It does help to be in the right place at the right time. But you get to pick where you are. Moving from New York to Silicon Valley in 1974 worked out very well for me.
Twentysomethings who went to San Francisco in 1998 for the dot-com boom did OK, although not for long. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of twentysomethings in SF dropped 40% when the dot-com boom collapsed.
You can work hard and still guess wrong, though. If you thought that fusion power was going to be big, and spent the necessary years to get a doctorate in nuclear physics, you're probably not working in that field now.
There's nothing right now that looks as promising as the great booms of the past - railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio, aviation, plastics, computing, the Internet. The smart young people I know seem to be going into either biotech or law, but neither field is really booming. I have hopes for robotics, but it's not having a boom yet.
It does help. It knocks years off the time it takes to get to the point that you have enough assets to do something.
In the US, having rich parents gives more of an edge than it did fifty years ago. Few kids used to attend private schools, and if they did, they were probably Catholic. Now, there's a whole system of high-end schools and activities for rich kids. There's heavy institutional support for getting into the right college. Fifty years ago, there were SATs, but nobody took special SAT preparation courses. This is reflected in the rising correlation between the parents income and the child's income.
How many people 100 years ago would have predicted heavier than air flight
100 years ago, the Wright Brothers had already flown. The first military flight and the first airport opening were both in 1908.
How many would have predicted the internet 50 years ago?
Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think", 1945, is considered the first article to describe something like the Internet. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." (Actually, that's Encarta.) 50 years ago, the SAGE system, with networked air defense centers, was starting to come on line.
On the other hand, by 1958, the first rockets had made it into orbit, yet within 15 years, boosters had become about as good as they were going to get. The first attempt at a fusion reactor, the Stellerator, was proposed in 1952, and built in the late 1950s.
Take a look at these pictures of the Aspidistra transmitter in Britain. Art deco design, curved chrome, indirect lighting, and parquet floors, all in an underground bunker. This was the 500KW transmitter used to break in on German radio stations and create the illusion of a local station within Germany.
The transmitter was purchased from RCA, and the Radio City design made it all the way to Sussex.
OK. Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
We're running out of some other minerals. There are substitutes, and recycling, but using a substitute is usually more energy intensive.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down. This has already happened in a number of Third World countries. A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor. The usual pattern is devolution into rich central cities surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Mexico City and Rio are classic examples.
We track the "bottom feeders" in Google AdWords over at SiteTruth. We consider about 36% of Google's advertisers, out of a set of 20,000 ad domains, to be "bottom-feeders" - no visible business address, or we have other negative info.
If you download AdRater, our Greasemonkey script for Firefox, we rate the advertiser behind every Google ad you see and display a rating icon on top of the ad. (Yes, the plugin "phones home". It tells us lots of stuff about the advertiser, which we're interested in, and very little about the user's browsing, which we don't care about. The plugin is open source, so you can check this.)
With the information we have, it's painfully obvious that Google isn't picky about their advertisers. The example in the article is one of many, not a unique exception.
Sonic.net will, if requested, deliver IPv6 packets to their DSL subscribers. Unfortunately, their upstream connections are IPv4, so they're just offering tunneling at their end.
In motion photography, motion blur is actually desirable because it functions as a form of temporal antialiasing, allowing frames with motion to blend into each other and create the illusion of continuous motion.
That's old-school chemical photography thinking. Now you want the sharpest frames you can get. Any blur can be added later if desired. The coming technology is smart frame interpolation/morphing. This gets you, among other things, arbitrary slow slow-motion. This is already being used in some sports coverage.
The sports people want to sell ESPN HD Football, and the people who buy that want detail.
A few weeks ago I felt I was being stalked by Tesla electric cars. Either they were behind me or in front of me. There was a green one I kept seeing. Why were exotic electric cars silently following me?
Actually, it's because I live on a road near the only Tesla dealership in Northern California, and it's a winding road through a canyon that leads to a long, little used, gently-winding two-lane road along a beautiful lake. Tesla is selling a $100,000 convertible, so they take customers along this route for a test drive. It's the only road within ten minutes of the dealership suitable for showing off such a car.
Driving on the freeway to San Francisco just doesn't make an expensive convertible seem worthwhile.
(If you want to see Teslas zoom by, take I-280 to the Edgewood Road interchange, drive down Edgewood to Canada Road, and drive along past Crystal Springs Reservoir.)
"The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be constantly fed," Dr. Hoffman said. "If you don't feed the delusion, sooner or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is that it needs to be repetitively reinforced."
Hm. I wonder if that would work with Islam. Islam is really into repetitive reinforcement, with prayer five times a day and heavy emphasis on memorizing the Koran. It's possible to OD on religion, and Islam is set up to encourage that. In most other religions, you have to become a monk or a priest or join a cult to reach that level of intensity.
With all that resolution, you're going to need either a tripod, Steadicam gyros, or stabilization processing. Stabilization processing won't help if the "shutter time" (really integration time) is more than a millisecond or two; the individual frames will be blurred.
High resolution with big enough collecting optics to get the shutter time down to 1ms or so, plus rate gyros to get info about camera movement, would be a useful option for news gathering. Just point in the direction of the action, take a bigger frame than you're going to use, and fix it up in post.
I know, that seems horribly inefficient. But remember, this process uses an electric arc to make the plasma. That requires a very large energy input. I'm impressed they can even reach energy breakeven. Breakeven is enough, though, because it makes the process independent of outside energy costs.
Their web site just screams "vaporware". In fact, the useful-scale project has been cancelled, and only a small "demonstration plant" will be built.
The real questions about this are 1) do they really get out more energy than they put in, and 2) how much processing of the exhaust gases is required? Westinghoue Plasma Corporation (which, sadly, has little to do with Westinghouse) claims that 1000 tonnes (metric?) of solid waste produces the energy equivalent of 1 (one) barrel of oil. So this isn't a big energy producer. Ordinary waste-to-energy plants do better than that, but don't burn as clean as a plasma arc.
The other problem is what comes out. Organic compounds are literally blasted apart into atoms at those temperatures, so it deals with biowaste just fine. CO2 comes out, of course. NOx, maybe. Everything heavier (metals, etc.) is supposed to come out as a "molten slag" suitable for cement aggregate. Not sure what the cement industry thinks of this. They're usually quite picky about what's allowed in cement aggregate. Some contaminants interfere with the chemistry of concrete curing and make bad concrete. It might be good for filling in swamps and such.
The way to do this is to use a split-core current transformer. You need two of these, one for each hot lead coming into your house, usually placed after the main switch. They clamp around one conductor of the power cable, but don't contact it, so they're safe. Out comes a voltage from 0-5V, proportional to the current. You can wire them in series, to get a single signal (phasing matters). Run the output (which is AC) through a full-wave bridge, and put a capacitor of about 100ufd across the output for filtering. Feed the output into some low-end microcontroller with an A/D. Transmit the data somewhere else for further processing.
Now it's time for some federal law enforcement action. Over at McColo, there will be records that indicate who's behind the spamming and botnet operations. They'll know who paid for servers. There will be phone records showing who made support phone calls to McColo.
McColo is in San Jose, and the San Francisco office of the FBI, which covers Silicon Valley, has a Cyber Intrusion Squad. It's their job to start digging and find out who's behind the spam operations.
Even if the people behind the spamming tried to stay anonymous to McColo, the odds are that they slipped up somewhere.
"Large Web mail operators like Google don't give a sh-- -- about spam originating from their networks because they
know they are too large to be blacklisted. This causes significant pain."
"Overall,
law enforcement referrals dropped for the third year in a row." "We also asked respondents if they believe law enforcement has the power and/or means to act upon information provided by
network operators. Only 21 percent said Yes, while nearly 64 percent said No".
"The attack stopped only because the attacker was paid.
The attacker remains at large and active.
No bots were used in this attack. The attacker had a small number of compromised Linux boxes from which he'd launch
the spoofed source DNS query. The DNS servers were all DNS servers open to recursion."
Templates were not in the original C++. They were added years later. For years, people were using unchecked down-conversions and horrible macros to work around that mistake. That's my point.
I haven't used Self, but going by my experience with Javascript, prototype-based languages suck compared to conventional class/metaclass based ones.
Generally true. Javascript was never intended for writing large programs. The object system is basically a hack on top of dictionaries. That's easy to implement, but doesn't scale well.
This is one of the classic things one can do wrong in language design, and which tend to have to be fixed in later versions, painfully. Some other classic boners are leaving out a "bool" type (C and Python), not providing generics in a statically typed object-oriented language (C++ and Java), and not designing in separate compilation (ISO Pascal).
Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax, and it's going to turn too many people off. Using whitespace as an operator (really!) is probably a bad idea. The ability to change the operator precedence dynamically may be "fun", but does not lead to readable or maintainable code.
Experience with "read macros" in LISP indicates that rewriting code during input isn't good for readability either. On top of all this, Ioke allows regular expressions in code, like Perl. (It's not clear from the description if you can use regular expressions in the read macros to rewrite the regular expressions in the code. I think you can.) So Ioke brings together the least readable features from four different languages.
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
He's using a Stirling engine to power the heater? Fuel to heat to air expansion to electricity to heat? That's a bit much. Just use a fuel-powered heater.
A quiet little 1KW Stirling engine would be useful to have around for backup power. One of those to power your furnace blowers, provide emergency lighting, and keep the UPS alive would be useful as a home accessory.
First, of course, bone marrow transplants are very risky. The fatality rate is around 20%.
Lacking CCR5 provides HIV immunity, but increases susceptibility to West Nile virus.
In that, it's similar to the genetic difference that enables sickle-cell anemia. People with that mutation are less susceptible to malaria.
This is progress, although a long way from a useful treatment.
I've visited Bletchley Park. It's a nice day trip out from London. The actual exhibits aren't that extensive. They have a few Enigmas, a fancier version with twelve rotors and a teletype machine interface, some replica bombes (some from a movie), the replica Colossus, and a collection of minor crypto-related items. The whole collection would fit in a corner of the Imperial War Museum.
It's a big country estate that needs to be maintained. There's a manor house, a lake with swans, some outbuildings, and the remainder of the famous "huts". There's far too much real estate for the exhibits.
The technical exhibits aren't in the manor house at all. The manor house is used for conferences and such. The upkeep on all that real estate is the problem.
It's nice that it's being maintained, but there's not that much to see there.
I'm moderately impressed with Bill Joy, having met him several times over the years, all the way back to his grad student days. But he's not right for this job. He gets more credit for the Internet than he should, though. He didn't invent TCP/IP. His was about the fourth or fifth implementation, and it wasn't one of the better ones. He had the huge advantage of government funding and permission to give the code away, though, so his was the one that was widely used. Then, at Sun, he had the advantage of being able to reuse code developed with
Government money at a privately funded startup.
In his post-Sun years, he went off on a weird anti-AI kick, as if we were actually close to making strong AI work. Which we're not. That seemed to be mostly a ploy to get attention. Since there's no real problem to work on, one can pontificate in that area. If, say, he'd picked security as an issue, he would have had to propose workable solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
It does help to be in the right place at the right time. But you get to pick where you are. Moving from New York to Silicon Valley in 1974 worked out very well for me.
Twentysomethings who went to San Francisco in 1998 for the dot-com boom did OK, although not for long. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of twentysomethings in SF dropped 40% when the dot-com boom collapsed.
You can work hard and still guess wrong, though. If you thought that fusion power was going to be big, and spent the necessary years to get a doctorate in nuclear physics, you're probably not working in that field now.
There's nothing right now that looks as promising as the great booms of the past - railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio, aviation, plastics, computing, the Internet. The smart young people I know seem to be going into either biotech or law, but neither field is really booming. I have hopes for robotics, but it's not having a boom yet.
It doesn't hurt to have very well-to-do parents.
It does help. It knocks years off the time it takes to get to the point that you have enough assets to do something.
In the US, having rich parents gives more of an edge than it did fifty years ago. Few kids used to attend private schools, and if they did, they were probably Catholic. Now, there's a whole system of high-end schools and activities for rich kids. There's heavy institutional support for getting into the right college. Fifty years ago, there were SATs, but nobody took special SAT preparation courses. This is reflected in the rising correlation between the parents income and the child's income.
How many people 100 years ago would have predicted heavier than air flight
100 years ago, the Wright Brothers had already flown. The first military flight and the first airport opening were both in 1908.
How many would have predicted the internet 50 years ago?
Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think", 1945, is considered the first article to describe something like the Internet. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." (Actually, that's Encarta.) 50 years ago, the SAGE system, with networked air defense centers, was starting to come on line.
On the other hand, by 1958, the first rockets had made it into orbit, yet within 15 years, boosters had become about as good as they were going to get. The first attempt at a fusion reactor, the Stellerator, was proposed in 1952, and built in the late 1950s.
Take a look at these pictures of the Aspidistra transmitter in Britain. Art deco design, curved chrome, indirect lighting, and parquet floors, all in an underground bunker. This was the 500KW transmitter used to break in on German radio stations and create the illusion of a local station within Germany.
The transmitter was purchased from RCA, and the Radio City design made it all the way to Sussex.
OK. Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
We're running out of some other minerals. There are substitutes, and recycling, but using a substitute is usually more energy intensive.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down. This has already happened in a number of Third World countries. A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor. The usual pattern is devolution into rich central cities surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Mexico City and Rio are classic examples.
That may be the future.
That's not a lone example. Search with Google for "craigslist auto posting software". These are all paid Google ads:
We track the "bottom feeders" in Google AdWords over at SiteTruth. We consider about 36% of Google's advertisers, out of a set of 20,000 ad domains, to be "bottom-feeders" - no visible business address, or we have other negative info. If you download AdRater, our Greasemonkey script for Firefox, we rate the advertiser behind every Google ad you see and display a rating icon on top of the ad. (Yes, the plugin "phones home". It tells us lots of stuff about the advertiser, which we're interested in, and very little about the user's browsing, which we don't care about. The plugin is open source, so you can check this.)
With the information we have, it's painfully obvious that Google isn't picky about their advertisers. The example in the article is one of many, not a unique exception.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted last month as saying "The Internet is fast becoming a cesspool" Was he complaining, or boasting? Much of that is Google's doing.
Sonic.net will, if requested, deliver IPv6 packets to their DSL subscribers. Unfortunately, their upstream connections are IPv4, so they're just offering tunneling at their end.
In motion photography, motion blur is actually desirable because it functions as a form of temporal antialiasing, allowing frames with motion to blend into each other and create the illusion of continuous motion.
That's old-school chemical photography thinking. Now you want the sharpest frames you can get. Any blur can be added later if desired. The coming technology is smart frame interpolation/morphing. This gets you, among other things, arbitrary slow slow-motion. This is already being used in some sports coverage.
The sports people want to sell ESPN HD Football, and the people who buy that want detail.
A few weeks ago I felt I was being stalked by Tesla electric cars. Either they were behind me or in front of me. There was a green one I kept seeing. Why were exotic electric cars silently following me?
Actually, it's because I live on a road near the only Tesla dealership in Northern California, and it's a winding road through a canyon that leads to a long, little used, gently-winding two-lane road along a beautiful lake. Tesla is selling a $100,000 convertible, so they take customers along this route for a test drive. It's the only road within ten minutes of the dealership suitable for showing off such a car. Driving on the freeway to San Francisco just doesn't make an expensive convertible seem worthwhile.
(If you want to see Teslas zoom by, take I-280 to the Edgewood Road interchange, drive down Edgewood to Canada Road, and drive along past Crystal Springs Reservoir.)
"The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be constantly fed," Dr. Hoffman said. "If you don't feed the delusion, sooner or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is that it needs to be repetitively reinforced."
Hm. I wonder if that would work with Islam. Islam is really into repetitive reinforcement, with prayer five times a day and heavy emphasis on memorizing the Koran. It's possible to OD on religion, and Islam is set up to encourage that. In most other religions, you have to become a monk or a priest or join a cult to reach that level of intensity.
With all that resolution, you're going to need either a tripod, Steadicam gyros, or stabilization processing. Stabilization processing won't help if the "shutter time" (really integration time) is more than a millisecond or two; the individual frames will be blurred.
High resolution with big enough collecting optics to get the shutter time down to 1ms or so, plus rate gyros to get info about camera movement, would be a useful option for news gathering. Just point in the direction of the action, take a bigger frame than you're going to use, and fix it up in post.
I know, that seems horribly inefficient. But remember, this process uses an electric arc to make the plasma. That requires a very large energy input. I'm impressed they can even reach energy breakeven. Breakeven is enough, though, because it makes the process independent of outside energy costs.
Their web site just screams "vaporware". In fact, the useful-scale project has been cancelled, and only a small "demonstration plant" will be built.
The real questions about this are 1) do they really get out more energy than they put in, and 2) how much processing of the exhaust gases is required? Westinghoue Plasma Corporation (which, sadly, has little to do with Westinghouse) claims that 1000 tonnes (metric?) of solid waste produces the energy equivalent of 1 (one) barrel of oil. So this isn't a big energy producer. Ordinary waste-to-energy plants do better than that, but don't burn as clean as a plasma arc.
The other problem is what comes out. Organic compounds are literally blasted apart into atoms at those temperatures, so it deals with biowaste just fine. CO2 comes out, of course. NOx, maybe. Everything heavier (metals, etc.) is supposed to come out as a "molten slag" suitable for cement aggregate. Not sure what the cement industry thinks of this. They're usually quite picky about what's allowed in cement aggregate. Some contaminants interfere with the chemistry of concrete curing and make bad concrete. It might be good for filling in swamps and such.
You're making this far too hard.
The way to do this is to use a split-core current transformer. You need two of these, one for each hot lead coming into your house, usually placed after the main switch. They clamp around one conductor of the power cable, but don't contact it, so they're safe. Out comes a voltage from 0-5V, proportional to the current. You can wire them in series, to get a single signal (phasing matters). Run the output (which is AC) through a full-wave bridge, and put a capacitor of about 100ufd across the output for filtering. Feed the output into some low-end microcontroller with an A/D. Transmit the data somewhere else for further processing.
I keep seeing "SQL injection", but injection into what? PHP? ASP? Plesk? Something else? Specific scripts, or the language engine itself?
Now it's time for some federal law enforcement action. Over at McColo, there will be records that indicate who's behind the spamming and botnet operations. They'll know who paid for servers. There will be phone records showing who made support phone calls to McColo.
McColo is in San Jose, and the San Francisco office of the FBI, which covers Silicon Valley, has a Cyber Intrusion Squad. It's their job to start digging and find out who's behind the spam operations.
Even if the people behind the spamming tried to stay anonymous to McColo, the odds are that they slipped up somewhere.
Ever heard of templates?
Templates were not in the original C++. They were added years later. For years, people were using unchecked down-conversions and horrible macros to work around that mistake. That's my point.
I haven't used Self, but going by my experience with Javascript, prototype-based languages suck compared to conventional class/metaclass based ones.
Generally true. Javascript was never intended for writing large programs. The object system is basically a hack on top of dictionaries. That's easy to implement, but doesn't scale well.
This is one of the classic things one can do wrong in language design, and which tend to have to be fixed in later versions, painfully. Some other classic boners are leaving out a "bool" type (C and Python), not providing generics in a statically typed object-oriented language (C++ and Java), and not designing in separate compilation (ISO Pascal).
Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax, and it's going to turn too many people off. Using whitespace as an operator (really!) is probably a bad idea. The ability to change the operator precedence dynamically may be "fun", but does not lead to readable or maintainable code. Experience with "read macros" in LISP indicates that rewriting code during input isn't good for readability either. On top of all this, Ioke allows regular expressions in code, like Perl. (It's not clear from the description if you can use regular expressions in the read macros to rewrite the regular expressions in the code. I think you can.) So Ioke brings together the least readable features from four different languages.
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
He's using a Stirling engine to power the heater? Fuel to heat to air expansion to electricity to heat? That's a bit much. Just use a fuel-powered heater.
A quiet little 1KW Stirling engine would be useful to have around for backup power. One of those to power your furnace blowers, provide emergency lighting, and keep the UPS alive would be useful as a home accessory.
First, of course, bone marrow transplants are very risky. The fatality rate is around 20%.
Lacking CCR5 provides HIV immunity, but increases susceptibility to West Nile virus. In that, it's similar to the genetic difference that enables sickle-cell anemia. People with that mutation are less susceptible to malaria.
This is progress, although a long way from a useful treatment.
I went to the talk at Stanford where Joy said that. The overall reaction was "Huh?"
Looks like he's at least getting some decent web developers behind him.
Well, let's see:
Interesting commented-out content:
This isn't good HTML. It's HTML copied from several other sites and cobbled together by an amateur. Lame.
I've visited Bletchley Park. It's a nice day trip out from London. The actual exhibits aren't that extensive. They have a few Enigmas, a fancier version with twelve rotors and a teletype machine interface, some replica bombes (some from a movie), the replica Colossus, and a collection of minor crypto-related items. The whole collection would fit in a corner of the Imperial War Museum.
It's a big country estate that needs to be maintained. There's a manor house, a lake with swans, some outbuildings, and the remainder of the famous "huts". There's far too much real estate for the exhibits. The technical exhibits aren't in the manor house at all. The manor house is used for conferences and such. The upkeep on all that real estate is the problem.
It's nice that it's being maintained, but there's not that much to see there.
I'm moderately impressed with Bill Joy, having met him several times over the years, all the way back to his grad student days. But he's not right for this job. He gets more credit for the Internet than he should, though. He didn't invent TCP/IP. His was about the fourth or fifth implementation, and it wasn't one of the better ones. He had the huge advantage of government funding and permission to give the code away, though, so his was the one that was widely used. Then, at Sun, he had the advantage of being able to reuse code developed with Government money at a privately funded startup.
In his post-Sun years, he went off on a weird anti-AI kick, as if we were actually close to making strong AI work. Which we're not. That seemed to be mostly a ploy to get attention. Since there's no real problem to work on, one can pontificate in that area. If, say, he'd picked security as an issue, he would have had to propose workable solutions.
So, no, this is not the person we want.