I went to a talk by Pickens, and I think he's losing it. He didn't mention wind at all. He was talking about how natural gas is going to solve all our energy problems, and how we just have to convert heavy trucks to run on natural gas. He's far more optimistic about natural gas supplies than most people in the industry.
"Like every company in the free space, your lifecycle has come to its conclusion. Don't fight it. Admit it. Profit from it."
As I point out occasionally, that's definitely true of social networks, which have a short life cycle of coolness, like nightclubs. It's less true of useful services, like PayPal or eTrade. (eTrade got into trouble because they got into home equity loans as a side business. One of the headaches of running a financial business is keeping the guys who want to do "big deals" with company assets under control.)
eBay is an especially good example, because 1) it has a real revenue model, and 2) there's a strong network effect in having one big auction market rather than many little ones. It's going to be tough for someone to knock off eBay. Many have tried and failed.
I don't know the details, but Robert Rodriguez seems to run a pretty light ship (Spy Kids, Sin City, the Mariachi films).
A few directors are good at cost control. Not many. Roger Corman (read his book "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime") is the all-time champion on getting production value at low, low cost. It's not about equipment cost, by the way. It's about time management.
One of the big problems with Internet businesses is that there's a huge disconnect between what will attract users and what will make money. In 1999, there were companies saying that growth was about "eyeballs", and only "old economy" people worried about revenue. That didn't work out too well. For a recap of this, see Downside's Deathwatch, which I did back then. (Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", it means they're long gone.)
So we've heard that particular line of bullshit before.
Similar claims have been heard for social networks, few of which have paid back their original investment. Myspace, in their best year, (2007) made only $10 million.
News Corp paid $580 million for Myspace. They'll never see that back. Investors in other has-been social networks (AOL, GeoCities, Orkut, Tribe, Friendster, Classmates, Nerve, etc.) did even worse.
Andreessen has a point that YouTube would have had to find a way to become profitable by now if they weren't part of Google. Of course they would. No VC would continue to fund a money drain like YouTube. YouTube couldn't even survive as a zombie; they cost too much to run. ("zombie": VC term for companies which can't come close to paying their startup investment, but generate just enough revenue to cover their operating costs. They're the living dead of startups.)
Google still gets something like 97% of their revenue from AdWords. Everything else they've done loses money. Google had one great revenue product - AdWords. They've been frantically trying to find another, without success. Google has a great capability for deploying money-losing free services, but none of them, from Gmail to book-scanning, are generating serious revenue.
There are lots of things that are interesting to do technically, and even useful and popular, but don't make money. I've done a few myself. Andreessen probably has some good ideas like that, and I'm sure he can find more. But if he's going to run money as a VC, he'll have to do better.
Better than the average VC, in fact.
There are currently too many venture capitalists. VCs as a group lose money, and have been losing money since 2003 or so. Venture capital as a business used to be highly profitable, but it no longer is. Too much dumb money came in during the first dot-com boom, and the VC business overexpanded. Silicon Valley venture capital used to be about funding a few engineers in a lab to do something great. Those startups often failed, but didn't cost more than a few million when they did. If one in 10 did something good, that was a win. During the dot-com boom, VCs started funding companies into the deployment and operating phase, which is when it starts to really cost. That's a way to lose hundreds of millions a pop.
So we'll see how Andreessen does. Remember, though, that it's not a win until long-term profitability is achieved and the original investment paid back.
Hollywood will see the commoditization of entertainment blockbusters...
Yeah, right. A bunch of open source enthusiasts will create a blockbuster movie. This is a crowd that can't create a decent set of desktop icons or logos that don't suck.
The tools for creating a good effects movie are available right now. Download Blender. Here's some good work done with Blender.. Unless you have real talent, you'll only be able to make crap with it. Sorry.
Look at YouTube. The Onion's take on YouTube is apt. If YouTube ever gets a plagiarism detection system that works, YouTube will die. Almost all the good content is a copy of something. Taking video is easy. Making a good movie is very hard. Assembling bits of clip art won't cut it.
A few years back, I was talking to a successful Hollywood director about where the technology was going. What he wanted was technology that would allow him to make a major film for about $10 million to $20 million, with a staff of 20-50 people, instead of needing $100 million and the services of over 500 people. We still don't have that. That's the technical challenge.
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was an attempt at a low-budget high-look production. The guy behind that actually tried to make the movie at home on a Mac, over a period of years. Not good enough. (The result can be seen in the "special features" section of the movie's DVD.) Producing the movie for real ultimately cost nearly $100 million, even though it was almost entirely green-screen work.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the USAF put a huge amount of effort into making electronics more reliable, with considerable success. One of their more interesting efforts involved marking a few percent of the Air Force's inventory of electronics boxes with a sticker instructing users that the unit was part of the USAF's Reliability Program, and if it broke, it was to be replaced as a unit, not fixed in the field. The broken unit was to be sent back to a lab (at Wright-Patterson AFB, I think) for analysis.
At the lab, the unit was tested and the failing component(s) found. The, the failing component was disassembled and analyzed. This involved opening up transistor cans and looking at the component under a microscope, and if necessary, an electron microscope. The USAF was trying to understand why components failed in the field. Did a "hermetic" seal leak? Was a bonding wire badly soldered to a pad? Was something mispositioned? Was the transistor substrate damaged?
Results were published in Aviation Week. With enlarged pictures of the defect. Part numbers and names of vendors were given. The USAF deliberately did this to apply pain to vendors.
Over time, parts got much better. By the 1980s, though, the USAF wasn't buying a big enough fraction of the output of the electronics industry to get much attention, much to the annoyance of senior USAF types.
Re:1976 TI Silent 700 Terminal - $1995, 13 lbs.
on
The Laptop, Circa 1968
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital.
Early FSK modems, below 1200 baud, were analog devices. The output side was just an oscillator switched between two frequencies, and the input side was a pair of filters.
This was a version of the technology used for radioteletype (RTTY), where it had often been
implemented with tubes. (There are some very retro radio hams still using all-tube demodulators with mechanical teletypes.)
At 1200 baud and above, modem technology changed drastically, and digital components appeared. But modems were still mostly analog devices until DSP-based modems became economically feasible in the 1980s.
We had one of those at Sperry Vickers (Troy, Michigan) in 1971, with the acoustic coupler in the wooden case. Even then, it was on the way out; we were moving to Uniscope CRT terminals and UNIVAC DCT 300 printers, connected to a UNIVAC 1108 computer.
Power was supplied to the modem as 120 VAC over otherwise-unused pins in the DB-25 connector from the Teletype Model 33 ASR.
Things were really clunky back then. We still had a full set of mechanical Remington Rand 90-column card gear, programmed by wiring up "connection boxes", mechanical plugboards which used flexible cables like bike brake cables to transmit data from input to output. That, too, was on the way out, but it was still used for a few jobs.
Which is why there should be a reference implementation that's free for anyone to use and relicense for any purpose.
The HTML 5 spec describes state machines for the tokenizer and parser, but it describes them in text. They should have been described in some formalism. There are well-known formalisms for describing syntax to a parser (BNF, state transition diagrams, transition tables, "yacc", etc.) that have been
developed in the programming language community over decades. But the HTML crowd doesn't seem to like formalism. This is a lack. It would be helpful if all parsers ran exactly the same state machines.
There is, though, a free parser implementation in Python. It's very straightforward code. Take a look at "tokenizer.py", where you can see the HTML 5 tokenization rules written out in Python in a very clear way. It probably won't run fast, though.
On a related tangent, have any of you wondered why mathematics uses prose rather than some kind of formalized pseudo-code to express algorithms?
There's mathematical work that uses a formalized pseudo-code. Look up Boyer-Moore theory.
This system still assumes the switches are trusted. The point-to-point links have quantum encryption, but that doesn't help in networks with enough stations to need routers.
From a crypto management point of view, secure links between two fixed points are easy. One time keys will work. Networks are much more difficult.
Remember the big flap with Second Life banks when Ginko Financial failed? They had a real bank run in Second Life, with avatars crowding branches demanding their money.
Linden Labs then banned all "banks" in Second Life unless operated by a regulated real-world financial institution. A few real banks established a presence in Second Life, but most (maybe all) have given it up by now.
The problem with banks in a virtual world is that what banks really do is sell loans. It's hard to collect from an avatar. So a loan business is tough to make work. A deposit and transfer business is quite workable, but it's expensive to run well. Among other things, it has all the fraud-prevention problems and costs of, say, PayPal.
Formally, HTML 5 is no longer based on SGML; the spec says this. The only SGML directive allowed is <!DOCTYPE... >. One advantage of this is that bogus (but not uncommon) HTML comments of the form <!This is an invalid comment> can now be parsed unambiguously. There's no need to worry about parsing unexpected SGML directives inside HTML.
HTML 5 parsing is just awful.
on
XHTML 2 Cancelled
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
At least with XML you have a simple, well-defined way to convert the XML text to a tree. With HTML 5, there's only "well-defined error handling". Read the
sort-of specification for this.
Here's what's supposed to happen for just one of the hard cases. (There are dozens of other cases, some at least as ugly.) Parsing is in "body" mode (normal content) and an end tag whose tag name is one of: "a", "b", "big", "code", "em", "font", "i", "nobr", "s", "small", "strike", "strong", "tt", "u" has been encountered.
Follow these steps:
Let the formatting element be the last element in the list of active formatting elements that:
is between the end of the list and the last scope marker in the list, if any, or the start of the list otherwise, and
has the same tag name as the token.
If there is no such node, or, if that node is also in the stack of open elements but the element is not in scope, then this is a parse error; ignore the token, and abort these steps.
Otherwise, if there is such a node, but that node is not in the stack of open elements, then this is a parse error; remove the element from the list, and abort these steps.
Otherwise, there is a formatting element and that element is in the stack and is in scope. If the element is not the current node, this is a parse error. In any case, proceed with the algorithm as written in the following steps.
Let the furthest block be the topmost node in the stack of open elements that is lower in the stack than the formatting element, and is not an element in the phrasing or formatting categories. There might not be one.
If there is no furthest block, then the UA must skip the subsequent steps and instead just pop all the nodes from the bottom of the stack of open elements, from the current node up to and including the formatting element, and remove the formatting element from the list of active formatting elements.
Let the common ancestor be the element immediately above the formatting element in the stack of open elements.
Let a bookmark note the position of the formatting element in the list of active formatting elements relative to the elements on either side of it in the list.
Let node and last node be the furthest block. Follow these steps:
Let node be the element immediately above node in the stack of open elements.
If node is not in the list of active formatting elements, then remove node from the stack of open elements and then go back to step 1.
Otherwise, if node is the formatting element, then go to the next step in the overall algorithm.
Otherwise, if last node is the furthest block, then move the aforementioned bookmark to be immediately after the node in the list of active formatting elements.
Create an element for the token for which the element node was created, replace the entry for node in the list of active formatting elements with an entry for the new element, replace the entry for node in the stack of open elements with an entry for the new element, and let node be the new element.
Insert last node into node, first removing it from its previous parent node if any.
Let last node be node.
Return to step 1 of this inner set of steps.
If the common ancestor node is a table, tbody, tfoot, thead, or tr element, then, foster parent whatever last node ended up being in the previous step, first removing it from its previous parent node if any.
Otherwise, append whatever last node ended up being in the previous step to the common ancestor node, first removing it from its previous parent node if any.
Create an element for the token for which the formatting element was created.
Take all of the child nodes of the furthest block and append them to the element created in the last st
Valid XML, all the time. Require that the tags balance, as in XHTML. This will make the document tree well-defined, which, at the moment, it is not. So all software that works on the DOM will behave consistently.
Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.
No more upper code pages. The only valid character sets should be Unicode, or ASCII with HTML escapes. Chars above 127 in ASCII mode are to be rendered as a black dot or square. No more "Latin-1", or the pre-Unicode encodings of Han or Korean. So all pages will render in all browsers, provided only that they have some full Unicode font.
Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.
WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.
2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.
Better parallelism. Pages must do their initial render without "document.write()". Forcing sequentiality during initial page load should be considered an error. This will make pages load faster. Some ad code will have to be rewritten.
Don't get too excited. A few other promising AIDS vaccines have made it this far. Phase I testing is just testing for safety, not effectiveness. Phase II testing is for effectiveness, and phase III testing is for effectiveness in a larger population. VaxGen's vaccine made it to Phase III before it turned out not to be very effective. 95% of the new drugs that make it to the beginning of testing in humans don't turn out to be useful.
Hollywood is really stuck for ideas. They've used up all the classic fables. They've used up the better cartoon characters. They've gone though the action figures. ("Transformers 2?" Coming up next, "GI Joe") The better video games have been done.
Every once in a while there's a successful original ("Up" being the latest example) but that's rare.
This expands the "safe harbor" of the CDA to cover ad-blockers. Now, ISP's can offer ad removal as a service. Corporate firewalls can provide ad-blocking. This would cut web traffic way down and speed up browsing.
This is almost as good as WowWee's Bat and Dragon. They're little, they fly with moving wings, and they can hover. $39.99. Available wherever toys are sold.
That's the entry-level product; the next step up, the Green Dragonfly, is an indoor/outdoor R/C ornithopter capable of hovering.
Those models doesn't have any onboard intelligence, but some of the other WowWee flying machines have collision avoidance. WowWee has a whole line of flying and robotic toys, and they deliver impressive technology at prices well under $100. Maybe DARPA should outsource.
I don't know of a single video game that actually trains you to use a weapon.
Silent Scope, an arcade game with a realistic sniper rifle. Silent Scope had a small LCD screen in the rifle's scope which provided a close-up view. That bothered some people, and no game has used that idea since.
And, of course, there's a whole series of "Deer Hunter" games, popular in red states.
During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1998)
That was from S.L.A. Marshall. There's a long analysis of that guy by Col. David Hackworth, who knew him well, in About Face. Much of S.L.A. Marshall's writings on war were faked. He wrote convincingly, but even though he really was a U.S. Army general in WWII, he never commanded a combat unit. He was a staff analyst. He made stuff up, and then wrote about it as if he'd been there.
Agreed. The whole "affiliate" business is mostly slimeballs now, anyway. After all, you can still buy the product. It's just that the spammer with the "affiliate" site doesn't get paid.
In the words of the New Yorker, on his bail hearing a few months back: "As soon as Sorkin finished asking that Madoff's bail be continued, Chin said curtly, "I don't need to hear from the government. It is my intention to remand Mr. Madoff." Immediate applause, quickly tamped down by the Judge. Moments later, two court officers approached Madoff, who stood silently and still, and then he moved his arms a little so that his hands were behind his back. And then there was a click."
That was Madoff's last moment of freedom for the rest of his life.
Madoff is Federal inmate #61727-054 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City, NY. That's a maximum security facility. Here is Madoff's cell.
MCC isn't a long-term facility, so the Bureau of Prisons will probably move him after a while.
The part of Google that actually makes money is surprisingly small. The search engine staff was under 100 people until a few years ago, and about fifteen of them did all the hard parts. AdWords has more people, plus a sizable sales staff. But it's not huge, and it's smaller since Google closed some of their branch sales offices. At peak, Google had around 20,000 employees. Two years ago, they had about 12,000, and they could profitably shrink back to that level. They've been dumping excess contract employees for the last year.
The labor-intensive parts are mostly in the money drains - YouTube, GMail, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to a talk by Pickens, and I think he's losing it. He didn't mention wind at all. He was talking about how natural gas is going to solve all our energy problems, and how we just have to convert heavy trucks to run on natural gas. He's far more optimistic about natural gas supplies than most people in the industry.
This is a losing strategy in real life, or even real war. (Roman saying: "The legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the legion kills.")
It doesn't really matter. Microsoft isn't supporting the <video> tag in HTML5.
"Like every company in the free space, your lifecycle has come to its conclusion. Don't fight it. Admit it. Profit from it."
As I point out occasionally, that's definitely true of social networks, which have a short life cycle of coolness, like nightclubs. It's less true of useful services, like PayPal or eTrade. (eTrade got into trouble because they got into home equity loans as a side business. One of the headaches of running a financial business is keeping the guys who want to do "big deals" with company assets under control.)
eBay is an especially good example, because 1) it has a real revenue model, and 2) there's a strong network effect in having one big auction market rather than many little ones. It's going to be tough for someone to knock off eBay. Many have tried and failed.
I don't know the details, but Robert Rodriguez seems to run a pretty light ship (Spy Kids, Sin City, the Mariachi films).
A few directors are good at cost control. Not many. Roger Corman (read his book "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime") is the all-time champion on getting production value at low, low cost. It's not about equipment cost, by the way. It's about time management.
One of the big problems with Internet businesses is that there's a huge disconnect between what will attract users and what will make money. In 1999, there were companies saying that growth was about "eyeballs", and only "old economy" people worried about revenue. That didn't work out too well. For a recap of this, see Downside's Deathwatch, which I did back then. (Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", it means they're long gone.) So we've heard that particular line of bullshit before.
Similar claims have been heard for social networks, few of which have paid back their original investment. Myspace, in their best year, (2007) made only $10 million. News Corp paid $580 million for Myspace. They'll never see that back. Investors in other has-been social networks (AOL, GeoCities, Orkut, Tribe, Friendster, Classmates, Nerve, etc.) did even worse.
Andreessen has a point that YouTube would have had to find a way to become profitable by now if they weren't part of Google. Of course they would. No VC would continue to fund a money drain like YouTube. YouTube couldn't even survive as a zombie; they cost too much to run. ("zombie": VC term for companies which can't come close to paying their startup investment, but generate just enough revenue to cover their operating costs. They're the living dead of startups.)
Google still gets something like 97% of their revenue from AdWords. Everything else they've done loses money. Google had one great revenue product - AdWords. They've been frantically trying to find another, without success. Google has a great capability for deploying money-losing free services, but none of them, from Gmail to book-scanning, are generating serious revenue.
There are lots of things that are interesting to do technically, and even useful and popular, but don't make money. I've done a few myself. Andreessen probably has some good ideas like that, and I'm sure he can find more. But if he's going to run money as a VC, he'll have to do better.
Better than the average VC, in fact. There are currently too many venture capitalists. VCs as a group lose money, and have been losing money since 2003 or so. Venture capital as a business used to be highly profitable, but it no longer is. Too much dumb money came in during the first dot-com boom, and the VC business overexpanded. Silicon Valley venture capital used to be about funding a few engineers in a lab to do something great. Those startups often failed, but didn't cost more than a few million when they did. If one in 10 did something good, that was a win. During the dot-com boom, VCs started funding companies into the deployment and operating phase, which is when it starts to really cost. That's a way to lose hundreds of millions a pop.
So we'll see how Andreessen does. Remember, though, that it's not a win until long-term profitability is achieved and the original investment paid back.
Hollywood will see the commoditization of entertainment blockbusters...
Yeah, right. A bunch of open source enthusiasts will create a blockbuster movie. This is a crowd that can't create a decent set of desktop icons or logos that don't suck.
The tools for creating a good effects movie are available right now. Download Blender. Here's some good work done with Blender.. Unless you have real talent, you'll only be able to make crap with it. Sorry.
Look at YouTube. The Onion's take on YouTube is apt. If YouTube ever gets a plagiarism detection system that works, YouTube will die. Almost all the good content is a copy of something. Taking video is easy. Making a good movie is very hard. Assembling bits of clip art won't cut it.
A few years back, I was talking to a successful Hollywood director about where the technology was going. What he wanted was technology that would allow him to make a major film for about $10 million to $20 million, with a staff of 20-50 people, instead of needing $100 million and the services of over 500 people. We still don't have that. That's the technical challenge.
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was an attempt at a low-budget high-look production. The guy behind that actually tried to make the movie at home on a Mac, over a period of years. Not good enough. (The result can be seen in the "special features" section of the movie's DVD.) Producing the movie for real ultimately cost nearly $100 million, even though it was almost entirely green-screen work.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the USAF put a huge amount of effort into making electronics more reliable, with considerable success. One of their more interesting efforts involved marking a few percent of the Air Force's inventory of electronics boxes with a sticker instructing users that the unit was part of the USAF's Reliability Program, and if it broke, it was to be replaced as a unit, not fixed in the field. The broken unit was to be sent back to a lab (at Wright-Patterson AFB, I think) for analysis.
At the lab, the unit was tested and the failing component(s) found. The, the failing component was disassembled and analyzed. This involved opening up transistor cans and looking at the component under a microscope, and if necessary, an electron microscope. The USAF was trying to understand why components failed in the field. Did a "hermetic" seal leak? Was a bonding wire badly soldered to a pad? Was something mispositioned? Was the transistor substrate damaged?
Results were published in Aviation Week. With enlarged pictures of the defect. Part numbers and names of vendors were given. The USAF deliberately did this to apply pain to vendors.
Over time, parts got much better. By the 1980s, though, the USAF wasn't buying a big enough fraction of the output of the electronics industry to get much attention, much to the annoyance of senior USAF types.
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital.
Early FSK modems, below 1200 baud, were analog devices. The output side was just an oscillator switched between two frequencies, and the input side was a pair of filters. This was a version of the technology used for radioteletype (RTTY), where it had often been implemented with tubes. (There are some very retro radio hams still using all-tube demodulators with mechanical teletypes.)
At 1200 baud and above, modem technology changed drastically, and digital components appeared. But modems were still mostly analog devices until DSP-based modems became economically feasible in the 1980s.
We had one of those at Sperry Vickers (Troy, Michigan) in 1971, with the acoustic coupler in the wooden case. Even then, it was on the way out; we were moving to Uniscope CRT terminals and UNIVAC DCT 300 printers, connected to a UNIVAC 1108 computer.
Power was supplied to the modem as 120 VAC over otherwise-unused pins in the DB-25 connector from the Teletype Model 33 ASR.
Things were really clunky back then. We still had a full set of mechanical Remington Rand 90-column card gear, programmed by wiring up "connection boxes", mechanical plugboards which used flexible cables like bike brake cables to transmit data from input to output. That, too, was on the way out, but it was still used for a few jobs.
Which is why there should be a reference implementation that's free for anyone to use and relicense for any purpose.
The HTML 5 spec describes state machines for the tokenizer and parser, but it describes them in text. They should have been described in some formalism. There are well-known formalisms for describing syntax to a parser (BNF, state transition diagrams, transition tables, "yacc", etc.) that have been developed in the programming language community over decades. But the HTML crowd doesn't seem to like formalism. This is a lack. It would be helpful if all parsers ran exactly the same state machines.
There is, though, a free parser implementation in Python. It's very straightforward code. Take a look at "tokenizer.py", where you can see the HTML 5 tokenization rules written out in Python in a very clear way. It probably won't run fast, though.
On a related tangent, have any of you wondered why mathematics uses prose rather than some kind of formalized pseudo-code to express algorithms?
There's mathematical work that uses a formalized pseudo-code. Look up Boyer-Moore theory.
This system still assumes the switches are trusted. The point-to-point links have quantum encryption, but that doesn't help in networks with enough stations to need routers.
From a crypto management point of view, secure links between two fixed points are easy. One time keys will work. Networks are much more difficult.
Remember the big flap with Second Life banks when Ginko Financial failed? They had a real bank run in Second Life, with avatars crowding branches demanding their money.
Linden Labs then banned all "banks" in Second Life unless operated by a regulated real-world financial institution. A few real banks established a presence in Second Life, but most (maybe all) have given it up by now.
The problem with banks in a virtual world is that what banks really do is sell loans. It's hard to collect from an avatar. So a loan business is tough to make work. A deposit and transfer business is quite workable, but it's expensive to run well. Among other things, it has all the fraud-prevention problems and costs of, say, PayPal.
Formally, HTML 5 is no longer based on SGML; the spec says this. The only SGML directive allowed is <!DOCTYPE ... >. One advantage of this is that bogus (but not uncommon) HTML comments of the form <!This is an invalid comment> can now be parsed unambiguously. There's no need to worry about parsing unexpected SGML directives inside HTML.
At least with XML you have a simple, well-defined way to convert the XML text to a tree. With HTML 5, there's only "well-defined error handling". Read the sort-of specification for this.
Here's what's supposed to happen for just one of the hard cases. (There are dozens of other cases, some at least as ugly.) Parsing is in "body" mode (normal content) and an end tag whose tag name is one of: "a", "b", "big", "code", "em", "font", "i", "nobr", "s", "small", "strike", "strong", "tt", "u" has been encountered.
Follow these steps:
If there is no such node, or, if that node is also in the stack of open elements but the element is not in scope, then this is a parse error; ignore the token, and abort these steps.
Otherwise, if there is such a node, but that node is not in the stack of open elements, then this is a parse error; remove the element from the list, and abort these steps.
Otherwise, there is a formatting element and that element is in the stack and is in scope. If the element is not the current node, this is a parse error. In any case, proceed with the algorithm as written in the following steps.
Otherwise, append whatever last node ended up being in the previous step to the common ancestor node, first removing it from its previous parent node if any.
What we really need in HTML standarization:
Don't get too excited. A few other promising AIDS vaccines have made it this far. Phase I testing is just testing for safety, not effectiveness. Phase II testing is for effectiveness, and phase III testing is for effectiveness in a larger population. VaxGen's vaccine made it to Phase III before it turned out not to be very effective. 95% of the new drugs that make it to the beginning of testing in humans don't turn out to be useful.
Hollywood is really stuck for ideas. They've used up all the classic fables. They've used up the better cartoon characters. They've gone though the action figures. ("Transformers 2?" Coming up next, "GI Joe") The better video games have been done.
Every once in a while there's a successful original ("Up" being the latest example) but that's rare.
This expands the "safe harbor" of the CDA to cover ad-blockers. Now, ISP's can offer ad removal as a service. Corporate firewalls can provide ad-blocking. This would cut web traffic way down and speed up browsing.
This is almost as good as WowWee's Bat and Dragon. They're little, they fly with moving wings, and they can hover. $39.99. Available wherever toys are sold. That's the entry-level product; the next step up, the Green Dragonfly, is an indoor/outdoor R/C ornithopter capable of hovering.
Those models doesn't have any onboard intelligence, but some of the other WowWee flying machines have collision avoidance. WowWee has a whole line of flying and robotic toys, and they deliver impressive technology at prices well under $100. Maybe DARPA should outsource.
I don't know of a single video game that actually trains you to use a weapon.
Silent Scope, an arcade game with a realistic sniper rifle. Silent Scope had a small LCD screen in the rifle's scope which provided a close-up view. That bothered some people, and no game has used that idea since.
And, of course, there's a whole series of "Deer Hunter" games, popular in red states.
During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1998)
That was from S.L.A. Marshall. There's a long analysis of that guy by Col. David Hackworth, who knew him well, in About Face. Much of S.L.A. Marshall's writings on war were faked. He wrote convincingly, but even though he really was a U.S. Army general in WWII, he never commanded a combat unit. He was a staff analyst. He made stuff up, and then wrote about it as if he'd been there.
Agreed. The whole "affiliate" business is mostly slimeballs now, anyway. After all, you can still buy the product. It's just that the spammer with the "affiliate" site doesn't get paid.
No. He's been in jail for months.
In the words of the New Yorker, on his bail hearing a few months back: "As soon as Sorkin finished asking that Madoff's bail be continued, Chin said curtly, "I don't need to hear from the government. It is my intention to remand Mr. Madoff." Immediate applause, quickly tamped down by the Judge. Moments later, two court officers approached Madoff, who stood silently and still, and then he moved his arms a little so that his hands were behind his back. And then there was a click."
That was Madoff's last moment of freedom for the rest of his life. Madoff is Federal inmate #61727-054 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City, NY. That's a maximum security facility. Here is Madoff's cell.
MCC isn't a long-term facility, so the Bureau of Prisons will probably move him after a while.
The part of Google that actually makes money is surprisingly small. The search engine staff was under 100 people until a few years ago, and about fifteen of them did all the hard parts. AdWords has more people, plus a sizable sales staff. But it's not huge, and it's smaller since Google closed some of their branch sales offices. At peak, Google had around 20,000 employees. Two years ago, they had about 12,000, and they could profitably shrink back to that level. They've been dumping excess contract employees for the last year.
The labor-intensive parts are mostly in the money drains - YouTube, GMail, etc.