The whole "PatchGuard" concept shows how broken Microsoft's approach to an OS has become. The whole concept is to catch changes made by programs which already have full access to kernel space. By checking every five or ten minutes for a change, no less. That's inherently a futile exercise. It may break some current exploits, but it won't break new ones. Any program that has access to kernel space can take over the machine. It could load a whole new OS if it wanted to.
The whole concept of add-on programs having access to kernel memory is so insecure that it has to go. UNIX and Linux limit it to loadable drivers, and the serious microkernels like QNX and IBM's VM don't allow it at all. But the Microsoft world, mostly for historical reasons, has all sorts of crap running with access to kernel memory, from various "security programs" to game DRM components. All that crap should have been taken out in Vista. The fact that it wasn't indicates how minor a change at the kernel level Vista is over XP.
For only $109,000 you can buy a Marquis Jet Card, good for 25 hours of charter jet time. Up to 7 passengers. Aircraft available on 10 hours notice. When your card runs out, just recharge it.
NetJets has over 625 aircraft, so you don't have to wait.
No searches or inspections; you leave all that behind.
Who can forget the English Electric Leo-Marconi KDF9, the British stack machine from 1960. That, and the Burroughs 5000, were where it all began.
Stack machines are simple and straightforward to build, but are hard to accelerate or optimize. Classically, there's a bottleneck at the top of the stack; everything has to go through there.
With register machines, low-level concurrency is easier. There's been very little work on superscalar stack machines. This student paper from Berkeley is one of the few efforts.
It's nice that you can build a Forth machine with about 4000 gates, but who cares today? It would have made more sense in the vacuum tube era.
We need to criminalize nicotine. Nicotine is the gateway drug. Most druggies start with nicotine. And nicotine addiction is the hardest to cure - getting people off crack is 40% successful, and most heroin addicts "age out" and give it up in their 40s. But only 20% of nicotine addicts are cured, and most continue to smoke right up to the grave.
Technology may provide a way out. A vaccine against nicotine addiction is in development. Current thinking is to use this to get smokers off nicotine, but if the vaccine turns out to be safe enough (which is looking good) it could be used as a preventative measure, with inoculations in schools at age 10 or so.
Yes. It used to be illegal to name any Navy ship after a living person. Then, in the 1980s, we got the USS John Stennis, named after the then-current Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That was really tacky.
The embarassing thing does happen. Los Angeles once had a Richard Nixon Freeway. It was renamed in the 1970s.
Then there's the whole "naming rights" thing for stadiums. "Staples Arena". "3COM Park". (formerly Candlestick Park, now "Monster Park", which confuses everyone.) That's just silly.
You're right. We need 3D AI.
What you're talking about has been done, and development continues. Mostly in the game world. The classic paper is Craig Reynolds' "Boids", which introduced flocking behavior. That's simple to implement, and worth trying to get a feeling for the strengths and limitations of field-based behavior.
The Sims uses field-based behavior, and gets rather impressive results with it.
So there is progress. It's slow, but we're way ahead of where we were ten years ago. Language-based AI has been more or less stuck since the 1980s, but 3D AI is plugging along.
(Reading your "AI page", I note that what you think is needed is a "3D camera". Those exist, both as stereo devices and as time-of-flight devices. You can even make one from two webcams and the stereo software in OpenCV. But a depth map is just the first step.)
Does Apple actually make anything themselves, in a factory with Apple employees? Or is everything outsourced? Apple closed their Sacramento plant in 2004, which was the last US plant. The Cork, Ireland plant is still open, and may still be manufacturing something, but probably not one of the volume products. Singapore is the hub for controlling the outsourcing operation in Asia, but Apple doesn't actually manufacture there.
Getting past the blogodreck, the real website of Hyperactive Bob is scary.
"Managing Chaos (Humans Not Included)". This is a robot scheduling and control system from CMU, originally developed to manage groups of robots in factories. In this application, people are substituted for the robots to lower costs. Really. "The kitchen is quiet with Bob", because employees no longer need to talk. "80% reduction in training costs" for kitchen staff.
The system (which is physically a PC, some cameras, some touchscreens, and a link into the POS system) takes about two days to install. Then it watches everything for two weeks, while it learns the customer and staff patterns.
Spam as advertising is dead, killed by a combination of CAN-SPAM and spam filters. What remains is ordinary criminality.
CAN-SPAM killed spam as advertising, in a way that neither the Direct Marketing Association or the anti-spam groups expected. CAN-SPAM has criminal penalties for forged headers, but doesn't restrict "legitimate e-mail marketing", which is what the DMA wanted. But with valid headers, spam filters can immediately discard spam. The result is that "legitimate e-mail marketing" attempts go directly to the bit bucket today. Notice how rarely you see a spam from any legitimate company any more. (This assumes you have reasonable filtering.)
With the legitimate businesses gone, spam became a branch of crime. To be a spammer today, you have to commit felonies. Which means a risk of doing jail time. The famous "Buffalo Spammer" went to jail in 2004, and gets out in 2011. Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison; he's out on bail pending an appeal, but sooner or later he's going to do those nine years. There's a Registry of Known Spam Operators, and law enforcement reads that list. Most of the people on that list have had visits from law enforcement.
Spammers have tried moving offshore, but that's not working as well as it used to. Few countries want to be known as spam havens. Even in China, it's getting harder; spammers have had to move from the developed coast to more remote provinces, where Beijing has less presence. ("The mountains are high and the emperor is far away") Operating offshore draws the attention of the investigators who follow money-laundering, terrorism, and drug-dealing. There are people doing this, but the risks are high.
What's left is what you'd expect - wannabe crooks, as in any bad neighborhood. They're not very good at crime. They're not making much money. They're what cops call "regular customers". They're a problem, but not a major threat. Those are the ones sending out useless spam.
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center. New strategies for click fraud are probably being discussed right now.
Order Fritz or Junior from ChessBase. Play chess against the machine.
Unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life, you're going to lose. Chess programs are very strong now. "Deep Blue" is obsolete; now multiprocessor PCs are beating grandmasters. You can buy and run PC programs that have beaten Kasparov.
Now that chess programs do better than people, nobody really cares outside the chess world. One of the leading chess programmers made a comment that explains what's happened. Analyzing grandmaster games, he discovered that, about once in every ten moves on average, grandmasters choose a suboptimal move. Not a really bad move, but one where a better option existed. That's the base human error rate, and that's enough to give computers a fundamental edge at the higher levels.
Digi-Key has pushed up the level of service expected in the electronics parts industry. Before Digi-Key, you placed an order, waited days or weeks, and got back 60-80% of what you ordered, plus back order notices. Most of the electronics resellers didn't really stock everything in their catalogs; they'd order from suppliers on many items. Digi-Key really does stock everything they say they stock, and you can check before ordering how many they have on hand. Sometimes they're out, and they say so.
That in itself is unusual. You could figure out the contents of Digi-Key's warehouse from their web site. Most companies treat that as proprietary information, but they don't.
If anyone talks about the "long tail", ask them if they know how to integrate the area under the curve. The simplest number for evaluation purposes is the value for which half the area under the curve is before that point, and half is after. What's that number for movies? For books? For audio CDs? For iPod downloads?
Netflix says that 30% of rentals are from the top 50 films, so the halfway point is probably below 100.
This is a killer issue for companies that have huge hardware inventories. Consider Digi-Key. They have the broadest inventory of electronic parts in the industry, with over 70,000 parts. Which is a big win for them, because you can usually use them as your only supplier. So there's an Internet-based company that really does profit from the "long tail".
Digi-Key doesn't get much attention as an Internet company, but they're one of the most successful ones. They had online ordering early, and it works really well. Not just the web front end, which looks boring but has what users need, like the ability to
search by component parameters. They have a near-complete collection of online data sheets.
When a part you've ordered previously is about to be discontinued, you get an e-mail, so you can order a final supply before it goes away. And they have an incredibly effective order fulfillment operation. Orders entered before 7 PM (yes, PM) Central time ship the same day by FedEx. They actually do that, consistently. When you order from DigiKey, you get a confirmation e-mail when the order goes in, and another when it ships, with the FedEx tracking info. The shipping confirmation often comes in within fifteen minutes of placing the order. Now that's operating on Internet time. And that's for orders which might contain twenty different electronics parts in small quantities.
There are wierder online PR things. See the Megaphone Desktop Toolbar. This is a piece of software designed to pump up pro-Israel responses in online polls and blogs. The toolbar pops up "alerts" when some central site sends them out. Nothing new there. But when it tells the user about a poll, the options are to vote their way, automatically, or not to vote at all. Site-specific scripts do the voting for you. Cute.
It is supposedly distributed on behalf of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That's a new development - government sponsored adware. But that may be a fake endorsement. The "gyius.org" site itself has a "cloaked domain", and the "standwithus.org" site with the endorsement has phony domain registration info. There's no real contact info for either. There's an EULA with no real company name, and mention of a remote update capability. So this may be some clever scheme to get people to install adware/spyware.
Somebody in the security business or the press really should chase this down. There's been an article in The Globe and Mail, but it's not about the technology.
One of the alternatives considered for car audio before the compact disc was a system with rectangular card-like optical media, scanned linearly. The scanning was more complex
but the loading was simpler.
Time is running out for SCO. Check the scheduling order. We're past the stalling of pretrial discovery. We're past wondering if SCO has some surprise evidence. Discovery is over. Now things speed up. Expert reports are coming in now and end on September 22. On September 25, summary judgement motions start, and undoubtedly IBM will make some. Things can only get worse for SCO in the summary judgement phase, where some or all of SCO's case may be thrown out and IBM might win on some of their counterclaims. This whole thing could end in September.
This thing won't produce a reading on a standard sound level meter. There's a standard bandwidth weighting ("A-law") for sound level meters, based on data about hearing damage, and it cuts off at only 8KHz. That's the definition used in most noise ordnances.
The trouble with most of these tools is that they're aimed at local coding style issues, not global problems.
Typical global problems that are potentially machine-checkable before execution are:
Object re-entry Object A calls object B, which calls object A again, entering object A with the object not in its stable state. This is a constant problem with callback-oriented GUI systems. Microsoft research has addressed this in their "Spec#" effort, which is worth a look.
Unlocked access This is more of a C/C++ issue. C and C++ don't give any language-level help in organizing threaded programs, and the language doesn't know which locks protect which data. (In Java, locking is class-oriented, which helps some.) Tools for detecting shared access to data without locking are needed.
Data size trouble Mostly a C (not C++) issue. The size of an array isn't carried along with the array in C, which is the root cause of most buffer overflow problems. Probably the biggest single problem with C programs. (A good first step - put in an include file with lines like "#define strcat USE_STRNCAT_INSTEAD" to catch the usual suspects.)
Uninitalized pointers Some projects require that any pointer passed to a function must be checked for NULL. If you're sure it's non-null, use a reference. That's worth enforcing.
Those are the kinds of things you need tools for. What we're seeing are tools that check for the easy-to-check but less important stuff.
All these ad-supported services are chasing the same pool of advertising spending. In that sense, they're competitors of Google. Now AOL has gone advertising-supported, so they're going after the same revenue.
The result is probably going to be that online advertising rates go through the floor, like banner ads did. We'll also see some sites get desperate and try annoying ads, popups, popunders, interstitials, and adware. Total spending on advertising is not going to increase; it has to stay a fraction of total retail sales. Somebody has to lose.
Print newspapers are already getting killed by this. Craigslist is draining off their classified ad revenue, and now Google has a deal witih the Associated Press. As a result, most newspapers really have very little content today. Take a typical newspaper today and mark all the articles that were generated by the newspaper's own reporters, and did not start as a press release. You might find ten per day. Only a few papers still have big reporting staffs.
There are two things that need to move to the web to finally kill off newspapers - real estate ads and car ads. So far, that hasn't happened. People have tried; Cars.com was supposed to replace auto dealerships, but today it's just a lead generation service. Realtor.com tried to take over real estate, but hasn't made a big dent. Now that's where to work on "Web 2.0" ideas - those are huge markets with real money being done badly.
The serious show in the industry is now the Game Developer's Conference. While there are a few talks that fans might like, like "Half Weasel, Half Otter, All Trouble: a Postmortem of Daxter for the Sony PSP", those are rare.
Most of the content is more like "High Performance Physics Solver Design for Next Generation Consoles" or "Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping for Highly Detailed Surface Rendering".
It's not all about programming. There's theory of gameplay: "Tomorrow's Military Shooter: Challenges in Next-Gen Wargaming", and "Fun versus Offensive - Balancing the Cultural Edge of Content for Global Games". And business issues, like "How to Outsource Art Successfully", and "Bigger AND More Creative: Building a Better Developer Through Mergers and Acquisitions".
Over the last few years, GDC has grown, moved to bigger convention centers, added business and production sessions, and has become the place where work gets done and deals get made.
Losing E3 is no great loss.
Even if this works, it will be tough.
on
Halving Half Lives
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if this works, it will be tough to use. You'll have to cool something that emits heat down to near absolute zero. The energy required for that refrigeration job will be greater than the heat energy the radioactive material will emit over its remaining decay life.
Oh, that thing. Aura was a sad story. They developed the first really powerful direct drive linear actuators, things that looked like hydraulic cylinders but were entirely electrical. (U.S. Patent #5,099,158) Some were so powerful that they were used for active damping on metal bridges, to reduce vibration when heavy trucks rolled by. These things were shown at industrial automation shows.
But they didn't sell. Good idea, too expensive.
Aura tried making the Interactor, a big subwoofer, using their actuator technology. Nobody cared. Aura eventually went under, in an ugly mess involving some stock scam.
Go to Wall Street, make money, then do whatever you want.
Of the best people we had on our DARPA Grand Challenge team, one is runnning a hedge fund in Santa Fe, and one is working on derivatives for a Wall Street firm.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole "PatchGuard" concept shows how broken Microsoft's approach to an OS has become. The whole concept is to catch changes made by programs which already have full access to kernel space. By checking every five or ten minutes for a change, no less. That's inherently a futile exercise. It may break some current exploits, but it won't break new ones. Any program that has access to kernel space can take over the machine. It could load a whole new OS if it wanted to.
The whole concept of add-on programs having access to kernel memory is so insecure that it has to go. UNIX and Linux limit it to loadable drivers, and the serious microkernels like QNX and IBM's VM don't allow it at all. But the Microsoft world, mostly for historical reasons, has all sorts of crap running with access to kernel memory, from various "security programs" to game DRM components. All that crap should have been taken out in Vista. The fact that it wasn't indicates how minor a change at the kernel level Vista is over XP.
For only $109,000 you can buy a Marquis Jet Card, good for 25 hours of charter jet time. Up to 7 passengers. Aircraft available on 10 hours notice. When your card runs out, just recharge it. NetJets has over 625 aircraft, so you don't have to wait.
No searches or inspections; you leave all that behind.
Israel is trying that in Lebanon now. We'll have to see if it works. Probably not; it didn't work last time.
Who can forget the English Electric Leo-Marconi KDF9, the British stack machine from 1960. That, and the Burroughs 5000, were where it all began.
Stack machines are simple and straightforward to build, but are hard to accelerate or optimize. Classically, there's a bottleneck at the top of the stack; everything has to go through there. With register machines, low-level concurrency is easier. There's been very little work on superscalar stack machines. This student paper from Berkeley is one of the few efforts.
It's nice that you can build a Forth machine with about 4000 gates, but who cares today? It would have made more sense in the vacuum tube era.
We need to criminalize nicotine. Nicotine is the gateway drug. Most druggies start with nicotine. And nicotine addiction is the hardest to cure - getting people off crack is 40% successful, and most heroin addicts "age out" and give it up in their 40s. But only 20% of nicotine addicts are cured, and most continue to smoke right up to the grave.
Technology may provide a way out. A vaccine against nicotine addiction is in development. Current thinking is to use this to get smokers off nicotine, but if the vaccine turns out to be safe enough (which is looking good) it could be used as a preventative measure, with inoculations in schools at age 10 or so.
Yes. It used to be illegal to name any Navy ship after a living person. Then, in the 1980s, we got the USS John Stennis, named after the then-current Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That was really tacky.
The embarassing thing does happen. Los Angeles once had a Richard Nixon Freeway. It was renamed in the 1970s.
Then there's the whole "naming rights" thing for stadiums. "Staples Arena". "3COM Park". (formerly Candlestick Park, now "Monster Park", which confuses everyone.) That's just silly.
You're right. We need 3D AI. What you're talking about has been done, and development continues. Mostly in the game world. The classic paper is Craig Reynolds' "Boids", which introduced flocking behavior. That's simple to implement, and worth trying to get a feeling for the strengths and limitations of field-based behavior.
The Sims uses field-based behavior, and gets rather impressive results with it.
So there is progress. It's slow, but we're way ahead of where we were ten years ago. Language-based AI has been more or less stuck since the 1980s, but 3D AI is plugging along.
(Reading your "AI page", I note that what you think is needed is a "3D camera". Those exist, both as stereo devices and as time-of-flight devices. You can even make one from two webcams and the stereo software in OpenCV. But a depth map is just the first step.)
Does Apple actually make anything themselves, in a factory with Apple employees? Or is everything outsourced? Apple closed their Sacramento plant in 2004, which was the last US plant. The Cork, Ireland plant is still open, and may still be manufacturing something, but probably not one of the volume products. Singapore is the hub for controlling the outsourcing operation in Asia, but Apple doesn't actually manufacture there.
Getting past the blogodreck, the real website of Hyperactive Bob is scary. "Managing Chaos (Humans Not Included)". This is a robot scheduling and control system from CMU, originally developed to manage groups of robots in factories. In this application, people are substituted for the robots to lower costs. Really. "The kitchen is quiet with Bob", because employees no longer need to talk. "80% reduction in training costs" for kitchen staff.
The system (which is physically a PC, some cameras, some touchscreens, and a link into the POS system) takes about two days to install. Then it watches everything for two weeks, while it learns the customer and staff patterns.
Then it takes over.
People should work. Machines should think.
CAN-SPAM killed spam as advertising, in a way that neither the Direct Marketing Association or the anti-spam groups expected. CAN-SPAM has criminal penalties for forged headers, but doesn't restrict "legitimate e-mail marketing", which is what the DMA wanted. But with valid headers, spam filters can immediately discard spam. The result is that "legitimate e-mail marketing" attempts go directly to the bit bucket today. Notice how rarely you see a spam from any legitimate company any more. (This assumes you have reasonable filtering.)
With the legitimate businesses gone, spam became a branch of crime. To be a spammer today, you have to commit felonies. Which means a risk of doing jail time. The famous "Buffalo Spammer" went to jail in 2004, and gets out in 2011. Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison; he's out on bail pending an appeal, but sooner or later he's going to do those nine years. There's a Registry of Known Spam Operators, and law enforcement reads that list. Most of the people on that list have had visits from law enforcement.
Spammers have tried moving offshore, but that's not working as well as it used to. Few countries want to be known as spam havens. Even in China, it's getting harder; spammers have had to move from the developed coast to more remote provinces, where Beijing has less presence. ("The mountains are high and the emperor is far away") Operating offshore draws the attention of the investigators who follow money-laundering, terrorism, and drug-dealing. There are people doing this, but the risks are high.
What's left is what you'd expect - wannabe crooks, as in any bad neighborhood. They're not very good at crime. They're not making much money. They're what cops call "regular customers". They're a problem, but not a major threat. Those are the ones sending out useless spam.
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center. New strategies for click fraud are probably being discussed right now.
All that evil in one place...
Chess programs qualify as "highbrow games".
Order Fritz or Junior from ChessBase. Play chess against the machine. Unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life, you're going to lose. Chess programs are very strong now. "Deep Blue" is obsolete; now multiprocessor PCs are beating grandmasters. You can buy and run PC programs that have beaten Kasparov.
Now that chess programs do better than people, nobody really cares outside the chess world. One of the leading chess programmers made a comment that explains what's happened. Analyzing grandmaster games, he discovered that, about once in every ten moves on average, grandmasters choose a suboptimal move. Not a really bad move, but one where a better option existed. That's the base human error rate, and that's enough to give computers a fundamental edge at the higher levels.
(June)
(July)
(last entries)
Digi-Key has pushed up the level of service expected in the electronics parts industry. Before Digi-Key, you placed an order, waited days or weeks, and got back 60-80% of what you ordered, plus back order notices. Most of the electronics resellers didn't really stock everything in their catalogs; they'd order from suppliers on many items. Digi-Key really does stock everything they say they stock, and you can check before ordering how many they have on hand. Sometimes they're out, and they say so.
That in itself is unusual. You could figure out the contents of Digi-Key's warehouse from their web site. Most companies treat that as proprietary information, but they don't.
If anyone talks about the "long tail", ask them if they know how to integrate the area under the curve. The simplest number for evaluation purposes is the value for which half the area under the curve is before that point, and half is after. What's that number for movies? For books? For audio CDs? For iPod downloads?
Netflix says that 30% of rentals are from the top 50 films, so the halfway point is probably below 100.
This is a killer issue for companies that have huge hardware inventories. Consider Digi-Key. They have the broadest inventory of electronic parts in the industry, with over 70,000 parts. Which is a big win for them, because you can usually use them as your only supplier. So there's an Internet-based company that really does profit from the "long tail".
Digi-Key doesn't get much attention as an Internet company, but they're one of the most successful ones. They had online ordering early, and it works really well. Not just the web front end, which looks boring but has what users need, like the ability to search by component parameters. They have a near-complete collection of online data sheets. When a part you've ordered previously is about to be discontinued, you get an e-mail, so you can order a final supply before it goes away. And they have an incredibly effective order fulfillment operation. Orders entered before 7 PM (yes, PM) Central time ship the same day by FedEx. They actually do that, consistently. When you order from DigiKey, you get a confirmation e-mail when the order goes in, and another when it ships, with the FedEx tracking info. The shipping confirmation often comes in within fifteen minutes of placing the order. Now that's operating on Internet time. And that's for orders which might contain twenty different electronics parts in small quantities.
That's a real "long tail" company.
There are wierder online PR things. See the Megaphone Desktop Toolbar. This is a piece of software designed to pump up pro-Israel responses in online polls and blogs. The toolbar pops up "alerts" when some central site sends them out. Nothing new there. But when it tells the user about a poll, the options are to vote their way, automatically, or not to vote at all. Site-specific scripts do the voting for you. Cute.
It is supposedly distributed on behalf of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That's a new development - government sponsored adware. But that may be a fake endorsement. The "gyius.org" site itself has a "cloaked domain", and the "standwithus.org" site with the endorsement has phony domain registration info. There's no real contact info for either. There's an EULA with no real company name, and mention of a remote update capability. So this may be some clever scheme to get people to install adware/spyware.
Somebody in the security business or the press really should chase this down. There's been an article in The Globe and Mail, but it's not about the technology.
One of the alternatives considered for car audio before the compact disc was a system with rectangular card-like optical media, scanned linearly. The scanning was more complex but the loading was simpler.
Time is running out for SCO. Check the scheduling order. We're past the stalling of pretrial discovery. We're past wondering if SCO has some surprise evidence. Discovery is over. Now things speed up. Expert reports are coming in now and end on September 22. On September 25, summary judgement motions start, and undoubtedly IBM will make some. Things can only get worse for SCO in the summary judgement phase, where some or all of SCO's case may be thrown out and IBM might win on some of their counterclaims. This whole thing could end in September.
If not, trial starts in February 2007.
This thing won't produce a reading on a standard sound level meter. There's a standard bandwidth weighting ("A-law") for sound level meters, based on data about hearing damage, and it cuts off at only 8KHz. That's the definition used in most noise ordnances.
The trouble with most of these tools is that they're aimed at local coding style issues, not global problems.
Typical global problems that are potentially machine-checkable before execution are:
Those are the kinds of things you need tools for. What we're seeing are tools that check for the easy-to-check but less important stuff.
All these ad-supported services are chasing the same pool of advertising spending. In that sense, they're competitors of Google. Now AOL has gone advertising-supported, so they're going after the same revenue.
The result is probably going to be that online advertising rates go through the floor, like banner ads did. We'll also see some sites get desperate and try annoying ads, popups, popunders, interstitials, and adware. Total spending on advertising is not going to increase; it has to stay a fraction of total retail sales. Somebody has to lose.
Print newspapers are already getting killed by this. Craigslist is draining off their classified ad revenue, and now Google has a deal witih the Associated Press. As a result, most newspapers really have very little content today. Take a typical newspaper today and mark all the articles that were generated by the newspaper's own reporters, and did not start as a press release. You might find ten per day. Only a few papers still have big reporting staffs.
There are two things that need to move to the web to finally kill off newspapers - real estate ads and car ads. So far, that hasn't happened. People have tried; Cars.com was supposed to replace auto dealerships, but today it's just a lead generation service. Realtor.com tried to take over real estate, but hasn't made a big dent. Now that's where to work on "Web 2.0" ideas - those are huge markets with real money being done badly.
The serious show in the industry is now the Game Developer's Conference. While there are a few talks that fans might like, like "Half Weasel, Half Otter, All Trouble: a Postmortem of Daxter for the Sony PSP", those are rare. Most of the content is more like "High Performance Physics Solver Design for Next Generation Consoles" or "Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping for Highly Detailed Surface Rendering".
It's not all about programming. There's theory of gameplay: "Tomorrow's Military Shooter: Challenges in Next-Gen Wargaming", and "Fun versus Offensive - Balancing the Cultural Edge of Content for Global Games". And business issues, like "How to Outsource Art Successfully", and "Bigger AND More Creative: Building a Better Developer Through Mergers and Acquisitions".
Over the last few years, GDC has grown, moved to bigger convention centers, added business and production sessions, and has become the place where work gets done and deals get made.
Losing E3 is no great loss.
Even if this works, it will be tough to use. You'll have to cool something that emits heat down to near absolute zero. The energy required for that refrigeration job will be greater than the heat energy the radioactive material will emit over its remaining decay life.
Oh, that thing. Aura was a sad story. They developed the first really powerful direct drive linear actuators, things that looked like hydraulic cylinders but were entirely electrical. (U.S. Patent #5,099,158) Some were so powerful that they were used for active damping on metal bridges, to reduce vibration when heavy trucks rolled by. These things were shown at industrial automation shows.
But they didn't sell. Good idea, too expensive.
Aura tried making the Interactor, a big subwoofer, using their actuator technology. Nobody cared. Aura eventually went under, in an ugly mess involving some stock scam.
Go to Wall Street, make money, then do whatever you want.
Of the best people we had on our DARPA Grand Challenge team, one is runnning a hedge fund in Santa Fe, and one is working on derivatives for a Wall Street firm.