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Yeah, I remember the hype back then. I used a Hitachi/GE A4 robot with bubble memory in the 1980s, and like you, I waited for bubble memory to go widespread, but it just seemed to fade away. According to this article, it seems like bubble memory found more industrial & military applications than consumer ones because of the price and power issues:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/wha...

I remember hearing that back in the mid-80's. May I introduce you to bubble memory?

Theft of free (libre) software is the same as theft of commercial software-- distributing, incorporating, etc. the code in violation of the license is a violation of copyright regardless of free license or commercial license.

The examples provided, in the other comments, of Microsoft's thefts are poor. Here are a few examples of theft, by Microsoft, of commercial code and code that was released to the community.

Links are just from quick google searches of examples I remember from over the years:

Microsoft Flight Simulator is stolen code:
http://www.radiolists.net/pipermail/af/2007-September/004813.html

Microsoft DOS is stolen (and to anybody [including me] who did low-level stuff in CP/M it is obvious; there was a "forensic" report that made the rounds by someone on the payroll of Microsoft [without indicating that he was on the payroll of Microsoft] that disputes this)
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2007/07/31/court-ruling-supports-claims-that-microsofts-first-os-was-stolen/

Microsoft Doublespace is stolen from Stac-- and after the court agreed and made Microsoft pay up, MS sued Stac for reverse engineering their OS since they proved to the court that it was impossible to write applications as functional as MS products for DOS without reverse engineering since MS didn't provide documentation. When MS didn't destroy Stac with their counter-suit (which I hope was looked at during the anti-trust investigations), they bought stac, and fired everybody (including some of my friends).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

MS embrace, extend, extinguish is also a form of theft. MS DNS, MS Kerberos, MS LDAP, MS implementation of opendoc, all are broken in ways that break interoperability (some, like DNS, inter-operate today because others broke their implementations so they would work with MS broken versions).

MS, Apple, even Redhat as commercial entities cannot be trusted to not try to damage the free software community for their own gain. It does not mean that it is impossible to work with these commercial entities, but vigilance is required.

Throw a camera in someone's face (which makes them nervous and puts them off-kilter) and tell them you're showing them the new iPhone (or anything else you want) and you're likely to get enough people who believe you to provide amusing comments allowing you to make a humorous highlight reel.

Well, with a large enough sample size, anything that would normally be improbable becomes probable. That's statistics, not human nature.

You even backed it up with your "If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Apple's userbase, I don't know what does."

Apple users are somehow more vulnerable to marketing than non-apple users. At least one company thinks so. There's any number of articles out there detailing the "cult of personality" surrounding the late Steve Jobs, and I don't know why I have to lay it out for you that Apple became big because of marketing. In technical specifications, Apple products are usually inferior to other offerings in the market, and they cost more. You can argue it in circles all you want -- but there really is something different in the mindset of people who exhibit brand loyalty to Apple.

Dvorak called a similar-looking 1982 computer a "half-clamshell".

Wait, so Dvorak was actually half right about something?!

That must have been the high point of his career.

Dvorak called a similar-looking 1982 computer a "half-clamshell". Also, until just now, I had always assumed that the term "clamshell" was coined in Whoopi Goldberg's 1986 movie but a search in New York Times archives for "clamshell AND computer" turned up hits from 1983. So I can't blast Time Magazine for an anachronism.

There was a "Bubble Memory is the future" hype train, but it was very brief.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-bubble-memory/

Really?

I took a quick look at his blog. He looks a bit like a skeptic to me, I haven't read enough to be sure but he certainly doesn't look unbiased and just the style of articles I saw set off several alarm bells that tend to make me drop bloggers from my RSS feed (regardless of whether they agree with me).

And either way I see no evidence that he actually has the scientific expertise to critique Mann's research. There's a huge gap between blogging about climate change, and actually understanding all the math, statistics, temperature records, satellite imagery, etc, to independently tell if someone is handling the data properly.

Even assuming Dvorak is impartial what bad things do you think Mann did that Dvorak would be able to effectively evaluate?

I don't take hime seriously because of this:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

Be careful.

Last time I pointed out how bad this was, a bunch of Sony Fanbois downmodded me.

They seem to spend far more money on faked astroturf ad campaigns than they do on security, anyways. Remember the PSP incidents?

The Sony Fanbois today are pretty much a standing example of FanDumb... not surprising since anyone with any sense jumped ship from Sony a long while ago.

And what happens when the placement of redzones causes there to be no legally safe place for these people to live?

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/05/04/community-of-sex-offenders-forced-to-live-like-animals-under-miami-underpass/

Here's a story of Sex Offenders that have to live under an overpass because every other place is either too close to a park, school, church, or daycare, or the landlords will not rent to them. The kicker in this is that by living under an overpass, they are likely breaking the terms of their parole which often times states that they must have a registered address. Most of these guys want a second chance; why treat them worse than those who kill?

He received his master’s in information technology and his bachelor’s in psychology and biology from the University of Maryland

The biology degree never showed up, and has since then been removed from all his bios. Let me be blunt. I have already reported this fact, reading my link would have revealed Dvorak's rebuttal to this weak defense. Vivek has made no attempt to clear up this biology degree question and continues to pretend the question does not exist. That you seem to believe this question does not exist and are willing to ignore this very big problem with the country's CTO lying on his resume exposes you as a political hack who would say anything in defense of your ideological allies.

Vivek is an empty suit - he is as ignorant as his idea: "Let's move our datacenter's to the cloud".

Try reading it this time!

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

...calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems.

Correction:
...call for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015 as well as shifting work to privately owned data centers.

If I hear someone talk about cloud computing again I think I’ll lose my lunch.

That said, Vivek Kundra is a fraud. Anything coming from his mouth is tainted. At the very least the guy lied on his resume about having a degree in biology, then all of a sudden his bio changed and he LOST the degree! Good thing there’s an internet archive!

Others agree:

But his degree in biology has yet to appear as his record shows a degree from College Park Campus for Psychology and nothing more.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-cio-vivek-kundra-must-go-2009-3
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/obamas-cio-vivek-kundra-previous-close-employees-arrested-fraud-bribery
http://tech.rightpundits.com/?p=36

You need to look into websites, there is no magazine that captures the zeitgeist of the personal computer industry today:

http://www.arstechnica.com/
http://www.lifehacker.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/

then there are specialty sites that focus on very particular topics, but those are some good, general sites to start with...

To get your John C. Dvorak fill, you could go here:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/

And Jerry Pournelle is here:

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Hope that helps

Because young drivers go to jail when their Toyota kills people: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/02/25/man-given-8-years-for-vehicular-homicide-in-2007-may-be-freed-using-toyota-defense/

Unless, of course, your research in them manages to steal the attention of this guy's girlfriend.

And if not, they could save her life.

I think Vivek wants to make himself look useful after being exposed as a fraud by John C. Dvorak. http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

So who will make Dvorak look useful after exposing himself as a fraud?

I wonder if he will insist the new computers will use "Cobol Data" and "skip logic". These are BS concepts he used in one of his early speaches. should should not act like he knows about IT when he obviously doesnt.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
Basically he claims to have been the CEO of a company with 2 employees. A guy like that should not be holding his Role

Oh, Vivek, what brilliant thing will you think of next? How much energy will it take to replace all of these server farms? How much energy will be required for the taxpayers to earn the money necessary to pay for it? What about security concerns of consolidating all of this data?

I think Vivek wants to make himself look useful after being exposed as a fraud by John C. Dvorak. http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

...but you'd be hard-pressed to find many customers if you didn't have any training or experience.

Yeah, nobody falls for fake doctors!

Yeah, I know right? Since XP came out, Windows is just rock solid. Oh...

Please, Vivek, explain away:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

"This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees." This part looks very interesting to me as in the past few weeks a lot of things Mr Vivek Kundra has been claiming he done in the past have turned out not true and has opened a lot of questions about his experience and expertise. You just had the John C.Dvorak blog bring up a lot of questions and day by day it seems he is more right http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/ I am starting to wonder if this selection was not some kind of political pay back for something Vivek Kundra did in the past or people around him.

he should have put on some Dvorak and calmed down I don' t know about you, but being exposed to Dvorak usually makes me much more upset!

Oh wait, you mean Dvorák... uh... never mind!

Tenenbaum committed his acts before Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store went online. He got caught in the vortex of the learning curve that the RIAA is currently going through that the BSA has already finished.

this is just the beginning. see the dvorak article... /facepalm

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

should've gone with the dude from cisco.

Kundra is at worst a fraud and at best someone who is clueless. Listen to some of the things this guy says. http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

Now, go RTFA...

To hell with tracking down "hackers." The story asserts that after a three year undercover investigation, the operation prevented only $70 million worth of fraud and identity theft (which would have been absorbed by the banks). For cryin' out loud, that's a fucking drop in the bucket! Why the hell couldn't they have directed these resources into investigating THE BANKS THEMSELVES, which have now robbed the American taxpayers of over $700 BILLION in bailout money? Why couldn't they have investigated Bernard Madoff and prevented the loss of $50 BILLION stolen from his investors? Or why did they not investigate this guy http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/01/22/presto-another-fund-manager-disappears%E2%80%A6/ who stole $300 MILLION from other investors?

If their role is to protect citizens from crime, I think the FBI's priorities need to be re-evaluated.

None of these are as good as this one: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/html/terms.html

Rules of games aren't copyrightable (well the actual text of the rules are, but not the rules themselves),

Exactly. I mention the rules because they contribute to the trademark infringment. Because the rules of scrabulous are identical, that contributes to the Scrabulous' ability to confuse people into thinking they are playing Scrabble. (because lets face it... they are playing scrabble.)

but they are patentable. I believe Scrabble had been patented (like Monopoly) but the patent has long since expired.

Yes. They are suing based on copyright and trademark, not patents.

IANAL, and I don't use Scrabulous, so I can't say if they are infringing on board layout or some other copyrightable effect.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15619

Tell me that picture isn't immediately recognizable as a scrabble board. Same color scheme. Same grid positions. Everything.

If this:

http://www.worsleyschool.net/socialarts/mon/mondrian.html

can be protected art. Then so can the scrabble board.

They probably have a good case on trademark though,

Definitely. Not only is there the name similiarity, but the look of the scrabble board is part of the 'trade dress' of the Scrabble trademark. Everything about scrabulous is designed to mimic scrabble exactly.

Scrabulous is pretty close to Scrabble. I don't think I can get away with a car company called Generalized Motors.

At least not if you sell cars; especially ones that from 6 ft away are virtually indistinguishable from GM cars.

My Feeds: Select: All 95 subscriptions, None, Unassigned A to Z Kids Stuff children http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/atoz.xml ABC News: Top Stories news http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/fp_rss20.xml About Computing Center technology http://z.about.com/6/g/pcworld/b/rss2.xml About.com Archaeology Archaeology http://z.about.com/6/g/archaeology/b/rss2.xml All Things Digital technology http://feeds.allthingsd.com/atd-feed/ Archaeology News Archaeology news http://www.topix.net/rss/science/archaeology.xml Ars Technica tech news http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf ArsTechnica: Security Content Security technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/security BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition U.K. http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition Science/Nature http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml Boing Boing odd http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag Breaking News: CBSNews.com news http://www.cbsnews.com/feeds/rss/main.rss Breitbart.tv varied news topics http://www.breitbart.com/xml/recentvideo.xml ChannelWeb Complete Feed Computer news http://www.crn.com/cwb/globalcontent/cweball/index.xml;jsessionid=L0I1HBDQISHBCQSNDLQSKH0CJUNN2JVN Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories news http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss CNN.com - Offbeat odd http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_offbeat.rss CNN.com - Politics politics http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss CNN.com - U.S. U.S. news http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_us.rss Computerworld Breaking News technology http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News Cool Tools technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools Courant.com - Connecticut News Ct. news http://feeds.courant.com/Courant/ConnecticutNews Defense Tech U.S. defense news http://www.defensetech.org/index.rdf Discovery News - Technology technology http://dsc.discovery.com/news/subjects/technology/xdb/topstories.xml Drudge Report news http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedPalooza/lwDu Dvorak Uncensored news http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?feed=rss2 Engadget robots & gadgets http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml Extremetech technology http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml Fark.com news http://www.pluck.com/rss/fark.rss FileForum software http://fileforum.b

This is especially ironic since many of the Olympic Committees sue anyone using the word 'Olympic' or press governments for legislation protecting their precious name. For instance a few link samples:
US: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15360
CA: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1777/125/
UK: http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/2008/02/06/olympic-tussle-over-a-name/
Given the IOC and each local Olympic committee's approach trademark ownership, they should have no problem removing the game.
This is unlikely because, they will not treat other's work the same as they want theirs enforces. Hypocrisy at its finest.

The lamp is 48" high = 1.219m, and the weight is 50lb = 22.679Kg

Potential energy = weight * height * g = 22.679 * 1.219 * 9.8 = 270.9J

Expeding that 270.9 Joules over the claimed 4 hr runtime, gives a continuous power output of 270.9 / (4 * 3600) = 0.01W

According to this story the record for Lumens per Watt from a LED stood last year at 131 Lumens/Watt :

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=5822

So that 0.01W LED might give you a whopping 1.3 Lumens light output, rather than the claimed 600-800. To improve that by the needed factor of 500 you'd have to increase the weightxheight by that amount. A 2000' high lamp or 2.5 ton weight (about 20 cu ft of Gold) should do the trick.

What am I missing?

and that is plug John's blog

http://www.dvorak.org/blog

Consumer Reports came to this conclusion over a year ago. Here's some free synopsis of the the controversial issue where they used virus kits to make variants of existing viruses to determine how good virus scanners are.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=6674

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/08/consumer_report.html

Anti-virus software actually used to work much better, but I think that the variants have grown to such a large number it's more difficult. The cynic in me says that the virus makers do simple fingerprint based updates simply because it requires you to keep your yearly subscription up to date.

I think they add almost no value, but on the other hand, people will happily run viruses if you tell them it's the latest picture of Brittany.

The article is a fluff piece with no real info, the findings from that study didn't yield anything as its redundant. And there is evidence in an article I read last year in GQ (of all places) that mice are the main targets of the infection that it thought to cause Schizophrenia.

also here http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=12372

  Also the Wikipedia entry point out that a realistic study say that the real infection rate is 0.55% of the population. [I guess we are not as crazy a planet as first mentioned]

on the whole I would give this article a 0 for points and both a REDUNDANT and OVERRATED tag

If you want to see what it looks like, it was already featured here. The thing's damn small...

Here's a really short article that shows what you're up against with a picture of an antenna that'll pick up passive RFID at 50 feet -

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=2437

No it's very realistic, they must both be friends with John "I get no spam" Dvorak.

This should give you an idea how big that thing is.

There is a certain logic to this. How many times have "experts" told us screwy nonsense, and had lousy track records, and yet the public at large retained them as experts? Sometimes, the untrained may be able to see things that the supposedly well-trained can't.

Or to put it another way, it all becomes a set of probabilities. If person X has guessed the outcome of something (say, a football game) correctly 80% of the time, then you're safer betting on his predictions than you are betting on expert Y who is only correct 30% of the time. If you aggregate the probabilities and successes, you should be able to develop a model with a high probability of being correct. You'll never be able to gain 100% accuracy, but that's just the nature of the Universe. ;)

Craigslist did this a while ago. There was a connection to an ebay auction. Jim Buckmaster (craigslist ceo) won the auction. (see http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1552 ) The second time around this is not that funny is it? Or did Yahoo add something substantial?

Stephan

The other guy is an ass in a hat who likes to suck up to his management.

No contest.

Like this one?

(Yes, I know it's probably a water droplet on a high-altitude atmospheric camera, since there's a grid of them. Why wouldn't the "UFOs" airbrushed out by NASA also be weather balloons and similar artifacts?)

"This is all very intriguing, but how exactly could someone exploit this RFID range to make my life worse? I can only think of things that would make it better. Could someone explain less abstractly than "Didn't you read 1984?"

It's quite simple. If you're travelling abroad, it's possible that someone would want to target you based on your nationality from a discrete range. This was proven possible at the blackhat convention, (see the link below). I appreciate that TPTB are paying attention to this issue.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=2437

...their Olympic gold medals for recording media!

Lego's getting scary though...

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4263
http://www.digital-ray.dk/galleri/billeder/lego_70 34_01.jpg

Never heard of it. By the way, visit my blog at dvorak.org/blog. Cheers,

John