Knowing C, and knowing C well is an independent skill of graphics programming, version control methods etc. Knowing C++ even moderately well is a skill that takes years and years of mistakes, and mastering it is hugely valuable, regardless of your other skills.
Yes, there are tons of IT and programming related skills and knowledge of particular technologies which become relevant and irrelevant in even shorter cycles than 2 years, but a ton of fundamentals have not changed in years.
Regexp and unix shells are as useful as ever. And a lot of people programming 8-bit MCU will go through their highly productive careers without ever worrying about scalability of node.js or some other fad like that.
This is not to say that learning new stuff and keeping abreast with new tech developments is worthless, quite the contrary. The wider your knowledge the better. But it's important to distinguish core skills from fads, and make your in-depth learning investments accordingly. For a lot of technologies, a 10-minute rapid fire quick start video from the next charismatic conference speaker is all you will ever seriously need to hear about.
Uhm.. if you cant bundle a browser with the OS these days... where the hell does this leave Chrome OS.. or any other tightly web technologies based OS or OS wannabe like WebOS ?
No kidding. A random article from 2005 http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050217_robotfrm.htm But researchers at Cornell University in New York State, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Holland’s Delft University of Technology have built robots that seem to more closely mimic the human gait -- and the Cornell robot matches human efficiency, their designers say.
The researchers’ inspiration: simple walking toys that fascinated children in the 19th century. .... Researchers at each of the three universities have built walking robots, differing slightly but based on the same principle. They are an extension of several years of research into “passive-dynamic walkers” that walk down a shallow slope, very much like simple walking toys that have been around since the 1800s and developed more scientifically starting in 1988.
This is awesome. Just a few years ago, it took Toyota research to put this little guy together : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDm22U_teoQ
And it used active internal gyro wheel to balance itself. Now a pretty much off the shelf stock humanoid does the trick without special aids.
It won't be long before these little hobby "toys" will be surpass the current capabilities of best lab robots. Several underlying technology trends are making them more and more capable. Rapidly advancing sensors of all sorts ( accelerometers, gyros, tactile, position feedback ) and massive distributed computing power provided by cheap chips like Cortex-M0 are closing a lot of loops, and even actuators such as shaped memory alloy linear motors are making new strides.
This does not come up in a lot of these conversations, but we have a "fuel depot" in orbit right now. It uses storable propellants, not cryogenic ones, but nobody says you cannot leave LEO with nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). In fact, that propellant combination was exactly the one being used to land on the moon in Apollo program.
The fuel depot on orbit of course is ISS Zarya or better known as FGB. It gets fuelled up by Proton's on a regular basis, and ISS uses the propellant for station keeping. Considering the mass of ISS, boosting its orbit is no small feat.
Russians also have a spare module, used to be called FGB-2 sitting somewhere in the hangar. It was proposed as various additions to ISS at some point.
In summary, storable hypergolic orbital propellant transfer is a well known, well developed and currently used technology. Yes you need quite a bit more of it to do burns with delta-v in order of km/s, but the maturity of the solution and abundance of off the shelf engines and propulsion module designs using hypergols may well outweigh cryogenics in overall system designs.
Propellant is also relatively cheap, even nasty stuff like hydrazine, and just lifting more of it would provide the much needed demand side for the globally stagnant launch industry, which has been in the oversupply mode for years, i.e. there are far more operational rockets than there are paid payloads.
The point that "propellant depots" is nothing new, and in fact NASA's current flagship HSF program uses it needs to be made more often. Switching to cryogenics would be a new development even if not that complicated, and may or may not be worth it, depending on overall mission requirements and other elements of system architecture.
A lot of western researchers seem to think "true" AI is somehow the holy grail. Its the evolution and further combination of what you call the "expert systems", that is bringing about the presence of artificial intelligence in everyday lives. Even if this presence may not appear truly "intelligent", it will and is already surpassing humans in certain capabilities.
You see, nothing says that the so called "expert systems" have to be based on canned logic and simple rules only, its perfectly possible to complement these by adaptive and evolving algorithms.
Again, Turing test is a worthless and irrelevant measure, to anyone but ivory tower research types. Oh, and "popular science" media.
Why ? Turing test is hardly a measure of useful artificial intelligence.
Without getting into much details, even your friend wikipedia elaborates on the subject.
The most important point is its irrelevance to real world applications. A car that drives you cross country autonomously does have a ton of useful AI in it, but for it to pass a Turing test would be just completely pointless.
Neither would your home assistant robot that runs errands, does grocery shopping and household chores need to be able to chat with you from behind a curtain.. duh.
AFAIK both are assembly plants, not the actual parts manufacturing plants. AFAIK Valmet actually manufactures a relevant portion of parts for Karma, plus does some of the assembly. When Fisker said they "couldn't find the facility" they meant parts manufacturing. Assembly you can pretty much do anywhere in the world, assuming workers are willing to be trained for the job and actually show up to work..
there is the major difference, natural speech.
I think it'll really become useful once it all becomes standard, and is "always listening".
That would be awesome.. imagine if your cloud collected web services could always access and record everything that happens around you, without pushing a single button.. wouldnt that make facebooks and google plusses even more awesome.. i mean who needs browser tracking cookies if you have access to microphone..
I think you are severely deluding yourself if you seriously think that all the "harm" that ever comes from fb obsessively tracking you, is targeted ads.
How is any Apollo moonwalker really a hero anyway ? I mean, they were propelled to our nearest neighbor in a cold war "our germans are better than yours" pissing contest, orchestrated by a central design bureau, with the tax money of millions.
Yes these were all brave and bright guys, hand picked "right stuff" material, but what extraordinary did they personally accomplish to become a "hero" ? I can
understand how a propaganda machine back then, just as it did with Yang Liwei in 2003, went out of its way to proclaim them all heroes, but were they, really ?
If you ask me, Burt Rutan or Elon Musk are much more of heroes of spaceflight thanks to their personal contributions on dragging the entire field out of state socialism mindset, than the twelve moonwalkers ever were.
I don't care how good your programmers are, version control is not optional
Im not trying to argue with your main point, but i've come across a ton of open source decent quality software that is only ever released as a tarball, without a central source repo.
Heck, go try and find the source control repo for once dominant embedded linux distro : uCinux-dist.
Quite a few companies choose not to patent by the way. Elon Musk is on record for saying that SpaceX doesnt patent anything, period, because it would be useless against their potential competitors.
Saner to just compete on execution and wipe the floor with them.
http://pr-lead.com/patents-and-paypal-elon-musk-from-spacex/
Goingreen, REVA UK importer stopped selling them, quoting the competition from mainstream manufacturers, like Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV and its rebadged Peugeout Ion cousin finally arriving on market.
See here
Reminds me (sadly) of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority" which describes a country at war that keeps developing ever more astonishing weapons in fewer and fewer quantities eventually leading to its defeat by its technically inferior enemy. (Probably was written before WWII where huge technological leaps clearly affected the war's outcome: A-bomb, radar, enigma).
Well.. Germany in WW2 was developing its own bunch of uberweapons, which, while technically advanced, failed to have a meaningful impact on the outcome. Jet engines, V2, supertanks and a bunch of other stuff. Look up "WunderWaffe"
By the same token, basically nobody should be allowed to friend anyone on facebook, as TIME AND TIME AGAIN people keep having sex with people under their sphere of influence.. ( bosses, politicians, priests , drill sergeants, sysadmins.. no wait.. )
Do you really need a briefing on security risks of something running in kernel vs something running in (restricted) userspace ?
Not that im lauding silverlight, activex or flash here..
Im just reposting this from elsewhere but.. as Shuttle program costs around $200M a month, this delay just cost NASA around $100M. Other people have built large companies for that money..
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing C, and knowing C well is an independent skill of graphics programming, version control methods etc. Knowing C++ even moderately well is a skill that takes years and years of mistakes, and mastering it is hugely valuable, regardless of your other skills.
Yes, there are tons of IT and programming related skills and knowledge of particular technologies which become relevant and irrelevant in even shorter cycles than 2 years, but a ton of fundamentals have not changed in years.
Regexp and unix shells are as useful as ever. And a lot of people programming 8-bit MCU will go through their highly productive careers without ever worrying about scalability of node.js or some other fad like that.
This is not to say that learning new stuff and keeping abreast with new tech developments is worthless, quite the contrary. The wider your knowledge the better. But it's important to distinguish core skills from fads, and make your in-depth learning investments accordingly. For a lot of technologies, a 10-minute rapid fire quick start video from the next charismatic conference speaker is all you will ever seriously need to hear about.
Uhm.. if you cant bundle a browser with the OS these days ... where the hell does this leave Chrome OS .. or any other tightly web technologies based OS or OS wannabe like WebOS ?
No kidding. A random article from 2005
....
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050217_robotfrm.htm
But researchers at Cornell University in New York State, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Holland’s Delft University of Technology have built robots that seem to more closely mimic the human gait -- and the Cornell robot matches human efficiency, their designers say. The researchers’ inspiration: simple walking toys that fascinated children in the 19th century.
Researchers at each of the three universities have built walking robots, differing slightly but based on the same principle. They are an extension of several years of research into “passive-dynamic walkers” that walk down a shallow slope, very much like simple walking toys that have been around since the 1800s and developed more scientifically starting in 1988.
This is awesome. Just a few years ago, it took Toyota research to put this little guy together : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDm22U_teoQ And it used active internal gyro wheel to balance itself. Now a pretty much off the shelf stock humanoid does the trick without special aids. It won't be long before these little hobby "toys" will be surpass the current capabilities of best lab robots. Several underlying technology trends are making them more and more capable. Rapidly advancing sensors of all sorts ( accelerometers, gyros, tactile, position feedback ) and massive distributed computing power provided by cheap chips like Cortex-M0 are closing a lot of loops, and even actuators such as shaped memory alloy linear motors are making new strides.
This does not come up in a lot of these conversations, but we have a "fuel depot" in orbit right now. It uses storable propellants, not cryogenic ones, but nobody says you cannot leave LEO with nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). In fact, that propellant combination was exactly the one being used to land on the moon in Apollo program.
The fuel depot on orbit of course is ISS Zarya or better known as FGB. It gets fuelled up by Proton's on a regular basis, and ISS uses the propellant for station keeping. Considering the mass of ISS, boosting its orbit is no small feat.
Russians also have a spare module, used to be called FGB-2 sitting somewhere in the hangar. It was proposed as various additions to ISS at some point.
In summary, storable hypergolic orbital propellant transfer is a well known, well developed and currently used technology. Yes you need quite a bit more of it to do burns with delta-v in order of km/s, but the maturity of the solution and abundance of off the shelf engines and propulsion module designs using hypergols may well outweigh cryogenics in overall system designs.
Propellant is also relatively cheap, even nasty stuff like hydrazine, and just lifting more of it would provide the much needed demand side for the globally stagnant launch industry, which has been in the oversupply mode for years, i.e. there are far more operational rockets than there are paid payloads.
The point that "propellant depots" is nothing new, and in fact NASA's current flagship HSF program uses it needs to be made more often. Switching to cryogenics would be a new development even if not that complicated, and may or may not be worth it, depending on overall mission requirements and other elements of system architecture.
A lot of western researchers seem to think "true" AI is somehow the holy grail. Its the evolution and further combination of what you call the "expert systems", that is bringing about the presence of artificial intelligence in everyday lives. Even if this presence may not appear truly "intelligent", it will and is already surpassing humans in certain capabilities.
You see, nothing says that the so called "expert systems" have to be based on canned logic and simple rules only, its perfectly possible to complement these by adaptive and evolving algorithms.
Again, Turing test is a worthless and irrelevant measure, to anyone but ivory tower research types. Oh, and "popular science" media.
Why ? Turing test is hardly a measure of useful artificial intelligence. Without getting into much details, even your friend wikipedia elaborates on the subject. The most important point is its irrelevance to real world applications. A car that drives you cross country autonomously does have a ton of useful AI in it, but for it to pass a Turing test would be just completely pointless. Neither would your home assistant robot that runs errands, does grocery shopping and household chores need to be able to chat with you from behind a curtain .. duh.
AFAIK both are assembly plants, not the actual parts manufacturing plants. AFAIK Valmet actually manufactures a relevant portion of parts for Karma, plus does some of the assembly. When Fisker said they "couldn't find the facility" they meant parts manufacturing. Assembly you can pretty much do anywhere in the world, assuming workers are willing to be trained for the job and actually show up to work ..
Back to bloglines ? I migrated away when they were closing down, and after their reopening never went back.
there is the major difference, natural speech. I think it'll really become useful once it all becomes standard, and is "always listening".
.. imagine if your cloud collected web services could always access and record everything that happens around you, without pushing a single button.. wouldnt that make facebooks and google plusses even more awesome .. i mean who needs browser tracking cookies if you have access to microphone ..
That would be awesome
http://www.idroidproject.org/
./ wants me to ..
and now i have to say something useless here because
Hi, im Google spider. I just made a note of the fact that you keep googling yourself. Thanks.
I think you are severely deluding yourself if you seriously think that all the "harm" that ever comes from fb obsessively tracking you, is targeted ads.
How is any Apollo moonwalker really a hero anyway ? I mean, they were propelled to our nearest neighbor in a cold war "our germans are better than yours" pissing contest, orchestrated by a central design bureau, with the tax money of millions.
Yes these were all brave and bright guys, hand picked "right stuff" material, but what extraordinary did they personally accomplish to become a "hero" ? I can understand how a propaganda machine back then, just as it did with Yang Liwei in 2003, went out of its way to proclaim them all heroes, but were they, really ?
If you ask me, Burt Rutan or Elon Musk are much more of heroes of spaceflight thanks to their personal contributions on dragging the entire field out of state socialism mindset, than the twelve moonwalkers ever were.
I don't care how good your programmers are, version control is not optional
Im not trying to argue with your main point, but i've come across a ton of open source decent quality software that is only ever released as a tarball, without a central source repo.
Heck, go try and find the source control repo for once dominant embedded linux distro : uCinux-dist.
Except that there are companies like Molycorp just reopening old pits in US right now. Rare earths are not all that rare, actually.
Steorn will join the project and provide cooling solutions.
Quite a few companies choose not to patent by the way. Elon Musk is on record for saying that SpaceX doesnt patent anything, period, because it would be useless against their potential competitors. Saner to just compete on execution and wipe the floor with them. http://pr-lead.com/patents-and-paypal-elon-musk-from-spacex/
Goingreen, REVA UK importer stopped selling them, quoting the competition from mainstream manufacturers, like Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV and its rebadged Peugeout Ion cousin finally arriving on market. See here
But does it have wifies ? Or geebies ?
Reminds me (sadly) of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority" which describes a country at war that keeps developing ever more astonishing weapons in fewer and fewer quantities eventually leading to its defeat by its technically inferior enemy. (Probably was written before WWII where huge technological leaps clearly affected the war's outcome: A-bomb, radar, enigma).
.. Germany in WW2 was developing its own bunch of uberweapons, which, while technically advanced, failed to have a meaningful impact on the outcome. Jet engines, V2, supertanks and a bunch of other stuff. Look up "WunderWaffe"
Well
Yes, diff against any of the thosand mirrors is going to be reallly really difficult to run and there is going to be rootkits in my linuxes.
s/police/hackers/ And i quote:
JeffK: "Oh noes, teh police! HIDE TEH LUNIX!!!11"
By the same token, basically nobody should be allowed to friend anyone on facebook, as TIME AND TIME AGAIN people keep having sex with people under their sphere of influence .. ( bosses, politicians, priests , drill sergeants, sysadmins .. no wait .. )
Do you really need a briefing on security risks of something running in kernel vs something running in (restricted) userspace ? Not that im lauding silverlight, activex or flash here ..
Im just reposting this from elsewhere but .. as Shuttle program costs around $200M a month, this delay just cost NASA around $100M. Other people have built large companies for that money ..