The Microsoft announcement says "Use of the software is governed by the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistance 6.5 Beta License Agreement accessible as a file in this download." So you can't read the terms of service without downloading (and installling?) the software.
For something that opens up remote access to local machines, with that access under the control of Microsoft, this matters.
What responsibility does Microsoft take for the security of your stored data? Is the system HIPPA compliant? Would it meet the standards for confidentiality of legal work product? Those of the Industrial Security Manual for unclassified but sensitive information? Does Microsoft claim any ownership rights in your data (like Facebook just tried?) Can your stored data be used to target advertising (like Google does?) What cryptosystem is being used? Who has access to the keys?
Until all those questions have been answered and the answers reviewed by qualified third parties, using this system in a business environment might be construed as gross negligence.
Buddy Beacon is the new way for Helio members to synchronize their social lives and tell friends where the fun is. Rather than calling or texting, Helio members can switch on their Buddy Beacon and use satellite technology to broadcast their location to the friends they add to their Buddy List. When they turn on Buddy Beacon, their Buddy List friends can see their location on a map along with a nearby address. Members can add up to 25 Buddies to their Buddy List. When members change locations and want to let everyone know the party is on the move, one simple command refreshes the location. Want to hide out? Just leave Buddy Beacon off to enjoy a night of privacy or to slip out the back of the club into the VIP room."
That's a clause that only matters if Facebook is in decline. On the way up, the fate of the information about departed users doesn't matter. On the way down, it matters a lot.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, which is reflected in their long term traffic statistics. They open, they may become popular, the cool people move in, there's a herd effect that makes them grow more if they start to become popular, the losers move in, the cool people leave, growth starts to flatten, and then the long decline starts, usually leveling out at maybe a quarter of peak. This works just like cool nightclubs and restaurants. Anybody who goes out frequently in a major city knows this pattern.
AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Salon, Nerve, Bebo, and Tribe all peaked years ago. Myspace peaked in early 2008, according to Alexa traffic stats. Facebook hasn't visibly peaked yet, but it looks like their management sees the inevitable coming and is getting ready.
This is a hint that it's too late for Facebook to IPO. That had to happen on the way up, or it won't happen at all. There was much talk of a Facebook IPO in 2007 or 2008, but now the word is "2010, if ever". Probably never. They should have gone public earlier.
If local dtv were serious about channel usage they could provide up to 5 tv signals per channel on their bandwidth
If the channels have any action, the quality will suck with five subchannels. That's all coming out of the same bandwidth. Low action channels (shopping, golf, talking heads (preachers, politicians)) can be compressed heavily without visible degradation, because the motion compression isn't dealing with much motion. Action sports don't compress well. Football is especially tough because there's so much
motion in different directions and the fans want to see the details of that motion.
Getting past the buzzwords, the real issue here is that key/value databases don't do joins. Joins are expensive and hard to distribute across machines. For many web apps, one key is enough to find the relevant data, and general joins aren't necessary.
Both Google and Amazon realized this, and their key/value systems don't support joins. Developers of both systems have spoken in EE380 at Stanford, and were grilled over this issue. The big advantage of a join-free system is that a database can be split across machines without the need for elaborate intercommunication between them. You can simply put keys A-L on machine 1, and keys M-Z on machine 2. There are no crosslinks between the machines, and you don't have to do inter-machine locking. The front end machines just direct the query to the appropriate back-end machine based on the key.
There's a set of things you can't do this way, but they seem not to be the high-volume queries in web applications. That's the real insight here.
This is very cute. The pendulum is powered, weakly, by a coil centered under the pendulum's rest point pushing against a permanent magnet in the bob. This is symmetrical; it pushes radially away from the rest position. So there's no active control over the direction of swing.
The new insight is that if the pushing pulse is delayed to the right point in the cycle, the applied force dampens, rather than increases, the tendency for the oscillation to become ellipical. The optimal time for the pushing pulse has been worked out. It's a neat little result.
Second, cable-chewing is a problem solved long ago by Western Electric, back when they made the cable for the Bell System. Find a telco outside plant person and get their advice.
For indoor use, there is rat-proof LAN cable.
JSON is a result of a piece of stupidity in the design of JavaScript. In LISP, you had the "reader", which took in a string and produced an S-expression (an in-memory linked structure), and you had "eval", which ran an S-expression as code. Using the "reader" on hostile data was safe, but "eval" was not.
JavaScript combines both functions into "eval". Since "eval" has the only built-in parser in the language, it's tempting to use it to parse data representations. Especially since character-by-character parsing in an interpreted language isn't very fast.
Attempts have been made to work around this by examining the string to be parsed, looking for "bad stuff", before applying "eval". This works about as well as you'd expect; attackers devise "bad stuff" the examiner won't recognize. More complex "examiners" work better, but run slower.
The end result is that "JSON" as a data transfer medium is either slow or insecure. Guess which option usually gets picked.
Those who do not know history are condemned to re-implement it, badly.
If Palm is going to use JSON in their system, though, they could provide a built-in parser for data expressions only, not just "eval". That would fix the problem. Maybe we could even get that into standard JavaScript.
I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
I remember reading about that one. Some well-known artist had a vision of a huge cube of metal. One day, he was driving around in New Jersey and saw a sign "You design it, we fabricate it". So he called them up. At first, he wanted a solid metal cube. It was explained to him how much a cubic meter of steel weighs and what it would take to move or display it. So he went with a sheet-metal cube with some internal support structure. The shop built it up and drop-shipped it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he had an exhibit scheduled. Really.
I've been to too many minor art openings in SF. A question I and a designer friend used to ask each other was "will this be around in ten years or will it have been tossed". A big fraction of the '80s stuff probably hit the dumpster years ago.
The Heathrow thing might work. It's like the little tracked automated trams many airports have. The vehicles have some modest automated driving capability, so they don't have to have railroad switches, and they can do some passing at stations. They stay entirely on their own dedicated guideways, though; they never mix with other traffic.
It's not really "personal". It's more like an automated bus system. This works for airports because the number of destinations is so limited.
The Dubai effort is less likely to happen. Dubai is having a major recession. The extravagant construction projects that aren't well along are being scaled back.
All this was discussed back in December. The LHC staff had been arguing over whether to go for a quick fix or a major redesign of the magnet protection systems and liquid helium pressure relief valves, and the new CERN director decided to go for the major redesign. Good move. Otherwise this would probably happen again in the years to come.
It's a big fix. Most of the magnets have to be physically moved along the tunnel to the lift shaft, brought to the surface, overhauled, checked out, and returned to position. Then the entire "commissioning" process, which took months, has to be done over.
The original LHC design goal was that a magnet quench would result in a few hours of shutdown, not a year. It became painfully clear that this hadn't been achieved.
If you really want to see "slimming down the operating system", check out QNX, which is a true microkernel used mostly for embedded systems.
The kernel just does memory, CPU, timer, and process management, plus interprocess communication. Everything else is optional. Networking, disk/file system support, display support, window management, etc. are all user-level processes that you can include, or not, when making a boot image.
The unusual feature here is that the components really are independent. You can have networking without a file system, or a file system without networking. If the machine has no display, you don't have to include any of the "console" stuff. Even error logging is an option, and can be connected to a display, a window, the network, or a file.
But this isn't what the original article meant by "just enough operating system". They're thinking more of bloated distros.
I hope "just enough operating system" means the ad-funded preloaded crap goes away. Remember Dell charging $50 extra to get rid of all that junk?
We had an article recently on "Green Plug", the USB power scheme. that's something else that went wrong. They made it way too complicated, requiring software handshaking between the power source and device.
Instead of GreenPlug, all that's needed is a low-power mode for USB power:
USB power sources should turn off their power supply when the resistance at the output is > 1 megohm. In "power supply off" mode they should draw < 10uA from the power line.
Devices charging from USB ports should present > 1 megohm resistance across the power lines when not in need of power.
That's all that's needed. Just some micropower electronics. No special "GreenPlug protocol", no software handshaking. USB power sources don't even need the data pins (good for security).
But, of course, the GreenPlug people wouldn't have any "proprietary technology" to sell.
If you think USB is scary for the host, check out Firewire's ability to automatically DMA into the host's address space.
I know about that. I once reported it as a Linux kernel bug, because the driver unconditionally turns that feature on. It's almost never used. The hardware has a bounds limit register for externally initiated read/write operations, and you can set that to 0. Amusingly, it's unconditionally set to allow access to the first 4GB under Linux, even for 64-bit systems.
But there are people who want that feature, for debugging.
(By the way, it's not really "DMA". It's not even a fast function. You can only read or write one word per packet tranaction. FireWire is really a local area packet network, with addressed packets; the hardware interface usually has rings of packet buffers just like an Ethernet driver. There are packet types which emulate reading and writing "device registers", and that's how control functions are performed. This sort of makes it look like a "bus". But it's not. The memory of the machine is only exposed if the driver lets it be exposed.)
Yes, I was in an airport recently, and there were power outlets with both AC and USB. The future is here.
Yes, but how do you know it only provides power? It might also read or write whatever is plugged into it, install malware, steal your info, or whatever. Microsoft OSs are all too willing to do things a USB port tells them to do.
Right. "Persistent object store" machines have been around for years. In addition to the ones listed above, the Go Computer (the first tablet machine) had a persistent object system.
There are some good points and some bad points to this. On the plus side, one of the big problems today is that support for "big objects", things one calls across a protection boundary, is lacking in many operating systems. There's no standard way to talk to protected middleware, like a database. (Notably UNIX/Linux, which still has at best mediocre interprocess communication.) This problem has been addressed many times, usually badly. OLE, CORBA, etc. are attempts in that direction, as are the ways the DLL concept is abused to create "big objects" with some autonomy. Many middleware apps have their own custom approach to talking across a protection boundary; MySQL is an example. Phantom at least is trying.
Major downsides are 1) it's weird, 2) you have to trust the compiler and storage manager to manage pointers properly, 3) it can lead to excessive paging I/O, and 4) if anything gets screwed up in a persistent-state machine, it's hard to unscramble the mess.
The last item is important. Databases, with all their elaborate interlinking and indexing, have the same problem, and database developers put vast effort into maintaining the integrity of the database even when applications go bad. Phantom has to do that too, at a finer-grained level. To some extent, so do applications. Memory leaks or uncontrolled object growth in persistent object systems are, well, persistent. Restarting doesn't help.
It's not a stupid idea; good systems have been built on this approach.
The sword nerds have been heard from.
After further analysis of the surveillance video, it's been determined that the weapon was not a Batleth, but a Valdris. It's not a useless two-handed sword like the Batleth, it's a large, single-handed, double-ended knife. Retails for $49. More for intimidation than actual use.
What's really annoying is that too many programs still insist on "administrator" privileges for installation. Installation needs to be a far more contained process, with limited authority.
Most applications don't really need the ability to manipulate elements of the system outside their own directory subtree and their own subtree of the Registry. Installation of "normal" applications (especially games) should be contained accordingly. Most applications are, in a security sense, "leaf nodes"; nothing else depends on them. But Microsoft doesn't make that distinction. (Nor do most Linux application installers, even though Linux/UNIX doesn't have the registry issues that Windows does.)
Officers are reviewing the surveillance tapes from inside the store but Lt. David Whitlock said he does not plan to release the video or photographs "at this time."
The video will probably be on "America's Dumbest Criminals" soon, if not on YouTube.
I don't think that NASA is actually involved with this, except as the landlord. When the Navy moved out of Moffett Field, NASA took over management of the base. It's a collection of old military buildings from the 1930s to the 1960s, including three airship hangars. (One of them now houses the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT) Not much is going on there, and there's plenty of vacant space. Back in 2005, Google was interested in leasing much of the space, but that didn't happen, and it's not likely to now.
This project is embarrassing. It took five college seniors ("Wireless and Telecommunications Technology" majors, no less) a whole year to build and use a pointable ham VHF antenna comparable to a fringe-area TV antenna. That's all they built; the transceiver was a stock ICOM Ic-V8000, which is a ham mobile radio that's basically a CB radio with higher power (75W) and fewer restrictions built in. This is not exotic technology. NASA has a program devoted to doing this in high schools.
From their blog, the only big problem was getting permission to go on the roof of a building (a large flat roof) to put up the antenna. If they'd just headed out to an open field (they're using a radio intended for car installation, after all), mounted the antenna on a tripod, and aimed it by hand, they probably could have completed the project in a week.
Hams talk to the ISS all the time. When it's visible, it's only a few hundred miles away, after all. The only real problem is booking some astronaut time.
If you don't want to bother with that, the ISS has an open packet repeater hams can use. It's only 9600 baud, using an old TNC. This technology is so old it was on Mir.
Their blog is like reading Twitter output: Of course, we've been busy for real lately. There's a whole bunch of new stuff going on. Exciting stuff!
For instance, we soldered the connectors to the control wires for our antenna's rotor. After all that was said and done, we were able to control the movement of our antenna from inside room N214. Here's a few pictures of us working on that.
Myspace vs. Facebook.
on
FBML Essentials
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to Alexa, Facebook passed Myspace last April. Myspace is in decline; they're now about 2x the reach of AOL, and dropping.
Current SETI work assumes that someone is specifically sending a "carrier" at us, an RF signal with a constant frequency. That's 1930s technology. No modern transmission system has a strong "carrier"; they all look like noise unless you can figure out the decoding. An advanced civilization may assume that anybody worth talking to has antennas the size of moons, picks up all RF that comes through its solar system, and figures out anything interesting. We're not there yet.
Maybe technological civilizations don't last that long. Recorded human history is about 3000 years, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. (The first railroad ticket was sold in 1808; that's a good starting point for deployed industrial technology.) Already, we're starting to run out of natural resources.
Slashdot Mirror
The Microsoft announcement says "Use of the software is governed by the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistance 6.5 Beta License Agreement accessible as a file in this download." So you can't read the terms of service without downloading (and installling?) the software.
For something that opens up remote access to local machines, with that access under the control of Microsoft, this matters. What responsibility does Microsoft take for the security of your stored data? Is the system HIPPA compliant? Would it meet the standards for confidentiality of legal work product? Those of the Industrial Security Manual for unclassified but sensitive information? Does Microsoft claim any ownership rights in your data (like Facebook just tried?) Can your stored data be used to target advertising (like Google does?) What cryptosystem is being used? Who has access to the keys?
Until all those questions have been answered and the answers reviewed by qualified third parties, using this system in a business environment might be construed as gross negligence.
Let's see what we can find out.
We have an IP address for the server hosting the phony pages: "[217.20.175.74]". This is in DNS as "sweeper.globmail.org",
eNom, a favored registrar of bottom-feeders, is the registrar.
There's an address in Kiev, but it's bogus.
WhiteDomainsOrg
Reiterska 13
Kiev Kiev
01001
UA
Phone:+380.5490567
That's a bar in Kiev, Dveri (Door). It's about two blocks from the old US Consulate.
The upstream provider is "ge0.colo0.kv.wnet.ua". So this is a colocated machine at WNet in Ukraine.
The US FBI has a local office in Kiev.
This is something that could be cracked by motivated law enforcement.
Helio had this available in 2006 They called it "Buddy Beacon":
Buddy Beacon is the new way for Helio members to synchronize their social lives and tell friends where the fun is. Rather than calling or texting, Helio members can switch on their Buddy Beacon and use satellite technology to broadcast their location to the friends they add to their Buddy List. When they turn on Buddy Beacon, their Buddy List friends can see their location on a map along with a nearby address. Members can add up to 25 Buddies to their Buddy List. When members change locations and want to let everyone know the party is on the move, one simple command refreshes the location. Want to hide out? Just leave Buddy Beacon off to enjoy a night of privacy or to slip out the back of the club into the VIP room."
That's been out since 2006. It's been available for the iPhone since April 2008. Google is late to the party on this.
That's a clause that only matters if Facebook is in decline. On the way up, the fate of the information about departed users doesn't matter. On the way down, it matters a lot.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, which is reflected in their long term traffic statistics. They open, they may become popular, the cool people move in, there's a herd effect that makes them grow more if they start to become popular, the losers move in, the cool people leave, growth starts to flatten, and then the long decline starts, usually leveling out at maybe a quarter of peak. This works just like cool nightclubs and restaurants. Anybody who goes out frequently in a major city knows this pattern.
AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Salon, Nerve, Bebo, and Tribe all peaked years ago. Myspace peaked in early 2008, according to Alexa traffic stats. Facebook hasn't visibly peaked yet, but it looks like their management sees the inevitable coming and is getting ready.
This is a hint that it's too late for Facebook to IPO. That had to happen on the way up, or it won't happen at all. There was much talk of a Facebook IPO in 2007 or 2008, but now the word is "2010, if ever". Probably never. They should have gone public earlier.
If local dtv were serious about channel usage they could provide up to 5 tv signals per channel on their bandwidth
If the channels have any action, the quality will suck with five subchannels. That's all coming out of the same bandwidth. Low action channels (shopping, golf, talking heads (preachers, politicians)) can be compressed heavily without visible degradation, because the motion compression isn't dealing with much motion. Action sports don't compress well. Football is especially tough because there's so much motion in different directions and the fans want to see the details of that motion.
Getting past the buzzwords, the real issue here is that key/value databases don't do joins. Joins are expensive and hard to distribute across machines. For many web apps, one key is enough to find the relevant data, and general joins aren't necessary.
Both Google and Amazon realized this, and their key/value systems don't support joins. Developers of both systems have spoken in EE380 at Stanford, and were grilled over this issue. The big advantage of a join-free system is that a database can be split across machines without the need for elaborate intercommunication between them. You can simply put keys A-L on machine 1, and keys M-Z on machine 2. There are no crosslinks between the machines, and you don't have to do inter-machine locking. The front end machines just direct the query to the appropriate back-end machine based on the key.
There's a set of things you can't do this way, but they seem not to be the high-volume queries in web applications. That's the real insight here.
Arguably, the web crowd just reinvented ISAM.
This is very cute. The pendulum is powered, weakly, by a coil centered under the pendulum's rest point pushing against a permanent magnet in the bob. This is symmetrical; it pushes radially away from the rest position. So there's no active control over the direction of swing.
The new insight is that if the pushing pulse is delayed to the right point in the cycle, the applied force dampens, rather than increases, the tendency for the oscillation to become ellipical. The optimal time for the pushing pulse has been worked out. It's a neat little result.
First, you need competent pest control.
Second, cable-chewing is a problem solved long ago by Western Electric, back when they made the cable for the Bell System. Find a telco outside plant person and get their advice. For indoor use, there is rat-proof LAN cable.
Actually, the Amish do have an autism problem. The Clinic for Special Children in Strausberg treats some of them. They're prone to some genetic problems, too; it's an inbred society.
JSON is a result of a piece of stupidity in the design of JavaScript. In LISP, you had the "reader", which took in a string and produced an S-expression (an in-memory linked structure), and you had "eval", which ran an S-expression as code. Using the "reader" on hostile data was safe, but "eval" was not.
JavaScript combines both functions into "eval". Since "eval" has the only built-in parser in the language, it's tempting to use it to parse data representations. Especially since character-by-character parsing in an interpreted language isn't very fast.
Attempts have been made to work around this by examining the string to be parsed, looking for "bad stuff", before applying "eval". This works about as well as you'd expect; attackers devise "bad stuff" the examiner won't recognize. More complex "examiners" work better, but run slower.
The end result is that "JSON" as a data transfer medium is either slow or insecure. Guess which option usually gets picked.
Those who do not know history are condemned to re-implement it, badly.
If Palm is going to use JSON in their system, though, they could provide a built-in parser for data expressions only, not just "eval". That would fix the problem. Maybe we could even get that into standard JavaScript.
I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
I remember reading about that one. Some well-known artist had a vision of a huge cube of metal. One day, he was driving around in New Jersey and saw a sign "You design it, we fabricate it". So he called them up. At first, he wanted a solid metal cube. It was explained to him how much a cubic meter of steel weighs and what it would take to move or display it. So he went with a sheet-metal cube with some internal support structure. The shop built it up and drop-shipped it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he had an exhibit scheduled. Really.
I've been to too many minor art openings in SF. A question I and a designer friend used to ask each other was "will this be around in ten years or will it have been tossed". A big fraction of the '80s stuff probably hit the dumpster years ago.
The Heathrow thing might work. It's like the little tracked automated trams many airports have. The vehicles have some modest automated driving capability, so they don't have to have railroad switches, and they can do some passing at stations. They stay entirely on their own dedicated guideways, though; they never mix with other traffic.
It's not really "personal". It's more like an automated bus system. This works for airports because the number of destinations is so limited.
The Dubai effort is less likely to happen. Dubai is having a major recession. The extravagant construction projects that aren't well along are being scaled back.
All this was discussed back in December. The LHC staff had been arguing over whether to go for a quick fix or a major redesign of the magnet protection systems and liquid helium pressure relief valves, and the new CERN director decided to go for the major redesign. Good move. Otherwise this would probably happen again in the years to come.
It's a big fix. Most of the magnets have to be physically moved along the tunnel to the lift shaft, brought to the surface, overhauled, checked out, and returned to position. Then the entire "commissioning" process, which took months, has to be done over.
The original LHC design goal was that a magnet quench would result in a few hours of shutdown, not a year. It became painfully clear that this hadn't been achieved.
If you really want to see "slimming down the operating system", check out QNX, which is a true microkernel used mostly for embedded systems. The kernel just does memory, CPU, timer, and process management, plus interprocess communication. Everything else is optional. Networking, disk/file system support, display support, window management, etc. are all user-level processes that you can include, or not, when making a boot image.
The unusual feature here is that the components really are independent. You can have networking without a file system, or a file system without networking. If the machine has no display, you don't have to include any of the "console" stuff. Even error logging is an option, and can be connected to a display, a window, the network, or a file.
But this isn't what the original article meant by "just enough operating system". They're thinking more of bloated distros.
I hope "just enough operating system" means the ad-funded preloaded crap goes away. Remember Dell charging $50 extra to get rid of all that junk?
We had an article recently on "Green Plug", the USB power scheme. that's something else that went wrong. They made it way too complicated, requiring software handshaking between the power source and device.
Instead of GreenPlug, all that's needed is a low-power mode for USB power:
That's all that's needed. Just some micropower electronics. No special "GreenPlug protocol", no software handshaking. USB power sources don't even need the data pins (good for security). But, of course, the GreenPlug people wouldn't have any "proprietary technology" to sell.
If you think USB is scary for the host, check out Firewire's ability to automatically DMA into the host's address space.
I know about that. I once reported it as a Linux kernel bug, because the driver unconditionally turns that feature on. It's almost never used. The hardware has a bounds limit register for externally initiated read/write operations, and you can set that to 0. Amusingly, it's unconditionally set to allow access to the first 4GB under Linux, even for 64-bit systems.
But there are people who want that feature, for debugging.
(By the way, it's not really "DMA". It's not even a fast function. You can only read or write one word per packet tranaction. FireWire is really a local area packet network, with addressed packets; the hardware interface usually has rings of packet buffers just like an Ethernet driver. There are packet types which emulate reading and writing "device registers", and that's how control functions are performed. This sort of makes it look like a "bus". But it's not. The memory of the machine is only exposed if the driver lets it be exposed.)
Yes, I was in an airport recently, and there were power outlets with both AC and USB. The future is here.
Yes, but how do you know it only provides power? It might also read or write whatever is plugged into it, install malware, steal your info, or whatever. Microsoft OSs are all too willing to do things a USB port tells them to do.
Right. "Persistent object store" machines have been around for years. In addition to the ones listed above, the Go Computer (the first tablet machine) had a persistent object system.
There are some good points and some bad points to this. On the plus side, one of the big problems today is that support for "big objects", things one calls across a protection boundary, is lacking in many operating systems. There's no standard way to talk to protected middleware, like a database. (Notably UNIX/Linux, which still has at best mediocre interprocess communication.) This problem has been addressed many times, usually badly. OLE, CORBA, etc. are attempts in that direction, as are the ways the DLL concept is abused to create "big objects" with some autonomy. Many middleware apps have their own custom approach to talking across a protection boundary; MySQL is an example. Phantom at least is trying.
Major downsides are 1) it's weird, 2) you have to trust the compiler and storage manager to manage pointers properly, 3) it can lead to excessive paging I/O, and 4) if anything gets screwed up in a persistent-state machine, it's hard to unscramble the mess.
The last item is important. Databases, with all their elaborate interlinking and indexing, have the same problem, and database developers put vast effort into maintaining the integrity of the database even when applications go bad. Phantom has to do that too, at a finer-grained level. To some extent, so do applications. Memory leaks or uncontrolled object growth in persistent object systems are, well, persistent. Restarting doesn't help.
It's not a stupid idea; good systems have been built on this approach.
The sword nerds have been heard from. After further analysis of the surveillance video, it's been determined that the weapon was not a Batleth, but a Valdris. It's not a useless two-handed sword like the Batleth, it's a large, single-handed, double-ended knife. Retails for $49. More for intimidation than actual use.
This robber isn't a Trekkie. He's a knife nut.
What's really annoying is that too many programs still insist on "administrator" privileges for installation. Installation needs to be a far more contained process, with limited authority. Most applications don't really need the ability to manipulate elements of the system outside their own directory subtree and their own subtree of the Registry. Installation of "normal" applications (especially games) should be contained accordingly. Most applications are, in a security sense, "leaf nodes"; nothing else depends on them. But Microsoft doesn't make that distinction. (Nor do most Linux application installers, even though Linux/UNIX doesn't have the registry issues that Windows does.)
Officers are reviewing the surveillance tapes from inside the store but Lt. David Whitlock said he does not plan to release the video or photographs "at this time."
The video will probably be on "America's Dumbest Criminals" soon, if not on YouTube.
I don't think that NASA is actually involved with this, except as the landlord. When the Navy moved out of Moffett Field, NASA took over management of the base. It's a collection of old military buildings from the 1930s to the 1960s, including three airship hangars. (One of them now houses the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT) Not much is going on there, and there's plenty of vacant space. Back in 2005, Google was interested in leasing much of the space, but that didn't happen, and it's not likely to now.
This project is embarrassing. It took five college seniors ("Wireless and Telecommunications Technology" majors, no less) a whole year to build and use a pointable ham VHF antenna comparable to a fringe-area TV antenna. That's all they built; the transceiver was a stock ICOM Ic-V8000, which is a ham mobile radio that's basically a CB radio with higher power (75W) and fewer restrictions built in. This is not exotic technology. NASA has a program devoted to doing this in high schools.
From their blog, the only big problem was getting permission to go on the roof of a building (a large flat roof) to put up the antenna. If they'd just headed out to an open field (they're using a radio intended for car installation, after all), mounted the antenna on a tripod, and aimed it by hand, they probably could have completed the project in a week.
Hams talk to the ISS all the time. When it's visible, it's only a few hundred miles away, after all. The only real problem is booking some astronaut time. If you don't want to bother with that, the ISS has an open packet repeater hams can use. It's only 9600 baud, using an old TNC. This technology is so old it was on Mir.
Their blog is like reading Twitter output:
Of course, we've been busy for real lately. There's a whole bunch of new stuff going on. Exciting stuff! For instance, we soldered the connectors to the control wires for our antenna's rotor. After all that was said and done, we were able to control the movement of our antenna from inside room N214. Here's a few pictures of us working on that.
According to Alexa, Facebook passed Myspace last April. Myspace is in decline; they're now about 2x the reach of AOL, and dropping.