Yes. One day I was in the Burger King near the cable car turntable in SF, a popular homeless hangout, and heard two homeless people talking about their old jobs. One of them used to be a printer. Once upon a time, that was a skilled trade with lifelong job security. No longer. Newspaper printing plants used to have huge staffs. Now, there aren't many people in a printing plant.
"Paul: How does IE in SP2 compare to IE in Windows Server 2003? Was the original idea to make it more like "IE Hard"? Obviously, it can't be that locked down.
Todd: The original idea was to make it sort of like IE Hard. The IE in Windows Server 2003 is really unusable for consumers. But we were thinking that drastic at first. I can tell you that during the [initial design] phase were definitely thinking as drastic as that.
It sounds like Microsoft actually has a secure version of Internet Explorer, without all the guck that makes it insecure. But they consider it "unusable for consumers". Probably because you can't run all those stupid "toolbars", "Active-X controls", "upgraders", and other crap you don't need. It's clear that the "features" people won out over the "security" people.
They could at least offer "IE Hard" for everyone who wants it. Most business desktops probably should be running "IE Hard".
This could be valuable for high-bandwidth instrumentation applications. Wideband data-acquisition cards tend to be both overpriced and out of date, because the product volumes are small.
Some years ago, I was doing some work on a laser rangefinder, and got to the point where I needed about $20K in test gear to find out why it wasn't working right. Something like this would have been a big help.
Radio hams will find uses for this. It should be great for working on new data transmission schemes for high-noise links, like HF.
One big problem with this is that if you set it up in the obvious way, everybody in your neighborhood ends up on the same LAN. Probably sharing their C: drive.
You'll be expected to clean up the resulting mess.
The legal problems aren't bad; you may have to get a business license, and you'll have to report business income. But you get to deduct your costs.
The cable company can't do anything to you. They don't have a legal monopoly. All they have is a franchise to run wires on poles on public streets.
The next big limitation on computer proliferation may be security. There are more and more places where you can't take a video phone. E-mail is choked with spam. PCs are choked with adware, spyware, and other hostile code. Programable phones are attracting viruses.
Within the next two or three years, I expect to see some major security debacle, like a week of total unusuablity for the Internet, major phone system downtime, or a collapse of part of the financial system.
Re:Horse cloning will actually be useful
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: 1
While they may not allow it for racing horses,
I wonder if they will allow it for studs?
The Jockey Club doesn't even allow artificial insemination in the Thoroughbred registry.
It's a political issue. Supposedly,
they're worried that the breed will become even more uniform than it already is. All Thoroughbreds are descended from three stallions.
Actually, they're worried that all but the top breeders will be forced out of business.
In the horse world, you can buy frozen semen from stallions with good pedigrees, and artificial insemination is routinely used for breeding. In some breeds, there are horses with hundreds of direct descendants. Most male horses are gelded and have no descendants.
In the cattle business, controlled breeding has essentially standardized cows. McDonald's hamburgers come from one line of cow; the King Ranch's Santa Gertrudis line.
Also, just as is the case with the Army, the game has a firm grounding in values. For example, the game establishes rules for engagement and imposes significant penalties for violations of these rules. Players who violate these rules or who engage in activities such as team killings, can find themselves in a virtual representation of the Army's jail at Fort Leavenworth or thrown out of the game.
So there.
Horse cloning will actually be useful
on
Re-Pet a Reality
·
· Score: 1
If someone can get horse cloning to work, there will be considerable interest. The Jockey Club won't allow it for thoroughbreds, but there are some great horses of other breeds that could usefully be duplicated.
SCOX is up a bit over the last few weeks. However, check the closing price versus the intraday prices. There's often a runup in the last hour of trading. That pattern has appeared several times in the past, back when SCO tried a stock buyback.
But really, SCOX isn't going anywhere. It's just wandering around on light trading.
Despite SCO's delaying tactics, there are some key court dates coming up early next year. Fact discovery ends on Febuary 11th. SCO will probably try to get an extension. But the judge isn't likely to go for that. ("You have UNIX, and anybody can get Linux. What more do you need?" - Judge Kimball)
If discovery isn't extended, the trial date in November 2005 becomes reasonably firm, and we can start counting down the days.
Meanwhile, IBM still has motions pending which, if won, crush SCO. Those will be decided soon.
The NBA is basically a marketing unit of Nike. Maybe EA and Nike can cut a deal.
In There, you could buy Nike products for your online avatar. With real money. Apply that thinking to a NBA/Nike/EA deal, and you really have something. "Buy Nike Air Jordans and your players can jump higher!"
There are operating systems for which "self-healing" is quite feasible, but UNIX is all wrong for it.
The most successful example is Tandem. For decades, systems that have to keep running have run on Tandem's operating system. For an overview of how they did it, see the 1985 paper Why Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It.
The basic concepts are:
All the permanent state is in a database with proper atomic restart and recovery mechanisms.
Flat "files" are implemented on top of the database, not the other way round.
When applications fail, they are usually restarted completely, with any in-process transactions being backed out.
Applications with long-running state are tracked by a watching program on another machine which periodically receives state updates from the first program. If the first program fails, the watching program restarts it from a previous good state.
Every time you use an ATM or trade a stock, somewhere a Tandem cluster was involved.
Tandem's problem was that they had rather expensive proprietary hardware. You also needed extra hardware to allow for fail-operational systems.
But it all really does work. HP still sells Tandem, but since Carly, it's being neglected, like most other high technology at HP.
Nescafe
Hot was a flop. "In 2002, Swiss beverage maker Nestle SA tested a self-heating can holding its Nescafe Hot When You Want coffee in England. But the company ended the trial run after several months, finding the can did not heat the liquid to a consistent temperature, said Nestle spokesman Francois-Xavier Perroud.
"It didn't pan out," he said. Nestle is still interested in the idea, which it believes will be popular with consumers, but it is "not aware of a self-heating can that lives up to our expectations,"
This guy makes some good points. His main point is that the distribution process for FireFox is very insecure. The "traditional open source approach" of voluntary mirrors (perhaps with manual MD5 checks) isn't good enough for high-volume end user products.
The FireFox team needs to work out a much more secure install sequence.
One approach might be to have users download an small installer from "firefox.org" (only!) which then verifies the downloaded file (which can come from anywhere). The download site on "firefox.org" should have an SSL certificate good enough for code signing.
Now LightScribe needs to eliminate the step of flipping the disk over. Then they need to integrate the labelling process with the burning process, so it's seamless - run the app and you get a recorded, labelled disk.
Then they'll get consumer acceptance.
Spam is changing, and in ways that indicate the end of the beginning may be in sight.
First, spam from "legitimate" companies is dead. If you don't lie in the headers, you get filtered out, and if you do lie, CAN-SPAM gets you. So it's a total lose for any company with a real, physical address.
As a result, political pressure for weak spam laws is decreasing. The "legitimate" players can't make any money with it. This offers the opportunity for better legislation next time around.
Spam is becoming a branch of organized crime. That only works until law enforcement starts taking it seriously. Spam is so visible that it can't be hidden, and it's not really that hard to follow the money.
"Phishing" scams are becoming seriously annoying to the financial-services industry, which has considerable clout. We'll see more action there.
One thing I expect we'll see is a major crackdown on anonymous businesses on the net. It's illegal in many jurisdictions to take a credit card without disclosing the real identity of the business, but enforcement is weak. This may well be enforced via the banking system. We're about ripe for a crackdown on "bulletproof credit card processing". It's money laundering, which attracts attention from anti-terrorism people.
True. Red Hat makes about $150 million per year. That's revenue. Profit is about $5 million per year. Which is not much, considering that Red Hat didn't have to pay for the development of Linux.
From US companies, too. The current leader in thinness is PowerFilm flexible solar panels. Flexible panels have been available for years from Ovonics; they're widely used on boats. Some sailboats have solar panels in the sails.
Warren Slocum, the Chief Elections Officer of San Mateo County, California (where I live) is outspoken about electronic voting safeguards. He's against touchscreen voting without a paper trail, and has been publicizing this position for some time. He's probably the most influential election official pushing for verified voting.
Elections here use big mark-sense ballots, which are
scanned when they go into the locked ballot box.
You mark them with a felt-tip marker, using big marks that are unambiguous. They're counted automatically, but can easily be recounted manually if necessary. Any single ballot box can be recounted and verified against the scanner results for that box, so it's easy to check the accuracy of the system.
CALTRANS has both cameras and sensor loops in the road, for most freeways in the SF and LA areas. When the sensor loops detect a discontinuity in traffic flow (usually a slow area with high vehicle density followed by a fast area with low vehicle density) they connect to the appropriate camera and take a look.
You need both. Without sensor loops, there's too much camera data for anybody to watch, and without cameras, the control center can't see what the problem is. They can usually tell if an incident requires a fire truck or tow truck, and dispatch those sooner.
Aggressive accident clearance is roughly equivalent to adding one lane, but far cheaper.
The Itanium's real design goal was to be uncloneable. It was Intel's answer to the AMD threat. That was achieved; there's lots of patentable technology in there, because it really is different inside. Not better, just different. Intel threw tons of money into Very Long Instruction Word machines, a dead-end previously abandoned by others. VILW machines are notoriously hard to generate code for, because the compiler has to do so much scheduling. I've been to talks where the Itanium compiler guys from HP admitted they didn't really have a solution to that problem.
Intel just ended up with a new, different, innovative, hard to program machine.
The high cost was an artifact of low volume. There's no particular reason Itaniums should be expensive to manufacture. It's surprising that Intel didn't sell Itaniums at lower prices to try to build market share.
The real failure was that Intel marketing was unable to shove this bad idea down everyone's throat. Marketing thought they could. They were wrong.
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Yes. One day I was in the Burger King near the cable car turntable in SF, a popular homeless hangout, and heard two homeless people talking about their old jobs. One of them used to be a printer. Once upon a time, that was a skilled trade with lifelong job security. No longer. Newspaper printing plants used to have huge staffs. Now, there aren't many people in a printing plant.
Todd: The original idea was to make it sort of like IE Hard. The IE in Windows Server 2003 is really unusable for consumers. But we were thinking that drastic at first. I can tell you that during the [initial design] phase were definitely thinking as drastic as that.
It sounds like Microsoft actually has a secure version of Internet Explorer, without all the guck that makes it insecure. But they consider it "unusable for consumers". Probably because you can't run all those stupid "toolbars", "Active-X controls", "upgraders", and other crap you don't need. It's clear that the "features" people won out over the "security" people.
They could at least offer "IE Hard" for everyone who wants it. Most business desktops probably should be running "IE Hard".
Some years ago, I was doing some work on a laser rangefinder, and got to the point where I needed about $20K in test gear to find out why it wasn't working right. Something like this would have been a big help.
Radio hams will find uses for this. It should be great for working on new data transmission schemes for high-noise links, like HF.
LabView support would be nice.
You'll be expected to clean up the resulting mess.
The legal problems aren't bad; you may have to get a business license, and you'll have to report business income. But you get to deduct your costs.
The cable company can't do anything to you. They don't have a legal monopoly. All they have is a franchise to run wires on poles on public streets.
That ended some years ago.
Within the next two or three years, I expect to see some major security debacle, like a week of total unusuablity for the Internet, major phone system downtime, or a collapse of part of the financial system.
The Jockey Club doesn't even allow artificial insemination in the Thoroughbred registry. It's a political issue. Supposedly, they're worried that the breed will become even more uniform than it already is. All Thoroughbreds are descended from three stallions. Actually, they're worried that all but the top breeders will be forced out of business.
In the horse world, you can buy frozen semen from stallions with good pedigrees, and artificial insemination is routinely used for breeding. In some breeds, there are horses with hundreds of direct descendants. Most male horses are gelded and have no descendants.
In the cattle business, controlled breeding has essentially standardized cows. McDonald's hamburgers come from one line of cow; the King Ranch's Santa Gertrudis line.
-
Also, just as is the case with the Army, the game has a firm grounding in values. For example, the game establishes rules for engagement and imposes significant penalties for violations of these rules. Players who violate these rules or who engage in activities such as team killings, can find themselves in a virtual representation of the Army's jail at Fort Leavenworth or thrown out of the game.
So there.If someone can get horse cloning to work, there will be considerable interest. The Jockey Club won't allow it for thoroughbreds, but there are some great horses of other breeds that could usefully be duplicated.
But really, SCOX isn't going anywhere. It's just wandering around on light trading.
Despite SCO's delaying tactics, there are some key court dates coming up early next year. Fact discovery ends on Febuary 11th. SCO will probably try to get an extension. But the judge isn't likely to go for that. ("You have UNIX, and anybody can get Linux. What more do you need?" - Judge Kimball)
If discovery isn't extended, the trial date in November 2005 becomes reasonably firm, and we can start counting down the days.
Meanwhile, IBM still has motions pending which, if won, crush SCO. Those will be decided soon.
In There, you could buy Nike products for your online avatar. With real money. Apply that thinking to a NBA/Nike/EA deal, and you really have something. "Buy Nike Air Jordans and your players can jump higher!"
(Whatever happened to Michael Jordan, anyway?)
The most successful example is Tandem. For decades, systems that have to keep running have run on Tandem's operating system. For an overview of how they did it, see the 1985 paper Why Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It.
The basic concepts are:
Every time you use an ATM or trade a stock, somewhere a Tandem cluster was involved.
Tandem's problem was that they had rather expensive proprietary hardware. You also needed extra hardware to allow for fail-operational systems. But it all really does work. HP still sells Tandem, but since Carly, it's being neglected, like most other high technology at HP.
Nescafe Hot was a flop. "In 2002, Swiss beverage maker Nestle SA tested a self-heating can holding its Nescafe Hot When You Want coffee in England. But the company ended the trial run after several months, finding the can did not heat the liquid to a consistent temperature, said Nestle spokesman Francois-Xavier Perroud. "It didn't pan out," he said. Nestle is still interested in the idea, which it believes will be popular with consumers, but it is "not aware of a self-heating can that lives up to our expectations,"
Yes, that made the "best of Japan" list in 1985.
Operating systems expand to fill the available boot media.
One approach might be to have users download an small installer from "firefox.org" (only!) which then verifies the downloaded file (which can come from anywhere). The download site on "firefox.org" should have an SSL certificate good enough for code signing.
Now LightScribe needs to eliminate the step of flipping the disk over. Then they need to integrate the labelling process with the burning process, so it's seamless - run the app and you get a recorded, labelled disk. Then they'll get consumer acceptance.
First, spam from "legitimate" companies is dead. If you don't lie in the headers, you get filtered out, and if you do lie, CAN-SPAM gets you. So it's a total lose for any company with a real, physical address.
As a result, political pressure for weak spam laws is decreasing. The "legitimate" players can't make any money with it. This offers the opportunity for better legislation next time around.
Spam is becoming a branch of organized crime. That only works until law enforcement starts taking it seriously. Spam is so visible that it can't be hidden, and it's not really that hard to follow the money. "Phishing" scams are becoming seriously annoying to the financial-services industry, which has considerable clout. We'll see more action there.
One thing I expect we'll see is a major crackdown on anonymous businesses on the net. It's illegal in many jurisdictions to take a credit card without disclosing the real identity of the business, but enforcement is weak. This may well be enforced via the banking system. We're about ripe for a crackdown on "bulletproof credit card processing". It's money laundering, which attracts attention from anti-terrorism people.
- World Console Software + PC Software, worldwide, 2003: US$18.5 bn
-
Film industry revenues, worldwide, 2003: $180bn.
-
Music (audio & video) recordings, worldwide, 2003:
US$32 bn
Hollywood films alone account for about $63 billion.By comparison, IBM has revenues of about $80 billion per year.
True. Red Hat makes about $150 million per year. That's revenue. Profit is about $5 million per year. Which is not much, considering that Red Hat didn't have to pay for the development of Linux.
That's a nice number, Note that in comparison, Microsoft's 2004 revenue is about $36 billion. Apple is around $10 billion.
From US companies, too. The current leader in thinness is PowerFilm flexible solar panels. Flexible panels have been available for years from Ovonics; they're widely used on boats. Some sailboats have solar panels in the sails.
Elections here use big mark-sense ballots, which are scanned when they go into the locked ballot box. You mark them with a felt-tip marker, using big marks that are unambiguous. They're counted automatically, but can easily be recounted manually if necessary. Any single ballot box can be recounted and verified against the scanner results for that box, so it's easy to check the accuracy of the system.
Here's his take on Diebold:
No ambiguity there.
Slocum has an RSS feed for election issues.
You need both. Without sensor loops, there's too much camera data for anybody to watch, and without cameras, the control center can't see what the problem is. They can usually tell if an incident requires a fire truck or tow truck, and dispatch those sooner.
Aggressive accident clearance is roughly equivalent to adding one lane, but far cheaper.
The high cost was an artifact of low volume. There's no particular reason Itaniums should be expensive to manufacture. It's surprising that Intel didn't sell Itaniums at lower prices to try to build market share.
The real failure was that Intel marketing was unable to shove this bad idea down everyone's throat. Marketing thought they could. They were wrong.