I heard similar reasoning from the Interleaf sales rep a long time ago. Interleaf is now defunct.
Interleaf was the first good WYSIWYG word processor/page editor/publication builder program.
It came out in the early 1980s, and originally ran on SUN workstations. Interleaf wanted to sell you a $60,000 bundle with Interleaf, a workstation and a laser printer, so they didn't sell very many units. But, eventually, there were Mac and Windows versions.
Interleaf remained a niche product for almost two decades. It was better than anything sold for word processing until the late 1990s, but the company was stuck with the high price point.
They could have owned word processing, but they blew it.
Interleaf was acquired by Broadvision around 1998, which killed it.
The Economist, which I've read for many years, used to be scrupulously neutral and very accurate. Then, a few years ago, articles started to appear which sounded like they came from the Heiritage Foundation.
Like this one.
The "electricity internet" scheme comes from the people who think free markets are the answer to everything. When free markets fail, they say they weren't free enough.
That group architected California electricity deregulation, with a power auction every half hour around the clock. Nobody was held responsible for electrical reliability,; the "market" would insure there was enough supply.
This was an absolute disaster. We had blackouts. The biggest electric utilities in California went bankrupt.
Rates went up. Even the major energy trader, Enron, went bust. And we're still paying for the mess.
The "electricity internet" scheme is a plan to provide more transmission facilities. But not because they're needed for power engineering reasons. The extra capacity is to facilitate energy trading.
The basic trouble with electricity deregulation is that it encourages building inefficient power plants. Traditionally, regulated electric utilities build mostly "base load" plants, intended to run 100% of the time at high efficiency, plus some less efficient "peaking" plants brought up during peak periods. In a deregulated environment, wholesale electricity prices change by several orders of magnitude throughout the day. The optimal strategy for a generation company is to target only the peak periods, using low-cost plants burning high-cost fuel. (These are usually natural-gas fired turbines.) And there's no money in having excess capacity that's only used a few times per year. A few blackouts a year are to be expected. That's the result of a free market solution.
In Californa, energy traders figured out how to create shortages. Buying, but not using, electrical transmission and natural gas pipeline capacity was one way used to drive up prices.
The fanatical free-market types claim the problem is that the huge variation in daily rates isn't pushed all the way down to residential customers. You'd set your thermostat in dollars per day, and when the power price went up, the air conditioning would turn off. Bigger customers would have energy storage facilities. Most people would just suffer. That's the plan.
For example, they let Veeck vs SBCCI stand, which allows laws to be copyrighted by private entities.
No, no. The Fifth Circuit ruled for Veeck, and the Supreme Court let that stand. Veeck put a "copyrighted" building code on the Internet, and the Fifth Circuit ruled this was legal, whether the author of the code liked it or not.
Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary,
Italy, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain all require "opt-in" for mail. (List from CAUCE Europe.
The US legalized "legitimate" spam with the CAN-SPAM act. Bulk mail with forged headers is a criminal offense. Bulk mail using stolen resources is a felony.
The FTC is very soft on spamcrime. There have been no FTC actions under the CAN-SPAM act whatsoever.
Wait until Kerry is in. We may have some progress under the next administration.
The language is straightforward enough. But I tried to do a few things in the early days, and between the AWT/Swing transition, discontinued development products, and Sun's annoying tendency to releaase huge half-implemented class libraries (remember Java 3D?), and the general realization that you don't write applications in Java, I got fed up and left.
There's a draft position paper on this from the IAU. It's a real issue, because planets are now being detected in other solar systems. (The current count of extrasolar planets is around 120.)
The smallest one detected thus far is about a tenth the mass of Jupiter. Detection of Earth-sized extrasolar planets, let alone Pluto-sized ones, is a ways off.
The IAU's current concern is to distinguish between extrasolar planets and dark stars. It takes about 13x the mass of Jupiter before an object generates the gravitational pressure needed to ignite the D-D reaction. So the IAU says that if it's smaller than 13x Jupiter, it's a planet. Bigger than that, it's a "brown dwarf" if not shining.
Indeed, Apple doesn't make any products for the "living room".
A stationary iPod, or an iPod base station that acts as a home stereo, might fill that niche. But that idea really works only if you have a home network, since the thing needs a network connection to the outside world, and nobody is going to buy a DSL line for their stereo.
That was supposed to be a joke.
But someone already built one, the Bass-Station. They put a WiFi access point, web server and 128MB drive into a boom box, making it a public-access jukebox. People can connect to it, view or change the playlist, and download its music collection.
It's time for a new generation of boom box. You could cram quite a bit into one of those big boxes. The list:
Stores music on a big disk drive.
Exchanges music with nearby devices using a WiFi link.
Full DJ features: mixing, scratching, synching, effects, etc.
"Instant party" mode:
connects to other boxes over the WiFi link, so everybody brings a boom box, slaves to the DJ, and all the slave boxes act as amps.
Keyboard and screen for general Internet use, plus PDA capabiliites.
3G cell phone.
Microphone and camera.
GPS receiver.
Anti-theft system, including remote link to car anti-theft system.
When they (Caterpillar) released their first model, the next 10 years were filled with constant innovation, but they eventually reached a point where the basic design was so solid, your basic earthmover looks the same as it did 20 years ago.
Actually, no. Caterpillar's line has changed drastically in recent years. The big earthmoving tractors even look different, with elevated drive sprockets. The rubber-tracked Challenger agricultural tractor looks like nothing ever seen on a farm. Most new Caterpillar machines have computers on board, and they play a much more active role in driving than car computers.
Joystick control of multiple axes is common
(although many machines have a hydraulic joystick system, not a computer-controlled one).
GPS-based automatic driving is available for farm tractors.
There's continuous progress in heavy equipment.
The field has not stagnated. "High tech" now works well enough to be trusted in tough environments like mining and construction.
Everything there has been powered for decades, but now there's more smarts behind the power.
Even "mature technologies" like locomotives continue to improve. The latest generation of locomotives have servomotor-type control of all the traction motors, so they all stay in sync and there is no wheel slip. Multiple engines synch up, so they all pull evenly. Helps get all those
imported products from the Port of Los Angeles over the Sierras.
OK, "grid computing" fans, here it is, a big CPU resource open for commercial customers. Let's see if people line up to buy cycles. There must be paying customers out there who want to do rendering, or VLSI simulation, or numerical wind-tunnel tests of wing sections, or something.
We're waiting...
As I've pointed out before, if there was a market for this, ISPs would be selling off-peak CPU time on their hosting farms.
"Social networking" sites are so over. Look who wrote the article: "Philipp Harper is a free-lance writer who lives in south Georgia." It's like online dating, which was really cool for about six months in 1998.
The guy behind the MacArthur awards was, basically, a spammer. He owned an crooked insurance company, Banker's Life.
At one point the company had a net worth of $4 and was notorious for refusing to pay claims. The company was kicked out of numerous states by insurance regulators.
He introduced mail-order insurance, advertised through newspaper ads, then direct mail. His policies had lots of exclusions, so they didn't have to pay off too often. This worked well enough that he made billions.
Now try to find out anything about MacArthur or Banker's Life. There's almost nothing ont he web. There's a biography, "The Stockholder"
(Hoffman, William, 1969, Lyle Stuart, New York, LC 69017957). "One of the ten best business books of 1969", according to Business Week. Great book.
Try to get a copy.
Russian education in math has been good for decades. There's a huge pool of people with strong math skills. That's a huge win for game development.
What private corporate labs are left?
on
AT&T Labs' Brain Drain
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not just Bell Labs. Xerox PARC was spun off as a private company, and isn't doing well. RCA did the same thing with RCA Labs years ago, forming Sarnoff Labs, noted primarily for developing the losing technology for HDTV. When IBM exited the disk drive business, IBM Almaden Labs lost much of its reason for existence, and the people I know there aren't happy. DEC's R&D operation disappeared after the Compaq acquisition.
Outside of drugs/biotech and automotive, it's hard to think of any major US corporate research labs not in decline.
Domain names are a nonissue at this point. The number of registered domains peaked two years ago. The number of domain name disputes is down. The "domain broker" business is essentially dead.
There are already shortcuts to "clavier visuel", "Invite de commandes" and "Regedit" in the visible part of the screen, so everything's ready to start hacking
Yes, Diebold didn't even take off the stuff that has no business whatsoever being on an ATM.
Of course, they couldn't take out Internet Explorer if they wanted to.
Did you notice "sav_trace", the movie file? Was someone recording the screens going by?
Every time there's some high-profile attack that exploits a huge hole like this, there are probably other attacks using the same hole. Ones that quietly break in, look for interesting data like credit card numbers, transmit to a remote system, and exit.
This is a huge hole. It requires no end-user action whatsoever to exploit. The "security" program it attacks is probably running with administrator privileges, even on locked down systems. There's no reason a packet filter should be able to write raw disks. In fact, if it still runs with those privileges, you want to get this "security" product off your system now. This might not be the only hole.
Same letter they sent Lehman Bros.
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This isn't new. This is one of the letters from the December batch from SCO. It reads just like the one they sent Lehman Bros., which has been filed as an exhibit in Red Hat vs. SCO. Lehman Bros. referred SCO to Red Hat, which blew a hole in SCO's claim that Red Hat didn't have standing to sue SCO.
None of SCO's desperate attempts to prop up the stock price have worked. Even the announcement of a stock buyback propped up the price for only one hour, between 0930 and 1030 last Tuesday. SCOX continues its long slide. SCOX closed at 8.71 on Friday. It started the week at 9.5, and the year around 20.
SCO has reached the point where nothing they can say can help them. Only winning some of their lawsuits can help them, and that looks increasingly unlikely. They have to win three separate suits (against Novell, IBM, and Red Hat) to even start collecting from end users.
The "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" was supposed to maintain the International Space Station. Didn't work, but total spending was somewhere around $50 million before Congress pulled the plug.
Slashdot Mirror
Maintenance has been outsourced to Moscow State University in Russia.
Broadvision, which now owns Interleaf, seems to be a company that acquires defunct software products and supports them.
Interleaf was the first good WYSIWYG word processor/page editor/publication builder program. It came out in the early 1980s, and originally ran on SUN workstations. Interleaf wanted to sell you a $60,000 bundle with Interleaf, a workstation and a laser printer, so they didn't sell very many units. But, eventually, there were Mac and Windows versions.
Interleaf remained a niche product for almost two decades. It was better than anything sold for word processing until the late 1990s, but the company was stuck with the high price point. They could have owned word processing, but they blew it. Interleaf was acquired by Broadvision around 1998, which killed it.
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
The "electricity internet" scheme comes from the people who think free markets are the answer to everything. When free markets fail, they say they weren't free enough.
That group architected California electricity deregulation, with a power auction every half hour around the clock. Nobody was held responsible for electrical reliability,; the "market" would insure there was enough supply.
This was an absolute disaster. We had blackouts. The biggest electric utilities in California went bankrupt. Rates went up. Even the major energy trader, Enron, went bust. And we're still paying for the mess.
The "electricity internet" scheme is a plan to provide more transmission facilities. But not because they're needed for power engineering reasons. The extra capacity is to facilitate energy trading.
The basic trouble with electricity deregulation is that it encourages building inefficient power plants. Traditionally, regulated electric utilities build mostly "base load" plants, intended to run 100% of the time at high efficiency, plus some less efficient "peaking" plants brought up during peak periods. In a deregulated environment, wholesale electricity prices change by several orders of magnitude throughout the day. The optimal strategy for a generation company is to target only the peak periods, using low-cost plants burning high-cost fuel. (These are usually natural-gas fired turbines.) And there's no money in having excess capacity that's only used a few times per year. A few blackouts a year are to be expected. That's the result of a free market solution.
In Californa, energy traders figured out how to create shortages. Buying, but not using, electrical transmission and natural gas pipeline capacity was one way used to drive up prices.
The fanatical free-market types claim the problem is that the huge variation in daily rates isn't pushed all the way down to residential customers. You'd set your thermostat in dollars per day, and when the power price went up, the air conditioning would turn off. Bigger customers would have energy storage facilities. Most people would just suffer. That's the plan.
No, no. The Fifth Circuit ruled for Veeck, and the Supreme Court let that stand. Veeck put a "copyrighted" building code on the Internet, and the Fifth Circuit ruled this was legal, whether the author of the code liked it or not.
The US legalized "legitimate" spam with the CAN-SPAM act. Bulk mail with forged headers is a criminal offense. Bulk mail using stolen resources is a felony. The FTC is very soft on spamcrime. There have been no FTC actions under the CAN-SPAM act whatsoever.
Wait until Kerry is in. We may have some progress under the next administration.
The language is straightforward enough. But I tried to do a few things in the early days, and between the AWT/Swing transition, discontinued development products, and Sun's annoying tendency to releaase huge half-implemented class libraries (remember Java 3D?), and the general realization that you don't write applications in Java, I got fed up and left.
The IAU's current concern is to distinguish between extrasolar planets and dark stars. It takes about 13x the mass of Jupiter before an object generates the gravitational pressure needed to ignite the D-D reaction. So the IAU says that if it's smaller than 13x Jupiter, it's a planet. Bigger than that, it's a "brown dwarf" if not shining.
Indeed, Apple doesn't make any products for the "living room".
A stationary iPod, or an iPod base station that acts as a home stereo, might fill that niche. But that idea really works only if you have a home network, since the thing needs a network connection to the outside world, and nobody is going to buy a DSL line for their stereo.
Then how come all the "content" Internet startups tanked? The survivors are useful service and infrastructure companies.
Remember "contentville.com"? The domain is for sale.
That was supposed to be a joke. But someone already built one, the Bass-Station. They put a WiFi access point, web server and 128MB drive into a boom box, making it a public-access jukebox. People can connect to it, view or change the playlist, and download its music collection.
Actually, no. Caterpillar's line has changed drastically in recent years. The big earthmoving tractors even look different, with elevated drive sprockets. The rubber-tracked Challenger agricultural tractor looks like nothing ever seen on a farm. Most new Caterpillar machines have computers on board, and they play a much more active role in driving than car computers. Joystick control of multiple axes is common (although many machines have a hydraulic joystick system, not a computer-controlled one). GPS-based automatic driving is available for farm tractors.
There's continuous progress in heavy equipment. The field has not stagnated. "High tech" now works well enough to be trusted in tough environments like mining and construction. Everything there has been powered for decades, but now there's more smarts behind the power.
Even "mature technologies" like locomotives continue to improve. The latest generation of locomotives have servomotor-type control of all the traction motors, so they all stay in sync and there is no wheel slip. Multiple engines synch up, so they all pull evenly. Helps get all those imported products from the Port of Los Angeles over the Sierras.
We're waiting...
As I've pointed out before, if there was a market for this, ISPs would be selling off-peak CPU time on their hosting farms.
True. The Palo Alto buildings didn't become vacant until Fiorina took over.
If you have a registered trademark, there's no problem. Why don't you? You can even apply online.
"Social networking" sites are so over. Look who wrote the article: "Philipp Harper is a free-lance writer who lives in south Georgia." It's like online dating, which was really cool for about six months in 1998.
Now try to find out anything about MacArthur or Banker's Life. There's almost nothing ont he web. There's a biography, "The Stockholder" (Hoffman, William, 1969, Lyle Stuart, New York, LC 69017957). "One of the ten best business books of 1969", according to Business Week. Great book. Try to get a copy.
Now there's a cover-up.
Russian education in math has been good for decades. There's a huge pool of people with strong math skills. That's a huge win for game development.
Outside of drugs/biotech and automotive, it's hard to think of any major US corporate research labs not in decline.
Domain names are a nonissue at this point. The number of registered domains peaked two years ago. The number of domain name disputes is down. The "domain broker" business is essentially dead.
Yes, Diebold didn't even take off the stuff that has no business whatsoever being on an ATM.
Of course, they couldn't take out Internet Explorer if they wanted to.
Did you notice "sav_trace", the movie file? Was someone recording the screens going by?
This is a huge hole. It requires no end-user action whatsoever to exploit. The "security" program it attacks is probably running with administrator privileges, even on locked down systems. There's no reason a packet filter should be able to write raw disks. In fact, if it still runs with those privileges, you want to get this "security" product off your system now. This might not be the only hole.
None of SCO's desperate attempts to prop up the stock price have worked. Even the announcement of a stock buyback propped up the price for only one hour, between 0930 and 1030 last Tuesday. SCOX continues its long slide. SCOX closed at 8.71 on Friday. It started the week at 9.5, and the year around 20.
SCO has reached the point where nothing they can say can help them. Only winning some of their lawsuits can help them, and that looks increasingly unlikely. They have to win three separate suits (against Novell, IBM, and Red Hat) to even start collecting from end users.
The "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" was supposed to maintain the International Space Station. Didn't work, but total spending was somewhere around $50 million before Congress pulled the plug.