In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.
San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.
All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.
What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.
Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.
Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.
We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.
The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.
It has apparently never occurred to publishers to band together and fund the creation of a system for buying content at dirt cheap prices using something like ACH transfers to keep the transaction costs low. How about a one-click purchase model where you pay $0.50/article or $3 for all content published that day?
It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.
"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.
We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.
This is what work looks like with computers in charge.
This is Amazon's new warehouse in Tracy, CA. The computers run the robots and do the planning and scheduling. The robots move the shelf units around/ The humans take things out of one container and put them in another, taking orders from the computers.
The bin picking will probably be automated soon. Bezos has a company developing robots for that.
As for repairing the robots, that's not a big deal. There are about a thousand mobile Kiva robots in that warehouse, sharing the work, and they're all interchangeable. Kiva, which makes and services the robots, has only a few hundred employees.
Retail is 12% of US employment. That number is shrinking.
This is the Eric Schmidt vision of the future. People will still go to offices and have meetings. They'll just have better cars and presentation tools, and better delivery services for physical stuff.
Will we really need that many office workers? That's the huge question. Given the head counts at newer companies, probably not.
3% loading...
Page with 3 icons loads. Click on first icon. Background sound loop of birds chirping with wihite noise and gap at the end of the loop starts.
That's all that happens.
Firefox 33 on Ubuntu reports:
Media resource http://automobility.ideo.com/a... could not be decoded. automobility.ideo.com
TypeError: e[0].play is not a function main.js:1
TypeError: e[0].pause is not a function main.js:1
Darryl Gates, former police chief of Los Angeles, once proposed that kids should be taught in school how to be arrested. Cops can't complain that it's being implemented.
There's a network effect for shared vehicles. Availablility is best if you have one big pool of cars rather than lots of little ones. So there will be a single winner in that space for each city.
Imagine Uber having the power of GM and Google combined. Run by the current team of assholes.
OK, a square monitor. Now maybe Apple will announce a round monitor. They already make a round PC, after all. All the Apple fanboys will then insist that round monitors are great.
decades ago, Cray Computers were assembled by people (housewives) who were allowed to spend no more time than they could be maximally effective in, using wires cut to millimeter-precise lengths.
Yes, and there's a Cray I at the Computer Museum here in Silicon Valley, upholstered base and all. You can sit on it if you like. It's not useful for much else.
All modern supercomputers are composed of a large number of microprocessors. The interconnects are faster than with ordinary hosting/cloud operations, but the CPUs are the same. The biggest supercomputer in the world, in China, is 3,120,000 cores of Intel Xeons, running at 2.2GHz each.
The question is whether the problem you're solving needs tight interconnection. If not, you can run it on a large number of ordinary computers. Weather may not be that tightly coupled; propagation time in air is kind of slow.
Don't worry, most of those jobs will go away soon. Amazon's newer warehouses use Kiva robots to move merchandise around to picking stations. Picking is still manual; the computers do all the thinking, the humans just pick up what the laser pointer points at. But Bezos owns a robotics startup working on automating that. At Amazon, being replaced by robots isn't a future problem. It's here now.
Customer service is already mostly automated. It's can't be long until customer service chat is with a computer, not a human. Then Amazon will need fewer people.
Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?
That's correct. The best known demonstration of this is the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which every signed driver since Windows 7 has passed. It's a proof of correctness system which checks drivers for buffer overflows, bad pointers, and bad parameters to the APIs drivers use. It works by symbolically tracing through the program, forking off a sub-analysis at each branch point. It can be slow, but it works.
Microsoft Research reports that in about 5% of the cases, the Verifier cannot reach a decision. It can't find a bug, but it can't demonstrate the lack of one either. After 45 minutes of case analysis it gives up.
If your driver is such a mess that it's anywhere near undecidable, it's broken. Those drivers get rewritten with a less ambiguous design, usually by adding more run-time checks. Problem solved.
(Remember when driver bugs crashed Windows all the time? Notice that's not happening any more? That's why.)
This is the problem with outsourcing manufacturing and keeping the "brand". Eventually, if they're good, the outsourcing company takes over.
It's about time for this to happen to Apple. The hardware is approaching maturity. The last rev of the iPhone was only a minor change over the previous one, and the technology was comparable to HTC's product of two years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.
San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.
All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.
What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.
Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.
Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.
We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.
The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.
It has apparently never occurred to publishers to band together and fund the creation of a system for buying content at dirt cheap prices using something like ACH transfers to keep the transaction costs low. How about a one-click purchase model where you pay $0.50/article or $3 for all content published that day?
It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.
The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.
There was a time when most US employees got that.
And double time on Sundays.
Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.
Mod parent up.
"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.
We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.
Same story was on Hacker News last week. From the same guy.
This is what work looks like with computers in charge. This is Amazon's new warehouse in Tracy, CA. The computers run the robots and do the planning and scheduling. The robots move the shelf units around/ The humans take things out of one container and put them in another, taking orders from the computers.
The bin picking will probably be automated soon. Bezos has a company developing robots for that.
As for repairing the robots, that's not a big deal. There are about a thousand mobile Kiva robots in that warehouse, sharing the work, and they're all interchangeable. Kiva, which makes and services the robots, has only a few hundred employees.
Retail is 12% of US employment. That number is shrinking.
Is it feasible to make sapphire smartphone screens which are not too shatter-prone?
Sure it is. Home Depot checkout scanner glass is sapphire-coated. You can drag steel tools across it all day for years on end.
"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, 1984
It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.
OK, here's a site with an interview with IDEO's designer. It has the key pictures without the UI from hell.
This is the Eric Schmidt vision of the future. People will still go to offices and have meetings. They'll just have better cars and presentation tools, and better delivery services for physical stuff.
Will we really need that many office workers? That's the huge question. Given the head counts at newer companies, probably not.
3% loading...
Page with 3 icons loads. Click on first icon. Background sound loop of birds chirping with wihite noise and gap at the end of the loop starts. That's all that happens.
Firefox 33 on Ubuntu reports: Media resource http://automobility.ideo.com/a... could not be decoded. automobility.ideo.com
TypeError: e[0].play is not a function main.js:1
TypeError: e[0].pause is not a function main.js:1
Don't they test their code?
Darryl Gates, former police chief of Los Angeles, once proposed that kids should be taught in school how to be arrested. Cops can't complain that it's being implemented.
There's a network effect for shared vehicles. Availablility is best if you have one big pool of cars rather than lots of little ones. So there will be a single winner in that space for each city.
Imagine Uber having the power of GM and Google combined. Run by the current team of assholes.
OK, a square monitor. Now maybe Apple will announce a round monitor. They already make a round PC, after all. All the Apple fanboys will then insist that round monitors are great.
decades ago, Cray Computers were assembled by people (housewives) who were allowed to spend no more time than they could be maximally effective in, using wires cut to millimeter-precise lengths.
Yes, and there's a Cray I at the Computer Museum here in Silicon Valley, upholstered base and all. You can sit on it if you like. It's not useful for much else.
All modern supercomputers are composed of a large number of microprocessors. The interconnects are faster than with ordinary hosting/cloud operations, but the CPUs are the same. The biggest supercomputer in the world, in China, is 3,120,000 cores of Intel Xeons, running at 2.2GHz each.
The question is whether the problem you're solving needs tight interconnection. If not, you can run it on a large number of ordinary computers. Weather may not be that tightly coupled; propagation time in air is kind of slow.
Does the National Weather Service need that computing power all the time, or could they buy it during major hurricanes from cloud services?
Don't worry, most of those jobs will go away soon. Amazon's newer warehouses use Kiva robots to move merchandise around to picking stations. Picking is still manual; the computers do all the thinking, the humans just pick up what the laser pointer points at. But Bezos owns a robotics startup working on automating that. At Amazon, being replaced by robots isn't a future problem. It's here now.
Customer service is already mostly automated. It's can't be long until customer service chat is with a computer, not a human. Then Amazon will need fewer people.
Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?
Mod parent up.
That's correct. The best known demonstration of this is the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which every signed driver since Windows 7 has passed. It's a proof of correctness system which checks drivers for buffer overflows, bad pointers, and bad parameters to the APIs drivers use. It works by symbolically tracing through the program, forking off a sub-analysis at each branch point. It can be slow, but it works.
Microsoft Research reports that in about 5% of the cases, the Verifier cannot reach a decision. It can't find a bug, but it can't demonstrate the lack of one either. After 45 minutes of case analysis it gives up.
If your driver is such a mess that it's anywhere near undecidable, it's broken. Those drivers get rewritten with a less ambiguous design, usually by adding more run-time checks. Problem solved.
(Remember when driver bugs crashed Windows all the time? Notice that's not happening any more? That's why.)
This is the problem with outsourcing manufacturing and keeping the "brand". Eventually, if they're good, the outsourcing company takes over. It's about time for this to happen to Apple. The hardware is approaching maturity. The last rev of the iPhone was only a minor change over the previous one, and the technology was comparable to HTC's product of two years ago.
I don't recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors.
The military has run short courses for electronic technicians and paramedics for decades. Paramedic boot camp is about 14 weeks.
Technically, this is quite do-able. Then again, consider what a dud 3D TV was.
Headgear for a game, like an FPS shooter, should be fun. But for passive watching, it's too much work.