That's because robots are both stupid and expensive.
Both are subject to Moore's law. We're just on the flat part of the curve. Once a robot gets 1/10th as effective at learning simple jobs on its own without programming it only takes 7-8 years until they're twice as effective.
We're making really good strides in machine vision right now and once we have humanoid robots that can be 'drop-in' replacements the real jobpoaclypse will begin.
Yeah but look on the bright side, you only need a revolutionary power source *once* to power cars.
We're already so efficient that we can deliver production cars with 300+ mile ranges.
If you could use a 100 mile range battery then electric cars would take over in a couple of years. We don't need 100 cheap, high capacity battery designs.... we need one.
Both Hiper and Life, a similar effort at Nif, estimate that a functioning laser power plant would need to cycle through more than 10 fuel pellets each second - a million each day.
Out of curiosity do we have any plans on how to precisely feed and align a pellet into an, I assume submerged, reaction chamber to heat water/steam?
That seems like an engineering challenge on the same order of difficult as the laser etc.
Would it be like belt fed? I assume it would need to position and clear the firing target in about 10ms.
That also seems like a recipe for a maintenance nightmare. Are there any similar machines in other industries?
I was going to ask. I have a Tab 10.1 and it seems like they and their accessories are perpetually sold out here. I was wondering where the rest of them were if they weren't selling 98% of them.
Obligatory disclaimers: Generalities, do not apply to everyone, is cultural not genetic etc etc...
But, in Indian culture there is a strong imperative to look after your own family. I've also observed that a lot of people from developing nations have a bit of a defensive inferiority complex and want to prove that they are [Modern\Developed\Educated\Capable\etc] which is perfectly understandable. I get that way a lot too about even nerdy things like software which I don't perceive gets the respect it deserves. It's human nature.
But between those two things there is a strong incentive to help your family/friends and also help prove that [Insert Developing Nation] is capable by hiring more of them.
It's speculated by sociologists and economists that it largely stems from the strength of the legal system. In the US we have a strong legal and welfare system so we value contracts and we discourage nepotism. When you grow up without a strong legal and welfare system you can only ever really rely on friends and family so it's good to keep them close. Your loyalty isn't to as much to your company as your family. Very much "Us vs The System".
It'll be interesting to see if we don't regress to some degree with diminishing social safety nets and pensions. The less incentive we have to be loyal the more our culture will regress to one with less trust. I wonder if it won't start reflecting in productivity drops.
It will cost less to help collectively maintain open software than it will to purchase a license for proprietary software.
Yeah, but the rest of the collective can pay and it'll be even cheaper!
If only you don't contribute you get 99.999% of the benefits at 0% of the cost.
If everyone thinks that they can get 99.999% of the benefits at 0% of the cost then they get crappy benefits.
It's like a potluck. Yeah if nobody brings anything you all go hungry, but if enough people bring something, the moochers can bring nothing and still eat like kings.
Which says that 55% of commands are right click, 30-something are from hotkeys and a bit more 10% use the Command Bar.
Solution: SHOVE EVERYTHING INTO THE COMMAND BAR.
You're approaching this completely backwards. People are using hotkeys and right click because the command bar is terrible.
If I discovered that 99% of my users hated a part of my UI I would take action to improve it.
"99% of windows users don't use search." "We should probably improve our search feature and make it more prominent."
You don't say: "99% of windows users don't use search." "We should remove it completely."
Just because something is popular doesn't make it right. And just because something is right doesn't mean it's popular. In UX design there are a lot of situations where you know something that 95% of your users don't know. You are aware of a feature that will really help but isn't placed well enough or users don't understand how to use it, or the interface is so clunky they don't want to use it. So the solution is to fix it up so that it becomes "competitive".
Following your logic Apple would have looked at smartphones and said: "80% of phone interactions take place with a stylus." "Solution: MORE STYLUS!"
No, they identified a *bad* UX element and rebuilt the UI to encourage a better way of working.
Yeah the main body says nice scientific things like.
"Likely will kill between 2million and 3million people but maybe more."
It's that political doomsday document tacked on that has outlandish non-scientific conclusions like "Since it's probably going to kill 2 million people, we should probably do something to stop it."
I work in the medical industry and to be able to carry 90% of the functionality of a laptop with better battery life and a smaller form factor is just incredibly useful.
But we're talking about Moore's law here. This is the same bubble we saw with "Netbooks". Netbooks were just underpowered laptops that had longer battery life. Now we have notebooks the same size and full powered processors.
My Tab10.1 is just a severely under-powered laptop/tablet-pc. In very short order we'll have 10hour batteries and 1.5 pound weight in an x86 machine just like we have with tablets. And then everyone will just go back to using full computers again.
Very true, but that doesn't really square with the claim that "the science is settled," does it? Many of the anti-AGW arguments are about methodology, yet the pro-AGW types often seem quick to dismiss (if not slander) anyone who questions their methodology.
First of all, Bullshit. Secondly you can disagree with the methodology of someone and still see the science as settled.
If you tried to test whether things fall and by how fast but you were using objects with an airfoil I would question your methodology. But that wouldn't invalidate the consensus that gravity on earth tends to pull objects towards the earth's core.
The problem with video games is that there's often a lot going on. In basketball or football you have a central point of interest. And you can point all the cameras at that. If you have a game of TF2 you have a spy sneaking in through the vents, an engineer in a duel with a soldier. A medic heavy combo and a demo man circling around the spawn... etc etc.
Pro games are often more team oriented but still to some degree scattered more broadly than one focal ball.
How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
Some of us are crazy enough to judge a product's success on its quality. In that regard it wipes the floor with iOS and Android.
Well not exactly. More like after the great awakening it became deeply intertwined. I wouldn't describe many of the founding fathers as particularly religious. You have Thomas Jefferson who famously tried to rewrite the bible.
Many of the founding fathers associated the church and faith/superstition with the monarchy and oppression.
A game console's specs really don't matter. What really matters are the games. Perhaps I'm in the minority but I really don't care if a game doesn't have pure HD graphics and ray-tracing and other eye candy as long as the game is fun.
In other news Imagination Technologies (aka PowerVR) is implementing a raytracing accelerator into their future mobile chips. So you actually might start seeing ray tracing in your handhelds before you see it in mainstream consoles.:P
Slashdot Mirror
That's because robots are both stupid and expensive.
Both are subject to Moore's law. We're just on the flat part of the curve. Once a robot gets 1/10th as effective at learning simple jobs on its own without programming it only takes 7-8 years until they're twice as effective.
We're making really good strides in machine vision right now and once we have humanoid robots that can be 'drop-in' replacements the real jobpoaclypse will begin.
Repeat after me:
"I am not the normal desktop user. I am not the normal desktop user. I am not..."
1991: Haha, Microsoft is moving to a GUI to dumb down their OS. Unix and its command line is going to destroy Windows!
2011: Haha, Microsoft is offering a touch GUI to dumb down their OS. Linux and its windows are going to destroy Windows!
Yeah but look on the bright side, you only need a revolutionary power source *once* to power cars.
We're already so efficient that we can deliver production cars with 300+ mile ranges.
If you could use a 100 mile range battery then electric cars would take over in a couple of years. We don't need 100 cheap, high capacity battery designs.... we need one.
Ummm, this is completely different in every single way. Those are all fuel cells. This is just a better lithium-ion battery.
I think it's important to note *where* this test was performed and in which language.
If someone sprung a Spanish Chatbot on me I would probably have trouble discerning it from a human as well.
Half right. My grandpa was in the Navy and the Vet paid for his hearing aids.
Seeing as every veteran probably has substantial hearing loss from small arms fire near their ears I think that's more than fair.
More consumer protecting, job killing regulation!? Socialist!
I'm confused, are you recommending we buy a second computer to use while booting our primary one?
Story fail.
Both Hiper and Life, a similar effort at Nif, estimate that a functioning laser power plant would need to cycle through more than 10 fuel pellets each second - a million each day.
Out of curiosity do we have any plans on how to precisely feed and align a pellet into an, I assume submerged, reaction chamber to heat water/steam?
That seems like an engineering challenge on the same order of difficult as the laser etc.
Would it be like belt fed? I assume it would need to position and clear the firing target in about 10ms.
That also seems like a recipe for a maintenance nightmare. Are there any similar machines in other industries?
That's not entirely fair. Fission is pretty easy create energy from. Most of fission research seems to be in efficiency and safety.
Refining materials is a well understood engineering task. Refine some fissile material and put it in a brick oven and you're going to get heat!
Yeah I'm sure they'll love living in Somalia with their stacks of cash.
I was going to ask. I have a Tab 10.1 and it seems like they and their accessories are perpetually sold out here. I was wondering where the rest of them were if they weren't selling 98% of them.
Obligatory disclaimers: Generalities, do not apply to everyone, is cultural not genetic etc etc...
But, in Indian culture there is a strong imperative to look after your own family. I've also observed that a lot of people from developing nations have a bit of a defensive inferiority complex and want to prove that they are [Modern\Developed\Educated\Capable\etc] which is perfectly understandable. I get that way a lot too about even nerdy things like software which I don't perceive gets the respect it deserves. It's human nature.
But between those two things there is a strong incentive to help your family/friends and also help prove that [Insert Developing Nation] is capable by hiring more of them.
It's speculated by sociologists and economists that it largely stems from the strength of the legal system. In the US we have a strong legal and welfare system so we value contracts and we discourage nepotism. When you grow up without a strong legal and welfare system you can only ever really rely on friends and family so it's good to keep them close. Your loyalty isn't to as much to your company as your family. Very much "Us vs The System".
It'll be interesting to see if we don't regress to some degree with diminishing social safety nets and pensions. The less incentive we have to be loyal the more our culture will regress to one with less trust. I wonder if it won't start reflecting in productivity drops.
Linux gets this right, where the same OS can just swap graphical shells for the task.
Ummm... you just described Windows 8. I would ask if you RTFA but obviously you didn't.
It will cost less to help collectively maintain open software than it will to purchase a license for proprietary software.
Yeah, but the rest of the collective can pay and it'll be even cheaper!
If only you don't contribute you get 99.999% of the benefits at 0% of the cost.
If everyone thinks that they can get 99.999% of the benefits at 0% of the cost then they get crappy benefits.
It's like a potluck. Yeah if nobody brings anything you all go hungry, but if enough people bring something, the moochers can bring nothing and still eat like kings.
Which says that 55% of commands are right click, 30-something are from hotkeys and a bit more 10% use the Command Bar.
Solution: SHOVE EVERYTHING INTO THE COMMAND BAR.
You're approaching this completely backwards. People are using hotkeys and right click because the command bar is terrible.
If I discovered that 99% of my users hated a part of my UI I would take action to improve it.
"99% of windows users don't use search."
"We should probably improve our search feature and make it more prominent."
You don't say:
"99% of windows users don't use search."
"We should remove it completely."
Just because something is popular doesn't make it right. And just because something is right doesn't mean it's popular. In UX design there are a lot of situations where you know something that 95% of your users don't know. You are aware of a feature that will really help but isn't placed well enough or users don't understand how to use it, or the interface is so clunky they don't want to use it. So the solution is to fix it up so that it becomes "competitive".
Following your logic Apple would have looked at smartphones and said:
"80% of phone interactions take place with a stylus."
"Solution: MORE STYLUS!"
No, they identified a *bad* UX element and rebuilt the UI to encourage a better way of working.
If you "minimize" the ribbon it doesn't take up any extra screen real-estate.
Yeah the main body says nice scientific things like.
"Likely will kill between 2million and 3million people but maybe more."
It's that political doomsday document tacked on that has outlandish non-scientific conclusions like "Since it's probably going to kill 2 million people, we should probably do something to stop it."
I work in the medical industry and to be able to carry 90% of the functionality of a laptop with better battery life and a smaller form factor is just incredibly useful.
But we're talking about Moore's law here. This is the same bubble we saw with "Netbooks". Netbooks were just underpowered laptops that had longer battery life. Now we have notebooks the same size and full powered processors.
My Tab10.1 is just a severely under-powered laptop/tablet-pc. In very short order we'll have 10hour batteries and 1.5 pound weight in an x86 machine just like we have with tablets. And then everyone will just go back to using full computers again.
Very true, but that doesn't really square with the claim that "the science is settled," does it? Many of the anti-AGW arguments are about methodology, yet the pro-AGW types often seem quick to dismiss (if not slander) anyone who questions their methodology.
First of all, Bullshit. Secondly you can disagree with the methodology of someone and still see the science as settled.
If you tried to test whether things fall and by how fast but you were using objects with an airfoil I would question your methodology. But that wouldn't invalidate the consensus that gravity on earth tends to pull objects towards the earth's core.
The problem with video games is that there's often a lot going on. In basketball or football you have a central point of interest. And you can point all the cameras at that. If you have a game of TF2 you have a spy sneaking in through the vents, an engineer in a duel with a soldier. A medic heavy combo and a demo man circling around the spawn... etc etc.
Pro games are often more team oriented but still to some degree scattered more broadly than one focal ball.
How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
Some of us are crazy enough to judge a product's success on its quality. In that regard it wipes the floor with iOS and Android.
Well not exactly. More like after the great awakening it became deeply intertwined. I wouldn't describe many of the founding fathers as particularly religious. You have Thomas Jefferson who famously tried to rewrite the bible.
Many of the founding fathers associated the church and faith/superstition with the monarchy and oppression.
A game console's specs really don't matter. What really matters are the games. Perhaps I'm in the minority but I really don't care if a game doesn't have pure HD graphics and ray-tracing and other eye candy as long as the game is fun.
In other news Imagination Technologies (aka PowerVR) is implementing a raytracing accelerator into their future mobile chips. So you actually might start seeing ray tracing in your handhelds before you see it in mainstream consoles. :P