43 karma · joined June 4, 2012
This service is separate from whatever the developer is working on that needs to call to it. If the work in progress exposes temporary credentials it's not the end of the world.
There are also some interesting papers if you search for 'peer to peer CPU resource sharing'.
Still, the ability to dynamically generate a topical chat bot from a corpus of digital artifacts is interesting. I'm currently envisioning their work as a natural language parser front end with subject specific response decoration and a machine learning algorithm to trigger "self-initiated" conversation and topic selection.
I'd still like to see why they think they can do better than what's already out there. Especially if they're making a play for academic funding, they need to publish something.
Note: this comment is without the benefit of searching for each of the team members prior works; if the company is not pointing to any particular technique or publication I'm not enthused enough to dig deeper.
I like resources such as the source code by address page, and the lack of complicated structures that get in the way of kernel programming, and I think it would still be fun to dig through the I/O and process management code when I have time to translate the naming paradigm so I can follow it.
Now, how many students would you be able to handle per mentor? I agree that teaching is part of leadership, but few team leaders have had to teach a 100 people at the same time. Maybe 30 per mentor?
Of course, after a year or two the senior students could help as mentors.
Who would join? Since it's a club, students will expect it to be fun. Granted, there are sports, band, cheerleading, etc where it is accepted that there will be hard work involved. They each have some kind of payoff, like games and concerts. I guess the club would be broken down into coaching and development sessions to teach skills, and then projects to develop them. You would want the projects to be something that the students could show the rest of the school, like a website or toy app. It would need to be small enough to be completed during a semester and could be done with the help of the art or A/V club.
How will a professional programmer feel about all of this? Yes, it is rewarding to teach, but at the same time you would be working with teenagers with varying levels of commitment. You're selecting for a very special type of person now, that is a programmer with vision, leadership skills, and that actually enjoys being around young adults.
I could see this working with small groups: 5 to 10 highly motivated students that already know the basics of programming hacking together apps with the help of a mentor. For those who don't know how to program yet, maybe work with the local colleges to open up programming courses similar to Vocational programs or Post Secondary Education Opportunities to learn the basics and earn college credit while still in high school.
A really cool demonstration of this technology would be to see a truly difficult shot. The company video [http://tracking-point.com] just shows people taking shots from several hundred feet away. Great, now I can shoot motionless unaware lower apparent intelligence lifeforms without even doing the math for bullet drop or wind myself, not to mention that I didn't have to track it (the video shows them flying around in a helicopter which is reasonable for someone spending $17,000 on a bolt action rifle) and I most likely didn't need this for sustenance, and the game they are shooting wasn't anywhere close to a community where population control is needed (like deer in the U.S. midwest since the natural predation cycle is broken).
Show me something awesome like a guy skydiving with this rifle and scoring a shot at something on a nearby mountain before popping out the wing suit flaps and gliding over to the kill and hoisting it by rope into a helicopter. Then release a second copy of the same video through an unaffiliated account on YouTube that is a viral meme like, "BANG, headshot!"
Also, I wonder if they intend on the working code examples to be included with the public patent after approval? If so then this would in a sense make all patented software open source, albeit with a very restrictive license. Still, that could vastly accelerate innovation and streamline arbitration.
In the end I think item 7, the proposal to research whether there is any economic benefit from software patents, is the most important and they should narrow down their scope to just that.
My concern would still be that the team is essentially guessing how valuable a given contribution is going to be beforehand. Even with industry experience it can be hard to know how much impact that new UI feature will have vs establishing the partnership with so-and-so.
I think some of the risk (of over incentivizing) could be mitigated by having only a set amount of equity distributed dynamically, and have a clear definition of the lock in point where the equity is no longer dynamic and is actually assigned. Also include your typical clauses for whether or not someone that left before lock-in point receives equity. This can be handled separately from what you get for bringing cash to the table.
In these special cases the mock modular forms, described by Ramanujan on his death bed in 1920 before anyone was talking about black holes, provide a counting function to describe the black hole's world line in string theory. In other words, they can model what's happening inside the black hole.
Using the mock modular forms was attractive because it satisfies the desire to use the holography theories about black holes to model what happens to information as matter crosses the event horizon.
The authors further justify their choice by explaining how modular forms are already used to describe characteristics of black holes in string theory, such as its Fourier coefficients (component waves) and how they change as an object crosses the wall.
The difference between a mock modular form and a modular form is that a modular form is holomorphic is differentiable at all points in Real space at infinity. A mock modular form is meromorphic, it is differentiable at almost all points in Real space at infinity. The authors account for their counting function being meromorphic by introducing a 'shadow' factor.
Edit: in particular they are complex differentiable. Wikipedia has a nice image where you can see a meromorphic function conforming to space and then a few spots where it jumps (is not continuous). A holomorphic function would conform smoothly all over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meromorphic_function
from: http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/bsa/
These wouldn't prevent you from making a purchase, and you might falsify information sufficiently to avoid association with your real identity and drawing unwanted attention, but it's another hurdle.
That blueprints link is pretty useful for taking a quick glance at what they're currently hacking on. Something longer term might be helpful for recruiting folks that don't want to lurk on the mailing list and irc just to figure out if there are interesting bits for them to contribute on.
As the Mark states in the article, this is terrible even within the network, let alone on the perimeter. Microsoft actually recommends against running Exchange and SQL Server on the same box anyways [1] for performance reasons.
Is there a good intention that would motivate someone to install something on a production box, leave it in an insecure config, and not document it?
[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997379(v=exchg....
Still, a little irrational voice inside is screaming that for something costing over $80,000 this should have a mind machine interface and not something pulled out of a Segway (the Vanderbilt is controlled by leaning while on crutches) or a D-pad (the Ekso and ReWalk). Hopefully prices would come down with scale.
The Cyberdyne HAL is around $20,000.
I laughed when I read the "Minimal Documentation" guideline in their design philosophy. Yes, aiming to make an application intuitive is great, but I first thought of how many developers achieve the Minimal Documentation goal in another sense.
It looks like they have put a lot of work into applications that meet their design goals, instead of rolling just another distro remix with the same old repositories, although it is listed as Ubuntu based on DistroWatch.
In case anyone else wants to look at their forum, it's at http://elementaryforums.org/ For such a UX focused project I find it unfortunate that they don't have a link to it on their support page and their answer service is listed as down from the home page even though I was able to reach it through Google.
Some points I found in [ref 1]: - each Xeon Phi card is running Linux and has it's own IP - you can SSH into the individual Xeon Phi just like hopping into a headless box - you can write apps that run entirely on the Xeon Phi
I don't see a physical ethernet jack on the card, so even though it has a network stack, it looks like it has to go through the host to access a NAS or other resources. I guess if network I/O becomes your bottleneck you're better off with separate boxes still.
I also wonder what prevents you from slapping this card into a system that doesn't have a Xeon processor. Is it a technical limitation such as having only developed PCI express drivers for that chipset so far, or marketing? I guess buying one and watching the driver install would reveal some answers if it's not stated in the literature.
[ref 1] http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/330164...
The reduction in size is possible because they found a way to not use a beam splitter and lenses. Comparing the diagram on Wikipedia makes it easy to see how that could save a lot of space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_holographic_microscopy
It would have been nice to see either a model or conventional images of their test targets for qualitative comparison to their resulting holograms. Still cool stuff though.