AOL just needs to promote itself as a "Web 2.0" company. They are, after all. Social networking? Definitely, they were there at the beginning. User-contributed content? Yes, they have that. Interactive client? Yes, AOL has that too. Mashups on the home page? Yes! Mobile phone capable? Of course. They even had virtual worlds with avatars, back in their Q-Link days.
An article on that subject by someone above the blithering blogger level would be useful. This subject needs coverage in the Wall Street Journal or Business Week.
There are some real issues here. If you're a bank, what do bank examiners think of Microsoft having a backdoor into your systems? If you're a health care provider, is there a HIPPA compliance issue? If you're a law firm and some of your clients are adverse to Microsoft, is it a breach of your duty to your clients to let Microsoft control your systems? If you're a defense contractor, is that back door permissible?
Many such companies run background checks on anyone who potentially has access to their data, and audits of what's happening within their own business. Who's auditing Microsoft for security? Who actually has access to the master keys that allow pushing an update? How many people have access to those keys? Are they US citizens? Do they have security clearances? Are they bonded?
Consumer Reports only reports on products they can buy at retail. They barely even talk to manufacturers. And not only do they make money, they're one of the very few magazines on the web people actually pay for.
It's so Popular Mechanics. Another resonant oscillating generator.
This is an old idea, but the usual form is a free-piston engine. Popular Mechanics was hot about that one back in 2004. For something that will light two LEDs, that thing looks big and expensive. Note the machined aluminum frame.
For comparison, here's a toy wind generator kit ("convert a plastic bottle to a wind generator!").
Notice how the guy with the vibrating ribbon generator demonstrates it in front of an electric fan. On high.
That's probably because it only works in a strong wind. People generally don't live where winds are regularly that high. Wind speed in Port-au-Prince has been between 9 and 12MPH all day, so something that cuts in around 9MPH is needed for use in Haiti.
The classic cheapie generator is taking an oil drum, cutting it in half, and using that as a Savonius rotor. Then you get an alternator from a car, and there's your actual generator. The axle sticks up into the air, where the halves
of the oil drum collect the wind and turn the alternator. Here's a smaller version.
LinkedIn is supposed to be about linking up people you already know. But it has spammers, called "open networkers", who will link to anybody. They're just trolling for big link counts. Some way to give those guys negative points when they spam would be useful.
Right now, there's no penalty for asking.
Among them is finding a business model that allows the hardware makers to subsidize the cost of the music.
Er, right.
The music industry has an even worse problem coming up. The music player industry will probably be eaten by the phone industry. Most newer phones have some music player capability. And the phone guys have a network in place that can distribute the music. The problem for the labels is that the telcos want a much bigger piece of the revenue than iTunes takes. Sprint started at $2.50 per song, back in 2006, and they kept most of that. Early in 2007, they dropped the price to $0.99 per song. It's not clear how much of that Sprint keeps, but it's probably more than Apple does. Plus, Sprint gives away a few songs a week to each customer, sends out audio streams, and probably doesn't pay the labels much for that.
From the label perspective, this is much worse than iTunes. iTunes is an online retailer. The telcos are the customer. The music labels are headed into a situation where they have about five to ten customers, all much bigger than any music industry company.
The patent expires in 2008 anyway. (For patents issued in that period, it's 20 years after filing or 17 years after issue, whichever is later. For this patent, it's 17 years after issue.)
I doubt that Microsoft is behind this. It's not one of their patents, and it's a weak claim. If Microsoft does something with patents, it's likely to involve something that has to be Microsoft-compatible, like Samba or Wine.
Most of the important stuff was in the first 100,000 articles. Look at new articles coming in. They're mostly articles about bands nobody has heard of, forgotten politicians, ordinary shopping malls, "State Route 73" articles, and similar dreck. There's been some progress in that area. The fancruft flood has to some extent been stemmed; for a while there were people adding articles for every minor character in every story in every Star Wars comic book. Now that Wikia is up, the fans can be sent over there. But still, most of what's coming in now doesn't add much to Wikipedia. Every article added takes up attention from the community. Somebody has to look at it; it may need cleanup, it probably needs linking to other articles, and the references may need work. That's wearing editors out.
Articles don't improve over time. They churn. This is the fundamental problem of Wikipedia. The concept was that articles would be polished until they became bright jewels. What actually happens is that most articles with many editors make it to about 75% of "good", then churn. Edits continue, but the overall quality does not improve. Take a look at "Horse". That article is totally rewritten about every six months, but it's not better for it.
The fanatics. There's an ongoing push from the Christian right to make the "Dark Ages" seem less dark. There's an ongoing push from the Jewish right to eliminate material which makes Israel look bad. Some articles critical of companies experience repeated "whitewashing" from unregistered users. Much Wikipedia dispute resolution activity comes from such problems.
There are lesser technical problems. The system is too labor-intensive. There are classes of articles for which a wiki is the wrong tool. Musical recordings and movies need a more structured database; GraceNote and IMDB do a better job on that data than Wikipedia, because they have more structure. IMDB can show all the films in which an actor appeared; Wikipedia can't, unless someone manually entered that data into the actor's article and got it right. Atlas information ("State Route 93" articles) belongs in a map-based system, not a text-based one. Wikipedia doesn't even have spell check.
Maybe someone should start Wikitrivia, where every topic can have an unlimited amount of inane blather...
That's what Wikia really is. They have the Star Wars wiki, the Halo wiki, the Bioshock wiki, the Marvel Database, etc. It's all about monetizing fancruft.
R/C ornithopters aren't that rare any more. Check out this video of the CyBird, which is pigeon-sized and battery powered. The video shows four minutes of aggressive aerobatics; it can be flown longer if you spend more time gliding. This thing costs $149.
Smaller ones are available. The dragonfly-sized ones are usually flown indoors, but if winds are low, they can be used outdoors.
So it could either be some Government agency watching, or somebody in the crowd with an R/C toy.
There's no fundamental reason this thing can be built. It's a light sport aircraft with folding wings and good taxi capability. The wings just fold, which looks stupid in car mode but can be done without much trouble.
They don't retract into the fuselage like one of the cooler-looking but unbuildable designs for flying cars. It's going to be a lousy car, though. Too fragile, and with all that sail area, hard to handle in a crosswind.
There's probably a market for some kind of ducted-fan thrust vehicle usable in tight spots. Moller is unlikely to make his "Skycar" work, after forty years of failure. But someone else might. Such a vehicle needs turbine power, will cost as much as a jet helicopter, and will be a fuel hog. The military could use something they could drop down into an urban street. With helicopters, the rotor circle is too big for that.
Interestingly, we're seeing small UAVs with those properties. Flying robots will be deployed before flying cars. The stability problem for small pure-thrust VTOL aircraft seems to have been solved.
FastCGI is a good idea that's underutilized, underdocumented, and undermaintained.
It's straightforward enough; the web server launches a subprocess, as with CGI, to handle the transaction. But instead of running it only once, the transaction process can be reused to process additional transactions. The web server and transaction process communicate via interprocess communication over local sockets.
If the transaction process crashes, the server starts another one. Multiple transactions processes can be run simultaneously.
This is the obvious way to do transactions. Yet it's much more common to build the transaction program into Apache's address space, with mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python, etc. This leads to security and reliability problems; you're trusting the interpreter and all its libraries. This is a real problem in shared hosting environments.
Also, if there's a memory leak, eventually Apache will choke. With FastCGI, the transaction programs have a finite life; they're usually terminated and reloaded every N transactions or N minutes, to flush them out and get a clean copy.
The problem seems to be that the Apache support organization dropped support for fast CGI when its developer fell behind the Apache distros some years back.
A later version, mod_fcgi, comes from China, and has almost no documentation in any language.
I've used mod_fcgi to run Python. It took several days to get the first program running, because the documentation is sparse and mod_fcgi doesn't produce useful error messages in the Apache log. There's also no mechanism to find out what mod_fcgi is doing, and the transaction parameters are configurable only on a per-server basis, rather than on a per-transaction basis.
That sort of thing is probably why it doesn't get used much. This could be fixed with a few weeks of work, if anybody cared. The basic idea and code are sound. Now that Microsoft is in the game, the open source world needs to play catch-up here.
LoJack, which has a very good track record in stolen car recovery, is better designed from a privacy standpoint. LoJack hides a box somewhere in the car. It normally doesn't transmit anything. The box just listens to a subcarrier on broadcast stations for a signal that tells the LoJack boxes to turn on. When the box turns on, it starts sending out a signal, which suitably equipped police cars can pick up and home in on by radio direction finding.
It's reasonably easy to monitor LoJack for abuse. The broadcast control signal can be listened to by anybody, and the signal from a LoJack box isn't a much of a secret either. When it's triggered, every police car with LoJack gear in range lights up, so there's considerable visibility of its use. Southern California has about 500 LoJack activations a month. LAPD has their helicopters equipped with LoJack receivers, so stealing a LoJack-equipped car is likely to result in being spotlighted from the air within minutes.
They're a public company, and it is not sufficient for them to simply make profits. They must actually grow those profits.
Google has the same problem. Having achieved domination of their main market, now what? There's a temptation to enter new markets, but the main market is so good that all the other product lines are less profitable.
The classic answer is to stop growing and pay dividends. Utility companies and railroads used to do that for decade after decade, once they'd maxed out their industry in their area. But a company that pays dividends and doesn't grow is valued by the market like a bond; the market cap is about 20x the dividend. Google currently has a P/E of 52, and doesn't pay dividends at all. eBay has a P/E of 39, and no dividends. Plus, dividends are taxed twice, once when the company pays them and once as income to the recipient.
The modern answer is merger and acquisition activity. Most M&A activity is a lose for shareholders, although a big win for management. eBay's is generally considered to have paid far too much for Skype.
Then there's buying back stock, which, again, is overall a lose for shareholders, but a win for management with stock options. Stock buybacks don't usually shrink the float; they just compensate for the dilution of options issued.
Not mentioned in all this is that Linux is mostly a very old design. Patente are only for twenty years. BSD UNIX was a mature system twenty years ago, in 1987, and is demonstrable prior art for most of what's in the Linux kernel. The Linux code is different, but the concepts are mostly the same. Which is what matters for patents.
Microsoft may find some obscure infringement somewhere, but that can be invented around.
I'd worry more about patents in the virtualization area. That's newer technology. Virtual machines go back to 1967 (the IBM 360/67), but the ugly hacks needed to make them work on x86 are still within the patentable period. If there's patent trouble, it's going to be in something that has to be done a certain way to be Microsoft-compatible, like importing.DOC files or SAMBA-type network emulation.
(Robotic Google voice) "May we suggest... Chez Panisse... which is 2.4 miles from your present location, Bill, and 1.3 miles from your present location, Karen. Reservations are available at 7:30 and 7:45 PM. A reservation has been made for you at 7:30. Bill, please turn right on Western. Karen, go 1 mile straight ahead to Central, then turn left on Western. Chez Panisse is at 1540 Western. Have a nice dinner, and thank you for choosing Google for your phone service."
often wonder what form modern computing would be in today if the personal computer had not been so wide accepted. Look around you at the walls. Some of the things you see are very ubiquitous. People take electrical outlets and phone jacks for granted. It is just part of the infrastructure we are used to. Now imagine a computer port next to all the rest. All you need is simple input(keyboard,mouse) and simple output(monitor,printer) devices attached to an adapter that plugs into this outlet. That is all you would need to know about computing. Computing power would be offered by a "Computer Utility" company. They would handle all the technical details. You simply pay your bill and the "technical goodness" comes down the line.
That was Control Data's vision of computing, circa 1967. One supercomputer per city. There's a paper on this in, I think, AFIPS FJCC for 1967. General Electric Time Sharing Services was providing something like that by 1968. The whole "time sharing" business tanked by the end of the 1970s.
What they should design is a small engine-less glider that sits on top of a conventional rocket and in an emergency a small solid fuel rocket would propel it and the occupants to safety.
Both Mercury and Apollo had that. In a pre-launch emergency, a solid fuel rocket on an escape tower atop the capsule would fire, explosive bolts would detach the capsule from the booster, and the astronauts would take a very short, high-G ride upward, away from the booster. Then more explosive bolts would detach the escape tower and a parachute would open. It was a whole-capsule ejection system. Never had to be used.
Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up.
The real damage from the Internet is that pounding-the-pavement newspaper journalism is no longer cost effective. That's not because anyone can blog; it's because Internet advertising is killing local newspapers. Ads for jobs, apartments, garage sales - all have moved to the Internet. Classified ads were a major money stream for newspapers, and that stream has dried up. Most newspaper content today is driven by press releases and other publicity. "News is what someone doesn't want published - all else is publicity". Pick up your local paper and mark the stories that didn't start from a speech, press release, wire service, or police report. In many papers, there won't be any. That's the problem.
Search for "MDA908", the "Virginia Contracting Activity". Much more interesting items come up.
Black Excursions. "The Virginia Contracting Activity on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency, request for quotations to purchase and install items listed on the RFQ (emergency response equipment) on black excursions."
The parent company of Ticketmaster is IACI, which also owns Ask.com, LendingTree, Match.com, the Home Shopping Network, the remnants of Excite, and some real estate companies. It's Barry Diller's company.
The corporate history of Ticketmaster is fascinating. Paul Allen owned it for a while (and, unusually, managed not to screw it up.) They've sued Microsoft over deep linking, and been sued by Pearl Jam over their monopoly.
It's not much of a cover. NSA lists the Maryland Procurement Office on their web site, in the "Doing Business with NSA" section. It's their central point for contractor invoicing. "DoD IECA PKI Certificate is required to access the website."
NSA used to be far more secretive. But that was a long time ago. Now everyone knows who they are and what they do.
It took the recording industry an amazingly long time to figure this out.
On top of their distribution problem, the recording industry has other problems. The rock music part of the industry is endlessly recycling decades-old music. The hip-hop/rap/urban component has bands with a very short commercial lifespan. (Rap band members tend to get shot, too, but that's a separate problem.) Folk is dead.
Classical is tiny. Country really isn't that big; the Dixie Chicks are more successful since they quit country.
The top two stories on Billboard this week are about litigation, not music.
Fundamental problem: the industry spends far more on promotion than on making the stuff. Any business in that position can be undercut on price.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL just needs to promote itself as a "Web 2.0" company. They are, after all. Social networking? Definitely, they were there at the beginning. User-contributed content? Yes, they have that. Interactive client? Yes, AOL has that too. Mashups on the home page? Yes! Mobile phone capable? Of course. They even had virtual worlds with avatars, back in their Q-Link days.
An article on that subject by someone above the blithering blogger level would be useful. This subject needs coverage in the Wall Street Journal or Business Week. There are some real issues here. If you're a bank, what do bank examiners think of Microsoft having a backdoor into your systems? If you're a health care provider, is there a HIPPA compliance issue? If you're a law firm and some of your clients are adverse to Microsoft, is it a breach of your duty to your clients to let Microsoft control your systems? If you're a defense contractor, is that back door permissible?
Many such companies run background checks on anyone who potentially has access to their data, and audits of what's happening within their own business. Who's auditing Microsoft for security? Who actually has access to the master keys that allow pushing an update? How many people have access to those keys? Are they US citizens? Do they have security clearances? Are they bonded?
Now those are the questions to be asking.
N = 8 * 10^8 * x-3/2
doesn't seem right. That's
N = 800000000*x - 1.5
and N increases with x, which is inconsistent with the problem statement.
That becomes a problem when you are considering custom installations, bundled products and services of every sort.
Not really. They use secret buyers for that.
Consumer Reports only reports on products they can buy at retail. They barely even talk to manufacturers. And not only do they make money, they're one of the very few magazines on the web people actually pay for.
It's so Popular Mechanics. Another resonant oscillating generator.
This is an old idea, but the usual form is a free-piston engine. Popular Mechanics was hot about that one back in 2004. For something that will light two LEDs, that thing looks big and expensive. Note the machined aluminum frame. For comparison, here's a toy wind generator kit ("convert a plastic bottle to a wind generator!").
Notice how the guy with the vibrating ribbon generator demonstrates it in front of an electric fan. On high. That's probably because it only works in a strong wind. People generally don't live where winds are regularly that high. Wind speed in Port-au-Prince has been between 9 and 12MPH all day, so something that cuts in around 9MPH is needed for use in Haiti.
The classic cheapie generator is taking an oil drum, cutting it in half, and using that as a Savonius rotor. Then you get an alternator from a car, and there's your actual generator. The axle sticks up into the air, where the halves of the oil drum collect the wind and turn the alternator. Here's a smaller version.
LinkedIn is supposed to be about linking up people you already know. But it has spammers, called "open networkers", who will link to anybody. They're just trolling for big link counts. Some way to give those guys negative points when they spam would be useful. Right now, there's no penalty for asking.
Among them is finding a business model that allows the hardware makers to subsidize the cost of the music.
Er, right.
The music industry has an even worse problem coming up. The music player industry will probably be eaten by the phone industry. Most newer phones have some music player capability. And the phone guys have a network in place that can distribute the music. The problem for the labels is that the telcos want a much bigger piece of the revenue than iTunes takes. Sprint started at $2.50 per song, back in 2006, and they kept most of that. Early in 2007, they dropped the price to $0.99 per song. It's not clear how much of that Sprint keeps, but it's probably more than Apple does. Plus, Sprint gives away a few songs a week to each customer, sends out audio streams, and probably doesn't pay the labels much for that.
From the label perspective, this is much worse than iTunes. iTunes is an online retailer. The telcos are the customer. The music labels are headed into a situation where they have about five to ten customers, all much bigger than any music industry company.
Reasons not to worry:
I doubt that Microsoft is behind this. It's not one of their patents, and it's a weak claim. If Microsoft does something with patents, it's likely to involve something that has to be Microsoft-compatible, like Samba or Wine.
Most of the important stuff was in the first 100,000 articles. Look at new articles coming in. They're mostly articles about bands nobody has heard of, forgotten politicians, ordinary shopping malls, "State Route 73" articles, and similar dreck. There's been some progress in that area. The fancruft flood has to some extent been stemmed; for a while there were people adding articles for every minor character in every story in every Star Wars comic book. Now that Wikia is up, the fans can be sent over there. But still, most of what's coming in now doesn't add much to Wikipedia. Every article added takes up attention from the community. Somebody has to look at it; it may need cleanup, it probably needs linking to other articles, and the references may need work. That's wearing editors out.
Articles don't improve over time. They churn. This is the fundamental problem of Wikipedia. The concept was that articles would be polished until they became bright jewels. What actually happens is that most articles with many editors make it to about 75% of "good", then churn. Edits continue, but the overall quality does not improve. Take a look at "Horse". That article is totally rewritten about every six months, but it's not better for it.
The fanatics. There's an ongoing push from the Christian right to make the "Dark Ages" seem less dark. There's an ongoing push from the Jewish right to eliminate material which makes Israel look bad. Some articles critical of companies experience repeated "whitewashing" from unregistered users. Much Wikipedia dispute resolution activity comes from such problems.
There are lesser technical problems. The system is too labor-intensive. There are classes of articles for which a wiki is the wrong tool. Musical recordings and movies need a more structured database; GraceNote and IMDB do a better job on that data than Wikipedia, because they have more structure. IMDB can show all the films in which an actor appeared; Wikipedia can't, unless someone manually entered that data into the actor's article and got it right. Atlas information ("State Route 93" articles) belongs in a map-based system, not a text-based one. Wikipedia doesn't even have spell check.
Maybe someone should start Wikitrivia, where every topic can have an unlimited amount of inane blather...
That's what Wikia really is. They have the Star Wars wiki, the Halo wiki, the Bioshock wiki, the Marvel Database, etc. It's all about monetizing fancruft.
R/C ornithopters aren't that rare any more. Check out this video of the CyBird, which is pigeon-sized and battery powered. The video shows four minutes of aggressive aerobatics; it can be flown longer if you spend more time gliding. This thing costs $149.
Smaller ones are available. The dragonfly-sized ones are usually flown indoors, but if winds are low, they can be used outdoors.
So it could either be some Government agency watching, or somebody in the crowd with an R/C toy.
There's no fundamental reason this thing can be built. It's a light sport aircraft with folding wings and good taxi capability. The wings just fold, which looks stupid in car mode but can be done without much trouble. They don't retract into the fuselage like one of the cooler-looking but unbuildable designs for flying cars. It's going to be a lousy car, though. Too fragile, and with all that sail area, hard to handle in a crosswind.
There's probably a market for some kind of ducted-fan thrust vehicle usable in tight spots. Moller is unlikely to make his "Skycar" work, after forty years of failure. But someone else might. Such a vehicle needs turbine power, will cost as much as a jet helicopter, and will be a fuel hog. The military could use something they could drop down into an urban street. With helicopters, the rotor circle is too big for that.
Interestingly, we're seeing small UAVs with those properties. Flying robots will be deployed before flying cars. The stability problem for small pure-thrust VTOL aircraft seems to have been solved.
FastCGI is a good idea that's underutilized, underdocumented, and undermaintained. It's straightforward enough; the web server launches a subprocess, as with CGI, to handle the transaction. But instead of running it only once, the transaction process can be reused to process additional transactions. The web server and transaction process communicate via interprocess communication over local sockets. If the transaction process crashes, the server starts another one. Multiple transactions processes can be run simultaneously.
This is the obvious way to do transactions. Yet it's much more common to build the transaction program into Apache's address space, with mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python, etc. This leads to security and reliability problems; you're trusting the interpreter and all its libraries. This is a real problem in shared hosting environments. Also, if there's a memory leak, eventually Apache will choke. With FastCGI, the transaction programs have a finite life; they're usually terminated and reloaded every N transactions or N minutes, to flush them out and get a clean copy.
The problem seems to be that the Apache support organization dropped support for fast CGI when its developer fell behind the Apache distros some years back. A later version, mod_fcgi, comes from China, and has almost no documentation in any language.
I've used mod_fcgi to run Python. It took several days to get the first program running, because the documentation is sparse and mod_fcgi doesn't produce useful error messages in the Apache log. There's also no mechanism to find out what mod_fcgi is doing, and the transaction parameters are configurable only on a per-server basis, rather than on a per-transaction basis.
That sort of thing is probably why it doesn't get used much. This could be fixed with a few weeks of work, if anybody cared. The basic idea and code are sound. Now that Microsoft is in the game, the open source world needs to play catch-up here.
LoJack, which has a very good track record in stolen car recovery, is better designed from a privacy standpoint. LoJack hides a box somewhere in the car. It normally doesn't transmit anything. The box just listens to a subcarrier on broadcast stations for a signal that tells the LoJack boxes to turn on. When the box turns on, it starts sending out a signal, which suitably equipped police cars can pick up and home in on by radio direction finding.
It's reasonably easy to monitor LoJack for abuse. The broadcast control signal can be listened to by anybody, and the signal from a LoJack box isn't a much of a secret either. When it's triggered, every police car with LoJack gear in range lights up, so there's considerable visibility of its use. Southern California has about 500 LoJack activations a month. LAPD has their helicopters equipped with LoJack receivers, so stealing a LoJack-equipped car is likely to result in being spotlighted from the air within minutes.
They're a public company, and it is not sufficient for them to simply make profits. They must actually grow those profits.
Google has the same problem. Having achieved domination of their main market, now what? There's a temptation to enter new markets, but the main market is so good that all the other product lines are less profitable.
The classic answer is to stop growing and pay dividends. Utility companies and railroads used to do that for decade after decade, once they'd maxed out their industry in their area. But a company that pays dividends and doesn't grow is valued by the market like a bond; the market cap is about 20x the dividend. Google currently has a P/E of 52, and doesn't pay dividends at all. eBay has a P/E of 39, and no dividends. Plus, dividends are taxed twice, once when the company pays them and once as income to the recipient.
The modern answer is merger and acquisition activity. Most M&A activity is a lose for shareholders, although a big win for management. eBay's is generally considered to have paid far too much for Skype. Then there's buying back stock, which, again, is overall a lose for shareholders, but a win for management with stock options. Stock buybacks don't usually shrink the float; they just compensate for the dilution of options issued.
Not mentioned in all this is that Linux is mostly a very old design. Patente are only for twenty years. BSD UNIX was a mature system twenty years ago, in 1987, and is demonstrable prior art for most of what's in the Linux kernel. The Linux code is different, but the concepts are mostly the same. Which is what matters for patents.
Microsoft may find some obscure infringement somewhere, but that can be invented around.
I'd worry more about patents in the virtualization area. That's newer technology. Virtual machines go back to 1967 (the IBM 360/67), but the ugly hacks needed to make them work on x86 are still within the patentable period. If there's patent trouble, it's going to be in something that has to be done a certain way to be Microsoft-compatible, like importing .DOC files or SAMBA-type network emulation.
"Hey, let's have dinner tonight"
(Robotic Google voice) "May we suggest ... Chez Panisse ... which is 2.4 miles from your present location, Bill, and 1.3 miles from your present location, Karen. Reservations are available at 7:30 and 7:45 PM. A reservation has been made for you at 7:30. Bill, please turn right on Western. Karen, go 1 mile straight ahead to Central, then turn left on Western. Chez Panisse is at 1540 Western. Have a nice dinner, and thank you for choosing Google for your phone service."
often wonder what form modern computing would be in today if the personal computer had not been so wide accepted. Look around you at the walls. Some of the things you see are very ubiquitous. People take electrical outlets and phone jacks for granted. It is just part of the infrastructure we are used to. Now imagine a computer port next to all the rest. All you need is simple input(keyboard,mouse) and simple output(monitor,printer) devices attached to an adapter that plugs into this outlet. That is all you would need to know about computing. Computing power would be offered by a "Computer Utility" company. They would handle all the technical details. You simply pay your bill and the "technical goodness" comes down the line.
That was Control Data's vision of computing, circa 1967. One supercomputer per city. There's a paper on this in, I think, AFIPS FJCC for 1967. General Electric Time Sharing Services was providing something like that by 1968. The whole "time sharing" business tanked by the end of the 1970s.
What they should design is a small engine-less glider that sits on top of a conventional rocket and in an emergency a small solid fuel rocket would propel it and the occupants to safety.
Both Mercury and Apollo had that. In a pre-launch emergency, a solid fuel rocket on an escape tower atop the capsule would fire, explosive bolts would detach the capsule from the booster, and the astronauts would take a very short, high-G ride upward, away from the booster. Then more explosive bolts would detach the escape tower and a parachute would open. It was a whole-capsule ejection system. Never had to be used.
Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up.
The real damage from the Internet is that pounding-the-pavement newspaper journalism is no longer cost effective. That's not because anyone can blog; it's because Internet advertising is killing local newspapers. Ads for jobs, apartments, garage sales - all have moved to the Internet. Classified ads were a major money stream for newspapers, and that stream has dried up. Most newspaper content today is driven by press releases and other publicity. "News is what someone doesn't want published - all else is publicity". Pick up your local paper and mark the stories that didn't start from a speech, press release, wire service, or police report. In many papers, there won't be any. That's the problem.
Search for "MDA908", the "Virginia Contracting Activity". Much more interesting items come up.
- Black Excursions.
-
Buying missiles from Venezuelan general.
-
Video Grammar for Locating Named People
-
A Bayesian network for identifying suspicious visitors
The Virginia Contracting Activity seems to be the financial management point for DIA, ARDA, and some DARPA and CIA work."The Virginia Contracting Activity on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency, request for quotations to purchase and install items listed on the RFQ (emergency response equipment) on black excursions."
A covert missile deal went bad, and the payment issue ended up in court. A good read.
One of many research papers associated with digesting audio and video content into useful forms.
Published in 2004. A reasonable project to be working on at that point.
The parent company of Ticketmaster is IACI, which also owns Ask.com, LendingTree, Match.com, the Home Shopping Network, the remnants of Excite, and some real estate companies. It's Barry Diller's company.
The corporate history of Ticketmaster is fascinating. Paul Allen owned it for a while (and, unusually, managed not to screw it up.) They've sued Microsoft over deep linking, and been sued by Pearl Jam over their monopoly.
It's not much of a cover. NSA lists the Maryland Procurement Office on their web site, in the "Doing Business with NSA" section. It's their central point for contractor invoicing. "DoD IECA PKI Certificate is required to access the website."
NSA used to be far more secretive. But that was a long time ago. Now everyone knows who they are and what they do.
It took the recording industry an amazingly long time to figure this out.
On top of their distribution problem, the recording industry has other problems. The rock music part of the industry is endlessly recycling decades-old music. The hip-hop/rap/urban component has bands with a very short commercial lifespan. (Rap band members tend to get shot, too, but that's a separate problem.) Folk is dead. Classical is tiny. Country really isn't that big; the Dixie Chicks are more successful since they quit country.
The top two stories on Billboard this week are about litigation, not music.
Fundamental problem: the industry spends far more on promotion than on making the stuff. Any business in that position can be undercut on price.