How many people bought FOO.OB in the weeks before the spam? Those things can be traced. It might require applying pressure to a number of intermediaries to follow the money, but that's not impossible; it's just hard work.
One of the problems with law enforcement is that they generally don't have big travel budgets. It's unusual for cop types to just get on a plane and go someplace - they need too much authorization. What's needed is an anti-spam consortium funded by big mail recipients like AOL and Google, headed by some good ex-FBI agent, employing good investigators in the main spam countries (former KGB people are easily available), and with a big travel budget. And a big budget for paying off informants.
The essay is amusing. Not for its content, but for its format. It starts out with a revision history of all things. Only a dweeb would put that at the beginning of an essay intended for public consumption.
Then there's the focus on "64 bit". Microsoft and Apple both had 64-bit operating systems, then backed off. (It was surprising that when Apple went from PowerPC to x86, they went to 32-bit x86, even though 64 bit parts were already out. Which meant Apple users would face an unnecessary 32 to 64 bit transition on x86, and Apple would have to deal with annoying dual-mode issues.)
What does this essay say Linux needs? "Drivers for all existing hardware". "People who buy a new desktop want to plug in their old PCI cards..." Earth to Linux fanatics: 80% of all PCs are never opened in the field during their entire working life. What's important is drivers for what's shipping right now from major hardware vendors.
"Luckily, Windows more or less stopped being a moving target recently." Haven't looked at what Microsoft wants developers to do for Vista apps, have you? There's a big push by Microsoft to get developers using Microsoft-only technologies embedded in Vista, ones you can't run under Wine because they require non-redistributable DLLS.
"To attract enough non-technical end users to make the hardware vendors care about us, we need Linux to come preinstalled on PCs in a configuration that just works." Finally, the right answer. But that's a political and legal problem. Vendors don't offer Linux preloads because Microsoft penalizes them if they do, and Ashcroft's Justice Department rolled over on keeping Microsoft from doing that.
This essay is aimed at making Linux fanatics happy. What it should be aimed at is making low end desktops for office use cheaper. Push on Leonovo to offer something comparable to Red Flag Linux (which they preload for Chinese consumption) for export. Push on WalMart to sell it. The standard low-end business desktop should become Linux. Your call center people don't need Windows.
This hits Microsoft where it hurts - price pressure. Microsoft wants to charge more for Vista than for XP, and that could be derailed.
What we need is more effective law enforcement. There aren't that many spammers any more. Look how few different spams show up. The top three or four spams represent most of the volume. We need a law enforcement effort aimed at finding the top ten spammers and putting them in jail.
The Espresso is supposed to be a miniature, one-off print shop all by itself.
That's what it's supposed to be, but it's not miniature enough. It's almost as big as the IBIS, which has 100x the speed. At the other end of the scale, there are many semi-automatic desktop hand binders that require some operator work but can bind about a book a minute.
This new device combines the size, cost and complexity of the big machines with the low throughput of a desktop binder. And all you get out is a glue-bound paperback book.
If they can't make it small and cheap, they should go for a better product. Build a machine that makes quality saddle-stitched hardcover books on demand. Now your product commands 3x the retail price, but costs maybe 1.5x to make.
It's surprising that the White House would do something this dumb. Karl Rove is usually brighter than that.
This just about guarantees that Congress will look into the matter. Flynt Leverett will probably be testifying before Congress. With TV coverage of exactly what the Bush Administration tried to cover up.
I'm beginning to get the feeling we may be headed for an impeachment. One with bipartisan support. One more Katrina-sized mistake out of the White House and Bush is toast.
Watched the video. The binder is huge, slow, and has way too many moving parts. Far too much paper handling. Looks like a prototype, too.
Worse, the price/performance is terrible. This $50,000 mechanical nightmare can only bind about 60 books per hour. Compare this IBIS automatic binder, which can produce 6000 books per hour; 12000 if you get some extra options.
A more fundamental question: Perfect bound books are made by doing a binding job that isn't perfect, then cutting off the edges to make the block of paper uniform. Maybe it would be easier to develop a better way of aligning the paper and using paper that's dimensionally uniform.
Well, first, the "iPhone" name belongs to Linksys, and they already have one out.
The second problem is that the handset industry is a slave to the carriers, at least in the US. Apple would have to do some major sucking up to Sprint, Verizon, etc. Worse, from Apple's perspective, is that handset margins are lousy. The carriers make all the money.
There's a classic comment that A people hire A people, but B people hire C people.
Bush has not exactly been known for great job appointments. If you actually follow his appointments, it's embarrassing, even if you're a Republican. They're loyal, but often not very good. (It's not just that lightweight at FEMA, "Mr. Torture" at Justice, and the economic advisers from Enron; there's a long, painful list of bad high level hires.)
Once you get the institutional idea that each level hires dumber people below them, a few steps down the food chain, people like this turkey are getting jobs.
As the series is sometimes referred to by less successful working writers.
But at least Rowling writes her own books. Tom Clancy seems to have given up writing in favor of licensing his name. Latest "Splinter Cell" book: "Tom Clancy" in big letters at top of front cover. "Written by David Michaels" in small type in grey letters on black background at bottom.
This month's incoming spam is incredibly uniform. A very small number of spammers are generating most of the volume.
There's the stock pump and dump guy with the noisy backgrounds. There's the text only stock spammer. There's the pill guy, with the same ad in different formats. Those three are probably generating half the spam on the Internet right now.
What we need is for some of the big mail operators, like Google and AOL, to put a million dollars or so into investigating each one of those annoyances. They may have to hire ex-FBI and ex-SAS people and fly them all over the world, and work the diplomatic circuit when some country needs to be leaned on to get cooperation. But it would be cheaper than adding whole buildings full of servers just to handle the spam.
There's been some complaining here about eBay feedback ratings. What's good?
eBay provides a "feedback score" and a "positive feedback percentage". How would one translate that into, say, "Good", "Medium", and "Bad"?
FireWire almost has peripheral sharing right, but not quite.
Firewire has a built in allocation scheme for bandwidth, and a scheme to decide who runs the network (yes, there is a node in charge), but it doesn't have an allocation or locking system to decide which hosts are supposed to be talking to which devices. Some per-device hack may be developed to fix that, but if you create a FireWire net with two hosts and two slave devices, there's currently no system to keep both hosts from talking to the same slave device.
FireWire, incidentally, is really a local area network down at the packet level. Calling it a "bus" is marketing-speak. There are packets with source and destination, acknowledges, retransmits, multicast modes, and roughly the same machinery as Ethernet.
Yes, there's support for loads and stores into remote addresses in the protocol, but in practice, that means some host generates "store xxx into device register yyy", and out in the peripheral, some embedded CPU executes a switch statement and reaches the "turn camera on" code. The load/store mode lets you send only 32 bits per packet, so major data transfers aren't done that way. It would have been simpler if the thing just had a command/response protocol, like SCSI, and in fact, there's SCSI over FireWire.
Javascript really isn't that bad as a language. It's fairly close to Python in capabilities. With a little bit of work, Javascript could grow up to be Python. It wouldn't be a bad thing if the client and the server spoke the same language.
Flash and Firefox now have just-in-time compilers for Javascript. Open source, even. Actual machine code gets generated. So performance isn't that bad any more.
Javascript's object model, which is borrowed from Self, is rather clunky. On the other hand, variable declaration and scope is better than in Python. Javascript could use Python-like tuples. But it's close enough that, in a future rev, it could catch up with Python.
Before CSS, we had formatting with nested tables. After CSS, we had formatting with nested DIVs. Big deal. Plus absolute positioning, the big mistake. And layers, which are 10% useful and 90% annoying ads.
Of course, now we have more "abstraction". Yeah, we have a macro system. Big deal.
The real effect of CSS was to make web layout more complicated, so as to keep a role for programmers in web design. Otherwise, the artists would be in full control by now.
This is the second rotating tower in Dubai. The first one has a 5 story stack of rotating penthouses, which rotate independently. At the top is a single "villa", which also rotates. It also has a car lift and three parking spaces.
Dubai is having an insane skyscraper boom. 205 high rise buildings completed, 333 under construction. (Los Angeles: 465 completed, 11 under construction.) Not because of space constraints. There's plenty of open desert nearby. It's ego, enthusiasm, and money.
Commercial pilot training is changing drastically. Traditionally, pilots had to have considerable flying experience before moving into the commercial world. Most airline pilots used to be ex-military, and airlines wouldn't even consider training anyone with less than a thousand hours of flight time.
Now there's "ab initio training" - no previous flight experience required. This is still rare in the United States, which has a big pool of private and military pilots, but outside the US, it's becoming more common. Even Lufthansa is doing it.
Then there's ab initio first officer training. This trains co-pilots. Since, in larger aircraft, the first officer job involves more talking to the aircraft computers and not much stick and rudder work, there's a trend to
"glass cockpit all the way" flight training. Traditional flight training starts out with aircraft equipped with minimal instruments, and the new pilot is taught to get an intutive, "seat of the pants" sense of flight control. That's changing; today, many of the small trainers have full glass cockpits. Some people think this is bad. Others think it inevitable.
Modern autopilots can manage most of the flight today, including landing. It's common to fly the autopilot, commanding altitudes and headings, rather than the airplane. Most large aircraft landings are still manual, but in low visibility conditions, only the autopilot can land the plane.
The day may be coming when, if you're off autopilot on a commercial flight, you declare an emergency.
The Bush administration's secrecy mania is about to run into Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). He's the ranking minority member of the House Government Reform Committee. On January 20th, he will become chairman. And he will then have subpoena power over the Executive Branch.
This is the congressman who published "Bush Administration's 237 Misleading Statements on Iraq". He is totally fed up with the lying and secrecy. Expect to see many officials of the Bush administration being questioned by Waxman's commiteee on TV. Under penalty of perjury.
Remember when all the cigarette company CEOs had to testify under oath about what they knew and when they knew it about addiction and hazards? That was Waxman.
And climate is on his agenda. He's very interested in things like the Clean Air Act; he represents Los Angeles.
"test equipment for electronic systems from low voltage DC to super high voltage AC."
Test for what? Normal operation? Electric shock hazards? RF emission? Noise sensitivity?
The requirements for each are totally different.
"Super High Voltage" in the power transmission industry means upwards of 300,000 volts. That's for long-haul power lines. Three Gorges Dam power is going out at 750,000 volts. Do you really need those voltage levels? You don't work with voltages like that on a lab bench.
The requirements seem reasonable enough. Under the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, the FAA isn't allowed to regulate early stage commercial space travel that heavily. It's accepted that this is a high risk activity, and everybody involved has to be so notified and sign an acceptance of that.
The requirements are all rather low. No physical exam is required for passengers, although one is recommended. Pilots and crew just have to pass a class 2 physical exam, not even the class 1 physical required of airline pilots or the even tougher physicals for military pilots. The pilot has to have just a commercial instrument rating and training on the specific vehicle. An ATR, let alone supersonic flight experience, is not required.
There was much discussion over that one. If the spacecraft is a ballistic capsule launched on a rocket and landed by parachute, pilot qualifications don't matter much. If it's an upper stage that reenters the atmosphere on wings, the pilot has to be really good. (Chuck Yeager had his worst accident doing that and had to eject.)
This is pathetic. The OS vendor is so inept that they can't keep hostile code from changing kernel data space, and their answer to this is to randomly move kernel code around? This will make many kernel bugs nonrepeatable, and improve Microsoft's defect deniability. That's its main advantage to Microsoft.
Meanwhile, hostile code can just take over the interrupt locations, which can't move. Attacks will have to do more of the operating systems's work, like that attack which installs a virtual machine under the operating system. There are other approaches, such as simply taking over the whole machine and running something else, like a mini-OS equipped with a spam engine. Eventually someone may notice and power cycle the machine, but night attacks could get whole zombie farms going. While the attacker has control of the machine, they can make changes to the disk, too, so that after the reboot some of their stuff remains for next time. There's also a potential attack on the network controller which could leave the machine wide open for future takeover.
Note the effect. This doesn't make attacks harder. It makes attacks which leave Windows running harder.
Earth to Microsoft: if an attack can get into kernel mode, it's succeeded.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people bought FOO.OB in the weeks before the spam? Those things can be traced. It might require applying pressure to a number of intermediaries to follow the money, but that's not impossible; it's just hard work.
One of the problems with law enforcement is that they generally don't have big travel budgets. It's unusual for cop types to just get on a plane and go someplace - they need too much authorization. What's needed is an anti-spam consortium funded by big mail recipients like AOL and Google, headed by some good ex-FBI agent, employing good investigators in the main spam countries (former KGB people are easily available), and with a big travel budget. And a big budget for paying off informants.
The essay is amusing. Not for its content, but for its format. It starts out with a revision history of all things. Only a dweeb would put that at the beginning of an essay intended for public consumption.
Then there's the focus on "64 bit". Microsoft and Apple both had 64-bit operating systems, then backed off. (It was surprising that when Apple went from PowerPC to x86, they went to 32-bit x86, even though 64 bit parts were already out. Which meant Apple users would face an unnecessary 32 to 64 bit transition on x86, and Apple would have to deal with annoying dual-mode issues.)
What does this essay say Linux needs? "Drivers for all existing hardware". "People who buy a new desktop want to plug in their old PCI cards..." Earth to Linux fanatics: 80% of all PCs are never opened in the field during their entire working life. What's important is drivers for what's shipping right now from major hardware vendors.
"Luckily, Windows more or less stopped being a moving target recently." Haven't looked at what Microsoft wants developers to do for Vista apps, have you? There's a big push by Microsoft to get developers using Microsoft-only technologies embedded in Vista, ones you can't run under Wine because they require non-redistributable DLLS.
"To attract enough non-technical end users to make the hardware vendors care about us, we need Linux to come preinstalled on PCs in a configuration that just works." Finally, the right answer. But that's a political and legal problem. Vendors don't offer Linux preloads because Microsoft penalizes them if they do, and Ashcroft's Justice Department rolled over on keeping Microsoft from doing that.
This essay is aimed at making Linux fanatics happy. What it should be aimed at is making low end desktops for office use cheaper. Push on Leonovo to offer something comparable to Red Flag Linux (which they preload for Chinese consumption) for export. Push on WalMart to sell it. The standard low-end business desktop should become Linux. Your call center people don't need Windows.
This hits Microsoft where it hurts - price pressure. Microsoft wants to charge more for Vista than for XP, and that could be derailed.
What we need is more effective law enforcement. There aren't that many spammers any more. Look how few different spams show up. The top three or four spams represent most of the volume. We need a law enforcement effort aimed at finding the top ten spammers and putting them in jail.
The Espresso is supposed to be a miniature, one-off print shop all by itself.
That's what it's supposed to be, but it's not miniature enough. It's almost as big as the IBIS, which has 100x the speed. At the other end of the scale, there are many semi-automatic desktop hand binders that require some operator work but can bind about a book a minute. This new device combines the size, cost and complexity of the big machines with the low throughput of a desktop binder. And all you get out is a glue-bound paperback book.
If they can't make it small and cheap, they should go for a better product. Build a machine that makes quality saddle-stitched hardcover books on demand. Now your product commands 3x the retail price, but costs maybe 1.5x to make.
It's surprising that the White House would do something this dumb. Karl Rove is usually brighter than that.
This just about guarantees that Congress will look into the matter. Flynt Leverett will probably be testifying before Congress. With TV coverage of exactly what the Bush Administration tried to cover up.
I'm beginning to get the feeling we may be headed for an impeachment. One with bipartisan support. One more Katrina-sized mistake out of the White House and Bush is toast.
Watched the video. The binder is huge, slow, and has way too many moving parts. Far too much paper handling. Looks like a prototype, too.
Worse, the price/performance is terrible. This $50,000 mechanical nightmare can only bind about 60 books per hour. Compare this IBIS automatic binder, which can produce 6000 books per hour; 12000 if you get some extra options.
A more fundamental question: Perfect bound books are made by doing a binding job that isn't perfect, then cutting off the edges to make the block of paper uniform. Maybe it would be easier to develop a better way of aligning the paper and using paper that's dimensionally uniform.
Well, first, the "iPhone" name belongs to Linksys, and they already have one out.
The second problem is that the handset industry is a slave to the carriers, at least in the US. Apple would have to do some major sucking up to Sprint, Verizon, etc. Worse, from Apple's perspective, is that handset margins are lousy. The carriers make all the money.
The current winner is the PS2.
There's a classic comment that A people hire A people, but B people hire C people. Bush has not exactly been known for great job appointments. If you actually follow his appointments, it's embarrassing, even if you're a Republican. They're loyal, but often not very good. (It's not just that lightweight at FEMA, "Mr. Torture" at Justice, and the economic advisers from Enron; there's a long, painful list of bad high level hires.)
Once you get the institutional idea that each level hires dumber people below them, a few steps down the food chain, people like this turkey are getting jobs.
As the series is sometimes referred to by less successful working writers.
But at least Rowling writes her own books. Tom Clancy seems to have given up writing in favor of licensing his name. Latest "Splinter Cell" book: "Tom Clancy" in big letters at top of front cover. "Written by David Michaels" in small type in grey letters on black background at bottom.
This month's incoming spam is incredibly uniform. A very small number of spammers are generating most of the volume. There's the stock pump and dump guy with the noisy backgrounds. There's the text only stock spammer. There's the pill guy, with the same ad in different formats. Those three are probably generating half the spam on the Internet right now.
What we need is for some of the big mail operators, like Google and AOL, to put a million dollars or so into investigating each one of those annoyances. They may have to hire ex-FBI and ex-SAS people and fly them all over the world, and work the diplomatic circuit when some country needs to be leaned on to get cooperation. But it would be cheaper than adding whole buildings full of servers just to handle the spam.
There's been some complaining here about eBay feedback ratings. What's good? eBay provides a "feedback score" and a "positive feedback percentage". How would one translate that into, say, "Good", "Medium", and "Bad"?
FireWire almost has peripheral sharing right, but not quite.
Firewire has a built in allocation scheme for bandwidth, and a scheme to decide who runs the network (yes, there is a node in charge), but it doesn't have an allocation or locking system to decide which hosts are supposed to be talking to which devices. Some per-device hack may be developed to fix that, but if you create a FireWire net with two hosts and two slave devices, there's currently no system to keep both hosts from talking to the same slave device.
FireWire, incidentally, is really a local area network down at the packet level. Calling it a "bus" is marketing-speak. There are packets with source and destination, acknowledges, retransmits, multicast modes, and roughly the same machinery as Ethernet. Yes, there's support for loads and stores into remote addresses in the protocol, but in practice, that means some host generates "store xxx into device register yyy", and out in the peripheral, some embedded CPU executes a switch statement and reaches the "turn camera on" code. The load/store mode lets you send only 32 bits per packet, so major data transfers aren't done that way. It would have been simpler if the thing just had a command/response protocol, like SCSI, and in fact, there's SCSI over FireWire.
Javascript really isn't that bad as a language. It's fairly close to Python in capabilities. With a little bit of work, Javascript could grow up to be Python. It wouldn't be a bad thing if the client and the server spoke the same language. Flash and Firefox now have just-in-time compilers for Javascript. Open source, even. Actual machine code gets generated. So performance isn't that bad any more. Javascript's object model, which is borrowed from Self, is rather clunky. On the other hand, variable declaration and scope is better than in Python. Javascript could use Python-like tuples. But it's close enough that, in a future rev, it could catch up with Python.
That's what Dreamweaver is for.
Slashdot has many users who like to hack on HTML/XML, but realistically, that job has been automated.
Before CSS, we had formatting with nested tables. After CSS, we had formatting with nested DIVs. Big deal. Plus absolute positioning, the big mistake. And layers, which are 10% useful and 90% annoying ads.
Of course, now we have more "abstraction". Yeah, we have a macro system. Big deal.
The real effect of CSS was to make web layout more complicated, so as to keep a role for programmers in web design. Otherwise, the artists would be in full control by now.
And now, every picture on Myspace will become part of your Permanent Record.
But at least dating sites will be able to filter out copies of pictures of famous people and porn stars.
This is the second rotating tower in Dubai. The first one has a 5 story stack of rotating penthouses, which rotate independently. At the top is a single "villa", which also rotates. It also has a car lift and three parking spaces.
Dubai is having an insane skyscraper boom. 205 high rise buildings completed, 333 under construction. (Los Angeles: 465 completed, 11 under construction.) Not because of space constraints. There's plenty of open desert nearby. It's ego, enthusiasm, and money.
Commercial pilot training is changing drastically. Traditionally, pilots had to have considerable flying experience before moving into the commercial world. Most airline pilots used to be ex-military, and airlines wouldn't even consider training anyone with less than a thousand hours of flight time.
Now there's "ab initio training" - no previous flight experience required. This is still rare in the United States, which has a big pool of private and military pilots, but outside the US, it's becoming more common. Even Lufthansa is doing it.
Then there's ab initio first officer training. This trains co-pilots. Since, in larger aircraft, the first officer job involves more talking to the aircraft computers and not much stick and rudder work, there's a trend to "glass cockpit all the way" flight training. Traditional flight training starts out with aircraft equipped with minimal instruments, and the new pilot is taught to get an intutive, "seat of the pants" sense of flight control. That's changing; today, many of the small trainers have full glass cockpits. Some people think this is bad. Others think it inevitable.
Modern autopilots can manage most of the flight today, including landing. It's common to fly the autopilot, commanding altitudes and headings, rather than the airplane. Most large aircraft landings are still manual, but in low visibility conditions, only the autopilot can land the plane. The day may be coming when, if you're off autopilot on a commercial flight, you declare an emergency.
Still, the worst corporate Xmas present ever has to be the year when Bank of America sent customers a cute little metal box containing -- an AOL disk.
They actually did that. I have one.
The diabetes-accessory industry is going to hate this.
This will destroy a $20 billion a year industry.
The Bush administration's secrecy mania is about to run into Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). He's the ranking minority member of the House Government Reform Committee. On January 20th, he will become chairman. And he will then have subpoena power over the Executive Branch.
This is the congressman who published "Bush Administration's 237 Misleading Statements on Iraq". He is totally fed up with the lying and secrecy. Expect to see many officials of the Bush administration being questioned by Waxman's commiteee on TV. Under penalty of perjury.
Remember when all the cigarette company CEOs had to testify under oath about what they knew and when they knew it about addiction and hazards? That was Waxman.
And climate is on his agenda. He's very interested in things like the Clean Air Act; he represents Los Angeles.
"test equipment for electronic systems from low voltage DC to super high voltage AC."
Test for what? Normal operation? Electric shock hazards? RF emission? Noise sensitivity? The requirements for each are totally different.
"Super High Voltage" in the power transmission industry means upwards of 300,000 volts. That's for long-haul power lines. Three Gorges Dam power is going out at 750,000 volts. Do you really need those voltage levels? You don't work with voltages like that on a lab bench.
The requirements seem reasonable enough. Under the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, the FAA isn't allowed to regulate early stage commercial space travel that heavily. It's accepted that this is a high risk activity, and everybody involved has to be so notified and sign an acceptance of that.
The requirements are all rather low. No physical exam is required for passengers, although one is recommended. Pilots and crew just have to pass a class 2 physical exam, not even the class 1 physical required of airline pilots or the even tougher physicals for military pilots. The pilot has to have just a commercial instrument rating and training on the specific vehicle. An ATR, let alone supersonic flight experience, is not required. There was much discussion over that one. If the spacecraft is a ballistic capsule launched on a rocket and landed by parachute, pilot qualifications don't matter much. If it's an upper stage that reenters the atmosphere on wings, the pilot has to be really good. (Chuck Yeager had his worst accident doing that and had to eject.)
This is pathetic. The OS vendor is so inept that they can't keep hostile code from changing kernel data space, and their answer to this is to randomly move kernel code around? This will make many kernel bugs nonrepeatable, and improve Microsoft's defect deniability. That's its main advantage to Microsoft.
Meanwhile, hostile code can just take over the interrupt locations, which can't move. Attacks will have to do more of the operating systems's work, like that attack which installs a virtual machine under the operating system. There are other approaches, such as simply taking over the whole machine and running something else, like a mini-OS equipped with a spam engine. Eventually someone may notice and power cycle the machine, but night attacks could get whole zombie farms going. While the attacker has control of the machine, they can make changes to the disk, too, so that after the reboot some of their stuff remains for next time. There's also a potential attack on the network controller which could leave the machine wide open for future takeover.
Note the effect. This doesn't make attacks harder. It makes attacks which leave Windows running harder.
Earth to Microsoft: if an attack can get into kernel mode, it's succeeded.