Move in to the Cambrian House. The home for you to develop ideas, to grow business ventures, to contribute to projects, and to earn your just rewards. If you are an inventor, a marketer, a coder, a creative, or just want to work with others to change the world here's what's in it for you.
If you're always thinking up new businesses, here's where you pitch, drum up interest and find people to help build it. If you've already taken an idea past its initial stages and need help with the make money part, you're welcome too.
Here at Rockwell Automation’s world headquarters, research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current, for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters.
Such an instrument comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliance Electric motors, Allen-Bradley controls, and all monitored by Rockwell Software is: Rockwell Automation’s ‘Retro-Encabulator’. Now, basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance.
The original machine had a base-plate of pre-fabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The lineup consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar wane shaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots of the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the ‘up’ end of the grammeters.
Moreover, whenever fluorescence score motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocation dingle arm, to reduce sinusoidal depleneration. The ‘Retro-Encabulator’ has now reached a high level of development, and it’s being successfully used in the operation of milford-trenions.
It’s available soon; wherever Rockwell Automation products are sold.
On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver (initially) about 350 movies and 650 television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.
Mr. Hastings said he chose the instant delivery afforded by streaming technology over downloads, which can take a while, because it would encourage subscribers to use the system to browse the catalog and discover new movies. If they do not like a movie, they can stop it and will be charged only for the minutes they actually watched.
I like this justification for streaming. Now, if only the service were extended to include the more obscure titles in the inventory, this would be an interesting augmentation for browsing the catalog.
Bill Gates: A Robot in Every Home | Scientific American
Topic: High Tech Developments
8:40 am EST, Dec 30, 2006
In a recent LA Times op-ed, various executives and pundits are polled for tech sector stock tips. Steve Ballmer suspiciously boasts:
Many technologies have the potential to catch fire, including Internet television, mobile video devices and even robots.
Perhaps "robots" seemed like a random comment at the time.
Well, the long form of the story is told by Bill Gates in the December issue of Scientific American. Apparently, robots are a lot like personal computers, and they're finally poised for takeoff.
With childlike naïvety, Gates characterizes DARPA's sponsorship of both packet networking and autonomous vehicles as "intriguing."
Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and many other systems. He wants Microsoft to "provide the same kind of common, low-level foundation for integrating hardware and software into robot designs."
I mentioned before that everyone in the LA Times piece was selling something. So, what is Gates pushing?
Microsoft Robotics Studio -- "Our goal for this release is to create an affordable, open platform that allows robot developers to readily integrate hardware and software into their designs."
In clever contrast to his comment about DARPA, Gates wraps up his futurist essay on "robots" by explaining that these robots won't look like those of science fiction -- so much so that you won't even call them robots. This is a nice way of insulating himself from being 'wrong' about the future.
Rick Rashid dreams of the ubiquitous remembrance agent.
Rick Rashid: One of our research projects a few years ago asked, If you started to harvest all the information on usage, what could you do? Logically, your computer knows where every piece of text in a document comes from. Did you type it? Did you cut and paste it? Where from? Did it come from an e-mail? And so on. Extrapolate that idea: computers could use the knowledge of where information comes from to very powerful effect.
...
Technology Review: Life has been a process of forgetting. Rashid: But it doesn't have to be anymore.
Moore's Law is relatively well known, and its effects are widespread. Analogous trends in mass storage are less well known, but their impact on the culture could be equally transformative.
What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”
Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.
The announcement is here. This is an interesting group: Eric Schmidt, Rick Rashid, Prabhakar Raghavan, Jon Kleinberg, and many more.
W[h]ither Routing? Geoff Huston on the IAB Routing Workshop
Topic: High Tech Developments
12:24 pm EDT, Oct 24, 2006
Geoff Huston has prepared a thoughtful essay about Internet routing, based on his participation in a recent IAB workshop on the subject.
I attended a Internet Architecture Board workshop in October 2006 on the topic of routing and addressing, and in this column I'd like to report on the impressions on this topic that I took away from this workshop. I should note at the outset that this is not in any way an official report of the meeting, nor even a report of my impressions of the presentations and the related workshop discussion. This article could best be described as my reactions to what I heard at this workshop and what I think they might imply in the area of routing and addressing.
... as we look forward some rather tough questions tend to reveal themselves.
The published report on the 1998 workshop is RFC 2902.
Google in Talks to Acquire YouTube for $1.6 Billion
Topic: High Tech Developments
8:41 pm EDT, Oct 6, 2006
The eyes have it.
Google is in serious talks to acquire YouTube, the wildly successful online video-sharing Web site, for $1.6 billion in cash and stock, people involved in the negotiations said today.
A deal would end an almost yearlong chess game among the nation’s media and technology moguls to take over YouTube, which allows users to share home movies, amateur spoofs and snippets of the best parts of television shows. Though it is not yet profitable, the site has exploded into a cultural phenomenon less than a year after its debut, broadcasting more than 100 million video clips a day.
Microsoft, Yahoo, Viacom and the News Corporation, among others, have all paid visits to YouTube’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., in recent months to inquire about buying the company.
Terms of the potential sale to Google could not be learned. It was still possible that the talks could collapse or that another suitor could swoop in with a rival offer.
The negotiations come as all of the established media conglomerates are in a frenzied hunt to acquire hot Internet properties. Yahoo, for instance, is in negotiations to buy Facebook, a social networking site originally aimed at college students, for more than $1 billion, according to people involved in those talks.
The buyout rush is partly a reaction to Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace, an online hangout with millions of personal Web pages. MySpace, which Mr. Murdoch bought last year for $580 million, is now worth as much as $2 billion by some analysts’ estimates.
Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Topic: High Tech Developments
7:17 pm EDT, Oct 2, 2006
This is a nice capsule; probably nothing but a nugget or two new here for many MemeStreams regulars.
“The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” published in 1971, which ended up selling a million copies and winning the National Book Award, has the eerie luminosity of a Sears catalog from the turn of the last century. It is a portrait of an age and its dreams.
As Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost.
The book earns plugs from Kevin Kelly and Douglas Rushkoff. The Publishers Weekly review calls it "a compelling genealogy", but that's about as glowing as they get.
And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely
Topic: High Tech Developments
5:05 am EDT, Oct 2, 2006
Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.
James Bennett, left, a Netflix vice president, with the company’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, in a headquarters screening room.
To win the prize, which is to be announced today, a contestant will have to devise a system that is more accurate than the company’s current recommendation system by at least 10 percent. And to improve the quality of research, Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings, a database the company says is the largest of its kind ever released.
“If we knew how to do it, we’d have already done it,” said Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, based in Los Gatos, Calif.
If no one wins within a year, Netflix will award $50,000 to whoever makes the most progress above a 1 percent improvement, and will award the same amount each year until someone wins the grand prize.
