An interesting tale in those books is how, back in the day that Western Union was the only way to transmit internationally, NSA leaned on them to in effect "Bcc" the U.S. Gov't on all incoming / outgoing faxes from the U.N. without the knowledge of our friends or allies.
Ah, yes. Many years ago, in the early 1970s, I visited a UNIVAC installation at Western Union in Parsippany, NJ. I worked at another UNIVAC instllation nearby, and knew the UNIVAC people at WU, so I got a detailed explaination of how things worked. One of the machines there was a UNIVAC 419-III real-time computer, acting as the international gateway for Western Union message traffic. I was told that messages were kept for three days (on FASTRAND drums), then erased. I noticed a tape drive writing a block every few seconds, obviously a log tape, and asked what that was. I was told, "Oh, that's for NSA".
Total message traffic in and out of the US was only a few messages per second in those days. Each message cost the sender several dollars.
That's probably SCO's announced stock buyback. They're using their own cash (which they got from Microsoft) to buy back their own stock, and thus prop up the price.
Most, although not all, spam, has the goal of getting the recipient to enter a credit card number.
At that point, the business has a legal obligation to identify itself. Here, for example, are some excerpts from California's law, from Business and Professions Code section 17538(d):
(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other
electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when
the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:
Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit
charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in
writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an
on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal
name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in
paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business
is actually conducted.
(2) If the disclosure of the vendor's legal name and address
information required by this subdivision is made by on-screen notice,
all of the following shall apply:
(A) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall
appear on any of the following: (i) the first screen displayed when
the vendor's electronic site is accessed, (ii) on the screen on
which goods or services are first offered, (iii) on the screen on
which a buyer may place the order for goods or services, (iv) on the
screen on which the buyer may enter payment information, such as a
credit card account number, or (v) for nonbrowser-based technologies,
in a manner that gives the user a reasonable opportunity to review
that information. The communication of that disclosure shall not be
structured to be smaller or less legible than the text of the offer
of the goods or services.
(g) Any violation of the provisions of this section is a
misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not
exceeding six months, by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars
($1,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
OK. So right there, we have a criminal offense committed by most spammers. With a potential six month jail term. The problem is enforcement.
What we really want is for Visa International and MasterCard, Inc, to require banks offering merchant accounts to police their merchant customers for spamming. If we can cut off spammer access to the credit card networks, and cause them
substantial chargebacks, spamming will become much riskier.
So we need to impose liability via the credit card processing chain. Banks can always find the merchant, or at least collect from them.
I'm talking to some banking people about this. Because Visa International, a California-based company, is pushing something called "u-commerce". which will require some regulatory approvals, it's a good time to put pressure on.
After scrolling through a page about a hundred screens high, containing many extracts from this guy's spam, you finally discover that this bozo has reinvented the whitelist.
Yeah. Ellison also has a sunlight-visible projection TV in that place.
And that's his old house. His new one is the size of a shopping mall, and it's years behind schedule.
There are basic limits to battery technology. A battery is two chemicals with electromotive potentials some number of volts apart. (Remember that chart in chemistry class?) As you move towards the ends of the scale, the chemicals become more corrosive and volatile.
Progress in battery technology consists of finding ways to handle chemical pairs with obnoxous properties. There are some good, but dangerous, combinations, like sodium-sulfur batteries.
Lithium cells are the best compromise between safety and energy density to date.
People have been beating on this problem, hard, for a century. They're still trying. Coming up,
Battcon 2004, in Columbus, OH.
Fuel cells, maybe. Ultracapacitors, maybe. Batteries are probably within a factor of two of their ultimate limits.
One of IBM's more enduring products, even though they keep trying to get rid of it, is CICS. CICS, the "customer information control system" is 35 years old this year.
CICS is a neat idea that deserves a new look. It's a "transaction processing OS". Think of it as an OS whose purpose in life is to run CGI programs efficiently. In its simplest form, each incoming transaction starts up a new program which reads the transaaction, connects to the database, processes the transaction, and exits, typically within a fraction of a second. The operating system is optimized for starting and running those transactions.
CGI processing under Linux is inefficient, and hacks like mod_perl are needed so that a new process isn't created for each transaction.
One could do better.
Transaction programs under CICS are started, run up to the point that they need input, and stopped. When a transaction comes in, a copy of the stopped transaction program is forked off, used to run the transaction, and terminated. So there's no way for data to leak between transactions. All transaction programs run in a jail, allowed to talk only to the database and to reply to their incoming message.
With better OS support for transactions, web servers could have a cleaner, faster interface for their transactions.
This is a gear and rack assembly. It's a funny shaped one, but it's a gear and rack.
Standard gear and rack interaction is well understood. Racks are usually straight-sided, while gear teeth are involute curves. Two gears which will mesh with the same straight-sided rack will mesh properly with each other. This fact reduces the size of simple gear inventories from O(N^2) to O(N).
"Mesh properly" has a specific meaning. There has to be contact on both sides of each gear tooth when the axes of the meshing gears are a constant distance apart. Getting this right improves gear life by orders of magnitude.
There's a nice little section in the back of every Boston Gear catalog which explains all this.
Available online, too.
Nonstandard rack shapes are rare, but not unheard of. The drive system on the IBM RS-1 electrohydraulic gantry robot used a curved-sided rack.
Yes. Greathead's shield solved the problem "how do you dig a tunnel in soft ground without cave-ins". TBMs built for soft ground incorporate a shield very much like Greathead's. The tunnel liner segments are assembled inside the rear of the cylindrical shield, and then the shield advances. That way, there's no unsupported tunnel roof at any time. In harder ground, it's not necessary to do that. In varied ground, things get complicated, for which see the New Austrian Tunneling Method, or NATM.
One thing though, how the heck do they get the rings through the tunnel? In pieces?
Yes. Each ring is made of segments. In newer sections of the London Underground, you can see metal ring segments bolted together, and it's clear how this all works. TBMs typically use six to ten segments per ring, and have a big hydraulic arm to lift them into position.
The segments travel up to the rear of the TBM on narrow gauge railroad tracks, which are also used to remove the dirt.
If you're beating a chess program, it must be an obsolete one. Get
Deep Fritz, for only $112. This is the program that tied Kasparov 2:2, running on a 4-CPU desktop machine.
Unless your picture has been on the cover of Chess Life, Deep Fritz will trounce you.
From the pictures, that's just the front end of the TBM. And without the cutting head. Here's the whole thing.
Eurotunnel used eleven TBMs. The main four TBMs that drilled under the channel were not recovered.
The other TBMs were used for the access tunnels at each end, and for the service tunnel. These look like TBMs used under land for the access tunnels.
A TBM isn't just a drill. It builds the tunnel. Up front, there's a cutter head, but that's just the front end. Behind the cutter is the machinery that lines the tunnel, usually with precast concrete segments. The cutter advances the width of one segment ring, and then a circle of big wedged-shape segments is inserted behind the cutting section. Once those are in place, the hydraulic cylinders that push the machine forward can push against the new section of ring for the next advance. This also squeezes the ring against the previous rings, sealing up any gaps.
No more than one ring width of roof is ever unsupported.
Then there are systems for debris removal, moving segment rings up to the TBM, laying railroad tracks on which the segment ring cars travel, grouting between the rings, and such. The whole rig can be several hundred feet long.
Note that the inside of the finished tunnel, with liner in place, is smaller than the TBM. So if you bore from both ends towards the middle, as Eurotunnel did to save time, you don't get your TBM back. You have to cut it apart and remove the pieces.
The CDC 1604 was a low-end machine. The "predecessor to the Cray" was the CDC 6600, Seymour Cray's design and the first real supercomputer.
The CDC 6600 had all the modern supercomputer stuff. It was a superscalar RISC machine, with lots of registers and instruction-level parallelism. This in the 1960s.
I/O was shoved off to ten "peripheral processors", which were really one CPU with hardware multiprogramming emulating ten slower machines.
The I/O processors handled all the peripherals. The I/O processors could request a context switch of the big CPU, and thus the peripheral processors managed the main CPU.
Freon-cooled, huge, and costing millions of dollars, the CDC 6600 was one of the big engines of scientific computing in the late 1960s. CDC had commercial data centers where you could buy CPU time.
Those are videos of the preliminary qualification, inspection, and demonstration at the California Motor Speedway in Fontana. You could see most of the event from a single point, and all of it from two points.
The TerraMax video, where it rams the mini-van repeatedly, is very funny.
Everybody serious already has 15cm accurate GPS with an INS to get past GPS outages. That was required, because you have to stay within the allowed boundary widths, which can be as narrow as 10'. If your vehicle is 6' wide, you're allowed +- 2' deviation from the centerline.
CMU is using an Applanix GPS. We're using a Novatel; the Applanix didn't meet the temperature spec.
Automatic driving is still sensor-limited. The
current generation of millimeter radars can see other cars, but not smaller obstacles like children. No way can they see a pothole. Vision systems are good enough for road following, but reliable obstacle avoidance still seems out of reach.
We, of course, are working on fully automatic driving. We have both a visual road-follower and a millimeter radar. That's not enough.
Even line-scanner laser rangefinders are too limited. We need a true 3D device. Such things have been built, but the market is so tiny (and they're so big and clunky) that they're all one-offs. It's clear that the problem can be fixed, but the market isn't there yet to do it.
That project has been kicking around Stanford for decades. I saw that satellite under construction almost twenty years ago. It's basically a subsidy program for PhD students, not a satellite program. If that job had been outsourced to Hughes or Loral, it would have launched decades ago.
Nussbaum claims 70 installations, but mostly for new-car sales operations, not parking.
The basic problem is designing and building something that can survive a hostile environment and indifferent maintenance. Trevipark has a good system for that. The basic lift is a single big hydraulic cylinder, a reliable, rugged technology used for heavy freight elevators everywhere.
On top of that is a turntable, also a reliable technology. On top of the turntable is a horizontal pallet mover, probably the least reliable mechanical component. But it's only one self-contained unit, so it can be overdesigned.
The large 2D rectangular systems involve too many cables, wheels, and tracks spread over a large space. High-maintenance.
The "lego machine" is in the basement corridor of the William Gates Computer Science Building (really!) at Stanford. The basement corridor seems to have the less-interesting historic hardware. There's also a large glass case of old networking hardware ("Wow! A DELNI!"), all unlabeled.
Copyright on functional objects is very limited. You can't copyright auto parts, for example, and keep others from making duplicates of them. (Auto companies have tried.) You can copyright software as a "writing", but the coverage is narrow. Coverage is broader when it looks like "artistic expression", which is why movie companies have to pay royalties to book authors, even if very little survives from book to film.
Note that what Darl is saying is much stronger than what SCO put in their court filings. If they tried to claim what Darl is saying in court, they'd lose, because of the "functional part" rule.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes. Many years ago, in the early 1970s, I visited a UNIVAC installation at Western Union in Parsippany, NJ. I worked at another UNIVAC instllation nearby, and knew the UNIVAC people at WU, so I got a detailed explaination of how things worked. One of the machines there was a UNIVAC 419-III real-time computer, acting as the international gateway for Western Union message traffic. I was told that messages were kept for three days (on FASTRAND drums), then erased. I noticed a tape drive writing a block every few seconds, obviously a log tape, and asked what that was. I was told, "Oh, that's for NSA".
Total message traffic in and out of the US was only a few messages per second in those days. Each message cost the sender several dollars.
That's probably SCO's announced stock buyback. They're using their own cash (which they got from Microsoft) to buy back their own stock, and thus prop up the price.
Most, although not all, spam, has the goal of getting the recipient to enter a credit card number. At that point, the business has a legal obligation to identify itself. Here, for example, are some excerpts from California's law, from Business and Professions Code section 17538(d):
OK. So right there, we have a criminal offense committed by most spammers. With a potential six month jail term. The problem is enforcement.
What we really want is for Visa International and MasterCard, Inc, to require banks offering merchant accounts to police their merchant customers for spamming. If we can cut off spammer access to the credit card networks, and cause them substantial chargebacks, spamming will become much riskier.
So we need to impose liability via the credit card processing chain. Banks can always find the merchant, or at least collect from them.
I'm talking to some banking people about this. Because Visa International, a California-based company, is pushing something called "u-commerce". which will require some regulatory approvals, it's a good time to put pressure on.
Next!
See Larry Ellison's Driveway Generator.
My point is that CGI does inefficiently what TIP and CICS do efficiently. That's an indication that better support for transactions is useful.
Fuel cells, maybe. Ultracapacitors, maybe. Batteries are probably within a factor of two of their ultimate limits.
CICS is a neat idea that deserves a new look. It's a "transaction processing OS". Think of it as an OS whose purpose in life is to run CGI programs efficiently. In its simplest form, each incoming transaction starts up a new program which reads the transaaction, connects to the database, processes the transaction, and exits, typically within a fraction of a second. The operating system is optimized for starting and running those transactions.
CGI processing under Linux is inefficient, and hacks like mod_perl are needed so that a new process isn't created for each transaction. One could do better. Transaction programs under CICS are started, run up to the point that they need input, and stopped. When a transaction comes in, a copy of the stopped transaction program is forked off, used to run the transaction, and terminated. So there's no way for data to leak between transactions. All transaction programs run in a jail, allowed to talk only to the database and to reply to their incoming message.
With better OS support for transactions, web servers could have a cleaner, faster interface for their transactions.
FreeAmp, now called Zinf, can be downloaded here. Free, open source, runs on Linux and Windows. No advertising. Just plays.
Standard gear and rack interaction is well understood. Racks are usually straight-sided, while gear teeth are involute curves. Two gears which will mesh with the same straight-sided rack will mesh properly with each other. This fact reduces the size of simple gear inventories from O(N^2) to O(N).
"Mesh properly" has a specific meaning. There has to be contact on both sides of each gear tooth when the axes of the meshing gears are a constant distance apart. Getting this right improves gear life by orders of magnitude.
There's a nice little section in the back of every Boston Gear catalog which explains all this. Available online, too.
Nonstandard rack shapes are rare, but not unheard of. The drive system on the IBM RS-1 electrohydraulic gantry robot used a curved-sided rack.
Yes. Greathead's shield solved the problem "how do you dig a tunnel in soft ground without cave-ins". TBMs built for soft ground incorporate a shield very much like Greathead's. The tunnel liner segments are assembled inside the rear of the cylindrical shield, and then the shield advances. That way, there's no unsupported tunnel roof at any time. In harder ground, it's not necessary to do that. In varied ground, things get complicated, for which see the New Austrian Tunneling Method, or NATM.
Yes. Each ring is made of segments. In newer sections of the London Underground, you can see metal ring segments bolted together, and it's clear how this all works. TBMs typically use six to ten segments per ring, and have a big hydraulic arm to lift them into position. The segments travel up to the rear of the TBM on narrow gauge railroad tracks, which are also used to remove the dirt.
If anybody really cares, see Segmental Concrete Lining Design and Installation, which will tell you more about this process than you ever wanted to know.
Unless your picture has been on the cover of Chess Life, Deep Fritz will trounce you.
Eurotunnel used eleven TBMs. The main four TBMs that drilled under the channel were not recovered. The other TBMs were used for the access tunnels at each end, and for the service tunnel. These look like TBMs used under land for the access tunnels.
If it were in anywhere near working condition, it could be sold on TBM exchange. Here're a large TBM in working condition for sale. Only has 6Km of mileage on it. Through solid rock.
A TBM isn't just a drill. It builds the tunnel. Up front, there's a cutter head, but that's just the front end. Behind the cutter is the machinery that lines the tunnel, usually with precast concrete segments. The cutter advances the width of one segment ring, and then a circle of big wedged-shape segments is inserted behind the cutting section. Once those are in place, the hydraulic cylinders that push the machine forward can push against the new section of ring for the next advance. This also squeezes the ring against the previous rings, sealing up any gaps. No more than one ring width of roof is ever unsupported.
Then there are systems for debris removal, moving segment rings up to the TBM, laying railroad tracks on which the segment ring cars travel, grouting between the rings, and such. The whole rig can be several hundred feet long.
Note that the inside of the finished tunnel, with liner in place, is smaller than the TBM. So if you bore from both ends towards the middle, as Eurotunnel did to save time, you don't get your TBM back. You have to cut it apart and remove the pieces.
The CDC 6600 had all the modern supercomputer stuff. It was a superscalar RISC machine, with lots of registers and instruction-level parallelism. This in the 1960s.
I/O was shoved off to ten "peripheral processors", which were really one CPU with hardware multiprogramming emulating ten slower machines. The I/O processors handled all the peripherals. The I/O processors could request a context switch of the big CPU, and thus the peripheral processors managed the main CPU.
Freon-cooled, huge, and costing millions of dollars, the CDC 6600 was one of the big engines of scientific computing in the late 1960s. CDC had commercial data centers where you could buy CPU time.
2006: eBay no longer accepts ads for analog speakers.
Anybody who tried that in a union shop would have strike that day.
The TerraMax video, where it rams the mini-van repeatedly, is very funny.
CMU is using an Applanix GPS. We're using a Novatel; the Applanix didn't meet the temperature spec.
We, of course, are working on fully automatic driving. We have both a visual road-follower and a millimeter radar. That's not enough.
Even line-scanner laser rangefinders are too limited. We need a true 3D device. Such things have been built, but the market is so tiny (and they're so big and clunky) that they're all one-offs. It's clear that the problem can be fixed, but the market isn't there yet to do it.
That project has been kicking around Stanford for decades. I saw that satellite under construction almost twenty years ago. It's basically a subsidy program for PhD students, not a satellite program. If that job had been outsourced to Hughes or Loral, it would have launched decades ago.
The basic problem is designing and building something that can survive a hostile environment and indifferent maintenance. Trevipark has a good system for that. The basic lift is a single big hydraulic cylinder, a reliable, rugged technology used for heavy freight elevators everywhere. On top of that is a turntable, also a reliable technology. On top of the turntable is a horizontal pallet mover, probably the least reliable mechanical component. But it's only one self-contained unit, so it can be overdesigned.
The large 2D rectangular systems involve too many cables, wheels, and tracks spread over a large space. High-maintenance.
The "lego machine" is in the basement corridor of the William Gates Computer Science Building (really!) at Stanford. The basement corridor seems to have the less-interesting historic hardware. There's also a large glass case of old networking hardware ("Wow! A DELNI!"), all unlabeled.
Note that what Darl is saying is much stronger than what SCO put in their court filings. If they tried to claim what Darl is saying in court, they'd lose, because of the "functional part" rule.