It's a tough time for libraries. First they had to deal with becoming homeless drop-in centers. Then they had to deal with becoming Internet cafes. Now they have to face being unable to lend books.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
but the publicity around it left what reputation the church had in ruin. No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them, and they even got the criticisms mentioned on TV news.
Huh? Scientology has been "exposed"manytimes. Whatever "anonymous" did was barely noticed.
As someone else pointed out, most of the re-entered objects that are reasonably intact are spherical tanks. They're one of the few components of a spacecraft that are very solidly built. Most are titanium, or titanium wrapped in Kevlar, so they can take re-entry temperatures. Spheres have good re-entry aerodynamics. Nose cones have been hemispherical since the late 1950, after it was discovered that pointy noses look cool but don't work well. (See the X-3 Stilleto, an unsuccessful jet plane from 1952. Looks it was designed by George Lucas.)
Bitcoin can't compete with Western Union Money Transfer, let alone forex trading, because the total volume in bitcoins is tiny. Yesterday's Bitcoin volume was about $50,000. (Some days are higher, but that's mostly the same money trading back and forth. There are trading programs running.) If one business the size of a typical supermarket converted a day's receipts in Bitcoins to dollars, the Bitcoin market would crash.
Bitcoin is behaving like a penny stock. It crashed from $31 to $2, and now it's noodling around in the $2 to $4 range.
Anyone remember Beenz? Flooz? DigiCash? CyberCoin? This isn't the first try at a "digital currency". I suspect that someone will probably make this work, but that somebody will be Facebook. Apple, or a telco.
Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens.
Yes. The company famous for that is The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Back when steam engines were high-tech, and blew up frequently, Hartford Steam Boiler was established in 1866 to insure them. More than half the company's staff is boiler inspectors. They inspect before they issue the policy, and the policy gives them the right to inspect whenever they want to, which they do regularly. Very, very seldom does a boiler insured by Hartford Steam Boiler blow up.
Many companies don't like that level of intrusiveness by an insurance company. On the other hand, it's been decades since a boiler insured by Hartford Steam Boiler blew up. It's time for computing to grow up and get that level of hard-ass attitude.
The real issue is whether Nike was behind the hype. Nike isn't that cool any more, and Michael Jordan is a has-been jock. They're the parties that would benefit from this. Follow the money.
I once considered having T-shirts made up with the line "I do what all the little boxes on my belt tell me to do". That was in the Palm Pilot era. When the iDweeb earbuds came out, I considered "I do what the voices in my head tell me to do", with an iPod-like white-wire silhouette. But "idweeb.com" was registered.
There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts.
No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.
I was looking at a Wall Street Journal page recently, and I brought it into an HTML editor so I could eliminate all non-story content. The story required an HTML page with only 72 lines. The original page was over 4000 lines. It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.
On top of that, there are content management systems which create a custom CSS page for each content page. So there's no useful caching in the browser.
Remember those people who said CSS was going to make web pages shorter? They were wrong. Look at Slashdot - bloated, slow pages that don't do much, yet consume CPU time when idle.
I agree. I have a dumb 2G phone, and a subnotebook if I want to look at the Web or do email. I'm not interested in trying to do input on a dinky screen. If I want to watch a movie, I have a 42" screen at home for that.
Amusingly, the phone I have has a web browser, but if I try to use it for anything, either Sprint's 2G network times out or the browser crashes.
Battery swapping is going to seem like a laughably silly idea 10 years from now. I think it's silly right now myself.
I agree. It was successful about a century ago. Today, it's just hype from Shai Agassi of Better Place. (I've met him. He's all hat and no cattle. After five years of hype, all they've installed are a couple of demo sites and a 3 taxicab demo in Tokyo.)
Many industrial PCs are underclocked. They have more CPU power than they need, and they need more reliability and temperature range than the consumer manufacturers provide.
The end of overclocking is coming anyway, because speed of light lag across the chip, rather than transistor switch time, is becoming the bottleneck. No amount of cooling will help with speed of light lag.
.... where Xerox marketed the Xerox Alto as the first commercial GUI driven computer in 1973?
As someone who visited PARC in 1975, and later spent some time programming an Alto, I can say that it wouldn't have been cost effective. PARC's plan, in the early 1970s, was to figure out what the future of computing would be like when the cost of hardware came down. The Alto was built without much regard to cost. The page-sized CRTs were hand-built at PARC itself, and the CPUs were made by Data General for Xerox. They were minicomputers, not microprocessors, basically Data General Novas with a different microcode. An Alto cost upwards of $20,000 to make.
Before PCs, there was a whole industry, led by Wang, in what were called "shared-logic word processors". These were a group of dumb terminals connected to a central unit with a CPU, disk, and printer. Places which did a lot of document revision, like law offices, bought such systems. Xerox came out with the Xerox Star, which was a cross between Alto technology and the dedicated word processor concept, and went into that market, at too high a price point. This was in the late 1970s. IBM introduced the IBM Displaywriter in 1980, with the same monitor that was later used with the IBM PC. Three displays, a printer, and a central control unit cost $26,000.
Getting costs down was a huge problem. The consensus in the industry was that the minimum useful personal computer would be a "3M" machine - one megabyte of memory, one MIPS of CPU power, and one megapixel of display. The Alto was there, but the early PCs, the Apple II, and the original Mac were well below those specs. The Lisa approached the 3M level but cost too much. (The original 64K Macintosh was a miserable flop commercially. Until the 512K Mac and the laser printer, with the specs approaching the "3M" level, did it make money.)
There was another line of development - UNIX workstations of the early 1980s. For about $20K, Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, IBM and others sold UNIX machines with big screens and enough CPU and RAM power to get something done. They all suffered from appallingly bad GUIs. Then, as now, the UNIX crowd had no clue about user interfaces. For years, Sun workstations mostly had nothing but text windows open. (Plus an analog clock, the most widely used graphic program.) What passed for a GUI tended to be some scheme for front-ending command line programs with a menu system.
If the UNIX industry had had a clue about graphics, the industry might have gone that way when the hardware cost came down.
This isn't new. Control Data, when they were next to Seymour Cray's farm in Minnesota, was dumping hot water into a well, while pumping cold water up from another nearby well. Once you drill down 15m or so, ground water temperature doesn't change much year round, and in Minnesota, it's around 46-52F.
I don't really care about the Blackberry, but QNX is a good real-time microkernel operating system, damaged by being resold first to Harmon (an audio company) and now RIM. During all the resales, it's gone from closed source to open (but not free) source to closed source to open source to closed source. This killed all open-source interest in QNX, which used to have a version of Firefox and was usable as a desktop OS, although nobody did this unless they were doing real-time work. QNX, pre-Harmon, contributed heavily to the development of Eclipse, and Eclipse's ability to work on C and C++ programs comes from QNX.
Some industrial automation company should buy QNX. Maybe one will.
The big antitrust issue is Google's preference for its own services in search results. Search for "new movies" with Google.Everything on the screen is a Google ad or service. No organic search results appear above the fold. The same thing happens for "DVD player", where everything is either an ad or Google Shopping.
As Senators Kohl and Lee write: "Rather than act as an honest broker of unbiased search results, Google's search results appear to favor the company's own web products and services. Given Google's dominant share in Internet search, any such bias or preferencing would raise serious questions as to whether Google is seeking to leverage its search dominance in adjacent markets, in a manner potentially contrary to antitrust law." Exactly.
US antitrust law comes from an era when railroads dominated the economy. Railroads could use their routes and shipping rates to extend their influence into real estate (especially in the western US, where the railroads came before the population) and manufacturing (by favoring affiliated manufacturers in shipping rates). Google now has something of a comparable position on the Internet.
It's amazing how few people change their default search provider. That's why this matters so much. Most of Bing's traffic comes from IE's default search box. Google pays Apple something like $100 million a year to be the default search provider on the iPhone.
I'm a little worried about the terms of the agreement not being disclosed. We're launching a search ad blocker that removes all but one ad per page on Google. Bing, and Yahoo search results. We're trying to re-introduce the idea that most of the screen space should be content, not ads, and we put some teeth into that idea with ad blockers. (Yes, you can block all the search ads if you want.)
The first version is a Firefox add-on, and has to go through the Mozilla approval process. It will be interesting to see if "problems" develop there. The controversial new, "soft" version of AdBlock apparently doesn't block Google search ads, while ours does.
I wish more studios would include workprints and stuff like that on their legitimate DVD/BD releases. The process of making a movie is often times far more fascinating to me than the movie itself.
If you go to SIGGRAPH meetings, especially in LA, you can see more of that stuff than you probably want to. "And here are all 34 versions of the slime flow we did before the director and the execs found one they liked". All of this is made possible by armies of people doing jobs which are a lot like aligning wallpaper patterns. We've gone from a cast of thousands on screen to a cast of thousands in cubicles. At least they have a union.
This happened in Russia already. There was something of a flap over a small UAV observing pro-democracy protests in Moscow. But it wasn't the Government doing it. It was a group of bloggers with a model helicopter, and here are the pictures it took.
I highly recommend that. It's a good read. This was not a sensor problem. The problem actually occurred in the message output queue of one of the CPUs, and resulted in sending data with the label for one data item with the data from another. The same hardware unit had demonstrated similar symptoms two years earlier, but the problem could not be replicated. This time, they tried really hard to induce the problem, with everything from power noise to neutron bombardment, and were unable to do so.
There are several thousand identical hardware units in use, and one of the others demonstrated a similar problem, once. No other unit has ever demonstrated this problem. The The investigators are still puzzled.
They unit which produced the errors has been tested extensively and the problem cannot be reproduced. They considered 24 different failure causes and eliminated all of them. It wasn't a stuck bit. It wasn't program memory corruption. (The code gets a CRC check every few seconds.) The code in ROM was what it was supposed to be. Thousands of other units run exactly the same software. It wasn't a single flipped bit. It wasn't a memory timing error. It wasn't a software fault. It looked like half of one 32-bit word was combined with half of another 32-bit word during queue assembly on at least some occasions. But there are errors not explained by that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a tough time for libraries. First they had to deal with becoming homeless drop-in centers. Then they had to deal with becoming Internet cafes. Now they have to face being unable to lend books.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
but the publicity around it left what reputation the church had in ruin. No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them, and they even got the criticisms mentioned on TV news.
Huh? Scientology has been "exposed" many times. Whatever "anonymous" did was barely noticed.
As someone else pointed out, most of the re-entered objects that are reasonably intact are spherical tanks. They're one of the few components of a spacecraft that are very solidly built. Most are titanium, or titanium wrapped in Kevlar, so they can take re-entry temperatures. Spheres have good re-entry aerodynamics. Nose cones have been hemispherical since the late 1950, after it was discovered that pointy noses look cool but don't work well. (See the X-3 Stilleto, an unsuccessful jet plane from 1952. Looks it was designed by George Lucas.)
Bitcoin can't compete with Western Union Money Transfer, let alone forex trading, because the total volume in bitcoins is tiny. Yesterday's Bitcoin volume was about $50,000. (Some days are higher, but that's mostly the same money trading back and forth. There are trading programs running.) If one business the size of a typical supermarket converted a day's receipts in Bitcoins to dollars, the Bitcoin market would crash.
Bitcoin is behaving like a penny stock. It crashed from $31 to $2, and now it's noodling around in the $2 to $4 range.
Anyone remember Beenz? Flooz? DigiCash? CyberCoin? This isn't the first try at a "digital currency". I suspect that someone will probably make this work, but that somebody will be Facebook. Apple, or a telco.
It would be more useful to measure the BMI of the customer and block oinkers from buying.
Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens.
Yes. The company famous for that is The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Back when steam engines were high-tech, and blew up frequently, Hartford Steam Boiler was established in 1866 to insure them. More than half the company's staff is boiler inspectors. They inspect before they issue the policy, and the policy gives them the right to inspect whenever they want to, which they do regularly. Very, very seldom does a boiler insured by Hartford Steam Boiler blow up.
Many companies don't like that level of intrusiveness by an insurance company. On the other hand, it's been decades since a boiler insured by Hartford Steam Boiler blew up. It's time for computing to grow up and get that level of hard-ass attitude.
The real issue is whether Nike was behind the hype. Nike isn't that cool any more, and Michael Jordan is a has-been jock. They're the parties that would benefit from this. Follow the money.
The amount of money one spends and the amount of money one has aren't inherently linked.
Very true. Read "The Millionaire Next Door".
Use it up
Wear it out.
Make it do.
Or do without
NASA still has 57 astronauts on the active list. They used to have over 100, and they probably need less than 25 at this point.
(NASA needs to revise their web site. It still talks about flying the Space Shuttle.)
Is it so hard to put a couple of holes in the board to solder wire to?
Is it so hard to provide screw holes holes for mounting?
Also, it's usually considered a good idea to put all the connectors on the same edge and line them up flush so you can put the thing in a box.
my phone told me where to go.
I once considered having T-shirts made up with the line "I do what all the little boxes on my belt tell me to do". That was in the Palm Pilot era. When the iDweeb earbuds came out, I considered "I do what the voices in my head tell me to do", with an iPod-like white-wire silhouette. But "idweeb.com" was registered.
There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts.
No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.
I was looking at a Wall Street Journal page recently, and I brought it into an HTML editor so I could eliminate all non-story content. The story required an HTML page with only 72 lines. The original page was over 4000 lines. It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.
On top of that, there are content management systems which create a custom CSS page for each content page. So there's no useful caching in the browser.
Remember those people who said CSS was going to make web pages shorter? They were wrong. Look at Slashdot - bloated, slow pages that don't do much, yet consume CPU time when idle.
I agree. I have a dumb 2G phone, and a subnotebook if I want to look at the Web or do email. I'm not interested in trying to do input on a dinky screen. If I want to watch a movie, I have a 42" screen at home for that.
Amusingly, the phone I have has a web browser, but if I try to use it for anything, either Sprint's 2G network times out or the browser crashes.
Battery swapping is going to seem like a laughably silly idea 10 years from now. I think it's silly right now myself.
I agree. It was successful about a century ago. Today, it's just hype from Shai Agassi of Better Place. (I've met him. He's all hat and no cattle. After five years of hype, all they've installed are a couple of demo sites and a 3 taxicab demo in Tokyo.)
Many industrial PCs are underclocked. They have more CPU power than they need, and they need more reliability and temperature range than the consumer manufacturers provide.
The end of overclocking is coming anyway, because speed of light lag across the chip, rather than transistor switch time, is becoming the bottleneck. No amount of cooling will help with speed of light lag.
.... where Xerox marketed the Xerox Alto as the first commercial GUI driven computer in 1973?
As someone who visited PARC in 1975, and later spent some time programming an Alto, I can say that it wouldn't have been cost effective. PARC's plan, in the early 1970s, was to figure out what the future of computing would be like when the cost of hardware came down. The Alto was built without much regard to cost. The page-sized CRTs were hand-built at PARC itself, and the CPUs were made by Data General for Xerox. They were minicomputers, not microprocessors, basically Data General Novas with a different microcode. An Alto cost upwards of $20,000 to make.
Before PCs, there was a whole industry, led by Wang, in what were called "shared-logic word processors". These were a group of dumb terminals connected to a central unit with a CPU, disk, and printer. Places which did a lot of document revision, like law offices, bought such systems. Xerox came out with the Xerox Star, which was a cross between Alto technology and the dedicated word processor concept, and went into that market, at too high a price point. This was in the late 1970s. IBM introduced the IBM Displaywriter in 1980, with the same monitor that was later used with the IBM PC. Three displays, a printer, and a central control unit cost $26,000.
Getting costs down was a huge problem. The consensus in the industry was that the minimum useful personal computer would be a "3M" machine - one megabyte of memory, one MIPS of CPU power, and one megapixel of display. The Alto was there, but the early PCs, the Apple II, and the original Mac were well below those specs. The Lisa approached the 3M level but cost too much. (The original 64K Macintosh was a miserable flop commercially. Until the 512K Mac and the laser printer, with the specs approaching the "3M" level, did it make money.)
There was another line of development - UNIX workstations of the early 1980s. For about $20K, Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, IBM and others sold UNIX machines with big screens and enough CPU and RAM power to get something done. They all suffered from appallingly bad GUIs. Then, as now, the UNIX crowd had no clue about user interfaces. For years, Sun workstations mostly had nothing but text windows open. (Plus an analog clock, the most widely used graphic program.) What passed for a GUI tended to be some scheme for front-ending command line programs with a menu system.
If the UNIX industry had had a clue about graphics, the industry might have gone that way when the hardware cost came down.
Someone needs to build an "Elf on the Shelf" webcam.
"He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when your're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good..."
This isn't new. Control Data, when they were next to Seymour Cray's farm in Minnesota, was dumping hot water into a well, while pumping cold water up from another nearby well. Once you drill down 15m or so, ground water temperature doesn't change much year round, and in Minnesota, it's around 46-52F.
I don't really care about the Blackberry, but QNX is a good real-time microkernel operating system, damaged by being resold first to Harmon (an audio company) and now RIM. During all the resales, it's gone from closed source to open (but not free) source to closed source to open source to closed source. This killed all open-source interest in QNX, which used to have a version of Firefox and was usable as a desktop OS, although nobody did this unless they were doing real-time work. QNX, pre-Harmon, contributed heavily to the development of Eclipse, and Eclipse's ability to work on C and C++ programs comes from QNX.
Some industrial automation company should buy QNX. Maybe one will.
The big antitrust issue is Google's preference for its own services in search results. Search for "new movies" with Google. Everything on the screen is a Google ad or service. No organic search results appear above the fold. The same thing happens for "DVD player", where everything is either an ad or Google Shopping.
As Senators Kohl and Lee write: "Rather than act as an honest broker of unbiased search results, Google's search results appear to favor the company's own web products and services. Given Google's dominant share in Internet search, any such bias or preferencing would raise serious questions as to whether Google is seeking to leverage its search dominance in adjacent markets, in a manner potentially contrary to antitrust law." Exactly.
US antitrust law comes from an era when railroads dominated the economy. Railroads could use their routes and shipping rates to extend their influence into real estate (especially in the western US, where the railroads came before the population) and manufacturing (by favoring affiliated manufacturers in shipping rates). Google now has something of a comparable position on the Internet.
Look at Bruce McCall's "Fully Loaded".cartoon. That was supposed to be a joke, not a design document.
It's amazing how few people change their default search provider. That's why this matters so much. Most of Bing's traffic comes from IE's default search box. Google pays Apple something like $100 million a year to be the default search provider on the iPhone.
I'm a little worried about the terms of the agreement not being disclosed. We're launching a search ad blocker that removes all but one ad per page on Google. Bing, and Yahoo search results. We're trying to re-introduce the idea that most of the screen space should be content, not ads, and we put some teeth into that idea with ad blockers. (Yes, you can block all the search ads if you want.)
The first version is a Firefox add-on, and has to go through the Mozilla approval process. It will be interesting to see if "problems" develop there. The controversial new, "soft" version of AdBlock apparently doesn't block Google search ads, while ours does.
I wish more studios would include workprints and stuff like that on their legitimate DVD/BD releases. The process of making a movie is often times far more fascinating to me than the movie itself.
If you go to SIGGRAPH meetings, especially in LA, you can see more of that stuff than you probably want to. "And here are all 34 versions of the slime flow we did before the director and the execs found one they liked". All of this is made possible by armies of people doing jobs which are a lot like aligning wallpaper patterns. We've gone from a cast of thousands on screen to a cast of thousands in cubicles. At least they have a union.
This happened in Russia already. There was something of a flap over a small UAV observing pro-democracy protests in Moscow. But it wasn't the Government doing it. It was a group of bloggers with a model helicopter, and here are the pictures it took.
How about reading the darned final report.
I highly recommend that. It's a good read. This was not a sensor problem. The problem actually occurred in the message output queue of one of the CPUs, and resulted in sending data with the label for one data item with the data from another. The same hardware unit had demonstrated similar symptoms two years earlier, but the problem could not be replicated. This time, they tried really hard to induce the problem, with everything from power noise to neutron bombardment, and were unable to do so.
There are several thousand identical hardware units in use, and one of the others demonstrated a similar problem, once. No other unit has ever demonstrated this problem. The The investigators are still puzzled. They unit which produced the errors has been tested extensively and the problem cannot be reproduced. They considered 24 different failure causes and eliminated all of them. It wasn't a stuck bit. It wasn't program memory corruption. (The code gets a CRC check every few seconds.) The code in ROM was what it was supposed to be. Thousands of other units run exactly the same software. It wasn't a single flipped bit. It wasn't a memory timing error. It wasn't a software fault. It looked like half of one 32-bit word was combined with half of another 32-bit word during queue assembly on at least some occasions. But there are errors not explained by that.
Very frustrating.