That was lame. Even if it hadn't disintegrated early, it was on an arc that would have hit the ground in about five seconds.
Now if they'd built it as a large R/C model aircraft, it would have been cool. That's been done in a 24 inch wingspan model, so it's possible to fly that shape.
He didn't get tenure at Stanford. Probably because he was too practical and commercial for Stanford CS of that period. (Back then, Stanford CS was part of Arts and Sciences and dominated by logicians and "expert systems" types. CS was moved to the School of Engineering around 1985). So he went to DEC, which used to have a very good research facility in Palo Alto. He ran their network R&D. When Compaq (remember Compaq? IBM PC clones?) bought DEC, they phased out software research, because Compaq didn't do much software. So he went to Bell Labs in Silicon Valley, which also shut down as Bellcore retreated from research.
Google hired him because he'd done AltaVista, the first big search engine. (Which, amusingly, was done as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU.)
It's no longer fun being a theoretical computer scientist in Silicon Valley. All the great corporate labs are gone. Along with the ones mentioned above, HP Labs, PARC, and IBM Almaden have also tanked. Google, Microsoft, and Intel still do a little theoretical work, but not that much.
I've always been amused by the cable thing. Even "high end" gear tends to use RCA phono jacks, which they gold plate, rather than BNC connectors, which are known to be flat to 50MHz and don't come loose.
Even Monster Cable for speaker cable is silly. All you need is heavy-gauge copper. Nothing else matters.
I was amused some years ago to find that Monster Cable didn't make VGA cables, where signal degradation is a real issue for long cables. That's a high bandwidth analog signal, and they'd have to actually work to make a good one. Eventually, they did get into VGA cables, which they overprice as usual. A high quality 5 meter VGA cable can be obtained for about $8, but Monster will charge you many times that.
There are things that do matter, like read error counts on CDs, but they're usually hidden from consumers. Early CD players had error counters, but the industry agreed to hide that information when people started complaining. Now, most CD players reread and buffer, so it's less of an issue.
10baseT has better noise immunity than RS-232 and 5V TTL encoder signals.
However, it (Ethernet) comes with an elevated price and is usually an overkill for simple control applications.
It's much cheaper than it used to be. Because Ethernet parts are produced in huge volumes, Ethernet interfaces are now about the same price as serial ports.
They now take up less board space than a DB-9 connector. They're much cheaper than the "industrial" interfaces like CANbus. If there was one standard industrial network, that would be OK, but there are about five in common use.
Control links have tended to be quite retro, with headaches like polled multidrop RS-485. There are real advantages in moving to Ethernet, even for slow data rates. You debug Ethernet-controlled devices with a web browser. You debug RS-485 devices with a scope. I've done both. At first, I thought that TCP over IP over 10baseT was huge overkill, but silicon is cheaper than soldering connectors.
Re:Using Ethernet to control devices
on
Trans-Atlantic Robots
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
See Making Ethernet Work in Real Time, from Sensors magazine. They show how to calculate the odds of delay exceeding a given value for a given network speed and loading.
With a 10 Mb Ethernet, sending 1000 64-byte packets per second, you can be 99% sure there will not be a delay of more than 7 ms in 9 years. You can't load the network very much (5-10% is tops for a real time application). But the odds of an error are higher than the odds of a timing miss.
CANbus latency is only deterministic for the highest priority messages on the cable. Everything else is subject to nondeterministic delays due to preemption.
There's something to be said for using 10baseT to talk to control devices.
10baseT has better noise immunity than RS-232 and 5V TTL encoder signals. We
had trouble with big servomotor PWM noise leaking into encoder signals, and a low noise in analog signals, but the 10baseT worked perfectly, even when near the engine of our robot vehicle. Not only is it differential over twisted pair, there's checking and retransmission.
The trend is towards putting an Ethernet interface on the thing to be controlled, rather than bothering with translation to CANbus. We used Galil motor controllers, which talk TCP and UDP over Ethernet. They're OK, but you can get comparable functionality in a smaller and cheaper package now.
10baseT has a feature that's important here - the connectors have retention latches, and don't fall out. USB does not latch, which is a showstopper in an industrial or vehicle environment.
Something we found useful was encapsulating boards. Mask the connectors with masking tape, and spray with Fine-L-Kote, which seals the board against humidity and provides some mechanical protection. Inspect under ultraviolet light (the stuff is clear, but glows) to see if you missed anything.
I don't see any control surfaces. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't build a rocket or jet propelled aircraft looking like that. Tailless aircraft have been built, although they have to be actively stabilized. But with no control surfaces at all, it's not going to be good for much except a launch in some random upward direction.
It would have been much cooler as a large maneuverable aircraft model. Fly-bys would look great. Something like this F-14 Tomcat model.
When forking something that's trademarked, you could do what Longs and Walgreens do. Their copies of out-of-patent medications are labelled with "compare to the ingredients in <proprietary name>". So something like "BetterOffice - compare to the components in OpenOffice" would probably work.
Having been around at the beginning, I should comment on this.
There are some fundamental problems with the way the Internet works, but hardware has saved us from having to solve them. The biggest problem is that we still can't deal effectively with congestion in the middle of a pure datagram network. We know what to do out near the edges (look up "fair queuing", which I invented), but in the middle, where there are too many flows and too little transit delay, that doesn't work.
The practical solution to the problem has been cheap long-haul bandwidth in the backbone of the network, with routers to match. Early users of the modern Internet may remember the days when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST would choke on traffic and the whole backbone would start losing half the packets. That was solved by cheap fibre optic links. Today, we have a network where the "last mile" usually saturates before the backbone does. This is what makes the whole thing work. But we never did get a good technical solution to that problem. We have some good hacks: the congestion window in TCP and "Random Early Drop", which together sort of work. At least where most of the traffic is TCP. We still don't have equally effective ways of throttling UDP traffic.
Roberts is a virtual circuit guy. He founded Telenet, which was a virtual circuit system. (I was recruited by Telenet when they had 13 employees, but turned them down.) Telenet was a flop commercially; it didn't scale up well. Telcos love virtual circuits, because they create connections they can bill. And they keep trying to get virtual circuits into the network. X.25, ISDN, ATM, and PPPoE are virtual circuit systems, and they all came from telcos. Roberts is still pushing variations on his virtual circuit scheme.
There are continuing attempts to get some kind of billable virtual circuit thing
into the network, and those attempts consistently come from telcos. There was a scheme tried for using multiple PPPoE connections over ADSL links to provide multiple classes of service, with the good ones being more expensive. That didn't fly. The whole "net neutrality" thing is about this. What telcos really want is to be able to charge based on the "value to the consumer". The wireless phone people do this, and cash in big - SMS messages cost more to send than photos. The wireline telcos see themselves being cut out of the revenue stream as video moves to the Internet. They want to create a place where they can step on the hose and cut off the flow unless you pay them extra.
I wrote the classic RFC on this too many years ago. Read the section "Game Theoretic Aspects of Network Congestion". It's still valid. But, as I said above, we don't have to solve the theoretical problem as long as throwing cheap backbone bandwidth at it works.
Cheap backbone bandwidth will continue to be available unless some monopoly situation develops that prevents backbone bandwidth from being provided near cost.
The basic problem is that Islam was never "reformed". Christianity went through the same sort of oppressive anti-intellectual period when the Catholic Church ran the world. That period, 600 years of "dumb", is called the "Dark Ages" for good reason.
There's hope. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are making progress, partly because they don't take Islam too seriously. Dubai has become a wealthy country without oil; it's a commercial center, like Hong Kong or Singapore. Saudi Arabia made a terrible policy mistake - the royal family let the religious types control education. Over 90% of the doctorates in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". Saudi Arabia ought to be training and exporting the world's oil experts, like Texas does. But they don't. They don't even train enough people to run their own country, which is going to hurt when the oil runs out.
Publishing in the Arab world is in terrible shape. The entire Arab world produces fewer books than minor European and Asian countries.
He's missing the point. The advantage of using an open, published standard with multiple implementations is that, twenty years from now when you really need to read the documents about the Jones contract, you'll be able to do so.
If you're a big company in business for a while, you probably have some documents in Word Perfect, some in WordStar, many in PDF, and maybe some on 8" floppies from a Wang word processor. There's no uniform way to archive all this stuff. And, because there isn't, it's not in an archive you can search like Google.
So you're probably paying for filing cabinets, off-site document storage, and people to track all that stuff, just in case. And you can't find anything in the archives anyway without a huge amount of work. It's a poor way to run a business.
Engineering goes where the manufacturing is. The early phase of "manufacturing outsourcing", where the design was done in the home country and manufacturing was done in some low wage area. But, over time, the engineering follows the manufacturing. And, eventually, so does ownership. IBM sold their PC business to Leonovo. 3Com is being sold to a Chinese company. That's the future.
Sounds useful for 3D animation work, where you need all that memory for textures. Remember, by the time players see a game, the textures have been "optimized"; stored at the minimum resolution that will do the job, and possibly with level of detail processing in the game engine. Developers and artists need to work with that data in its original, high-resolution form.
There are ways to demonstrate non-obviousness in a patent application. One of the better ones is this:
Show that, before the patent, others had identified the problem, but hadn't solved it.
Show that the solution in the patent solves the problem.
Show that, after the patent, the solution was used in practice.
The "one click" patent satisfies those criteria. Before "one click", online shopping was time-consuming and was recognized as such. The "one click buy" mechanism made online shopping less time-consuming. Others then imitated the "one click buy" mechanism. Thus, it's "non-obvious".
"Obvious in retrospect" is not "obvious" for patent purposes. If other people in the field tried and failed to solve the problem, that indicates non-obviousness.
Sometimes the new product flops. New Coke and the Sony PS3 are well known examples. Automobile models from major manufacturers flop regularly.
The problem for Microsoft is that they now have only one main OS product line. When Windows ME flopped, they had the NT product line almost ready for consumer desktops, and could afford to kill off the DOS/Win3.1/Win95 product line. This time, they only have one offering in the desktop/laptop OS space.
This is certainly fixable from the Microsoft side, but they need to recognize that they have a serious problem and fix it.
Managing big spools of line is surprisingly difficult. Oceanographers run into this all the time, as they try to lower a few miles of line into the ocean. The textile industry runs into it when they try to use very large spools so they can run machinery longer without splicing. Designing something to unspool 30Km of line under near-zero tension in zero G is non-trivial.
It's not really enough to just check the URL against some phishing database. The phishing sites now use unique URLs for each phish going out. Some even use unique subdomains. An example is http://onlinesession-949076872.natwest.com.nigy3r.cn.
We've been struggling with this for SiteTruth, which, among other things, uses PhishTank's data. Originally, we used PhishTank's online query API, but that required an exact match on the URL, which was useless. Now we download their entire database every few hours and blacklist the entire base domain (what you buy from a domain registrar) if there's a verified, active phishing site anywhere in the domain.
That seems reasonable enough. But there's collateral damage.
So, most days, we have AOL, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo blacklisted. That's because those major sites have "open redirectors" - URLs which will redirect to any specified site. For example,
http://r.aol.com/cgi/redir?http://mgw1.haoyisheng.com/icons/asp.html A convenient, easy to use redirection script popular with phishers. Provides a URL that appears to be on AOL, but isn't. Interestingly, AOL treats as spam any email that uses their own redirector URL. So it's only useful for attacking non-AOL users.
http://login.live.com/logout.srf?ct=1179231565
&rver=4.0.1532.0&lc=1033&id=64855
&ru=http:%2F%2Fby117w.bay117.mail.live.com%2Fmail%2Flogout.aspx%3Fredirect%3Dtrue
%26logouturl%3Dhttp:%2F%2F62.49.9.117:443/HB.onlineserv.cgi/
The "logout" page for Microsoft Live can be abused, with some effort, to make it appear as if some hostile site is on Microsoft Live. This looks like Microsoft tried "security through obscurity" and failed.
http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0Je5VTi9_RDDbAA3TJXNyoA;
_ylu=X3oDMTE2ZXYybGFuBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDc3IEdnRpZANpMDIxXzQ3/SIG=15j5u6auo/
EXP=1140214114/**http://hticketing.com/www.bankofamerica.com/sslencrypt218bit/online_banking/
A Yahoo redirector URL intended to create the illusion of a Bank of America site. It may be possible to exploit this as a cross site scripting attack.
These were all active phishing sites an hour or two ago.
Yes, arguably the intelligent user should be able to visually parse the URLs above and realize that they're not really on the sites indicated. Or notice that a redirection took place.
But most users don't notice that. Neither do many anti-phishing tools, especially if the attacker combines both techniques described above.
Phishing has reached the point that if you have an open redirector or proxy on your web site, someone will use it to borrow your reputation for their scam. Open redirectors are now like open mail relays - a nice Internet feature that had to be shut down because of exploits.
So fix those open redirectors, people, or expect to be listed as a phishing-friendly site.
DARPA is doing OK; they've been getting results. I've dealt with DARPA on and off since the 1980s, and I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was something that needed doing. DARPA had been funding robotics research since the 1960s without much to show for it that DoD could actually use.
The academic AI community needed some serious butt-kicking. CMU had been working on automatic driving since the 1980s, with very slow progress. Stanford AI had totally tanked. MIT AI was off on the behavior-based robots tangent, which had peaked in the early 1990s. Some of the old guys had to be shoved aside to get things moving again. That's now happened.
In the private sector, though, computer science research is almost dead. Google is focused on applications; they do a little theory, but not much. Microsoft did some good work; their big contribution was moving Bayesian statistics into the mainstream, something for which Bill Gates was directly responsible. Beyond that, there's not much. The DEC research centers are gone; HP Labs barely exists, PARC was dumped by Xerox and isn't doing much, Bell Labs is barely alive, and IBM Almaden was severely downsized. (I happened to be visiting IBM Almaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was like a funeral.) Apple does little basic research any more. Sony SCEA diverted most of their research talent into dealing with the horrors of the PS3 programming problem.
Smart people aren't going into research any more. They go into startups. Or finance. The two best people on our DARPA Grand Challenge team went to hedge funds, where they did very well financially.
Big deal. Early this year, I bought a 2007 Jeep Wrangler. If I bought the same vehicle today, it would be $3000 cheaper, because Jeep is now offering big sales incentives. And the warranty period was only three years when I bought it; now there's a lifetime power train warranty.
(That has more to do with the breakup of Damlier-Chrysler and retaining customer confidence, though.)
What's really annoying iPhone suckers, I suspect, is that their overpriced status symbol just stopped being an overpriced status symbol.
The CEO of Rolex once said "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." That applies here.
The AVA Solar web site has almost no useful information. But they have a
patent on the manufacturing process, which discloses what they're trying to do. Among other things, the patent tells us that "AVA" stands for "Air-Vacuum-Air". The process is mostly conducted in a low grade vacuum, with some preprocessing in air before the vacuum chamber and some final steps after vacuum processing. The big deal is supposed to be that there's only one trip in and out of vacuum, which simplifies the production process. This patent was filed in 2000, so they've been working on this for a while now.
They're trying to make cadmium-telluride solar cells, which aren't new. The new thing is making them with a continuous process, instead of in batches.
AVA Solar has some job ads on Dice. They're looking for a plant manager, and on Dice they say "200+" employees, rather than the "500+" mentioned in the press release. AVA Solar doesn't seem to actually make anything yet, so they have to build and run a new kind of manufacturing plant of their own design without an organization experienced in doing that. That's hard.
They're supposedly building a pilot plant, to be running by the end of 2007. So wait a few months. If that works, it's worth looking at them again.
Slashdot Mirror
Results ... of about 387,000 for: peoplesoft failure.
Some of those hits are irrelevant, but many lead to Peoplesoft horror stories.
That was lame. Even if it hadn't disintegrated early, it was on an arc that would have hit the ground in about five seconds.
Now if they'd built it as a large R/C model aircraft, it would have been cool. That's been done in a 24 inch wingspan model, so it's possible to fly that shape.
Somebody went through Judge Kimball's entire summary judgement appeal record and posted it. No, he doesn't get reversed two-thirds of the time.
70 minutes is probably the battery life, not the recording time. It's a transmitter, not a recorder.
He didn't get tenure at Stanford. Probably because he was too practical and commercial for Stanford CS of that period. (Back then, Stanford CS was part of Arts and Sciences and dominated by logicians and "expert systems" types. CS was moved to the School of Engineering around 1985). So he went to DEC, which used to have a very good research facility in Palo Alto. He ran their network R&D. When Compaq (remember Compaq? IBM PC clones?) bought DEC, they phased out software research, because Compaq didn't do much software. So he went to Bell Labs in Silicon Valley, which also shut down as Bellcore retreated from research.
Google hired him because he'd done AltaVista, the first big search engine. (Which, amusingly, was done as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU.)
It's no longer fun being a theoretical computer scientist in Silicon Valley. All the great corporate labs are gone. Along with the ones mentioned above, HP Labs, PARC, and IBM Almaden have also tanked. Google, Microsoft, and Intel still do a little theoretical work, but not that much.
I've always been amused by the cable thing. Even "high end" gear tends to use RCA phono jacks, which they gold plate, rather than BNC connectors, which are known to be flat to 50MHz and don't come loose.
Even Monster Cable for speaker cable is silly. All you need is heavy-gauge copper. Nothing else matters.
I was amused some years ago to find that Monster Cable didn't make VGA cables, where signal degradation is a real issue for long cables. That's a high bandwidth analog signal, and they'd have to actually work to make a good one. Eventually, they did get into VGA cables, which they overprice as usual. A high quality 5 meter VGA cable can be obtained for about $8, but Monster will charge you many times that.
The "tubes vs. transistors" amplifier thing is amusing. Back in 1990, Bob Carver, who designs amplifiers, challenged two high-end audio magazines to give him any audio amplifier at any price, and he'd duplicate its sound in one of his lower cost transistor amps. Two magazines took him up on the challenge. He won. Then, almost as a joke, he built the Carver Silver 7 amplifier, which is all tube and sold for $17,000/pair. Each amp has two chassis, one for the power supply, and the thing is chrome-plated. Audiophiles bought the things. Then he came out with a transistor amplifier with the same transfer function at 1/40th the price.
There are things that do matter, like read error counts on CDs, but they're usually hidden from consumers. Early CD players had error counters, but the industry agreed to hide that information when people started complaining. Now, most CD players reread and buffer, so it's less of an issue.
10baseT has better noise immunity than RS-232 and 5V TTL encoder signals. However, it (Ethernet) comes with an elevated price and is usually an overkill for simple control applications.
It's much cheaper than it used to be. Because Ethernet parts are produced in huge volumes, Ethernet interfaces are now about the same price as serial ports. They now take up less board space than a DB-9 connector. They're much cheaper than the "industrial" interfaces like CANbus. If there was one standard industrial network, that would be OK, but there are about five in common use.
Control links have tended to be quite retro, with headaches like polled multidrop RS-485. There are real advantages in moving to Ethernet, even for slow data rates. You debug Ethernet-controlled devices with a web browser. You debug RS-485 devices with a scope. I've done both. At first, I thought that TCP over IP over 10baseT was huge overkill, but silicon is cheaper than soldering connectors.
See Making Ethernet Work in Real Time, from Sensors magazine. They show how to calculate the odds of delay exceeding a given value for a given network speed and loading. With a 10 Mb Ethernet, sending 1000 64-byte packets per second, you can be 99% sure there will not be a delay of more than 7 ms in 9 years. You can't load the network very much (5-10% is tops for a real time application). But the odds of an error are higher than the odds of a timing miss.
CANbus latency is only deterministic for the highest priority messages on the cable. Everything else is subject to nondeterministic delays due to preemption.
There's something to be said for using 10baseT to talk to control devices. 10baseT has better noise immunity than RS-232 and 5V TTL encoder signals. We had trouble with big servomotor PWM noise leaking into encoder signals, and a low noise in analog signals, but the 10baseT worked perfectly, even when near the engine of our robot vehicle. Not only is it differential over twisted pair, there's checking and retransmission.
The trend is towards putting an Ethernet interface on the thing to be controlled, rather than bothering with translation to CANbus. We used Galil motor controllers, which talk TCP and UDP over Ethernet. They're OK, but you can get comparable functionality in a smaller and cheaper package now.
10baseT has a feature that's important here - the connectors have retention latches, and don't fall out. USB does not latch, which is a showstopper in an industrial or vehicle environment.
Something we found useful was encapsulating boards. Mask the connectors with masking tape, and spray with Fine-L-Kote, which seals the board against humidity and provides some mechanical protection. Inspect under ultraviolet light (the stuff is clear, but glows) to see if you missed anything.
I don't see any control surfaces. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't build a rocket or jet propelled aircraft looking like that. Tailless aircraft have been built, although they have to be actively stabilized. But with no control surfaces at all, it's not going to be good for much except a launch in some random upward direction.
It would have been much cooler as a large maneuverable aircraft model. Fly-bys would look great. Something like this F-14 Tomcat model.
When forking something that's trademarked, you could do what Longs and Walgreens do. Their copies of out-of-patent medications are labelled with "compare to the ingredients in <proprietary name>". So something like "BetterOffice - compare to the components in OpenOffice" would probably work.
Having been around at the beginning, I should comment on this.
There are some fundamental problems with the way the Internet works, but hardware has saved us from having to solve them. The biggest problem is that we still can't deal effectively with congestion in the middle of a pure datagram network. We know what to do out near the edges (look up "fair queuing", which I invented), but in the middle, where there are too many flows and too little transit delay, that doesn't work.
The practical solution to the problem has been cheap long-haul bandwidth in the backbone of the network, with routers to match. Early users of the modern Internet may remember the days when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST would choke on traffic and the whole backbone would start losing half the packets. That was solved by cheap fibre optic links. Today, we have a network where the "last mile" usually saturates before the backbone does. This is what makes the whole thing work. But we never did get a good technical solution to that problem. We have some good hacks: the congestion window in TCP and "Random Early Drop", which together sort of work. At least where most of the traffic is TCP. We still don't have equally effective ways of throttling UDP traffic.
Roberts is a virtual circuit guy. He founded Telenet, which was a virtual circuit system. (I was recruited by Telenet when they had 13 employees, but turned them down.) Telenet was a flop commercially; it didn't scale up well. Telcos love virtual circuits, because they create connections they can bill. And they keep trying to get virtual circuits into the network. X.25, ISDN, ATM, and PPPoE are virtual circuit systems, and they all came from telcos. Roberts is still pushing variations on his virtual circuit scheme.
There are continuing attempts to get some kind of billable virtual circuit thing into the network, and those attempts consistently come from telcos. There was a scheme tried for using multiple PPPoE connections over ADSL links to provide multiple classes of service, with the good ones being more expensive. That didn't fly. The whole "net neutrality" thing is about this. What telcos really want is to be able to charge based on the "value to the consumer". The wireless phone people do this, and cash in big - SMS messages cost more to send than photos. The wireline telcos see themselves being cut out of the revenue stream as video moves to the Internet. They want to create a place where they can step on the hose and cut off the flow unless you pay them extra.
I wrote the classic RFC on this too many years ago. Read the section "Game Theoretic Aspects of Network Congestion". It's still valid. But, as I said above, we don't have to solve the theoretical problem as long as throwing cheap backbone bandwidth at it works. Cheap backbone bandwidth will continue to be available unless some monopoly situation develops that prevents backbone bandwidth from being provided near cost.
The basic problem is that Islam was never "reformed". Christianity went through the same sort of oppressive anti-intellectual period when the Catholic Church ran the world. That period, 600 years of "dumb", is called the "Dark Ages" for good reason.
There's hope. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are making progress, partly because they don't take Islam too seriously. Dubai has become a wealthy country without oil; it's a commercial center, like Hong Kong or Singapore. Saudi Arabia made a terrible policy mistake - the royal family let the religious types control education. Over 90% of the doctorates in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". Saudi Arabia ought to be training and exporting the world's oil experts, like Texas does. But they don't. They don't even train enough people to run their own country, which is going to hurt when the oil runs out.
Publishing in the Arab world is in terrible shape. The entire Arab world produces fewer books than minor European and Asian countries.
I'm not seeing any of this. I'm trying commonly spammed phrases in Google, and seeing nothing unusual.
-
"digital camera" - OK
-
"ink cartridge" - OK
-
"flat screen TV" - PCworld at the top
-
"auto parts" - OK
-
"london hotels" - usual results
-
"britney spears" - usual results
-
"viagra" - Pfizer, Wikipedia, etc.
-
"rebelde" (the Mexican telenovela, one of the top ten searches) - normal
Not oneHe's missing the point. The advantage of using an open, published standard with multiple implementations is that, twenty years from now when you really need to read the documents about the Jones contract, you'll be able to do so.
If you're a big company in business for a while, you probably have some documents in Word Perfect, some in WordStar, many in PDF, and maybe some on 8" floppies from a Wang word processor. There's no uniform way to archive all this stuff. And, because there isn't, it's not in an archive you can search like Google.
So you're probably paying for filing cabinets, off-site document storage, and people to track all that stuff, just in case. And you can't find anything in the archives anyway without a huge amount of work. It's a poor way to run a business.
That's what you tell management.
Engineering goes where the manufacturing is. The early phase of "manufacturing outsourcing", where the design was done in the home country and manufacturing was done in some low wage area. But, over time, the engineering follows the manufacturing. And, eventually, so does ownership. IBM sold their PC business to Leonovo. 3Com is being sold to a Chinese company. That's the future.
Sounds useful for 3D animation work, where you need all that memory for textures. Remember, by the time players see a game, the textures have been "optimized"; stored at the minimum resolution that will do the job, and possibly with level of detail processing in the game engine. Developers and artists need to work with that data in its original, high-resolution form.
There are ways to demonstrate non-obviousness in a patent application. One of the better ones is this:
The "one click" patent satisfies those criteria. Before "one click", online shopping was time-consuming and was recognized as such. The "one click buy" mechanism made online shopping less time-consuming. Others then imitated the "one click buy" mechanism. Thus, it's "non-obvious".
"Obvious in retrospect" is not "obvious" for patent purposes. If other people in the field tried and failed to solve the problem, that indicates non-obviousness.
Is it standalone, or does it phone home? If it sends the content out for translation, it's a huge security hole for an organization.
Sometimes the new product flops. New Coke and the Sony PS3 are well known examples. Automobile models from major manufacturers flop regularly.
The problem for Microsoft is that they now have only one main OS product line. When Windows ME flopped, they had the NT product line almost ready for consumer desktops, and could afford to kill off the DOS/Win3.1/Win95 product line. This time, they only have one offering in the desktop/laptop OS space.
This is certainly fixable from the Microsoft side, but they need to recognize that they have a serious problem and fix it.
Managing big spools of line is surprisingly difficult. Oceanographers run into this all the time, as they try to lower a few miles of line into the ocean. The textile industry runs into it when they try to use very large spools so they can run machinery longer without splicing. Designing something to unspool 30Km of line under near-zero tension in zero G is non-trivial.
Here's a discussion of spool winding, if you're really interested. There are even companies that specialize in spool winding.
It's not really enough to just check the URL against some phishing database. The phishing sites now use unique URLs for each phish going out. Some even use unique subdomains. An example is http://onlinesession-949076872.natwest.com.nigy3r.cn.
We've been struggling with this for SiteTruth, which, among other things, uses PhishTank's data. Originally, we used PhishTank's online query API, but that required an exact match on the URL, which was useless. Now we download their entire database every few hours and blacklist the entire base domain (what you buy from a domain registrar) if there's a verified, active phishing site anywhere in the domain.
That seems reasonable enough. But there's collateral damage. So, most days, we have AOL, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo blacklisted. That's because those major sites have "open redirectors" - URLs which will redirect to any specified site. For example,
A convenient, easy to use redirection script popular with phishers. Provides a URL that appears to be on AOL, but isn't. Interestingly, AOL treats as spam any email that uses their own redirector URL. So it's only useful for attacking non-AOL users.
&rver=4.0.1532.0&lc=1033&id=64855
&ru=http:%2F%2Fby117w.bay117.mail.live.com%2Fmail%2Flogout.aspx%3Fredirect%3Dtrue
%26logouturl%3Dhttp:%2F%2F62.49.9.117:443/HB.onlineserv.cgi/
The "logout" page for Microsoft Live can be abused, with some effort, to make it appear as if some hostile site is on Microsoft Live. This looks like Microsoft tried "security through obscurity" and failed.
_ylu=X3oDMTE2ZXYybGFuBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDc3IEdnRpZANpMDIxXzQ3/SIG=15j5u6auo/
EXP=1140214114/**http://hticketing.com/www.bankofamerica.com/sslencrypt218bit/online_banking/
A Yahoo redirector URL intended to create the illusion of a Bank of America site. It may be possible to exploit this as a cross site scripting attack.
These were all active phishing sites an hour or two ago.
Yes, arguably the intelligent user should be able to visually parse the URLs above and realize that they're not really on the sites indicated. Or notice that a redirection took place. But most users don't notice that. Neither do many anti-phishing tools, especially if the attacker combines both techniques described above.
Phishing has reached the point that if you have an open redirector or proxy on your web site, someone will use it to borrow your reputation for their scam. Open redirectors are now like open mail relays - a nice Internet feature that had to be shut down because of exploits.
So fix those open redirectors, people, or expect to be listed as a phishing-friendly site.
DARPA is doing OK; they've been getting results. I've dealt with DARPA on and off since the 1980s, and I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was something that needed doing. DARPA had been funding robotics research since the 1960s without much to show for it that DoD could actually use.
The academic AI community needed some serious butt-kicking. CMU had been working on automatic driving since the 1980s, with very slow progress. Stanford AI had totally tanked. MIT AI was off on the behavior-based robots tangent, which had peaked in the early 1990s. Some of the old guys had to be shoved aside to get things moving again. That's now happened.
In the private sector, though, computer science research is almost dead. Google is focused on applications; they do a little theory, but not much. Microsoft did some good work; their big contribution was moving Bayesian statistics into the mainstream, something for which Bill Gates was directly responsible. Beyond that, there's not much. The DEC research centers are gone; HP Labs barely exists, PARC was dumped by Xerox and isn't doing much, Bell Labs is barely alive, and IBM Almaden was severely downsized. (I happened to be visiting IBM Almaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was like a funeral.) Apple does little basic research any more. Sony SCEA diverted most of their research talent into dealing with the horrors of the PS3 programming problem.
Smart people aren't going into research any more. They go into startups. Or finance. The two best people on our DARPA Grand Challenge team went to hedge funds, where they did very well financially.
Big deal. Early this year, I bought a 2007 Jeep Wrangler. If I bought the same vehicle today, it would be $3000 cheaper, because Jeep is now offering big sales incentives. And the warranty period was only three years when I bought it; now there's a lifetime power train warranty. (That has more to do with the breakup of Damlier-Chrysler and retaining customer confidence, though.)
What's really annoying iPhone suckers, I suspect, is that their overpriced status symbol just stopped being an overpriced status symbol. The CEO of Rolex once said "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." That applies here.
OK, let's see if this is for real.
First, the "story" is a regurgitated press release. For an more critical story by a local reporter, see "AVA Solar enters crowded field", by Tom Hacker.
The AVA Solar web site has almost no useful information. But they have a patent on the manufacturing process, which discloses what they're trying to do. Among other things, the patent tells us that "AVA" stands for "Air-Vacuum-Air". The process is mostly conducted in a low grade vacuum, with some preprocessing in air before the vacuum chamber and some final steps after vacuum processing. The big deal is supposed to be that there's only one trip in and out of vacuum, which simplifies the production process. This patent was filed in 2000, so they've been working on this for a while now.
They're trying to make cadmium-telluride solar cells, which aren't new. The new thing is making them with a continuous process, instead of in batches.
AVA Solar has some job ads on Dice. They're looking for a plant manager, and on Dice they say "200+" employees, rather than the "500+" mentioned in the press release. AVA Solar doesn't seem to actually make anything yet, so they have to build and run a new kind of manufacturing plant of their own design without an organization experienced in doing that. That's hard.
They're supposedly building a pilot plant, to be running by the end of 2007. So wait a few months. If that works, it's worth looking at them again.