And only if he didn't have any fun. If he did have fun writing the software, then he additionally saved the money for movie tickets, theme park rides, drinks in pubs, etc... that other people seem to have to PAY to have fun, so the cost for the device might even come out negative.
When the "People needed to get food" shrank from 100% of the population to about 90% of the population when agriculture was developed that was a great boos for society.
When the horseshoe, the heavy plow and the horse collar freed up around 50% of the agricultural workforce around 1000AD that was also a great boost for European society. The same for the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine.
I think the one thing different now compared to those times is that the "freed up" workforce CAN'T do other things, because switching jobs to REALLY NEW things is to complicated these days because of a lot of red tape that prevents it. A lot of those historic job changes also required new "barter schemes" and/or new forms of government besides the already existing ones, (like the free cities that were founded in the middle ages as a place for journeymen and masters to make their fortune, creating a whole new class that hasn't existed before ) and that is something you can't get that past the existing tax collectors and governments these days.
That is very true. Guns don't *cause* crime in any relevant percentage, but on the other hand they also don't *prevent* crime in any relevant percentage.
Sometimes I wish both the "take everyone's gun away, and everything will be fine!" and the "giver everybody guns and everything will be fine!" groups would just give up on throwing statistics at each other, when "gun ownership" is proven over and over again to have no real influence on crime rates, since both sides can cherry-pick the statistics they like so easily.
I for one hope that robotics will provide Google with a revenue stream other than ads and customer data.
Or they simply want thug-bots that can go to your house and beat you up in person to get information, instead of just mining it out of your electronic devices.
The problem of course is that you CAN'T have a "secret police" that spies on "the bad guys" and then forbid that police to spy on a sub-set of people. Because then "the bad guys" just set their operation up to disguise as the people the secret police is forbidden to spy on.
You basically have three options as a country:
1) Pay a "secret police" that does it's job, but give up your freedom. 2) Pay a "secret police" that doesn't really do anything. 3) Get rid of the secret police altogether..
No amount of "getting rid of the head of the secret police every now and then as a PR stunt" changes the fact that the US is heading down option 1).
They also don't help now when your wind shield is covered in ice. You probably would have to clean the sensors the same way you now clean the wind shield, or the "automatic mode" will most likely refuse to switch on.
So I guess the car would say something like "Get out and clean me, human!" to its servant.;-P
They aren't afraid of people who threaten them with "we will come with our weapons", they are afraid of people who threaten them with "we will NOT come with our money";-)
The actuators themselves are probably not even that expensive. A decent stepping motor can be had at under ~$10 if you buy a large enough quantity.
I spent a few years building packaging machines that used that kind of things. Even with more expensive actuators that can move a few kilograms the cost of "actually installing and aligning them" in the machine is multiple times the price of the actual actuator. Having an actuator "move" between different parts it has to actuate feels like it's going to take one hell of accurate alignment nightmare between all the involved parts. And instead of install and align an actuator once it would have to be kept in alignment all the time somehow.
My gut feeling is that the way to bring the price down would be to find a way to mass-produce, say, a 8x8 grid of cheap actuators that could then be stacked in either direction. You might even be able to come up with a ways that you some of the parts now needed for one actuator might only be needed once per 8x8 group.
Because then instead of only n by n actuators to actually move the pins, you would need n by n actuators to lock/unlock the pins plus your "moving actuators" plus something to move them.
We're doing ourselves a disservice by assuming everyone wants what we want.
Don't worry, that's something Microsoft seems to have learned from us Linux folks.
The font smoothing in IE 10 causes headaches for you and your users and you want to turn that crappy "ClearType" of? No. Not gonna happen. "We are right any you are all wrong!!"
Funny thing is, there the difference is not so much "FOSS" vs. "Proprietary", it's "Configurable" against "Locked Down". These days there seems to be a pretty mix-and-match going. A lot of FOSS moving to the "Locked Down" model, too, while on the other hand there is also a lot of configurable proprietary software around.
In your yearbook, are there any students who are just eyes and teeth? If the photography setup were truly unbiased that wouldn't happen. But the photographer decided to use a flash and a certain shutter speed, and a certain f-stop because that setup works 80% of the time.
Uh-oh. Imagine the solution to that.
Having one photo/lighting/background setup for white people and one setup for black people and then having queues labelled "white people" / "black people". Which would be the perfect technical solution for the problem, but would probably cause one hell of a havoc with the "PC" folks.
Depends. There also has been somewhat of a shift from "Who is the most important target" to "who is the easiest target to catch" in what is loosely called "law enforcement" these days.
Great. As if divorce lawyers didn't earn enough with the fight about who keeps the kids, the house, the car and the dog. Now they also have earn money with the fight about who keeps copyright to the stash of dirty pictures and videos.
In software there is always the chance of a "Dang, we have to re-write this thing from scratch" moment, when something becomes to cluttered an unmanageable.
In such a moment ever happens to Linux (or another FOSS OS) they can always pick up things like HURD and go from there, if it fits their goals better than the thing that became to "wrong direction". With FOSS the chance of having someone or something "gone the first steps for fun" and getting picked up later by someone else is always there.
How will I pay for my material things? Why would someone invest money into building and operate a factory of robots only to give away free snorkles and swimfins?
You imply some kind of utopia on the horizon, but I fail to see a path leading there.
But, to turn it around:
Who will you sell your snorkels and swimfins too, if you have eliminated all workers and nobody can earn a wage?
Historically there have been quite a few major shifts in the "job market". After all, we have moved from about 90% of the population working in just creating enough basic food stuff to perhaps 5% of the population needed to create the basic food supply.
What's interesting is that most major shifts in labour distribution also lead to major shifts in society and the political landscape. That's of course what the politicians are afraid of.
Well to actually *withdraw* money they would either need my ID card (if they try to get it out of a human teller that doesn't know me personally) or my cash card and pin number (to get it at an ATM), too.
To set up automated payments they would either also convince a human teller that they are me, or log into an on-line banking account with the login credentials the don't have.
To apply for new cards the same thing.
They *could* of course pull money out of my account via direct debit, but then I would have 6 weeks to reverse the transfer.
"names, addresses, gender, birth dates, bank account numbers and bank sort codes" is (sans the birth date and gender) basically what is printed in most business letterheads anyway.
The most credit to the success of Benz, that resulted in the big Mercedes-Benz thing that is still very much relevant today basically goes to his wife.
There is somewhat of a startling co-incidence with Apple Products. There were a lot of people who build "cars" before Benz.
The "Patented Benz Motorcar" was basically a failure with no customers, until his wife loaded their two kids on board (without telling him) and went on a 212km (132 miles) round trip. That was basically the "Hey, a motorcar is not just a toy for geeks, even a mom can drive one" moment that started the commercial success.
Without a cell phone, and with pay phones rapidly being taken out of service, how do you get a hold of roadside assistance?
Hitch or walk to the next gas station or house. They either let you call, or in some cases even come out and tow you. I had a somewhat wonky car in the 80s. Was a pretty nice way of meeting new and interesting people along the way.;-)
Having done some billing etc... stuff myself in my opinion there is only *one* time when it is a good time to trash the old system and re-write from scratch:
When the "business rules" also are completely trashed and re-written from scratch. Since not only the existing business rules influenced the existing software, but also the other way around.
Re-Writing something so that it does exactly the same thing as an old system will pretty much never happen. And it doesn't make much sense either. When you write a new system, it makes sense to check if with the new technical possibilities old rules can be simplified. But while that is somewhat possible in "business" settings I guess it is completely impossible in "legal" settings.
What would really *be* great is a team of coders and health care professionals building the new system and the new laws, then there might be a chance improvement. But when do job is done by politicians an lobbyist, there is not much hope.
Well, that's the thing with the "all rolled up into one" solutions. Those scanners scan/mail/archive/etc... all by themselves, without further user intervention and without the need for an additional computer attached.
The big foul-up is that hey use JBIG, not a more sensible compression algorithm like LZW or JPEG where "to small to read" stuff really gets "too small to read" in the scan, too, not "improved" to something else. The foulup would have been exactly the same if someone later in the tool chain had used JBIG.
They probably hat a test run by a marketing drone that found that JBIG "looks so much clearer";-P
Well, you would definitely need the former admit to show you how to log into something *if you don't have the password*.
That's the one main problem I had taking over stuff from "disappeared" people. The other being something like "something happens every night at 03:00 that processes some data in a DB or on a network share, but nobody knows from where it is run anymore"
It is of course possible to get into systems without a password, or figure out what data flows around the different servers by doing network traces, etc..., but it usually turns things that would taken a few minutes into jobs that take a few days.
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And only if he didn't have any fun. If he did have fun writing the software, then he additionally saved the money for movie tickets, theme park rides, drinks in pubs, etc... that other people seem to have to PAY to have fun, so the cost for the device might even come out negative.
... new technologies freed up labour force?
When the "People needed to get food" shrank from 100% of the population to about 90% of the population when agriculture was developed that was a great boos for society.
When the horseshoe, the heavy plow and the horse collar freed up around 50% of the agricultural workforce around 1000AD that was also a great boost for European society. The same for the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine.
I think the one thing different now compared to those times is that the "freed up" workforce CAN'T do other things, because switching jobs to REALLY NEW things is to complicated these days because of a lot of red tape that prevents it. A lot of those historic job changes also required new "barter schemes" and/or new forms of government besides the already existing ones, (like the free cities that were founded in the middle ages as a place for journeymen and masters to make their fortune, creating a whole new class that hasn't existed before ) and that is something you can't get that past the existing tax collectors and governments these days.
That is very true. Guns don't *cause* crime in any relevant percentage, but on the other hand they also don't *prevent* crime in any relevant percentage.
Sometimes I wish both the "take everyone's gun away, and everything will be fine!" and the "giver everybody guns and everything will be fine!" groups would just give up on throwing statistics at each other, when "gun ownership" is proven over and over again to have no real influence on crime rates, since both sides can cherry-pick the statistics they like so easily.
I for one hope that robotics will provide Google with a revenue stream other than ads and customer data.
Or they simply want thug-bots that can go to your house and beat you up in person to get information, instead of just mining it out of your electronic devices.
The problem of course is that you CAN'T have a "secret police" that spies on "the bad guys" and then forbid that police to spy on a sub-set of people. Because then "the bad guys" just set their operation up to disguise as the people the secret police is forbidden to spy on.
You basically have three options as a country:
1) Pay a "secret police" that does it's job, but give up your freedom.
2) Pay a "secret police" that doesn't really do anything.
3) Get rid of the secret police altogether..
No amount of "getting rid of the head of the secret police every now and then as a PR stunt" changes the fact that the US is heading down option 1).
They also don't help now when your wind shield is covered in ice. You probably would have to clean the sensors the same way you now clean the wind shield, or the "automatic mode" will most likely refuse to switch on.
So I guess the car would say something like "Get out and clean me, human!" to its servant. ;-P
They aren't afraid of people who threaten them with "we will come with our weapons", they are afraid of people who threaten them with "we will NOT come with our money" ;-)
The actuators themselves are probably not even that expensive. A decent stepping motor can be had at under ~$10 if you buy a large enough quantity.
I spent a few years building packaging machines that used that kind of things. Even with more expensive actuators that can move a few kilograms the cost of "actually installing and aligning them" in the machine is multiple times the price of the actual actuator. Having an actuator "move" between different parts it has to actuate feels like it's going to take one hell of accurate alignment nightmare between all the involved parts. And instead of install and align an actuator once it would have to be kept in alignment all the time somehow.
My gut feeling is that the way to bring the price down would be to find a way to mass-produce, say, a 8x8 grid of cheap actuators that could then be stacked in either direction. You might even be able to come up with a ways that you some of the parts now needed for one actuator might only be needed once per 8x8 group.
Because then instead of only n by n actuators to actually move the pins, you would need n by n actuators to lock/unlock the pins plus your "moving actuators" plus something to move them.
We're doing ourselves a disservice by assuming everyone wants what we want.
Don't worry, that's something Microsoft seems to have learned from us Linux folks.
The font smoothing in IE 10 causes headaches for you and your users and you want to turn that crappy "ClearType" of?
No. Not gonna happen. "We are right any you are all wrong!!"
Funny thing is, there the difference is not so much "FOSS" vs. "Proprietary", it's "Configurable" against "Locked Down". These days there seems to be a pretty mix-and-match going. A lot of FOSS moving to the "Locked Down" model, too, while on the other hand there is also a lot of configurable proprietary software around.
In your yearbook, are there any students who are just eyes and teeth? If the photography setup were truly unbiased that wouldn't happen. But the photographer decided to use a flash and a certain shutter speed, and a certain f-stop because that setup works 80% of the time.
Uh-oh. Imagine the solution to that.
Having one photo/lighting/background setup for white people and one setup for black people and then having queues labelled "white people" / "black people". Which would be the perfect technical solution for the problem, but would probably cause one hell of a havoc with the "PC" folks.
Depends. There also has been somewhat of a shift from "Who is the most important target" to "who is the easiest target to catch" in what is loosely called "law enforcement" these days.
Great. As if divorce lawyers didn't earn enough with the fight about who keeps the kids, the house, the car and the dog. Now they also have earn money with the fight about who keeps copyright to the stash of dirty pictures and videos.
In software there is always the chance of a "Dang, we have to re-write this thing from scratch" moment, when something becomes to cluttered an unmanageable.
In such a moment ever happens to Linux (or another FOSS OS) they can always pick up things like HURD and go from there, if it fits their goals better than the thing that became to "wrong direction". With FOSS the chance of having someone or something "gone the first steps for fun" and getting picked up later by someone else is always there.
Yea. Actually, from a non-linier, non subjective point of view it is more like a big ball of wibbily wobbly timey wimey...stuff
How will I pay for my material things? Why would someone invest money into building and operate a factory of robots only to give away free snorkles and swimfins?
You imply some kind of utopia on the horizon, but I fail to see a path leading there.
But, to turn it around:
Who will you sell your snorkels and swimfins too, if you have eliminated all workers and nobody can earn a wage?
Historically there have been quite a few major shifts in the "job market". After all, we have moved from about 90% of the population working in just creating enough basic food stuff to perhaps 5% of the population needed to create the basic food supply.
What's interesting is that most major shifts in labour distribution also lead to major shifts in society and the political landscape. That's of course what the politicians are afraid of.
The next big step will probably be when it gets a ticket for "flying outside our private property without a license plate"
Well to actually *withdraw* money they would either need my ID card (if they try to get it out of a human teller that doesn't know me personally) or my cash card and pin number (to get it at an ATM), too.
To set up automated payments they would either also convince a human teller that they are me, or log into an on-line banking account with the login credentials the don't have.
To apply for new cards the same thing.
They *could* of course pull money out of my account via direct debit, but then I would have 6 weeks to reverse the transfer.
"names, addresses, gender, birth dates, bank account numbers and bank sort codes" is (sans the birth date and gender) basically what is printed in most business letterheads anyway.
The most credit to the success of Benz, that resulted in the big Mercedes-Benz thing that is still very much relevant today basically goes to his wife.
There is somewhat of a startling co-incidence with Apple Products. There were a lot of people who build "cars" before Benz.
The "Patented Benz Motorcar" was basically a failure with no customers, until his wife loaded their two kids on board (without telling him) and went on a 212km (132 miles) round trip. That was basically the "Hey, a motorcar is not just a toy for geeks, even a mom can drive one" moment that started the commercial success.
There is only one ocean....
There used to be five!
Yeah. Job cuts these days stop at nothing. First they consolidated the oceans, but you just wait, the continents will be next.
Who needs 5 guys when they can get Pangea to do the job cheaper?
Well, a highly-modified closed-source "Unix A" kernel is also only reminiscent of another "Unix B" kernel.
Without a cell phone, and with pay phones rapidly being taken out of service, how do you get a hold of roadside assistance?
Hitch or walk to the next gas station or house. They either let you call, or in some cases even come out and tow you. I had a somewhat wonky car in the 80s. Was a pretty nice way of meeting new and interesting people along the way. ;-)
Having done some billing etc... stuff myself in my opinion there is only *one* time when it is a good time to trash the old system and re-write from scratch:
When the "business rules" also are completely trashed and re-written from scratch. Since not only the existing business rules influenced the existing software, but also the other way around.
Re-Writing something so that it does exactly the same thing as an old system will pretty much never happen. And it doesn't make much sense either. When you write a new system, it makes sense to check if with the new technical possibilities old rules can be simplified. But while that is somewhat possible in "business" settings I guess it is completely impossible in "legal" settings.
What would really *be* great is a team of coders and health care professionals building the new system and the new laws, then there might be a chance improvement. But when do job is done by politicians an lobbyist, there is not much hope.
Well, that's the thing with the "all rolled up into one" solutions. Those scanners scan/mail/archive/etc... all by themselves, without further user intervention and without the need for an additional computer attached.
The big foul-up is that hey use JBIG, not a more sensible compression algorithm like LZW or JPEG where "to small to read" stuff really gets "too small to read" in the scan, too, not "improved" to something else. The foulup would have been exactly the same if someone later in the tool chain had used JBIG.
They probably hat a test run by a marketing drone that found that JBIG "looks so much clearer" ;-P
Well, you would definitely need the former admit to show you how to log into something *if you don't have the password*.
That's the one main problem I had taking over stuff from "disappeared" people. The other being something like "something happens every night at 03:00 that processes some data in a DB or on a network share, but nobody knows from where it is run anymore"
It is of course possible to get into systems without a password, or figure out what data flows around the different servers by doing network traces, etc..., but it usually turns things that would taken a few minutes into jobs that take a few days.