hobbies. Ham radio, building simple electronic devices from discrete components, etc.
...it's actually SCO, and not IBM, that owns the rights to the zSeries instruction set.
Forget about Midori ... I want to know when parts of Mojave will find their way into Windows and .net !!
Draft bill. Not final. Not to worry. An army of lobbyists is already on a flight to NZ to "correct" the situation before it passes.
I'm pretty sure it's Eolas that owns all of the lunar intellectual property.
(We like da moon / and it is pa-ten-ted...)
I think you mean champing at the bit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_%28horse%29#In_popular_culture for more detail on that.
Yes, I know, it's a Commodore in name only. However, it's about time that someone gave this venerable form factor another shot in the market. Why should I throw away a perfectly good monitor every couple of years just because the Macintosh inside it is obsolete? I've been saying for years that they should build the guts of the computer into the keyboard, not the monitor.
I'm ready to see this form factor start to get deployed again. Now that the typical desktop computer doesn't have quite as many cables coming out of it as it did a few years ago, it's time.
Ok then ... I live in the United States, which is supposedly a democracy. How do I go about forking? I'd like to start my own fork of the United States that doesn't include yesterday's government takeover of health care.
What a great machine. The Altos 586 was the first machine I used to run my BBS (which has run nonstop since 1988 and is still online today) before SCO Xenix and later Linux arrived on the scene. It was an insanely cool computer.
Anyway, even if there were an operating system available today that is still capable of parsing the Xenix filesystem, you wouldn't be able to get to it because the disk is attached to the system I/O board using an ST506 controller. Good luck finding a modern computer with one of those in it.
You're going to have to move that data off the machine the way we did it back in the days when an Altos was a modern computer. Plug a null modem cable into that serial port and use UUCP to get the data moved. Or if the machine has rzsz installed, you might be able to get away with using Zmodem instead.
Microsoft won't copy Nintendo. Microsoft innovates. Steve Ballmer said so.
Back during the DOS 2.0 days, Microsoft intended for Xenix to be the successor to DOS. And the worst of Xenix was still preferable to the best of Windows.
Microsoft had several opportunities to ubiquitize a quality operating system, irrespective of their horrific business practices. They could have built their next-gen OS on top of Xenix. They could have finished the OS/2 project instead of stabbing IBM in the back and doing Windows on top of DOS. They could have even completed Dave Cutler's vision for Windows NT instead of MAKING THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE and top-loading all of their crap into the Win32 layer instead of building around the NT microkernel.
They could have done any of the above, and still practiced their bullshit monopolistic business practices, and they could have still taken over the market. In fact, if they had built Presentation Manager on top of Xenix, it's entirely possible that Linux would not exist today, and the X Window System would never have evolved past the days of TWM and Athena Widgets because all the unixheads would have happily moved to the commodity operating system.
But no. Aside from being monopolistic bullies in the marketplace, they also consistently deliver really bad products. There is a reason Linux has already overtaken Windows in the enterprise computing market, and has denied them a monopoly in this area. People who run back end data center applications don't want an operating system that has a GUI intertwined with the bottom layers of
the OS. They don't want mouse clicks in the same event queue as disk and network I/O. Windows is a bullshit design and it will never be adequate.
I hate to sound unsympathetic here, but the Internet is a hostile place. If you have port 22 open to the world, you should expect to get pummelled with password cracking attempts more or less constantly.
Either learn to live with it, or at least take some steps to slow them down. I find that throttling back the number of connections any one IP address can make in a short time pretty much slows it down to a reasonable level. Alternatively, you can also put some "trap" logins on your system. Usernames like "admin" or "oracle" with the password set to the same as the username are good. When the login succeeds, you immediately drop the connection and lock the source IP address out using iptables.
Unless it's really causing a lot of pain, though, please don't harass the ISP from which the connection is originating. You're just going to make some overworked sysadmin's day a little more unpleasant. Chances are, they're already doing everything they can to keep rogues off their network.
Nothing at all. In fact, one of the particularly misleading advertisements the cable company here has been using is "Fiber is nothing special, we've been using fiber since 1991." Sure, but that's fiber to the (vastly oversubscribed) node, not fiber to the home. As consumers begin to expect more and more bandwidth, tv channels, and services, the cable company is going to have to keep doing node splits until they eventually find they would have been better served by running fiber to each subscriber.
Verizon FiOS uses the Actiontec MI424WR router to bridge Ethernet to coax using MoCA (Multimedia Over Cable Alliance) technology. This allows them to provide Internet access to your set top boxes without having to string Cat5 to the TV location.
Used MI424WR routers can be found cheap on eBay. Get a pair of them (or three or four or whatever), turn off the DHCP stuff, and you've got yourself a nice set of Ethernet-to-coax bridges.
As an extra benefit, these have wifi in them, so you're also going to get a whole-house wifi setup at no extra charge. And by the way, MoCA runs at >1000 MHz so you can run cable TV on the same wiring plant without interference.
If Verizon is now Skype-friendly, then the next thing I want to see is for them to allow Skype calls from their FiOS set-top boxes. These boxes have USB ports and are already connected to the Internet. It would be a great way for Verizon to really stick it to those cable companies (whose anti-FiOS advertising has been getting downright nasty lately) -- imagine being able to just plug a $20 webcam into your set-top box and effortlessly videoconference with Skype users anywhere.
... a few weeks of development and you'd have a killer advantage.
C'mon Verizon, the infrastructure is already in place
It's ironic to see Bill Gates downplaying tablets. The "Tablet PC" was his pet project half a decade ago. Gates was convinced that tablets were the future, everyone would have one, and because it was his pet project it had all of the resources of Microsoft behind it.
Tablet PC's failed miserably.
Why? I think it was because Gates was bent on force-fitting it to be a PC. Gates wants everything to be a PC. He's incapable of even parsing the idea that non-PC devices exist.
Apple walked in with the idea that a tablet can be a "big iPod" or a "big iPhone" rather than a "small PC with a stylus." For that matter, that was essentially the same idea behind netbooks, except with a keyboard. Microsoft was successful in bullying the netbook manufacturers into larding up the hardware specs so that they eventually became "small laptops" instead, but that was easy because the netbook manufacturers were PC companies that Microsoft already had the ability to bend over a barrel.
The next generation of tablets, and the next generation of netbooks, are going to come from companies like Apple, Nokia, LG, Motorola, etc. who aren't already beholden to Microsoft for other product lines. And if Microsoft comes knocking and tells them "you're going to redesign this device so that it is a Windows PC" those companies will say "Fuck off, Bill. This device isn't a PC and it's not going to become one." They want ultimate portability, super long battery life, and other features that Ye Olde Windows PC just isn't going to enable.
There's a subtle negative feedback loop here, and I think it's a bit short sighted for Canonical to contribute to it.
Google is a huge advocate and supporter of Linux. Google helps to make Linux happen. Google helps to make the non-Microsoft ecosystem happen. By sending Ubuntu users to Yahoo search (which, as has been mentioned, is actually Bing), Canonical is helping Microsoft to chip away at Google's market share. This is not good! Google is the non-Microsoft world's single biggest chance of finally taking down the monopolist. If Google falls, Microsoft will make sure that the Web becomes a Windows-only experience. Do we really want that to happen?
Actually, I think that after Google finishes polishing up the Linux version of Chrome, they should pony up a few bucks to make Chrome (and Google search) the default web browser in Ubuntu. What's good for Google is good for Linux, and vice versa. Or as has been said here many times before: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Bite your tongue. If anything replaces Flash it will be Silverlight. Do you really want Microsoft controlling the non-HTML portion of the Web? Do you really want Microsoft turning the Web into a Windows-only experience? Because that's what's going to happen if Flash is supplanted. Be careful wht you wish for.
"AT&T has found that only 3% of its smartphone users -- primarily iPhone owners -- are responsible for 40% of total data usage"
Or, put another way: AT&T has found that 97% of its smartphone users are not using anywhere close to the amount of bandwidth they are paying for.
As a result, they should have plenty of extra capacity and plenty of extra cash for network upgrades, right?
I work for a technology company that was started by a doctor. We actually do follow the hospital model. The on-call tech sleeps in a dormitory at the office, and gets paid for the shift. During that time he is expected to respond to the pager, the telephone, and the front door. He gets paid the same amount of money for the shift, regardless of whether he slept for eight hours or had a hellish night of one crisis after another (normally it's somewhere in between). It's not a perfect system, but it does seem to work pretty well.
Wait a minute. Wasn't a CME this big supposed to completely destroy the power grid? Wasn't this supposed to plunge us back into the stone age?
So what happened?
You might also enjoy Citadel, which started life as a BBS package and is now popular as a groupware platform. People are still using it to run online communities, too.
Gee, I think I've heard of something like that ... it's called a BBS.
(Actually, when you think about it, any social network is really nothing more than a really big BBS with some domain-specific optimizations.)
There's already a "near realtime flu tracking system." It's called Twitter.