Ever since seeing this talk https://archive.org/details/youtube-eXe-rvXVL-g , whenever I see these stories of kafkaesque incidents, I am reminded that there is a common way to describe all of them -- the lack of due process.
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They have videos discussing how you would add a light switch or remove one -- basically a mansonry hole saw, and matching grout to fill in.
It seemed slightly more trouble to do modifications than a cinder block wall, but the quality and strength was much higher. I went with low expectations but I was impressed.
I didn't see any walls at the stage of construction where I could see what the insulation was, whether is was expanding foam or fiberglass.
Anyway the modification of them is addressed in some of the videos in the show house. Essentially you use a circular saw with masonry teeth to cut new holes, they provide shade-matching grout to fill in an old hole. It's less flexible than sheetrock but about what modifying a cinder block wall would be. Unlike most cinder block commercial buildings, the wiring is inside the wall and not in an exposed conduit, there might have been one exception in a bathroom or something.
Over all, to my non-professional opinion, it seemed more expensive than traditional "stick built" but also higher quality, probably worth it if you wanted a high quality structure.
I have also visited their site in South Austin on St. Elmo, and the small "tiny houses" they built in the Community First village for the ex-homeless, but I wasn't able to go inside those.
My overall impression is that it's a great technology that will be used for more and more structures. Thus far I think they have been too traditional in their floor plans, they have been focusing on showing that they can build real up-to-code houses that banks will accept as collateral. Hopefully with their new cheaper printer, maybe in some area outside of HOAs and zoning, they can starting making some more interesting houses -- like round towers Victorian style, for example.
The snow doesn't change the energy budget of the earth at night, because there is nothing for it to reflect, and the infrared energy it emits is pretty much like the infrared energy from most other surfaces, and a certain percentage makes it off planet and the atmosphere absorbs a certain percentage.
The skypaint emits infrared in a particular bandwidth which the atmosphere does not absorb, called the "atmospheric window", so a much higher portion of it's energy makes it off the planet. This effect will operate regardless of whether the sun is shining on it or not, it will keep dumping something around 120 watts per square meter off the planet as long as it is exposed to the sky.
I tested the results with an insulated box with an open top covered with glad wrap, and confirmed 11 F less than ambient temp at night, at a variety of humidities. I haven't gotten up early ( or stayed up late ) enough to do a test in the early morning when it's close to 100 percent humidity, but it seems to not be affected by atmospheric humidity, which would confirm it's emitting at that "atmospheric window".
The materials are cheap at scale and the process is probably about as complicated as brewing beer, actually probably less so.
I bought a pack of standard asphalt roofing tiles, so I could paint them and leave them exposed and see how quickly dust, rain and etc degraded the effect. I used the acrylic / acetone / water paint that NightHawkInLight describes, but also tried mixing it with clear coat, and I have a few other cheap and scalable application methods to try.
http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/
This is of course much better because the tools and kernel are modern. Great work !
Jason has a similar ( maybe the same ? ) Defcon talk, in which the goons apparently mis-schedule something and he starts in, is told someone else is going to present, and just power-speeds through the whole presentation in 3 minutes while the other presenter gets ready. I can't find that video though.
"CAM" is computer aided machineing and it is software that takes a 3D model and a lot of machine parameters in, including size of the cutting bit and etc, and produces "g code" which is movement instructions for a computer controlled mill of some type.
It is the equivalent of the "slicer" in 3D printing.
But for milling or subtractive manufacturing there are many more details, and there needs to be a way to visualize and simulate the toolpath, and edit it by hand.
I think it was that experience, along with a later experience at "Do it with Drupal" in New Orleans, that lead to me completely re-evaluating how I valued and approached conferences and other "community" type events. Prior to that I put them in the same class as picking the right powerpoint template and buying obnoxious people drinks at the hotel bar, i.e., complete sales / business fluff to my nerdy point of view. After Defcon and that presentation in particular, I tried to never miss any of the "community run" tech events, such as Defcon, Linux Fests, Drupal camps, etc.
Was not too surprised to see Joe Barr (Austin) in there. He died in 2008 and Linux Journal, where a lot of his writing was published, is gone now also.
Also, look at the time-to-first-byte . . . if that is high, maybe further tweaks to the cache plugin settings may help you. If you are not using at least PHP version 7.0 you will get a noticable improvement by getting to that as well.
Make sure you are using a recent version of PHP and appropriate WP caching plugins.
Also check to see if your DB is hanging when a connection is made to it, perhaps due to trying to reverse lookup the IP for logging purposes and waiting for that to time out, or something else simple like that.
They use more modern Linux / Debian stuff for actually browsing the web and other computing tasks, but keep several reliable DOS machines for school prep, because of being burned on Windows and Linux having problems (mostly related to poorly timed updates, or fsck'ing a disk) which used up hours on a night when new material had to be ready by the next morning.
Then you can plug that bitting code into a script which will generate an STL model for the key. [3]
I did this, except I measured the key with calibers and back-calculated the key number. I printed the key on a cheap Prusa I3 in ABS, it was not impressive in terms of resolution or strength, but it did work in my house. I carefully tested it because I thought it might break off in the lock, and it felt weak, but worked -- definitely good enough for a single covert access, or even use as an emergency backup key to hide somewhere.
No fancy metal printer needed, and you could write a script to pull pictures of keys out of twitter or whatever and automate the process.
[1] http://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key-duplication/
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kxuH9jR...
They introduced webmail to the masses, they pushed user-generated content into the masses via their purchase of geocities. Yahoo Groups was the replacement of usenet as more control was needed for community management.
As a free lancer at the time, every other idiot idea I was approached with was "can you build me a site like Yahoo, but for _____" . Usually the blank was porn or real estate.
I think another thing they are underappreciated for is the industrialization and scaling of placing web ads via ad networks.
As with many big leaders, they weren't the inventor of many of these things -- they often purchased a smaller company or copied a first mover, but brought the idea to "prime time".
I was interested in steam cars for a while, I have a manual to a Stanley Steamer and a short book published by Lindsay on them.
However it was reading the history of steam that is in the opening chapters of Lyle Cummin's "Internal Fire" and his description of the limitations of steam and sterling engines, that I came to think there was a fundamental reason behind it.
The Doble and Stanley era cars seem to have gotten about 10 mpg.
On the other hand, they do have a possible advantage in being able to consume a variety of non-standard fuels. There may be a niche market for that, which given the relative size of the car markets in 1925 vs 2015, is quiet huge and could support a sizeable company.
The pattern is that we build a tool that allows non-programmers to build more and more complex things, until they are actually programming, and then we find ourselves in a mess because we have "code" with all the complexity of such without the tools and practices to manage it.
I think I saw this decades ago as the community of Unix users I was with developed more and more complex dotfiles, and traded them around, they were modified more and more by non-programmers, until the day someone put them in CVS and shared them.
This definitely happened in the Visual Basic story arc.
I suspect this also happened in COBOL, which started out as a way to let non-programmers program, then became a programming language that non-programmers could at least read and understand, and then became a black art.
I believe this happened with PHP, as it started with a way for non-programming "html coders" to reference the same $footer across all pages, and as that group of programmers moved through their careers and became real programmers, the tools and PHP itself evolved with them.
I think this is happening with Javascript now, as a class of "front end developers" who mostly started out as non-programmer, non-technical graphic designers discovered the power of being able to tell computers what to do, and now are doing things like node.js.
In the CMS world, I think WordPress is a bit behind on this arc compared to Drupal. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation of where a much larger community with a different balance of site builder vs user vs developer is -- WordPress is much further along on arc of widespread adoption, though.
We tried to image sound waves, but the density gradient for sound is much less than that produced by changes in temperature. We attempted to make a resonant chamber and use a high-intensity ultrasonic source, and make a standing wave that we might capture photographically, and while we saw something once we could not produce it. It's likely that the ultrasonic source we were using was gradually degrading.
The research paper you link to almost surely uses the heat differences to see the jets of air coming out of the mouth, and not actual sound waves.
WP probably gets a bit of a bad rap because the types of sites made with it often don't have the budget to bring high quality development. When you serve 20% of the web, and people choose you precisely because they can get cheap developers, there will be some problem sites out there running WP.
In this particular case, it seems to me that they would have been flagged if they had been running anything, Drupal or Jekyll or a static site - they had an external theme provider who referred to a domain in CSS comments that was listed by google.
The problem seems to be the accuracy of Google's flagging, not WordPress.
Walmart has a hard time at their brick and mortar store charging more for diapers to the poor person who lives down the street and has no car to get to competitors, and less to the better off person who arrived by car. But a huge amount of "big data" work is spent differentially pricing online commerce -- the travel industry is most famous for it of course.
The general trend of technology tends to be that tools once only available to the big institutions become democratized and more revolutionary as they are. Similarly I think the "big data" and tracking and etc will swing around into a more equitable balance.
That can be hard to believe, but try to imagine this -- you go to buy something online, but you pay with bitcoin, and a browser plugin you have pops up a screen when you are on the final checkout page -- this plugin uses the bitcoin chains and non-anonymity to show you all recent transactions with that bitcoin address. You can then get an instant sense of whether you are overpaying or getting a deal.
Such a system could be gamed and evaded of course.
At one time I discussed making a reverse-Priceline system, where consumers would use a browser plugin that shared what offers were being accepted and rejected on Priceline style reverse auctions.
The sum total such efforts is a lot of infrastructure invested in replecating what a simple open-outcry market would be, if the market were run by disinterested, trusted authority.
However, from what I have seen of Salesforce, which is not direct experience but in watching demos over people's shoulders, their test environment setup is very smooth. I think you have to pay more for it, but you can get a copy of your environment, if you are writing custom plugins it checks that you wrote tests, that those tests pass, and that those tests aren't stubs, before it lets you put anything live. It seemed a legit best practices operation.
Maybe Salesforce can implement that setup for the ET service and APIs. In the meantime I will checkout customer.io for the next project that needs email campaigns.
It was fast, could run development environments in VirtualBox well, had a long battery life, etc. Even the speakers and microphone where better than I was used to for Skype and etc.
Unfortunately it was stolen before I ever had the chance to get involved the Sputnik stuff. It was kind of expensive as laptops of that size go, and I have to decide if I should get another one or not.
My basis for saying that there is room for innovation is that I have worked on a number of big websites, and I have never been able to use out-of-the-box blogging for any of them, the features had to be too integrated and specialized.
One way to think about the market is to keep in mind that what people mean by "blogging" may be slowly evolving.
If I were implementing a blogging platform, I would use Drupal because that's what I'm most familar with. I think extending Wordpress is also an idea you should consider. However, it be best to ignore the underlying platform, and just think about and write the API. After you have defined that, pick a platform or framework and implement it.