It's still a reason not to use their products, if you know the staff cares more about the promo than the product. Why would I want to use something (or build a business on something) that would disappear soon thereafter.
The demo video answered my questions, is short and the tech is impressive. Not entirely sure of the business model though. The non-rigid tracking might be more useful than the projection -- perhaps a Defense application?
Skimming the description, they used a structured light approach (active) for geometry deformation tracking. This is still probably useful for certain defense applications but an ideal goal is often to use passive tracking systems. It's impressive either way.
Lots of theater, performing, and visual art uses come to mind.
Some retailers (especially Japanese ones) have a fascination with the idea of allowing customers to "try on" different colors/styles via an on-screen avatar that's based on a scan of the customer. This would seem like a logical next step.
I'm unsure how much customers would actually want it though, at least after the novelty wears off.
Not a history book, per se, but a great tour into the culture and philosophy of Unix: The Art of Unix Programming [1], by Eric Raymond. Chapter 2 is titled "History."
You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3].
I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL.
Thanks for this blast from the past. I bought the book in 1997 as a sophomore student at university. My favorite book at the time. Leafing through the PDF after all these years I came across some gems I hadn't appreciated back then:
On page 161 the author mentions in passing that Eric Schmidt had been working on BerkNet. THE Eric Schmidt. The Google Eric Schmidt.
Earlier the book mentions that Bill Joy was able to hire a developer with money they got from DARPA. That developer was Michael Toy and later Sam Leffler. There's a movie called Code Rush about the open-sourcing of Netscape's source code in 1998 (which begat Mozilla and Firefox) and Michael Toy was the project lead for the open source effort back then. Sam Leffler later developed TIFF.
Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard.
Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.
Same, I've been avoiding domains that I know will just show me an unacceptable banner (on mobile) or paywall (desktop). It's funny that I've trained myself to avoid them. I wouldn't really mind them being blocked in these lists, as long as I can optionally disable/enable the domains, or whitelist them if I want (there are some news websites I've paid for)
> skip employing doctors at all in favor of nurse practitioners
Hold up. I hope you're not being negative on hiring NPs. As someone who is in favor of NPs (and knows many NPs), they provide excellent primary care and hiring them can help bring down the overall cost of healthcare. I say we should teach and hire MORE NPs to provide cheaper primary and preventative care, not blame clinics for hiring them.
This, and exactly this. NP's are great for the run-of-the-mill sicknesses and minor injuries that most adults and children get. In conjunction with a PCP, they provide excellent primary care even for more complicated patients.
In addition, specialist nurses are a great addition to a specialist's team. I don't see a neurologist all that often, but I have checkups with one of the team of wonderful nurses at the office, some of which specialize in the disease I have. It works out wonderfully and allows the specialist to take care of more patients and still provide pretty wonderful service.
I am not, I'm just stating the fact that they are replacing physicians, mainly due to costs. I'm struggling to see how you read into that statement a negative tone on the matter.
FWIW, my partner was an NP before leaving direct patient care.
> All the students I met with were surprisingly well informed about both events in the US and American history.
This is surprising to me. I imagine they read some news/propaganda about the events, rather than reading the NYTimes, WAPO, or BBC news directly. Can you comment on that?
> This is surprising to me. I imagine they read some news/propaganda about the events, rather than reading the NYTimes, WAPO, or BBC news directly. Can you comment on that?
Their history lessons certainly have a different emphasis than American history lessons. They emphasize things like slavery in the US and the CIA's interventions in Latin America in service of US businesses, but from all my conversations with students none of them had learned anything that was actually incorrect. They get their news mainly from government run newspapers, but also word of mouth spreads news pretty quickly.
> Did you have to get special approval?
It had been long enough since my time in service that non of my clearances were still valid, and so there was no special risk of me disclosing anything. I just contacted the American embassy in China and informed them of my plans.
> Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction
It makes me uncomfortable that the data is always there, and the direction of the business just needs to change. Perhaps they're not being profitable enough for wall street? And on a time scale of 10 more years, I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.
This is exactly why I'm one of the (probably many) silent switchers away from Fitbit now that this acquisition has happened. Whatever Google says now, in one or two or ten years, that could change, and my data will still be there.
> I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.
This is my other concern, closely related to the first. Data companies (Google included) have a very different idea of what is "savory" w.r.t data usage. Not from a place of malice, necessarily, but innocence/privilege/not thinking about the consequences.
Let's say the engineers are building a data-using feature, such as one which takes Fitbit health data and links it to your medical record to recommend tests or interventions that might benefit you. Those engineers may only think about how many lives this will save - the benefits of sharing this data. Because there are some benefits, for some people, in that use case. The problem is when those engineers do not consider all the many ways that sharing could go wrong, and how many other people could be hurt. Discrimination, denial of insurance, stalking, etc.
Personally, I think it would be incredibly beneficial for most software engineers to spend time learning hacking and adversarial thinking. Teaching the people who build these features to think about how the features could, and will, be misused would likely help them build better, safer features. (/soapbox :) )
Sharing CCs across teams is a business antipattern. You should use expense reporting, or switch to invoicing.
Regardless, when I was a consultant we had success with the email admins tracking the signup and/or billing emails, which arrived at the account numbers.
I've only found this page [1] which donates to the Mozilla org without specifying which project you care deeply about. Ideally there would be sliders, like on Humble Bundle for percentages.
