The Author's WIsh for Self-Driving Cars -- further down the road?

Carmakers have so far introduced autonomous technology carefully, aware that having too little to worry about behind the wheel can be just as dangerous as having too many distractions. Too slowly for this committed car junkie. After all, what could be more futuristic than jumping into your hovercar, pulling the door downward to close it, keying in your destination, and dozing for two hours until you arrive at the seaside? Well, a jetpack. But, failing personal flight, autonomous driving would finally bring the future to now.

But this MIT article throws cold water on the dream of autodrive mode.

From this article: 'Vehicle automation is being developed at a blistering pace, and it should make driving safer, more fuel-efficient, and less tiring. But despite such progress and the attention surrounding Google's "self-driving" cars, full autonomy remains a distant destination. A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed. The problem is that until the moment our cars can completely take over, we will need automotive technologies to strike a tricky balance: they will have to extend our abilities without doing too much for the driver.'

Star Trek Replicator? Not yet, but 3D printing is hot!

Until recently, 3-D printing was limited to only those who could afford the industrial machines. The typical 3-D printer works layering melted plastic with a nozzle, controlled by data from a computer program, creating three-dimensional objects. Some printers can build objects made of other materials, including glass and metal. The less-expensive personal devices and open-source nature of many designs (files you download off the inter-webs) to allow users to customize their own things -- think personalized iPhone cases and jewelry or those shoe gewgaws kids like.
Sites like this are popping up to help the hobbyist or budding engineer design and print prototypes or even finished products. You can create and share 3d models at sites like this.
A variants on the plastics "toner" is selective laser sintering (SLS). This builds objects by laying down a fine layer of powder and then using the laser to selectively fuse some of its granules together -- and output objects using a wide range of powdered materials, such as wax, polystyrene, nylon, glass, ceramics, stainless steel, titanium, aluminium and various alloys. During printing, non-bonded powder granules support the object as it is constructed. Once printing is complete, almost all excess power is able to be recycled.
3D printers capable of outputting in color and multiple materials will continue to improve to a point where functional products will be able to be output, one at a time at home, downloaded from the net. Not quite downloaded coffee, but pretty darned cool!

Lanthanum? Unubtanium? What's the Most Valuable Resource.

As readers may have come to realize, my position on the most valued commodity is, in fact, not a commodity at all. I see knowledge workers as the key to success, at the micro-economic level (talented staff, discerning customers), and, as The Economist reports, at the macro level:

THE world’s most valuable resource is talent. No country grows enough of it. Some, however, enjoy the colossal advantage of being able to import it. Rich, peaceful countries can attract clever immigrants. Unlike other useful imports, they cost the recipient country nothing. They come, they study, they work, they set up businesses, they create jobs: 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies are immigrants and their children. Yet they are only 23% of Americans.

I've consistently advocated for immigration, both in the U.S. and in the Republic of Ireland, as the secret sauce to boost entrepreneurialism. My grandfather arrived illegally in New York, and made his way to being a successful baker, in spite being an "enemy of the state" during the 2nd World War. He, like many others, chose to be American (nobody chooses their heritage/nationality) -- the hallmark of civilized human rights is the freedom to migrate. And these two countries remain magnets for the talented, the motivated, the (learned or not) quick-witted.





- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Deconstructing the Xerox - Apple Myth

In the aftermath of the Apple patent lawsuit, there's a lot of misinformation making its way around the inter-web. This is a detailed deconstruction of the "Steve Jobs Stole Xerox's Secrets" myth may help readers understand the complexities, spanning decades. A salient chunk:

Here is the first complicating fact about the Jobs visit. In the legend of Xerox PARC, Jobs stole the personal computer from Xerox. But the striking thing about Jobs's instructions to Hovey is that he didn't want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. "You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons—three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse," Hovey went on. "The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important."

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical "animal" back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart's mouse, Xerox's mouse, and Apple's mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs's imagination. Xerox PARC's innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user's intention and the computer's response. Jobs's software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized "direct manipulation." If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that's appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Save Steve!

I am worried... Very concerned... The Woz is in trouble, he's on the Cinnabon Express Bus headed for heart attack city. He needs an intervention.
His views on the Cloud are, well, a little simplistic.



It doesn't seem like the Woz can tell the difference between consumer-oriented cloud application services (iCloud, Dropbox, Gmail) and infrastructure services such as Amazon AWS and Google App - which actually provide 'economies-of-scale' benefits over owning and managing one's own servers. This is particularly true if the consumer is a small business with no IT department.


Woz, scale back on the sugar, Trans fats, and hype. The cloud is only as evil as the companies that build/provide the services.

Software-based Radio - mobile's next great leap forward

Imagine a mobile phone that works anywhere in the world -- including Antarctica. And is the size of your iPhone. How? By the software of the phone switching the range of signals from the radio spectrum it receives, auto-"magically".
This approach to mobile devices would enable an entire new breed of wireless devices, using the same chipset and antenna (think: economies of scale in production).
Per Vices has introduced software-defined radio gear that Ars Technica thinks will usher in this new era. E company's software radio can broadcast and receive nearly any radio signal on nearly any frequency at the same time. The Per Vices Phi is one of the first devices aimed at the mass hobbyist market to take advantage of this technology. Read more here...

Just noting - nerds are some of the richest guys around

Judging from many comments on the BBC's article on Warhammer 40,000 (40k), many Brits have not realized that nerds have conquered (I'm thinking Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.). All the commenters' negative remarks about infantile, nerdy, etc., demonstrates a complete lack of perspective. Imagination is how we improve, even excel.

Dont take my word, chek out what the "nerds" at American Scientist have to say...

VTOL flight takes flight on this day...

On June 16, 1922, Henry Berliner demonstrated a working helicopter prototype to the United States Army, and is often given as the debut of the helicopter, at College Park Airport.

Wired: Officials of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics watch Henry Berliner make the first controlled horizontal helicopter flight in the United States.