SCO can't file their 10-K because "it is examining matters related to stock issued as part of its compensation plans"? That's one of the lamer excuses sent to the SEC in a while.
The "10-K" is the backup data behind a company's annual report. It's the single most important disclosure of a company's financial status. The SEC allows 3 months after the close of the fiscal year for a 10-K filing. SCO's year closed at the end of October, and their 10-K was due at the end of January. Late filing of a 10-K or 10-Q (the quarterly report) is considered a major red flag for a stock. When I was following dying dot-coms, a late 10-K or 10-Q was a strong indicator of trouble. Nobody files late because they have unexpectedly good numbers.
SCO filed an NT-12K form with the SEC, asking for a 15-day extension. "The Company currently anticipates that the Form 10-K will be filed by no later than the fifteenth calendar day following the date on which the Form 10-K was due." They missed that date, too.
There has to be something really embarassing in the compensation plan. Really embarassing, if they're willing to risk delisting from the NASDAQ.
Delisting kicks a stock down to the pink sheets.
That's where the penny stocks favored by spammers and scammers live.
Kent Displays has had a similar technology since the late 1990s. Their displays require no power when not changing and are sunlight-readable. Update is sluggish, so they are used mostly for signs, clocks, and other less-dynamic applications.
No, E-ink is issuing press releases about it. Note that the "products" page just says "E-ink is working with partners...", and hasn't been updated since 2002.
I wrote "Falling Bodies", a simulator for simulating humanoid characters banging around. So I know something about this.
You cannot, even in theory, predict how a human with arms and legs banging around will move in a complex crash. It's chaotic, in the formal mathematical sense of the world. That is, an arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions can create a large change in the outcome. In Falling Bodies, if you change the low order digit of a double precision number in the initial conditions for a fall down a staircase, the simulations will start to diverge after about a second, and the fall may end quite differently.
I had this discussion a few years ago with an Army officer who was trying to reduce accidents in parachute landings, and was considering using Falling Bodies. I talked him out of it.
Auto collisions can be simulated well because there's one big mass that dominates the simulation. So you get a deterministic result within some error limits. Multibody systems with joints and links are quite different.
Realistically, you can probably do a sound simulation which predicts how a passenger will bounce around from the beginning of the collision to the first passenger interior collision with the vehicle. Beyond that point, forget it.
On my old Mac IIci, running Adobe Premiere, if you put in an audio CD, it appeared as a directory, and you could import audio into your Premiere project.
I miss the days when audio and video were just ordinary data.
(Could be worse, though. Back in 1999, I had some long screaming sessions with Microsoft corporate support. Some bozo at Microsoft had put Macrovision copy protection on the Y2K update CD for Visual SourceSafe. It wouldn't read on high-end machines with SCSI CD drives. One major software company lost the entire history of their product due to that defect.)
In Walgreens, you will find duplicates of over the counter medications, made directly for Walgreens under contract. They'll have similar, but not confusingly indentical, packaging. They'll contain the words "Compare to the ingredients in [major name brand]". And they'll be cheaper.
So there's business precedent for this.
It's well-established that you can mention the trademarks of others in comparative advertising.
There's a well-developed theory of how to maximize data transmission through a noisy channel. You can use more power or more redundancy. There's a tradeoff and an optimum, and most modern transmission systems work near it. Modems (including DSL), digital radio systems (including cell phones), and recording media (including DVD and CD) all operate below the threshold where all the bits get through correctly. Redundancy and error correction is used to compensate.
The optimal error rate before correction is typically low. A few percent, tops, even for
forgiving applications like cell phones.
On a related note, if it has a UL mark and blows up, report that to UL. If you check the box "Yes, I agree to ship the defective product to UL", they will send you shipping instructions, pay your shipping costs, examine the product, and return it to you. They also accept JPG and GIF files of the defective or phony product.
Again, there's no UL certification number on the Ultra XConnect label. The named manufacturer doesn't appear in the UL database. The same part number is in the database, but the manufacturer is Taiwan Youngyear, not Ultra. And the database says that the marking should contain "Company name or tradename, "E126556" (the certification number) and model designation." It doesn't.
So it's a phony UL certification label.
UL tightly controls what appears on a UL label.
Only authorized UL label printers can print them, and only when UL authorizes a specific label. UL even insists on approving the label layout. No way did that label go through UL approval.
If you look at the Taiwan Youngyear line of power supplies, you won't find anything that matches the Ultra XConnect unit. The UltraXconnect has a bay of power outlets for DC power, and all the Taiwan Youngyear supplies have the usual cables and connectors hanging out.
Ultra may be buying Taiwan Youngyear power supplies, opening them up, modifying them by adding their own connector bay, and relabeling the product. But that makes them a manufacturer. They have to get their own UL certification after they've moldified up the box.
And for good reason.
Remember, this power supply blew up when loaded to its rated load.
Re:Power supplies with phony UL certifications
on
Power Supply Torture Test
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· Score: 2, Informative
UL says that part number is for a 372.69W power supply made by TAIWAN YOUNGYEAR ELECTRONICS CO LTD.
It's not clear whether Ultra resells the unit, modifies the unit, copies the unit, or just uses the same part number. Ultra rates it at 500 watts. They didn't certify under their own name, but put a UL logo on their own nameplate. UL doesn't allow that.
If you don't see the UL certification number on the nameplate, or it doesn't match the certification database, it's not UL certified.
Again, note the strong correlation between "not properly UL certified" and "blows up".
As usual with these PC power supply tests, the supplies that passed the tests from Underwriters Laboratories work fine, and the ones that don't. In this review, there's a clear picture of each power supply label, so it's possible to check the certifications.
The HIPER
HP3S350 appears to be the first of the phonies. The label has the UL "recognized component mark" (the reversed-R U symbol), but there's no UL certification number. That's an indication of a phony; all UL marks must be accompanied by a UL certification number, an E followed by digits. Certification numbers can be easily checked with UL here.
Looking up HIPER in the UL database, HIPER has a few products listed, but none of them are computer power supplies. So that's a brand to avoid.
Jeantech's power supply label also has the UL component logo without a certification number. They're not in the UL database at all. Uh oh.
The Seasonic SS 400-FB power supply has a proper UL marking, and the certification number E104405
is in the UL certification database. There's not an exact match on model; an SS-400FS was certified and this is an SS-400FB. That's sloppy, but this company is clearly trying to comply.
SilentMax has no UL logo at all. It blew up under test. It's clear why that one doesn't have a UL certification.
The Ultra Xconnectblew up under test. There's a UL marking, but no file number, on the label. Ultra Products has no listings in the UL database. So that's another phony.
Consistently, every power supply with a valid UL mark passed. And every power supply that blew up lacked a valid UL mark.
UL tests power supplies by loading them up to their rated load at their maximum rated temperature and running them for hours or days.
They also test for safe behavior if short circuited, overloaded, or overvoltaged.
They're not concerned with power quality, just safety. The device must not blow up or catch fire, even after a single component failure.
Report phony UL marks to UL at 1-877-UL-HELPS (854-3577). They arrange for seizure at U.S. Customs, and catch about $12 million a year of hazardous components, which are then crushed.
What do you expect? Worldcom/MCI was run by criminals. Their former CEO, Bernie Ebbers, is on trial right now in New York for fraud and conspiracy.
Been there, done that: Minuteman III ICBM
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 3, Informative
The Minuteman III ICBM was built for $7 million each. Launch facilities are simple; it sits, unattended, in a silo until launched. A recent engine test of a 30-year old solid booster was successful. Thousands were made. 500 are still deployed as ICBMs. Manufactured between 1968 and 1977.
It's even outlived its successor, the MX "Peacekeeper" from the Reagan era. MX has been retired, but the Minuteman III lives on. They're
"remanufactured" every few decades, on a slow upgrade cycle. The basic vehicle lives on.
So the "cheap booster" is quite feasible, if you order a thousand at a time.
These guys started with L4, which been used to run a modified Linux for years. About a half dozen other operating systems have been ported to run on top of L4. So it's not that big a deal.
The Hurd website, wiki, etc. haven't been updated in years.
At a more fundamental level, there's a design disaster in the making here.
L4 seems to make the same mistake Mach made with interprocess communication - unidirectional IPC. This design error is called "what you want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation". This is a crucial design decision. Botch this and your microkernel performance will suck.
QNX gets it right - the basic message-passing primitive is MsgSend, which sends a message and blocks until a reply is received (or a timeout occurs). The implementation immediately transfers control to the destination process (assuming it's waiting for a message), without a trip through the scheduler. That's crucial to getting good performance on real work from a microkernel.
Mach botched this. Mach IPC is pipe-like, with one-way transmission. And that's a major reason Mach was a flop. (Note that the version of Mach used for the MacOS isn't the final "pure Mach", it's a Berkeley BSD UNIX kernel with Mach extensions.)
Why does this matter so much? Because if send doesn't block, when you send, control continues in the sending process. Later, presumably, the sending process blocks waiting for a reply. But who runs next? Whoever was ready to run next. If you're CPU-bound and there are processes ready to run, every time you do a message pass, you lose your turn and your quantum, and have to wait. So programs with extensive IPC activity grind to a crawl on a loaded system.
But if message passing is tightly integrated with scheduling, a message pass doesn't hurt your thread's CPU access. Control continues in the new process with the same quantum (and in QNX, the same priority by default, which avoids priority inversions in real time work). Now message passing is only slightly more expensive than a subroutine call, and can be used for everything.
There is a big literature about Mach, Minix and related underperforming academic microkernels, while the key architectural details of the commercial microkernels that work (basically QNX and IBM's VM) aren't well publicized. But you can dig the information out if you work at it.
In 1967, you could order and prepay for all six volumes, to be delivered as published. At a good price, too. I wonder how many people are still waiting.
I'd like to have, as an option, an "Extreme GPL" for truly free software. The Extreme GPL would forbid resale of the software value, in any form, including compilations. This would keep packagers like Red Hat from taking free software and putting a price tag on it. Can't sell it. Have to give it away. Because it's not yours to sell.
Not all software should be under the Extreme GPL, but the option should be available to developers who want it.
Actually, no, it's not a software licensing problem. Look at Respower, the rentable render farm, again. They're licensed for all the major rendering engines: Maya, Mental Ray, Lightwave, 3DS Max, etc. (Not RenderMan, though.)
This is in an industry where the software works well on clusters and customers are used to outsourcing. Yet it's a business disaster:
ResPower's load today: 1 frame in progress, 0 waiting, 500 machines available. 99.8% of their machines are idle today. Worse, if you see only one frame in progress, it's probably their freebie demo. Anybody can create an account and render one frame on one machine for free.
ResPower used to be busier. Maybe it's a slow week. Or month. Or year.
Despite the "grid enthusiasts", grid computing, as a business, is a disaster. You can build it, but they won't come.
Pay By Touch doesn't really identify people based on fingerprints. You have to "enter your phone search number (usually your phone number)". The fingerprint reader is only for "verification".
So the fingerprint recognition could be total vaporware, and it would still appear to work.
Even if it's real, typical Equal Error Rates for fingerprint systems are around 5%.
So if you have a list of customer phone numbers and access to a fingerprint terminal, you should be able to crack the system in about 20 tries.
Then you have access to someone else's accounts.
So Sun's finally found a use for all of their spare inventory.
That sounds about right. Scientific time sharing hasn't been a good business model since 1980. If you
need heavy compute power, you get your own cluster. If there was a viable business model in this space, hosting companies would be selling this as a service. They already have the right infrastructure.
For a while, it looked like commercial render farms might be a viable business. But today's stats at ResPower read "Running frames: 3, Waiting frames 0", so only 3 of their 500+ computers are active right now.
The "use spare cycles on other people's PCs" model works fine, if you're a spammer or an adware/spyware company. But nobody seems to be paying out money to home users for spare cycles.
Cyc is basically the bad "expert system" idea from the 1980s, with too much funding. The concept of Cyc is straightforward - have a big staff putting in handwritten rules, and it will be able to answer anticipated questions. Like call centers where the staff just reads scripts. No way is it ever going to become "intelligent". On a really good day, given a narrow enough range of questions in an area where good answers have been preloaded, it can sort of fake it some of the time.
It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.
Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.
Eric Kriss, secretary of administration and finance of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:
They have made representations to us recently they are planning to modify that license, and we believe, if they do so in the way that we understand that they have spoken about (we will leave it obviously to them to describe exactly what they are going to do), it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats. These formats, like DOC files, will be deemed to be Open Formats because they will no longer have restrictions on their use.
That would potentially include (again, we need to wait for the final designation of this by Microsoft) Word Processing ML, which is the wrapper around DOC files, Spreadsheet ML, which is the wrapper around XLS files, and the form template schemas.
Massachusetts residents, hold your state to that.
Only if the formats "no longer have restrictions on their use" do they qualify as open formats.
No-MMU systems should be restricted to applications where the processor costs a few dollars or less and all the code is in permanent read-only memory.
Something that costs a few hundred dollars and runs Linux should have an MMU.
Slashdot Mirror
The "10-K" is the backup data behind a company's annual report. It's the single most important disclosure of a company's financial status. The SEC allows 3 months after the close of the fiscal year for a 10-K filing. SCO's year closed at the end of October, and their 10-K was due at the end of January. Late filing of a 10-K or 10-Q (the quarterly report) is considered a major red flag for a stock. When I was following dying dot-coms, a late 10-K or 10-Q was a strong indicator of trouble. Nobody files late because they have unexpectedly good numbers.
SCO filed an NT-12K form with the SEC, asking for a 15-day extension. "The Company currently anticipates that the Form 10-K will be filed by no later than the fifteenth calendar day following the date on which the Form 10-K was due." They missed that date, too.
There has to be something really embarassing in the compensation plan. Really embarassing, if they're willing to risk delisting from the NASDAQ.
Delisting kicks a stock down to the pink sheets. That's where the penny stocks favored by spammers and scammers live.
Kent Displays has had a similar technology since the late 1990s. Their displays require no power when not changing and are sunlight-readable. Update is sluggish, so they are used mostly for signs, clocks, and other less-dynamic applications.
No, E-ink is issuing press releases about it. Note that the "products" page just says "E-ink is working with partners...", and hasn't been updated since 2002.
You cannot, even in theory, predict how a human with arms and legs banging around will move in a complex crash. It's chaotic, in the formal mathematical sense of the world. That is, an arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions can create a large change in the outcome. In Falling Bodies, if you change the low order digit of a double precision number in the initial conditions for a fall down a staircase, the simulations will start to diverge after about a second, and the fall may end quite differently.
I had this discussion a few years ago with an Army officer who was trying to reduce accidents in parachute landings, and was considering using Falling Bodies. I talked him out of it.
Auto collisions can be simulated well because there's one big mass that dominates the simulation. So you get a deterministic result within some error limits. Multibody systems with joints and links are quite different.
Realistically, you can probably do a sound simulation which predicts how a passenger will bounce around from the beginning of the collision to the first passenger interior collision with the vehicle. Beyond that point, forget it.
I miss the days when audio and video were just ordinary data.
(Could be worse, though. Back in 1999, I had some long screaming sessions with Microsoft corporate support. Some bozo at Microsoft had put Macrovision copy protection on the Y2K update CD for Visual SourceSafe. It wouldn't read on high-end machines with SCSI CD drives. One major software company lost the entire history of their product due to that defect.)
Of course, the press can retaliate. Just ignore all Apple press releases for a year.
So there's business precedent for this.
It's well-established that you can mention the trademarks of others in comparative advertising.
Centos can probably win this.
The optimal error rate before correction is typically low. A few percent, tops, even for forgiving applications like cell phones.
On a related note, if it has a UL mark and blows up, report that to UL. If you check the box "Yes, I agree to ship the defective product to UL", they will send you shipping instructions, pay your shipping costs, examine the product, and return it to you. They also accept JPG and GIF files of the defective or phony product.
So it's a phony UL certification label.
UL tightly controls what appears on a UL label. Only authorized UL label printers can print them, and only when UL authorizes a specific label. UL even insists on approving the label layout. No way did that label go through UL approval.
If you look at the Taiwan Youngyear line of power supplies, you won't find anything that matches the Ultra XConnect unit. The UltraXconnect has a bay of power outlets for DC power, and all the Taiwan Youngyear supplies have the usual cables and connectors hanging out.
Ultra may be buying Taiwan Youngyear power supplies, opening them up, modifying them by adding their own connector bay, and relabeling the product. But that makes them a manufacturer. They have to get their own UL certification after they've moldified up the box.
And for good reason. Remember, this power supply blew up when loaded to its rated load.
If you don't see the UL certification number on the nameplate, or it doesn't match the certification database, it's not UL certified. Again, note the strong correlation between "not properly UL certified" and "blows up".
Looking up HIPER in the UL database, HIPER has a few products listed, but none of them are computer power supplies. So that's a brand to avoid.
Consistently, every power supply with a valid UL mark passed. And every power supply that blew up lacked a valid UL mark.
UL tests power supplies by loading them up to their rated load at their maximum rated temperature and running them for hours or days. They also test for safe behavior if short circuited, overloaded, or overvoltaged. They're not concerned with power quality, just safety. The device must not blow up or catch fire, even after a single component failure.
Report phony UL marks to UL at 1-877-UL-HELPS (854-3577). They arrange for seizure at U.S. Customs, and catch about $12 million a year of hazardous components, which are then crushed.
What do you expect? Worldcom/MCI was run by criminals. Their former CEO, Bernie Ebbers, is on trial right now in New York for fraud and conspiracy.
It's even outlived its successor, the MX "Peacekeeper" from the Reagan era. MX has been retired, but the Minuteman III lives on. They're "remanufactured" every few decades, on a slow upgrade cycle. The basic vehicle lives on.
So the "cheap booster" is quite feasible, if you order a thousand at a time.
The Hurd website, wiki, etc. haven't been updated in years.
At a more fundamental level, there's a design disaster in the making here. L4 seems to make the same mistake Mach made with interprocess communication - unidirectional IPC. This design error is called "what you want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation". This is a crucial design decision. Botch this and your microkernel performance will suck.
QNX gets it right - the basic message-passing primitive is MsgSend, which sends a message and blocks until a reply is received (or a timeout occurs). The implementation immediately transfers control to the destination process (assuming it's waiting for a message), without a trip through the scheduler. That's crucial to getting good performance on real work from a microkernel.
Mach botched this. Mach IPC is pipe-like, with one-way transmission. And that's a major reason Mach was a flop. (Note that the version of Mach used for the MacOS isn't the final "pure Mach", it's a Berkeley BSD UNIX kernel with Mach extensions.)
Why does this matter so much? Because if send doesn't block, when you send, control continues in the sending process. Later, presumably, the sending process blocks waiting for a reply. But who runs next? Whoever was ready to run next. If you're CPU-bound and there are processes ready to run, every time you do a message pass, you lose your turn and your quantum, and have to wait. So programs with extensive IPC activity grind to a crawl on a loaded system.
But if message passing is tightly integrated with scheduling, a message pass doesn't hurt your thread's CPU access. Control continues in the new process with the same quantum (and in QNX, the same priority by default, which avoids priority inversions in real time work). Now message passing is only slightly more expensive than a subroutine call, and can be used for everything.
There is a big literature about Mach, Minix and related underperforming academic microkernels, while the key architectural details of the commercial microkernels that work (basically QNX and IBM's VM) aren't well publicized. But you can dig the information out if you work at it.
In 1967, you could order and prepay for all six volumes, to be delivered as published. At a good price, too. I wonder how many people are still waiting.
Not all software should be under the Extreme GPL, but the option should be available to developers who want it.
This is in an industry where the software works well on clusters and customers are used to outsourcing. Yet it's a business disaster: ResPower's load today: 1 frame in progress, 0 waiting, 500 machines available. 99.8% of their machines are idle today. Worse, if you see only one frame in progress, it's probably their freebie demo. Anybody can create an account and render one frame on one machine for free.
ResPower used to be busier. Maybe it's a slow week. Or month. Or year.
Despite the "grid enthusiasts", grid computing, as a business, is a disaster. You can build it, but they won't come.
So the fingerprint recognition could be total vaporware, and it would still appear to work.
Even if it's real, typical Equal Error Rates for fingerprint systems are around 5%. So if you have a list of customer phone numbers and access to a fingerprint terminal, you should be able to crack the system in about 20 tries. Then you have access to someone else's accounts.
That sounds about right. Scientific time sharing hasn't been a good business model since 1980. If you need heavy compute power, you get your own cluster. If there was a viable business model in this space, hosting companies would be selling this as a service. They already have the right infrastructure.
For a while, it looked like commercial render farms might be a viable business. But today's stats at ResPower read "Running frames: 3, Waiting frames 0", so only 3 of their 500+ computers are active right now.
The "use spare cycles on other people's PCs" model works fine, if you're a spammer or an adware/spyware company. But nobody seems to be paying out money to home users for spare cycles.
Also, this seems to be in another one of those no-pictures documentation formats, like DocBook.
What's wrong with this picture? Go to the computer section of any bookstore and try to find a book that has no drawings or screenshots.
It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.
Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.
Here's a critique of Cyc from 1994.
That would potentially include (again, we need to wait for the final designation of this by Microsoft) Word Processing ML, which is the wrapper around DOC files, Spreadsheet ML, which is the wrapper around XLS files, and the form template schemas.
Massachusetts residents, hold your state to that. Only if the formats "no longer have restrictions on their use" do they qualify as open formats.
Actually, Apple has had multi-button mice since the early days. They just put the buttons on the keyboard.
No-MMU systems should be restricted to applications where the processor costs a few dollars or less and all the code is in permanent read-only memory. Something that costs a few hundred dollars and runs Linux should have an MMU.