Augmented reality is a great example. Everyone knows that it will become a "Big Thing" in the future. Like why would smartphones be the final form factor of personal computing? Of course there will be something that will dethrone it.
But despite every big company throwing a couple billions at the problem for the last few years (Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of oculus, Google's $500 million investment into Magic Leap, Apple's acquisition of Metaio/ARkit, Microsoft Hololens), all we have are literal toys!
So now you can't talk about AR as a serious subject anymore. People all dismiss it, saying we are still too early. I imagine it's like that for every "toy to big thing" transition.
I think there’s a very good chance the smartphone will be the dominant form factor essentially forever. Anything smaller won’t be good for presenting visual information, and when you don’t need it, it isn’t stuck to your face.
Alternatively taking a long view, how many times do you think the dominant form factor of personal computers (in the general sense, including smart phones) will change? Another 3 times, another 5? Every 20 years forever?
The only exception I can think of is a direct neural link, but that’s generations away and even then I’m not entirely convinced. Maybe in the very long term.
I don't see how that could physically work. To present a high fidelity bright, clear display has irreducible base power requirements, and I don't see any way to provision that amount of energy in the form factor. Signal reception would also be a problem, and then there's the issue of dealing with thermal losses. Thermodynamics is not our friend, especially for powered devices in physical contact with our eyeballs.
Contact lenses are a pita. I suspect it's going to be a smartphone-like form factor combined with a voice UI similar to the movie Her from 2013. Eventually the visuals on the phone screen will be replaced with a neural link. It would make sense if the implant is just a dumb antenna, combined with a removable "earbud" that connects it to the computing device.
We have not conceived useful applications that actually require AR yet. It has to be something requiring immediate feedback - maybe driving a car or piloting a similar vehicle would be such application.
Maybe stock market. Or something entirely unforseen, like data analysis or warehousing - using human intelligence better?
Voice is much too slow, as is listening - might as well use the current devices at those speeds.
Computers started with bookkeeping and mass production control. It took quite some time for them to penetrate office market or to (partially) replace the previously used communication tools.
Are you being sarcastic? I've been wearing contacts and glasses for nearly 40 years. Contacts are absolutely an absolute pleasure compared to glasses. I only wear glasses when I absolutely have to (i.e., right after I take out my contacts until I have to go to sleep at night and vice versa in the morning). For instance, I hate working out in glasses. They get all foggy and start slipping down my face from the sweat. Doing high intensity sprints in glasses is the worst.
As could glasses, starting with how they're kept on your head and the weight. Just look at how far VR helmets have come, or skiing goggles. There's more that can be done still, but not enough pressure to do it.
Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore.
From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets.
Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began.
In that 20 years the hardware and software exponentially grew in capacity and decreased greatly in cost. Computers turned into something you’d want in your pocket once they could be unobtrusive enough to be tolerable with you all day.
On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.
I would probably assume he's just really into Romance of the Three Kingdoms or other historical dramas where the 司馬 surname is common. Or that his real name is Zimmerman.
I've read that a number of Chinese with the surname 欧阳 [Ouyang] logically chose the English surname O'Young, confusing a lot of people who were led by the name to expect someone more Irish.
I assume you didn't mean that literally because I can't see how that will ever work out in terms of cpu cost. I think breaking it up into blocks like what RAID4/5/6 would be better but will still impact the performance of reads.
The performance of writes is going to be worse. Not because of the parity calculation but because you will be taking the max latency over all the cloud providers.
I can't see people trading off that much performance for better fault tolerance (in a world where S3 guarantees 11 nines) or ease of switching.
Yeah, RAID 4/5/6 are planned for the future. The plan is to offer all of them and let developers choose what is the best practice for their application. RAID 0/2/3 are not CPU efficient, but are great for privacy and security. No cloud provider has the full picture and can't spy on your data and if they have a data leak it won't be anything useful. RAID 1 gives great fault tolerance with no extra latency (except on failures) and prevents vendor lock-in.
>> 40% of the residents of a large portion of Southeast Vancouver are Chinese.
So... 40% of the population of Vancouver are not Chinese, as you seem to imply with your intro to a quote that specifically contradicts your implication?
Yea I probably shouldn't have used a quote there. The number ranges from 20% to 50% depending on which part of vancouver you look at. Point is that they aren't a minority there.
Assuming your parent meant "not a small minority". I don't have numbers in front of me, but having lived in and near Vancouver most of my life, I wouldn't be surprised if close to that percentage had Chinese origins. Regardless, it's enough people that it's certainly worth candidates' time to consider them.
> If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works.
Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge:
> There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrangements, but, once in place, there’s no incremental cost. That’s why we have similar agreements to Backblaze in place with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, etc. It’s pretty shameful, actually, that AWS has so far refused. When using Cloudflare, they don’t pay for the bandwidth, and we don’t pay for the Bandwidth, so why are customers paying for the bandwidth. Amazon pretends to be customer-focused. This is a clear example where they’re not.
According to Cloudflare, they do not have any bandwidth pricing arrangement with Microsoft for Azure users.
They also do charge for Enterprise plans, but instead of transparent pricing I got high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate so that as we grow past our current contract, we're forced to upgrade at any point with pricing based solely on our original negotiation.
Frankly, while I save money using Cloudflare over Azure's CDN right now, it's left a very sour taste in my mouth and I'll be jumping their ship as soon as I have time to find a suitable alternative.
Cloudflare most certainly disables zones on the free plan that use excess bandwidth. Enterprise contracts are also negotiated based on transit and those prices mirror comparable CDN services.
All that tells us is that cloudflare has a different revenue stream. Amazon is a business and they are in the business of making money. If they weren't charging for egress bandwidth they'd just charge for something else.
Out of 170 graduates, 27 went to facebook, 21 went to google, 13 went to microsoft, 6 went to amazon, 2 went to apple, etc. That's basically half the class including a lot of people from the bottom half of the class (the best people I knew usually didn't choose FAAMG and their outcomes were a crapshoot).
Really cool report. Looking through the list the Google and FB numbers go up including Waymo, DeepMind, and WhatsApp.
Out of about ~150 graduates at my undergrad, I think 3 went to Amazon (including myself), 1 went to Facebook, 1 went to Microsoft in a support role and the rest went to Cisco, IBM, and consulting companies.
I wonder why CMU only had 6 to Amazon. That seems low! I think trading firms like JS, Two Sigma, Jump and Ansatz had more combined...
It seems kind of asshole to say this but Amazon is considered low-tier at CMU so people don't choose it unless they got rejected from everyone else. =/
> It seems kind of asshole to say this but Amazon is considered low-tier at CMU so people don't choose it unless they got rejected from everyone else. =
Why is that?
Also, MIT's distribution seems very different. Amazon and Facebook are near equal and GM takes a big chunk, which is not what I would have expected. Oracle is also around the same as my undergrad.
I think you're right that you shouldn't learn from the "fundamental" books but there definitely are such a thing as fundamental books.
They are usually hugely influential in their times but have been refined or made easier to digest since. If you care deeply about your field you should read them at some point to see how ideas evolved historically.
English: Shakespeare
Biology: Darwin's Origin of Species
Math: Euclid's Elements
For OP's topic, I'd say Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is up there for computer science.
