Oh wow thank you, I’ve looked for this for years. I am pretty sure this story and King’s Quest are the two major reasons I ended up in computer engineering.
I'm sure it's that way for quite a lot of us that are of a similar age. I have a really distinct memory of watching it as a child. I wasn't really interested in computers beyond the (rudimentary) games we had on ours, but this episode planted a lot of ideas in my head I'm sure.
I would have been roughly kindergarten age at the time. That kid back then watching a face on tv would have never predicted the world would change in such ways that we'd be here chatting. As ugly as some things have gotten on the internet of late, that still fills me with something like awe, joy, and hope for the future.
I may only be 2/3rds your age, but every time I look back on life I feel the same way. I hope I always feel that way, because I think that means I'm continuing to learn and grow.
My friend, I am doing my best and really hope to catch up. But I always seem to be almost 600 days behind you. Please, can we do something to fix this? (Without any danger to either of us, of course!)
Wasn’t there an old Nova episode about this on PBS? I vaguely recall it, and have always wanted to rewatch as an adult. Just a fantastic (real!) story.
Several other companies are working on these (Quanergy, Blackmore) too, but so far they seem to be just press releases. Hopefully we'll see some real ones soon; the current state of the art for wide field lidar are many thousands of dollars and (imo) too fragile for use in production vehicles.
I take all solid state lidar with a giant grain of salt. Research at universities is still very primitive (beamwidth[1] of 30-40 degrees) and nobody has demonstrated a solid prototype. Quanergy in particular looks very fuzzy. These companies all kind of imply they are using some kind of patch antenna/diode source, which is much more primitive than the nanostructured antennas in academic research. At the same time academic research is 15-20 years away from forming a reasonably collimated laser.
The allure of solid state lidar is intense though. Not needing avalanche diodes gives me a bubbly sensation around my prostate. There is probably no such thing as cheap lidar without solid state.
[1] no laser forms a perfectly straight line, but 30 degrees is more like a floodlight. It makes it very difficult to take measurements by applying a complex filter over everything. Basically all of the data is massively blurred when you get it and has to be deconvolved, which is never perfect. It's very hard to turn a blurry image into a sharp one.
This article doesn't mention a breakthrough in solid state LIDAR design, as article you link to does, but rather that they have an actual product ready-ish:
> Velodyne today announced a solid-state automotive lidar ranging system that the company will demonstrate in a few months, release in test kits later this year, and mass produce at its new megafactory in San Jose, Calif., in 2018. The estimated price per unit is in the hundreds of dollars.
Not much info here from Velodyne. What's the range? Is this a flash or MEMS device? Resolution?
Advanced Scientific Concepts has had good flash LIDAR units for sale for years. They just cost too much. They sold them to DoD and Space-X.
Continental, the German auto parts maker (a very big company, not a startup) has purchased the ASC technology and expects to ship in volume in 2020. Here's a Continental prototype mounted on a Mercedes.[1] This is mounted at bumper height and has a 120 degree field of view, and has only 30m range. So this is for city driving or slow driving in tight spots.
Continental says they intend to ship in volume in 2020. Nobody is yet interested in ordering enough units in the kind of volume a major auto parts manufacturer needs.
Google uses a high-mounted LIDAR with longer range as well as the bumper height sensors. This doesn't address that market.
In the video, the Continental rep says "120 degree field of view" and "reaching out as far as thirty meters".[1] This may be the short range model for bumper height applications.
ASC has built units with much longer ranges.
For more range, you need bigger collecting optics, which means a bigger unit, or a narrower field of view. The tradeoffs are straightforward.
You also have to spread the laser output over a wider area to keep it eye-safe. The laser eye-safety requirement is on power through a 1/4" hole, corresponding to the pupil size of an eye. This protects people staring directly into the emitter. The power can be greater if the beam is wider. If you devoted the top inch of the windshield to sensors, and spread the laser output over a wide area of windshield, the power could be much higher.
I'm a host as well, and their new stats section breaks down the reviews in detail. You can see who left what stars. Don't know if this works the same for the traveler.
My company currently employs a brilliant, in my opinion, Argentine scientist. We'd love to bring him to the US periodically, but he can't get a visa as he owns no property in Argentina, isn't married, etc. Short of meeting in a more neutral country do we have any options?
As usual with AWS (or anything I guess) there's more than one way to accomplish a particular goal. How much of Amazon's Elastic Container Service is replicated by Docker for AWS? I'm currently using ECS + Docker but this looks potentially simpler.
Our goal for this project was to keep it as simple as possible. We tried to only use standard AWS features (CloudFormation, EC2, Autoscaling groups, VPC, ELB, etc) and we are using Docker 1.12 out of the box, with no changes.
All of the scheduling is handled in the docker engine itself, so we didn't need to add anything outside of that.
This version is pretty much an MVP, and we hope that the beta testers will help us test it out, and guide the future direction of the project.
Seems like there's not much in the way, at the moment, about attaching EBS volumes, or using your own custom AMI. For example, I want to mount an NFS share on the host to connect some container data volumes to directories inside. I've asked about this on the new forum https://forums.docker.com/c/docker-for-aws
What if your app was designed to work against AWS's data offerings, from RDS, S3, etc? Unless you're self-hosting your DB, concerns about persistence are less of an issue. Also worth considering if you are self-hosting is the replication/redundancy in the platform, you should be able to preserve-restart instances.
Me, I'd rather use what's available than self-host more often than not, but depends on the use-case.
