So we have a Slashdot link to a blog discussing another blog which links to another blog which links to a list of about fifteen companies which links to blog landing pages which finally link to the "corporate blogs". And every step of the way, there's advertising.
When you finally get to the "corporate blogs", they turn out to be PR pieces.
Nothing to see here, move along.
(It's striking how few blogs use a moderation system, like Slashdot's. Of course, Slashdot still doesn't let you moderate the stories.)
Which, after all, is what it is. Remember push technology? Remember what happened to push technology? All the interest was from the pushers, not the pushees. "Now, you can shove your crap right onto user's machines, when you want to." It's about making the Web into a broadcast medium.
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth. Netnews is even a true peer to peer distributed system.
I'm still expecting Microsoft to "embrace and extend" so that RSS forks and RSS reader makers are scrambling to adapt to all the tags Microsoft introduces.
Roland the Plogger is Back!
on
Biotech Data Mining
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· Score: 4, Interesting
He's Back! I thought we were rid of Roland the Plogger, still trying to drive traffic to his blog. But no. Must be some new editor on the night shift who let this one through.
The little boxes are still there. Still green, pink, blue, and yellow. In Daly City, California. And they're now very expensive little boxes, because they are in a beautiful location, overlooking the ocean and just south of San Francisco.
You mean: the Army has a video game that a bunch of guys convinced their bosses would be "for the specific intention of recruiting people for service?", and they got away with it. How cool is that?
It's very cool. And very real.
If you do well in the game, you might get a call from a U. S. Army recruiter. "Hey, kid, how'd you like to do some real fragging?".
Wired had a big article on Enologix a few years ago.
The wine industry is terrified that once wine is figured out, good wine will be cranked out on an industrial scale, by mixing ethyl alcohol, water, and flavoring.
This has already happened in the hard liquor industry. They try to keep a low profile, but Frank-Lin Distillers makes over 1000 different brands of liquor sold on the West Coast. They use only about 100 different formulas, though. It's all about branding. They're located near the railroad yards in San Jose, where the tank cars of industrial alcohol arrive from the Midwest on their two private railroad spurs. They run tap water through an in-house deionizing and purification plant, mix it with the alcohol, add flavoring, and bottle.
Here's a nice article about the automated palletizing system at their plant, including the three-conveyor bridge over the railroad tracks. You'll recognize the brand names on the product.
Some quotes".
"With an impressive assortment of distilled liquor tanks and eight automated bottling lines, Frank-Lin's San Jose, CA, plant produces more than five million cases of liquor products a year.... During the same shift and on the same bottling line, high-end 750-mL recyclable glass bottles of Tequila may be followed by 1.5-L recyclable polyethylene terephthalate bottles of Caribbean Rum, without a glitch."
Once wine is figured out, the vintners are going to face competition from industrial producers like that. The vintners will fight, make noises about tradition and appelation, but in the end, the industrial scale stuff will win out. Because, most of the time, it will be better.
The bottom has fallen out of banner ads. Totally untargeted banner ads from bottom-feeders are available at $100/million impressions. Those are the people who put your banner on hundreds of low-end web sites.
More popular sites with better targeting have higher rates. Most banners today are sold on a click-through basis, anyway. But there's a low tier in this business, and the site in the original ad definitely fits there.
Agreed. The going rate for banner ad impressions is about $100 per million impressions, and that's for a 486*60 pixel ad with decent placement. This guy would charge $30,000 for a standard sized banner. So he'd have to get 300 million hits to be competitive. No way.
And his is an ad-cluttered site. You probably have to derate the price by a factor of 5 or so. At which point you've reached the English-speaking population of the planet as the breakeven point.
This settlement is terrible. Almost everything Sony is agreeing to, they've already done to avoid prosecution in New York and Texas. In exchange, they get unlimited relief from lawsuits from everybody whose systems were damaged by their program. That's a giveway.
One of the terms of the settlement is that if more than 1000 people opt out of it, the deal goes bust. There's going to be an opt out form soon. Check it out, and take the opt-out option.
Alamo Car Rental at LAX has had wireless check-in for fifteen years, and it works better than Apple's. The wearable printer is a bit nerdy, but you get out of there fast.
That's actually not true. There was no "tailgating". During the Grand Challenge, no vehicle was allowed to approach another while both vehicles were active. DARPA had the ability to remotely pause any vehicle. When vehicles got anywhere near each other, the trailing vehicle was paused to maintain separation. If the trailing vehicle was clearly faster, a pass was scheduled.
All passing took place with one vehicle stationary and at a wide place in the road. Wired has this wrong.
As one of the team leaders of another Grand Challenge team, I'm enormously impressed with the Stanford work.
The basic idea is that the LIDARs profile the road ahead out to 20m or so, and the vision system decides whether the road further out is "like" the near road. That vision system was a huge breakthrough. It was obvious that such a system would be a big win, but making it work reliably was impressive. I didn't think that was possible at the current state of the art. I look forward to seeing a more detailed paper on how it was done. A good hint is in this paper on texture comparison.
I was never that impressed with the CMU approach. All that manual preplanning was an obvious dead end. And the giant mechanically stablized gimbal was just too clunky. It didn't help them in 2004, when they hit an obstacle placed by DARPA, and it didn't help them in 2005, when DARPA moved the racecourse from California to Nevada to prevent preplanning. The Air Force colonel in charge for 2005 said preplanning wouldn't work, and he meant it.
Computer vision of the natural world is finally about to take off, after three decades of frustration.
It's probably possible to do much of the early vision processing in a current-generation GPU, which may make it affordable. Look for new apps that connect to cameras and pick out items of interest. Read that paper linked above.
It's like watching other people's vacation videos, only worse.
There's this place in San Francisco called Artists' Television Access, which has video gear and an editing suite so that artists can produce videos. Of course, they have video showings. The stuff they show is crap, and that's the better stuff. It's like watching auditions of garage bands.
There really aren't that many people who can do good video. It's not a technology problem.
Users with a LAN aren't really examinable by the ISP anyway. And by now, most users need a LAN, just so the home PC, the game console, and the TV can coexist.
The ISP's first responsibility is IP egress filtering. The ISP must validate the outgoing source IP address of each packet. This at least prevents the most annoying types of denial of service attacks. Most competent ISPs do this now, although some of the cable guys are weak in this area.
The ISP's second responsibility is outgoing mail rate limiting. That's enough to slow down zombie-based spam. If the outgoing mail rate exceeds some reasonable threshold, the user should get a phone call, even if the phone call is automatically generated.
The ISP's third responsibility is incoming mail spam filtering. This should include virus filtering.
Incidentally, ISPs which block outgoing TCP ports should return an ICMP message (type Destination Unreachable, code Communication Administratively Prohibited). At least then you know what's going on, and who's doing the filtering.
Antivirus software should not use a browser for anything. That offers an attack vector. The last thing you want is for an antivirus program running on a corrupted machine to have to work through a corrupted browser.
Look at the icons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Guess what those programs do.
The Thunderbird icon looks more like Edna Mode from The Incredibles than a bird. Downsizing the logo does not an icon make.
Only a few people do icon design well. Susan Kare, who did both the original Mac icons and the original Windows icons, is the best known. Take a good look at her work. For some modern icon designs, see Kare's icon family for Autodesk.
Metrowerks was there for Apple when all Apple had was MPW, which was a clone of the UNIX Programmer's Workbench, circa 1979. Metrowerks made the PowerPC transition possible. And recently, Apple made it hard for users of the Metrowerks environment to convert their programs.
Metrowerks offered a stable, reliable development environment, even as Apple was frantically moving from one development platform to another. (Use Rhapsody! Prepare for Copeland! Use OpenDoc! Dump OpenDoc! Use Carbon! No, use Cocoa! Use OpenStep! Use Objective-C! Switch to XCode!.) Each time Apple pulled one of these stunts, more developers dropped their platform.
There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net
This is boasting about how many free hosting accounts you have.
There aren't anywhere near that many real projects.
Most of those 100,000 "projects" are empty, or junk. Even many of those listed as "production-stable" have no content whatsoever behind them. Among the real projects, there are lots like this:
6393. source code line counter - The line counter takes files and directories from the command line, and counts the total number of lines, lines of code, lines of comment and blank lines in the files.
SourceForge ought to purge all the projects that have nothing behind them and have been idle for a year, but that would reduce the number that the CEO of VA Linux/Systems/Software/Burgers
likes to boast about.
There's good stuff on SourceForge, but the number of real projects is probably about 10% of the claimed number.
And the really annoying blurring of the entire Capitol Building complex has been removed.
The White House blurring was particularly pointless. You can go up to the top of the Washington Monument and take good pictures of the White House roof, and hundreds of tourists do that every day.
It's good to see some of the sillier Homeland Security paranoia being rolled back.
Slashdot Mirror
An exploit of "gdi32.dll" using a WMF file for the attack was documented back in November. Does this new exploit use the same attack approach?
When you finally get to the "corporate blogs", they turn out to be PR pieces.
Nothing to see here, move along.
(It's striking how few blogs use a moderation system, like Slashdot's. Of course, Slashdot still doesn't let you moderate the stories.)
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth. Netnews is even a true peer to peer distributed system.
Already happened. "Another part of Microsoft's RSS plans seemed to draw the most criticism. Microsoft also released a specification for an extension to one format of syndication feeds, RSS 2.0, for handling ordered lists."
He's Back! I thought we were rid of Roland the Plogger, still trying to drive traffic to his blog. But no. Must be some new editor on the night shift who let this one through.
The little boxes are still there. Still green, pink, blue, and yellow. In Daly City, California. And they're now very expensive little boxes, because they are in a beautiful location, overlooking the ocean and just south of San Francisco.
It's very cool. And very real. If you do well in the game, you might get a call from a U. S. Army recruiter. "Hey, kid, how'd you like to do some real fragging?".
This has already happened in the hard liquor industry. They try to keep a low profile, but Frank-Lin Distillers makes over 1000 different brands of liquor sold on the West Coast. They use only about 100 different formulas, though. It's all about branding. They're located near the railroad yards in San Jose, where the tank cars of industrial alcohol arrive from the Midwest on their two private railroad spurs. They run tap water through an in-house deionizing and purification plant, mix it with the alcohol, add flavoring, and bottle.
Here's a nice article about the automated palletizing system at their plant, including the three-conveyor bridge over the railroad tracks. You'll recognize the brand names on the product.
Some quotes". ... During the same shift and on the same bottling line, high-end 750-mL recyclable glass bottles of Tequila may be followed by 1.5-L recyclable polyethylene terephthalate bottles of Caribbean Rum, without a glitch."
"With an impressive assortment of distilled liquor tanks and eight automated bottling lines, Frank-Lin's San Jose, CA, plant produces more than five million cases of liquor products a year.
Once wine is figured out, the vintners are going to face competition from industrial producers like that. The vintners will fight, make noises about tradition and appelation, but in the end, the industrial scale stuff will win out. Because, most of the time, it will be better.
More popular sites with better targeting have higher rates. Most banners today are sold on a click-through basis, anyway. But there's a low tier in this business, and the site in the original ad definitely fits there.
And his is an ad-cluttered site. You probably have to derate the price by a factor of 5 or so. At which point you've reached the English-speaking population of the planet as the breakeven point.
One of the terms of the settlement is that if more than 1000 people opt out of it, the deal goes bust. There's going to be an opt out form soon. Check it out, and take the opt-out option.
Alamo Car Rental at LAX has had wireless check-in for fifteen years, and it works better than Apple's. The wearable printer is a bit nerdy, but you get out of there fast.
That's actually not true. There was no "tailgating". During the Grand Challenge, no vehicle was allowed to approach another while both vehicles were active. DARPA had the ability to remotely pause any vehicle. When vehicles got anywhere near each other, the trailing vehicle was paused to maintain separation. If the trailing vehicle was clearly faster, a pass was scheduled. All passing took place with one vehicle stationary and at a wide place in the road. Wired has this wrong.
I was never that impressed with the CMU approach. All that manual preplanning was an obvious dead end. And the giant mechanically stablized gimbal was just too clunky. It didn't help them in 2004, when they hit an obstacle placed by DARPA, and it didn't help them in 2005, when DARPA moved the racecourse from California to Nevada to prevent preplanning. The Air Force colonel in charge for 2005 said preplanning wouldn't work, and he meant it.
Computer vision of the natural world is finally about to take off, after three decades of frustration. It's probably possible to do much of the early vision processing in a current-generation GPU, which may make it affordable. Look for new apps that connect to cameras and pick out items of interest. Read that paper linked above.
It's like watching other people's vacation videos, only worse.
There's this place in San Francisco called Artists' Television Access, which has video gear and an editing suite so that artists can produce videos. Of course, they have video showings. The stuff they show is crap, and that's the better stuff. It's like watching auditions of garage bands.
There really aren't that many people who can do good video. It's not a technology problem.
The ISP's first responsibility is IP egress filtering. The ISP must validate the outgoing source IP address of each packet. This at least prevents the most annoying types of denial of service attacks. Most competent ISPs do this now, although some of the cable guys are weak in this area.
The ISP's second responsibility is outgoing mail rate limiting. That's enough to slow down zombie-based spam. If the outgoing mail rate exceeds some reasonable threshold, the user should get a phone call, even if the phone call is automatically generated.
The ISP's third responsibility is incoming mail spam filtering. This should include virus filtering.
Incidentally, ISPs which block outgoing TCP ports should return an ICMP message (type Destination Unreachable, code Communication Administratively Prohibited). At least then you know what's going on, and who's doing the filtering.
Antivirus software should not use a browser for anything. That offers an attack vector. The last thing you want is for an antivirus program running on a corrupted machine to have to work through a corrupted browser.
They're redistributing Microsoft marketing materials. Usually, you have to pay a PR firm to do that.
Only a few people do icon design well. Susan Kare, who did both the original Mac icons and the original Windows icons, is the best known. Take a good look at her work. For some modern icon designs, see Kare's icon family for Autodesk.
I did. I dumped Mac support.
Metrowerks offered a stable, reliable development environment, even as Apple was frantically moving from one development platform to another. (Use Rhapsody! Prepare for Copeland! Use OpenDoc! Dump OpenDoc! Use Carbon! No, use Cocoa! Use OpenStep! Use Objective-C! Switch to XCode!.) Each time Apple pulled one of these stunts, more developers dropped their platform.
This is boasting about how many free hosting accounts you have. There aren't anywhere near that many real projects. Most of those 100,000 "projects" are empty, or junk. Even many of those listed as "production-stable" have no content whatsoever behind them. Among the real projects, there are lots like this:
SourceForge ought to purge all the projects that have nothing behind them and have been idle for a year, but that would reduce the number that the CEO of VA Linux/Systems/Software/Burgers likes to boast about.
There's good stuff on SourceForge, but the number of real projects is probably about 10% of the claimed number.
Some Navy people still think it was rude to kick out the Chief of Naval Operations, who used to live there, so the Vice President could move in.
And the really annoying blurring of the entire Capitol Building complex has been removed.
The White House blurring was particularly pointless. You can go up to the top of the Washington Monument and take good pictures of the White House roof, and hundreds of tourists do that every day.
It's good to see some of the sillier Homeland Security paranoia being rolled back.