The default screen saver in QNX, the high-reliability operating system, is the Matrix "green numbers" screen saver. That's what you get if you don't select a screen saver.
Suspicious timing
on
SCO.com Defaced
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's interesting that SCO managed to get press releases out on this in the middle of the night over the Thanksgiving weekend.
SCO has a November 30 filing deadline in the IBM case, on the IBM counterclaims. That's tomorrow. SCO has to reply to IBM's "You violated the GPL and you can't use IBM's code in Linux any more" counterclaim. This is the day SCO has to provide legal arguments to back up their "the GPL is unconstitutional/illegal/irrelevant" claim.
Which they're not going to be able to do successfully.
That's not the news SCO wants heavily publicized.
So the timing here is suspiciously convenient for SCO.
NASA has a long string of robotics failures.
Except the little rovers from JPL, which is really a unit of Caltech, very little good has come out of NASA in robotics. They attract good people and put them into NASA's underperforming organization, wasting America's robotics talent.
NASA tried to develop a robot to do jobs like servicing the Hubble. The Flight Telerobotic Servicer project cost $288 million and produced zilch. Then there was the Robotic Satellite Servicer, NASA's second try at the same idea and another flop. Now they're trying to get their nose in the trough again and go for failure #3.
If we're going to have robotic repair, we should get it working here on Earth first, get it thoroughly debugged, use it for real applications, and then build space-qualified versions of the hardware for the occasional space job. Trying to do robotic repair in space when we can't do it on the ground is guaranteed to fail.
Also annoying to us in robotics is that NASA tries to claim credit for anything in which they had the vaguest involvement. They even have an arrangement with the USPTO so that if you patent something in robotics, the USPTO sends you a form under which you're supposed to declare any NASA involvement, so they can take credit.
I recently had an invitation to speak at NASA Ames. I told them to fuck off.
Here in Silicon Valley, we have lots of office space with similar facilities. Available now, at low, low rents. Try $0.90/square foot for class A R&D space. The Excite@Home facility is still completely vacant.
The area near Moffett Field, where SGI used to be and Google is now, has acres of vacant buildings.
The huge new 150,000 square meter Pacific Shores Center complex still has entire buildings vacant, and it's filling up. EA and Dreamworks moved in. Shrek 2 was made there. Health club, Olympic size swimming pool, public hiking trails, baseball field, soccer field, ampitheater, cafe, day spa, and an incredible view of the San Francisco bay. Ample parking. Gigabits of bandwidth.
Pacific Shores alone is one and a half times the size of Hong Kong's "Cyberport."
I'd like to have some cameras installed overlooking Washington DC restaurants and bars popular with lobbyists and members of Congress. Preload it with photos of lobbyists and politicians, and start correlating meetings with votes in Congress.
From the specs, that's roughly 1998 technology in graphics boards - triangle fill, but no "geometry engine", i.e. no 4x4 transformation matrix multiplier.
There's a better graphics engine available by default in most motherboard chipsets today.
It's probably more worthwhile to get VIA to document in detail how to talk to the S3 graphics engine in their midrange motherboard chipsets.
It's a straight enhancement. Resize up by 50%, adjust levels, center in white space. Look at the original with your monitor brightness turned way up for comparison.
The Solar Lite people need a new web site designer very, very badly. This isn't rocket science.
The proposed amendments to the Telemarketing Sales Rule are undesirable. They create consumer confusion, in that consumers now expect that the do not call list means that they should not receive any marketing calls whatsoever. The FTC should act consistent with that expectation.
The notion of an established business relationship has historically been abused by telemarketers. Recognizing this, the FCC has sunset the established business relationship exception to the TCPA rules involving unsolicited faxes. After June 30, 2005, the FCC requires a signed statement by the recipient, specifying a specific telephone number, before a marketing-related fax can be sent to that recipient. (Ref FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, June 26, 2003, revising 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(a)(3)(i))
Since the petitioner has proposed that the FTC should follow the FCC in this area, it would be appropriate for the FTC at this time to similarly sunset its established business relationship exception. This will simplify compliance for business by providing a consistent rule across agencies.
As for the predictive dialing issue, the marketplace has already provided several commercial predictive dialer systems which are advertised as capable of complying with current FTC regulations. Thus, no relaxation of FTC rules is required in this area.
The sites use Lycos logos, but it's not at all clear that Lycos has anything to do with this.
While these sites link to Lycos, there's no obvious link to it from the Lycos main page.
It's not really that bad. In the gambling industry, software vendors are held financially responsible for their errors. It costs GTech about 0.8% of their revenues to pay penalties. This despite contractual provisions calling for $10,000 per minute (yes, per minute) penalties for downtime.
Aerospace has dealt with high complexity for decades, rather more successfully than the IT industry. Here's how.
Interface specifications dominate If it doesn't work the way the spec says it does, fix the box, not the spec. If A won't talk to B, run the tests to check compliance with the spec. If you can't tell who's at fault, the spec is broken.
This is why you can swap a Pratt and Whitney engine for a Rolls Royce engine.
The buyer, not the vendor, decides what is a "defect". One of the fundamental problems in IT is that vendors have sole discretion to decide what is a defect and what isn't. That doesn't fly in aerospace.
Fix blame. In aerospace, people get blamed for screwing up. You do not want your name or the name of your company to appear in an NTSB crash report. If you screw up big time, it will.
Mistakes in aerospace are publicized. There's an NTSB database of 140,000 crashes. If it was a hardware failure, the vendor is named.
Warranties have real meaning Airplanes come with good warranties, and so do all the parts that go into them. Commercial software doesn't.
This runs engineering costs way up, and the life cycles are longer, but in IT, most of the commercial products are sold in large numbers, so you get to spread that engineering cost over a large number of items.
It's time for computing to grow up and accept this kind of discipline. The automotive industry had to accept it in the 1960s, and cars got much better within a decade.
Go read Drexler's "Engines of Creation" for the classic "nanoassembler" hype. The idea of pushing atoms together is neat, but it's hard to do. Free-floating nanoassemblers are still a fantasy. I expect to see nanoassemblers, but they'll probably be more like scanning tunneling microscopes made on an IC substrate and used to read and write DNA. Making big hunks of solid materials that way is too slow. Look at how long it takes to make a tree, or a coral reef, or a pearl.
(Admittedly biology is power-limited. In a manufacturing environment, you can run external power into the nanomachines and remove that limitation. But that won't work for the free-floating nanomachine concept.)
If you have a good milling machine, you can make almost any solid shape you want. I know four people with milling machines at home. Two of them have good computer-controlled mills with all the necessary software. Yet they don't actually make all that much. One of them is building a steam engine, and he's been at that for years.
Then there are stereolithography machines. The newer ones work fine. You can now make things out of ABS and nylon, which are tough enough to be useful. This is a big improvement over the early models, which made only soft wax models nice to look at but useless.
It's a very slow way to make stuff. In the real world, almost all consumer products, with the notable exception of wood and fabric products, are made by some kind of cheap moulding process. There are dozens of such processes, from die casting to injection moulding to progressive stamping, but they all involve forcing material into a mould. This is an incredibly cheap process in quantity, and is why manufactured goods are so cheap.
Very few consumer items are made by machining down a solid hunk of material.
Even ICs aren't made by direct writing. It's quite possible to make ICs with direct-writing electron beam machines. This eliminates the need for masks, and every IC can be different. Works fine. Useful ICs have been prototyped that way for years. Too slow to be commercially feasible.
If they ship something with optics suitable for an imager that big (which means a lens about 2cm in diameter), this would be quite useful for press photographers.
If they ship it with a dinky lens, the exposure times will be too long for a handheld device.
Most of the hard work is in the encoder, which has to recognize frame-to-frame motion and make hard decisions. The decoder just does what the data stream says to do.
The worst problems in the Linux/UNIX world come from user interfaces that deal with the state of the underlying system without knowing enough about what that state really is.
Printer configuration is an obvious one. Why should there even be printer configuration? When you want to print something, you should be presented with a list of available printers. Everything else should be automatic. Worst case, you might have to type in the name of a remote printer that's not on your local LAN.
This company just bought the tooling to a failed McDonnell/Douglas solar project from the 1980s.
And now they're trying a Stirling engine from United Stirling in Sweden, which has been building marginally useful Stirling cycle engines since 1962.
At one point there was a Stirling-powered Ford Pinto, and later a Stirling-powered Ford Taurus, but neither was very successful.
Some background is here.
"Ken Stone discussed how the United Stirling engine and parabolic dish system
was taken out of moth
balls and revived. He announced that there is now a new company that
appears to be getting into the
Stirling engine field with the old United Stirling engine designs."
Microsoft has been holding off on that release for over a year, to avoid embarassing Intel with an AMD-only product. Although Microsoft did release an AMD-only beta.
You can get it now if you want it. It's a pre-release with a self-destruct timer, but it's available.
If you want support from the right wing for violent video games, bundle them with a real gun. Call the game a "training aid". That will get the RKBA people on your side.
The National Rifle Association's online store already carries X-Treme Accuracy Shooting, a sniper training game. "If you like guns, you will love this game." For sex and gun freaks, they have Kill It and Grill It, with a cover showing women in sexy tops carrying big guns. For those who like to shoot while drinking, or drink while shooting, there's the NRA hip flask. So the NRA's already pushing violence, sex, and booze. They make GTA look like small-timers.
And, of course, one of the best selling games of all time continues to be Deer Hunter, now with "ultra realistic environments", "accurate animal behavior" and "addictive gameplay".
So if you're in the game industry and getting flak from "family" groups, give them a tour of the gun nut world and see what they have to say about that.
The IRS may not agree that whom some employer says is an "independent contractor" really is. This has tax consequences for both employer and employee.
One way to resolve the issue is to ask the employer to fill out IRS Form SS-8", "Determination of Worker Status for purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Witholding." Workers can also fill out the form directly. This initiates a process at the IRS in which the IRS sends forms to both sides and eventually issues a letter opinion resolving the issue.
If an employer proposes that you should be an "independent contractor", but it's really a job (they tell you when and where to work and how to do the job), this is a useful form to show them.
It scares HR departments and their lawyers.
If the IRS decides that a class of "independent contractors" is in fact employees, the employer has to pay back employment taxes. The IRS tends to view anything that looks like a job as a job, regardless of what the employer says.
If you've been an "independent contractor" recently but no longer have a connection to that company, you can file an SS-8 form, and may save some money on taxes if you're retroactively reclassified as an employee.
Followed by virus-through-firewall applications
on
P2P Through Firewalls
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If P2P through firewalls is deployed, viruses through firewalls can't be far behind.
0wn corporate networks! Laugh at their ineffective firewalls. Use them to send spam all night! Resell them on Spamforum.biz.
At last, the killer app for "grid computing".
Slashdot Mirror
The default screen saver in QNX, the high-reliability operating system, is the Matrix "green numbers" screen saver. That's what you get if you don't select a screen saver.
SCO has a November 30 filing deadline in the IBM case, on the IBM counterclaims. That's tomorrow. SCO has to reply to IBM's "You violated the GPL and you can't use IBM's code in Linux any more" counterclaim. This is the day SCO has to provide legal arguments to back up their "the GPL is unconstitutional/illegal/irrelevant" claim. Which they're not going to be able to do successfully. That's not the news SCO wants heavily publicized.
So the timing here is suspiciously convenient for SCO.
Inside job?
NASA tried to develop a robot to do jobs like servicing the Hubble. The Flight Telerobotic Servicer project cost $288 million and produced zilch. Then there was the Robotic Satellite Servicer, NASA's second try at the same idea and another flop. Now they're trying to get their nose in the trough again and go for failure #3.
If we're going to have robotic repair, we should get it working here on Earth first, get it thoroughly debugged, use it for real applications, and then build space-qualified versions of the hardware for the occasional space job. Trying to do robotic repair in space when we can't do it on the ground is guaranteed to fail.
Also annoying to us in robotics is that NASA tries to claim credit for anything in which they had the vaguest involvement. They even have an arrangement with the USPTO so that if you patent something in robotics, the USPTO sends you a form under which you're supposed to declare any NASA involvement, so they can take credit.
I recently had an invitation to speak at NASA Ames. I told them to fuck off.
Worse. Outdoor company meetings.
The huge new 150,000 square meter Pacific Shores Center complex still has entire buildings vacant, and it's filling up. EA and Dreamworks moved in. Shrek 2 was made there. Health club, Olympic size swimming pool, public hiking trails, baseball field, soccer field, ampitheater, cafe, day spa, and an incredible view of the San Francisco bay. Ample parking. Gigabits of bandwidth.
Pacific Shores alone is one and a half times the size of Hong Kong's "Cyberport."
So there.
That would get some attention.
It's probably more worthwhile to get VIA to document in detail how to talk to the S3 graphics engine in their midrange motherboard chipsets.
The Solar Lite people need a new web site designer very, very badly. This isn't rocket science.
The notion of an established business relationship has historically been abused by telemarketers. Recognizing this, the FCC has sunset the established business relationship exception to the TCPA rules involving unsolicited faxes. After June 30, 2005, the FCC requires a signed statement by the recipient, specifying a specific telephone number, before a marketing-related fax can be sent to that recipient. (Ref FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, June 26, 2003, revising 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(a)(3)(i))
Since the petitioner has proposed that the FTC should follow the FCC in this area, it would be appropriate for the FTC at this time to similarly sunset its established business relationship exception. This will simplify compliance for business by providing a consistent rule across agencies.
As for the predictive dialing issue, the marketplace has already provided several commercial predictive dialer systems which are advertised as capable of complying with current FTC regulations. Thus, no relaxation of FTC rules is required in this area.
After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.
Kungsgatan 6
Stockholm, 111 43
SE
[Administrative contact] Brockman, Didde
Starring Ltd AB
Kungsgatan 6
111 43 Stockholm
SE
Email: technical@starring.se
Phone: +46 8 6144600
Fax: +46 8 6144610
The sites use Lycos logos, but it's not at all clear that Lycos has anything to do with this. While these sites link to Lycos, there's no obvious link to it from the Lycos main page.
It's not really that bad. In the gambling industry, software vendors are held financially responsible for their errors. It costs GTech about 0.8% of their revenues to pay penalties. This despite contractual provisions calling for $10,000 per minute (yes, per minute) penalties for downtime.
-
Interface specifications dominate If it doesn't work the way the spec says it does, fix the box, not the spec. If A won't talk to B, run the tests to check compliance with the spec. If you can't tell who's at fault, the spec is broken.
This is why you can swap a Pratt and Whitney engine for a Rolls Royce engine.
-
The buyer, not the vendor, decides what is a "defect". One of the fundamental problems in IT is that vendors have sole discretion to decide what is a defect and what isn't. That doesn't fly in aerospace.
-
Fix blame. In aerospace, people get blamed for screwing up. You do not want your name or the name of your company to appear in an NTSB crash report. If you screw up big time, it will.
Mistakes in aerospace are publicized. There's an NTSB database of 140,000 crashes. If it was a hardware failure, the vendor is named.
-
Warranties have real meaning Airplanes come with good warranties, and so do all the parts that go into them. Commercial software doesn't.
This runs engineering costs way up, and the life cycles are longer, but in IT, most of the commercial products are sold in large numbers, so you get to spread that engineering cost over a large number of items.It's time for computing to grow up and accept this kind of discipline. The automotive industry had to accept it in the 1960s, and cars got much better within a decade.
Go read Drexler's "Engines of Creation" for the classic "nanoassembler" hype. The idea of pushing atoms together is neat, but it's hard to do. Free-floating nanoassemblers are still a fantasy. I expect to see nanoassemblers, but they'll probably be more like scanning tunneling microscopes made on an IC substrate and used to read and write DNA. Making big hunks of solid materials that way is too slow. Look at how long it takes to make a tree, or a coral reef, or a pearl. (Admittedly biology is power-limited. In a manufacturing environment, you can run external power into the nanomachines and remove that limitation. But that won't work for the free-floating nanomachine concept.)
If you have a good milling machine, you can make almost any solid shape you want. I know four people with milling machines at home. Two of them have good computer-controlled mills with all the necessary software. Yet they don't actually make all that much. One of them is building a steam engine, and he's been at that for years.
Then there are stereolithography machines. The newer ones work fine. You can now make things out of ABS and nylon, which are tough enough to be useful. This is a big improvement over the early models, which made only soft wax models nice to look at but useless.
It's a very slow way to make stuff. In the real world, almost all consumer products, with the notable exception of wood and fabric products, are made by some kind of cheap moulding process. There are dozens of such processes, from die casting to injection moulding to progressive stamping, but they all involve forcing material into a mould. This is an incredibly cheap process in quantity, and is why manufactured goods are so cheap. Very few consumer items are made by machining down a solid hunk of material.
Even ICs aren't made by direct writing. It's quite possible to make ICs with direct-writing electron beam machines. This eliminates the need for masks, and every IC can be different. Works fine. Useful ICs have been prototyped that way for years. Too slow to be commercially feasible.
If they ship it with a dinky lens, the exposure times will be too long for a handheld device.
Most of the hard work is in the encoder, which has to recognize frame-to-frame motion and make hard decisions. The decoder just does what the data stream says to do.
That project was in development a few years ago, but wasn't picked up. That would have been a fun movie. Like "Van Helsing", but with a female lead.
The worst problems in the Linux/UNIX world come from user interfaces that deal with the state of the underlying system without knowing enough about what that state really is.
Printer configuration is an obvious one. Why should there even be printer configuration? When you want to print something, you should be presented with a list of available printers. Everything else should be automatic. Worst case, you might have to type in the name of a remote printer that's not on your local LAN.
And what do you do when you merge together two divergent versions? That's what patch theory is all about.
Some background is here. "Ken Stone discussed how the United Stirling engine and parabolic dish system was taken out of moth balls and revived. He announced that there is now a new company that appears to be getting into the Stirling engine field with the old United Stirling engine designs."
You can get it now if you want it. It's a pre-release with a self-destruct timer, but it's available.
The National Rifle Association's online store already carries X-Treme Accuracy Shooting, a sniper training game. "If you like guns, you will love this game." For sex and gun freaks, they have Kill It and Grill It, with a cover showing women in sexy tops carrying big guns. For those who like to shoot while drinking, or drink while shooting, there's the NRA hip flask. So the NRA's already pushing violence, sex, and booze. They make GTA look like small-timers.
And, of course, one of the best selling games of all time continues to be Deer Hunter, now with "ultra realistic environments", "accurate animal behavior" and "addictive gameplay".
So if you're in the game industry and getting flak from "family" groups, give them a tour of the gun nut world and see what they have to say about that.
One way to resolve the issue is to ask the employer to fill out IRS Form SS-8", "Determination of Worker Status for purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Witholding." Workers can also fill out the form directly. This initiates a process at the IRS in which the IRS sends forms to both sides and eventually issues a letter opinion resolving the issue.
If an employer proposes that you should be an "independent contractor", but it's really a job (they tell you when and where to work and how to do the job), this is a useful form to show them. It scares HR departments and their lawyers. If the IRS decides that a class of "independent contractors" is in fact employees, the employer has to pay back employment taxes. The IRS tends to view anything that looks like a job as a job, regardless of what the employer says.
If you've been an "independent contractor" recently but no longer have a connection to that company, you can file an SS-8 form, and may save some money on taxes if you're retroactively reclassified as an employee.
Then there will be pressure to apply it to whitehouse.org, which is an anti-Bush satire site.
Then redirecting al-Jazeera to Fox News...
0wn corporate networks! Laugh at their ineffective firewalls. Use them to send spam all night! Resell them on Spamforum.biz. At last, the killer app for "grid computing".