If you're really doing something of value on your own, be very serious about keeping your own work and your employer's work separate. When I did this, the work I was doing at home was on a different kind of computer than I used at work, in a different subject area. I even used a different color of scratch pad for my own work (yellow for the employer, green for my own work). For the employer's work, I used blue pens; for my own work, black pens of a different brand. No paper or media associated with my own work ever entered the employer's premises.
This is a hassle. It is far less hassle than the litigation required to untangle things if you succeed at what you're doing.
It worked out very well for me, and I was able to retire before I was 40.
Most of the proposed "upgrades" are worse. There was a "Clean Slate Program" at Stanford, but the general idea was to put the network firmly under the thumb of the carriers, turning the Internet into something like mobile telephony. That didn't fly.
IPv6 and IPSEC would fix most of the problems down at the IP level. It might be useful if the FCC mandated that US ISPs must support IPv6 to consumers by some date. More likely, China may mandate IPv6; they need the address space. The 2008 Olympics was mostly run on IPv6, so the technology is working there.
I believe this is a conscious commercial strategy designed to drive more and more content to Wikia, which is a for-profit company founded by Jimmy Wales.
I used to think that too. But Wikia has been a flop. It ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] wikis, fan fiction, and TV show wikis. Their demographic lives in their parents basement. Wikia Search, an attempt to "crowdsource" a search engine, shut down months ago. Now Wikia is a dumping ground for material not good enough for Wikipedia. They're not getting major advertisers, just the usual Google ad dreck.
Over the past three years, the standards have tightened up. Now, everything has to have footnoted references. Wikipedia has always required that material be verifiable, but now, "verifiable" means correctly footnoted to a reliable source.
If you've published in refereed journals, or spent time in academia, this is no big deal.
The problem for many inexperienced editors is that they're not used to writing with references.
Most of the whining comes from people who just want to write their own stuff, not dig for references and write footnotes. Wikipedia calls that "original research".
This requirement first appeared in politically controversial articles. Then it spread to most articles on serious subjects. Now it's applied even to fancruft. ("What do you mean I can't write about 'Zords in Power Rangers: Jungle Fury' because they weren't mentioned in a Journal of Popular Culture article?") The detailed fancruft is gradually moving to Wikia, which has lower standards.
Wikipedia is an open source project with coding standards and quality control, not a blog.
There have been formal semiconductor roadmaps to the future since 1992. There's an consensus roadmap updated annually by an industry group.
This isn't a blue-sky thing. It tells all the players what they need to do to keep up their part of the technology. The fab-equipment people, the device physics people, the etching people, the mask people, the substrate people, the design tools people, etc. all have to push their parts forward. The roadmap tells them how far each piece has to be pushed.
These roadmaps are available for past years, and you can see how the industry has tracked the roadmap. It's reasonably close for any five year period. The big change in the last decade is that heat dissipation is starting to dominate the problem. The roadmap now focuses on memory devices, which have low activity per cell compared to compute elements and aren't yet power-limited.
The current consensus is that the improvements to known technology can get down to 22nm, and then it gets hard. The roadmap assumes CMOS transistors; other devices are discussed, but aren't factored into the mainline predictions.
Kind of reminds me of the 2007 Beowulf movie, the one that's all motion-captured animation but the characters look somewhat like the motion-capture actors. That's the one where Angelina Jolie is drawn as a golden avatar rising out of water. With a tail.
This is very nice work. The most interesting result is that some manipulation problems become easier if done fast. In the short term, inertia makes the motions of objects very predictable. With millisecond reaction times, that can be exploited.
Fast machinery isn't unusual, but it's rarely that smart.
The problem is service provider sloppyness
on
Real-Time Keyloggers
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Bank of America used to have a good system for authenticating their site. At login, you input your ID, and the B of A site gave you back a photo of your own choosing to tell you that you were on the real Bank of America site. Only then did you input your password.
Last Friday, B of A broke this feature. I'm now getting a password prompt without seeing the photo I'd chosen. My first thought was that there's was a security problem. I checked the SSL cert info, which looked OK. I reinstalled Firefox. No change. I called Bank of America. They wanted me to remove Flash, which I did. No change. They advised me not to log in. Then they passed me off to tech support, which hasn't called back yet.
Then I took out a Linux-based Eee PC 2G Surf that had been unused for months, powered it up, plugged in an Ethernet cable, and saw the site doing exactly the same thing. So it's probably not a client side problem.
What I think happened is that someone at B of A did a partial site redesign and broke something. They introduced some Flash (something called "/sas/sas-docs/html/pmfso.swf") on the password page (a terrible idea, given Flash's history of security vulnerabilities) and along with that, broke some part of the login process.
If, in fact, they've had a break in on the server side, the main login of Bank of America has been compromised for at least three days now. I'm not seeing any indication of that, though; just general ineptitude.
(The page HTML is awful. It's clearly been modified over and over for years without a cleanup. It has Flash, Javascript, CSS, single-pixel GIFs for formatting, and comments like "July maintenance OLB timeout inactivity update starts". The "enter password" page has 966 lines of HTML and JavaScript, not including external files. That's too much flaky machinery for such a security-critical function.)
Re:What have they been doing until now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Do tell what NASA's core competencies are then.
Public relations, of course. NASA has a huge PR operation, with visitor centers, educational outreach, and other image-enhancement activities.
The Internet Archive has been fighting this, but not to prevent access to out of print books. They want get the same deal as Google - the right to redistribute out of print books unless the author/publisher opts out. What they object to is that the current deal is structured to give Google essentially exclusive rights to charge for access to out of print books. Libraries get one (1) terminal allowed to access the books for free; everything else goes behind a Google paywall.
This is really a legal scheme to make copyright opt-in again, instead of opt-out. Before various revisions to US copyright law, you had to register copyrights and renew them to keep them in force. So out of print stuff slipped easily into the public domain. Under current law, most material is locked up by copyright, even if nobody cares.
They're scraping free data from the FAA web site and FlightStats, then pumping it out into an iPhone app feed.
But they're not using a really good data source. The high quality system is PASSUR RightETA. This system uses hundreds of radar receivers near airports to pick up the transponder signals from aircraft. It doesn't transmit. Any radar in the area that triggers an aircraft transponder causes the transponder to emit, and the PASSUR receivers pick that up. Using multiple receivers and time of flight calculations, the aircraft can be located very precisely. In fact, this is more accurate than single-point radar. You can buy a feed of this data, but it's not free.
I know someone who moved from the iPhone project to Palm. He was at a high enough level to be screamed at by Steve Jobs in person, and he didn't like that. He waited until the iPhone shipped, then left for a company with sane management.
I can imagine a similar discussion in 1875: "What will telegraphs look like in the future?"
Actually, the view from 1875 was surprisingly clear. Because, by 1875, telegraphy was a mature technology.
It was generally recognized that a "printing telegraph" was desirable. But it was hard to do. The House Printing Telegraph dated from 1852. Early machines had trouble staying in sync. By 1875, though, there were reasonably good printing telegraphs and stock tickers, using a design by Phelps.
The sending and receiving gear then stagnated for decades. Progress was made in transmission, but the end node technology was relatively static for years. It wasn't until 1921, with the first Teletype machines that worked, that a new technology replaced the old one. The reason was manufacturing technology. The Phelps machines had a relatively low parts count. Teletypes had perhaps 5x as many parts. Until manufacturing techniques improved, page printers were just too much machinery to build and deploy in quantity.
Once Baudot-code teletypes, with associated paper tape punches and readers, were developed, the technology started to move forward again. Messages could at last be forwarded without manual retyping. Forwarding still required people tearing off sections of paper tape from punches and moving them to readers.
It wasn't until 1948 that Western Union Plan 55-A produced a fully automatic message switch. (It was entirely electromechanical, with many paper tape readers and punches, and switchgear to interconnect them. Think Sendmail built from moving parts.)
Not until 1977 did Western Union finally get rid of the last of the paper-tape switching centers. By then, telegrams were in decline anyway.
One of the obvious extensions is a cell phone that's entirely in a headset. No display at all; everything is voice-operated. Preferably with an interface that's at least as smart as Wildfire, not the voice input crap shipping with current headsets. (Wildfire is ten year old technology. It was in use for a while, but took too much CPU power. Microsoft bought it, did little with it, and sold it off. It needs a redo with current voice recognition technology and lower cost.)
Ideally, this should be shrunk down to earring size and not require recharging.
It should also include audio player capabilities, again with no button-pushing, like an iPod Shuffle, only better.
IPv6 should have been built by changing the damn format of the packets, but using the exact same IPv4 addresses with a specific prefix, routed exactly the same place.
Yes, that's what was done the last two times the address space was upgraded.
When ARPANET IMP addresses went from one byte to two bytes, to allow the number of nodes to increase beyond 256, the old addresses retained their 8-bit value, with a new prefix.
When the ARPANET was extended to the Internet, the two byte IMP address was the low two octets of the IP address, and the first two octets were 10 and 0, so IMP addresses converted to IP addresses as [10.0.xxx.xxx]. And that's where "network 10" came from. When the ARPANET went down, it freed up that address space for other uses.
The Linux kernel ought to be done by now, and stable.
Drivers, file systems, and networks ought not to be in the kernel. That's a big part of the problem.
Real microkernels like QNX don't change much. USB and FireWire support were added without kernel mods, for example.
Yes, microkernels require extra copying. But copying is cheap on modern CPUs, as long as what's being copied was accessed recently and is in cache. Fear of copying cost dates from older CPU architectures, where instruction cycles mattered more than cache footprint.
Perhaps they plan to build carriers with larger reactors that have greater output than the needs of the ship itself...
They already have such carriers. All the nuclear carriers have far more nuclear powerplant capacity than they usually use. (The oldest carrier, the Enterprise, has eight nuclear reactors and is way overpowered.) Carriers lug around big tanks of jet fuel, and that's one of the resources that can run out during major operations. The capability to make jet fuel onboard would be a win, even if it was inefficient.
Nuclear submarines already extract fresh water and oxygen from seawater. They also extract hydrogen, but that's just pumped overboard. So there's existing technology for most of the process.
There are already throwable robots. The iRobot PackBot is sometimes thrown through a window
to get a look inside a house. The USMC would like something a bit smaller, but the concept already works.
Previous urban tactics were to throw in a grenade or demolish houses with artillery and tanks, so there's been some progress.
About nine years ago, when phones started to get GPS capability, I was asking people what they thought of having their location tracked. Older people were horrified. Teenagers wanted a live map with all their friends on it.
The cell phone industry was hesitant to roll out GPS-based people tracking applications for years. Helio was the first to really do it, with their "Buddy Beacon" system. (This only worked if both parties had a Helio phone, so it wasn't that useful given Helio's tiny market share.) Now it's a common phone capability.
She's in the miserable position of being a 36-year old second-tier ex-model. That's tough.
Modeling is a low-paying job, except at the top. The top 100 models make real money. The next 500 models do about as well as a successful office worker. Below that, nobody is making real money. The pay is high during work, but there are long dry spells. It's like acting in that respect. In LA, you meet broke actress/model/waitress types so often that it's a cliche.
The work isn't really that much fun, either. Most models aren't doing fashion shows; they're doing catalogs and ads. "OK, next is dress DL-3342, blue, and hurry it up, we have fifty more to shoot before lunch."
When was the GDP not the key indicator of the national economy?
Actually, GDP may be on the way out. There's increased interest in watching consumer spending.
Financial transactions contribute to GDP in a way that creates illusory "production" through double-counting. Because of the turmoil in financial markets over the last year, GDP isn't a strong indicator of real world economic activity.
Older key indicators were housing starts (1990s; Alan Greenspan was a big fan of housing starts), Gross National Product (1980s), real median income (1970s; it peaked in 1973 and hasn't been mentioned much since Reagan), automobile production (1950s-1960s), railroad freight car carloadings (1930s-1940s), and the price of gold (pre-1930s).
Personally, I think the number to watch is either real median income or consumer spending.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're really doing something of value on your own, be very serious about keeping your own work and your employer's work separate. When I did this, the work I was doing at home was on a different kind of computer than I used at work, in a different subject area. I even used a different color of scratch pad for my own work (yellow for the employer, green for my own work). For the employer's work, I used blue pens; for my own work, black pens of a different brand. No paper or media associated with my own work ever entered the employer's premises.
This is a hassle. It is far less hassle than the litigation required to untangle things if you succeed at what you're doing.
It worked out very well for me, and I was able to retire before I was 40.
Most of the proposed "upgrades" are worse. There was a "Clean Slate Program" at Stanford, but the general idea was to put the network firmly under the thumb of the carriers, turning the Internet into something like mobile telephony. That didn't fly.
IPv6 and IPSEC would fix most of the problems down at the IP level. It might be useful if the FCC mandated that US ISPs must support IPv6 to consumers by some date. More likely, China may mandate IPv6; they need the address space. The 2008 Olympics was mostly run on IPv6, so the technology is working there.
I believe this is a conscious commercial strategy designed to drive more and more content to Wikia, which is a for-profit company founded by Jimmy Wales.
I used to think that too. But Wikia has been a flop. It ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] wikis, fan fiction, and TV show wikis. Their demographic lives in their parents basement. Wikia Search, an attempt to "crowdsource" a search engine, shut down months ago. Now Wikia is a dumping ground for material not good enough for Wikipedia. They're not getting major advertisers, just the usual Google ad dreck.
That's not retro; it has a CPU in it. Look at this all vacuum tube digital clock where all the logic is tubes. 103 tubes.
Over the past three years, the standards have tightened up. Now, everything has to have footnoted references. Wikipedia has always required that material be verifiable, but now, "verifiable" means correctly footnoted to a reliable source.
If you've published in refereed journals, or spent time in academia, this is no big deal. The problem for many inexperienced editors is that they're not used to writing with references. Most of the whining comes from people who just want to write their own stuff, not dig for references and write footnotes. Wikipedia calls that "original research".
This requirement first appeared in politically controversial articles. Then it spread to most articles on serious subjects. Now it's applied even to fancruft. ("What do you mean I can't write about 'Zords in Power Rangers: Jungle Fury' because they weren't mentioned in a Journal of Popular Culture article?") The detailed fancruft is gradually moving to Wikia, which has lower standards.
Wikipedia is an open source project with coding standards and quality control, not a blog.
There have been formal semiconductor roadmaps to the future since 1992. There's an consensus roadmap updated annually by an industry group.
This isn't a blue-sky thing. It tells all the players what they need to do to keep up their part of the technology. The fab-equipment people, the device physics people, the etching people, the mask people, the substrate people, the design tools people, etc. all have to push their parts forward. The roadmap tells them how far each piece has to be pushed.
These roadmaps are available for past years, and you can see how the industry has tracked the roadmap. It's reasonably close for any five year period. The big change in the last decade is that heat dissipation is starting to dominate the problem. The roadmap now focuses on memory devices, which have low activity per cell compared to compute elements and aren't yet power-limited.
The current consensus is that the improvements to known technology can get down to 22nm, and then it gets hard. The roadmap assumes CMOS transistors; other devices are discussed, but aren't factored into the mainline predictions.
Kind of reminds me of the 2007 Beowulf movie, the one that's all motion-captured animation but the characters look somewhat like the motion-capture actors. That's the one where Angelina Jolie is drawn as a golden avatar rising out of water. With a tail.
This is very nice work. The most interesting result is that some manipulation problems become easier if done fast. In the short term, inertia makes the motions of objects very predictable. With millisecond reaction times, that can be exploited.
Fast machinery isn't unusual, but it's rarely that smart.
Bank of America used to have a good system for authenticating their site. At login, you input your ID, and the B of A site gave you back a photo of your own choosing to tell you that you were on the real Bank of America site. Only then did you input your password.
Last Friday, B of A broke this feature. I'm now getting a password prompt without seeing the photo I'd chosen. My first thought was that there's was a security problem. I checked the SSL cert info, which looked OK. I reinstalled Firefox. No change. I called Bank of America. They wanted me to remove Flash, which I did. No change. They advised me not to log in. Then they passed me off to tech support, which hasn't called back yet.
Then I took out a Linux-based Eee PC 2G Surf that had been unused for months, powered it up, plugged in an Ethernet cable, and saw the site doing exactly the same thing. So it's probably not a client side problem.
What I think happened is that someone at B of A did a partial site redesign and broke something. They introduced some Flash (something called "/sas/sas-docs/html/pmfso.swf") on the password page (a terrible idea, given Flash's history of security vulnerabilities) and along with that, broke some part of the login process.
If, in fact, they've had a break in on the server side, the main login of Bank of America has been compromised for at least three days now. I'm not seeing any indication of that, though; just general ineptitude.
(The page HTML is awful. It's clearly been modified over and over for years without a cleanup. It has Flash, Javascript, CSS, single-pixel GIFs for formatting, and comments like "July maintenance OLB timeout inactivity update starts". The "enter password" page has 966 lines of HTML and JavaScript, not including external files. That's too much flaky machinery for such a security-critical function.)
Do tell what NASA's core competencies are then.
Public relations, of course. NASA has a huge PR operation, with visitor centers, educational outreach, and other image-enhancement activities.
That Facebook quiz page puts Firefox 3.5 into a loop at:
"Script: file:///D:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/modules/XPCOMUtils.jsm:260"
FAIL.
The Internet Archive has been fighting this, but not to prevent access to out of print books. They want get the same deal as Google - the right to redistribute out of print books unless the author/publisher opts out. What they object to is that the current deal is structured to give Google essentially exclusive rights to charge for access to out of print books. Libraries get one (1) terminal allowed to access the books for free; everything else goes behind a Google paywall.
This is really a legal scheme to make copyright opt-in again, instead of opt-out. Before various revisions to US copyright law, you had to register copyrights and renew them to keep them in force. So out of print stuff slipped easily into the public domain. Under current law, most material is locked up by copyright, even if nobody cares.
They're scraping free data from the FAA web site and FlightStats, then pumping it out into an iPhone app feed.
But they're not using a really good data source. The high quality system is PASSUR RightETA. This system uses hundreds of radar receivers near airports to pick up the transponder signals from aircraft. It doesn't transmit. Any radar in the area that triggers an aircraft transponder causes the transponder to emit, and the PASSUR receivers pick that up. Using multiple receivers and time of flight calculations, the aircraft can be located very precisely. In fact, this is more accurate than single-point radar. You can buy a feed of this data, but it's not free.
I know someone who moved from the iPhone project to Palm. He was at a high enough level to be screamed at by Steve Jobs in person, and he didn't like that. He waited until the iPhone shipped, then left for a company with sane management.
I can imagine a similar discussion in 1875: "What will telegraphs look like in the future?"
Actually, the view from 1875 was surprisingly clear. Because, by 1875, telegraphy was a mature technology.
It was generally recognized that a "printing telegraph" was desirable. But it was hard to do. The House Printing Telegraph dated from 1852. Early machines had trouble staying in sync. By 1875, though, there were reasonably good printing telegraphs and stock tickers, using a design by Phelps.
The sending and receiving gear then stagnated for decades. Progress was made in transmission, but the end node technology was relatively static for years. It wasn't until 1921, with the first Teletype machines that worked, that a new technology replaced the old one. The reason was manufacturing technology. The Phelps machines had a relatively low parts count. Teletypes had perhaps 5x as many parts. Until manufacturing techniques improved, page printers were just too much machinery to build and deploy in quantity.
Once Baudot-code teletypes, with associated paper tape punches and readers, were developed, the technology started to move forward again. Messages could at last be forwarded without manual retyping. Forwarding still required people tearing off sections of paper tape from punches and moving them to readers. It wasn't until 1948 that Western Union Plan 55-A produced a fully automatic message switch. (It was entirely electromechanical, with many paper tape readers and punches, and switchgear to interconnect them. Think Sendmail built from moving parts.)
Not until 1977 did Western Union finally get rid of the last of the paper-tape switching centers. By then, telegrams were in decline anyway.
One of the obvious extensions is a cell phone that's entirely in a headset. No display at all; everything is voice-operated. Preferably with an interface that's at least as smart as Wildfire, not the voice input crap shipping with current headsets. (Wildfire is ten year old technology. It was in use for a while, but took too much CPU power. Microsoft bought it, did little with it, and sold it off. It needs a redo with current voice recognition technology and lower cost.)
Ideally, this should be shrunk down to earring size and not require recharging.
It should also include audio player capabilities, again with no button-pushing, like an iPod Shuffle, only better.
IPv6 should have been built by changing the damn format of the packets, but using the exact same IPv4 addresses with a specific prefix, routed exactly the same place.
Yes, that's what was done the last two times the address space was upgraded.
When ARPANET IMP addresses went from one byte to two bytes, to allow the number of nodes to increase beyond 256, the old addresses retained their 8-bit value, with a new prefix.
When the ARPANET was extended to the Internet, the two byte IMP address was the low two octets of the IP address, and the first two octets were 10 and 0, so IMP addresses converted to IP addresses as [10.0.xxx.xxx]. And that's where "network 10" came from. When the ARPANET went down, it freed up that address space for other uses.
But we have DNS now.
The Linux kernel ought to be done by now, and stable.
Drivers, file systems, and networks ought not to be in the kernel. That's a big part of the problem.
Real microkernels like QNX don't change much. USB and FireWire support were added without kernel mods, for example.
Yes, microkernels require extra copying. But copying is cheap on modern CPUs, as long as what's being copied was accessed recently and is in cache. Fear of copying cost dates from older CPU architectures, where instruction cycles mattered more than cache footprint.
Perhaps they plan to build carriers with larger reactors that have greater output than the needs of the ship itself...
They already have such carriers. All the nuclear carriers have far more nuclear powerplant capacity than they usually use. (The oldest carrier, the Enterprise, has eight nuclear reactors and is way overpowered.) Carriers lug around big tanks of jet fuel, and that's one of the resources that can run out during major operations. The capability to make jet fuel onboard would be a win, even if it was inefficient.
Nuclear submarines already extract fresh water and oxygen from seawater. They also extract hydrogen, but that's just pumped overboard. So there's existing technology for most of the process.
There are already throwable robots. The iRobot PackBot is sometimes thrown through a window to get a look inside a house. The USMC would like something a bit smaller, but the concept already works.
Previous urban tactics were to throw in a grenade or demolish houses with artillery and tanks, so there's been some progress.
Did you also ask the Teenagers about their parents having a live map with them on it?
Today, I heard an AT&T radio ad for exactly that.
About nine years ago, when phones started to get GPS capability, I was asking people what they thought of having their location tracked. Older people were horrified. Teenagers wanted a live map with all their friends on it.
The cell phone industry was hesitant to roll out GPS-based people tracking applications for years. Helio was the first to really do it, with their "Buddy Beacon" system. (This only worked if both parties had a Helio phone, so it wasn't that useful given Helio's tiny market share.) Now it's a common phone capability.
She's in the miserable position of being a 36-year old second-tier ex-model. That's tough.
Modeling is a low-paying job, except at the top. The top 100 models make real money. The next 500 models do about as well as a successful office worker. Below that, nobody is making real money. The pay is high during work, but there are long dry spells. It's like acting in that respect. In LA, you meet broke actress/model/waitress types so often that it's a cliche.
The work isn't really that much fun, either. Most models aren't doing fashion shows; they're doing catalogs and ads. "OK, next is dress DL-3342, blue, and hurry it up, we have fifty more to shoot before lunch."
When was the GDP not the key indicator of the national economy?
Actually, GDP may be on the way out. There's increased interest in watching consumer spending. Financial transactions contribute to GDP in a way that creates illusory "production" through double-counting. Because of the turmoil in financial markets over the last year, GDP isn't a strong indicator of real world economic activity.
Older key indicators were housing starts (1990s; Alan Greenspan was a big fan of housing starts), Gross National Product (1980s), real median income (1970s; it peaked in 1973 and hasn't been mentioned much since Reagan), automobile production (1950s-1960s), railroad freight car carloadings (1930s-1940s), and the price of gold (pre-1930s).
Personally, I think the number to watch is either real median income or consumer spending.