This is a great idea. But it needs to be standardized, so everything recharges from any pad. Otherwise we'll be back in wall transformer hell. This one is about the third scheme for doing this, and so far, they're incompatible.
If it's done totally wrong, there will be an encrypted handshake between the pad and the device receiving power, so only authorized devices can recharge. Like printer ink cartridges.
As for breaking bulbs perhaps if this is enough of an issue they could put those bulbs inside some of that indestructable plastic that they package ear buds or compact flash cards in.
That's actually a reasonable idea. Ruggedized incandescent and fluorescent lamps have been available for decades. The incandescents are coated with a high-temperature translucent silicone rubber, and the tube fluorescents are enclosed in a plastic tube. These are sometimes used in industrial applications.
I had a Keyhole subscription for years before Google bought it, and it was really cool. If all you've seen is the Javascript kludge, you haven't seen the real thing. The real Keyhole application required 3D hardware, could do smooth zooms, tilts, and pans, and showed the world with elevation.
Google still offers that as a download, but it's not used all that much.
The CNet version looks like it was picked up by a runaway screen scraper, which sucked up two following articles. Then some paragraphs were duplicated. Lame.
Some time in the last two years, Google started becoming much more "SEO friendly". There are meetings at Google for SEO types. Google sponsors "Search Engine Marketing" conferences. It's getting a bit embarassing.
Google has to keep growing to justify their P/E ratio of 47 and keep their stockholders happy. That's hard to do when they already have most of their primary market. It's common to see dumb merger and acquisition activity in that situation. Search with occasional ads was a terrific business - doesn't take many employees, moderate operating costs, almost no cost of goods, good margins. The things Google has gone into since search (mail, video, office apps, etc.) don't have those properties, and are less profitable than search, if not outright money drains.
There's no big problem running a certificate authority at a moderate cost per transaction. It could probably be done effectively for about $10-$20 per certificate.
If you want to buy a certificate for an organization, identity has to be verified. The way to do this is 1) look up the organization in corporation or d/b/a name records, as appropriate, and 2) send a letter or FedEx envelope (extra charge) to the address for service of process listed therein. You'd order a certificate on line, but it's not enabled until the letter is received and the code in the letter is entered.
Disallow P.O. box and PMB addresses.
This provides reasonably good address checking.
Generating the mailing pieces can be outsourced to a direct mail company. There's a whole industry out there that will print stuff, put postage on it, and get it into the postal system at very low cost. (Typical cost for this is about $0.47 per envelope sent.)
For an individual, require purchase with a credit card, and send the letter to the billing address of the credit card, which can be verified during credit card verification.
This yields certificates that provide solid address information, but without manual processing.
It's not free, but it's definitely possible to get the cost down.
I'd like to see this done for domain registration. The domain doesn't go live until the WHOIS information has been verified in this way. That would solve the junk WHOIS info problem.
Mod parent up. The original article reflects a complete misunderstanding of the compulsory license system. It's compulsory against owners of rights in sound recordings. They have to grant a license whether they want to or not. However, there's nothing prohibiting owners of sound recordings and a distribution service of whatever type from making a deal outside the compulsory license system.
For example, someone could set up a Free Music Foundation to offer free licenses to Internet radio stations, unknown bands could grant distribution rights for their stuff to the Free Music Foundation, and Internet "radio stations" (really streaming download sites) could play exclusively Free Music Foundation material, without any compulsory license or statutory royalties.
Or, at the other extreme, you could have Payola Internet Radio, where bands pay to put their stuff on the stream. Again, no statutory royalties.
This isn't a big issue in the industry. The big issue with compulsory licenses right now is whether they apply to ringtones. The Copyright Board said they do last year, which makes ringtones much cheaper. The Harry Fox Agency is dragging their feet on this, but it's now established that if you download an entire song and use it as a ringtone, that's covered under the compulsory license. Arguments continue about using only part of the song.
This vulnerability in AdWords exists because Google made them "reseller-friendly." That needs to stop.
When you click on a Google AdWords ad link, the link goes to Google, not to the destination site. Then Google's ad link server looks at the URL, logs the click, and does a redirect to the site specified by the advertiser. That isn't necessarily the destination shown in the Google ad. It's often some "ad broker" or "affiliate", which wants to see the click event for "tracking". That's what created the vulnerability. Attackers can buy ads for "Bank of America" and have them redirect to "slimeballcentral.biz".
Google does check, when the ad is purchased and occasionally thereafter, that the link sold with the ad eventually redirects to the purported destination, or what Google calls the "landing site". But that's not good enough any more. Attackers can create ads which attract innocent users, run them past the attacker's site where the attacker gets a shot at them, then direct them invisibly to the destination. That's how this attack works.
It's time to cut the middlemen out of the loop. Google ad links need to go directly to the destination site, only. "Ad brokers" and "affiliates" will have to use Google's own ad tracking numbers. This might require outside auditing to be trustworthy.
That would cause some disruption in the ad-broker / "search engine optimization" business, although they'd adjust to it.
It's going to be interesting to see whether Google chooses to protect its search customers or its ad brokers. That will tell us whether Google has abandoned "Don't be evil".
I just found and read the actual paper, too; now I don't have to post the link.
(It ought to be a Slashdot requirement that when you post a story about something,
you have to link to the real source, not just some news site or blog link.)
This isn't really about simulating a mouse brain. This is more like running a synthetic benchmark to demonstrate that if they had the wiring diagram for a mouse brain, IBM Almaden has enough CPU power on hand to simulate it. But they don't have a mouse brain wiring diagram; they're just exercising the simulator with some random set of connections.
...
Negroponte did confirm that the XO's developers have been working with Microsoft to get the OLPC up to spec for Windows.
Right. That means putting back in an old-style boot BIOS, Trusted Platform Management, Microsoft code in System Management Mode, trusted audio and video paths, and all the other DRM stuff, I suppose. The hope with OLPC was that they were going to dump all that stuff.
Those are overreaching terms. The obligation to inform the employer is normal. The "owns ideas developed on your own time" is illegal in California. The employer probably has some out of state form they're using.
That provision of California law built Silicon Valley. Anybody good who has a good idea is free to leave and do a startup. Which is what happens here all the time.
Obligations beyond the end of employment need to be considered very carefully, because they can affect your next job. For that one, you need a lawyer.
The
WebSphere DataPower XML Accelerator XA35 is more like a web page template engine front end. The front end faces the HTML clients, and the back end faces some system that delivers results in XML. That's a potential Cell application, because it can be done as a streaming operation, with the template and the transaction results merged in a Cell SPE. Might make sense for catalog applications, where the user does a search, and after the search is complete, a nice-looking catalog page needs to be built.
(The killer app: off-loading the insertion of contextual ads.)
The early ink-jet printer patents should be expiring soon. The first inkjet printers were developed in 1976, and HP's original DeskJet shipped in 1998. We'll probably see a flood of no-brand-name printers using generic ink over the next few years. That's what happened to laser printers when those patents expired years ago.
They own (through their membership) most of LA and a good chunk of southern California.
The movie industry is big, but the music industry isn't. Total US music industry sales are around $10 billion a year, and dropping, or so says the RIAA. Google, Microsoft, Apple, HP, and IBM each generate more revenue, and far more profits, than the entire music industry. The music industry doesn't employ many people, unlike the movie industry, so the employee votes aren't there.
IBM has been talking this up for a while. The idea is to offload some "streaming stuff" onto the Cell processors. The phrase "XML acceleration" has been used, which probably means the Cell gets the job of taking some DB2 result and pumping it out in XML. It's also useful for SSL encryption and other related streaming-type tasks.
This is a traditional IBM transaction processing approach. The mainframe is surrounded by lesser machines which handle the communications and formatting, extract the transaction which needs access to the data, ships that to the mainframe, gets a result back, and then formats a reply to the requestor. In the green-screen terminal era, that was done by dedicated hardware. In the web era, too much of that work moved onto the mainframe itself.
Think of this usage of the Cell as offloading the front half of Apache to peripheral processors. When your AJAX app makes an XMLHttpRequest, the idea is that the front-end machines get the request, decode it, wait until it's complete, then pass one single transaction to the mainframe. A single reply comes back, is reformatted as XML, and is shipped out to the client. The number of events processed by the mainframe goes way down, and all the protocol work is offloaded to the low-cost Cell machines with tiny memories.
Has nothing to do with gaming, though. They're not putting the PS3's GPU (from NVidia) on mainframes.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though. That's too small. Just cramming the whole protocol stack in there will fill most of the memory. I think this thing will really start to fly when IBM gets up to a 2-4MB per Cell CPU. Then you'll be able to fit the front-end processing for a web server in the Cell. Until then, it's a niche product.
From the California Penal Code:
158. Common barratry is the practice of exciting groundless
judicial proceedings, and is punishable by imprisonment in the county
jail not exceeding six months and by fine not exceeding one thousand
dollars ($1,000).
159. No person can be convicted of common barratry except upon
proof that he has excited suits or proceedings at law in at least
three instances, and with a corrupt or malicious intent to vex and
annoy.
Barratry prosecutions are almost unheard of, but there was one in 1988 in California and it was affirmed by an appeals court. The RIAA's activities seem to qualify. "Exciting groundless judicial proceedings" - check. "At least three instances" - check. "Corrupt or malicious intent to vex and annoy" - requires proving intent, and in this last case, that can probably be shown.
That's going to be a problem. Now that there's an attack which works through redirects,
the ad-tracking industry may have to stop using them, or Google may have to limit them to "trusted third parties". (DoubleClick?) Probably wouldn't bother Google if they had to enforce that rule for security reasons.
Right now,
Google seems to claim that the destination URL and landing URL should be the same, so AdWords users can't really complain if they start enforcing that rule.
It's useful to examine those redirects. On searches for very general terms like "mortgage", almost all the links go through some pay-per-click service. But search for, say, "servomotor", and the landing pages are the real site.
The ones that redirect through some pay-per-click service are generally less useful; they're basically spam. You don't want to go there anyway. Filtering out those would be no great loss from a consumer perspective.
Browser toolbars like AdBlock and other security tools probably now need to filter AdWords.
Something like this would work:
When a link to a Google AdWords site is found in an HTML "a" tag, extract the "q" and "adurl" fields from the URL.
Extract the base domain (i.e. www.example.com => example.com) from whichever of those fields is present.
Extract the text within the A tag. Strip blanks and convert to lower case. Extract the
base domain from that.
If they don't match, the ad doesn't go where it says it does. Make it un-clickable.
Do all this at the DOM level, so any Javascript that creates ad entries is evaluated before filtering.
With this, legitimate AdWords will work, but ones that redirect through other questionable sites won't. This may interfere with some brokered ads, but from an consumer perspective, you probably didn't want to go there anyway.
Whilst it's laudable that companies are investing in robotics at all, it seems to me that the time has come for investment on a commercial scale in robotics for specific applications. These 'hobby' type robots are all well and good (and no doubt particularly appealing to many around here) but they don't actually DO very much of any use, and the average member of the public is not going to be all that excited by them.
Hey, something like 60% of Roomba owners name the things, and those things rate slightly above wind-up toys and below a Furby in smarts. There's a market for those things. Of course, there's a market for the Ionic Breeze air cleaner, which doesn't even clean air.
What this new effort sounds like is an alternative to FIRST robotics, but at a lower price point.
The real action starts around $1000. Check out Robots-Dreams.org, which covers Japanese and other hobbyist humanoid robots. There are four or five makers of those things now, and they're very impressive.
Hobbyist robotics tends to be weak on sensors and terrible on sensor fusion, but once anyone can get working hardware, that should improve. There's been enormous progress in vision processing in the last five years, but it hasn't filtered down to the hobbyists yet, even though the hardware isn't the problem there.
There's more. Definitely read the blog section at Webmaster World linked above, which is being updated rapidly. Apparently it really is a virus. "It spreads by installing the activex on the computer that clicks the ad and looking to see if the infected host uses adwords, then does the same to their account." The pay per click people are panicking, because they're billed by Google for the ads. "The daily budget was increased to a number that would have produced a 7 figure Monthly payout." The details of exactly how this all works are still sketchy, though. Here's an early technical analysis.
It's worse than that. The URL Google displays for the link is, of course, not the actual link; the actual link goes to Google so they can log the click-through. But the link to Google may in fact cause redirection to a completely different third-party domain, usually some ad broker who is doing arbitrage on the click-through.
Here's an example, obtained by searching Google for "mortgage rates". This is a direct Google result from Google's home page.
<font size=+0> <a id=an4 href=/url?sa=L&ai=BMHn-CuwvRs7QLpOYgQO0vMmWBoO9jRX zgpWxAvvb3gfg3X0QBBgHKAg4AFDj9Mzv_v____8BYMn2-IbIo 6AZyAEByAL77xXZAw3PC8TgQncC&num=7&ggladgrp=2585635 35&gglcreat=543052995&q=http://pixel-user-1042.eve resttech.net/1042/rq/3/543052995_mortgage%2520rate s_s/url%3Dhttp%253A//www.lendingtree.com/stm3/offe rs/marketpromov34.asp%253Fpromo%253D00224%2526loan _type%253D1%2526esourceid%253D835910%2526source%25 3D835910%2526EF%253D1%2526partner%253DGoogle%25268 00num%253D800-460-8109%2526adtype%253D1&usg=AFrqEz f58V3yFBM0ywyFkKryLzAMqmIWRQ><b>Mortgage</b> Rate Offers</a> </font><br> $400,000 for Only $1,334/Month!<br> Refinance Now, Offers in Minutes.<br> <span class=a>www.LendingTree.com</span><br> <br>
Note that field coded into the URL on the A tag: q="http://pixel-user-1042.everesttech.net". That's where Google is going to send you. Not to Lending Tree, but to EverestTech.net. Who's "Everesttech.net?
An ad broker, or as they put it, "the leader in Search Engine Marketing".
This creates a new attack vector. The Google ad often shows the name of some well-known business, but actually takes you to some place you never heard of. That gives the third party an opportunity to try browser-based attacks.
Windows. The speed of Windows halves every two years.
Spyware, adware, and malware. Extra CPU power is needed to run all those spam engines in the background.
Spam filtering. Running Bayesian filters on all the incoming mail isn't cheap.
Virus detection. That gets harder all the time, since signature based detection stopped working.
Games. Gamers expect an ever-larger number of characters on-screen, all moving well. That really uses resources.
Despite this, there have been complaints from the PC industry that Vista isn't enough of a resource hog to force people to buy new hardware.
Computers have become cheaper. I once paid $6000 for a high-end PC to run Softimage|3D. The machine after that was $2000. The machine after that was $600.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a great idea. But it needs to be standardized, so everything recharges from any pad. Otherwise we'll be back in wall transformer hell. This one is about the third scheme for doing this, and so far, they're incompatible.
If it's done totally wrong, there will be an encrypted handshake between the pad and the device receiving power, so only authorized devices can recharge. Like printer ink cartridges.
As for breaking bulbs perhaps if this is enough of an issue they could put those bulbs inside some of that indestructable plastic that they package ear buds or compact flash cards in.
That's actually a reasonable idea. Ruggedized incandescent and fluorescent lamps have been available for decades. The incandescents are coated with a high-temperature translucent silicone rubber, and the tube fluorescents are enclosed in a plastic tube. These are sometimes used in industrial applications.
I had a Keyhole subscription for years before Google bought it, and it was really cool. If all you've seen is the Javascript kludge, you haven't seen the real thing. The real Keyhole application required 3D hardware, could do smooth zooms, tilts, and pans, and showed the world with elevation.
Google still offers that as a download, but it's not used all that much.
The CNet version looks like it was picked up by a runaway screen scraper, which sucked up two following articles. Then some paragraphs were duplicated. Lame.
Some time in the last two years, Google started becoming much more "SEO friendly". There are meetings at Google for SEO types. Google sponsors "Search Engine Marketing" conferences. It's getting a bit embarassing.
Google has to keep growing to justify their P/E ratio of 47 and keep their stockholders happy. That's hard to do when they already have most of their primary market. It's common to see dumb merger and acquisition activity in that situation. Search with occasional ads was a terrific business - doesn't take many employees, moderate operating costs, almost no cost of goods, good margins. The things Google has gone into since search (mail, video, office apps, etc.) don't have those properties, and are less profitable than search, if not outright money drains.
There's no big problem running a certificate authority at a moderate cost per transaction. It could probably be done effectively for about $10-$20 per certificate.
If you want to buy a certificate for an organization, identity has to be verified. The way to do this is 1) look up the organization in corporation or d/b/a name records, as appropriate, and 2) send a letter or FedEx envelope (extra charge) to the address for service of process listed therein. You'd order a certificate on line, but it's not enabled until the letter is received and the code in the letter is entered. Disallow P.O. box and PMB addresses. This provides reasonably good address checking.
Generating the mailing pieces can be outsourced to a direct mail company. There's a whole industry out there that will print stuff, put postage on it, and get it into the postal system at very low cost. (Typical cost for this is about $0.47 per envelope sent.)
For an individual, require purchase with a credit card, and send the letter to the billing address of the credit card, which can be verified during credit card verification.
This yields certificates that provide solid address information, but without manual processing.
It's not free, but it's definitely possible to get the cost down.
I'd like to see this done for domain registration. The domain doesn't go live until the WHOIS information has been verified in this way. That would solve the junk WHOIS info problem.
Mod parent up. The original article reflects a complete misunderstanding of the compulsory license system. It's compulsory against owners of rights in sound recordings. They have to grant a license whether they want to or not. However, there's nothing prohibiting owners of sound recordings and a distribution service of whatever type from making a deal outside the compulsory license system.
For example, someone could set up a Free Music Foundation to offer free licenses to Internet radio stations, unknown bands could grant distribution rights for their stuff to the Free Music Foundation, and Internet "radio stations" (really streaming download sites) could play exclusively Free Music Foundation material, without any compulsory license or statutory royalties.
Or, at the other extreme, you could have Payola Internet Radio, where bands pay to put their stuff on the stream. Again, no statutory royalties.
This isn't a big issue in the industry. The big issue with compulsory licenses right now is whether they apply to ringtones. The Copyright Board said they do last year, which makes ringtones much cheaper. The Harry Fox Agency is dragging their feet on this, but it's now established that if you download an entire song and use it as a ringtone, that's covered under the compulsory license. Arguments continue about using only part of the song.
Just put a signed self-installing Active-X control on the company web site on some page that sounds interesting, and let it do drive-by installs.
This vulnerability in AdWords exists because Google made them "reseller-friendly." That needs to stop.
When you click on a Google AdWords ad link, the link goes to Google, not to the destination site. Then Google's ad link server looks at the URL, logs the click, and does a redirect to the site specified by the advertiser. That isn't necessarily the destination shown in the Google ad. It's often some "ad broker" or "affiliate", which wants to see the click event for "tracking". That's what created the vulnerability. Attackers can buy ads for "Bank of America" and have them redirect to "slimeballcentral.biz".
Google does check, when the ad is purchased and occasionally thereafter, that the link sold with the ad eventually redirects to the purported destination, or what Google calls the "landing site". But that's not good enough any more. Attackers can create ads which attract innocent users, run them past the attacker's site where the attacker gets a shot at them, then direct them invisibly to the destination. That's how this attack works.
It's time to cut the middlemen out of the loop. Google ad links need to go directly to the destination site, only. "Ad brokers" and "affiliates" will have to use Google's own ad tracking numbers. This might require outside auditing to be trustworthy.
That would cause some disruption in the ad-broker / "search engine optimization" business, although they'd adjust to it. It's going to be interesting to see whether Google chooses to protect its search customers or its ad brokers. That will tell us whether Google has abandoned "Don't be evil".
I just found and read the actual paper, too; now I don't have to post the link. (It ought to be a Slashdot requirement that when you post a story about something, you have to link to the real source, not just some news site or blog link.)
This isn't really about simulating a mouse brain. This is more like running a synthetic benchmark to demonstrate that if they had the wiring diagram for a mouse brain, IBM Almaden has enough CPU power on hand to simulate it. But they don't have a mouse brain wiring diagram; they're just exercising the simulator with some random set of connections.
Right. That means putting back in an old-style boot BIOS, Trusted Platform Management, Microsoft code in System Management Mode, trusted audio and video paths, and all the other DRM stuff, I suppose. The hope with OLPC was that they were going to dump all that stuff.
Those are overreaching terms. The obligation to inform the employer is normal. The "owns ideas developed on your own time" is illegal in California. The employer probably has some out of state form they're using.
That provision of California law built Silicon Valley. Anybody good who has a good idea is free to leave and do a startup. Which is what happens here all the time.
Obligations beyond the end of employment need to be considered very carefully, because they can affect your next job. For that one, you need a lawyer.
The WebSphere DataPower XML Accelerator XA35 is more like a web page template engine front end. The front end faces the HTML clients, and the back end faces some system that delivers results in XML. That's a potential Cell application, because it can be done as a streaming operation, with the template and the transaction results merged in a Cell SPE. Might make sense for catalog applications, where the user does a search, and after the search is complete, a nice-looking catalog page needs to be built.
(The killer app: off-loading the insertion of contextual ads.)
The early ink-jet printer patents should be expiring soon. The first inkjet printers were developed in 1976, and HP's original DeskJet shipped in 1998. We'll probably see a flood of no-brand-name printers using generic ink over the next few years. That's what happened to laser printers when those patents expired years ago.
Oh, right.
They own (through their membership) most of LA and a good chunk of southern California.
The movie industry is big, but the music industry isn't. Total US music industry sales are around $10 billion a year, and dropping, or so says the RIAA. Google, Microsoft, Apple, HP, and IBM each generate more revenue, and far more profits, than the entire music industry. The music industry doesn't employ many people, unlike the movie industry, so the employee votes aren't there.
IBM has been talking this up for a while. The idea is to offload some "streaming stuff" onto the Cell processors. The phrase "XML acceleration" has been used, which probably means the Cell gets the job of taking some DB2 result and pumping it out in XML. It's also useful for SSL encryption and other related streaming-type tasks.
This is a traditional IBM transaction processing approach. The mainframe is surrounded by lesser machines which handle the communications and formatting, extract the transaction which needs access to the data, ships that to the mainframe, gets a result back, and then formats a reply to the requestor. In the green-screen terminal era, that was done by dedicated hardware. In the web era, too much of that work moved onto the mainframe itself.
Think of this usage of the Cell as offloading the front half of Apache to peripheral processors. When your AJAX app makes an XMLHttpRequest, the idea is that the front-end machines get the request, decode it, wait until it's complete, then pass one single transaction to the mainframe. A single reply comes back, is reformatted as XML, and is shipped out to the client. The number of events processed by the mainframe goes way down, and all the protocol work is offloaded to the low-cost Cell machines with tiny memories.
Has nothing to do with gaming, though. They're not putting the PS3's GPU (from NVidia) on mainframes.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though. That's too small. Just cramming the whole protocol stack in there will fill most of the memory. I think this thing will really start to fly when IBM gets up to a 2-4MB per Cell CPU. Then you'll be able to fit the front-end processing for a web server in the Cell. Until then, it's a niche product.
Barratry is a criminal offense in California.
From the California Penal Code:
158. Common barratry is the practice of exciting groundless judicial proceedings, and is punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months and by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000).
159. No person can be convicted of common barratry except upon proof that he has excited suits or proceedings at law in at least three instances, and with a corrupt or malicious intent to vex and annoy.
Barratry prosecutions are almost unheard of, but there was one in 1988 in California and it was affirmed by an appeals court. The RIAA's activities seem to qualify. "Exciting groundless judicial proceedings" - check. "At least three instances" - check. "Corrupt or malicious intent to vex and annoy" - requires proving intent, and in this last case, that can probably be shown.
That's going to be a problem. Now that there's an attack which works through redirects, the ad-tracking industry may have to stop using them, or Google may have to limit them to "trusted third parties". (DoubleClick?) Probably wouldn't bother Google if they had to enforce that rule for security reasons.
Right now, Google seems to claim that the destination URL and landing URL should be the same, so AdWords users can't really complain if they start enforcing that rule.
It's useful to examine those redirects. On searches for very general terms like "mortgage", almost all the links go through some pay-per-click service. But search for, say, "servomotor", and the landing pages are the real site. The ones that redirect through some pay-per-click service are generally less useful; they're basically spam. You don't want to go there anyway. Filtering out those would be no great loss from a consumer perspective.
Browser toolbars like AdBlock and other security tools probably now need to filter AdWords. Something like this would work:
Do all this at the DOM level, so any Javascript that creates ad entries is evaluated before filtering.
With this, legitimate AdWords will work, but ones that redirect through other questionable sites won't. This may interfere with some brokered ads, but from an consumer perspective, you probably didn't want to go there anyway.
Whilst it's laudable that companies are investing in robotics at all, it seems to me that the time has come for investment on a commercial scale in robotics for specific applications. These 'hobby' type robots are all well and good (and no doubt particularly appealing to many around here) but they don't actually DO very much of any use, and the average member of the public is not going to be all that excited by them.
Hey, something like 60% of Roomba owners name the things, and those things rate slightly above wind-up toys and below a Furby in smarts. There's a market for those things. Of course, there's a market for the Ionic Breeze air cleaner, which doesn't even clean air.
What this new effort sounds like is an alternative to FIRST robotics, but at a lower price point.
The real action starts around $1000. Check out Robots-Dreams.org, which covers Japanese and other hobbyist humanoid robots. There are four or five makers of those things now, and they're very impressive.
Hobbyist robotics tends to be weak on sensors and terrible on sensor fusion, but once anyone can get working hardware, that should improve. There's been enormous progress in vision processing in the last five years, but it hasn't filtered down to the hobbyists yet, even though the hardware isn't the problem there.
There's more. Definitely read the blog section at Webmaster World linked above, which is being updated rapidly. Apparently it really is a virus. "It spreads by installing the activex on the computer that clicks the ad and looking to see if the infected host uses adwords, then does the same to their account." The pay per click people are panicking, because they're billed by Google for the ads. "The daily budget was increased to a number that would have produced a 7 figure Monthly payout." The details of exactly how this all works are still sketchy, though. Here's an early technical analysis.
It just hit the mainstream press, in the Washington Post
It's worse than that. The URL Google displays for the link is, of course, not the actual link; the actual link goes to Google so they can log the click-through. But the link to Google may in fact cause redirection to a completely different third-party domain, usually some ad broker who is doing arbitrage on the click-through.
Here's an example, obtained by searching Google for "mortgage rates". This is a direct Google result from Google's home page.
Note that field coded into the URL on the A tag: q="http://pixel-user-1042.everesttech.net". That's where Google is going to send you. Not to Lending Tree, but to EverestTech.net. Who's "Everesttech.net? An ad broker, or as they put it, "the leader in Search Engine Marketing".
This creates a new attack vector. The Google ad often shows the name of some well-known business, but actually takes you to some place you never heard of. That gives the third party an opportunity to try browser-based attacks.
This isn't just theoretical; it's in the wild. See this article on Webmaster World: " I just had my AdWords account hacked and it seems campaigns were setup with redirects pointing to places like orbitz.com and business.com that try to install some activex remote desktop program."
It's not clear how to deal with this. The example above is from Google's main site, not "adwords.google.com".
Despite this, there have been complaints from the PC industry that Vista isn't enough of a resource hog to force people to buy new hardware.
Computers have become cheaper. I once paid $6000 for a high-end PC to run Softimage|3D. The machine after that was $2000. The machine after that was $600.