The toy industry is getting close. The Barbie B-Book Learning Laptop has a keyboard and mouse, but an undersized screen. Each year, Barbie's new laptop has better specs. The first one appeared in 1999, and now Barbie is up to version 5.
This is NASA's fourth try at this, at least. The Flight Telerobotic Servicer was the first. NASA blew $288 million on that without producing working hardware. Then there was the Robotic Satellite Servicer. Then there was a sort of "flying PDA" for the ISS. This time, at least, they're trying something small first.
Try holding a pose for ten minutes while somebody fusses with the camera. That's why posed models tend to look vacant.
Some fashion photographers strive for more dynamism in their shots. That's hard to do. Most photographers can't bring it off consistently.
A few can. Look at Richard Avedon's work. That's why he's one of the greats.
Early versions of Netscape, through Netscape Communicator 4, could load an arbitrary font with the web page. This feature was called "Dynamic Fonts".
Microsoft didn't like it, because it used Bitstream's font format. So Microsoft implemented their own proprietary scheme in IE. Web designers stopped using Dynamic Fonts. Netscape dropped Dynamic Fonts in Netscape 6.
The Bitstream PFR format is public. But Bitstream withdrew the tools that allow
conversion of other fonts into PFR format, partly because of threats of litigation.
The Internet Archive gets Alexa's old backup tapes of the web crawl and uses them to load up the Archive with page copies. The indexing systems are completely different. The Archive barely has an index.
New big piece of closed-source code! Executes wide range of commands from web pages! Good potential for yummy exploits! Anybody find one yet?
Can you write a worm in it?
I like the place in the documentation where it says that they're going to add more sandboxing "later". Before, or after, the first big exploit?
The original article notes that, even though the recipient loses access to the message, it's still stored for law enforcement, the intelligence community, and probably for marketing purposes.
Ajax, all the problems of time sharing, back again
on
Mastering Ajax Websites
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I keep encountering dynamic web sites that sort of work, or have performance bottlenecks. When I close some pages on tribe.net, there's about 10 seconds of disk activity from the browser, during which time the browser locks up. (Does anyone know what they're doing wrong?)
A growing annoyance is a page that hangs during loading because its advertising site is slow. With plain HTML, page rendering isn't delayed for image loading. With AJAX, page load can be stalled while the ad server cranks.
I keep seeing "Waiting for servedby.advertising.net" in the browser status line. Fortunately, I can just close the page and go to a competitor.
I just bought 40 backup tapes. First site had some problem with its dynamic stuff. Went to another site and spent money there.
Sadly, what Google really is an ad agency that uses a search engine as a traffic builder. It's a very good search engine, but fundamentally, Google is an advertising-delivery system.
If they'd gone private instead of going public, they could have been a very profitable near-monopoly, sustained by the fact that it doesn't really cost that much to run a search engine, and thus, their ad content can be minimal. But now they have to produce a reasonable return on investment for their overblown market cap. So they have to add more and more advertising-oriented services, from catalogs to classifieds.
This dooms them to become more like their competitors in those spaces.
It's not going to be fun to work there as the profitabilty vise closes.
Somebody at NASA didn't do their homework. Very similar spherical hopping robots were developed in 1997 at Sandia, with DARPA funding. They actually work; they're not just a proposed project with pretty pictures. "Where we want to go is Mars and the moon. With a hopper, you could go much farther from the lander. You could throw out a dozen of these to search in all directions."
There's some interest in this as a new generation of land mine. Dump out a few hundred of these and they wait for a target, like a convoy, to come along. When they find a suitable target, the hopper that found it calls for backup, and the hoppers in the neighborhood swarm to attack the target.
Elliot Spitzer, the New York State Attorney General, is working on that. After Sony announced the recall, his investigators found "recalled" CDs still on sale. As Spitzer put it, "It is unacceptable that more than three weeks after this serious vulnerability was revealed, these same CDs are still on shelves, during the busiest shopping days of the year."
Spitzer's office has been going after spyware and adware for some time now. They shut down MyCoolScreen, KeenValue, IncrediFind, and a host of other annoyances.
Here's how a prosecutor described that spyware and adware:
In successive tests conducted by the Attorney General's office, the sole hint - far from legally sufficient - of any software bundled with the screensaver occurred on the fourth page of a long license agreement, under the vague heading "Additional Information." Even then, the bundled spyware was described in vague and misleading terms.
Exacerbating the harm from its installation of hidden spyware programs, Intermix employs deceptive methods to prevent users from detecting and removing its software....
Making matters worse, Intermix designs its spyware programs so that when users uninstall the program with which the spyware was bundled (e.g., a screensaver), Intermix's spyware products remain behind, installed and fully operational....
Intermix also prevents its spyware programs from being listed in the commonlyaccessed "Add/Remove Programs" utility in the Microsoft Windows operating system, making removal yet more difficult.
In the rare instance where Intermix does allow for the uninstallation of its software, the uninstall often does not work properly, leaving files and functionality installed.
Finally, Intermix sometimes reinstalls spyware after a user has deleted it.
FIRST CAUSE OF ACTION (DECEPTIVE ACTS AND PRACTICES)
32. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in deceptive acts or practices in violation of 9 GBL 349.
SECOND CAUSE OF ACTION (FALSE ADVERTISING)
36. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in false advertising in violation of GBL 350.
THIRD CAUSE OF ACTION (TRESPASS TO CHATTELS)
39. New York common law prohibits the intentional intermeddling with a chattel, including a computer, in possession of another that results in the deprivation of the use of the chattel or impairment of the condition, quality or usefulness of the chattel.
40. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in trespass to chattels in violation of New York common law.
41. Respondent's violations of New York common law constitute repeated and persistent illegal conduct in violation of Executive Law 63(12).
Almost identical language can be used to describe Sony/BMG's spyware. And probably will be.
It has to do with critical mass and synergy, two vital value creation forces. Taken individually, Web 2.0 techniques like harnessing collective intelligence, radical decentralization, The Long Tail are quite powerful... You need a core set of Web 2.0 techniques in order to be successful and then the value curve goes geometric. This is why the ROI of software built this way is so much greater....
Using Web 2.0 you can build better software with less people, less money, less abstractions, less effort, and with this increase in constraints you get cleaner, more satisfying software as the result. And simpler software is invariably higher quality.
Yeah, right.
What really matters, if you're selling stuff on the web, is that people can 1) find what they want, 2) order it without much hassle,
and 3) get what they ordered without delays or screwups.
It's 2) and 3) that matter, because they determine repeat business. Serious retailers talk about the "abandoned shopping cart" ratio, or how many people started the process of buying something but never finished the transaction. One screwup in the fulfilment process usually loses the customer. Most profit is on repeat customers, remember.
The "Web 2.0" stuff is mostly about the front end, the advertising/marketing part of the operation. That only matters in attracting first-time customers.
In the end, all the "Web 2.0" stuff gives you roughly the capabilities Flash has now. If that was so great, we'd see more all-Flash sites.
All this dynamic stuff requires a server
on
The Future of HTML
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Web pages that won't run without a connection to the server are limited. They can't be archived. They can't be cached effectively. They can't be viewed offline. They often cannot be printed.
Much of this "dynamic content" is annoying advertising, anyway. So it's going to have to be blocked, like popups and Flash.
Worse, programmability in the browser means advertisers running their software on your machine. You just know they'll try adware and spyware if it can possibly be implemented. Keeping Java and Javascript in their cage is tough enough already.
Web Forms 2.0, though, is a good idea. We should have had more declarative validation years ago. Declarative forms are good - the browser may be able to fill in fields.
In most US states and in many countries, it's a criminal offense to operate a business anonymously. Most of the grumbling comes from slimeballs who operate marginal businesses and don't want their unhappy customers coming after them. I'd like to see every domain that can lead to a credit card transaction tied to a valid business, or the transaction isn't valid. At least for ".com" and ".net". That would force credit card merchant banks to validate Whois information.
If you want a domain as an individual, there's ".name".
I own five domains, and every one has a valid street address and phone number. I get very few annoying calls, and little paper mail, as a result. Two threats in the last eight years - one from a company which didn't like what I said about them on Downside (their stock dropped 98% from its peak), and a guy running a patent-broker scam (he's now out of business). It's just not a big problem if you're legitimate.
When the auto industry starts shipping cars without AM/FM radios, it's over.
Could happen. And soon. Consider portable audio players. Some have radio receivers, most don't. It's not a major selling point. Far more cell phones have digital audio players than AM/FM radios. The car is the last bastion of analog broadcast.
The day the first car ships from the factory with a built-in iPod but no AM/FM receiver is the day the broadcast radio industry begins to die.
Yes, that compiles and runs, but it doesn't do what you think it does.
Put in some debug print to see what's actually happening, which is this:
"5,5" is evaluated using the built-in definition of ",", returning "5". The no-conversion built-in operator comma has higher priority than the conversion sequence involving a conversion to "location", then the use of the overloaded comma operator. So the built-in comma operator is used. See the discussion in the C++ ARM, section 13.2, "Argument matching": which says "consider an exact match better than any conversion".
"5" is converted to type "location" by the constructor for "location", resulting in a "location" object with "dimension=1" and "coordinates[0]=5".
This "location" object is passed to "operator[]", which then accesses "coordinates[1]", an uninitialized value, which it then uses as a subscript, returning a reference to a arbitrary memory location.
So, instead of returning "&blah.matrix[5][5]", it returns "&blah.matrix[???][5]". The example program seems to run in VC++ only because that part of memory happens to be 0 at startup, so this returns
"&blah.matrix[0][5]". In other circumstances, it might cause a crash.
"10" is stored into the wrong location of "blah",or outside it, due to the bad reference generated above.. This is where the buffer overflow occurs.
You can force the conversion with
blah[ location(5), 5] = 10;
but that's not useful except to see what's happening.
You can't overload the built-in operators for built-in types.
So overloading, outside of an object, "operator,(int, int)" won't work either.
Auto Gordian Knot, one of the programs reported to crash, does have SSE3 code. And it loads some different DLLs when it finds it. That's clearly going to give trouble on a system where only some processors have SSE3.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's only $59.95!
(For boys, there's the Batman Laptop.)
A bigger screen and some USB ports, and these things are going to be useful.
This is NASA's fourth try at this, at least. The Flight Telerobotic Servicer was the first. NASA blew $288 million on that without producing working hardware. Then there was the Robotic Satellite Servicer. Then there was a sort of "flying PDA" for the ISS. This time, at least, they're trying something small first.
Now that would be a win, if Dun and Bradstreet's corporate information fed into Google's rankings.
Some fashion photographers strive for more dynamism in their shots. That's hard to do. Most photographers can't bring it off consistently. A few can. Look at Richard Avedon's work. That's why he's one of the greats.
The Bitstream PFR format is public. But Bitstream withdrew the tools that allow conversion of other fonts into PFR format, partly because of threats of litigation.
The division of engineers into "transactional engineers" and "dynamic engineers" is unique to this paper. (Try those phrases in Google.)
The Internet Archive gets Alexa's old backup tapes of the web crawl and uses them to load up the Archive with page copies. The indexing systems are completely different. The Archive barely has an index.
I like the place in the documentation where it says that they're going to add more sandboxing "later". Before, or after, the first big exploit?
If you haven't seen it, see "Josie and the Pussycats" (the live action movie, not the cartoon.) It's a spoof of product placement.
The original article notes that, even though the recipient loses access to the message, it's still stored for law enforcement, the intelligence community, and probably for marketing purposes.
A growing annoyance is a page that hangs during loading because its advertising site is slow. With plain HTML, page rendering isn't delayed for image loading. With AJAX, page load can be stalled while the ad server cranks. I keep seeing "Waiting for servedby.advertising.net" in the browser status line. Fortunately, I can just close the page and go to a competitor.
I just bought 40 backup tapes. First site had some problem with its dynamic stuff. Went to another site and spent money there.
If they'd gone private instead of going public, they could have been a very profitable near-monopoly, sustained by the fact that it doesn't really cost that much to run a search engine, and thus, their ad content can be minimal. But now they have to produce a reasonable return on investment for their overblown market cap. So they have to add more and more advertising-oriented services, from catalogs to classifieds. This dooms them to become more like their competitors in those spaces.
It's not going to be fun to work there as the profitabilty vise closes.
And it was rated G.
I was horrified at the time.
The EFF has a lousy litigation track record. This could set back verified voting.
There's some interest in this as a new generation of land mine. Dump out a few hundred of these and they wait for a target, like a convoy, to come along. When they find a suitable target, the hopper that found it calls for backup, and the hoppers in the neighborhood swarm to attack the target.
Spitzer's office has been going after spyware and adware for some time now. They shut down MyCoolScreen, KeenValue, IncrediFind, and a host of other annoyances.
Here's how a prosecutor described that spyware and adware:
In successive tests conducted by the Attorney General's office, the sole hint - far from legally sufficient - of any software bundled with the screensaver occurred on the fourth page of a long license agreement, under the vague heading "Additional Information." Even then, the bundled spyware was described in vague and misleading terms.
Exacerbating the harm from its installation of hidden spyware programs, Intermix employs deceptive methods to prevent users from detecting and removing its software. ...
Making matters worse, Intermix designs its spyware programs so that when users uninstall the program with which the spyware was bundled (e.g., a screensaver), Intermix's spyware products remain behind, installed and fully operational. ...
Intermix also prevents its spyware programs from being listed in the commonlyaccessed "Add/Remove Programs" utility in the Microsoft Windows operating system, making removal yet more difficult.
In the rare instance where Intermix does allow for the uninstallation of its software, the uninstall often does not work properly, leaving files and functionality installed.
Finally, Intermix sometimes reinstalls spyware after a user has deleted it.
FIRST CAUSE OF ACTION (DECEPTIVE ACTS AND PRACTICES)
32. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in deceptive acts or practices in violation of 9 GBL 349.
SECOND CAUSE OF ACTION (FALSE ADVERTISING)
36. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in false advertising in violation of GBL 350.
THIRD CAUSE OF ACTION (TRESPASS TO CHATTELS)
39. New York common law prohibits the intentional intermeddling with a chattel, including a computer, in possession of another that results in the deprivation of the use of the chattel or impairment of the condition, quality or usefulness of the chattel.
40. By repeatedly and persistently engaging in the acts and practices described above, Respondent has repeatedly and persistently engaged in trespass to chattels in violation of New York common law.
41. Respondent's violations of New York common law constitute repeated and persistent illegal conduct in violation of Executive Law 63(12).
Almost identical language can be used to describe Sony/BMG's spyware. And probably will be.
It has to do with critical mass and synergy, two vital value creation forces. Taken individually, Web 2.0 techniques like harnessing collective intelligence, radical decentralization, The Long Tail are quite powerful ... You need a core set of Web 2.0 techniques in order to be successful and then the value curve goes geometric. This is why the ROI of software built this way is so much greater. ...
Using Web 2.0 you can build better software with less people, less money, less abstractions, less effort, and with this increase in constraints you get cleaner, more satisfying software as the result. And simpler software is invariably higher quality.
Yeah, right.
What really matters, if you're selling stuff on the web, is that people can 1) find what they want, 2) order it without much hassle, and 3) get what they ordered without delays or screwups. It's 2) and 3) that matter, because they determine repeat business. Serious retailers talk about the "abandoned shopping cart" ratio, or how many people started the process of buying something but never finished the transaction. One screwup in the fulfilment process usually loses the customer. Most profit is on repeat customers, remember.
The "Web 2.0" stuff is mostly about the front end, the advertising/marketing part of the operation. That only matters in attracting first-time customers.
In the end, all the "Web 2.0" stuff gives you roughly the capabilities Flash has now. If that was so great, we'd see more all-Flash sites.
Much of this "dynamic content" is annoying advertising, anyway. So it's going to have to be blocked, like popups and Flash.
Worse, programmability in the browser means advertisers running their software on your machine. You just know they'll try adware and spyware if it can possibly be implemented. Keeping Java and Javascript in their cage is tough enough already.
Web Forms 2.0, though, is a good idea. We should have had more declarative validation years ago. Declarative forms are good - the browser may be able to fill in fields.
If you want a domain as an individual, there's ".name".
I own five domains, and every one has a valid street address and phone number. I get very few annoying calls, and little paper mail, as a result. Two threats in the last eight years - one from a company which didn't like what I said about them on Downside (their stock dropped 98% from its peak), and a guy running a patent-broker scam (he's now out of business). It's just not a big problem if you're legitimate.
The RIAA has nothing to do with lyrics. That's a composer rights issue, and is handled by ASCAP and BMI in the United States.
Could happen. And soon. Consider portable audio players. Some have radio receivers, most don't. It's not a major selling point. Far more cell phones have digital audio players than AM/FM radios. The car is the last bastion of analog broadcast.
The day the first car ships from the factory with a built-in iPod but no AM/FM receiver is the day the broadcast radio industry begins to die.
It's a good thing that the EFF isn't involved in GPL enforcement. They'd botch that, too.
Yeah, but Commandment 1 was about market share maintenance.
You can force the conversion with
blah[ location(5), 5] = 10;
but that's not useful except to see what's happening.
You can't overload the built-in operators for built-in types. So overloading, outside of an object, "operator,(int, int)" won't work either.
Hence the need for a straightforward solution.
Auto Gordian Knot, one of the programs reported to crash, does have SSE3 code. And it loads some different DLLs when it finds it. That's clearly going to give trouble on a system where only some processors have SSE3.