Earlier on, I identified robot delivery vehicles as one of the steps on the roadmap to robot cars. In fact, these are officially what the DARPA grand challenges really seek, since the military wants robots that can move things through danger zones without putting soldiers at risk.
Over the weekend I was at the [BIL conference]http://www.bilconference.com, a barcamp/unconference style justaposition on the very expensive TED conference. I gave a few talks, including one on self driving cars, privacy and AI issues.
The conference, being free, was at a small community center. This location did not have internet. Various methods were possible to provide internet. The easiest are routers which can take cellular network EVDO cards and offer an 802.11 access point. That works most places, but is not able to handle many people, and may or may not violate some terms of service. However, in just about all these locations there are locations very nearby with broadband internet which can be used, including hotels, businesses and even some private homes. But how to get the access in quickly?
What would be useful would be an "instant internet kit" with all you need to take an internet connection (or two) a modest distance over wireless. This kit would be packed up and available via courier to events that want internet access on just a couple of days notice.
What would you put in the kit?
As our devices get more and more complex, configuring them gets harder and harder. And for members of the non-tech-savvy public, close to impossible.
Here's an answer: Develop a simple browser plug-in for all platforms that can connect a USB peripheral to a TCP socket back to the server where the plugin page came from. (This is how flash and Java applets work, in fact this could be added to flash or Java.)
Yesterday I wrote about predictive suspension, to look ahead for bumps on the road and ready the suspension to compensate. There should be more we can learn by looking at the surface of the road ahead, or perhaps touching it, or perhaps getting telemetry from other cars.
I'm not the first to think of this idea, but in my series of essays on self driving cars I thought it would be worth discussing some ideas on suspension.
Driven cars need to have a modestly tight suspension. The driver needs to feel the road. An AI driven car doesn't need that, so the suspension can be tuned for the maximum comfort of the passengers. You can start bu just making it much softer than a driver would like, but you can go further.
A big trend in systems operation these days is the use of virtual machines -- software systems which emulate a standalone machine so you can run a guest operating system as a program on top of another (host) OS. This has become particularly popular for companies selling web hosting. They take one fast machine and run many VMs on it, so that each customer has the illusion of a standalone machine, on which they can do anything.
If you have read my articles on power you know I yearn for the days when we get smart power so we have have universal supplies that power everything. This hit home when we got a new Thinkpad Z61 model, which uses a new power adapter which provides 20 volts at 4.5 amps and uses a new, quite rare power tip which is 8mm in diameter. For almost a decade, thinkpads used 16.5 volts and used a fairly standard 5.5mm plug. It go so that some companies standardized on Thinkpads and put cheap 16 volt TP power supplies in all the conference rooms, allowing employees to just bring their laptops in with no hassle.
Lenovo pissed off their customers with this move. I have perhaps 5 older power supplies, including one each at two desks, one that stays in the laptop bag for travel, one downstairs and one running an older ThinkPad. They are no good to me on the new computer.
Lenovo says they knew this would annoy people, and did it because they needed more power in their laptops, but could not increase the current in the older plug. I'm not quite sure why they need more power -- the newer processors are actually lower wattage -- but they did.
Here's something they could have done to make it better.
I'm a director of BitTorrent Inc. (though not speaking for it) and so the recent debate about P2P applications and ISPs has been interesting to me. Comcast has tried to block off BitTorrent traffic by detecting it and severing certain P2P connections by forging TCP reset packets. Some want net neutrality legislation to stop such nasty activity, others want to embrace it. Brett Glass, who runs a wireless ISP, has become a vocal public opponent of P2P.
Some base their opposition on the fact that since BitTorrent is the best software for publishing large files, it does get used by copyright infringers a fair bit. But some just don't like the concept at all. Let's examine the issues.
A broadband connection consists of an upstream and downstream section. In the beginning, this was always symmetric, you had the same capacity up as down. Even today, big customers like universities and companies buy things like T-1 lines that give 1.5 megabits in each direction. ISPs almost always buy equal sized pipes to and from their peers.
With aDSL, the single phone wire is multiplexed so that you get much less upstream than downstream. A common circuit will give 1.5mbps down and say 256kb up -- a 6 to 1 ratio. Because cable systems weren't designed for 2 way data, they have it worse. They can give a lot down, but they share the upstream over a large block of customers under the existing DOCSIS system. They also will offer upstream on near the 6 to 1 ratio but unlike the DSL companies, there isn't a fixed line there.
As many of you will know, it's been a tumultuous week in President Bush's battle to get congress to retroactively nullify our lawsuit against AT&T over the illegal wiretaps our witnesses have testified to. The President convinced the Senate to pass a bill with retroactive immunity for the phone companies -- an immunity against not just this but all sorts of other illegal activities that have been confirmed but not explained by administration officials. But the House stood firm, and for now has refused. A battle is looming as the two bills must be reconciled.
I've read studies that say that "chocolate" is the world's favourite flavour. That's not too surprising. Coming from central America after the Spanish conquest, the candy at least quickly was adopted all over Europe and to a lesser degree elsewhere. So did many other new world ingredients, such as corn, beans, squash, chiles, potatoes, vanilla, tomatoes, peanuts and many others. And we've seen many of these become common, and even essential ingredients in many overseas cuisines.
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