We've been through this already. Remember Mozilla, and how it turned into bloatware, then had to be slimmed down for Firefox? Rmember how XUL was going to be a "platform" that would make Netscape into a Microsoft competitor?
Then there was XPCOM, the Mozilla answer to Active-X, Microsoft's bad idea.
We don't need another stupid "platform". If you want to run programs in the client, we have Javascript and Flash for the simple stuff, and Java for more complex tasks. Cross-browser compatibility, even.
That's standard sales training. That's what everybody learns in basic marketing management.
A big problem with the open-source world is that it doesn't develop marketing use cases.
How little need a user know to successfully run Linux on the desktop? That's not something one hears in KDE vs. Gnome discussions. Yet it's the question that matters.
About a dozen non-government funded inventions a year get hit by a secrecy order in the United States. (That number is from the 1990s; this may have changed.)
One of the best suppressed ideas was Airadar, which was a radar for light aircraft developed in the early 1970s. It was a phased-array radar with a conformal antenna built into the wing and a fast sweep rate. All modern radars are like that, but back then, the USAF still had only systems with a big moving dish in the aircraft nose and slow-updating images. They were unhappy about the civilian sector pulling ahead. So that became a suppressed invention, even though it had been demonstrated and reviewed in Flying magazine.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter.
Me too. Did you ever see the "million volt lightning generator", which was a Marx generator? I saw it working. The steel-ball-on-steel anvil setup that would bounce for minutes? Telerama, the old Bell Telephone exhibit? The working Linotype machine?
The Henry Ford Museum used to be really hardcore in that regard. ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, circa 1938") But it's been dumbed down, too.
Probably the best remaining hardcore tech museum is the Museum of Flight in Seattle. They try to keep many of the planes in flyable condition, and many of the staff are Boeing retirees who know all about the aircraft.
Wood cases for computers have been done many times, starting with the Apple 1. Putting a CRT in a wooden box has usually been a dud idea; the result was a bulky box and overheating problems. Some older bank executives used to get such things, but that's died out. A wooden frame around an LCD panel looks fine, and ought to be a cheap option.
You can get LCD panels with wood bezels, sold as "digital picture frames", and those aren't expensive.
The wooden keyboard looks silly. There's a stone mouse, but the plastic scroll wheel ruins the effect.
Also, the company mentioned has a site full of search engine spam keywords in white type on a grey background, not a good sign of legitimacy. No business address on the web site, either.
ICANN had already invoked the "provide backup copy of registrar data" provision of the Registrar agreement, which requires that, on demand, any registrar provide ICANN with a backup copy of the registrar's data in a standard format. RegisterFly didn't comply.
That data isn't lost, though.
There's a source of backup WHOIS data. Try DomainTools, which maintains copies of all WHOIS and DNS data. So if you need to prove domain ownership after RegisterFly shuts down, there's a way.
The problem they're working on with this isn't one the US has. The "superhuman abilities" thing is useful when assaulting hard, heavily defended, hard to access targets. But the US military is very good at assaulting hard targets.
What the US military is lousy at is fighting guerrilla and insurgent movements. Those are about intelligence, not firepower. The opposition tries to avoid offering any hard targets. They don't fight pitched battles. It's classic Maoist doctrine: "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." The US couldn't deal with that in Vietnam, and it can't deal with it in Iraq.
Google, when you go over to their HQ, does have the look and feel of an overexpanding dot-com. The offices are very nice. Conference rooms are very well equipped. The food is great. But that doesn't really mean much.
The only part of the business that makes money is AdWords; everything else is a lose. Which is a problem.
There's only so much revenue available via click-through advertising, and too many players are going after that pot.
Google's next big push seems to as a paid "application service provider", but that has not, historically, been a very profitable business.
Hell, it is an ad. Read the last line of the article.
SELinux is a great idea, but almost nobody gets it. NSA wrote it so that commercial and open source application developers could get accustomed to writing programs that would work on a system that enforced mandatory security. The hope was that, for example, Firefox and Apache would be modified to work well under very restrictive security models, so that if some app misbehaved, its damage would be limited. This was the first step in getting out of the mess we're in now with patch-based insecurity.
Aviation cockpit designers think hard about this stuff. They refer to it as "head-down time", the time the pilot is looking at something else in the cockpit and not out the windscreen. In combat, this is fatal. Hence the military emphasis on heads-up displays and HOTAS (Hands On Throttle and Stick) input devices. In civilian aircraft, cockpits are designed to minimize head-down time at least during takeoff, approach, and landing.
Much automotive and civilian gear is terrible by these standards. Cockpit designers insist on big knobs you can set by feel and interfaces that minimize head-down time. They try hard to avoid interfaces with unneeded state, and ones where you have to look to see what state you're in. BMW's iDrive was terrible in this regard. BMW's answer was to include a disclaimer that it was unsafe to operate iDrive while driving. Really.
One design feature that can kill - an interface which times out. The pilot/driver must be able to stop dealing with some cockpit gadget without losing any work. Phones/keyboards/dashboard devices that time out during data entry are dangerous, because they train the user to give them undivided attention. Some phones have this problem, and some don't. Texting has this problem.
"Nothing to watch but the road" - early Oldsmobile slogan.
One of the big problems in the UNIX world, and the one that is sometimes said to have killed UNIX on the desktop/workstation, was the problem of too many incompatible versions. BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, AIX,.... And no application portability.
The legacy of that is all the nonsense that goes on when you type "./configure".
Linux at least has a somewhat standard kernel, but the "distro" problem is holding back adoption.
Dell assumes that customers 1) know the difference between an Inspiron, a Latitude, and and an XPS, and 2) care. Even GM gave up on that nonsense and discontinued the Oldsmobile nameplate.
Well, what did you expect? The PS3 is so different from other machines that either you design for it first and then port to a more conventional architecture, or you re implement. Unlike previous generations of game consoles, the weirdness isn't in the graphics; the PS3 has a more standard graphics engine than any previous Sony game console. It's in the main processing. So a graphics library won't help you.
Also, in all previous consoles, the weird hardware architecture drove costs down. That didn't work on the PS3.
Someday there will be something like the Cell, but useful. It will probably have much more memory per CPU.
(Would someone summarize? Don't have time to watch 55 minutes of talking head video.)
MMORPGs have the same problem, with "griefers". The trick is to design the system so that a griefer can't annoy a disproportionate number of people.
The classic line is "It takes ten honest people to support one crook". That's very real; when the fraction of troublemakers gets too large, nobody can get anything done. Happens routinely in bad neighborhoods and war zones.
If the background is so cluttered as to make the OCR difficult, then chances are the human will have trouble reading it too.
Web site images with logos against faint but busy backgrounds are moderately common. I'm talking about stuff like this. Commercial OCR programs interpret that as "a picture". Because we're working to automatically extract business identities from uncooperative websites, we sometimes need heavier technology than the search engines.
I'd thought Google would be doing that by now. I've been implementing something that has to read arbitrary web pages (see SiteTruth) and extract data, and I've been considering how to deal with JavaScript effectively.
Conceptually, it's not that hard. You need a skeleton of a browser, one that can load pages and run Javascript like a browser, builds the document tree, but doesn't actually draw anything. You load the page, run the initial OnLoad JavaScript, then look at the document tree as it exists at that point. Firefox could probably be coerced into doing this job.
It's also possible to analyze Flash files. Text which appears in Flash output usually exists as clear text in the Flash file. Again, the most correct approach is to build a psuedo-renderer, one that goes through the motions of processing the file and executing the ActionScript, but just passes the text off for further processing, rather than rendering it.
Ghostscript had to deal with this problem years ago, because PostScript is actually a programming language, not a page description language. It has variables, subroutines, and an execution engine. You have to run PostScript programs to find out what text out.
OCR is also an option. Because of the lack of serious font support in HTML, most business names are in images. I've been trying OCR on those, and it usually works if the background is uncluttered.
Sooner or later, everybody who does serious site-scraping is going to have to bite the bullet and implement the heavy machinery to do this. Try some other search engines. Somebody must have done this by now.
Again, I'm surprised that Google hasn't done this. They went to the trouble to build parsers for PDF and Microsoft Word files; you'd think they'd do "Web 2.0" documents.
Remember VA Linux? They were going to make Linux PCs. Biggest IPO first-day runup in history. Then the stock declined 98% from the peak. Nobody is going to get funding for that idea for a while.
The more likely player is Lenovo. They're not as beholden to Microsoft as Dell is, they can offer corporate support through IBM, and they've sold Linux laptops outside the US.
Remember
IntellAdmin, offering a free DST patch for Windows 2000? Well, it doesn't work. I installed it on a Win2K system, and the time didn't change to DST. I contacted Intelladmin, and got "workaround instructions" (open clock, change to another time zone, change back, then reset the clock to the correct time.). It only changes to DST the next time you manually set the clock.
So if you deployed this "patch" on your Win2K machines in a corporate environment, the time is going to be wrong when everybody shows up on Monday.
You really misread the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.
US citizens (and non-citizens) will be required to present a passport (or other acceptable documentation) to ENTER the USA, not to leave.
No, it goes well beyond that. Read the actual Federal Register regulations:
As a result
of this final rule, with limited
exceptions discussed below, beginning
January 23, 2007, all United States
citizens and nonimmigrant aliens from
Canada, Bermuda, and Mexico
departing from or entering the United
States from within the Western
Hemisphere at air ports-of-entry will be
required to present a valid passport.
Comment
Two commenters asked if non-U.S.
citizens would be allowed to depart the
United States without a passport,
regardless of their intent to return to the
United States.
Response
Currently, if an individual is not
required to present a passport upon
entry to the United States, that
individual does not need to present a
passport upon exit. Under this final
rule, however, if an individual must
present a passport upon entry, then that
individual will also need to bear one
upon exit. In the event that non-U.S.
citizens' passports are lost or stolen,
those individuals would need to contact
their nearest consular office to have the
documents replaced prior to departing
the United States.
(Federal Register / Vol. 71, No. 226 / Friday, November 24, 2006 / Rules and Regulations, pages 68412-68415)
That's the "air phase", currently in effect. The "land and sea phase", originally scheduled for 2008, seems to be in a more ambiguous status.
Slashdot Mirror
There will always be a market for sound cards.
Probably not. The high end will probably have a digital connection into the mixing console, rather than a sound card in the computer.
We've been through this already. Remember Mozilla, and how it turned into bloatware, then had to be slimmed down for Firefox? Rmember how XUL was going to be a "platform" that would make Netscape into a Microsoft competitor?
Then there was XPCOM, the Mozilla answer to Active-X, Microsoft's bad idea.
We don't need another stupid "platform". If you want to run programs in the client, we have Javascript and Flash for the simple stuff, and Java for more complex tasks. Cross-browser compatibility, even.
That's standard sales training. That's what everybody learns in basic marketing management.
A big problem with the open-source world is that it doesn't develop marketing use cases. How little need a user know to successfully run Linux on the desktop? That's not something one hears in KDE vs. Gnome discussions. Yet it's the question that matters.
So they're setting up a monopoly. Who did they pay off to get this through the FCC and the "Justice Department"?
About a dozen non-government funded inventions a year get hit by a secrecy order in the United States. (That number is from the 1990s; this may have changed.)
One of the best suppressed ideas was Airadar, which was a radar for light aircraft developed in the early 1970s. It was a phased-array radar with a conformal antenna built into the wing and a fast sweep rate. All modern radars are like that, but back then, the USAF still had only systems with a big moving dish in the aircraft nose and slow-updating images. They were unhappy about the civilian sector pulling ahead. So that became a suppressed invention, even though it had been demonstrated and reviewed in Flying magazine.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter.
Me too. Did you ever see the "million volt lightning generator", which was a Marx generator? I saw it working. The steel-ball-on-steel anvil setup that would bounce for minutes? Telerama, the old Bell Telephone exhibit? The working Linotype machine?
The Henry Ford Museum used to be really hardcore in that regard. ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, circa 1938") But it's been dumbed down, too.
Probably the best remaining hardcore tech museum is the Museum of Flight in Seattle. They try to keep many of the planes in flyable condition, and many of the staff are Boeing retirees who know all about the aircraft.
As Roger Corman used to say, "You can only show a breast if it's bloody".
Wood cases for computers have been done many times, starting with the Apple 1. Putting a CRT in a wooden box has usually been a dud idea; the result was a bulky box and overheating problems. Some older bank executives used to get such things, but that's died out. A wooden frame around an LCD panel looks fine, and ought to be a cheap option. You can get LCD panels with wood bezels, sold as "digital picture frames", and those aren't expensive.
The wooden keyboard looks silly. There's a stone mouse, but the plastic scroll wheel ruins the effect.
Also, the company mentioned has a site full of search engine spam keywords in white type on a grey background, not a good sign of legitimacy. No business address on the web site, either.
ICANN had already invoked the "provide backup copy of registrar data" provision of the Registrar agreement, which requires that, on demand, any registrar provide ICANN with a backup copy of the registrar's data in a standard format. RegisterFly didn't comply.
That data isn't lost, though. There's a source of backup WHOIS data. Try DomainTools, which maintains copies of all WHOIS and DNS data. So if you need to prove domain ownership after RegisterFly shuts down, there's a way.
True. That may be solving the wrong problem.
The problem they're working on with this isn't one the US has. The "superhuman abilities" thing is useful when assaulting hard, heavily defended, hard to access targets. But the US military is very good at assaulting hard targets.
What the US military is lousy at is fighting guerrilla and insurgent movements. Those are about intelligence, not firepower. The opposition tries to avoid offering any hard targets. They don't fight pitched battles. It's classic Maoist doctrine: "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." The US couldn't deal with that in Vietnam, and it can't deal with it in Iraq.
Google, when you go over to their HQ, does have the look and feel of an overexpanding dot-com. The offices are very nice. Conference rooms are very well equipped. The food is great. But that doesn't really mean much.
The only part of the business that makes money is AdWords; everything else is a lose. Which is a problem. There's only so much revenue available via click-through advertising, and too many players are going after that pot.
Google's next big push seems to as a paid "application service provider", but that has not, historically, been a very profitable business.
Hell, it is an ad. Read the last line of the article.
SELinux is a great idea, but almost nobody gets it. NSA wrote it so that commercial and open source application developers could get accustomed to writing programs that would work on a system that enforced mandatory security. The hope was that, for example, Firefox and Apache would be modified to work well under very restrictive security models, so that if some app misbehaved, its damage would be limited. This was the first step in getting out of the mess we're in now with patch-based insecurity.
Not too much of that has happened.
Aviation cockpit designers think hard about this stuff. They refer to it as "head-down time", the time the pilot is looking at something else in the cockpit and not out the windscreen. In combat, this is fatal. Hence the military emphasis on heads-up displays and HOTAS (Hands On Throttle and Stick) input devices. In civilian aircraft, cockpits are designed to minimize head-down time at least during takeoff, approach, and landing.
Much automotive and civilian gear is terrible by these standards. Cockpit designers insist on big knobs you can set by feel and interfaces that minimize head-down time. They try hard to avoid interfaces with unneeded state, and ones where you have to look to see what state you're in. BMW's iDrive was terrible in this regard. BMW's answer was to include a disclaimer that it was unsafe to operate iDrive while driving. Really.
One design feature that can kill - an interface which times out. The pilot/driver must be able to stop dealing with some cockpit gadget without losing any work. Phones/keyboards/dashboard devices that time out during data entry are dangerous, because they train the user to give them undivided attention. Some phones have this problem, and some don't. Texting has this problem.
"Nothing to watch but the road" - early Oldsmobile slogan.
One of the big problems in the UNIX world, and the one that is sometimes said to have killed UNIX on the desktop/workstation, was the problem of too many incompatible versions. BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, AIX, .... And no application portability.
The legacy of that is all the nonsense that goes on when you type "./configure".
Linux at least has a somewhat standard kernel, but the "distro" problem is holding back adoption.
Dell assumes that customers 1) know the difference between an Inspiron, a Latitude, and and an XPS, and 2) care. Even GM gave up on that nonsense and discontinued the Oldsmobile nameplate.
Well, what did you expect? The PS3 is so different from other machines that either you design for it first and then port to a more conventional architecture, or you re implement. Unlike previous generations of game consoles, the weirdness isn't in the graphics; the PS3 has a more standard graphics engine than any previous Sony game console. It's in the main processing. So a graphics library won't help you.
Also, in all previous consoles, the weird hardware architecture drove costs down. That didn't work on the PS3.
Someday there will be something like the Cell, but useful. It will probably have much more memory per CPU.
(Would someone summarize? Don't have time to watch 55 minutes of talking head video.)
MMORPGs have the same problem, with "griefers". The trick is to design the system so that a griefer can't annoy a disproportionate number of people.
The classic line is "It takes ten honest people to support one crook". That's very real; when the fraction of troublemakers gets too large, nobody can get anything done. Happens routinely in bad neighborhoods and war zones.
If the background is so cluttered as to make the OCR difficult, then chances are the human will have trouble reading it too.
Web site images with logos against faint but busy backgrounds are moderately common. I'm talking about stuff like this. Commercial OCR programs interpret that as "a picture". Because we're working to automatically extract business identities from uncooperative websites, we sometimes need heavier technology than the search engines.
The model for websites is supposed to work something like this:
If only. Turn off JavaScript and try these sites:
Yes, that's exactly how they blew it. Mod parent up. Thanks.
I'd thought Google would be doing that by now. I've been implementing something that has to read arbitrary web pages (see SiteTruth) and extract data, and I've been considering how to deal with JavaScript effectively.
Conceptually, it's not that hard. You need a skeleton of a browser, one that can load pages and run Javascript like a browser, builds the document tree, but doesn't actually draw anything. You load the page, run the initial OnLoad JavaScript, then look at the document tree as it exists at that point. Firefox could probably be coerced into doing this job.
It's also possible to analyze Flash files. Text which appears in Flash output usually exists as clear text in the Flash file. Again, the most correct approach is to build a psuedo-renderer, one that goes through the motions of processing the file and executing the ActionScript, but just passes the text off for further processing, rather than rendering it.
Ghostscript had to deal with this problem years ago, because PostScript is actually a programming language, not a page description language. It has variables, subroutines, and an execution engine. You have to run PostScript programs to find out what text out.
OCR is also an option. Because of the lack of serious font support in HTML, most business names are in images. I've been trying OCR on those, and it usually works if the background is uncluttered.
Sooner or later, everybody who does serious site-scraping is going to have to bite the bullet and implement the heavy machinery to do this. Try some other search engines. Somebody must have done this by now.
Again, I'm surprised that Google hasn't done this. They went to the trouble to build parsers for PDF and Microsoft Word files; you'd think they'd do "Web 2.0" documents.
Remember VA Linux? They were going to make Linux PCs. Biggest IPO first-day runup in history. Then the stock declined 98% from the peak. Nobody is going to get funding for that idea for a while.
The more likely player is Lenovo. They're not as beholden to Microsoft as Dell is, they can offer corporate support through IBM, and they've sold Linux laptops outside the US.
Remember IntellAdmin, offering a free DST patch for Windows 2000? Well, it doesn't work. I installed it on a Win2K system, and the time didn't change to DST. I contacted Intelladmin, and got "workaround instructions" (open clock, change to another time zone, change back, then reset the clock to the correct time.). It only changes to DST the next time you manually set the clock.
So if you deployed this "patch" on your Win2K machines in a corporate environment, the time is going to be wrong when everybody shows up on Monday.
You really misread the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. US citizens (and non-citizens) will be required to present a passport (or other acceptable documentation) to ENTER the USA, not to leave.
No, it goes well beyond that. Read the actual Federal Register regulations:
Response Currently, if an individual is not required to present a passport upon entry to the United States, that individual does not need to present a passport upon exit. Under this final rule, however, if an individual must present a passport upon entry, then that individual will also need to bear one upon exit. In the event that non-U.S. citizens' passports are lost or stolen, those individuals would need to contact their nearest consular office to have the documents replaced prior to departing the United States.
(Federal Register / Vol. 71, No. 226 / Friday, November 24, 2006 / Rules and Regulations, pages 68412-68415)
That's the "air phase", currently in effect. The "land and sea phase", originally scheduled for 2008, seems to be in a more ambiguous status.