This has nothing to do with the Web. It's about telephony in its VoIP form, broadcast content redistributed over the Internet, and mobile browsers. It doesn't affect web sites. See S.3304.
That's about right, if you show the detail of a block in free space. Texture mapping doesn't help much for Lego blocks.
However, as soon as a Lego block meshes with another Lego block, you can drop most of the now-interior detail. A block in a
wall comes down to one rectangle on each side. Big flat areas can be reduced to texture-mapped rectangles covering many blocks.
From a distance, you can drop the model of a block top or bottom to a rectangle with a bump map.
Worst case is a fly-through over a simple random pile of blocks. All the exterior detail shows, and the collision detection load is high.
Buran was a nice spacecraft. They had the advantage of doing it after the US, so they were able to avoid some mistakes. Buran's tiles aren't as fragile as the US tiles. Buran could fly through rain; the US shuttle can be damaged by raindrops.
While Buran looks much like the US shuttle, it's not. Buran has no main engines. The carrier booster has the engines.
It had to be done. Open Office (and MySQL) are too important to be entrusted to Larry Ellison. Already, a few parts of MySQL, such as the Windows GUI client, are no longer reliable.
("LibreOffice", as a name, though, has to go. The open source community sucks at naming.)
One of the more amusing camera issues has been red light cameras photographing cops running red lights. The processing of the images is usually outsourced and automated, and the company doing the work handles the process. The cops have to either pay up or go to court. There is much whining about this.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw writes to other police departments: "Please advise your members if they are captured on camera in their vehicles running the red light at these intersections, they will be cited. The only remedy for relief will be through the traffic court system. All law enforcement personnel must understand the high standard of conduct is applied to them in order for the public to have confidence in their departments and the officers."
It's a real problem. The most reliable IC technologies, like silicon-on-sapphire, which is radiation-hard aren't that popular. The most reliable CPU designs are one-instruction-per-clock CPUs.
There are many sources of error in commercial-grade electronics, and the efforts to stamp them out aren't as intense as they could be. I went to a talk at Stanford last week by a computer designer who's trying to cram even more CPUs on a board, and he had some slides on DRAM error rates. Different groups are measuring error rates four orders of magnitude apart. And they don't know why. Some people have been blaming ambient radiation, but that can't possibly explain some of the higher error rate results.
I can't find anything about this company that doesn't come from a press release.
The COO is James M. Demitrius. Looking him up, he's an accountant. Here's his bio. He was at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the Michael Milken era, before the indictments and bankruptcy. During the dot-com era, he was involved in the 1999 IPO of Ixnet, which was acquired by Global Crossing, which went bankrupt in 2002. Then he was COO of Frontier Communications for a year. Then Aluma Systems, a Canadian concrete company, which he arranged to sell off to somebody.
The "error page" is clearly a Facebook server reporting a DNS failure within Facebook's own network.
Facebook requests are processed by user-facing servers which make RPC calls (not HTTP) into Facebook's internal network.
Machines in multiple locations may be involved in generating a single Facebook page. If their in-house DNS system for organizing their internal network failed, they might produce messages like that.
Wikipedia already has programs which detect most of the blatant vandalism. Page blanking and big deletions are caught immediately. Deletions that delete references generate warnings. Incoming text that duplicates other content on the Web is caught. That gets rid of most of the blatant vandalism. It's not a serious problem on Wikipedia.
The current headaches are mostly advertising, fancruft, and pushing of some political point of view. That's hard to deal with using what is, after all, a rather dumb machine learning algorithm that has no model of the content or subject matter.
That's appropriate. Military command training (at least in the US) focuses on making the right decisions under pressure with contradictory information. The big questions are military: who is the enemy? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their capabilities? What else is going on that benefits from this? Is this is a diversion or the main attack?
The military view of this is quite different from the civilian view. In the civilian sector, there's an ongoing stream of minor attacks to be fended off. Most computer security efforts focus on that. The military thinks of that as people throwing rocks over the fence - an annoyance to be dealt with, but not a serious enemy. They're much more worried about the threat that you don't detect until the enemy pulls the trigger on it.
IBOC was designed to prevent broadcasters from competition. One of the alternative schemes was to use spread-spectrum across the entire AM broadcast band, on top of existing stations. This would make the "properties" of incumbent stations far less valuable.
It's worth keeping analog AM as an emergency broadcast medium. The receivers are simple, dumb, and reliable, and the transmitters have huge range. That's useful during floods, hurricanes, and such.
A "preservationist" is someone like Martin Scorsese who has worked tirelessly to make sure old celluloid films aren't lost.
Crosby was a major figure in the early days of magnetic tape recording. He wanted better audio for his Bing Crosby show, and used some early tape recorders based on the German Magnetophon. The engineers involved with the early recorders started Ampex, Crosby put in $50,000, and pro audio rapidly moved to tape.
The Bing Crosby Show was the first show to be edited before broadcast, which tightened up the pacing and made it a hit show.
Ampex later went on to build the first videotape recorder in 1950, which was simply called "Crosby Video".
So Crosby definitely had a major role in the preservation of audio and video.
The Grand Prize is only $100,000. Most of the "winners" just get some upcoming Nokia device. "Winning" means that the app receives "$1 million" in marketing promotion: "a Nokia press release, premium placement on Ovi Store, placement in Nokia digital and social media efforts, and direct consumer messaging via email and/or SMS." In other words, winning means Nokia spams for your app.
Nokia takes a 30% cut on sales through their "Ovi Store", so they're promoting themselves.
Nokia's total outlay on this "contest" is probably under $1 million.
The US has some of the largest deposits of rare earths in the world. One big location is Mountain Pass, California. The mine there was closed in 2002, because it wasn't competitive with the China price. (Or with China's mining with a complete lack of environmental controls.)
The problem with rare-earth mining is that, since the materials are rare, the waste problem is huge. The early stages of extractoin are messy. Big acid lakes, things like that.
On the other side of this are the search engines. They may not follow the chain of links, especially if it involves "cookies".
So a reference that uses a redirection service may not be credited as an inbound link for ranking purposes.
Then there's the firewall/proxy issue. Firewalls need to see where you're really going, so they have to run down the link chain. This may result in bogus hits on the end site, if both the firewall and the browser separately do this.
There's a tendency to put a little CPU in devices to handle activity when the device is "off". Something has to sit there and watch for the remote if the TV is to be turned on remotely. Many machines have a "wake on LAN" capability, and most servers have an extensive remote management capability built into the network controller. All of these imply some little CPU, invisible to the main operating system, doing things when the device is supposedly "off".
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does provide an attack surface. Especially since those little machines tend to have very powerful access to the rest of the system, bypassing most security measures.
This new chip looks like an effort to integrate the "power off" CPU onto the same silicon as the main CPUs. That's a routine use of silicon real estate by putting more on one part. But the concept isn't new.
Google's business model requires dodgy advertisers. Google has created and funded a whole industry of AdWords arbitrage, encouraging web spam. That's a big part of their customer base. How often do you see a Fortune 1000 company in a Google ad?
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" In 2006, Google turned to the dark side. They started sponsoring the Search Engine Strategies conference, the web spammer's convention. That's when "Don't be Evil" ended.
We track Google ads at SiteTruth, trying to find the business behind the ad. For about 36% of Google ads (by domain, not hits) not on search pages, there's no identifiable real-world business behind the ad. We call those "bottom-feeders". The "John Does" Google is suing fall into that category. If Google kicked off all those "John Doe" advertisers, they'd lose a third of their advertiser base.
Blu-Ray players are just starting to fall below the $100 price point. That's when mass adoption takes place. By this holiday season, the combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD player will be the standard retail offering, and in a year or so, almost all read-only drives will read all formats. Blu-Ray combo writer drives aren't that common yet, but they're only $110 even now.
On the other hand, bandwidth limits on DSL and cable are tightening down. It used to be that only the people doing torrent downloads sucked bandwith by the gigabyte. With video on demand, Joe Sixpack is doing it. The cable infrastructure can't handle that, and it's not cheap or fast to upgrade.
At the prices they pay for service, it might just make sense for them to buy out Iridium.
Essentially, they did. When Iridium was about to go under and the satellites were days from being de-orbited, DoD bought into the system at a bargain price. This turned out to be extremely useful once the US got entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Originally, DoD bought unlimited airtime for 10,000 users. Now they're past 100,000 DoD users. Iridium overall has about 360,000 users.
It's the thing to have if you need to communicate from Outer Nowhere. Works anywhere on the planet that you can see the sky. Airtime is about $1 to $2 a minute, and phones are about $1500. A roll-up solar panel is a common accessory. The typical user drives a HUMMV, a yacht, or a dogsled.
There are things Oracle could use if they really wanted "unbreakable". There are some very tough microkernels available. LynxOS
is certified to DO-178B leval A for safety-critical software, yet it can run Linux ABI binaries.
LynxOS drives quite a number of systems with serious firepower. The Navy Shipboard Self-Defense System, the "Multiple Missile Kill Vehicle", stuff like that. On the civilian side, LinxOS powers the Airbus navigation system.
There's a performance penalty over Linux, and LynxOS is not free. But if it really has to work, there are options.
The big innovation in gaming is figuring out new ways to extract money from players. The concept that you can buy your way up in a game has become mainstream. Too mainstream; YoVille brownies in 7-11.
This idea originated in Japan, where you've been able to buy stuff for your virtual girlfriend with your mobile phone for years. But that was a niche product. Farmville peaked at 82 million users.
I'd like to see the actual paper, which doesn't seem to be linked. Do they mean 25 purchases to one location, or 25 purchases per delivery run?
Buses, by the way, have a similar problem. Buses have good energy efficiency when full and when going roughly from source to destination. They have terrible efficiency when they're running winding routes designed to cover as much area as possible, carrying few people. Which is the typical suburban bus situation.
Slashdot Mirror
This has nothing to do with the Web. It's about telephony in its VoIP form, broadcast content redistributed over the Internet, and mobile browsers. It doesn't affect web sites. See S.3304.
QWERTY keyboard build into the steering wheel. Now you can text while keeping your hands on the wheel!
You mean like this police car keyboard?
That's about right, if you show the detail of a block in free space. Texture mapping doesn't help much for Lego blocks.
However, as soon as a Lego block meshes with another Lego block, you can drop most of the now-interior detail. A block in a wall comes down to one rectangle on each side. Big flat areas can be reduced to texture-mapped rectangles covering many blocks. From a distance, you can drop the model of a block top or bottom to a rectangle with a bump map.
Worst case is a fly-through over a simple random pile of blocks. All the exterior detail shows, and the collision detection load is high.
Buran was a nice spacecraft. They had the advantage of doing it after the US, so they were able to avoid some mistakes. Buran's tiles aren't as fragile as the US tiles. Buran could fly through rain; the US shuttle can be damaged by raindrops.
While Buran looks much like the US shuttle, it's not. Buran has no main engines. The carrier booster has the engines.
It had to be done. Open Office (and MySQL) are too important to be entrusted to Larry Ellison. Already, a few parts of MySQL, such as the Windows GUI client, are no longer reliable.
("LibreOffice", as a name, though, has to go. The open source community sucks at naming.)
One of the more amusing camera issues has been red light cameras photographing cops running red lights. The processing of the images is usually outsourced and automated, and the company doing the work handles the process. The cops have to either pay up or go to court. There is much whining about this.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw writes to other police departments: "Please advise your members if they are captured on camera in their vehicles running the red light at these intersections, they will be cited. The only remedy for relief will be through the traffic court system. All law enforcement personnel must understand the high standard of conduct is applied to them in order for the public to have confidence in their departments and the officers."
Somebody gets it.
It's a real problem. The most reliable IC technologies, like silicon-on-sapphire, which is radiation-hard aren't that popular. The most reliable CPU designs are one-instruction-per-clock CPUs.
There are many sources of error in commercial-grade electronics, and the efforts to stamp them out aren't as intense as they could be. I went to a talk at Stanford last week by a computer designer who's trying to cram even more CPUs on a board, and he had some slides on DRAM error rates. Different groups are measuring error rates four orders of magnitude apart. And they don't know why. Some people have been blaming ambient radiation, but that can't possibly explain some of the higher error rate results.
I can't find anything about this company that doesn't come from a press release.
The COO is James M. Demitrius. Looking him up, he's an accountant. Here's his bio. He was at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the Michael Milken era, before the indictments and bankruptcy. During the dot-com era, he was involved in the 1999 IPO of Ixnet, which was acquired by Global Crossing, which went bankrupt in 2002. Then he was COO of Frontier Communications for a year. Then Aluma Systems, a Canadian concrete company, which he arranged to sell off to somebody.
The "error page" is clearly a Facebook server reporting a DNS failure within Facebook's own network. Facebook requests are processed by user-facing servers which make RPC calls (not HTTP) into Facebook's internal network. Machines in multiple locations may be involved in generating a single Facebook page. If their in-house DNS system for organizing their internal network failed, they might produce messages like that.
Wikipedia already has programs which detect most of the blatant vandalism. Page blanking and big deletions are caught immediately. Deletions that delete references generate warnings. Incoming text that duplicates other content on the Web is caught. That gets rid of most of the blatant vandalism. It's not a serious problem on Wikipedia.
The current headaches are mostly advertising, fancruft, and pushing of some political point of view. That's hard to deal with using what is, after all, a rather dumb machine learning algorithm that has no model of the content or subject matter.
Terrible article. What "DNS error"? Is Facebook running its own DNS servers that do something funny, or what?
As for DNS "moving to the cloud", DNS is already far more distributed than any of the "cloud" systems. Which is a good thing.
That's appropriate. Military command training (at least in the US) focuses on making the right decisions under pressure with contradictory information. The big questions are military: who is the enemy? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their capabilities? What else is going on that benefits from this? Is this is a diversion or the main attack?
The military view of this is quite different from the civilian view. In the civilian sector, there's an ongoing stream of minor attacks to be fended off. Most computer security efforts focus on that. The military thinks of that as people throwing rocks over the fence - an annoyance to be dealt with, but not a serious enemy. They're much more worried about the threat that you don't detect until the enemy pulls the trigger on it.
IBOC was designed to prevent broadcasters from competition. One of the alternative schemes was to use spread-spectrum across the entire AM broadcast band, on top of existing stations. This would make the "properties" of incumbent stations far less valuable.
It's worth keeping analog AM as an emergency broadcast medium. The receivers are simple, dumb, and reliable, and the transmitters have huge range. That's useful during floods, hurricanes, and such.
Does the clock stop for Farmville if Facebook goes down?
A "preservationist" is someone like Martin Scorsese who has worked tirelessly to make sure old celluloid films aren't lost.
Crosby was a major figure in the early days of magnetic tape recording. He wanted better audio for his Bing Crosby show, and used some early tape recorders based on the German Magnetophon. The engineers involved with the early recorders started Ampex, Crosby put in $50,000, and pro audio rapidly moved to tape. The Bing Crosby Show was the first show to be edited before broadcast, which tightened up the pacing and made it a hit show.
Ampex later went on to build the first videotape recorder in 1950, which was simply called "Crosby Video".
So Crosby definitely had a major role in the preservation of audio and video.
The Grand Prize is only $100,000. Most of the "winners" just get some upcoming Nokia device. "Winning" means that the app receives "$1 million" in marketing promotion: "a Nokia press release, premium placement on Ovi Store, placement in Nokia digital and social media efforts, and direct consumer messaging via email and/or SMS." In other words, winning means Nokia spams for your app.
Nokia takes a 30% cut on sales through their "Ovi Store", so they're promoting themselves.
Nokia's total outlay on this "contest" is probably under $1 million.
This was covered in the Economist last week.
The US has some of the largest deposits of rare earths in the world. One big location is Mountain Pass, California. The mine there was closed in 2002, because it wasn't competitive with the China price. (Or with China's mining with a complete lack of environmental controls.)
The Mountain Pass mine is being reopened under new management. In a few years, this problem will be over.
The problem with rare-earth mining is that, since the materials are rare, the waste problem is huge. The early stages of extractoin are messy. Big acid lakes, things like that.
On the other side of this are the search engines. They may not follow the chain of links, especially if it involves "cookies". So a reference that uses a redirection service may not be credited as an inbound link for ranking purposes.
Then there's the firewall/proxy issue. Firewalls need to see where you're really going, so they have to run down the link chain. This may result in bogus hits on the end site, if both the firewall and the browser separately do this.
There's a tendency to put a little CPU in devices to handle activity when the device is "off". Something has to sit there and watch for the remote if the TV is to be turned on remotely. Many machines have a "wake on LAN" capability, and most servers have an extensive remote management capability built into the network controller. All of these imply some little CPU, invisible to the main operating system, doing things when the device is supposedly "off".
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does provide an attack surface. Especially since those little machines tend to have very powerful access to the rest of the system, bypassing most security measures.
This new chip looks like an effort to integrate the "power off" CPU onto the same silicon as the main CPUs. That's a routine use of silicon real estate by putting more on one part. But the concept isn't new.
Google's business model requires dodgy advertisers. Google has created and funded a whole industry of AdWords arbitrage, encouraging web spam. That's a big part of their customer base. How often do you see a Fortune 1000 company in a Google ad?
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" In 2006, Google turned to the dark side. They started sponsoring the Search Engine Strategies conference, the web spammer's convention. That's when "Don't be Evil" ended.
We track Google ads at SiteTruth, trying to find the business behind the ad. For about 36% of Google ads (by domain, not hits) not on search pages, there's no identifiable real-world business behind the ad. We call those "bottom-feeders". The "John Does" Google is suing fall into that category. If Google kicked off all those "John Doe" advertisers, they'd lose a third of their advertiser base.
Blu-Ray players are just starting to fall below the $100 price point. That's when mass adoption takes place. By this holiday season, the combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD player will be the standard retail offering, and in a year or so, almost all read-only drives will read all formats. Blu-Ray combo writer drives aren't that common yet, but they're only $110 even now.
On the other hand, bandwidth limits on DSL and cable are tightening down. It used to be that only the people doing torrent downloads sucked bandwith by the gigabyte. With video on demand, Joe Sixpack is doing it. The cable infrastructure can't handle that, and it's not cheap or fast to upgrade.
At the prices they pay for service, it might just make sense for them to buy out Iridium.
Essentially, they did. When Iridium was about to go under and the satellites were days from being de-orbited, DoD bought into the system at a bargain price. This turned out to be extremely useful once the US got entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Originally, DoD bought unlimited airtime for 10,000 users. Now they're past 100,000 DoD users. Iridium overall has about 360,000 users.
It's the thing to have if you need to communicate from Outer Nowhere. Works anywhere on the planet that you can see the sky. Airtime is about $1 to $2 a minute, and phones are about $1500. A roll-up solar panel is a common accessory. The typical user drives a HUMMV, a yacht, or a dogsled.
There are things Oracle could use if they really wanted "unbreakable". There are some very tough microkernels available. LynxOS is certified to DO-178B leval A for safety-critical software, yet it can run Linux ABI binaries.
LynxOS drives quite a number of systems with serious firepower. The Navy Shipboard Self-Defense System, the "Multiple Missile Kill Vehicle", stuff like that. On the civilian side, LinxOS powers the Airbus navigation system.
There's a performance penalty over Linux, and LynxOS is not free. But if it really has to work, there are options.
The big innovation in gaming is figuring out new ways to extract money from players. The concept that you can buy your way up in a game has become mainstream. Too mainstream; YoVille brownies in 7-11.
This idea originated in Japan, where you've been able to buy stuff for your virtual girlfriend with your mobile phone for years. But that was a niche product. Farmville peaked at 82 million users.
I'd like to see the actual paper, which doesn't seem to be linked. Do they mean 25 purchases to one location, or 25 purchases per delivery run?
Buses, by the way, have a similar problem. Buses have good energy efficiency when full and when going roughly from source to destination. They have terrible efficiency when they're running winding routes designed to cover as much area as possible, carrying few people. Which is the typical suburban bus situation.