That's very true. I went to a state school with some ADHD kids who had been transferred in from other parts of the country? What triggered them? Boring lessons. History teacher who would make the class spend the entire hour just copying down notes from the blackboard. No discussion, just copy, copy, copy, then go to the next class. If you were lucky you managed to copy everything. If not, too bad. Language lessons would have everyone just stare at an overhead projector screen with pictures of things and their foreign language equivalent. And we'd go through these one after the other.
Science teachers had a better way. You got laminated work cards that told you exactly what to do. Copy this paragraph, do this experiment, take these measurements, what conclusions can you make? If you didn't get all the work done in time, you took it home with you.
I know stray radar microwaves can take out a PC. There was weather radar station close to where I lived. Whenever my smartphone app received a heavy rain warning, my gaming PC would crash seconds before.
One component that many defence contract required was a Nuclear Event Detector. This little component would set a pin when it detected the precursor of a nuclear detonation. What the system did next was up to the vendor, but usually it would involve a shutdown and disconnect of ports and power lines.
Just about every culture and civilisation have their own board games. Egyptians played "Dogs and Jackals", Vikings played "Hnefatafl". Back in the 1980's "Space Lines" was popular , a 3D tic-tac-toe. Every 8-bit computer system had a chess playing game system with some AI. It is one of those games with unlimited number of moves.
I would be happy with a mobile phone that just had the maps feature (to navigate around a city), the telephone (to call taxis) and web browsing (to view bus timetables), without all the social media baked in (Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram etc...).
Having overlays for public transport bus routes would be a big boost. Presently it involves scrambling around downloading PDF's from the bus company, viewing google maps, and trying to munge the two by scale and location in order to figure out where the buses go. Sometimes the only way to figure out a bus route, is to actually take a bus ride there and back.
Logitech G19 gaming keyboard. Having a glowing keyboard is really useful working at night and having a room light disturbed those in other rooms (doorways had glass windows above the door). The built in mini LCD screen was a nice touch. Mini apps could be written for it, even an X-windows driver.
If I had the money to invest, and I knew there was a 50:50 chance the company might move there, and prices go up regardless, then it would be worth making the purchase either way.
Before digital customer service systems, the manager/worker ratio was something like 1:3 . Whole chains of directors, assistant directors, senior managers, managers, team leaders, lead engineers and engineers all sitting in offices passing line printer dockets to each other up and down, signing them off, filing them away, going into each others office, maintaining their [IN], [OUT] and [PENDING] trays. Once everything was online, they didn't need to print things out, sign them off or even go into each others office. Those management jobs just vaporized when they retired.
The problem is that as that infrastructure ages, more money is spent on maintaining existing systems rather than expanding the network. Old brick and clay tunnels that leak water and flood when there are rainstorms might be acceptable when everything was gas lamps, but add on modern electronic track monitoring and electrically operated junctions and the message "all services are suspended until further notice due to signalling problems" becomes frequent. Then money has to be spent replacing the signalling equipment and compensating passengers.
Most application developers build their own shell applications that load in the commonly used libraries (OpenCV, OpenGL, CUDA, maths libraries) and then run a basic application rendering loop. Then there are file parsers, object serializers, libraries to simply data transfer between hosts
Every apartment is just enough space for a bed, desk, shelves, shower, microwave cooker and shower/toilet cubicle. Some places may just have a communal shower/toilet and kitchen facilities. France has "studettes".
Even when taking a panoramic photograph, the camera software now seems to think you actually want to make a movie as well. I could never understand why it became impossible to send a panoramic picture. All because someone thought it would be incredibly spiffy if you could do two things at the same time, or maybe they figured that sometime they'll have better stitching software at a later date, and if you keep both the movie and panorama in the same file, it can be reprocessed at a later date.
There is stereo photography to get depth perception. Or maybe they'll add a laser scanner to get the depthfield. You get addon genuine USB attachable IR cameras, plus endoscopic cameras. But then they take functionality away like using digital zoom with panoramic mode. But they did add enhanced night-vision by making use of the 16-bit depth resolution of the CCD sensor.
But those H1B visa guys burn themselves out as well due to lack of knowledge. I know a company that did custom systems. They had a project that needed a vendor or customer splash screen that needed to appear upon power on. The task was split up into several parts using Agile methodology (#1 = display the splash screen, #2 provide a menu to select the splash screen, #3 write the selection to the display routine). Well, the boot loader took 50 milliseconds, the specification called for 15 milliseconds, so they put the vendor splash screen into the boot loader, which could only be updated by SD card. That guy gets a big round of applause for showing ingenuity. The GUI guy merrily went on with creating the menu selection screen. He gets a big round of applause for having a flashy menu interface. The third guy gets the last and final task of writing the selection from the GUI menu into the boot loader. Can't be done in software, so obviously he's no good at the job and gets fired.
Avoid those corporations and set yourself up as a independent software provider.
Starts up are primarily concerned in building a big blob of technology that they can sell to a corporation and get bought out. That requires technical skills and design. As they get larger, there is more maintenance work and less design work, Once they get bought out, the corporation will impose formal project management structures like architects, project manager, team leaders, tech leads, all to make sure there isn't any code regression with bugs. The original founders and engineers will leave to found new startups.
If you look at human brain architecture through fMRI and diffusion tensor analysis, it's the same architecture as a supercomputer. Neural bundles carry information to and from the body into the brain. There are various data flow pipelines to process audio, vision (what and where), touch (temperature, pressure, motion), position and movement. Something like around 1800 cortical units that actually interlock with each other, do particularly processing from one type to another (image->name, name->sound, sound->object, object->purpose, sound->text, text->action).
Each of these process conversions has a dual-use. It could be used for a car entertainment system, but it could also be used to assist fighter pilots or tank drivers and missile operators. TCP/IP is a type of AI that reroutes data traffic from one system to another even when nodes are lost in a mesh network.
That was the days of flowcharts and expert systems. The researchers back then thought that everything from diagnosing medical conditions to optimizing traffic flow through grids of traffic lights was a simple yes/no binary decision. Then when they started interviewing doctors and traffic light police to find out how they made decisions, they started getting phrases like "it might be", "they might have". Anything from a simple infection to a rare tropical parasite can cause an inflammation and fever. It's only if a specific antigen test was performed that they could be absolute certain. Other times they just had to make an educated guess based on limited information available. So they ended up with "fuzzy logic" where things aren't binary 0 or 1, but fuzzy 0.0 to 1.0
So if you want a text processing system that can read number plates, it doesn't do a simple pixel by pixel comparison, but does something like sum the square of the differences. The digit with the least difference is the most likely candidate. The differences between a 6, 0, 9 and 8 are a very small group of pixels. They applied that to everything to trains that could stop and self align at platforms to image classification. Then all that expands into deep neural networks where the patterns become more complicated.
If you watch those videos of fighter jets flying at low altitude over beaches, you can see the shock wave cause water to condense. What they plan on doing is creating two shock waves from different parts of the aircraft and have them cancel out.
Going by the way our civilisation is burning hydrocarbons and increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, we are terraforming our own planet. Now, if we can figure out a way of doing the reverse process and remove that CO2 from the atmosphere at the same scale, we could do the same for Mars.
There are hundreds of such machines buried across the world. They are just written off as part of the construction expense, as no one really wants the cost of extracting them overground.
The commodity PC wars in the 2000's drove down the price of desktop systems down to less that $600. This made the price of the Windows OS way more conspicuous to vendors and customers, who disliked the fact that the OS (which they called the Microsoft Windows Tax) cost a good percentage of the price of a new PC even with vendor discounts and the fact the users weren't planning to use Windows.
Then laptops and netbooks became powerful enough to read email and surf the web. These are quickly followed by netbooks and smartphones. Users weren't willing to fork out another hundred $$$$ every year for upgraded Microsoft Word/Spreadsheet and other applications. So they all have had to move to the "service" model with annual or monthly licenses, and advertising in order to continue to bring in revenue. The problems with malware led to the development of app stores. Virus databases on PC's were taking up 250 Megabytes of disk space.
The problem is the hardware is so complex now. All that logic in CPU's,GPU's, bus protocols, is usually patented protected, cross-licensed, NDA, DRM and DMCA restricted, Sometimes the driver code is actually used to prevent combinations of hardware settings that work but aren't licensed, aren't in the specification or are going to be patented in future. It takes teams of 200+ developers to get all the device driver software for a GPU: Windows/Android/Linux window system support + actual hardware.
Before home computers, if you wanted a computer system, you had to build it yourself as a S-100 rack mounted system. You could buy all sorts of add-on boards (CPU, speech synthesizer, text display video board). Everything was rack mounted. CPU's were beefy for the time: 68030
There used to be competitions to be in the most remote location and take a photograph of yourself. That was before the days of Photoshop, Gimp and other utilities. So people would go hill-climbing or sailing out in the ocean, or find some generic bit of sand dune and say they were in somewhere exotic. Much easier if you can just fake your GPS coordinate.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very true. I went to a state school with some ADHD kids who had been transferred in from other parts of the country? What triggered them? Boring lessons. History teacher who would make the class spend the entire hour just copying down notes from the blackboard. No discussion, just copy, copy, copy, then go to the next class. If you were lucky you managed to copy everything. If not, too bad. Language lessons would have everyone just stare at an overhead projector screen with pictures of things and their foreign language equivalent. And we'd go through these one after the other.
Science teachers had a better way. You got laminated work cards that told you exactly what to do. Copy this paragraph, do this experiment, take these measurements, what conclusions can you make? If you didn't get all the work done in time, you took it home with you.
I know stray radar microwaves can take out a PC. There was weather radar station close to where I lived. Whenever my smartphone app received a heavy rain warning, my gaming PC would crash seconds before.
One component that many defence contract required was a Nuclear Event Detector. This little component would set a pin when it detected the precursor of a nuclear detonation. What the system did next was up to the vendor, but usually it would involve a shutdown and disconnect of ports and power lines.
Just about every culture and civilisation have their own board games. Egyptians played "Dogs and Jackals", Vikings played "Hnefatafl". Back in the 1980's "Space Lines" was popular , a 3D tic-tac-toe. Every 8-bit computer system had a chess playing game system with some AI. It is one of those games with unlimited number of moves.
I would be happy with a mobile phone that just had the maps feature (to navigate around a city), the telephone (to call taxis) and web browsing (to view bus timetables), without all the social media baked in (Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram etc...).
Having overlays for public transport bus routes would be a big boost. Presently it involves scrambling around downloading PDF's from the bus company, viewing google maps, and trying to munge the two by scale and location in order to figure out where the buses go. Sometimes the only way to figure out a bus route, is to actually take a bus ride there and back.
Logitech G19 gaming keyboard. Having a glowing keyboard is really useful working at night and having a room light disturbed those in other rooms (doorways had glass windows above the door). The built in mini LCD screen was a nice touch. Mini apps could be written for it, even an X-windows driver.
A $10 keyboard from the supermarket.
If I had the money to invest, and I knew there was a 50:50 chance the company might move there, and prices go up regardless, then it would be worth making the purchase either way.
Before digital customer service systems, the manager/worker ratio was something like 1:3 . Whole chains of directors, assistant directors, senior managers, managers, team leaders, lead engineers and engineers all sitting in offices passing line printer dockets to each other up and down, signing them off, filing them away, going into each others office, maintaining their [IN], [OUT] and [PENDING] trays. Once everything was online, they didn't need to print things out, sign them off or even go into each others office. Those management jobs just vaporized when they retired.
The problem is that as that infrastructure ages, more money is spent on maintaining existing systems rather than expanding the network. Old brick and clay tunnels that leak water and flood when there are rainstorms might be acceptable when everything was gas lamps, but add on modern electronic track monitoring and electrically operated junctions and the message "all services are suspended until further notice due to signalling problems" becomes frequent. Then money has to be spent replacing the signalling equipment and compensating passengers.
Most application developers build their own shell applications that load in the commonly used libraries (OpenCV, OpenGL, CUDA, maths libraries) and then run a basic application rendering loop. Then there are file parsers, object serializers, libraries to simply data transfer between hosts
Nakagin capsule tower:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/p...
Every apartment is just enough space for a bed, desk, shelves, shower, microwave cooker and shower/toilet cubicle. Some places may just have a communal shower/toilet and kitchen facilities. France has "studettes".
Even when taking a panoramic photograph, the camera software now seems to think you actually want to make a movie as well. I could never understand why it became impossible to send a panoramic picture. All because someone thought it would be incredibly spiffy if you could do two things at the same time, or maybe they figured that sometime they'll have better stitching software at a later date, and if you keep both the movie and panorama in the same file, it can be reprocessed at a later date.
There is stereo photography to get depth perception. Or maybe they'll add a laser scanner to get the depthfield. You get addon genuine USB attachable IR cameras, plus endoscopic cameras. But then they take functionality away like using digital zoom with panoramic mode. But they did add enhanced night-vision by making use of the 16-bit depth resolution of the CCD sensor.
But those H1B visa guys burn themselves out as well due to lack of knowledge. I know a company that did custom systems. They had a project that needed a vendor or customer splash screen that needed to appear upon power on. The task was split up into several parts using Agile methodology (#1 = display the splash screen, #2 provide a menu to select the splash screen, #3 write the selection to the display routine). Well, the boot loader took 50 milliseconds, the specification called for 15 milliseconds, so they put the vendor splash screen into the boot loader, which could only be updated by SD card. That guy gets a big round of applause for showing ingenuity. The GUI guy merrily went on with creating the menu selection screen. He gets a big round of applause for having a flashy menu interface. The third guy gets the last and final task of writing the selection from the GUI menu into the boot loader. Can't be done in software, so obviously he's no good at the job and gets fired.
Avoid those corporations and set yourself up as a independent software provider.
Starts up are primarily concerned in building a big blob of technology that they can sell to a corporation and get bought out. That requires technical skills and design. As they get larger, there is more maintenance work and less design work, Once they get bought out, the corporation will impose formal project management structures like architects, project manager, team leaders, tech leads, all to make sure there isn't any code regression with bugs. The original founders and engineers will leave to found new startups.
If you look at human brain architecture through fMRI and diffusion tensor analysis, it's the same architecture as a supercomputer. Neural bundles carry information to and from the body into the brain. There are various data flow pipelines to process audio, vision (what and where), touch (temperature, pressure, motion), position and movement. Something like around 1800 cortical units that actually interlock with each other, do particularly processing from one type to another (image->name, name->sound, sound->object, object->purpose, sound->text, text->action).
Each of these process conversions has a dual-use. It could be used for a car entertainment system, but it could also be used to assist fighter pilots or tank drivers and missile operators. TCP/IP is a type of AI that reroutes data traffic from one system to another even when nodes are lost in a mesh network.
That was the days of flowcharts and expert systems. The researchers back then thought that everything from diagnosing medical conditions to optimizing traffic flow through grids of traffic lights was a simple yes/no binary decision. Then when they started interviewing doctors and traffic light police to find out how they made decisions, they started getting phrases like "it might be", "they might have". Anything from a simple infection to a rare tropical parasite can cause an inflammation and fever. It's only if a specific antigen test was performed that they could be absolute certain. Other times they just had to make an educated guess based on limited information available. So they ended up with "fuzzy logic" where things aren't binary 0 or 1, but fuzzy 0.0 to 1.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So if you want a text processing system that can read number plates, it doesn't do a simple pixel by pixel comparison, but does something like sum the square of the differences. The digit with the least difference is the most likely candidate. The differences between a 6, 0, 9 and 8 are a very small group of pixels. They applied that to everything to trains that could stop and self align at platforms to image classification. Then all that expands into deep neural networks where the patterns become more complicated.
If you watch those videos of fighter jets flying at low altitude over beaches, you can see the shock wave cause water to condense. What they plan on doing is creating two shock waves from different parts of the aircraft and have them cancel out.
Round where I live, it's the learner drivers with their two stroke mopeds that make the noise. The larger more powerful ones are quiet.
Because they have the wind tunnels, supercomputers and software to model and supersonic flight airframe designs?
Going by the way our civilisation is burning hydrocarbons and increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, we are terraforming our own planet. Now, if we can figure out a way of doing the reverse process and remove that CO2 from the atmosphere at the same scale, we could do the same for Mars.
In many cases, tunnel boring machines are custom built and buried in a side channel once construction is complete...
https://untappedcities.com/201...
There are hundreds of such machines buried across the world. They are just written off as part of the construction expense, as no one really wants the cost of extracting them overground.
The commodity PC wars in the 2000's drove down the price of desktop systems down to less that $600. This made the price of the Windows OS way more conspicuous to vendors and customers, who disliked the fact that the OS (which they called the Microsoft Windows Tax) cost a good percentage of the price of a new PC even with vendor discounts and the fact the users weren't planning to use Windows.
Then laptops and netbooks became powerful enough to read email and surf the web. These are quickly followed by netbooks and smartphones. Users weren't willing to fork out another hundred $$$$ every year for upgraded Microsoft Word/Spreadsheet and other applications. So they all have had to move to the "service" model with annual or monthly licenses, and advertising in order to continue to bring in revenue. The problems with malware led to the development of app stores. Virus databases on PC's were taking up 250 Megabytes of disk space.
The problem is the hardware is so complex now. All that logic in CPU's,GPU's, bus protocols, is usually patented protected, cross-licensed, NDA, DRM and DMCA restricted, Sometimes the driver code is actually used to prevent combinations of hardware settings that work but aren't licensed, aren't in the specification or are going to be patented in future. It takes teams of 200+ developers to get all the device driver software for a GPU: Windows/Android/Linux window system support + actual hardware.
Linux is the last option left now.
BYTE magazine would be a good indication. There are online manuals which cover the bus and CPU's:
http://www.s100computers.com/M...
http://www.pestingers.net/page...
Before home computers, if you wanted a computer system, you had to build it yourself as a S-100 rack mounted system. You could buy all sorts of add-on boards (CPU, speech synthesizer, text display video board). Everything was rack mounted. CPU's were beefy for the time: 68030
http://www.s100computers.com/H...
There used to be competitions to be in the most remote location and take a photograph of yourself. That was before the days of Photoshop, Gimp and other utilities. So people would go hill-climbing or sailing out in the ocean, or find some generic bit of sand dune and say they were in somewhere exotic. Much easier if you can just fake your GPS coordinate.