There was something like this called "Fun Physics", from Knowledge Revolution, in 1988, for the Mac. (!)
That eventually became Working Model, a 2D engineering simulator. Knowledge Revolution was acquired by McNeil Schwindler, the price of Working Model was increased by a factor of 10, and the game product disappeared.
I don't see a role for Wikipedia in this. Archive.org already accepts video uploads of useful archival material, so that's covered. Wikipedia has enough trouble finding redistributable still images for articles. Who's going to create useful video for Wikipedia that isn't original research or a copyright violation?
I only credit anyone for calling exactly when it would completely implode. That took brains.
It was rather obvious to anyone who understands the fundamentals. I called it on Downside in 2004. I expected trouble sooner, around 2006. But the Fed cut rates, which merely postponed the inevitable and made it worse.
Note that Baker also started predicting trouble in 2004.
This stuff isn't really that hard. There are certain ratios that are grounded in reality. A house is worth about 2.5x to 3x annual income. Stock in a stable company is worth about 10x to 20x earnings. Whenever prices get above those upper limits, they can be expected to go down, and when they get way above those limits, it's a speculative bubble. All speculative bubbles eventually burst, because the supply of "greater fools" who will buy overpriced assets in hopes of selling them for even more is finite
"The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. -- William McChesney Martin,, head of the Federal Reserve from 1951 to 1970.
"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.
It might be simpler to just get them an account on some game that demands long login times, like Evercrack or World of Warcraft. If they stay on for hours at a time, they don't really have a serious ADHD problem. They're probably just bored with school. See The Trouble with Boys", from Newsweek. "Very well-meaning people have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."
In fact, games might be a good tool for sorting out students with serious disorders from the merely bored.
In some ways, software is getting worse. There are some new problems that have appeared in the last decade. Here are some of them:
Customizability Users now expect massive customizability in applications. This leads to very complex configuration mechanisms. Such things are hard to test, because there are so many combinations of configuration options. Testing runs into combinatoric explosion problems.
Layer bloat There's an tendency to deal with problems in one layer by wallpapering them over with another layer. Over time, this gets to be a problem. Virtualization adds a layer, and most of the time, it's added because the operating system can't provide enough isolation. (If applications have to be installed as "root" or "administrator", you've blown isolation right there.)
There's a "system management mode" layer under the OS. Further up, there's some interpreted virtual machine like Java or.NET. Most applications use a window system indirectly, through some other layer that encapsulates the basic window system interface. There may be multiple such layers, with something like XUL involved. Java programs today tend to involve "frameworks", "packagers", and incredible call depths. At the language level, C++ is used partly to support wrappers that hide the underlying flaws of the language. Each of these levels has overhead, and the overheads multiply. Each has its own bugs. And each has its own versions leading to version hell.
Extreme/agile programming The more "agile" programming models focus on "features", not architecture. This leads to programs which are a collection of features in search of a structure.
If something is badly designed down at the bottom, it will probably never get fixed. Some open source projects tend to suffer badly from this problem, because there's nobody in a strong enough position to insist that some mess at the bottom be fixed.
These are new problems, on top of the classic ones.
The reason software is so bad is that the customers absorb the cost of defects. That's a political decision. Cars used to be that way; today, if a car even stalls unexpectedly, that's considered a manufacturing defect. In the US, the manufacturer has to pay for the recall to fix the problem. Cars are far more reliable, and much safer, as a result.
In a few industries, the software developer is financially liable for errors. The gambling industry works that way. The companies that run lotteries pay back a few percent of their revenue as penalties for failures and errors. (And they try very hard not to have expensive errors.)
Back before the Bush administration caved on the Microsoft antitrust case, I proposed the Full Warranty remedy. The FTC took a look at this issue in 2000, but the Bush Administration didn't do anything. It may be time to revisit this.
Big companies with real products and a user base can hang on for a long time. Unisys is still around. NCR (National Cash Register), amazingly, is still around, and still selling cash registers (now "Point of Sale Workstations"). Most of the names on the list, like CA, Sun, VMware, and Novell, still have an installed base to service. They can shrink and remain profitable.
I'd look for collapses in advertising-funded companies. We'll probably see some of the social networks go bust. Companies that get most of their revenue from Google ads are at risk. Marchex (the people with "www.90210.com" and hundreds of thousands of similar junk domains) have had their stock drop from 25 to 5. Expect to see free hosting sites, free mail services, and free blog services shut down.
I did a list like this back in the dot-com area, based strictly on cash-flow analysis. That was quite accurate. It's easy to do this analysis for money-losing startups. The definition of "dead" used was "stock dropped 90%". From a stockholder perspective, that's "dead", even if some vestige of the company hangs on. That's was quite common with overfunded startups, by the way. Some of them succeeded, some of them went bust, but many of them become what VCs call "zombies"; they could generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but they couldn't pay back the money invested in them.
Doesn't Open Office support.doc files and Times New Roman font?
Indeed, it does. Open Office's ".doc" support was miserable in OO 1.0, almost OK in OO 2.0 (certainly good enough for a student paper), and has been cleaned up a bit more in OO 3.0, now that the spec for ".doc" files is available.
Can't speak for Google Docs. The browser font situation still sucks, ten years on.
Well, now we'll see if Homeland Security does anything. That's part of what their "National Cyber-Security Center" is supposed to be doing. The current head of that office is a former lobbyist, but Obama's team will probably can him and put in someone with a clue.
It may take much longer than that. After 1929, the stock market didn't reach its previous high until 1954. And that was with WWII in the middle. Japan hasn't come back from their 1989 crash yet. This recession may be "L-shaped".
The really depressing analysis is that not only is this the start of the Second Great Depression, it's when we start running out of key raw materials like oil, copper, etc. Slowly, industrial civilization, which is only two centuries old, winds down. The world becomes the Rust Belt.
We end up with a sustainable society in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. Probably Islamic, too; Islam does well in dysfunctional societies.
This isn't new; it's just cheaper. Magnetic motion tracking devices have been around for two decades. I had a chance to try "virtual ping pong", like this thing does, on an Autodesk system demoed at the Hacker's Conference two decades ago. All the gloves-and-goggles systems use magnetic trackers like this. So do some of the tracking systems used for motion capture. If you've been to SIGGRAPH, you've probably seen a dancer up on a platform wired up with multiple sensors, driving an animated character on a screen.
The early systems suffered from serious lag, noise, and accuracy problems. The sensing was noisy enough that it had to be low-pass filtered, which introduced lag. You moved, then waited for the display to catch up. This was a killer problem with head-mounted VR. Accuracy was a problem. Even relative accuracy wasn't that good. When I saw these things at SIGGRAPH, I'd sometimes gesture to the dancer demoing the thing to put her hands together, forefinger to forefinger. If the character on screen showed the forefingers touching, the system had decent relative accuracy. Usually it didn't.
It's hard to tell from the video how accurate this new version is. With single-sensor demos, you can't see if there's serious error. But it's cheap. The Polhemus systems cost thousands of dollars.
The
MotoMan RoboBar is much more impressive technology, from a big robotics manufacturer, but it tries to be cool and fails. MotoMan's original slogan was "We already make your car. Now let us make your drink".
Not being a sports fan, I don't see much of this stuff, but I once visited the company in Silicon Valley that makes the gear. The "yellow line" is one of the easier applications. It's basically a camera with encoders driving a fairly simple video processor. Calibration is manual; there's a setup display that shows the normal lines of a football field, and someone aligns the corners to match the real image from the camera. When the generated image matches the real one, the system is in alignment.
That's 1998 technology. The newer systems have gone way beyond that.
Ads on billboards are sometimes replaced using the same system. Ads you see on the air may not be what people in the stadium are seeing.
There's player tracking, ball tracking, the "virtual strike zone" for baseball, GPS-based tracking for NASCAR, and virtual billboard insertion into everything.
Not really. It just discusses the general nature of the problem, not what they did about it.
For that, there's the DarkStar documentation.
This is a new data storage back end, like the ones from Google and Amazon. This one is specialized for game usage. It's really a transaction engine which links to a transaction-oriented object store. Entire transactions are atomic; either all the objects
being changed commit, or none of them do. In a real system, the application transactions (in Java) run on a farm of machines, while the data objects reside on a second farm of machines. Clients talk to the application farm; the application farm talks to the data farm.
It's not really game-oriented at all. It's more general than that. It would be a reasonable back end for a big social-networking site, or a big auction site. The general assumption is that transactions and data objects are small; big stuff like canned web pages, images, and such goes elsewhere.
Incidentally, it may not all be open source. The current single node version is open source. But that's just a toy. There's no point in using the DarkStar architecture unless you need to scale up. Sun is vague about what the deal for the scalable architecture will be.
Consider the JVC DRMV100B DVD+VHS Recorder. This is a unit with a VHS VCR, a DVD R/W/RW drive, an NTSC tuner, and an ATSC tuner. It's under $200. It's stocked by mainstream outlets like Amazon and Sam's Club. With this, she can program the unit to record her soaps to tape just as she does now. Once she's comfortable with that, she can switch over to DVD RW blanks instead of tape.
The thing even up-converts to 1080p and has an HDMI output, so it will work with a modern display. Or you can get out S-Video, composite video, or, if really desperate, NTSC video on RF to drive the antique color TV in a wooden cabinet.
Maybe phase out analog TV by time slot. Leave analog up from 1800 to 2200 hours for a few extra months; the rest of the time broadcast "Convert to digital" messages at reduced power. That will get the message across to the holdouts without causing withdrawal symptoms.
The publicity director for Palisades Amusement Park (this was a long time ago) used to get stacks of new bills bound into tear-off pads, which he then put in a checkbook cover. That was almost useful.
For example, the helium-3 surface deposits on the moon could provide a energy source far greater than that of fission or conventional power generation.
That's space PR bullshit.
We don't know how to build any kind of fusion reactor that works.
Fusing He-3 is harder to do that fusing deteureum. It's potentially cleaner. Maybe.
The density of He-3 on the moon is very low. A big fraction of the Moon's entire surface
would have to be strip-mined. Deutereum, on the other hand, is easily extracted from water.
Certain molecular structures only form in the absence of a strong gravitational field. It could provide for advances in building materials, or allow for the development of quantum devices that may not be possible to produce terrestrially (or be prohibitively expensive) en masse.
Nobody has ever found anything worth manufacturing in space. NASA has tried. For small things, gravity isn't that big a deal. For big things, lift capacity is too expensive. Some early shuttle flights carried an electrophoresis apparatus to try to make some drug, but it turned out to be easier to do that via genetic engineering. Almost all the the "science projects" currently on the ISS are related to space flight as an end in itself. There's currently something up on "biological macromolecular crystals", but in fact, those can and are grown on the ground.
What do we need a "broadband stimulus" for? Why subsidize TV over IP, torrents, and p0rn? That's the only reason for more bandwidth than we have now. 90% of US "active internet users" already have something faster than dialup.
About 67% of US households have a broadband connection. Only 58% have cable TV. Well under 50% get a newspaper delivered. What's the problem?
With the exception of South Korea, all the countries with higher broadband penetration than the US are tiny, snowbound, or both.
The Apple fanboys think Jobs is important for his design influence. But Apple's design work is actually outsourced. (Early on, Apple used frogdesign; they've since used others.)
What really turned around Apple were two deals. One was the deal with Microsoft that kept Office on the Mac, and the other was the deal with the recording industry that put music on the iPod.
Apple needs a dealmaker from the content industry. Probably a film executive; recording industry people are too dumb. (Really.) Successful film producers are good at getting multiple parties who don't like each other all pulling in the same direction.
From the cached page, this sounds like just another attempt to install malware. "How can you help?
You download and install the file from our site.
The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed.
There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!" There's no indication of who's behind this, and the only contact point is a GMail address.
The domain is registered anonymously through some Register.com front organization in Portugal.
It's currently not resolving at all. DNS is on a Register.com server.
If you are working on a masters project, you may find it hard to get your professors to sign an NDA however.
I actually did that at Stanford in the 1980s. My Master's project not only went in with an NDA and a copyright notice, but stamped in huge red letters "ILLEGAL COPY IF NOT IN RED" on every page.
The program (the first auto-trace program for PCs) became an Autodesk product, and I came out of this very well. Years later, I found out that there had been considerable faculty discussion over this, resulting in some policy changes, but I never had any serious trouble from Stanford.
However, I was never an employee of Stanford. The deal for people who accept money from the school is different.
Stanford tends to encourage students and faculty to do startups. They spun off Yahoo, Google, Cisco, and Sun, after all. This is unusual; most schools don't have on-campus venture capitalists. Looking at the Southern Utah University site, I found a copyright policy, but no patent policy. It's quite possible that nobody there ever had an idea that made money, so they've never had to consider the issue.
I run Downside, where, in 2000, I called the dot-com crash before it happened and named names. Check my track record. Since then, I've occasionally pointed out the obvious before it became conventional wisdom:
2004-10-11 - The coming mortgage crunch
The next crash looks to be housing-related. Fannie Mae is in trouble. But not because of their accounting irregularities. The problem is more fundamental. They borrow short, lend long, and paper over the resulting interest rate risk with derivatives. In a credit crunch, the counterparties will be squeezed hard. The numbers are huge. And there's no public record of who those counterparties are.
Derivatives allow the creation of securities with a low probability of loss coupled with a very high but unlikely loss. When unlikely events are uncorrelated, as with domestic fire insurance, this is a viable model. When unlikely events are correlated, as with interest rate risk, everything breaks at once. Remember "portfolio insurance"? Same problem.
Mortgage financing is so tied to public policy that predictions based on fundamentals are not possible. All we can do is to point out that huge stresses are accumulating in that sector. At some point, as interest rates increase, something will break in a big way. The result may look like the 1980s S&L debacle.
2006-01-01 - Predictions for 2006
Saudi Arabia finally admits the Gawar field has peaked. Oil passes $70 per barrel.
US interest rate spike. "Homeowners" with adjustable-rate interest-only loans default and are foreclosed. Housing prices crash as foreclosures glut market..
Nobody wins in Iraq. Neither side can force a decision, so both sides keep bleeding.
One of the big three US car manufacturers goes bankrupt.
A major hurricane wipes out another southern US city.
The 2004 prediction describes exactly what happened in housing. No question about that.
The 2006 predictions took longer to happen than I'd expected. The Fed cut rates sharply in 2007, accelerating the economy when it should have been hitting the brakes. This deferred the collapse of the housing bubble, but not for long. When it did pop, it was worse than it had to be.
I expected one of the car manufacturers to go bust. Instead, they all almost went bust, and only a Government bailout saved them. The fundamentals indicated something had to give. The housing bubble and interest rate cuts resulted in something of a "car bubble", deferring the inevitable a few more more years.
The hurricane prediction was kind of off the wall, but Galveston was duly flattened.
Slashdot Mirror
There was something like this called "Fun Physics", from Knowledge Revolution, in 1988, for the Mac. (!) That eventually became Working Model, a 2D engineering simulator. Knowledge Revolution was acquired by McNeil Schwindler, the price of Working Model was increased by a factor of 10, and the game product disappeared.
I don't see a role for Wikipedia in this. Archive.org already accepts video uploads of useful archival material, so that's covered. Wikipedia has enough trouble finding redistributable still images for articles. Who's going to create useful video for Wikipedia that isn't original research or a copyright violation?
I only credit anyone for calling exactly when it would completely implode. That took brains.
It was rather obvious to anyone who understands the fundamentals. I called it on Downside in 2004. I expected trouble sooner, around 2006. But the Fed cut rates, which merely postponed the inevitable and made it worse. Note that Baker also started predicting trouble in 2004.
This stuff isn't really that hard. There are certain ratios that are grounded in reality. A house is worth about 2.5x to 3x annual income. Stock in a stable company is worth about 10x to 20x earnings. Whenever prices get above those upper limits, they can be expected to go down, and when they get way above those limits, it's a speculative bubble. All speculative bubbles eventually burst, because the supply of "greater fools" who will buy overpriced assets in hopes of selling them for even more is finite
"The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. -- William McChesney Martin,, head of the Federal Reserve from 1951 to 1970.
"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.
MIT can do that to people. Burnout is a real risk there. But MIT's 6-year graduation rate for undergraduates is 94%. Most students do make it eventually. By comparison, Ohio State is at 68%. The University of California at Santa Barbara (America's best college for sex) is at 65%.
(I didn't go to MIT. Went to Stanford.)
MIT doesn't work that way. If you can get into MIT, you should be able to get through MIT.
It might be simpler to just get them an account on some game that demands long login times, like Evercrack or World of Warcraft. If they stay on for hours at a time, they don't really have a serious ADHD problem. They're probably just bored with school. See The Trouble with Boys", from Newsweek. "Very well-meaning people have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."
In fact, games might be a good tool for sorting out students with serious disorders from the merely bored.
In some ways, software is getting worse. There are some new problems that have appeared in the last decade. Here are some of them:
These are new problems, on top of the classic ones.
Indeed.
The reason software is so bad is that the customers absorb the cost of defects. That's a political decision. Cars used to be that way; today, if a car even stalls unexpectedly, that's considered a manufacturing defect. In the US, the manufacturer has to pay for the recall to fix the problem. Cars are far more reliable, and much safer, as a result.
In a few industries, the software developer is financially liable for errors. The gambling industry works that way. The companies that run lotteries pay back a few percent of their revenue as penalties for failures and errors. (And they try very hard not to have expensive errors.)
Back before the Bush administration caved on the Microsoft antitrust case, I proposed the Full Warranty remedy. The FTC took a look at this issue in 2000, but the Bush Administration didn't do anything. It may be time to revisit this.
Big companies with real products and a user base can hang on for a long time. Unisys is still around. NCR (National Cash Register), amazingly, is still around, and still selling cash registers (now "Point of Sale Workstations"). Most of the names on the list, like CA, Sun, VMware, and Novell, still have an installed base to service. They can shrink and remain profitable.
I'd look for collapses in advertising-funded companies. We'll probably see some of the social networks go bust. Companies that get most of their revenue from Google ads are at risk. Marchex (the people with "www.90210.com" and hundreds of thousands of similar junk domains) have had their stock drop from 25 to 5. Expect to see free hosting sites, free mail services, and free blog services shut down.
I did a list like this back in the dot-com area, based strictly on cash-flow analysis. That was quite accurate. It's easy to do this analysis for money-losing startups. The definition of "dead" used was "stock dropped 90%". From a stockholder perspective, that's "dead", even if some vestige of the company hangs on. That's was quite common with overfunded startups, by the way. Some of them succeeded, some of them went bust, but many of them become what VCs call "zombies"; they could generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but they couldn't pay back the money invested in them.
Doesn't Open Office support .doc files and Times New Roman font?
Indeed, it does. Open Office's ".doc" support was miserable in OO 1.0, almost OK in OO 2.0 (certainly good enough for a student paper), and has been cleaned up a bit more in OO 3.0, now that the spec for ".doc" files is available.
Can't speak for Google Docs. The browser font situation still sucks, ten years on.
Well, now we'll see if Homeland Security does anything. That's part of what their "National Cyber-Security Center" is supposed to be doing. The current head of that office is a former lobbyist, but Obama's team will probably can him and put in someone with a clue.
In five years, we'll be out of this slump
It may take much longer than that. After 1929, the stock market didn't reach its previous high until 1954. And that was with WWII in the middle. Japan hasn't come back from their 1989 crash yet. This recession may be "L-shaped".
The really depressing analysis is that not only is this the start of the Second Great Depression, it's when we start running out of key raw materials like oil, copper, etc. Slowly, industrial civilization, which is only two centuries old, winds down. The world becomes the Rust Belt. We end up with a sustainable society in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. Probably Islamic, too; Islam does well in dysfunctional societies.
This isn't new; it's just cheaper. Magnetic motion tracking devices have been around for two decades. I had a chance to try "virtual ping pong", like this thing does, on an Autodesk system demoed at the Hacker's Conference two decades ago. All the gloves-and-goggles systems use magnetic trackers like this. So do some of the tracking systems used for motion capture. If you've been to SIGGRAPH, you've probably seen a dancer up on a platform wired up with multiple sensors, driving an animated character on a screen.
The early systems suffered from serious lag, noise, and accuracy problems. The sensing was noisy enough that it had to be low-pass filtered, which introduced lag. You moved, then waited for the display to catch up. This was a killer problem with head-mounted VR. Accuracy was a problem. Even relative accuracy wasn't that good. When I saw these things at SIGGRAPH, I'd sometimes gesture to the dancer demoing the thing to put her hands together, forefinger to forefinger. If the character on screen showed the forefingers touching, the system had decent relative accuracy. Usually it didn't.
It's hard to tell from the video how accurate this new version is. With single-sensor demos, you can't see if there's serious error. But it's cheap. The Polhemus systems cost thousands of dollars.
That is a nice piece of design. People like it.
The MotoMan RoboBar is much more impressive technology, from a big robotics manufacturer, but it tries to be cool and fails. MotoMan's original slogan was "We already make your car. Now let us make your drink".
Not being a sports fan, I don't see much of this stuff, but I once visited the company in Silicon Valley that makes the gear. The "yellow line" is one of the easier applications. It's basically a camera with encoders driving a fairly simple video processor. Calibration is manual; there's a setup display that shows the normal lines of a football field, and someone aligns the corners to match the real image from the camera. When the generated image matches the real one, the system is in alignment.
That's 1998 technology. The newer systems have gone way beyond that. Ads on billboards are sometimes replaced using the same system. Ads you see on the air may not be what people in the stadium are seeing. There's player tracking, ball tracking, the "virtual strike zone" for baseball, GPS-based tracking for NASCAR, and virtual billboard insertion into everything.
The article is extremely technical in nature
Not really. It just discusses the general nature of the problem, not what they did about it. For that, there's the DarkStar documentation.
This is a new data storage back end, like the ones from Google and Amazon. This one is specialized for game usage. It's really a transaction engine which links to a transaction-oriented object store. Entire transactions are atomic; either all the objects being changed commit, or none of them do. In a real system, the application transactions (in Java) run on a farm of machines, while the data objects reside on a second farm of machines. Clients talk to the application farm; the application farm talks to the data farm.
It's not really game-oriented at all. It's more general than that. It would be a reasonable back end for a big social-networking site, or a big auction site. The general assumption is that transactions and data objects are small; big stuff like canned web pages, images, and such goes elsewhere.
Incidentally, it may not all be open source. The current single node version is open source. But that's just a toy. There's no point in using the DarkStar architecture unless you need to scale up. Sun is vague about what the deal for the scalable architecture will be.
Consider the JVC DRMV100B DVD+VHS Recorder. This is a unit with a VHS VCR, a DVD R/W/RW drive, an NTSC tuner, and an ATSC tuner. It's under $200. It's stocked by mainstream outlets like Amazon and Sam's Club. With this, she can program the unit to record her soaps to tape just as she does now. Once she's comfortable with that, she can switch over to DVD RW blanks instead of tape.
The thing even up-converts to 1080p and has an HDMI output, so it will work with a modern display. Or you can get out S-Video, composite video, or, if really desperate, NTSC video on RF to drive the antique color TV in a wooden cabinet.
Maybe phase out analog TV by time slot. Leave analog up from 1800 to 2200 hours for a few extra months; the rest of the time broadcast "Convert to digital" messages at reduced power. That will get the message across to the holdouts without causing withdrawal symptoms.
Woz is such a nut.
The publicity director for Palisades Amusement Park (this was a long time ago) used to get stacks of new bills bound into tear-off pads, which he then put in a checkbook cover. That was almost useful.
For example, the helium-3 surface deposits on the moon could provide a energy source far greater than that of fission or conventional power generation.
That's space PR bullshit.
Certain molecular structures only form in the absence of a strong gravitational field. It could provide for advances in building materials, or allow for the development of quantum devices that may not be possible to produce terrestrially (or be prohibitively expensive) en masse.
Nobody has ever found anything worth manufacturing in space. NASA has tried. For small things, gravity isn't that big a deal. For big things, lift capacity is too expensive. Some early shuttle flights carried an electrophoresis apparatus to try to make some drug, but it turned out to be easier to do that via genetic engineering. Almost all the the "science projects" currently on the ISS are related to space flight as an end in itself. There's currently something up on "biological macromolecular crystals", but in fact, those can and are grown on the ground.
What do we need a "broadband stimulus" for? Why subsidize TV over IP, torrents, and p0rn? That's the only reason for more bandwidth than we have now. 90% of US "active internet users" already have something faster than dialup.
About 67% of US households have a broadband connection. Only 58% have cable TV. Well under 50% get a newspaper delivered. What's the problem?
With the exception of South Korea, all the countries with higher broadband penetration than the US are tiny, snowbound, or both.
The Apple fanboys think Jobs is important for his design influence. But Apple's design work is actually outsourced. (Early on, Apple used frogdesign; they've since used others.)
What really turned around Apple were two deals. One was the deal with Microsoft that kept Office on the Mac, and the other was the deal with the recording industry that put music on the iPod.
Apple needs a dealmaker from the content industry. Probably a film executive; recording industry people are too dumb. (Really.) Successful film producers are good at getting multiple parties who don't like each other all pulling in the same direction.
The Help Israel Win site is down. But Google's cache of the site is available, so that seems to be the site mentioned.
From the cached page, this sounds like just another attempt to install malware. "How can you help? You download and install the file from our site. The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!" There's no indication of who's behind this, and the only contact point is a GMail address.
The domain is registered anonymously through some Register.com front organization in Portugal. It's currently not resolving at all. DNS is on a Register.com server.
Probably had nothing to do with Israel at all.
If you are working on a masters project, you may find it hard to get your professors to sign an NDA however.
I actually did that at Stanford in the 1980s. My Master's project not only went in with an NDA and a copyright notice, but stamped in huge red letters "ILLEGAL COPY IF NOT IN RED" on every page.
The program (the first auto-trace program for PCs) became an Autodesk product, and I came out of this very well. Years later, I found out that there had been considerable faculty discussion over this, resulting in some policy changes, but I never had any serious trouble from Stanford. However, I was never an employee of Stanford. The deal for people who accept money from the school is different.
Stanford tends to encourage students and faculty to do startups. They spun off Yahoo, Google, Cisco, and Sun, after all. This is unusual; most schools don't have on-campus venture capitalists. Looking at the Southern Utah University site, I found a copyright policy, but no patent policy. It's quite possible that nobody there ever had an idea that made money, so they've never had to consider the issue.
I run Downside, where, in 2000, I called the dot-com crash before it happened and named names. Check my track record. Since then, I've occasionally pointed out the obvious before it became conventional wisdom:
The next crash looks to be housing-related. Fannie Mae is in trouble. But not because of their accounting irregularities. The problem is more fundamental. They borrow short, lend long, and paper over the resulting interest rate risk with derivatives. In a credit crunch, the counterparties will be squeezed hard. The numbers are huge. And there's no public record of who those counterparties are.
Derivatives allow the creation of securities with a low probability of loss coupled with a very high but unlikely loss. When unlikely events are uncorrelated, as with domestic fire insurance, this is a viable model. When unlikely events are correlated, as with interest rate risk, everything breaks at once. Remember "portfolio insurance"? Same problem.
Mortgage financing is so tied to public policy that predictions based on fundamentals are not possible. All we can do is to point out that huge stresses are accumulating in that sector. At some point, as interest rates increase, something will break in a big way. The result may look like the 1980s S&L debacle.
The 2004 prediction describes exactly what happened in housing. No question about that.
The 2006 predictions took longer to happen than I'd expected. The Fed cut rates sharply in 2007, accelerating the economy when it should have been hitting the brakes. This deferred the collapse of the housing bubble, but not for long. When it did pop, it was worse than it had to be.
I expected one of the car manufacturers to go bust. Instead, they all almost went bust, and only a Government bailout saved them. The fundamentals indicated something had to give. The housing bubble and interest rate cuts resulted in something of a "car bubble", deferring the inevitable a few more more years.
The hurricane prediction was kind of off the wall, but Galveston was duly flattened.
It's nice to be right, but it isn't happy-making.