There's the screen real estate problem, of course. More important, though, is the business model. Phones are sold to carriers. They make their money from service charges. They don't need ads. They'd rather have paid services be paid for through them.
We'd be much better off spending research money on fusion power than on space. If we get fusion, we'll get space. Sending people to Mars is a dead end. We know what Mars looks like. We have a space station, and no use for it.
It looks like Space-X has the low-cost booster thing figured out. That took long enough, especially considering that the US mass-produced ICBMs in the 1960s.
Closing about half the NASA centers would be a good start. NASA Slidell (the "Stennis Space Center") was scheduled to downsize, but instead they got funding for a big museum. NASA Ames is dead except for the wind tunnel. NASA still has 23,000 employees, and that doesn't include the contractors.
They previously put a small habitat into orbit. Now they're sending some people up. The US had Skylab, the USSR had Mir, and China is now doing something in roughly the same scale. Why not?
IPMI is useful but a huge security hole with some bad default settings. Some servers come with ADMIN/ADMIN as the factory default. Some Dell servers use "admin/calvin". The problem of securely getting a server from in the box to in service wasn't well worked out.
IPMI systems themselves can be vulnerable. Some are small ARM systems running Linux. Badly configured Linux. "Older versions of the X8SIL-F IPMI code accepted ssh connections no matter what password was given. The software would then check the password and reject or accept the connection, but there was a brief window to create ssh port forwards. People were getting spam/abuse complaints for their IPMI IPs because of this. "... "A second problem is an anonymous user with a default password. The anonymous user seems to be fixed in firmware version 2.22."
There's also the question of whether there might be a built-in factory password/key that you can't detect. If someone wanted to build a backdoor into servers, the IPMI interface firmware would be a very good place to do it. Especially since the article linked above found one.
Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.
For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.
2nd home (it seems) is halted (hsc electronics). excess solutions, weirdstuff,
HSC has had basically the same stuff for the last 10 years. It's a good place for open-frame power supplies (not for PCs), older connectors, and such. They also have a selection of NTE crap parts.
Other than that, you can do better on line. Weird Stuff is useful if you want Windows 3.1 software, previous generation networking gear, or old VGA boards. They sell the good stuff on line. The stuff in the store is what they can't unload.
Why should Schlutze stay to the bitter end? It makes sense to get out now. Especially if he has a good exit deal. He still owns 20% of the company, and is "exploring options" for unloading it.
I wonder if Zuckerberg will ever come back from his honeymoon. FB stock is in a screaming dive (it just dropped through $26.50). Revenue per user is down. Traffic stopped growing in mid-2011. A new study indicates that 80% of Facebook users never, ever buy anything from a Facebook ad. This would be a great time for Zuckerberg to leave and pursue other interests.
(So much for using users' personal information for ad targeting. There's getting to be a consensus in the targeted advertising community that the only really valuable info is what the user has previously purchased. Amazon and eBay have such info, but Facebook does not.)
That's modeling. Below the top 100 or so supermodels, nobody is making much money. If you've spent any time in LA, you've met actress/model/waitress types, competing for low-end modeling jobs. There's trade show work, like this. There's catalog modeling ("OK, the next item is S-3721, the beige skirt, and hurry it up, we have 50 more to do before lunch"), fit modeling for designers ("it's too loose in the back, stand still while we get the pins in"), and extra work in movies ("be in makeup at 4 AM, we shoot at dawn").
In the early days of Autodesk, the company was doing about 30 trade shows a year. They hired two young women to run the trade show operation. They were both California blondes with cheerleader personalities who liked to travel. They could do a small trade show alone; they knew how to use the software and do demos. For bigger shows, they'd have assistance, but for smaller ones, it was sometimes just the two of them. It surprised some people that they weren't just decorative, and it amused them to be underestimated.
They had booth setup down. They had a space-frame booth made in Scandinavia which fit into a large rolling suitcase. (Those were rare in the early 1980s) They'd roll their cases up to a booth space, take out the space frame, grab hold of the ends, pull to unfold it, and lock it open. Setup took about two minutes. One of the women described to me the look of anger and hatred she got from union labor at Chicago's McCormick Place when doing this. She grinned back, and wasn't intimidated.
Building the headset is the easy part. It's creating something useful to do with it that's hard.
I tried all the first generation gloves-and-goggles systems, including Jaron Lanier's original one. They sucked. Lag between position sensing and graphics generation was huge; you turned your head and waited for the low-pass filters in the position measurement system to settle and the graphics system to catch up. That's no problem to fix today. You really need a frame rate somewhere in the 60-100 range, and, more important, you need low frame latency. A graphics card that's pipelining two frame behind won't do it.
The advantage of goggles is that, with the proper optics, you get an image focused at infinity and a wide screen.
The problem with gloves-and-goggles VR is that manipulation in free space without force feedback sucks. But Carmack is just using this to play Doom, for which it should work fine. (Basic problem with VR without force feedback: you can shoot stuff and drive, but not much else works. Fortunately, shooting stuff and driving covers most of video gaming.)
More physically-oriented games, like some of the Kinect stuff, ought to be better. But you absolutely have to have the motion compensation good enough to provide a reliable visual horizon, or your users will fall down.
(The video is embedded in some cheezy ad container with three ad sources, and is considered hostile code by Firefox 12: "[Exception... "'DNTP Redirect Blocked' when calling method: [nsIChannelEventSink::asyncOnChannelRedirect]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "" data: no]". Lame.)
The interesting question is, who wrote that letter? Not an FBI agent; an FBI agent wouldn't write to Hoover directly, outside of channels. That came from some outside source with a political agenda. But the source has been "redacted".
The Macromedia Flash interpreter gets more done with less code than almost anything else in computing today. Until a few years ago, the executable was under 1MB. The file structure allows execution before the entire file has been read in. The timeline and assets stream organization makes this possible. It's an elegant little system for doing animation with a low-bandwidth stream. Yes, today it tends to be used mostly for its video codec, but that's an artifact of YouTube. (And the fact that Apple turned the QuickTime plug-in into a way to force people to install iTunes.)
The Flash format isn't even proprietary. There are third-party Flash interpreters. They're widely used for the 2D interface components of video games.
Higher education consists of actual dialog, lots of words, and drawing on blackboards.
Misery is looking at video of people writing things on blackboards. At least move up to the format where there's a clear view of the slides and an inset for the talking head.
A classic problem with fuel cells is extreme intolerance to contaminants. Even trace amounts of contaminants tend to damage fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells need cleaner hydrogen than is normally available commercially. Research continues on making fuel cells more tolerant of contaminants, but it's hard. Fuel cells are surface chemistry systems. 40 years of research hasn't solved this problem.
Reverse osmosis water purification systems once had the same problem. Today they routinely take in raw seawater and pump out clear water. They just need a backflush cycle once in a while to flush the crud off the membranes. Fuel cells aren't there yet.
DirectTV has a satellite downlink, with their own satellites and antennas. AppleTV just has the Internet. Only in countries with net neutrality will Apple TV win out over the offerings of cable TV companies and telcos. The Comcast 300MB data cap is good for maybe 60-70 hours of HD video. Average American TV consumption is 5 hours a day.
You'd think that cutting down the reproduction and stocking costs of a book would free up money for other tasks, but in fact what happens is that editing, design and promotion become an opportunity for cutting what is now a more significant proportion of expenses.
Right. That's what happened to newspapers. Newspaper production used to require a huge labor force. Look at all those people. 67 linotypes! A room full of proofreaders to catch typesetting errors. Hundreds of people moving paper around, making printing plates, loading them onto presses, running the presses, handling the printed newspapers. Compared to the army needed to print the papers, the reporting staff was tiny, a small expense. The reporting and editing staff, the composing room, and the printing plant were all in the same building. Any separation would slow things down, and the competition would "scoop" them.
Now compare a modern large newspaper plant. There are people around, but not many. There's essentially no direct labor. All paper and plate handling is mechanized. The files to be printed are created elsewhere and come in over a data connection. The printed newspapers leave in big trucks. Many different papers are printed in the same plant. The plant is far from the reporting and editorial staff, and is run by a separate corporation from the "newspaper".
So, to newspaper management, reporters are now the big labor cost, the first thing to cut.
The intent of the new syntax is that
&char[n] buf
means passing a reference to an array of size n. char[n] is an array type, something C currently lacks. Syntax like this is needed so that you can have casts to array types.
I've had a few go-rounds at this syntax problem. See "Strict pointers for C". Unfortunately, there's no solution that's backwards-compatible with existing code. However, mixing files of old-style and new-style code is possible, and mechanical conversion of old-style code to new-style code looks possible.
It's worth looking at this again now that C's market share is back above that of C++.
What porn? I have over 10,000 edits on Wikipedia and don't recall seeing any porn. Wikipedia has bios of porn stars and links to their work, but they rarely host actual porn content. It has to be both notable and freely licensed to get into Wikipedia. Commercial porn doesn't qualify.
Is the problem here some religious group with a modesty fetish, or what?
If you want porn, search videos with Google or Bing and you'll find whatever you're looking for.
The article is stupid. But the language and OS problem is real.
First, we ought to have secure operating system kernels by now. Several were developed and passed the higher NSA certifications in the 1980s and 1990s. Kernels don't need to be that big. QNX has a tiny microkernel (about 70KB) and can run a reasonable desktop or server environment. (The marketing and politics of QNX have been totally botched, but that's a different problem.) Microkernels have a bad rep because CMU's Mach sucked so badly, but that was because they tried to turn BSD into a microkernel.
If we used microkernels and message passing more, we'd have less trouble with security problems. The way to build secure systems is to have small secure parts which are rigorously verified, and large untrusted parts which can't get at security-critical objects. This has been known for decades. Instead, we have bloated kernels for both Linux and Windows, and bloated browsers on top of them.
On the language front, down at the bottom, there's usually C. Which sucks. The fundamental problems with C are 1) "array = pointer", and 2) tracking "who owns what". I've discussed this before. C++ doesn't help; it just tries to wallpaper over the mess at the C level with what are essentially macros.
This is almost fixable for C. I've written about this, but I don't want to spend my life on language politics. The key idea is to be able to talk about the size of an array within the language. The definition of "read" should look like
int read(int fd, &char[n] buf; size_t n);
instead of the current C form
int read(int fd, char* buf, size_t n);
The problem with the second form, which the standard UNIX/Linux "read" call, is that you're lying to the language. You're not passing a pointer to a char. You're passing an array of known size. But C won't let you say that. This is the cause of most buffer overflows.
(It's not even necessary to change the machine code for calling sequences to do this. I'm not proposing array descriptors, just syntax so that you can talk about array size to the compiler, which can then do checking if desired. The real trick here is to be able to translate old-style C into "safe C" automatically, which might be possible.)
As for "who owns what", that's a language problem too. The usual solution is garbage collection, but down at the bottom, garbage collection may not be an option. Another approach is permissions for references. A basic set of permissions is "read", "write", "keep", and "delete". Assume that everything has "read" for now. "write" corresponds to the lack of "const". "delete" on a function parameter means the function called has the right to delete the object. That's seldom needed, and if it's not present, the caller can be sure the object will still be around when the function returns. "Keep" is more subtle. "Keep" means that the callee is allowed to keep a reference to a passed object after returning. The object now has multiple owners, and "who owns what" issues come up. If you're using reference counts, only "keep" objects need them. Objects passed without "keep" don't need reference count updates.
Do those few things, and most low-level crashes go away.
"Superior Formatting Publishing"'s web site is broken. It consists mostly of "Whoops, looks like there was a problem get the book data from Amazon. Please try again in a moment" and "Amazon API error". Plus a Kindle ad. And "All of our e-books are formatted specifically for the Kindle by an expert in formatting online content using only raw code."
At about 75%, from what I read on the black hat forums.
There's a whole social spam ecosystem out there now, with tools and services for spamming Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Yelp, Tumblr, Youtube, random blogs, and for retro types, Myspace. It's not just a few people doing this. It's an industry with a supply chain.
Read my "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" paper for an overview. If it feeds into Google search rankings, it's being spammed.
Slashdot Mirror
There's the screen real estate problem, of course. More important, though, is the business model. Phones are sold to carriers. They make their money from service charges. They don't need ads. They'd rather have paid services be paid for through them.
We'd be much better off spending research money on fusion power than on space. If we get fusion, we'll get space. Sending people to Mars is a dead end. We know what Mars looks like. We have a space station, and no use for it.
It looks like Space-X has the low-cost booster thing figured out. That took long enough, especially considering that the US mass-produced ICBMs in the 1960s.
Closing about half the NASA centers would be a good start. NASA Slidell (the "Stennis Space Center") was scheduled to downsize, but instead they got funding for a big museum. NASA Ames is dead except for the wind tunnel. NASA still has 23,000 employees, and that doesn't include the contractors.
They previously put a small habitat into orbit. Now they're sending some people up. The US had Skylab, the USSR had Mir, and China is now doing something in roughly the same scale. Why not?
VB 6 is probably a better language for modest applications than Perl, TCL, or PHP. We're not making much forward progress here.
Sketchup didn't fit Google's business model. No ads. No user tracking.
IPMI is useful but a huge security hole with some bad default settings. Some servers come with ADMIN/ADMIN as the factory default. Some Dell servers use "admin/calvin". The problem of securely getting a server from in the box to in service wasn't well worked out.
IPMI systems themselves can be vulnerable. Some are small ARM systems running Linux. Badly configured Linux. "Older versions of the X8SIL-F IPMI code accepted ssh connections no matter what password was given. The software would then check the password and reject or accept the connection, but there was a brief window to create ssh port forwards. People were getting spam/abuse complaints for their IPMI IPs because of this. " ... "A second problem is an anonymous user with a default password. The anonymous user seems to be fixed in firmware version 2.22."
There's also the question of whether there might be a built-in factory password/key that you can't detect. If someone wanted to build a backdoor into servers, the IPMI interface firmware would be a very good place to do it. Especially since the article linked above found one.
Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.
For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.
2nd home (it seems) is halted (hsc electronics). excess solutions, weirdstuff,
HSC has had basically the same stuff for the last 10 years. It's a good place for open-frame power supplies (not for PCs), older connectors, and such. They also have a selection of NTE crap parts. Other than that, you can do better on line. Weird Stuff is useful if you want Windows 3.1 software, previous generation networking gear, or old VGA boards. They sell the good stuff on line. The stuff in the store is what they can't unload.
If you want parts, go to Digi-Key.
Why should Schlutze stay to the bitter end? It makes sense to get out now. Especially if he has a good exit deal. He still owns 20% of the company, and is "exploring options" for unloading it.
I wonder if Zuckerberg will ever come back from his honeymoon. FB stock is in a screaming dive (it just dropped through $26.50). Revenue per user is down. Traffic stopped growing in mid-2011. A new study indicates that 80% of Facebook users never, ever buy anything from a Facebook ad. This would be a great time for Zuckerberg to leave and pursue other interests.
(So much for using users' personal information for ad targeting. There's getting to be a consensus in the targeted advertising community that the only really valuable info is what the user has previously purchased. Amazon and eBay have such info, but Facebook does not.)
That's modeling. Below the top 100 or so supermodels, nobody is making much money. If you've spent any time in LA, you've met actress/model/waitress types, competing for low-end modeling jobs. There's trade show work, like this. There's catalog modeling ("OK, the next item is S-3721, the beige skirt, and hurry it up, we have 50 more to do before lunch"), fit modeling for designers ("it's too loose in the back, stand still while we get the pins in"), and extra work in movies ("be in makeup at 4 AM, we shoot at dawn").
In the early days of Autodesk, the company was doing about 30 trade shows a year. They hired two young women to run the trade show operation. They were both California blondes with cheerleader personalities who liked to travel. They could do a small trade show alone; they knew how to use the software and do demos. For bigger shows, they'd have assistance, but for smaller ones, it was sometimes just the two of them. It surprised some people that they weren't just decorative, and it amused them to be underestimated.
They had booth setup down. They had a space-frame booth made in Scandinavia which fit into a large rolling suitcase. (Those were rare in the early 1980s) They'd roll their cases up to a booth space, take out the space frame, grab hold of the ends, pull to unfold it, and lock it open. Setup took about two minutes. One of the women described to me the look of anger and hatred she got from union labor at Chicago's McCormick Place when doing this. She grinned back, and wasn't intimidated.
The real problem is the cost of evaluating what students know.
That's what internships are for.
That may be the future: DIY college education plus unpaid competitive internships.
Building the headset is the easy part. It's creating something useful to do with it that's hard.
I tried all the first generation gloves-and-goggles systems, including Jaron Lanier's original one. They sucked. Lag between position sensing and graphics generation was huge; you turned your head and waited for the low-pass filters in the position measurement system to settle and the graphics system to catch up. That's no problem to fix today. You really need a frame rate somewhere in the 60-100 range, and, more important, you need low frame latency. A graphics card that's pipelining two frame behind won't do it.
The advantage of goggles is that, with the proper optics, you get an image focused at infinity and a wide screen.
The problem with gloves-and-goggles VR is that manipulation in free space without force feedback sucks. But Carmack is just using this to play Doom, for which it should work fine. (Basic problem with VR without force feedback: you can shoot stuff and drive, but not much else works. Fortunately, shooting stuff and driving covers most of video gaming.) More physically-oriented games, like some of the Kinect stuff, ought to be better. But you absolutely have to have the motion compensation good enough to provide a reliable visual horizon, or your users will fall down.
(The video is embedded in some cheezy ad container with three ad sources, and is considered hostile code by Firefox 12: "[Exception... "'DNTP Redirect Blocked' when calling method: [nsIChannelEventSink::asyncOnChannelRedirect]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "" data: no]". Lame.)
The interesting question is, who wrote that letter? Not an FBI agent; an FBI agent wouldn't write to Hoover directly, outside of channels. That came from some outside source with a political agenda. But the source has been "redacted".
The Macromedia Flash interpreter gets more done with less code than almost anything else in computing today. Until a few years ago, the executable was under 1MB. The file structure allows execution before the entire file has been read in. The timeline and assets stream organization makes this possible. It's an elegant little system for doing animation with a low-bandwidth stream. Yes, today it tends to be used mostly for its video codec, but that's an artifact of YouTube. (And the fact that Apple turned the QuickTime plug-in into a way to force people to install iTunes.)
The Flash format isn't even proprietary. There are third-party Flash interpreters. They're widely used for the 2D interface components of video games.
Higher education consists of actual dialog, lots of words, and drawing on blackboards.
Misery is looking at video of people writing things on blackboards. At least move up to the format where there's a clear view of the slides and an inset for the talking head.
"Flame" isn't on the list of malware detected by the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. Why not?
A classic problem with fuel cells is extreme intolerance to contaminants. Even trace amounts of contaminants tend to damage fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells need cleaner hydrogen than is normally available commercially. Research continues on making fuel cells more tolerant of contaminants, but it's hard. Fuel cells are surface chemistry systems. 40 years of research hasn't solved this problem.
Reverse osmosis water purification systems once had the same problem. Today they routinely take in raw seawater and pump out clear water. They just need a backflush cycle once in a while to flush the crud off the membranes. Fuel cells aren't there yet.
DirectTV has a satellite downlink, with their own satellites and antennas. AppleTV just has the Internet. Only in countries with net neutrality will Apple TV win out over the offerings of cable TV companies and telcos. The Comcast 300MB data cap is good for maybe 60-70 hours of HD video. Average American TV consumption is 5 hours a day.
You'd think that cutting down the reproduction and stocking costs of a book would free up money for other tasks, but in fact what happens is that editing, design and promotion become an opportunity for cutting what is now a more significant proportion of expenses.
Right. That's what happened to newspapers. Newspaper production used to require a huge labor force. Look at all those people. 67 linotypes! A room full of proofreaders to catch typesetting errors. Hundreds of people moving paper around, making printing plates, loading them onto presses, running the presses, handling the printed newspapers. Compared to the army needed to print the papers, the reporting staff was tiny, a small expense. The reporting and editing staff, the composing room, and the printing plant were all in the same building. Any separation would slow things down, and the competition would "scoop" them.
Now compare a modern large newspaper plant. There are people around, but not many. There's essentially no direct labor. All paper and plate handling is mechanized. The files to be printed are created elsewhere and come in over a data connection. The printed newspapers leave in big trucks. Many different papers are printed in the same plant. The plant is far from the reporting and editorial staff, and is run by a separate corporation from the "newspaper".
So, to newspaper management, reporters are now the big labor cost, the first thing to cut.
The intent of the new syntax is that &char[n] buf means passing a reference to an array of size n. char[n] is an array type, something C currently lacks. Syntax like this is needed so that you can have casts to array types.
I've had a few go-rounds at this syntax problem. See "Strict pointers for C". Unfortunately, there's no solution that's backwards-compatible with existing code. However, mixing files of old-style and new-style code is possible, and mechanical conversion of old-style code to new-style code looks possible.
It's worth looking at this again now that C's market share is back above that of C++.
What porn? I have over 10,000 edits on Wikipedia and don't recall seeing any porn. Wikipedia has bios of porn stars and links to their work, but they rarely host actual porn content. It has to be both notable and freely licensed to get into Wikipedia. Commercial porn doesn't qualify.
Is the problem here some religious group with a modesty fetish, or what?
If you want porn, search videos with Google or Bing and you'll find whatever you're looking for.
Google Shopping isn't even in their main toolbar. It's now hidden under "more".
The article is stupid. But the language and OS problem is real.
First, we ought to have secure operating system kernels by now. Several were developed and passed the higher NSA certifications in the 1980s and 1990s. Kernels don't need to be that big. QNX has a tiny microkernel (about 70KB) and can run a reasonable desktop or server environment. (The marketing and politics of QNX have been totally botched, but that's a different problem.) Microkernels have a bad rep because CMU's Mach sucked so badly, but that was because they tried to turn BSD into a microkernel.
If we used microkernels and message passing more, we'd have less trouble with security problems. The way to build secure systems is to have small secure parts which are rigorously verified, and large untrusted parts which can't get at security-critical objects. This has been known for decades. Instead, we have bloated kernels for both Linux and Windows, and bloated browsers on top of them.
On the language front, down at the bottom, there's usually C. Which sucks. The fundamental problems with C are 1) "array = pointer", and 2) tracking "who owns what". I've discussed this before. C++ doesn't help; it just tries to wallpaper over the mess at the C level with what are essentially macros.
This is almost fixable for C. I've written about this, but I don't want to spend my life on language politics. The key idea is to be able to talk about the size of an array within the language. The definition of "read" should look like int read(int fd, &char[n] buf; size_t n); instead of the current C form int read(int fd, char* buf, size_t n); The problem with the second form, which the standard UNIX/Linux "read" call, is that you're lying to the language. You're not passing a pointer to a char. You're passing an array of known size. But C won't let you say that. This is the cause of most buffer overflows.
(It's not even necessary to change the machine code for calling sequences to do this. I'm not proposing array descriptors, just syntax so that you can talk about array size to the compiler, which can then do checking if desired. The real trick here is to be able to translate old-style C into "safe C" automatically, which might be possible.)
As for "who owns what", that's a language problem too. The usual solution is garbage collection, but down at the bottom, garbage collection may not be an option. Another approach is permissions for references. A basic set of permissions is "read", "write", "keep", and "delete". Assume that everything has "read" for now. "write" corresponds to the lack of "const". "delete" on a function parameter means the function called has the right to delete the object. That's seldom needed, and if it's not present, the caller can be sure the object will still be around when the function returns. "Keep" is more subtle. "Keep" means that the callee is allowed to keep a reference to a passed object after returning. The object now has multiple owners, and "who owns what" issues come up. If you're using reference counts, only "keep" objects need them. Objects passed without "keep" don't need reference count updates.
Do those few things, and most low-level crashes go away.
I won't live to see it.
"Superior Formatting Publishing"'s web site is broken. It consists mostly of "Whoops, looks like there was a problem get the book data from Amazon. Please try again in a moment" and "Amazon API error". Plus a Kindle ad. And "All of our e-books are formatted specifically for the Kindle by an expert in formatting online content using only raw code."
Re:How far behind were the criminals/spammers?
At about 75%, from what I read on the black hat forums.
There's a whole social spam ecosystem out there now, with tools and services for spamming Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Yelp, Tumblr, Youtube, random blogs, and for retro types, Myspace. It's not just a few people doing this. It's an industry with a supply chain. Read my "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" paper for an overview. If it feeds into Google search rankings, it's being spammed.