Here's the court filing. It's in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, WA. None of the parties are there; DirectMedia is in New York, and Avenue Media is in Curacao. But DirectMedia claims that Seattle is appropriate because the software is sometimes used there.
Avenue Media is claiming "tortious interference with contract" on the grounds that DirectMedia is interfering with their contractual relationships with their customers. This is in addition to their Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim.
The rationale, presumably, is that if they can show some kind of illegal act under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, their "tortious interference" claim might go somewhere.
Some anti-spyware group might want to file a friend-of-the-court brief. The best possible ruling would be that both parties are violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and therefore DirectMedia cannot claim to come to court with clean hands.
If Firefox/Mozilla's "block images from this server" extended to Flash, even more ads would become invisible. That needs to go into Firefox. Control of the right-click menu for Flash needs to be taken away from the Flash plugin and given back to the user.
A good ad blocker can cut your browser's bandwidth consumption in half. At least.
There really was a Raymond Lemme, and he did work for the inspector general of the Florida Department of Transportation, and he's dead. He got a brief "memorial" on page 57 of this FDOT annual report.
That's all that comes up in Google. Can anyone find out more? A "suicide" of an inspector general staff member of anything is inherently suspicious.
Not true anymore. That only worked when the US had the reserve currency, the one everybody wanted.
But read the current issue of the Economist. The British Pound used to hold that position. The dollar has had it since WWII. Now, the euro is taking over.
The euro zone now has a bigger economy than the US. And the euro is now more stable than the dollar. The US is now a debtor nation, rather than a creditor nation. The debt is mostly in dollars, but that's beginning to change.
Only the country with the main reserve currency can get other countries to finance its deficits.
Other countries with deficits go into deep depressions when they overspend, because they have to pay back their debts in someone else's currency. If they try to print money, they go into runaway inflation.
Look at any country that's faced IMF intervention.
Clearly, IBM is exiting that business.
Given that the iPod is taking off while Apple desktop market share remains tiny, Apple's direction is becoming clear. The computer business is becoming a drag on the stock, tying up too much capital without generating revenue in proportion.
At some point, Apple will probably sell off its computer business and become an entertainment products company.
Now that the basic principles are understood, it should be possible to reprogram a camera phone with a fast processor to do the same job.
It has to find and register the wheel, which is an object of known form. Lane Hawk could do this. It then has to find and
track the ball, which is not too hard (try the Lucas-Kanade feature tracker in OpenCV) and extract position and velocity. Given that information, prediction is possible.
Now that 3D game capability is going into camera phones, there's enough processing power in phones to consider this. It can all be done with passive sensors. You don't need lasers.
In 1986, the Internet was up and running just fine.
I'd been working on it for almost five years. Everybody in academia and aerospace had already made the transition from the IMP-based ARPANET protocols to TCP/IP, thousands of LANs were interconnected with the wide area net, and the protocols were working reliably. Sun was already a viable company. The Internet was growing steadily.
What hadn't happened yet was cheap high-bandwidth fibre. The cost of long-haul links was still quite high in 1986. Much lower cost pipes were needed before the Internet could become a big, free network with a backbone that wouldn't saturate.
All NASA did here was provide the meeting space.
IBM and some universities are doing the work.
But in the article, NASA gets mentioned twice.
Actually, increasing system reliability and restartability isn't fundamentally all that hard. It's trying to do it in the presence of the vast amount of dreck on Microsoft systems that makes it difficult.
What this really says is that the business model for AdSense, where Google ads are served on other sites to which Google pays money, has problems. But AdWords, on Google's own site, are still OK.
Basically, Google has just discovered that "affilate banner programs" are abusable. That's not exactly news.
This doesn't really hurt Google's core search business. The worst that can happen with AdWords is that they have to pay out a refund to an unhappy customer once in a while. Their expansion into the banner ad business may be a failure, but that's no great loss.
Somebody has transmit all that crap long distances through many cables and routers before it finally hits the spammers's server. Most of the costs are incurred by innocent parties. Some of whom may sue Lycos.
This approach to controlling spam probably has more collateral damage than anything since firewalling entire countries.
For years, all the major US TV networks were synchronized, down to the horizontal sweep clock, from a master clock in New York. The rotating heads in every broadcast VCR were synched to that clock.
This was necessary to allow switching without image tearing.
Video links were expensive enough that AT&T did some of the video switching at regional switch points in the distribution chain. When a network switched from New York origination to Los Angeles origination, AT&T was involved.
So everybody had to be agreed on a tight schedule in advance.
Then came frame buffers and cheap digital transmission. Now, there are so many frame buffers in the chain you may be a second behind by the time it gets to the screen. Everybody has dedicated links.
And synchronization fanaticism is a thing of the past.
"We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results'," but the company has shied away from implementing this yet.
That's an good idea.
Other useful capabilities for advanced search:
Ignore sites with ads.
Ignore sites which are primarily indexes of other sites.
Ignore auction sites.
Ignore sites advertised in spam, using Gmail spam info.
Google may end up becoming a major player in spam control, because they process large volumes of mail through search systems and can potentially recognize almost all bulk mail.
Once upon a time, around 1900 or so, "stationary engineering" was a hot high-tech field. Somebody had to run the big steam engines running. Or you could become a millwright, and help set up machinery in factories.
There are still stationary engineers. There are still millwrights. Not a lot of them, though. It's an skilled blue-collar job, often unionized, with a formal apprenticeship.
There are exams and certificates.
Being a system administrator is, fundamentally, the same kind of thing, with technology a century newer.
Redwood City, CA has had a ShotSpotter gunfire detection system since 1996. It works fine, but it's not that useful for apprehending major criminals. Its real use is deterring the bozos who "celebrate" by firing guns into the air in urban areas. The Redwood City system has cut down on that problem, much to the relief of local residents.
Here's an
evaluation.
Median location error is about 25 feet. That at least gets it down to two or three houses.
I met the designer of this system some years ago. The original prototype worked using microphones and hard-wired phone connections for each microphone. The signal from each microphone was transmitted using an analog FM carrier system over the phone line designed to trade frequency response for dynamic range. The system had terrible audio frequency response but huge dynamic range, so that pulse events like gunshots come through cleanly without overload. When you have enough dynamic range, gunfire is easy to recognize, because the leading edge of the pulse is so sharp. Few other sounds have that form.
The microphones are up on telephone poles and atop buildings, and they're omnidirectional. So they mostly pick up loud bangs, wind, and aircraft noise.
The original pole units were entirely analog, phone line powered, and very dumb. The original central processing system was a PC with some data acquisition cards running LabView. Since then, it's become fancier, with better integration with mapping programs and transmission of gunfire locations to PDA-type devices. But it's not really very complicated.
A very few years ago, there were less than a hundred major spammers. And most of them were low-rent operations. One arrest per week would have killed off the spam industry.
Now that organized crime is involved, it's going to be much harder.
On the other hand, "legitimate" spam is almost dead. You see few spams today from any business that is even vaguely legitimate.
I've noticed that too. Google News seems to have nearly eliminated stories from al Jazeera. If you search for al Jazeera, you don't get any stories from al Jazeera. (Incidentally, the real al Jazeera is aljazeera.net.
There's an aljazeera.info and an aljazeera.com, but they're junk sites to steal traffic.)
A good way to see Google's bias is to search regular Google for "bin laden" video. Al Jazeera has a full transcript of the latest bin Laden video, and Google's PageRank system gives that the top ranking. But that article isn't even on the first page of Google News for the same search.
This is significant, because the Bush campaign pressured the US press not to report on that video in its entirity. Not because of any connection to terrorism. They just didn't like this part:
...
we have not found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.
Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth.
There's already a National Directory of New Hires. This is supposedly to locate "deadbeat dads". Enforcement against employers is weak. But it's there.
Today, Nov. 30th, is the deadline for SCO to file their response to IBM's counterclaim that SCO is infringing IBM's copyrights. The one where they have to explain violating the GPL on Linux code, infringing IBM's copyrights in IBM's contributions to Linux. If SCO loses on that one (and it's a fast-tracked summary judgement motion), they are out of the Linux business and owe money to IBM.
We're all looking forward to reading SCO's reply on that one.
In other news, SCO just had a setback in their DaimlerChrysler case. SCO wants that case stayed until SCO vs IBM is decided. This is wierd, because SCO is the plaintiff in the DaimlerChrysler case - they started it. But they were losing, so they want it stayed. The judge just denied the stay, and the case will be heard in January.
That's the case where SCO claims that because DaimlierCrysler used some UNIX-based product in the distant past, they can't use Linux now without paying SCO. This very weak claim is on its way to being laughed out of court.
There are really only a few ways in which files are used. Systems should support these.
Files which are complete entities. These should be updated as an atomic operation, presumably by some atomic renaming operation.
UCLA Locus did this very neatly; you could update
a file and commit it, and only the changed pages actually had to be written. UNIX/Linux does it badly. NT and later have an atomic operation to replace a file, but it's obscure and not used universally.
Databases Databases should have atomic, recoverable commit/revert semantics. The technology is well understood. Even MySQL finally has this. Anything that's changed incrementally should be in a real database.
This is the really important one for reliability. The UNIX/Linux world needs a lightweight database that's as widely used as the standard I/O library.
It may seem overkill to keep your bookmarks and address books in full ACID-compliant databases. The user whose data isn't lost will never know enough to thank you. But that's the difference between "works" and "sort of works", the sort of thing Tog is going for here. The challenge for the Linux world is to create the middleware which makes it easy to do this right.
Conceptually, the original Mac designers were on the right track with the Resource Manager. It was always available and handled structured data well. But the update safety of the Resource Manager was awful. (128K and one floppy, remember.) There's no problem doing it right today.
The Windows world has Jet, which is a mediocre database but is at least standard.
Logs. Files used for logging should have commit semantics. When you commit, you're guaranteed that everything up to the commit point is safe. A "delayed commit" option is useful; when you request a commit (say at each end of each complete write), you're guaranteed a commit within N seconds. This holds down I/O. You lose some data in a crash, but never more than the commit delay, and you always have a cleanly ended file.
True temporary files. These don't outlive the program that created them. No need to "clean up/tmp".
The mainframe people have had this for decades, NT and later sort of have this, but the UNIX/Linux world lags here.
The real problem is the standard C library, which supports a very dumb file system model. Two or three generations of programmers know only that.
There are fewer platforms all the time. Realistically, there's Linux and Windows.
Most of "autoconf" exists to support obsolete UNIX implementations run by very few people. At this point it's not worth supporting anything that doesn't have all the POSIX basics.
SMS is an incredible rip-off in terms of cost per byte, of course. No other service costs as much.
It's now cheaper to send pictures than SMS messages on Sprint PCS: "Take, upload and send an unlimited number of pictures with Sprint PCS Picture Mail. Includes 100 SMS Text Messages and Web access."
Maybe the next big thing is converting text messages to pictures before sending them.
Slashdot Mirror
Avenue Media is claiming "tortious interference with contract" on the grounds that DirectMedia is interfering with their contractual relationships with their customers. This is in addition to their Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim. The rationale, presumably, is that if they can show some kind of illegal act under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, their "tortious interference" claim might go somewhere.
Some anti-spyware group might want to file a friend-of-the-court brief. The best possible ruling would be that both parties are violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and therefore DirectMedia cannot claim to come to court with clean hands.
Why carry two things around? It looks like 2005 will be the year cell phones get music capability. Once the size and weight gets low enough, there's no reason for a separate music box.
A good ad blocker can cut your browser's bandwidth consumption in half. At least.
That's all that comes up in Google. Can anyone find out more? A "suicide" of an inspector general staff member of anything is inherently suspicious.
But read the current issue of the Economist. The British Pound used to hold that position. The dollar has had it since WWII. Now, the euro is taking over. The euro zone now has a bigger economy than the US. And the euro is now more stable than the dollar. The US is now a debtor nation, rather than a creditor nation. The debt is mostly in dollars, but that's beginning to change.
Only the country with the main reserve currency can get other countries to finance its deficits. Other countries with deficits go into deep depressions when they overspend, because they have to pay back their debts in someone else's currency. If they try to print money, they go into runaway inflation. Look at any country that's faced IMF intervention.
Clearly, IBM is exiting that business. Given that the iPod is taking off while Apple desktop market share remains tiny, Apple's direction is becoming clear. The computer business is becoming a drag on the stock, tying up too much capital without generating revenue in proportion. At some point, Apple will probably sell off its computer business and become an entertainment products company.
It has to find and register the wheel, which is an object of known form. Lane Hawk could do this. It then has to find and track the ball, which is not too hard (try the Lucas-Kanade feature tracker in OpenCV) and extract position and velocity. Given that information, prediction is possible.
Now that 3D game capability is going into camera phones, there's enough processing power in phones to consider this. It can all be done with passive sensors. You don't need lasers.
Unfortunately, most of the broadband connections don't have enough bandwidth for good NTSC video, let alone HDTV.
In 1986, the Internet was up and running just fine. I'd been working on it for almost five years. Everybody in academia and aerospace had already made the transition from the IMP-based ARPANET protocols to TCP/IP, thousands of LANs were interconnected with the wide area net, and the protocols were working reliably. Sun was already a viable company. The Internet was growing steadily.
What hadn't happened yet was cheap high-bandwidth fibre. The cost of long-haul links was still quite high in 1986. Much lower cost pipes were needed before the Internet could become a big, free network with a backbone that wouldn't saturate.
Actually, increasing system reliability and restartability isn't fundamentally all that hard. It's trying to do it in the presence of the vast amount of dreck on Microsoft systems that makes it difficult.
Basically, Google has just discovered that "affilate banner programs" are abusable. That's not exactly news.
This doesn't really hurt Google's core search business. The worst that can happen with AdWords is that they have to pay out a refund to an unhappy customer once in a while. Their expansion into the banner ad business may be a failure, but that's no great loss.
This approach to controlling spam probably has more collateral damage than anything since firewalling entire countries.
Video links were expensive enough that AT&T did some of the video switching at regional switch points in the distribution chain. When a network switched from New York origination to Los Angeles origination, AT&T was involved. So everybody had to be agreed on a tight schedule in advance.
Then came frame buffers and cheap digital transmission. Now, there are so many frame buffers in the chain you may be a second behind by the time it gets to the screen. Everybody has dedicated links. And synchronization fanaticism is a thing of the past.
It can be done. There's a $39.95 commercial product to remove Internet Explorer and much other stuff you don't want running.
That's an good idea. Other useful capabilities for advanced search:
Google may end up becoming a major player in spam control, because they process large volumes of mail through search systems and can potentially recognize almost all bulk mail.
There are still stationary engineers. There are still millwrights. Not a lot of them, though. It's an skilled blue-collar job, often unionized, with a formal apprenticeship. There are exams and certificates.
Being a system administrator is, fundamentally, the same kind of thing, with technology a century newer.
Here's an evaluation. Median location error is about 25 feet. That at least gets it down to two or three houses.
I met the designer of this system some years ago. The original prototype worked using microphones and hard-wired phone connections for each microphone. The signal from each microphone was transmitted using an analog FM carrier system over the phone line designed to trade frequency response for dynamic range. The system had terrible audio frequency response but huge dynamic range, so that pulse events like gunshots come through cleanly without overload. When you have enough dynamic range, gunfire is easy to recognize, because the leading edge of the pulse is so sharp. Few other sounds have that form.
The microphones are up on telephone poles and atop buildings, and they're omnidirectional. So they mostly pick up loud bangs, wind, and aircraft noise. The original pole units were entirely analog, phone line powered, and very dumb. The original central processing system was a PC with some data acquisition cards running LabView. Since then, it's become fancier, with better integration with mapping programs and transmission of gunfire locations to PDA-type devices. But it's not really very complicated.
A very few years ago, there were less than a hundred major spammers. And most of them were low-rent operations. One arrest per week would have killed off the spam industry.
Now that organized crime is involved, it's going to be much harder.
On the other hand, "legitimate" spam is almost dead. You see few spams today from any business that is even vaguely legitimate.
Google News does index al Jazeera. Look up something specific not well covered in the Western press and it will come up. So it's being crawled.
A good way to see Google's bias is to search regular Google for "bin laden" video. Al Jazeera has a full transcript of the latest bin Laden video, and Google's PageRank system gives that the top ranking. But that article isn't even on the first page of Google News for the same search.
This is significant, because the Bush campaign pressured the US press not to report on that video in its entirity. Not because of any connection to terrorism. They just didn't like this part:
Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth.
Looks like Google caved, too.
There's already a National Directory of New Hires. This is supposedly to locate "deadbeat dads". Enforcement against employers is weak. But it's there.
In other news, SCO just had a setback in their DaimlerChrysler case. SCO wants that case stayed until SCO vs IBM is decided. This is wierd, because SCO is the plaintiff in the DaimlerChrysler case - they started it. But they were losing, so they want it stayed. The judge just denied the stay, and the case will be heard in January. That's the case where SCO claims that because DaimlierCrysler used some UNIX-based product in the distant past, they can't use Linux now without paying SCO. This very weak claim is on its way to being laughed out of court.
That's the real SCO news today.
Conceptually, the original Mac designers were on the right track with the Resource Manager. It was always available and handled structured data well. But the update safety of the Resource Manager was awful. (128K and one floppy, remember.) There's no problem doing it right today.
The Windows world has Jet, which is a mediocre database but is at least standard.
The mainframe people have had this for decades, NT and later sort of have this, but the UNIX/Linux world lags here.
The real problem is the standard C library, which supports a very dumb file system model. Two or three generations of programmers know only that.
Most of "autoconf" exists to support obsolete UNIX implementations run by very few people. At this point it's not worth supporting anything that doesn't have all the POSIX basics.
Maybe the next big thing is converting text messages to pictures before sending them.
Worse than dimmed menu items are menu items that aren't dimmed, but don't currently do anything.