I've seen those posters. Long, detailed small-type discussions of code coverage analysis mounted above urinals. Last week's poster: Google measures code coverage on a per-statement basis. Really.
Visiting Google HQ bothers me a bit. I'm the guy who did Downside, tracking failing dot-coms, and I see too many similarities between Google today and some of the more exuberant dot-coms. Google's business is basically AdWords and a search engine; on the side, they also operate a bunch of unprofitable dot-coms. YouTube, Gmail, and the web apps aren't profitable. If anything happens to force AdWords prices down, like an advertising price war with Microsoft or trouble with the pay-per-click model, Google may have problems.
Google has a lot of smart people, but somehow that's not translating into new, profitable product lines.
The install for this thng requires 25MB of disk space. For a little program that supposedly just launches apps from the keyboard. It has to be doing something they're not telling you.
They admit that it has remote update, so it has a built-in security vulnerability. Vista won't let it run for that reason.
Today's volume on LindX is L$38,744,689. Todays average exchange rate is L$269.0276 / US$1.00, or US$144,030. So there's some hope of moving US$10,000. But it's going to affect the rate some.
The reason the author calls it a Ponzi scheme is that it strongly resembles the scam known as a High Yield Investment Program. These schemes make it very difficult to get money out, so that, while the customer's investment appears to be increasing, it can't actually be converted to some other form of value. And in the end, the "HYIP" always goes bust. That seems to be exactly what high-interest "in-game banks" are doing.
The other problem is that the currency trading market in Second Life only trades about $40,000 per day. So if you try to sell $10,000 worth of SLL, the market moves too much. There's insufficient liquidity for trading.
Although the power is very seldom used, the House of Representatives can impeach cabinet officials.
Oath of office for the Attorney General:
"I (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and
defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to
the same; that I take this obligation freely without any mental
reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully
discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
What's striking is that Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is funding this. If they're funding it, it's not totally bogus; they will have done a due diligence and had some competent people look over the technology. There may turn out to be some reason it's not feasible, but if it was physically impossible, they wouldn't have obtained money from that group.
Not all scanners have diamond coating. It's an option, at $80 or so. A checkout scanner glass gets much harder use than a cell phone, so Nokia can use much thinner layers of diamond.
Yes, check out eBay prices. The 20GB units are now selling below retail.
Remember, price is not what the seller is asking. The price is what a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. When it won't sell, the asking price isn't a real price. eBay makes this so obvious, but it's also true in retail; if there's a huge stack of unsold stuff, the price is going to drop.
Diamonex, of Allentown, PA, has been doing these diamond-like coatings for years. It's not a new technology, and Nokia isn't claiming it as such. The most common application is the glass cover on supermarket POS scanners. Diamonex offers a lifetime warranty on their scanner glass; it doesn't scratch even after a few million canned goods have been dragged across it. It's probably in a supermarket near you.
Diamond-like coatings haven't typically been used in consumer products because they were too expensive. The Nokia approach, a very thin coating on plastic, is probably the first consumer application.
Read the actual study. This doesn't look that promising.
First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being
efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must
be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."
Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.
Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.
Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends... another study.
Wales' behavior may be an issue for Wikipedia. If the same person is involved with a profit-making venture and a nonprofit in the same area, the tax status of the nonprofit becomes questionable. When a US nonprofit files their tax return, they have to list any officers or directors involved with profit-making ventures in the same field.
The IRS is concerned because if you have a nonprofit and a for-profit organization under the same management, it's often possible to structure things so that the for-profit corporation shows a phony tax loss.
This could work out for the music industry, partly because it cuts out the take that Apple and Microsoft get now. If music files are plain MP3 files, anyone can make an player, and players will cost $29.95. No more iTunes store. No more lock-in. No more 50% profit margin for Apple.
This is the RIAA's revenge against Apple. In a year, the iPod could be irrelevant.
That paper has been out for a while. I cited it a few weeks ago.
Key points:
The response rate on large scale stock spams, in terms of actual stock transactions, is around 18 in 1,000,000.
This isn't a big-money operation. The biggest spam they studied resulted in around $36,000 in transactions. The spammer made maybe 5% of that, and other investors lost about 5% of that.
With those numbers, it's going to turn out that this is some kid in his parent's basement. It's not a market manipulation problem. It's the buildings full of servers that have to be installed to process all the spam that cost.
A big problem with most spam filters, especially the open source ones, is that they're single user.
They're trying to work out from the content what's spam. Systems like gmail (and Spamcop before IronPort bought it) look at spam addressed to a large number of addresses. When roughly similar material starts showing up at a few hundred different addresses, the probability that it's spam is very high.
Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.
Yes. The key point is that there aren't that many spammers left. The number of different spams, and especially the number of different stock spams, is quite small.
What's needed is to push on the SEC to find out who's behind the stock spams. They can do it. The number of people buying those penny stocks before the spam started is tiny, and following the money will eventually lead to the spammer. Yes, they may be working through intermediaries, but that's what FinCen and the money-laundering people trace all the time.
For the SEC, this is a low priority. They have scams in the billion dollar range, like Enron, WorldCom, etc. to deal with. The typical stock spam makes the spammer a few thousand dollars.
The problem is the collateral damage from the spams, not the investment fraud.
It's Roland the Plogger, trolling for his blog again. For a while, Slashdot was careful about not letting him get a link to drive traffic to his blog, but somebody slipped up.
If you use OpenOffice 2 Writer and nothing else, you're fine. But interchange with.doc files still doesn't work all that well. Something readable usually makes it through the conversion, but it won't look quite right.
Impress and OpenOffice Draw are OK, but, realistically, PowerPoint and Visio are better. PowerPoint has all those provided templates and graphical items which make it possible for suits to make up elaborate-looking presentations without much effort. With Impress, you start with a blank page and a few basic layouts. This is fine if you have the graphic design skills to start with a blank page, but that scares most people.
The help system for OpenOffice is still terrible. The typical help page describes how to do something, but doesn't tell you under what menu item or button to find the indicated command. The help system is a manual chopped up into bits, not a coherent help system.
OpenOffice's little star popup thing, their answer to Clippy, is just as annoying as Microsoft's, but dumber about figuring out what you're doing.
It's classic open source. The essential stuff works, and everything else is kind of half done. It's far better than OpenOffice 1.0, but it still has a ways to go.
Don't get it from archive.org. The Internet Archive isn't really set up to have a huge number of quick retrievals of the same tiny item. There's no front-end cache farm, and response will be slow. (This was a problem after they started archiving Greatful Dead fan recordings. The Deadheads, many of whom did too many drugs in the 1960s, would stream the same audio, over and over and over. The music archive had to be moved to a completely different system.)
Try to get this hosted by "w3c.org", which hosts other DTDs and seems to do a good job.
Computing was traditionally taught bottom up. At one time, the first step was to learn binary arithmetic, then AND and OR gates, and maybe on to the half and full adder. Then came the concept of the CPU, memory, program counter, and instruction execution. People tend not to start that low any more; Java is now considered the bottom level, unless you're going into hardware architecture. But one starts out with "Hello, World" in Java and goes up from there.
There's another approach. Start out with a web page. Teach HTML. Then the mechanics of building a web site. Go on to how databases and back-end processing are used. Teach some scripting language. Then go down a level and look at web servers and browser clients - what are they actually doing. Below that is the level of hard-coded languages, resource management, and talking directly to the operating system. Then down to how an operating system and compiler really work.
And finally, what a CPU does and how simpler ones actually do it.
The idea is to turn off fewer people in the early stages.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine. It's a hard problem. There were some spectacular failures in the early days of game physics, the most notable being Trespasser, the licensed Jurassic Park game. That was the first attempt at a major physics-based game, and it was a disaster. The Trespasser post-mortem (Gamasutra login required) describes what went wrong and who blew it. Dreamworks lost a lot of money on that debacle.
Originally, I was using Working Model, from Knowledge Revolution. On hard problems it was painfully slow, and that was a 2D system. The problem just wasn't well understood in 1994. Then from 1995-1997 I wrote Falling Bodies, which was almost real-time for single humanoid characters at 200 MIPS. Since then, there's been steady progress.
The algorithms in wide use today aren't really that good, though; accuracy has been sacrificed for speed. That's why most ragdolls don't move quite right. The computational load difference between "looks sort of OK" and "is within the noise threshold of being physically correct" is maybe 10x.
NaturalMotion is a step in that direction, but not a very big step.
That's a somewhat brute-force learning system, and those peak low.
You need a little more abstraction than that. But it's progress.
They're about the third company to try that. Other companies are MotionFactory (defunct, very planning-oriented) and Boston Dynamics (doing OK, mostly selling to DoD).
It's a hard problem, but more CPU resources help. I spent some time on it around 1994, at 20 MIPS, and it took hours to simulate a few seconds. It was just too early. Today, though, the hardware is here.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen those posters. Long, detailed small-type discussions of code coverage analysis mounted above urinals. Last week's poster: Google measures code coverage on a per-statement basis. Really.
Visiting Google HQ bothers me a bit. I'm the guy who did Downside, tracking failing dot-coms, and I see too many similarities between Google today and some of the more exuberant dot-coms. Google's business is basically AdWords and a search engine; on the side, they also operate a bunch of unprofitable dot-coms. YouTube, Gmail, and the web apps aren't profitable. If anything happens to force AdWords prices down, like an advertising price war with Microsoft or trouble with the pay-per-click model, Google may have problems.
Google has a lot of smart people, but somehow that's not translating into new, profitable product lines.
The install for this thng requires 25MB of disk space. For a little program that supposedly just launches apps from the keyboard. It has to be doing something they're not telling you.
They admit that it has remote update, so it has a built-in security vulnerability. Vista won't let it run for that reason.
What did they do, load it up with adware?
The company I work for contracts with advertisers to send out bulk mailings to our opted-in users.
And did they opt in by specifically requesting your mail, or implicitly as part of some other transaction? If it's the latter, you're a spammer. Die.
If people really want your content, offer an RSS feed. If nobody subscribes to your feed, they didn't want your content.
Won't work. It just means the owners of zombie PCs get big bills.
Today's volume on LindX is L$38,744,689. Todays average exchange rate is L$269.0276 / US$1.00, or US$144,030. So there's some hope of moving US$10,000. But it's going to affect the rate some.
That's fascinating.
The reason the author calls it a Ponzi scheme is that it strongly resembles the scam known as a High Yield Investment Program. These schemes make it very difficult to get money out, so that, while the customer's investment appears to be increasing, it can't actually be converted to some other form of value. And in the end, the "HYIP" always goes bust. That seems to be exactly what high-interest "in-game banks" are doing.
The other problem is that the currency trading market in Second Life only trades about $40,000 per day. So if you try to sell $10,000 worth of SLL, the market moves too much. There's insufficient liquidity for trading.
Although the power is very seldom used, the House of Representatives can impeach cabinet officials.
Oath of office for the Attorney General:
"I (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
First off, this was reported in Business Week back in 2005, with some of the same quotes.
What's striking is that Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is funding this. If they're funding it, it's not totally bogus; they will have done a due diligence and had some competent people look over the technology. There may turn out to be some reason it's not feasible, but if it was physically impossible, they wouldn't have obtained money from that group.
Not all scanners have diamond coating. It's an option, at $80 or so. A checkout scanner glass gets much harder use than a cell phone, so Nokia can use much thinner layers of diamond.
Yes, check out eBay prices. The 20GB units are now selling below retail.
Remember, price is not what the seller is asking. The price is what a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. When it won't sell, the asking price isn't a real price. eBay makes this so obvious, but it's also true in retail; if there's a huge stack of unsold stuff, the price is going to drop.
Diamonex, of Allentown, PA, has been doing these diamond-like coatings for years. It's not a new technology, and Nokia isn't claiming it as such. The most common application is the glass cover on supermarket POS scanners. Diamonex offers a lifetime warranty on their scanner glass; it doesn't scratch even after a few million canned goods have been dragged across it. It's probably in a supermarket near you.
Diamond-like coatings haven't typically been used in consumer products because they were too expensive. The Nokia approach, a very thin coating on plastic, is probably the first consumer application.
Read the actual study. This doesn't look that promising.
First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."
Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.
Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.
Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends ... another study.
Wales' behavior may be an issue for Wikipedia. If the same person is involved with a profit-making venture and a nonprofit in the same area, the tax status of the nonprofit becomes questionable. When a US nonprofit files their tax return, they have to list any officers or directors involved with profit-making ventures in the same field.
The IRS is concerned because if you have a nonprofit and a for-profit organization under the same management, it's often possible to structure things so that the for-profit corporation shows a phony tax loss.
This could work out for the music industry, partly because it cuts out the take that Apple and Microsoft get now. If music files are plain MP3 files, anyone can make an player, and players will cost $29.95. No more iTunes store. No more lock-in. No more 50% profit margin for Apple.
This is the RIAA's revenge against Apple. In a year, the iPod could be irrelevant.
That paper has been out for a while. I cited it a few weeks ago.
Key points:
With those numbers, it's going to turn out that this is some kid in his parent's basement. It's not a market manipulation problem. It's the buildings full of servers that have to be installed to process all the spam that cost.
A big problem with most spam filters, especially the open source ones, is that they're single user. They're trying to work out from the content what's spam. Systems like gmail (and Spamcop before IronPort bought it) look at spam addressed to a large number of addresses. When roughly similar material starts showing up at a few hundred different addresses, the probability that it's spam is very high.
Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.
Yes. The key point is that there aren't that many spammers left. The number of different spams, and especially the number of different stock spams, is quite small.
What's needed is to push on the SEC to find out who's behind the stock spams. They can do it. The number of people buying those penny stocks before the spam started is tiny, and following the money will eventually lead to the spammer. Yes, they may be working through intermediaries, but that's what FinCen and the money-laundering people trace all the time.
For the SEC, this is a low priority. They have scams in the billion dollar range, like Enron, WorldCom, etc. to deal with. The typical stock spam makes the spammer a few thousand dollars. The problem is the collateral damage from the spams, not the investment fraud.
I think the business of encoding an image on a single photon is a confabulation by the author of the press release.
Yeah. This is just the two-slit experiment with a material with a slow propagation velocity in the optical path. It's not new physics.
It's Roland the Plogger, trolling for his blog again. For a while, Slashdot was careful about not letting him get a link to drive traffic to his blog, but somebody slipped up.
If you use OpenOffice 2 Writer and nothing else, you're fine. But interchange with .doc files still doesn't work all that well. Something readable usually makes it through the conversion, but it won't look quite right.
Impress and OpenOffice Draw are OK, but, realistically, PowerPoint and Visio are better. PowerPoint has all those provided templates and graphical items which make it possible for suits to make up elaborate-looking presentations without much effort. With Impress, you start with a blank page and a few basic layouts. This is fine if you have the graphic design skills to start with a blank page, but that scares most people.
The help system for OpenOffice is still terrible. The typical help page describes how to do something, but doesn't tell you under what menu item or button to find the indicated command. The help system is a manual chopped up into bits, not a coherent help system.
OpenOffice's little star popup thing, their answer to Clippy, is just as annoying as Microsoft's, but dumber about figuring out what you're doing.
It's classic open source. The essential stuff works, and everything else is kind of half done. It's far better than OpenOffice 1.0, but it still has a ways to go.
Don't get it from archive.org. The Internet Archive isn't really set up to have a huge number of quick retrievals of the same tiny item. There's no front-end cache farm, and response will be slow. (This was a problem after they started archiving Greatful Dead fan recordings. The Deadheads, many of whom did too many drugs in the 1960s, would stream the same audio, over and over and over. The music archive had to be moved to a completely different system.)
Try to get this hosted by "w3c.org", which hosts other DTDs and seems to do a good job.
Computing was traditionally taught bottom up. At one time, the first step was to learn binary arithmetic, then AND and OR gates, and maybe on to the half and full adder. Then came the concept of the CPU, memory, program counter, and instruction execution. People tend not to start that low any more; Java is now considered the bottom level, unless you're going into hardware architecture. But one starts out with "Hello, World" in Java and goes up from there.
There's another approach. Start out with a web page. Teach HTML. Then the mechanics of building a web site. Go on to how databases and back-end processing are used. Teach some scripting language. Then go down a level and look at web servers and browser clients - what are they actually doing. Below that is the level of hard-coded languages, resource management, and talking directly to the operating system. Then down to how an operating system and compiler really work. And finally, what a CPU does and how simpler ones actually do it.
The idea is to turn off fewer people in the early stages.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine. It's a hard problem. There were some spectacular failures in the early days of game physics, the most notable being Trespasser, the licensed Jurassic Park game. That was the first attempt at a major physics-based game, and it was a disaster. The Trespasser post-mortem (Gamasutra login required) describes what went wrong and who blew it. Dreamworks lost a lot of money on that debacle.
Originally, I was using Working Model, from Knowledge Revolution. On hard problems it was painfully slow, and that was a 2D system. The problem just wasn't well understood in 1994. Then from 1995-1997 I wrote Falling Bodies, which was almost real-time for single humanoid characters at 200 MIPS. Since then, there's been steady progress.
The algorithms in wide use today aren't really that good, though; accuracy has been sacrificed for speed. That's why most ragdolls don't move quite right. The computational load difference between "looks sort of OK" and "is within the noise threshold of being physically correct" is maybe 10x.
NaturalMotion is a step in that direction, but not a very big step. That's a somewhat brute-force learning system, and those peak low. You need a little more abstraction than that. But it's progress.
They're about the third company to try that. Other companies are MotionFactory (defunct, very planning-oriented) and Boston Dynamics (doing OK, mostly selling to DoD).
It's a hard problem, but more CPU resources help. I spent some time on it around 1994, at 20 MIPS, and it took hours to simulate a few seconds. It was just too early. Today, though, the hardware is here.