There used to be a real need for high-end PCs. In the 1980s and early 1990s, you needed a specially configured PC to run AutoCAD. In the late 1990s, I had a $6000 PC (with a Pentium Pro and a $2000 graphics card) to run Softimage. Stock traders used to order special "trading workstations" with multiple monitor support. Avid had a whole industry selling expensive hardware in expensive furniture for video editing.
Now you can do all that stuff on stock mid-range PCs. You might need some extra RAM or a multicore CPU, but those are cheap options now.
Nobody writes games that require a quad CPU. When you look at the benchmarks for "high end" gamer systems, you see them doing maybe 30% better for 2x the cost. The price/performance isn't there.
The US only has about 26,000 real computer scientists. The number of programmers without a theory background is much higher. That in turn is dwarfed by the "information technology" people, "power users", and users generally.
So why should kids be forced to learn "computer science"?
One could make a better case for teaching auto mechanics or machine shop skills.
Unless the program has the code to recognize EV certs (which requires tables of valid issuers) it can't distinguish between them and ordinary certificates. So, if there's trouble with EV certs, it means suppport was added, but botched.
Baloney. It's "offshoring" that killed SV
on
How To Create More Jobs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Silicon Valley used to be about manufacturing. ICs were actually made here, along with many of the products that used them. Intel, National Semiconductor, and HP all had big manufacturing facilities in Silicon Valley. National Semi watches and HP calculators were made in Silicon Valley. Amdahl mainframes were made here. Dozens of disk drive companies made hard drives. Apple used to make Macs in Fremont.
When the manufacturing went offshore for cheaper labor, the production engineering followed. Slowly the fab technology industry moved to Japan and Taiwan. Then the actual IC design work went offshore. Now, the entire consumer electronics industry is outside the US.
Anyway, Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't apply at all while you're venture-funded. Only at the IPO stage does it matter. At that point, you have to provide a very detailed prospectus, which isn't a new requirement. Sarbanes-Oxley isn't that much of a hassle to comply with for a straightforward manufacturing company. Only when the financial structure is "creative", with special-purpose entities, multiple corporations under one parent, and similar gimmicks, is compliance a problem. That's why the WSJ is grumbling - it makes financial gimmicks less desirable.
Certifying Authority keys are assets, and thus capable of being transferred.
That in itself is an interesting question. A "signature" is not normally considered a transferable asset. Also, there's a "relying party" liability associated with certificates. Signing carries with it obligations. Did Comodo acquire that liability?
This subject is being discussed by Firefox developers, Comodo CA people, the person who reported the problem, and somebody named "Patricia" from CertStar, the issuer, here.
Looking at this cert further, it's a very wierd certificate. "Issuer" of ""www.mozilla.com" has "O=Comodo CA Limited". That's descended from "Positive SSL CA", for which "Issuer" has "O = The USERTRUST Network". That's descended from "UTN-USERFirst-Hardware", for which Issuer has "O = AddTrust AB". That's descended from "AddTrust External CA Root". Why is a Comodo cert being issued under AddTrust? Comodo is a root CA itself, with its own root certs in major browsers. Something is not right here.
AddTrust went beyond using resellers. They apparently allowed subordinate CAs to issue certs in AddTrust's name: AddTrust's rapid Trust Service Provider (Licensee) start-up package allows you to deliver cutting-edge public key infrastructure (PKI) services cost-effectively and in a way that best complements your business model. Literally within months you can start selling pre-packaged outsourced PKI services allowing your customers...
AddTrust's globally recognized PKI brand is designed for co-branding with companies recognized for high-quality IT services and products.... Rather than relying on external certification authorities, you can easily provide high-end certificates yourself by becoming an AddTrust-licensed Trust Service Provider. This allows you to decide how much of the underlying secure infrastructure you want to run and invest in yourself.
The relationship between Comodo and AddTrust is mentioned in this email. Robin Aldin of Comodo wrote: There is no ongoing relationship with AddTrust AB, Sweden. I'm not even sure if AddTrust AB still exists as a company. I think AddTrust may exist now only as a brand of ScandTrust AB. Sweden - although Comodo does have the right to continue using the root CA certificates which we purchased from them and which bear the AddTrust name.
So the party ultimately responsible for this certificate is out of business?
The article is confusing, and the author declines to name the certificate issuer that's the problem.
But the screenshot gives the details. It's PositiveSSL.
He really did get PositiveSSL to issue him a Comodo-authorized cert in the name of "www.mozilla.com". Try this link and look at the certificate details.
It looks like certificates with this issuer information need to be rejected:
CN = PositiveSSL CA
O = Comodo CA Limited
L = Salford
ST = Greater Manchester
C = GB
I loaded all current Comodo certificate revocation lists, and this bogus certificate has not been revoked.
Some Comodo CA root certificate needs to be removed from the approved list.
Back to basics. A capacitor is an insulator between two conductors. The key concept here is that their insulator has an insanely high breakdown voltage, which is why they can supposedly make an ultracapacitor that operates around 500V instead of the usual 5V or so.
The patent says "The alumina-coated calcined CMBT powder and the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic have exceptional high-voltage breakdown and when used as a composite with the plastic as the matrix the average voltage breakdown was 5.57 * 10^6 V/cm or higher. The voltage breakdown of the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic is 580 V/micrometer at 23 degrees C. and the voltage breakdown of the alumina-coated CMBT powders is 610 V/micrometer at 85 degrees C."
Note how many different units they use. Conventionally, dielectric strength is quoted as KV/mm. So we have
First, why did they make a composite that's worse than either of its components?
This would be obvious if they used the same units for all their breakdown voltages in the patent.
Second, those are unreasonably good numbers. The usual breakdown voltage for PET as used in Mylar capacitors is only 17 KV/mm. Why is their PET 35 times as good as everybody else's?
(Check this, please. Look at the actual patent image. The searchable text version at the USPTO doesn't show math symbols very well.)
It's not the compute power that's the problem. It just hasn't been done. Robot sonar data reduction could be smarter than it is. But most research is going into vision and LIDAR.
The available sonar hardware for air is not only dumb, but obsolete. Most of it is a holdover from the Polaroid instant camera auto-focus systems. Today, everybody does auto-focus optically.
There's good work going on with multi-beam sonar for underwater robotic vehicles, where vision doesn't work well but audio propagation is very good.
You can actually build up somewhat fuzzy images from a moving sonar rangefinder; Moravec did it in the early 1980s, and I implemented a version in the late 1980s. Look up "certainty grids". You can resolve details somewhat narrower than the beam width by using pings from multiple locations. I could get a 2D image showing the legs of a chair clearly, even though the beam width was much wider than the chair legs. Fun twenty years ago.
I'm amazed that something this good emerged from regulatory agencies under the Bush Administration. I suspect that some staffers are thinking very hard about what happens to their career once government regulation again gets, as Obama puts it, "adult supervision".
In my humble opinion, the Darpa Grand Challenge, by offering a market to LIDAR makers, made vision-based SLAM a thing of the past and the under-budgeted.
That's what many of us with Grand Challenge entries once thought. Even Sebastian Thrun once thought that. But, in fact, the winning 2005 Stanford "Stanley" vehicle was running mostly on vision. Above 25MPH it was out-driving its LIDAR range. The vision system wasn't doing SLAM, though. It was comparing the road further ahead with the near road. If they "looked the same" (the machine learning system for making that judgment was the breakthrough) and the LIDARs profiled the near road as flat, then the vehicle could drive faster than it could stop within the LIDAR range.
For the Urban Challenge, LIDAR units were more useful, because the speeds were slower and the environment more cluttered. But see the current issue of IEEE Trans. on Robotics, the special issue on SLAM, to see how much progress has been made. It's useful to use a camera and a limited LIDAR together with a SLAM algorithm; the vision system brings in more data and the LIDAR has
less ambiguity.
The Velodyne thing (which is a better-built version of the Team Dad spinning LIDARs of 2005) is a good device, but too big, too expensive, and has too much rotating machinery for a production product. I've met its designers and seen the thing. The next step will probably involve either flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors. Eye-safe flash LIDAR is a reality, and if produced in volume, it wouldn't be that expensive. It's expensive now only because it needs custom ICs.
An affordable little non-scanning 3D LIDAR for indoor use would be useful. There's the Swiss Ranger, the first device that qualifies. This is a true 3D time of flight sensor with no moving parts and 176x144 pixels.
It's been around for about five years as a custom research item, but it's now being sold as a product by Acroname for $7500. The price needs to drop by an order of magnitude or two, which is quite possible.
It looks like the sensors are dumb ranging sonars at four heights. Those are very crude sensors; all you get is the range of the nearest solid object in a 30 degree cone. You could probably separate walls, tables, chairs, and humans with that, at least some of the time. It won't ever work very well. People have been fooling with those things since the 1980s. (The usual sonar sensors are left over from Polaroid auto-focus cameras. Very few robotics people have tried to do serious sonar processing, like submarines or bats.) You're just too information-starved. Vision, though...
There's been much more progress in the last five years than most people realize, though. SLAM works now. Vision algorithms actually work. Low-cost inertial devices work. We're starting to see the payoff from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which gave robotics a serious and needed butt-kick.
No, there are no major visual observatories near NYC. The nearest serious research telescopes are near Ithaca. Some closer schools have observatories, but they're training or hobby facilities.
Brings back memories of wiring up 7400 series TTL gates with a wire-wrap gun. I wonder how they developed the thing. It would be amusing to write a back-end for a VHDL compiler or a logic simulator to generate logic in LittleBigMan devices. Probably easier than trying to debug the thing inside the game.
Danny Hillis once made a Tic-tac-toe machine out of Tinkertoys and string. I've seen the thing. I'm amazed that it worked. He once told me that it didn't work very well.
If a UL-rated power supply blows up on you, UL wants to know. There's a form for reports. They accept pictures (.JPG or.GIF). If you're willing to ship the failed product to UL, they'll send you mailing instructions.
The image on that site isn't good enough to allow reading the certification number below the UR symbol. After some enhancement in Photoshop, it looks something like "E??430?", but I can't be sure.
Product reviewers: please provide a clear photo of the nameplate on anything you review.
Class: Power Supplies, Information Technology Equipment Including Electrical Business Equipment - Component
UL certification: E214301
ALLIED LEADER INTERNATIONAL LTD E214301
1ST FL
18 WU CHUN 7 RD, WU GU INDUSTRY AREA
WU GU SHIANG, TAIPEI TAIWAN
Model: AL-D500EXP
Input voltage: 230VAC.
The UL certification database has UL's test numbers, and they're above the ones from "jonnyGURU.com". But the UL database lists this as a supply intended for 230V power only.
They list all the other Allied power supplies as "115/230VAC", but not this one. JonnyGuru reported that the primary side blew out, not the secondary side. Running on 115V, the primary side has to draw twice the current required at 230V. (Yes, that's how switching power supplies work.)
So this thing is mislabeled, or was submitted for testing with a different label. It went through UL testing as 230V only, and won't work on 115V.
They should have checked each power supply for a UL marking, and an entry in the UL Certification Database. Things seem to be getting better, though; the power supplies tested did not blow up or catch fire at full load. That's a big improvement from a few years ago.
The basic UL requirements are 1) no overload problems at full load, 2) no explosion or fire under output overload/short conditions, and 3) no single component failure can cause a fire (i.e. there should be a fuse of some kind in there.) It's permitted for an overloaded unit to fail and never work again; that's not a safety issue. Some no-name power supplies had real problems meeting those basic conditions.
It's about the right time to do this. There have been about three competing schemes for smart inductive wireless charging, none of which got any traction. This needs to be standardized, preferably worldwide.
If this works, every business hotel will have a convenient charging pad in every room. We might see charging pads built into cars.
Computer conventions are on the way out. Comdex, E3, and Macworld are dead or dying; now Novell. The SF Convention Bureau says that two Cisco conventions and one from NetApp have been canceled for 2009.
Get some filtering box for the school network, from Barracuda or somebody, and don't worry too much about the home situation.
For worried parents, aim them at OpenDNS with the porn filtering option. Tell them to reconfigure their home broadband router to use OpenDNS, and lock down the router.
For overly worried parents, suggest TrueVine, the filtered Christian dial-up ISP. "We block offensive material BEFORE it enters your home." Nobody actually buys that service for themselves, but it gives you an answer for the fanatics.
Paper consumption peaked a few years ago and is now declining. As the old paper-oriented people retire and die off, demand for paper decreases. Young people are more likely to upload a photo to Flickr than print it on an inkjet.
Besides, if you're printing text, get something with a xerographic engine, a laser or LED printer. Toner is cheap.
These are mostly read-only implementations for dealing with archival data. They're not read/write, which is more work to implement and not that useful.
QNX has had user-space file systems for decades. (It's a microkernel; almost everything is in user space.) Some users wrote file system implementations for weird file systems, like.zip files. Most of the modern QNX file system action is supporting various flash-based file systems and networked file systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's because portable devices are used up faster. They get lost, damaged, stolen, and the batteries die. Desktops have none of those problems.
That's a good read. Thanks.
There used to be a real need for high-end PCs. In the 1980s and early 1990s, you needed a specially configured PC to run AutoCAD. In the late 1990s, I had a $6000 PC (with a Pentium Pro and a $2000 graphics card) to run Softimage. Stock traders used to order special "trading workstations" with multiple monitor support. Avid had a whole industry selling expensive hardware in expensive furniture for video editing.
Now you can do all that stuff on stock mid-range PCs. You might need some extra RAM or a multicore CPU, but those are cheap options now.
Nobody writes games that require a quad CPU. When you look at the benchmarks for "high end" gamer systems, you see them doing maybe 30% better for 2x the cost. The price/performance isn't there.
The US only has about 26,000 real computer scientists. The number of programmers without a theory background is much higher. That in turn is dwarfed by the "information technology" people, "power users", and users generally.
So why should kids be forced to learn "computer science"? One could make a better case for teaching auto mechanics or machine shop skills.
Unless the program has the code to recognize EV certs (which requires tables of valid issuers) it can't distinguish between them and ordinary certificates. So, if there's trouble with EV certs, it means suppport was added, but botched.
Silicon Valley used to be about manufacturing. ICs were actually made here, along with many of the products that used them. Intel, National Semiconductor, and HP all had big manufacturing facilities in Silicon Valley. National Semi watches and HP calculators were made in Silicon Valley. Amdahl mainframes were made here. Dozens of disk drive companies made hard drives. Apple used to make Macs in Fremont.
When the manufacturing went offshore for cheaper labor, the production engineering followed. Slowly the fab technology industry moved to Japan and Taiwan. Then the actual IC design work went offshore. Now, the entire consumer electronics industry is outside the US.
Anyway, Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't apply at all while you're venture-funded. Only at the IPO stage does it matter. At that point, you have to provide a very detailed prospectus, which isn't a new requirement. Sarbanes-Oxley isn't that much of a hassle to comply with for a straightforward manufacturing company. Only when the financial structure is "creative", with special-purpose entities, multiple corporations under one parent, and similar gimmicks, is compliance a problem. That's why the WSJ is grumbling - it makes financial gimmicks less desirable.
Certifying Authority keys are assets, and thus capable of being transferred.
That in itself is an interesting question. A "signature" is not normally considered a transferable asset. Also, there's a "relying party" liability associated with certificates. Signing carries with it obligations. Did Comodo acquire that liability?
This subject is being discussed by Firefox developers, Comodo CA people, the person who reported the problem, and somebody named "Patricia" from CertStar, the issuer, here.
Robert Alden of Comodo says they "have suspended Certstar's reseller activities until our investigation has been completed." The CertStar site now says "Due to technical issues we are unable to process orders at this time. We are working hard to resolve the issue and apologize for any convenience caused. Please check back later."
The Mozilla team is discussing revoking some root CA keys.
Looking at this cert further, it's a very wierd certificate. "Issuer" of ""www.mozilla.com" has "O=Comodo CA Limited". That's descended from "Positive SSL CA", for which "Issuer" has "O = The USERTRUST Network". That's descended from "UTN-USERFirst-Hardware", for which Issuer has "O = AddTrust AB". That's descended from "AddTrust External CA Root". Why is a Comodo cert being issued under AddTrust? Comodo is a root CA itself, with its own root certs in major browsers. Something is not right here.
So who's AddTrust? Their web site says "Under Reconstruction". This does not look good. Checking the Internet Archive, we find "JOIN THE ADDTRUST FAMILY Gain an edge over your competitors by providing co-branded PKI services"
AddTrust went beyond using resellers. They apparently allowed subordinate CAs to issue certs in AddTrust's name: AddTrust's rapid Trust Service Provider (Licensee) start-up package allows you to deliver cutting-edge public key infrastructure (PKI) services cost-effectively and in a way that best complements your business model. Literally within months you can start selling pre-packaged outsourced PKI services allowing your customers ...
AddTrust's globally recognized PKI brand is designed for co-branding with companies recognized for high-quality IT services and products. ... Rather than relying on external certification authorities, you can easily provide high-end certificates yourself by becoming an AddTrust-licensed Trust Service Provider. This allows you to decide how much of the underlying secure infrastructure you want to run and invest in yourself.
The relationship between Comodo and AddTrust is mentioned in this email. Robin Aldin of Comodo wrote: There is no ongoing relationship with AddTrust AB, Sweden. I'm not even sure if AddTrust AB still exists as a company. I think AddTrust may exist now only as a brand of ScandTrust AB. Sweden - although Comodo does have the right to continue using the root CA certificates which we purchased from them and which bear the AddTrust name.
So the party ultimately responsible for this certificate is out of business?
The article is confusing, and the author declines to name the certificate issuer that's the problem. But the screenshot gives the details. It's PositiveSSL. He really did get PositiveSSL to issue him a Comodo-authorized cert in the name of "www.mozilla.com". Try this link and look at the certificate details.
It looks like certificates with this issuer information need to be rejected:
I loaded all current Comodo certificate revocation lists, and this bogus certificate has not been revoked.
Some Comodo CA root certificate needs to be removed from the approved list.
Back to basics. A capacitor is an insulator between two conductors. The key concept here is that their insulator has an insanely high breakdown voltage, which is why they can supposedly make an ultracapacitor that operates around 500V instead of the usual 5V or so.
The patent says "The alumina-coated calcined CMBT powder and the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic have exceptional high-voltage breakdown and when used as a composite with the plastic as the matrix the average voltage breakdown was 5.57 * 10^6 V/cm or higher. The voltage breakdown of the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic is 580 V/micrometer at 23 degrees C. and the voltage breakdown of the alumina-coated CMBT powders is 610 V/micrometer at 85 degrees C."
Note how many different units they use. Conventionally, dielectric strength is quoted as KV/mm. So we have
First, why did they make a composite that's worse than either of its components? This would be obvious if they used the same units for all their breakdown voltages in the patent.
Second, those are unreasonably good numbers. The usual breakdown voltage for PET as used in Mylar capacitors is only 17 KV/mm. Why is their PET 35 times as good as everybody else's?
(Check this, please. Look at the actual patent image. The searchable text version at the USPTO doesn't show math symbols very well.)
It's not the compute power that's the problem. It just hasn't been done. Robot sonar data reduction could be smarter than it is. But most research is going into vision and LIDAR.
The available sonar hardware for air is not only dumb, but obsolete. Most of it is a holdover from the Polaroid instant camera auto-focus systems. Today, everybody does auto-focus optically. There's good work going on with multi-beam sonar for underwater robotic vehicles, where vision doesn't work well but audio propagation is very good.
You can actually build up somewhat fuzzy images from a moving sonar rangefinder; Moravec did it in the early 1980s, and I implemented a version in the late 1980s. Look up "certainty grids". You can resolve details somewhat narrower than the beam width by using pings from multiple locations. I could get a 2D image showing the legs of a chair clearly, even though the beam width was much wider than the chair legs. Fun twenty years ago.
The given URL is no good. Message with Department of Commerce document as attachment is here.
I'm amazed that something this good emerged from regulatory agencies under the Bush Administration. I suspect that some staffers are thinking very hard about what happens to their career once government regulation again gets, as Obama puts it, "adult supervision".
In my humble opinion, the Darpa Grand Challenge, by offering a market to LIDAR makers, made vision-based SLAM a thing of the past and the under-budgeted.
That's what many of us with Grand Challenge entries once thought. Even Sebastian Thrun once thought that. But, in fact, the winning 2005 Stanford "Stanley" vehicle was running mostly on vision. Above 25MPH it was out-driving its LIDAR range. The vision system wasn't doing SLAM, though. It was comparing the road further ahead with the near road. If they "looked the same" (the machine learning system for making that judgment was the breakthrough) and the LIDARs profiled the near road as flat, then the vehicle could drive faster than it could stop within the LIDAR range.
For the Urban Challenge, LIDAR units were more useful, because the speeds were slower and the environment more cluttered. But see the current issue of IEEE Trans. on Robotics, the special issue on SLAM, to see how much progress has been made. It's useful to use a camera and a limited LIDAR together with a SLAM algorithm; the vision system brings in more data and the LIDAR has less ambiguity.
The Velodyne thing (which is a better-built version of the Team Dad spinning LIDARs of 2005) is a good device, but too big, too expensive, and has too much rotating machinery for a production product. I've met its designers and seen the thing. The next step will probably involve either flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors. Eye-safe flash LIDAR is a reality, and if produced in volume, it wouldn't be that expensive. It's expensive now only because it needs custom ICs.
An affordable little non-scanning 3D LIDAR for indoor use would be useful. There's the Swiss Ranger, the first device that qualifies. This is a true 3D time of flight sensor with no moving parts and 176x144 pixels. It's been around for about five years as a custom research item, but it's now being sold as a product by Acroname for $7500. The price needs to drop by an order of magnitude or two, which is quite possible.
It looks like the sensors are dumb ranging sonars at four heights. Those are very crude sensors; all you get is the range of the nearest solid object in a 30 degree cone. You could probably separate walls, tables, chairs, and humans with that, at least some of the time. It won't ever work very well. People have been fooling with those things since the 1980s. (The usual sonar sensors are left over from Polaroid auto-focus cameras. Very few robotics people have tried to do serious sonar processing, like submarines or bats.) You're just too information-starved. Vision, though...
There's been much more progress in the last five years than most people realize, though. SLAM works now. Vision algorithms actually work. Low-cost inertial devices work. We're starting to see the payoff from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which gave robotics a serious and needed butt-kick.
No, there are no major visual observatories near NYC. The nearest serious research telescopes are near Ithaca. Some closer schools have observatories, but they're training or hobby facilities.
Brings back memories of wiring up 7400 series TTL gates with a wire-wrap gun. I wonder how they developed the thing. It would be amusing to write a back-end for a VHDL compiler or a logic simulator to generate logic in LittleBigMan devices. Probably easier than trying to debug the thing inside the game.
Danny Hillis once made a Tic-tac-toe machine out of Tinkertoys and string. I've seen the thing. I'm amazed that it worked. He once told me that it didn't work very well.
If a UL-rated power supply blows up on you, UL wants to know. There's a form for reports. They accept pictures (.JPG or .GIF). If you're willing to ship the failed product to UL, they'll send you mailing instructions.
The image on that site isn't good enough to allow reading the certification number below the UR symbol. After some enhancement in Photoshop, it looks something like "E??430?", but I can't be sure.
Product reviewers: please provide a clear photo of the nameplate on anything you review.
The UL database does have an entry for this item.
1ST FL
18 WU CHUN 7 RD, WU GU INDUSTRY AREA
WU GU SHIANG, TAIPEI TAIWAN
The UL certification database has UL's test numbers, and they're above the ones from "jonnyGURU.com". But the UL database lists this as a supply intended for 230V power only. They list all the other Allied power supplies as "115/230VAC", but not this one. JonnyGuru reported that the primary side blew out, not the secondary side. Running on 115V, the primary side has to draw twice the current required at 230V. (Yes, that's how switching power supplies work.)
So this thing is mislabeled, or was submitted for testing with a different label. It went through UL testing as 230V only, and won't work on 115V.
They should have checked each power supply for a UL marking, and an entry in the UL Certification Database. Things seem to be getting better, though; the power supplies tested did not blow up or catch fire at full load. That's a big improvement from a few years ago.
The basic UL requirements are 1) no overload problems at full load, 2) no explosion or fire under output overload/short conditions, and 3) no single component failure can cause a fire (i.e. there should be a fuse of some kind in there.) It's permitted for an overloaded unit to fail and never work again; that's not a safety issue. Some no-name power supplies had real problems meeting those basic conditions.
It's about the right time to do this. There have been about three competing schemes for smart inductive wireless charging, none of which got any traction. This needs to be standardized, preferably worldwide.
If this works, every business hotel will have a convenient charging pad in every room. We might see charging pads built into cars.
Computer conventions are on the way out. Comdex, E3, and Macworld are dead or dying; now Novell. The SF Convention Bureau says that two Cisco conventions and one from NetApp have been canceled for 2009.
Doctor conventions are up, though.
Get some filtering box for the school network, from Barracuda or somebody, and don't worry too much about the home situation.
For worried parents, aim them at OpenDNS with the porn filtering option. Tell them to reconfigure their home broadband router to use OpenDNS, and lock down the router.
For overly worried parents, suggest TrueVine, the filtered Christian dial-up ISP. "We block offensive material BEFORE it enters your home." Nobody actually buys that service for themselves, but it gives you an answer for the fanatics.
Paper consumption peaked a few years ago and is now declining. As the old paper-oriented people retire and die off, demand for paper decreases. Young people are more likely to upload a photo to Flickr than print it on an inkjet.
Besides, if you're printing text, get something with a xerographic engine, a laser or LED printer. Toner is cheap.
These are mostly read-only implementations for dealing with archival data. They're not read/write, which is more work to implement and not that useful.
QNX has had user-space file systems for decades. (It's a microkernel; almost everything is in user space.) Some users wrote file system implementations for weird file systems, like .zip files. Most of the modern QNX file system action is supporting various flash-based file systems and networked file systems.