I wrote this to The Atlantic, which is a "think piece" magazine read by some decision makers in Washington.
After seeing that show, I was struck by the cluelessness of the panelists. I don't expect them to understand how networks really work, but they didn't even understand the organizations involved. Key organizations in a crisis like that would be the North American Network Operators Group and the North American Electric Reliability Council, along with the US Computer Emergency Response Team. The participants didn't know that, and they didn't have staffers to tell them.
The panelists were obsessing over whether they had enough authority to do something, while totally lacking any idea of what to do.
There are a few reasonable steps they could have taken at their level.
First, after a physical attack on electric power facilities, get troops guarding key substations. The NERC would know where those are, and there should be a plan in place to do that.
Second, faced with an massive attack via "smart phones", ask network operators to temporarily disable 4G and 3G services while keeping voice up. That would cut traffic 90% and stop further infections. Cellular voice service would probably come back up.
Third, ask ISPs to temporarily block all HTML/MIME email, while allowing text email. That would stop most attacks against PCs and virus transmission. Yes, the FCC lacks the authority to order this. But if CERT and NANOG simply asked network operators to do that in an emergency, 99% would do it.
Fourth, activate the Emergency Broadcasting System, which uses AM radio, for a Presidential address. That will get through even if almost everything else is down.
Fifth, get FEMA cranked up to provide emergency services in areas with power outages. That's where people are going to die. Everything else is an economic problem.
Having taken the initial steps, the next priority is bringing the electrical grid back up. If substations were damaged, it may be necessary to move some very large transformers around, and possibly to import them from other countries. Military assets (i.e. big transport aircraft) should be made available to help with that.
In parallel with this, the intelligence community and DoD can work on who's behind the attack. But that's not going to be dealt with in the first hours. Don't obsess on hitting back.
Students DID notice the little green lights turning on. Many, many times. When they reported this to the district, the district said it was a "glitch."
In an indictment, that turns into "knowingly, willfully, and with intent to defraud".
I'm almost a little surprised that the school wasn't being penalized for this beyond the "Don't turn on the cameras".
This is just a preliminary injunction. The big legal hammer is being assembled and raised into hammering position. The school district is now in the very uncomfortable position of having the FBI, the Justice Department, and the ACLU all against them. Both Fox News and NPR are against them.
The U.S. military has some weapons which are much better than many video game weapons. Video games need "balance", so players aren't given weapons that are too "powerful". DoD doesn't have that limitation.
The Grid Square Removal Service. When a Multiple Launch Rocket System unit is loaded up with rockets with submunitions, it fires 12 rockets, each of which carries 518 submunitions, each of which explodes into a rain of fragments. This kills anything unarmored in a 1km grid square. In the U.S. Army inventory for years. Some Iraqi army units were wiped out with those things.
The FireFinder radar. Shoot at a U.S. Army unit with an indirect fire weapon, and one of these will see the incoming projectiles, calculate the location of the gun, and pass that information to the U.S. Army guns, which will duly plaster the shooter. Within one minute. Standard equipment for Army and USMC artillery units. The technology dates from the 1970s, but in newer versions, it's been shrunk down to a size a HUMMV can carry.
The XM-25 "smart" grenade launcher. Useful when someone is shooting at you from behind cover or from a window. Just point at the side of the window, and click a button to get the range with the laser rangefinder. Then fire a round though the window. The round goes through the window, and, with its timer set automatically, explodes 1-2 meters just inside, in the right place for killing the sniper. Finally, a practical weapon that shoots around corners.
The Combat Engineer Vehicle, another reason the "Dune" approach to desert warfare won't work. These are tank chassis, with the armor, equipped with a bulldozer blade. They're used for removing obstacles. In the first Gulf War, they were used in Kuwait against dug-in Iraqi troops. They didn't bother shooting at them. They just bulldozed sand over their fighting holes, burying them alive.
"If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can kill it." As insurgent groups have figured out, the only way to succeed against a modern military force is to have a population in which to hide, one which the US isn't willing to exterminate.
HostGator is surprisingly good for modest sites. There are some undocumented headaches; for example, any MySQL transaction that runs more than a few seconds is killed. Somewhat to my surprise, they're willing to host Downside, which has a MySQL database of all SEC filings back to 2000, updated every night by a cron job. They lost the database once, and they reloaded it from their backups. It took a day, but it worked.
I dumped EZpublishing and Aplus for HostGator, and it seems to be working out OK.
No, four legs are better for a large machine. There's a tradeoff between leg working envelope, vehicle length, and top speed.
There was a big fad for six-legged insect robots in the 1990s, led by Rod Brooks at MIT. Those were very slow, very dumb, and had a very wide stance. Six legs don't scale up well. One big issue is inertia.
Double the dimensions of something, and it gets four times as strong (strength comes from cross-section) but eight times as massive (mass comes from volume.) This is called the cube-square law, and it's why there are no giant insects. For small creatures,
forces like surface tension matter, but inertia doesn't. For large, fast ones, inertia dominates.
Before dynamic balance was figured out, robots tended to have very wide stances, and some had too many legs.
DARPA built funded the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle at Ohio State in the 1980s. 28 feet long, six legs, seats one, no cargo capacity. Top speed 3-5 MPH on flat ground.
At least three legs were on the ground at all times, and often four, five, or six. The gaits were very conservative.
It was supposed to be off-road capable, but that part never worked. A sloping road was as far as they got. There was some computer control, but the thing was mostly driven by an onboard driver, using three joysticks.
With dynamic balance and traction control, the leg geometry doesn't have to be as conservative. BigDog's leg geometry is four legs with three joints each, a narrow stance, and control which allows the leg envelopes to overlap. This is close to the layout of the larger
quadrupeds. (BigDog has the size and weight of a medium pony; it's bigger than dog-size.)
With four legs and a long body, pitch stability isn't too hard, but roll stability requires active control. The faster quadrupedal mammals have very narrow stances; a horse's track is less than a foot wide, narrower than its body. BigDog doesn't track quite that narrow, but it gets close. The narrow track makes tight turns possible, and allows sudden changes in yaw when needed for slip recovery or collision avoidance.
With dynamic balance and slip control, the speed can be cranked up. The six-legged machines mostly crawled; the modern four-legged machines trot, and some run. (The usual running gaits, the ones with a moment of suspension, for a quadruped are the trot, pronk, rotatory gallop, and canter. BigDog can trot and pronk; it may be able to do a rotatory gallop.) That's the real reason to go with four legs. Six legs just get in the way at speed.
BigDog's three-joint leg isn't mentioned much, but the third joint lets the control system adjust the ground contact force vector to stay within the friction cone, without changing the
foot position. This is a big win when climbing hills, and the hind end needs to come under the body.
It's all about the control algorithms. Don't let the legs collide, prevent slip, recover from slip, support the body, maintain roll balance, provide propulsion, avoid obstacles, stay on course, accomplish the mission. Those are the priorities.
If you want to understand the theory behind BigDog, read Didier Papadoupolis's thesis, "Stable Running for a Quadruped Robot with Compliant Legs". The technology for BigDog came from Martin Buehler's lab at McGill University. Buehler himself quit McGill and went to work for Boston Dynamics as the chief engineer on BigDog. (Once BigDog worked, he went to iRobot.) The theory is out there in the literature. Some of it is mine.
The management moved to Ireland? That's a bad place to go bankrupt, and a good place to sue creditors. Ireland still has bankruptcy law left over from the days when English landlords ran the country. Creditors can put a company or an individual into involuntary bankruptcy. There's nothing like "debtor in possession" bankruptcy (US "Chapter 11") in Ireland. Personal bankruptcy? The debtor may retain "such articles of clothing, household furniture, bedding, tools and equipment of his trade or profession or other necessities for himself, his wife, his children, and other dependent relatives living with him, as he may select, not exceeding in value EUR 3,175."
It gets worse. Bankruptcies put individuals on a public blacklist. Officers of companies that go bankrupt can't be officers of a company again. Individuals can't get credit of more than EUR 630.
The employees need to get a judgment in Australia against the CEO, which shouldn't be hard since he fled the country with unpaid employees. Then hire an aggressive collection agency in Dublin. ("100% success rate for many clients. No collection, no fee.") There are international collection agencies, such as Global Credit Solutions, with branches in 80 countries. They have offices in both Australia and Ireland.
Why should businesses keep "upgrading"? Really, Microsoft's OS hasn't changed much in the last decade. Almost everything runs under Windows 2000. Even ".NET" and Direct-X applications tend to work, and all the major open-source applications do.
Why pay Microsoft more money? Most of this "upgrading" is planned obsolescence, not progress.
It was different in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Microsoft went from Windows 3.0/DOS, which was awful, to Windows 2000, which was a good OS. Desktop computing made great strides in the 1990s. But by 2000, the problems were solved. In Windows 2000, networking worked, 3D graphics worked, and the system was stable after the first service packs.
For most businesses, that was good enough.
In the last decade, Microsoft went through Windows 2000, XP (which was really to pull the Win 95/98/ME crowd onto a decent platform), Vista (enough said), and now Windows 7 (the new, improved Vista.) At the end of this, we have an OS which offers essentially the same API as ten years ago. Not much has really changed.
Most commercial and open source applications work on Windows 2000, and almost all work on Windows XP.
Load up the latest Firefox, and all the "Web 2.0" stuff works on Windows 2000.
If you don't get too cute with tricky HTML and Javascript, the same code works on IE6 and later browsers.
Worse, Microsoft's newer OSs are oinkers. They need more CPU and more RAM to do the same thing. They phone home to Redmond constantly. They have activation problems. They're constantly getting updates, some of which make things worse. Why should companies pay for this? Where's the return on investment?
Except Wales doesn't have an unbroken string of failures - because he has Bomis, a search engine largely known back in the day as a pornography portal.
Bomis, which was a "web ring" (remember web rings?), seems to have ended as a zombie. It never was very successful, and wasn't sold to a bigger player. The site is still up, but hasn't been updated since 2006.
Right. There's no problem if you have a real business. It's employment masquerading as consulting that's prohibited by US tax law. If you write and sell a software product to multiple buyers, no problem. That's a business. If you take ten jobs a year on Rent-A-Coder, no problem. (Not much money, though.) If you develop and patent technology, then license the technology, no problem.
If you work for one company for a year, are paid for time, not results, have a "boss", and do what they tell you, you're an employee.
Deal with it.
Of all the things in the world to worry about, a fingerprint reading time clock is very close to the bottom of the list.
True. The internal representation isn't a picture, anyway. It's a compact representation which can be easily matched by a simple algorithm. Most one-finger systems aren't good enough to uniquely identify individuals from a large population. Tens or hundreds of people, yes. Millions, no. Some numbers claimed for low-end systems are false acceptance rate < 0.001%, false rejection rate < 1.0%. There are high-end systems that supposedly do better, but a time clock won't have them.
California DMV takes a single fingerprint, but not a full set. Even my gym now has a fingerprint reader.
I haven't had a full set of prints taken in years, though, not since I was in the DoD security-cleared world.
Linux uses available memory for cache, and rather aggressively. All available memory can be filled with cached file blocks. This happens routinely on systems which have big randomly-accessed files open, like databases.
There's nothing wrong with this, except that, once in a while, Linux hits a race condition in prune_one_dentry, causing an "oops" crash, when there's an unblockable need for a memory page and something is locking the file block cache.
This is one of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Linux. Linus wrote about it in 2001 ("I'll try to think about it some more, but I'd love to have more reports to
go on to try to find a pattern.. "). As of 2009, this area is still giving trouble.
The locking in this area is very complex.
Let them take away the right to say "Fuck" and you've given up the ability to say "Fuck the Government."
That's not the problem. As Orwell points out in the appendix to "1984", where he discusses "Newspeak", one could say "Big Brother is doubleplus ungood" in Newspeak. But the language for saying why wasn't available. So no one could make a convincing argument against Big Brother. "In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent."
Watch for this phenomenon. It's real. Especially on talk radio.
Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.
Right. This is something the better venture capitalists used to keep in mind. As a group, venture capitalists have lost money since 2000, because there's too much venture capital available and companies are running too long on VC money.
(Much VC money is dumb money now. Too much money is desperately looking for decent yields in a period when no investment is doing well.)
Venture capital in Silicon Valley used to be about technology. Someone would propose building a thing, and would get VC funding to build a prototype. Either it worked, or it didn't. If it failed, the VCs were out the cost of building a prototype. If it worked, there was a potential business. The failure rate was about 9 out of 10, and a win meant a 10 to 100x profit.
As semiconductor, electronics, and software technology matured, startups tended to be business concepts rather than technology concepts. So they had to be brought to the point of having a sizable user base before it was clear whether they'd succeed or fail. This led to the first dot-com boom. In that boom, it was possible to take companies public early, and the VCs could often cash out before the business failed. (I used to track this; see Downside's Deathwatch, where "chart is not available for this symbol" isn't a bug; it means the company is gone and forgotten.)
In the second dot-com boom ("Web 2.0"), investors weren't willing to pay for untried companies. So Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace are still running on VC money. Myspace could have gone public a few years ago, but it's too late now. Adult Friendfinder tried to go public last week, but just gave up.
Wales' business, Wikia, is in that category - VC-funded, losing money, and lacking an exit strategy. The problem is that VCs looked at Wales' success with Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit, and thought that would translate into business success. It didn't. They should have looked at his unbroken string of business failures.
VC-funded companies don't always succeed or fail. There's a third option, and it's the most common - the "zombie" company. The company makes enough money to cover its expenses, but not enough to pay back its investors. This is, in fact, the most common outcome. VCs usually have a stable of zombies they're trying to sell to somebody, anybody, just to get them off the books. They usually end up being sold to some big player in the same field at a huge discount.
This just means they need more separation between the electrodes of their submersion sensor. Which is a problem in a small device.
To sense water reliably, while ignoring condensation, you need contacts some distance apart and some distance from a surface. The distances needs to be bigger than a water droplet. The size of water droplets is limited by surface tension. About 0.3 inch is probably big enough. In a tiny device, getting an air space that big is tough.
Is this for real? The link in the article returns a 404 error. Here's a somewhat more useful link. The actual bill going forward is considerably less restrictive.
Switzerland is rather liberal about sex. Prostitution is legal, and hookers charge VAT and take credit cards. Teen porn is available in mainstream video rental stores. While Switzerland isn't very violent, Swiss citizens and most permanent residents can own guns, and almost everyone in the military reserves (a big fraction of the population, since Switzerland has a draft) has a military-issued assault rifle at home.
On the other hand, actually doing anything violent is considered un-Swiss. Violent crime is rare in Switzerland. It tends to attract too much attention. With a big army for its size, a well-organized police force, a large number of people who not only own guns but regularly qualify on the range, and a tendency to bullet-proof banks and even railway ticket offices, violent crime tends not to be successful.
For a slightly higher fee, can I just get someone who will use the computer for me whenever I need to do something on it?
That's expensive. IBM used to have that for their top executives, in the 1970s. The executives got a 3270 display with a phone handset. When they picked up the phone handset, they were connected to an operator who could bring up IBM internal financial and sales data. Really.
First, what happened to the "Trusted Computing Platform" concept, or what Microsoft called "Palladium"? That was a signing system that was supposed to allow an application to be sure that the layers below it were stock. Any funny stuff happening during the boot process or at the lower levels would invalidate the signature. Allowing some game company low-level access to a general purpose machine is just wrong. Games shouldn't even need administrator privileges.
As for the cheating front generally, it should be feasible to build an aimbot which only needs the video as input. Just get the cursor in about the right place, and the aimbot does the fine adjustment. (That's how some real-world weapons work, of course.) Also, a cheat program which runs on a separate computer, observing the data stream from the computer running the game, has potential. Neither of those is detectable.
The real purpose of this is to cut education costs by only providing 10 years of free public education, instead of 12. Schools can dump all the expensive advanced placement courses. This also helps keep poor kids from moving up in society, by diverting them off to some low-end community college, instead of bringing them to the point where they can compete for entrance to a good school.
Rich kids in private schools will have an even bigger edge than they have now.
The next step will be to divert the kids who don't make the cut into "work experience" programs, i.e. McDonalds.
Our own data, at SiteTruth, indicates that about 34% of Google Content Network advertisers, by domain name, are "bottom feeder" sites which we can't associate with a real-world business. This is disappointing, but not surprising. When you see a Google ad, it's not usually from a Fortune 1000 company, after all.
Our data comes from our AdRater plug-in, which rates the advertiser behind each Google ad as it appears on the user's web page. If someone goes to an ad-heavy typosquatting site, we'll see the domains advertised there. (We don't see the typosquatting domain, though; we don't monitor what pages the user views, just the ad domains. We're interested in advertiser behavior, not use behavior.)
We collect the domain names of the advertisers, so we have a sizable fraction of Google's customer list, and this is hard data. We're not extrapolating.
(Collecting Google's customer list is a "long tail" kind of thing. The first 25,000 Google advertisers were seen in the first two months; the next 25,000 showed up over about four months. We'll never see them all, but we've probably seen most of them by now. Google probably has somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 active advertisers, by domain name.)
The numbers indicate that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from those "bottom feeders". That's why Google can't be very tough on "web spam". They have Matt Cutts claiming that Google tries to stop web spam, but, realistically, they don't try very hard. They can't. It's essential to their business model.
Search Google for "craigslist auto posting tool". Not only are there paid ads for software to put ads on Craiglist using phony accounts, some of them use Google Checkout, so Google gets a cut of what's basically a fraud scheme. ("Automatic CAPTCHA bypass available with integrated Image-to-Text support!") Google's advertiser validation standards are very low.
Been there, done that, in an aerospace company. Here's what it's like.
First, the security clearance. There's the background check before hiring, which doesn't mean much. Then, there's the real background check. The one where the FBI visits your neighbors. The one where, one day, you're sent to an unmarked office in an anonymous building for a lie detector test.
Programming is waterfall model. There are requirements documents, and, especially, there are interface documents. In the aerospace world, interface documents define the interface. If a part doesn't conform to the interface document, the part is broken, not the document. The part gets fixed, not the documentation. (This is why you can take a Rolls Royce engine off a 747, put on a GE engine, and go fly.)
Memory-safe languages are preferred. The Air Force used to use Jovial. Ada is still widely used in flight software. Key telephony software uses Erlang.
Changes require change orders, and are billable to the customer as additional work. Code changes are tied back to change orders, just like drawing changes on metal parts.
In some security applications, the customer (usually a 3-letter agency) has their own "tiger teams" who attack the software. Failure is expensive for the contractor. NSA once had the policy that two successive failures meant vendor disqualification. (Sadly, they had to lighten up, except for some very critical systems.)
So that's what it's like to do it right.
A real problem today is that we need a few rock-solid components built to those standards. DNS servers and Border Gateway Protocol nodes would be a good example. They perform a well-defined security-critical function that doesn't change much. Somebody should be selling one that meets high security standards (EAL-6, at least.) It should be running on an EAL-6 operating system, like Green Hills Integrity.
: a futuristic gun, a futuristic spaceship (steam-punk styled) and finally a robot.
If those are the examples, it's a crap book. Spaceships are considered lame as animation work. They're very easy to do, and if you put one on a demo reel, most studios will throw it away.
Classic still life subjects, like a bowl of fruit, are harder to do. Do a deer nibbling on a rosebush, and you'll be taken seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote this to The Atlantic, which is a "think piece" magazine read by some decision makers in Washington.
After seeing that show, I was struck by the cluelessness of the panelists. I don't expect them to understand how networks really work, but they didn't even understand the organizations involved. Key organizations in a crisis like that would be the North American Network Operators Group and the North American Electric Reliability Council, along with the US Computer Emergency Response Team. The participants didn't know that, and they didn't have staffers to tell them.
The panelists were obsessing over whether they had enough authority to do something, while totally lacking any idea of what to do.
There are a few reasonable steps they could have taken at their level.
Having taken the initial steps, the next priority is bringing the electrical grid back up. If substations were damaged, it may be necessary to move some very large transformers around, and possibly to import them from other countries. Military assets (i.e. big transport aircraft) should be made available to help with that.
In parallel with this, the intelligence community and DoD can work on who's behind the attack. But that's not going to be dealt with in the first hours. Don't obsess on hitting back.
Students DID notice the little green lights turning on. Many, many times. When they reported this to the district, the district said it was a "glitch."
In an indictment, that turns into "knowingly, willfully, and with intent to defraud".
I'm almost a little surprised that the school wasn't being penalized for this beyond the "Don't turn on the cameras".
This is just a preliminary injunction. The big legal hammer is being assembled and raised into hammering position. The school district is now in the very uncomfortable position of having the FBI, the Justice Department, and the ACLU all against them. Both Fox News and NPR are against them.
The U.S. military has some weapons which are much better than many video game weapons. Video games need "balance", so players aren't given weapons that are too "powerful". DoD doesn't have that limitation.
"If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can kill it." As insurgent groups have figured out, the only way to succeed against a modern military force is to have a population in which to hide, one which the US isn't willing to exterminate.
HostGator is surprisingly good for modest sites. There are some undocumented headaches; for example, any MySQL transaction that runs more than a few seconds is killed. Somewhat to my surprise, they're willing to host Downside, which has a MySQL database of all SEC filings back to 2000, updated every night by a cron job. They lost the database once, and they reloaded it from their backups. It took a day, but it worked.
I dumped EZpublishing and Aplus for HostGator, and it seems to be working out OK.
No, four legs are better for a large machine. There's a tradeoff between leg working envelope, vehicle length, and top speed.
There was a big fad for six-legged insect robots in the 1990s, led by Rod Brooks at MIT. Those were very slow, very dumb, and had a very wide stance. Six legs don't scale up well. One big issue is inertia.
Double the dimensions of something, and it gets four times as strong (strength comes from cross-section) but eight times as massive (mass comes from volume.) This is called the cube-square law, and it's why there are no giant insects. For small creatures, forces like surface tension matter, but inertia doesn't. For large, fast ones, inertia dominates.
Before dynamic balance was figured out, robots tended to have very wide stances, and some had too many legs. DARPA built funded the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle at Ohio State in the 1980s. 28 feet long, six legs, seats one, no cargo capacity. Top speed 3-5 MPH on flat ground. At least three legs were on the ground at all times, and often four, five, or six. The gaits were very conservative. It was supposed to be off-road capable, but that part never worked. A sloping road was as far as they got. There was some computer control, but the thing was mostly driven by an onboard driver, using three joysticks.
With dynamic balance and traction control, the leg geometry doesn't have to be as conservative. BigDog's leg geometry is four legs with three joints each, a narrow stance, and control which allows the leg envelopes to overlap. This is close to the layout of the larger quadrupeds. (BigDog has the size and weight of a medium pony; it's bigger than dog-size.)
With four legs and a long body, pitch stability isn't too hard, but roll stability requires active control. The faster quadrupedal mammals have very narrow stances; a horse's track is less than a foot wide, narrower than its body. BigDog doesn't track quite that narrow, but it gets close. The narrow track makes tight turns possible, and allows sudden changes in yaw when needed for slip recovery or collision avoidance.
With dynamic balance and slip control, the speed can be cranked up. The six-legged machines mostly crawled; the modern four-legged machines trot, and some run. (The usual running gaits, the ones with a moment of suspension, for a quadruped are the trot, pronk, rotatory gallop, and canter. BigDog can trot and pronk; it may be able to do a rotatory gallop.) That's the real reason to go with four legs. Six legs just get in the way at speed.
BigDog's three-joint leg isn't mentioned much, but the third joint lets the control system adjust the ground contact force vector to stay within the friction cone, without changing the foot position. This is a big win when climbing hills, and the hind end needs to come under the body.
It's all about the control algorithms. Don't let the legs collide, prevent slip, recover from slip, support the body, maintain roll balance, provide propulsion, avoid obstacles, stay on course, accomplish the mission. Those are the priorities.
If you want to understand the theory behind BigDog, read Didier Papadoupolis's thesis, "Stable Running for a Quadruped Robot with Compliant Legs". The technology for BigDog came from Martin Buehler's lab at McGill University. Buehler himself quit McGill and went to work for Boston Dynamics as the chief engineer on BigDog. (Once BigDog worked, he went to iRobot.) The theory is out there in the literature. Some of it is mine.
The management moved to Ireland? That's a bad place to go bankrupt, and a good place to sue creditors. Ireland still has bankruptcy law left over from the days when English landlords ran the country. Creditors can put a company or an individual into involuntary bankruptcy. There's nothing like "debtor in possession" bankruptcy (US "Chapter 11") in Ireland. Personal bankruptcy? The debtor may retain "such articles of clothing, household furniture, bedding, tools and equipment of his trade or profession or other necessities for himself, his wife, his children, and other dependent relatives living with him, as he may select, not exceeding in value EUR 3,175."
It gets worse. Bankruptcies put individuals on a public blacklist. Officers of companies that go bankrupt can't be officers of a company again. Individuals can't get credit of more than EUR 630.
The employees need to get a judgment in Australia against the CEO, which shouldn't be hard since he fled the country with unpaid employees. Then hire an aggressive collection agency in Dublin. ("100% success rate for many clients. No collection, no fee.") There are international collection agencies, such as Global Credit Solutions, with branches in 80 countries. They have offices in both Australia and Ireland.
Why should businesses keep "upgrading"? Really, Microsoft's OS hasn't changed much in the last decade. Almost everything runs under Windows 2000. Even ".NET" and Direct-X applications tend to work, and all the major open-source applications do. Why pay Microsoft more money? Most of this "upgrading" is planned obsolescence, not progress.
It was different in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Microsoft went from Windows 3.0/DOS, which was awful, to Windows 2000, which was a good OS. Desktop computing made great strides in the 1990s. But by 2000, the problems were solved. In Windows 2000, networking worked, 3D graphics worked, and the system was stable after the first service packs. For most businesses, that was good enough.
In the last decade, Microsoft went through Windows 2000, XP (which was really to pull the Win 95/98/ME crowd onto a decent platform), Vista (enough said), and now Windows 7 (the new, improved Vista.) At the end of this, we have an OS which offers essentially the same API as ten years ago. Not much has really changed.
Most commercial and open source applications work on Windows 2000, and almost all work on Windows XP. Load up the latest Firefox, and all the "Web 2.0" stuff works on Windows 2000. If you don't get too cute with tricky HTML and Javascript, the same code works on IE6 and later browsers.
Worse, Microsoft's newer OSs are oinkers. They need more CPU and more RAM to do the same thing. They phone home to Redmond constantly. They have activation problems. They're constantly getting updates, some of which make things worse. Why should companies pay for this? Where's the return on investment?
Except Wales doesn't have an unbroken string of failures - because he has Bomis, a search engine largely known back in the day as a pornography portal.
Bomis, which was a "web ring" (remember web rings?), seems to have ended as a zombie. It never was very successful, and wasn't sold to a bigger player. The site is still up, but hasn't been updated since 2006.
Right. There's no problem if you have a real business. It's employment masquerading as consulting that's prohibited by US tax law. If you write and sell a software product to multiple buyers, no problem. That's a business. If you take ten jobs a year on Rent-A-Coder, no problem. (Not much money, though.) If you develop and patent technology, then license the technology, no problem.
If you work for one company for a year, are paid for time, not results, have a "boss", and do what they tell you, you're an employee. Deal with it.
Of all the things in the world to worry about, a fingerprint reading time clock is very close to the bottom of the list.
True. The internal representation isn't a picture, anyway. It's a compact representation which can be easily matched by a simple algorithm. Most one-finger systems aren't good enough to uniquely identify individuals from a large population. Tens or hundreds of people, yes. Millions, no. Some numbers claimed for low-end systems are false acceptance rate < 0.001%, false rejection rate < 1.0%. There are high-end systems that supposedly do better, but a time clock won't have them.
California DMV takes a single fingerprint, but not a full set. Even my gym now has a fingerprint reader. I haven't had a full set of prints taken in years, though, not since I was in the DoD security-cleared world.
Linux uses available memory for cache, and rather aggressively. All available memory can be filled with cached file blocks. This happens routinely on systems which have big randomly-accessed files open, like databases.
There's nothing wrong with this, except that, once in a while, Linux hits a race condition in prune_one_dentry, causing an "oops" crash, when there's an unblockable need for a memory page and something is locking the file block cache.
This is one of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Linux. Linus wrote about it in 2001 ("I'll try to think about it some more, but I'd love to have more reports to go on to try to find a pattern.. "). As of 2009, this area is still giving trouble. The locking in this area is very complex.
Let them take away the right to say "Fuck" and you've given up the ability to say "Fuck the Government."
That's not the problem. As Orwell points out in the appendix to "1984", where he discusses "Newspeak", one could say "Big Brother is doubleplus ungood" in Newspeak. But the language for saying why wasn't available. So no one could make a convincing argument against Big Brother. "In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent."
Watch for this phenomenon. It's real. Especially on talk radio.
Link should read - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022000679.html
That link hauls in junk and tracking from a huge number of sites, including
That's embarrassing.
Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.
Right. This is something the better venture capitalists used to keep in mind. As a group, venture capitalists have lost money since 2000, because there's too much venture capital available and companies are running too long on VC money. (Much VC money is dumb money now. Too much money is desperately looking for decent yields in a period when no investment is doing well.)
Venture capital in Silicon Valley used to be about technology. Someone would propose building a thing, and would get VC funding to build a prototype. Either it worked, or it didn't. If it failed, the VCs were out the cost of building a prototype. If it worked, there was a potential business. The failure rate was about 9 out of 10, and a win meant a 10 to 100x profit.
As semiconductor, electronics, and software technology matured, startups tended to be business concepts rather than technology concepts. So they had to be brought to the point of having a sizable user base before it was clear whether they'd succeed or fail. This led to the first dot-com boom. In that boom, it was possible to take companies public early, and the VCs could often cash out before the business failed. (I used to track this; see Downside's Deathwatch, where "chart is not available for this symbol" isn't a bug; it means the company is gone and forgotten.)
In the second dot-com boom ("Web 2.0"), investors weren't willing to pay for untried companies. So Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace are still running on VC money. Myspace could have gone public a few years ago, but it's too late now. Adult Friendfinder tried to go public last week, but just gave up.
Wales' business, Wikia, is in that category - VC-funded, losing money, and lacking an exit strategy. The problem is that VCs looked at Wales' success with Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit, and thought that would translate into business success. It didn't. They should have looked at his unbroken string of business failures.
VC-funded companies don't always succeed or fail. There's a third option, and it's the most common - the "zombie" company. The company makes enough money to cover its expenses, but not enough to pay back its investors. This is, in fact, the most common outcome. VCs usually have a stable of zombies they're trying to sell to somebody, anybody, just to get them off the books. They usually end up being sold to some big player in the same field at a huge discount.
This just means they need more separation between the electrodes of their submersion sensor. Which is a problem in a small device.
To sense water reliably, while ignoring condensation, you need contacts some distance apart and some distance from a surface. The distances needs to be bigger than a water droplet. The size of water droplets is limited by surface tension. About 0.3 inch is probably big enough. In a tiny device, getting an air space that big is tough.
Is this for real? The link in the article returns a 404 error. Here's a somewhat more useful link. The actual bill going forward is considerably less restrictive.
Switzerland is rather liberal about sex. Prostitution is legal, and hookers charge VAT and take credit cards. Teen porn is available in mainstream video rental stores. While Switzerland isn't very violent, Swiss citizens and most permanent residents can own guns, and almost everyone in the military reserves (a big fraction of the population, since Switzerland has a draft) has a military-issued assault rifle at home.
On the other hand, actually doing anything violent is considered un-Swiss. Violent crime is rare in Switzerland. It tends to attract too much attention. With a big army for its size, a well-organized police force, a large number of people who not only own guns but regularly qualify on the range, and a tendency to bullet-proof banks and even railway ticket offices, violent crime tends not to be successful.
For a slightly higher fee, can I just get someone who will use the computer for me whenever I need to do something on it?
That's expensive. IBM used to have that for their top executives, in the 1970s. The executives got a 3270 display with a phone handset. When they picked up the phone handset, they were connected to an operator who could bring up IBM internal financial and sales data. Really.
First, what happened to the "Trusted Computing Platform" concept, or what Microsoft called "Palladium"? That was a signing system that was supposed to allow an application to be sure that the layers below it were stock. Any funny stuff happening during the boot process or at the lower levels would invalidate the signature. Allowing some game company low-level access to a general purpose machine is just wrong. Games shouldn't even need administrator privileges.
As for the cheating front generally, it should be feasible to build an aimbot which only needs the video as input. Just get the cursor in about the right place, and the aimbot does the fine adjustment. (That's how some real-world weapons work, of course.) Also, a cheat program which runs on a separate computer, observing the data stream from the computer running the game, has potential. Neither of those is detectable.
The real purpose of this is to cut education costs by only providing 10 years of free public education, instead of 12. Schools can dump all the expensive advanced placement courses. This also helps keep poor kids from moving up in society, by diverting them off to some low-end community college, instead of bringing them to the point where they can compete for entrance to a good school. Rich kids in private schools will have an even bigger edge than they have now.
The next step will be to divert the kids who don't make the cut into "work experience" programs, i.e. McDonalds.
Our own data, at SiteTruth, indicates that about 34% of Google Content Network advertisers, by domain name, are "bottom feeder" sites which we can't associate with a real-world business. This is disappointing, but not surprising. When you see a Google ad, it's not usually from a Fortune 1000 company, after all.
Our data comes from our AdRater plug-in, which rates the advertiser behind each Google ad as it appears on the user's web page. If someone goes to an ad-heavy typosquatting site, we'll see the domains advertised there. (We don't see the typosquatting domain, though; we don't monitor what pages the user views, just the ad domains. We're interested in advertiser behavior, not use behavior.) We collect the domain names of the advertisers, so we have a sizable fraction of Google's customer list, and this is hard data. We're not extrapolating.
(Collecting Google's customer list is a "long tail" kind of thing. The first 25,000 Google advertisers were seen in the first two months; the next 25,000 showed up over about four months. We'll never see them all, but we've probably seen most of them by now. Google probably has somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 active advertisers, by domain name.)
The numbers indicate that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from those "bottom feeders". That's why Google can't be very tough on "web spam". They have Matt Cutts claiming that Google tries to stop web spam, but, realistically, they don't try very hard. They can't. It's essential to their business model.
Search Google for "craigslist auto posting tool". Not only are there paid ads for software to put ads on Craiglist using phony accounts, some of them use Google Checkout, so Google gets a cut of what's basically a fraud scheme. ("Automatic CAPTCHA bypass available with integrated Image-to-Text support!") Google's advertiser validation standards are very low.
If this becomes acceptable, someday Windows PCs will require a network connection to operate at all.
With each new release, Microsoft Windows becomes more dependent on servers in Redmond. Someday they'll have an outage and the whole world will stop.
Been there, done that, in an aerospace company. Here's what it's like.
First, the security clearance. There's the background check before hiring, which doesn't mean much. Then, there's the real background check. The one where the FBI visits your neighbors. The one where, one day, you're sent to an unmarked office in an anonymous building for a lie detector test.
Programming is waterfall model. There are requirements documents, and, especially, there are interface documents. In the aerospace world, interface documents define the interface. If a part doesn't conform to the interface document, the part is broken, not the document. The part gets fixed, not the documentation. (This is why you can take a Rolls Royce engine off a 747, put on a GE engine, and go fly.)
Memory-safe languages are preferred. The Air Force used to use Jovial. Ada is still widely used in flight software. Key telephony software uses Erlang.
Changes require change orders, and are billable to the customer as additional work. Code changes are tied back to change orders, just like drawing changes on metal parts.
In some security applications, the customer (usually a 3-letter agency) has their own "tiger teams" who attack the software. Failure is expensive for the contractor. NSA once had the policy that two successive failures meant vendor disqualification. (Sadly, they had to lighten up, except for some very critical systems.)
So that's what it's like to do it right.
A real problem today is that we need a few rock-solid components built to those standards. DNS servers and Border Gateway Protocol nodes would be a good example. They perform a well-defined security-critical function that doesn't change much. Somebody should be selling one that meets high security standards (EAL-6, at least.) It should be running on an EAL-6 operating system, like Green Hills Integrity.
We're not seeing those trusted boxes.
: a futuristic gun, a futuristic spaceship (steam-punk styled) and finally a robot.
If those are the examples, it's a crap book. Spaceships are considered lame as animation work. They're very easy to do, and if you put one on a demo reel, most studios will throw it away.
Classic still life subjects, like a bowl of fruit, are harder to do. Do a deer nibbling on a rosebush, and you'll be taken seriously.
Really, how many HDTV channels can someone watch at once? A full-rate HDTV channel is 19.4mb/s.