This time they're paying back the Bush adminstration for the FCC deal that permits them to keep third-party ISPs from using their lines. The telcos have been lobbying for this for years, so that consumers don't have a choice of ISPs.
It's an election year move, not a new development.
SBC has talked up a few fibre-to-the home trials, but even the small scale trials never seem to happen.
Sooner or later, someone will come out with something that has "all the oldies". There are about 2000 official "oldies" (contact your local Clear Channel station for a list). So why not just preload all of them. Negotiate a bulk rate.
Or just program a device with a receiver to accumulate them from broadcast radio.
Browser windows are going to have to become hierarchical. If the code in window A causes the opening of window B, window B must be considered a child of window A. If window A closes, so must window B.
This means popups can't survive their parents, which is probably a good thing.
Visual parenting is needed, too. If the parent window is minimized or goes to the back, so should its child windows. Window headers should reflect the parent window's header.
Child windows shouldn't be allowed to position themselves entirely outside of the parent window. They should have to overlap, at least marginally.
(Strict users might turn on a mode where they have to overlap totally, like subwindows in an application.) This creates a visual association between the parent and child windows.
With this, multiple window sites behave in a more tolerable manner.
Here's a very similar article from 1997, from the same guy at MIT, making about the same claims. They sounded closer to success back then.
They've been working on this since 1993, and in 1997 they said they'd have it working in three years. In 2004, they say they'll have it working in three years.
It doesn't work yet. They can fabricate the individual parts, but it doesn't really generate power.
It's not an unreasonable idea, but if this was going to work, there should already be little
gas turbine powerplants a few inches long, machined out of metal by standard techniques. The smallest turbines available weight around 1.5Kg, and are used for model aircraft, and they don't have to run for very long. There's a "microturbine" industry, but they mean 10KW units taller than a man.
Little turbines are hard. Automotive turbines and light-plane turbines have been attempted many times, but have never been cost-effective.
I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME!
He should talk.
Shatner's career other than Star Trek has been a disaster. He has a minor part in "Dodgeball". A minor part in "American Psycho 2".
A minor part in "Miss Congeniality". A minor part in "Loaded Weapon 1". Decades of minor roles, all the way back to Ranger Bob in the Howdy Doody TV series in 1952. He hasn't been a principal actor in a non-Star Trek feature film since he did Star Trek.
There's also "ntcrash", but Microsoft killed it
on
IE Shines On Broken Code
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's also "ntcrash2" which generates random Win32 calls. It saves what it's doing in a file, so when you crash, there's a record. After the reboot, it starts up again, avoiding all recorded crashes in its log. Microsoft was very upset about that.
That's not even a very tough test. A tougher test would be to generate calls which are permuted slightly from valid ones.
I got an e-mail from Google once that came from a Bonded Spammer (er, Sender) IP address. Unfortunately, it was a misdirected mail bounce, which is a violation of the Bonded Sender TOS. A note to Bonded Sender and Google made them stop that.
If you sign up with one of these "trusted sender" schemes, be very careful that there's no way mail bounces, virus-generated mail, or mail via open proxies can become "trusted". Your ID will be on the mail, and you'll be blamed. Spammers are going to be targeting those sites, since they provide a bypass around some spam filters.
Much of what he's predicting now he was predicting, in 1980, for 2000.
If we get life extension that really works, it will probably work only for genetically modified humans.
The genome, and the species, will have to be changed. The new models probably won't interbreed with the old ones. It will take a few generations to get these new species thoroughly debugged. But it will be really great for people a few centuries downstream.
If you thought race and religion were problems, wait until we have multiple species of humans.
What we are seeing is quite different. Applications programming is becoming more of an off-the-shelf business with minor local customization. This is the business of PeopleSoft, SAP, and the rest of that crowd. There's been a big dent in the COBOL/Java crowd, but there's about as much serious programming as a decade ago.
For those in San Francisco, note that Edward Klockars, Blacksmith, still has his little wooden shop on Folsom near 1st. Even though there is now a skyscraper next door and two more going up across the street.
It's possible to pinpoint the moment when US political reporting tanked. It was during the Reagan Administration, when Ronald Reagan's handler Mike Deaver
introduced the "photo opportunity", and imposed the "no questions at a photo op" rule. Up until then, whenever the press met with the President, they asked questions.
At first, there was talk among the press of simply ignoring "photo ops" as not newsworthy. But the press caved in. That was the beginning of the end of political reporting.
Today, Bush's press conferences are scripted. Ari Fletcher, the White House press secretary, tells Bush which reporters to call on.
Some, although not all, of the reporters ask only planted questions. The whole process is controlled by the White House, not the press.
The overall effect is that there is no moment left in American politics when the President has to answer hostile questions. Even in the recent debates, that was avoided. Read the rules.
Re:I think it's the perceived attitude....
on
The Empires Strike Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes. What we need are news stories like "Former FBI agent Joe Smith, after his conviction for unlawfully seizing property under color of law, is now working as a night shift security guard at the Wal-Mart warehouse in Tupelo, Kansas."
That's what "accountability" means. We need to keep pushing on accountability until we see stories like that.
It's not pointless. Put in your E-mail address and you'll receive lots of interesting messages about how you can enhance your sex life and obtain home mortgages.
Since this is part 15, anybody can play. This could become like WiFi. Anybody can set up a network to everybody on the same transformer, which is likely to become popular in business environments. And if the power company puts in bypass caps around the transformers so they can send, you too can send longer distances, and have a neighborhood-sized LAN.
This has potential for gamers, local Internet radio, and local businesses.
If this is the WOW Energies thing, it's probably bogus. They're talking about "100% increases in efficiency". Bad sign. Recovering large amounts of energy from low-grade waste heat is not possible.
Second law of thermodynamics, remember?
Anybody talking about numbers better than that is claiming perpetual motion. If you could beat the Second Law, you could hook a heat pump up to a heat engine and gain energy.
Doesn't anybody take thermo in engineering school any more?
In real steam plants, additional stages are added at the output which run at successively lower pressures and lower exhaust temperatures, until it ceases to be cost effective to add more stages. This is old technology. Triple expansion steam engines date back to 1900 or so, and multistage steam turbines are almost as old.
What do you want, LiveJournal crap? Here's the last 24 hours of Team Overbot.
Received rev. 2 front connector panel for motion controller interface board. It fits the connectors perfectly. Rechecked interface board on vehicle by jacking up the rear two axles (It's a 6x6, remember) and running the engine. Driveshaft encoder, tach, and throttle control tested and work. Ordered more boards, new optoisolator parts for boards (the old ones didn't source enough current to drive the big solid state relays) and matching front panels. We should have final interface board hardware working in a week.
This will finish all chassis control gear except transmission control.
The roughness in the laser rangefinder tilt head drive turns out to be an out-of-tolerance shaft. The shaft and motor have been removed and sent out
for rework.
The bogus readings from the laser rangefinder simulator turned out to be a wierd behavior in Blender. We have a workaround and have reported a collision detection bug.
Tomorrow is trash day. Empty trash.
If you want that level of detail, join the team. We have papers, videos, and photos on the Overbot web site for those casually interested.
This guy talks about 3000 RPM as a novel, high, shaft speed. Standard power generation turbines normally run at 3600 RPM, or sometimes 1800 RPM, to synch with the power grid. Modern microturbines run up to 96,000 RPM. (Yes, at last, Capstone Turbine isn't vaporware any more. You can actually buy a 60KW generator from them. This is an option worth considering if you need backup power for your data center.) Only 24% efficient, though. General Electric's most efficient gas turbines have reached 60%. (Big turbines are more efficient than little ones.)
Turbine technology is up against materials limits.
Vast amounts of effort (many billions of dollars) have been put into finding better materials for turbine blades, because this limits aircraft performance. Current blades are single crystals of metal, often with a ceramic coating. Pure ceramic blades have been made, but have tensile strength and brittleness problems. The turbine this guy is talking about requires materials way beyond anything that exists today.
If it's thermodynamically possible to build a big machine of the type this guy is talking about, it should possible to build a little one right now.
More than once UPS, USPS, etc dropped off the wrong box in the shipping room, intended for B&N, we'd be opening boxes quickly usually and didn't always notice until we looked at the invoice.
Why do you think Wal-Mart is moving to RFID tags? Soon, every box entering a Wal-Mart will have an RFID tag, placed there by the supplier, or Wal-Mart won't buy it. When that tag comes through the door, it will be immediately checked against the purchasing system. If there's no match, display screens will flash a warning to the stock people, the box goes back on the truck, and somewhere in Bentonville, a computer will log a supplier screwup.
Funny that your website also happens to appear in conjunction with QNX frequently in google searches.
How wierd. We use QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, but none of the Animats animation software runs on QNX.
I have no connection with QSSL, the company that puts out QNX, other than as a user.
What I like about QNX, though, is that it demonstrates that you can build a stable microkernel OS that does everything people expect today on a desktop. It's not technically necessary to have a multimillion line kernel that you'll be patching forever. You pay a 10-20% overhead for message passing. In exchange, you get a microkernel small enough to debug thoroughly. There's only about 100K bytes of code
in the QNX kernel. And it changes rarely. The last significant API change was when 64-bit memory allocation went in.
OpenGL and video playback were added without kernel mods. That demonstrates how flexible the low-level architecture is.
But very, very few microkernel developers have gotten it right. VM for IBM mainframes and QNX are the most notable successes. Note that both of those systems are noted for high uptime, as in years between crashes. I can't think of any academic OS project that resulted in a production-quality microkernel. (Mach 2, the basis for Apple's OS X, is a warmed-over BSD UNIX, and Mach 3, CMU's real microkernel, isn't used much.)
Yeah. I had high hopes for the Hurd, which is supposed to be a microkernel OS. But they went off into a long detour involving Mach, which didn't work out too well.
A key issue with microkernel operating systems is that you have to get the basic architecture right the first time. You can't retrofit it. Mach is a retrofit of a microkernel architecture to BSD. This is like trying to build a racing bicycle starting from SUV parts.
The Hurd guys are now trying to use L4, which is an elegant little research kernel that nobody uses for anything and which is maybe 70% finished.
This is where the Linux architecture, with drivers in the kernel, really bites you. Because all the drivers have to be made preemptable, too. This is at odds with the traditional UNIX "top and bottom" driver architecture, with the "top" running as a process and the "bottom" running at interrupt level.
If you want hard real time and protected mode, you need an architecture like that of QNX, where almost everything runs in user space. File systems, drivers, and networking are all user programs, intercommunicating by message passing. The kernel only handles CPU dispatching, memory management, and message passsing.
In an architecture like that, everything in user space is preemptable, without any extra work in
the system services. There are no long latencies in the QNX kernel; they were all taken care of years ago.
As Linus points out, though, few consumer embedded devices really need hard real time. Most media-related stuff can paper over delays with buffering. A classic comment is, "You run your web server on Linux. You run your nuclear reactor on QNX".
Automotive systems, though, really need it. QNX is big in that market.
SCO stock has been wandering around $3.50 since midsummer. Hasn't been above $4 since mid-August.
Hasn't fallen below $3 yet, although it did make it down to $3.18 once.
Nobody really cares about SCOX any more.
Nobody is going to buy SCO as an ongoing business because IBM has huge counterclaims against them. Remember, IBM is sueing SCO for stealing IBM code. IBM released IBM code into Linux under the GPL. Then SCO resold it, but refused to accept their obligations under the GPL. So IBM revoked SCO's implied license under the GPL, which the GPL allows, and is sueing them for major copyright violations. And IBM can show (and has shown) exact copying of megabytes of IBM code by SCO.
We're getting close to the day when some of IBM's summary judgement motions get decided. If IBM wins any of those, SCO is in deep trouble. At that point, no spin control will help SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
And they announced it back in 2003 "We plan to hit about one million lines by the end of 2003".
And they announced it back in 2002.
Stay tuned for another announcement in 2005.
This time they're paying back the Bush adminstration for the FCC deal that permits them to keep third-party ISPs from using their lines. The telcos have been lobbying for this for years, so that consumers don't have a choice of ISPs. It's an election year move, not a new development.
SBC has talked up a few fibre-to-the home trials, but even the small scale trials never seem to happen.
Or just program a device with a receiver to accumulate them from broadcast radio.
This means popups can't survive their parents, which is probably a good thing.
Visual parenting is needed, too. If the parent window is minimized or goes to the back, so should its child windows. Window headers should reflect the parent window's header.
Child windows shouldn't be allowed to position themselves entirely outside of the parent window. They should have to overlap, at least marginally. (Strict users might turn on a mode where they have to overlap totally, like subwindows in an application.) This creates a visual association between the parent and child windows.
With this, multiple window sites behave in a more tolerable manner.
Advertising should not be deductable as a business expense. It should come directly out of the bottom line. That would reduce ad clutter.
They've been working on this since 1993, and in 1997 they said they'd have it working in three years. In 2004, they say they'll have it working in three years.
It doesn't work yet. They can fabricate the individual parts, but it doesn't really generate power.
It's not an unreasonable idea, but if this was going to work, there should already be little gas turbine powerplants a few inches long, machined out of metal by standard techniques. The smallest turbines available weight around 1.5Kg, and are used for model aircraft, and they don't have to run for very long. There's a "microturbine" industry, but they mean 10KW units taller than a man.
Little turbines are hard. Automotive turbines and light-plane turbines have been attempted many times, but have never been cost-effective.
He should talk. Shatner's career other than Star Trek has been a disaster. He has a minor part in "Dodgeball". A minor part in "American Psycho 2". A minor part in "Miss Congeniality". A minor part in "Loaded Weapon 1". Decades of minor roles, all the way back to Ranger Bob in the Howdy Doody TV series in 1952. He hasn't been a principal actor in a non-Star Trek feature film since he did Star Trek.
That's not even a very tough test. A tougher test would be to generate calls which are permuted slightly from valid ones.
If you sign up with one of these "trusted sender" schemes, be very careful that there's no way mail bounces, virus-generated mail, or mail via open proxies can become "trusted". Your ID will be on the mail, and you'll be blamed. Spammers are going to be targeting those sites, since they provide a bypass around some spam filters.
If we get life extension that really works, it will probably work only for genetically modified humans. The genome, and the species, will have to be changed. The new models probably won't interbreed with the old ones. It will take a few generations to get these new species thoroughly debugged. But it will be really great for people a few centuries downstream.
If you thought race and religion were problems, wait until we have multiple species of humans.
Their company may be incorporated in the Bahamas, but their servers are in the London Docklands area. They're a customer of "core-isp.net".
What we are seeing is quite different. Applications programming is becoming more of an off-the-shelf business with minor local customization. This is the business of PeopleSoft, SAP, and the rest of that crowd. There's been a big dent in the COBOL/Java crowd, but there's about as much serious programming as a decade ago.
For those in San Francisco, note that Edward Klockars, Blacksmith, still has his little wooden shop on Folsom near 1st. Even though there is now a skyscraper next door and two more going up across the street.
At first, there was talk among the press of simply ignoring "photo ops" as not newsworthy. But the press caved in. That was the beginning of the end of political reporting.
Today, Bush's press conferences are scripted. Ari Fletcher, the White House press secretary, tells Bush which reporters to call on. Some, although not all, of the reporters ask only planted questions. The whole process is controlled by the White House, not the press.
The overall effect is that there is no moment left in American politics when the President has to answer hostile questions. Even in the recent debates, that was avoided. Read the rules.
That's what "accountability" means. We need to keep pushing on accountability until we see stories like that.
It's not pointless. Put in your E-mail address and you'll receive lots of interesting messages about how you can enhance your sex life and obtain home mortgages.
This has potential for gamers, local Internet radio, and local businesses.
Anybody talking about numbers better than that is claiming perpetual motion. If you could beat the Second Law, you could hook a heat pump up to a heat engine and gain energy. Doesn't anybody take thermo in engineering school any more?
In real steam plants, additional stages are added at the output which run at successively lower pressures and lower exhaust temperatures, until it ceases to be cost effective to add more stages. This is old technology. Triple expansion steam engines date back to 1900 or so, and multistage steam turbines are almost as old.
What do you want, LiveJournal crap? Here's the last 24 hours of Team Overbot.
If you want that level of detail, join the team. We have papers, videos, and photos on the Overbot web site for those casually interested.Received rev. 2 front connector panel for motion controller interface board. It fits the connectors perfectly. Rechecked interface board on vehicle by jacking up the rear two axles (It's a 6x6, remember) and running the engine. Driveshaft encoder, tach, and throttle control tested and work. Ordered more boards, new optoisolator parts for boards (the old ones didn't source enough current to drive the big solid state relays) and matching front panels. We should have final interface board hardware working in a week. This will finish all chassis control gear except transmission control.
The roughness in the laser rangefinder tilt head drive turns out to be an out-of-tolerance shaft. The shaft and motor have been removed and sent out for rework.
The bogus readings from the laser rangefinder simulator turned out to be a wierd behavior in Blender. We have a workaround and have reported a collision detection bug.
Tomorrow is trash day. Empty trash.
This guy talks about 3000 RPM as a novel, high, shaft speed. Standard power generation turbines normally run at 3600 RPM, or sometimes 1800 RPM, to synch with the power grid. Modern microturbines run up to 96,000 RPM. (Yes, at last, Capstone Turbine isn't vaporware any more. You can actually buy a 60KW generator from them. This is an option worth considering if you need backup power for your data center.) Only 24% efficient, though. General Electric's most efficient gas turbines have reached 60%. (Big turbines are more efficient than little ones.)
Turbine technology is up against materials limits. Vast amounts of effort (many billions of dollars) have been put into finding better materials for turbine blades, because this limits aircraft performance. Current blades are single crystals of metal, often with a ceramic coating. Pure ceramic blades have been made, but have tensile strength and brittleness problems. The turbine this guy is talking about requires materials way beyond anything that exists today.
If it's thermodynamically possible to build a big machine of the type this guy is talking about, it should possible to build a little one right now.
Why do you think Wal-Mart is moving to RFID tags? Soon, every box entering a Wal-Mart will have an RFID tag, placed there by the supplier, or Wal-Mart won't buy it. When that tag comes through the door, it will be immediately checked against the purchasing system. If there's no match, display screens will flash a warning to the stock people, the box goes back on the truck, and somewhere in Bentonville, a computer will log a supplier screwup.
How wierd. We use QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, but none of the Animats animation software runs on QNX. I have no connection with QSSL, the company that puts out QNX, other than as a user.
What I like about QNX, though, is that it demonstrates that you can build a stable microkernel OS that does everything people expect today on a desktop. It's not technically necessary to have a multimillion line kernel that you'll be patching forever. You pay a 10-20% overhead for message passing. In exchange, you get a microkernel small enough to debug thoroughly. There's only about 100K bytes of code in the QNX kernel. And it changes rarely. The last significant API change was when 64-bit memory allocation went in.
OpenGL and video playback were added without kernel mods. That demonstrates how flexible the low-level architecture is.
But very, very few microkernel developers have gotten it right. VM for IBM mainframes and QNX are the most notable successes. Note that both of those systems are noted for high uptime, as in years between crashes. I can't think of any academic OS project that resulted in a production-quality microkernel. (Mach 2, the basis for Apple's OS X, is a warmed-over BSD UNIX, and Mach 3, CMU's real microkernel, isn't used much.)
A key issue with microkernel operating systems is that you have to get the basic architecture right the first time. You can't retrofit it. Mach is a retrofit of a microkernel architecture to BSD. This is like trying to build a racing bicycle starting from SUV parts.
The Hurd guys are now trying to use L4, which is an elegant little research kernel that nobody uses for anything and which is maybe 70% finished.
If you want hard real time and protected mode, you need an architecture like that of QNX, where almost everything runs in user space. File systems, drivers, and networking are all user programs, intercommunicating by message passing. The kernel only handles CPU dispatching, memory management, and message passsing.
In an architecture like that, everything in user space is preemptable, without any extra work in the system services. There are no long latencies in the QNX kernel; they were all taken care of years ago.
As Linus points out, though, few consumer embedded devices really need hard real time. Most media-related stuff can paper over delays with buffering. A classic comment is, "You run your web server on Linux. You run your nuclear reactor on QNX".
Automotive systems, though, really need it. QNX is big in that market.
Nobody really cares about SCOX any more.
Nobody is going to buy SCO as an ongoing business because IBM has huge counterclaims against them. Remember, IBM is sueing SCO for stealing IBM code. IBM released IBM code into Linux under the GPL. Then SCO resold it, but refused to accept their obligations under the GPL. So IBM revoked SCO's implied license under the GPL, which the GPL allows, and is sueing them for major copyright violations. And IBM can show (and has shown) exact copying of megabytes of IBM code by SCO.
We're getting close to the day when some of IBM's summary judgement motions get decided. If IBM wins any of those, SCO is in deep trouble. At that point, no spin control will help SCO.
You should try this other MMORPG called "ebay". It's about items, items, items, buying, selling, and becoming more powerful.
View it now. Your cooperation is being monitored.