Comment That's beautiful. (Score 1) 63
That's a beautiful little project.
That's a beautiful little project.
We've gone from "So clear you can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?!?"
Right. Cellular telephony just barely works now. There's lag as long as a second, even when the call supposedly isn't going over VoIP. (Sprint seems to have that problem.) There's occasional echo when the lag exceeds what the echo suppressors can handle. Background noise kills the cellular compression algorithm.
Why don't we have CD-quality audio on phones?
What does Yahoo still do, anyway?
Apple needs to get their ruggedness act together. Meanwhile, here's a real phone, the Caterpillar B15.
Cat B15 tested by users. Dragged behind car. Used to play basketball. (As the ball, not as a computer game.) Dropped off bridge. Run through cement mixer. Frozen in bucket of ice. Run over by car. No problem.
Cat B15 tested by Caterpillar. Dropped into pool of water. Scooped out with heavy equipment. Run over by front end loader. (One of Cat's smaller front end loaders.) No problem.
It's an Android phone. The B15 runs Android 4.2; the new B15Q runs Android 4.4. Price around $300. Available in the US at Home Depot. Unlocked; pick any GSM carrier. T-Mobile works. No annoying carrier-provided apps. Caterpillar preloads apps for ordering Caterpillar heavy equipment parts and renting heavy equipment.
If you have one of these in a pocket, you will break before it will. I carry one of these horseback riding.
With all this hassle nowadays - I remember the times when nVidia was the only company supporting Linux and was something like the darly child of the FOSS community - which company actually *is* the most FOSS friendly today? Intel? AMD/ATI? Some other company?
Educated opinions on this needed.
You're an experiecned C developer? Well, sorry, but that's a no-brainer then. Go for Objective-C. Anything else would be really really stupid. You'll have to change some C habits to actually 'get' Obj-C, but you'll live. Obj-C works on every plattform, so you wouldn't be tied to iOS/OS X either. Only upsides to that route for you.
I OTOH also am an experienced developer, but pampered by 15 years of modern scripting language usage. I would want to learn C++ or Objective-C (I've been trying to pick up C++ for the last 2 years but haven't put enough effort into it yet), especially because im a FOSS Linux Geek, but I hate having to deal with anachronistic shit - so for me actually using an easy-to-use lock-in language would actually make sense - especially if I know what I want to build on iOS exclusively, since I would only do something very product and project specific on iOS. And only if I'm paid for it.
I know lots of people who go, but have no desire to go myself.
You say you're an experienced embedded-systems developer. Those are rare. Stay with that and get better at it. There are already a huge number of people grinding out appcrap, more than the app market can support. Soon there will be a glut of former phone app programmers, if there isn't already.
Try to get in on the back end of the "Internet of things". That crowd is overrun with appcrap people and has no clue about embedded.
The low-end 3D printers, the ones that try to weld ABS string together, still suck. TechShop has several of them. The Jet was a a flat failure. The Replicator 2 is OK if you're not building something more than about 2cm thick. I haven't tried the Type A Machines unit. In the end, it's a slow way to make prototype plastic parts that are inferior to injection-moulded ABS. Injection moulding requires machining a die, which is a big job, but then the production rate is high and the cost is very low.
The higher end printers have much better quality and more material options, but the machine cost is high and the process is slow. The really high end printers, the ones Space-X and Lockheed use to print aerospace parts, are very impressive, but still slow.
The real breakthrough in LED lighting is getting rid of electrolytic capacitors in the power supply. Those are currently the components with the shortest life. See "Elimination of an Electrolytic Capacitor in AC/DC Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Driver With High Input Power Factor and Constant Output Current" Variations on that technology are now going into production LED lighting units. This should push unit lifetimes up from 20,000 hours to that of the LEDs, 40,000 or so. (Provided the quality of the LEDs doesn't slip.)
... how the indignation at a major vulnerability like this (2nd in a few months) is so muted when the OS in question doesn't come from Microsoft.
Bugs happen. The bullshit and coverup that comes with many of them needn't happen.
When did shellshock come out? A week ago?
We already have testing routines, fixes, live reports on ongoing exploits, ad-hoc sidetracking fixes for commercial non-FOSS versions (Mac OS X), countless how-tos on how to close up holes, a lively worldwide debate among experts on how to prevent this class of exploit, the bash crew merging the fixes, existing updates for debian, etc.
Seriously, this is a *very* *bad* hole, and yet the cool with which I was able to approach it simply knowing that all my outward facing boxes run a type-a prime FOSS distribution like debian was something you will not see with a windows admin. apt-get upgrade, apt-get update
Sorry pal, but even with a bug of this magnitude, the way the FOSS community deals with it is a whole different league than any other camp. Openness beats everything else in this line of work, every time.
My 2 cents.
It's time to demand that Fourth Amendment rights be taken as seriously as Second Amendment rights. That's starting to happen.
What, they're going to ship a VR headset without positional tracking? When you turn your head, nothing happens? That's not VR. That's a TV you wear on your head.
That's neat. The demo takes in the video from a video game of the Pong/Donkey Kong era, can operate the controls, and in addition has the score info. It then learns to play the game. How to do that?
It's been done before, but not this generally. "Pengi", circa 1990, played Pengo using only visual input from the screen. It had hand-written heuristics, but only needed vision input from the game. So we have a starting point.
The first problem is feature extraction from vision. What do you want to take from the image of the game that you can feed into an optimizer? Motion and change, mostly. Something like an MPEG encoder, which breaks an image into moving blocks and tracks their motion, would be needed. I doubt they're doing that with a neural net.
Now you have a large number of time-varying scalar values, which is what's needed to feed a neural net. The first thing to learn is how the controls affect the state of the game. Then, how the state of the game affects the score.
I wonder how fast this thing learns, and how many tries it needs.
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. - Niels Bohr
