I think you need to update Verisign and Amazon. Did you automate your search for dying companies or do manual analysis when you picked them?
Verisign dropped from 250 in 2000 to around 5 in 2002. Based on Downside's definition, (investors lost 90% of their investment), that stock was "dead". They're around 29 today, and never came back to anywhere near their stock price of 1999-2000. Even today, they have a P/E of 167, which is way too high.
Amazon actually did come back; their stock price today, 77, is at least in the same ballpark as their peak around 107 back in 1999. But they bottomed out around 6, so they had a 90% drop from the peak. Their P/E today is 107, which very high, considering that they're in a low-margin business and aren't growing much.
As we said on the Deathwatch "about" page back in 2000, "If you owned any of them, you're not happy."
Identifying sellers. If you're a seller, you can't be anonymous. That's the law in California and the European Union, but enforcement is weak. We're dealing with that at SiteTruth, where we try to find the business behind the web site. If we can't, we downgrade their search ranking.
Identifying buyers. That's a problem for the credit card industry. If they really considered it a problem, they'd fix it. They have the tools. One-time credit card numbers, confirmation by cell phone, smart credit cards - solutions are known.
Spam Spam by legitimate businesses mostly died with CAN-SPAM, because anything clearly identifiable can be easily filtered. Everything left comes from crooks. And not very many different crooks. Notice how few different spams get through your filters. What's left is a law enforcement problem. Someday the main Viagra spammer will be found and arrested, and that problem will shrink. The US SEC is working the pump-and-dump problem.
Vulnerable clients Make Microsoft financially liable and the problem gets fixed, fast.
We don't need to redesign the Internet, much as some telcos would like to so they can raise rates. All the major problems are at the endpoints.
Yes, the "Web 2.0" bubble will pop, but nobody will notice.
I did Downside, and I have a good track record predicting Web 1.0 failures. Last time around, we had way too much capital going into bad ideas. "Web 2.0" companies aren't that capital intensive, and most of them aren't publicly held early stage companies. If that sector collapses, it will be a blip.
That said, we're seeing some high P/E ratios. Google's is 44, and Yahoo's is 45. Those are high but not insane. Reasonable values for a big, successful company are in the 10-20 range. (Microsoft is 21, IBM is 17, Boeing is 23, AT&T is 20, News Corp is 21.)
It's not like last time, when we were seeing P/E ratios above 100. Some of that history is at Downside's Deathwatch. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is so dead their ticker symbol is ancient history.)
As an investor, I'm much more worried about housing and energy issues. Oil is at $77/bbl today. That has much more impact than anything in the web area. The US housing bubble is deflating, foreclosures are way up, too many adjustable-rate borrowers are being squeezed by rising interest rates, and it's not clear who holds all the paper collateralized by mortgages. Parts of the financial services sector will be squeezed hard by that. Those issues are 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger than "Web 2.0".
Actually no. In reality you get to management by who you know and social skills.
...
Gates was never a geek, he was a poser and the face man.
No, Bill Gates is brilliant. I know smart technical people who've spent some time with him, (one is the CEO of a competitor and doesn't have to suck up) and they say he's brilliant. Gates did have rich parents, though. That knocks 5-10 years off of the time needed to achieve success.
George Bush Jr. is the epitome of someone who made it through connections. He's the ultimate frat-boy. Business people who met him in his private sector days say he "wasn't much of a businessman." (One of the most encouraging things about the upcoming election cycle is that all the candidates from both parties are far more qualified than Bush.)
Crack the code of socalizing, get that one done and you will become upper management.
That's not enough by itself, but it will get you a good career in sales.
(Major idea shortage in Hollywood. Too many movies this year were either sequels or adaptations of successes in other media. The comic book genre is being mined out; it started at Superman, and bottomed at the Silver Surfer. We're now down to trading card movies and toy doll movies. The better ideas in game movies have been done. Effects movies have maxed out; with current CG technology you can put anything on the screen, so nobody is impressed. Expect more whining by the MPAA that theater attendance is down due to "piracy". The problem is ennui, not piracy.)
This is progress, but not a breakthrough. The problem with electric cars used to be that batteries didn't have enough energy density. With lithium-ion batteries, the energy density is almost good enough, but the battery pack costs too much. So they're trying to deal with that by leasing the batteries. Interest rates are unusually low right now by historical standards, so this might actually work. But it's more of a financing gimmick than a technical advance.
Dragsters are going electric. The energy storage required to go a quarter mile isn't that much; the problem is getting it out of the battery fast enough. There's now an electric motorcycle that can go 0-60mph in under one second. They hope to break the top-fuel record for the quarter mile within a year, once they get a new battery pack.
Wikia is a for-profit company. Users running portions of their crawler should be paid. At least in stock of the company. Otherwise it's a ripoff. It's reminiscent of Kazaa's approach to "peer to peer": user machines do the work; Kazaa collects the money.
Distributing the web crawl isn't that big a win. The crawl is a batch job, but replying to search requests is a near real time application. The expensive part of a search engine is the system that generates fast search responses. That's where you need the systems with gigabytes of RAM and tight coupling to the other machines of the cluster.
Doing the web crawl on user machines offloads some of the effort, but not all that much of it. If you want to cut crawl costs, some of the query machines can be devoted to crawling during slow periods.
Remember, you can't trust the client. Web spammers can modify their copies of the crawler to report extra, phony links to their web sites and boost their stats. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "link farming". Until Wikia, there was no easy way for "search engine optimization" types to mess with the internals of the search engine. Now there is.
Besides, what's the selling point? "Our search costs less to use than Google?" Hello?
If you want to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about Microsoft products, point out that Dell went back to shipping Windows XP instead of Vista. Mention the problems with Vista activation. With the "tilt bit" that can kill your system. With Vista phoning home. (Do you want a system that regularly and secretly contacts Microsoft in your business?)
Wouldn't it make sense to wait and see about Vista? Wouldn't that be the safe thing to do? Do you want to take the risk of using a defective operating system in your business?
This is a sound decision. There's a classic principle of English common law that says "an agreement to agree is not an agreement at all". A contract to agree to terms not yet defined is not an enforceable contract. This is standard contract law.
Parties
to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic
basis to learn whether they have been changed by the
other side. Indeed, a party can't unilaterally change the terms
of a contract; it must obtain the other party's consent before
doing so. Union Pac. R.R. v. Chi., Milwaukee, St. Paul &
Pac. R.R., 549 F.2d 114, 118 (9th Cir. 1976). This is because
a revised contract is merely an offer and does not bind the
parties until it is accepted. Matanuska Valley Farmers Cooperating
Ass'n v. Monaghan, 188 F.2d 906, 909 (9th Cir.
1951). And generally "an offeree cannot actually assent to an
offer unless he knows of its existence." Samuel Williston &
Richard A. Lord, A Treatise on the Law of Contracts 4:13,
at 365 (4th ed. 1990); see also Trimble v. N.Y. Life Ins. Co.,
255 N.Y.S. 292, 297 (App. Div. 1932) ("An offer may not be
accepted until it is made and brought to the attention of the
one accepting."). Even if Douglas's continued use of Talk
America's service could be considered assent, such assent can
only be inferred after he received proper notice of the proposed
changes.
Companies have been trying to get away with something that has no basis in law. Finally, someone sued on that issue, and won.
The Register points out that this is consistent with UK law. That's not surprising. This goes back to ancient common-law traditions. The Register also points out that the issue of whether terms can be changed when the consumer has an ongoing obligation to the seller (like a cell phone service agreement) has been argued in Britain and decided in favor of consumers.
Generator 1 detected a problem in its start sequence and shut itself down within 8-10 seconds.
After initial failure, Generator 1 attempted to pass its 732 kW load to Back-up 1, which also detected a problem in its start sequence.
After Generator 1 and Back-up 1 failed to carry the 732 kW, the load was transferred to Back-up 2 which correctly accepted the load as designed.
Generator 3 started up and ran for 30 seconds before it too detected a problem in the start sequence and passed an additional 780 kW to Back-up 2 as designed.
Generator 4 started up and ran for 2 seconds before detecting a problem in the start sequence, passing its 900 kW load on to Back-up 2. This 900kW brought the total load on Back-up 2 to over 2.4 MW, ultimately overloading the 2.1 MW Back-up 2 unit, causing it to fail. Generator 4 was manually started and brought back into operations at 2:22 p.m. Generator 4 was switched to utility operations at 7:05 a.m. on 7/25 to address an exhaust leak...
Generators 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 all operated as designed and carried their respective loads appropriately.
So they apparently had startup failures in four out of ten Hitec units. Their basic architecture is that they have eight main UPS systems (each is a motor/generator/flywheel/Diesel combo), each driving a separate section of the colo, and two spares, Backup 1 and Backup 2, which can be switched to drive any section. No big battery banks; it's all flywheels and Diesels. At least eight systems must be running to keep the full data center up.
365 Main has had Hitec experts flown in from Holland, where the UPS was made. Today, Hitec top management arrived: "A longstanding member of the Hitec Board of Directors is arriving later tonight and will be onsite tomorrow (Sunday) to participate in all investigation activities."
If that guy isn't a Mossad agent, then I don't who is!
Unlikely. The Mossad has real threats to deal with. Even the Israeli Foreign Ministry probably doesn't have a full time Wikipedia lobbyist. This sort of thing is left to the various pro-Israel volunteer organizations.
Amusingly, there's a major PR operation by the Israeli Consulate in New York this month. "Women of the Israel Defense Forces", in Maxim, is officially sponsored by the Israeli Consulate. They did some polling and discovered that Israel's image among young men in the US was terrible. (Something along the line of "old religious nuts with beards".) "Maxim was approached by the Israeli consulate to be a part of reshaping Israel's public image, specifically because of our unmatched mainstream reach to men aged 18 to 35."
The Hurd debacle has a number of causes. First, it started from Mach. Mach was an attempt to build a microkernel by adding stuff to an early BSD kernel. This was a bad idea to begin with, and the end result was disappointing.
Microkernel architecture is quite hard, and if any of the initial design decisions are botched, you get a slow, ugly system. The better microkernels are commercial and proprietary, and don't have many papers on how the internals were designed. Mach has the published papers, because it was an academic system, and this results in a tendency to emulate Mach, which is generally considered to have been a botch.
UNIX-like kernels are straightforward to write. There have been many clones of UNIX, most of them forgotten.
Open source projects have trouble with difficult architectural decisions. There's a tendency in the open source world to focus on "features", and microkernels aren't about "features". They're about doing message passing, protection, and CPU dispatching really well, making it possible to do everything else outside the kernel.
For the same reasons, I suspect that everyone who wasn't at the level of Kasparov would have gotten their asses handed to them in a game of chess against older versions of computers which couldn't yet beat him.
Current reality is that any of the betterchess programs for PCs can trounce you, unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life. Grandmasters are now playing Rybka
with Rybka handicapped by one pawn, or with no opening book, and still losing fairly often. It's clear that computer chess performance has passed the human level.
And this is without supercomputers. Programs are playing at the grandmaster level on 2 and 4-CPU PCs. No need for custom "Deep Blue" hardware.
One of the workers on computer chess comments, after analyzing many grandmaster games, that about one grandmaster move in ten is suboptimal. This error rate is enough to give computers an edge humans can't match. A big problem in the chess world now is people cheating in the World Open using hidden links to computers.
Serious work on poker is only a few years old, and already the programs are doing well. Give it a few more years.
This is going to kill online poker played for real money.
Lauren Nelson, "Miss America 2007": "I am here today to ask you to please implement mandatory education on Internet Safety for all of our children."
Dr. David Finkelhor,
Director, Crimes Against Children Research Center Horton Social Sciences Center, University of New Hampshire: "Online Sex Crimes against Juveniles:
Myth and Reality" -- "Our research with youth suggests that giving out personal information is not what puts kids at risk. Nor does having a blog or a personal web site or frequenting My Space. What puts kids in danger for these crimes is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers, and having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web -- going to sex sites and chat rooms, and interacting with lots of people there."
Ernie Allen, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Our mission: to follow the money. This new initiative is the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography. First, we will aggressively seek to identify illegal child pornography sites with method of payment information attached. Then we will work with the credit card industry to identify the merchant bank. Then we will stop the flow of funds to these sites.
Christine Jones, General Counsel, GoDaddy: We do use our Universal Terms of Service broadly to cancel
privacy when the Go Daddy Abuse Department determines it is being used for ANY
improper purpose.
The witnesses heard are reasonable ones. We used to see a big presence from the religious right at these things, but that's not happening this time. Nobody was asking for much on the legislative front.
The turnaround begins. The TRIPS agreement (if you're involved in this debate, you know what that is) calls for a minimum copyright term of 50 years. So what we need are "Copyright Harmonization Acts" which set copyright limits to no more than the limits in the TRIPS agreement. First in Europe, to harmonize terms across the European Union, then in the US.
Webvan had a good idea. But they mismanaged their expansion. They got something like 3% market share in 30 cities; when what they needed was 30% market share in 3 cities. The delivery costs of low-density deliveries were killing them.
Safeway offers something that seems similar now, but they do it by having people pick from the shelves of their retail stores. Because the stock on hand there is thin, the online system can't reserve or even see the shelf stock, and they don't do back-orders, they tend to deliver orders with missing items.
The press release "RedEnvelope Reports Two Years of Continuous Uptime at 365 Main's San Francisco Data Center", which was on the 365 Main web site earlier today, has disappeared from there.
The classic Bell System policy on emergency generators, in the electromechanical switching era, was as follows:
Generators are started once a week.
Once a month, generators are started and run for an hour.
Once a year, generators are started and the entire facility run without external power for 24 hours.
And this was in addition to the 48VDC battery backup.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has not been maintained in the computer era.
If you have to build reliable systems, it's worth understanding electromechanical telephone switching. Because the components weren't that reliable, the systems had to be engineered so that the system as a whole was far more reliable than the components.
Read up on Number Five Crossbar. The Wikipedia article isn't really enough to understand the architecture, but other references are available.
The company's San Francisco facility includes two complete back-up systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live back-up generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running.
They use a Hytec Continuous Power System, which is a motor, generator, flywheel, clutch, and Diesel engine all on the same shaft. They don't use batteries.
With this type of equipment, if for some reason you lose power and the generator doesn't start before the flywheel runs down, you're dead. There's no way to start the thing without external power. Unless you buy the optional Black Start feature, which has an extra battery pack for starting the Diesel. "Usually the black start facility will not be often
needed but it won't hurt to consider installing
one. Just imagine if you were unable to start up
your UPS system because the mains supply is not
available.". Did 365 Main buy that option?
Just called a friend at One Market, the big office tower downtown at the end of Market Street, and she says the power has been going on and off there for hours. Building alarms were sounding, but nothing serious was happening other than power loss.
First, if you don't know about THEL, see this video.
Beam weapons aren't a joke any more.
Mobile THEL was a repackaging of the original fixed THEL system into three semitrailers. It's too bulky to deploy and too vulnerable on the ground. This thing is meant to defend against short-ranged mortars, rockets, and artillery. So it has to be sited up near the sharp end. Something more rugged and more mobile is needed.
Now that everyone has seen THEL shooting down rockets, artillery projectiles, and mortar rounds, the name of the game is making it small enough to be useful. This new project is to get something onto a single large truck that will do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but when you go out to a club to be with people, those really annoying guys get on stage and make so much noise you can't talk to anybody.
That is a funny sentence. I didn't write that on purpose; I just got lucky.
I think you need to update Verisign and Amazon. Did you automate your search for dying companies or do manual analysis when you picked them?
Verisign dropped from 250 in 2000 to around 5 in 2002. Based on Downside's definition, (investors lost 90% of their investment), that stock was "dead". They're around 29 today, and never came back to anywhere near their stock price of 1999-2000. Even today, they have a P/E of 167, which is way too high.
Amazon actually did come back; their stock price today, 77, is at least in the same ballpark as their peak around 107 back in 1999. But they bottomed out around 6, so they had a 90% drop from the peak. Their P/E today is 107, which very high, considering that they're in a low-margin business and aren't growing much.
As we said on the Deathwatch "about" page back in 2000, "If you owned any of them, you're not happy."
There are only a few major issues:
- Identifying sellers. If you're a seller, you can't be anonymous. That's the law in California and the European Union, but enforcement is weak. We're dealing with that at SiteTruth, where we try to find the business behind the web site. If we can't, we downgrade their search ranking.
- Identifying buyers. That's a problem for the credit card industry. If they really considered it a problem, they'd fix it. They have the tools. One-time credit card numbers, confirmation by cell phone, smart credit cards - solutions are known.
- Spam Spam by legitimate businesses mostly died with CAN-SPAM, because anything clearly identifiable can be easily filtered. Everything left comes from crooks. And not very many different crooks. Notice how few different spams get through your filters. What's left is a law enforcement problem. Someday the main Viagra spammer will be found and arrested, and that problem will shrink. The US SEC is working the pump-and-dump problem.
- Vulnerable clients Make Microsoft financially liable and the problem gets fixed, fast.
We don't need to redesign the Internet, much as some telcos would like to so they can raise rates. All the major problems are at the endpoints.Yes, the "Web 2.0" bubble will pop, but nobody will notice.
I did Downside, and I have a good track record predicting Web 1.0 failures. Last time around, we had way too much capital going into bad ideas. "Web 2.0" companies aren't that capital intensive, and most of them aren't publicly held early stage companies. If that sector collapses, it will be a blip.
That said, we're seeing some high P/E ratios. Google's is 44, and Yahoo's is 45. Those are high but not insane. Reasonable values for a big, successful company are in the 10-20 range. (Microsoft is 21, IBM is 17, Boeing is 23, AT&T is 20, News Corp is 21.) It's not like last time, when we were seeing P/E ratios above 100. Some of that history is at Downside's Deathwatch. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is so dead their ticker symbol is ancient history.)
As an investor, I'm much more worried about housing and energy issues. Oil is at $77/bbl today. That has much more impact than anything in the web area. The US housing bubble is deflating, foreclosures are way up, too many adjustable-rate borrowers are being squeezed by rising interest rates, and it's not clear who holds all the paper collateralized by mortgages. Parts of the financial services sector will be squeezed hard by that. Those issues are 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger than "Web 2.0".
Actually no. In reality you get to management by who you know and social skills.
... Gates was never a geek, he was a poser and the face man.
No, Bill Gates is brilliant. I know smart technical people who've spent some time with him, (one is the CEO of a competitor and doesn't have to suck up) and they say he's brilliant. Gates did have rich parents, though. That knocks 5-10 years off of the time needed to achieve success.
George Bush Jr. is the epitome of someone who made it through connections. He's the ultimate frat-boy. Business people who met him in his private sector days say he "wasn't much of a businessman." (One of the most encouraging things about the upcoming election cycle is that all the candidates from both parties are far more qualified than Bush.)
Crack the code of socalizing, get that one done and you will become upper management.
That's not enough by itself, but it will get you a good career in sales.
From the pictures, it looks vaguely like Starship Troopers. "The only good Bug is a dead Bug".
And Yu-Gi-Oh, the Movie is in production. From Warner Brothers, makers of Pokemon, the Movie.
(Major idea shortage in Hollywood. Too many movies this year were either sequels or adaptations of successes in other media. The comic book genre is being mined out; it started at Superman, and bottomed at the Silver Surfer. We're now down to trading card movies and toy doll movies. The better ideas in game movies have been done. Effects movies have maxed out; with current CG technology you can put anything on the screen, so nobody is impressed. Expect more whining by the MPAA that theater attendance is down due to "piracy". The problem is ennui, not piracy.)
This is progress, but not a breakthrough. The problem with electric cars used to be that batteries didn't have enough energy density. With lithium-ion batteries, the energy density is almost good enough, but the battery pack costs too much. So they're trying to deal with that by leasing the batteries. Interest rates are unusually low right now by historical standards, so this might actually work. But it's more of a financing gimmick than a technical advance.
Dragsters are going electric. The energy storage required to go a quarter mile isn't that much; the problem is getting it out of the battery fast enough. There's now an electric motorcycle that can go 0-60mph in under one second. They hope to break the top-fuel record for the quarter mile within a year, once they get a new battery pack.
Wikia is a for-profit company. Users running portions of their crawler should be paid. At least in stock of the company. Otherwise it's a ripoff. It's reminiscent of Kazaa's approach to "peer to peer": user machines do the work; Kazaa collects the money.
Distributing the web crawl isn't that big a win. The crawl is a batch job, but replying to search requests is a near real time application. The expensive part of a search engine is the system that generates fast search responses. That's where you need the systems with gigabytes of RAM and tight coupling to the other machines of the cluster.
Doing the web crawl on user machines offloads some of the effort, but not all that much of it. If you want to cut crawl costs, some of the query machines can be devoted to crawling during slow periods.
Remember, you can't trust the client. Web spammers can modify their copies of the crawler to report extra, phony links to their web sites and boost their stats. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "link farming". Until Wikia, there was no easy way for "search engine optimization" types to mess with the internals of the search engine. Now there is.
Besides, what's the selling point? "Our search costs less to use than Google?" Hello?
If you want to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about Microsoft products, point out that Dell went back to shipping Windows XP instead of Vista. Mention the problems with Vista activation. With the "tilt bit" that can kill your system. With Vista phoning home. (Do you want a system that regularly and secretly contacts Microsoft in your business?)
Wouldn't it make sense to wait and see about Vista? Wouldn't that be the safe thing to do? Do you want to take the risk of using a defective operating system in your business?
This is a sound decision. There's a classic principle of English common law that says "an agreement to agree is not an agreement at all". A contract to agree to terms not yet defined is not an enforceable contract. This is standard contract law.
The actual decision says:
Parties to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic basis to learn whether they have been changed by the other side. Indeed, a party can't unilaterally change the terms of a contract; it must obtain the other party's consent before doing so. Union Pac. R.R. v. Chi., Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pac. R.R., 549 F.2d 114, 118 (9th Cir. 1976). This is because a revised contract is merely an offer and does not bind the parties until it is accepted. Matanuska Valley Farmers Cooperating Ass'n v. Monaghan, 188 F.2d 906, 909 (9th Cir. 1951). And generally "an offeree cannot actually assent to an offer unless he knows of its existence." Samuel Williston & Richard A. Lord, A Treatise on the Law of Contracts 4:13, at 365 (4th ed. 1990); see also Trimble v. N.Y. Life Ins. Co., 255 N.Y.S. 292, 297 (App. Div. 1932) ("An offer may not be accepted until it is made and brought to the attention of the one accepting."). Even if Douglas's continued use of Talk America's service could be considered assent, such assent can only be inferred after he received proper notice of the proposed changes.
Companies have been trying to get away with something that has no basis in law. Finally, someone sued on that issue, and won.
The Register points out that this is consistent with UK law. That's not surprising. This goes back to ancient common-law traditions. The Register also points out that the issue of whether terms can be changed when the consumer has an ongoing obligation to the seller (like a cell phone service agreement) has been argued in Britain and decided in favor of consumers.
365 Main has placed a statement about their Hitec UPS failures on their web site. Highlights:
So they apparently had startup failures in four out of ten Hitec units. Their basic architecture is that they have eight main UPS systems (each is a motor/generator/flywheel/Diesel combo), each driving a separate section of the colo, and two spares, Backup 1 and Backup 2, which can be switched to drive any section. No big battery banks; it's all flywheels and Diesels. At least eight systems must be running to keep the full data center up.
365 Main has had Hitec experts flown in from Holland, where the UPS was made. Today, Hitec top management arrived: "A longstanding member of the Hitec Board of Directors is arriving later tonight and will be onsite tomorrow (Sunday) to participate in all investigation activities."
If that guy isn't a Mossad agent, then I don't who is!
Unlikely. The Mossad has real threats to deal with. Even the Israeli Foreign Ministry probably doesn't have a full time Wikipedia lobbyist. This sort of thing is left to the various pro-Israel volunteer organizations.
Amusingly, there's a major PR operation by the Israeli Consulate in New York this month. "Women of the Israel Defense Forces", in Maxim, is officially sponsored by the Israeli Consulate. They did some polling and discovered that Israel's image among young men in the US was terrible. (Something along the line of "old religious nuts with beards".) "Maxim was approached by the Israeli consulate to be a part of reshaping Israel's public image, specifically because of our unmatched mainstream reach to men aged 18 to 35."
The Hurd debacle has a number of causes. First, it started from Mach. Mach was an attempt to build a microkernel by adding stuff to an early BSD kernel. This was a bad idea to begin with, and the end result was disappointing.
Microkernel architecture is quite hard, and if any of the initial design decisions are botched, you get a slow, ugly system. The better microkernels are commercial and proprietary, and don't have many papers on how the internals were designed. Mach has the published papers, because it was an academic system, and this results in a tendency to emulate Mach, which is generally considered to have been a botch.
UNIX-like kernels are straightforward to write. There have been many clones of UNIX, most of them forgotten.
Open source projects have trouble with difficult architectural decisions. There's a tendency in the open source world to focus on "features", and microkernels aren't about "features". They're about doing message passing, protection, and CPU dispatching really well, making it possible to do everything else outside the kernel.
Burt Rutan is not one of the casualties. He's spoken to the press since the accident. All six casualties were Scaled Composites employees.
For the same reasons, I suspect that everyone who wasn't at the level of Kasparov would have gotten their asses handed to them in a game of chess against older versions of computers which couldn't yet beat him.
Current reality is that any of the better chess programs for PCs can trounce you, unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life. Grandmasters are now playing Rybka with Rybka handicapped by one pawn, or with no opening book, and still losing fairly often. It's clear that computer chess performance has passed the human level.
And this is without supercomputers. Programs are playing at the grandmaster level on 2 and 4-CPU PCs. No need for custom "Deep Blue" hardware.
One of the workers on computer chess comments, after analyzing many grandmaster games, that about one grandmaster move in ten is suboptimal. This error rate is enough to give computers an edge humans can't match. A big problem in the chess world now is people cheating in the World Open using hidden links to computers.
Serious work on poker is only a few years old, and already the programs are doing well. Give it a few more years.
This is going to kill online poker played for real money.
Sens. Stevens and Inyoue had a similar hearing last year. Not much happened.
This year, they heard fewer witnesses. A summary:
The witnesses heard are reasonable ones. We used to see a big presence from the religious right at these things, but that's not happening this time. Nobody was asking for much on the legislative front.
The turnaround begins. The TRIPS agreement (if you're involved in this debate, you know what that is) calls for a minimum copyright term of 50 years. So what we need are "Copyright Harmonization Acts" which set copyright limits to no more than the limits in the TRIPS agreement. First in Europe, to harmonize terms across the European Union, then in the US.
Webvan had a good idea. But they mismanaged their expansion. They got something like 3% market share in 30 cities; when what they needed was 30% market share in 3 cities. The delivery costs of low-density deliveries were killing them.
Safeway offers something that seems similar now, but they do it by having people pick from the shelves of their retail stores. Because the stock on hand there is thin, the online system can't reserve or even see the shelf stock, and they don't do back-orders, they tend to deliver orders with missing items.
The press release "RedEnvelope Reports Two Years of Continuous Uptime at 365 Main's San Francisco Data Center", which was on the 365 Main web site earlier today, has disappeared from there.
But they sent the press release to PR Newswire, and you can still read it there.
And this was in addition to the 48VDC battery backup.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has not been maintained in the computer era.
If you have to build reliable systems, it's worth understanding electromechanical telephone switching. Because the components weren't that reliable, the systems had to be engineered so that the system as a whole was far more reliable than the components. Read up on Number Five Crossbar. The Wikipedia article isn't really enough to understand the architecture, but other references are available.
Data sheet for 365 Main:
The company's San Francisco facility includes two complete back-up systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live back-up generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running.
They use a Hytec Continuous Power System, which is a motor, generator, flywheel, clutch, and Diesel engine all on the same shaft. They don't use batteries.
With this type of equipment, if for some reason you lose power and the generator doesn't start before the flywheel runs down, you're dead. There's no way to start the thing without external power. Unless you buy the optional Black Start feature, which has an extra battery pack for starting the Diesel. "Usually the black start facility will not be often needed but it won't hurt to consider installing one. Just imagine if you were unable to start up your UPS system because the mains supply is not available.". Did 365 Main buy that option?
Just called a friend at One Market, the big office tower downtown at the end of Market Street, and she says the power has been going on and off there for hours. Building alarms were sounding, but nothing serious was happening other than power loss.
First, if you don't know about THEL, see this video. Beam weapons aren't a joke any more.
Mobile THEL was a repackaging of the original fixed THEL system into three semitrailers. It's too bulky to deploy and too vulnerable on the ground. This thing is meant to defend against short-ranged mortars, rockets, and artillery. So it has to be sited up near the sharp end. Something more rugged and more mobile is needed.
Now that everyone has seen THEL shooting down rockets, artillery projectiles, and mortar rounds, the name of the game is making it small enough to be useful. This new project is to get something onto a single large truck that will do the job.