Posts by Alter Hase

Shortage of Greater Fools

Obviously, there is a shortage of greater fools....

Nothing new...

Advertising in the sky is nothing new -- I am old enough to remember "skywriters" -- planes that wrote advertising messages with smoke in the sky.

In some cases a single plane performed acrobatic maneuvers to write the message, and in other cases a group of planes flew in parallel to write the message using "dot matrix" techniques.

And even today, we have planes towing advertising banners, not to mention blimps....

Been there, done that!

In the 1960s (yes, I am that old!), IBM used chiplets in its SLT (Solid Logic Technology) modules. Of course, a chiplet was a pair of diodes or a single transistor. But Moore's Law took care of that!

Re Sub-head -- "We're gonna need a bigger rolled-up newspaper"

With the advent of digital media, newspapers are getting smaller, not bigger....

Making eye-contact

I like the idea of autonomous vehicles on Motorways/Freeways/Turnpikes/etc, but I don't see anyone discussing human-mediated "vehicle-to-vehicle" communication. In my everyday driving on city streets here in California (Silicon Valley!), I routinely make eye-contact with pedestrians and other drivers, sometimes as simple as "I see you; you see me", or perhaps a gesture ceding the right of way.

When AI can read human intent as well as humans can (however imperfect that is), then we will have competent L5 vehicles for city streets. Until then, I will use my (future) autonomous vehicle only on restricted access roads and be happy with that.

Is anyone analyzing the comments in this thread?

Is anyone analyzing the comments in this thread? -- It would make just as much sense as the original "study". Perhaps even more.....

Fujitsu, meet HTC

It sounds like HTC could use Fujitsu's services:

"We understand the potential of digital scarcity and uniqueness. With Exodus, HTC aims to be a general blockchain asset marketplace," said Chen. "We believe there is a paradigm shift and the pendulum is swinging back to ownership and the value of content."

Re: Distribution

Let the claimants determine the distribution of cy pres payments. The beneficiaries can be determined by crowd-sourcing amongst all claimants that choose to exercise a vote at the settlement web site. They can send most of the money to the Claimy McClaimface Foundation if they so desire...

I like it!

So what's new?

When I worked for IBM in Germany in the 60s, we would joke that, when we made an error in a design document, "That's to confuse the Russians." And in the 90s, when I was working at a small telecom equipment company, a Chinese competitor came out with an identical product, identical down to the details of the layout of the circuit board.

My non-techie wife supports elimination of net neutrality....

I didn't find my name on the NY Attorney General's list, but I did find my wife's name and our address with a comment supporting the elimination of net neutrality. Which is strange, because she has not used a computer or e-mail for over two years due to illness....

Where's the amusement park?

I am disappointed at our British cousins' lack of imagination -- from the title of the article, I expected something like the following:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/10/18/wunderland_kalkar_the_nuclear_reactor_turned_family_fun_park.html

What about the IBM 1620?

The IBM 1620 debuted in 1959 and was conceived as a computer for small engineering companies. As such, it could be thought of as a small "personal" computer as it was often run by a single programmer/operator.

It was succeeded in 1965 by the IBM 1130 which could drive the IBM 2250 Graphical Display, allowing direct interaction with the user. (As a Junior Engineer at IBM in the 1960s, I developed a tic-tac-toe demo for the 1130/2250 combination.)