France used to require government approval for children's names when registering births. This was a francophone thing, not a uniqueness thing. But it could have been expanded to use a uniqueness check. Corporation and D/B/A names have to be unique within their jurisdiction.
Names in China used to be disambiguated by asking "What is your village?" This is no longer very helpful.
Low usage by 18-24 year olds may be due to heavy unemployment in that group. Social networking is fine for getting people together to go out, but if you have to organize anything complex, you need a more persistent medium. Try organizing something more complex than meeting at a bar over SMS. Even trying to organize something over Facebook is tough. It's fine for casual chat, but the "everything scrolls off" approach is no good when there are actual tasks to do and track.
For big, complex, highly structured projects, there are decent collaboration tools. Open source projects have had forums systems coupled to bug trackers coupled to source code management for years. There are comparable systems for specific problems, like Autodesk Vault for mechanical engineers and Alienbrain for game developers. Tools for medium-sized loose collaboration have been built, but haven't developed big followings. (Google Wave was supposed to be usable for that.) Those still tend to be run via e-mail.
There's also the problem that single-source "cloud" services tend to go away after a few years. If you were using Google Wave for anything important, you were screwed. This sounds like a case for an open source project, but open source will never get "user friendly" right.
As one of the people who was active in TCP design back then (see my RFCs), this article sounds weird.
First, the ARPAnet was not "the Internet". The ARPAnet was a closed backbone network, with flow control and guaranteed delivery of packets. When hosts talked directly to ARPAnet nodes (IMPs), the backbone provided reliable transport.
When Ethernet to ARPAnet gateways were created, the possibility of packet loss in gateways appeared, and congestion packet loss became a problem.
The TCP/IP implementation from Berkeley in BSD wasn't the first; it was about the fourth. We at Ford Aerospace used 3COM's UNET, which was a very early TCP/IP. I had to overhaul it, adding ICMP. UDP, congestion control (that's why I have those RFCs on network congestion), and checking for invalid packets. After that it could talk reliably over fast or slow links and to other valid implementations. We had a real "bit bucket"; all packets that didn't meet the spec were logged, and I used to check that every day and send out notes to other TCP implementers. Mark Crispin at Stanford was responsible for the PDP-10/DEC-20 implementation, and we talked a lot as we made two very different implementations play well together. I was impressed with Mark; unlike many developers today, he never blamed someone else when his end was at fault. I once sent a packet to Stanford which caused the implementation there to crash the mainframe, and I apologized to him. He wrote back that it was his fault if his mainframe crashed, not mine.
The Berkeley people had originally assumed that TCP/IP would use Ethernet as a backbone and didn't worry too much about interoperability with other TCP implementations. Berkeley UNIX up to 4.3BSD could barely operate over a slow or congested link, and interoperated badly with other TCP implementations. The initial release of 4.3BSD would only talk to DEC-20 implementations for 4 hours out of every 8, because the sequence number arithmetic in BSD had been botched. (I had to fix that, which was a painful 3 days.)
Van Jacobson was responsible for bringing the BSD TCP up to an acceptable level of behavior under heavy traffic. That was a few years later, around 1988.
3COM discontinued UNET in the early 1980s, since UC Berkeley, funded by the Government, was giving away a comparable product. Ford Aerospace got out of networking because they only did DoD work, and networking was going commercial. I left Ford Aerospace, and networking, in 1986 because a friend of mine had started up a little company to do CAD software, and it was becoming successful.
It seems to me that you could do a p2p certificate authority where a certificates trust is based on the number of people who trust the cert as well as a past history of your trusts.
As someone else pointed out, that's Moxie's other project, Convergence. The trouble with "web of trust" schemes like that is fake "people", i.e. dummy accounts. Dummy account generators have trashed Craigslist, turned Hotmail into a reply service for spammers, garbaged Gmail, filled Google+ with fake accounts, and created vast numbers of bogus Yelp reviews. See my paper
"Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social." for the details of who does that dirty work.
The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be outsourced.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System. This is what's used to check who can buy a gun. It's currently a kludge, works differently in some states, and is up only 17 hours a day. (It's down on Xmas.) There should be an app for that.
E-Verify, for checking whether someone is authorized to work in the United States. There should be an app for that. Then there would be no excuse for not checking.
I have a TechShop membership, and have spent a lot of time there. What goes on there is mostly not all that high-tech. Most of it is hobby artwork. Some people are repairing cars. Others are making furniture. The electronics facilities are basic and little used. Much of the machine shop usage is by pros from companies nearby that need some machining done.
At times, it's rather pathetic. iPhones and iPads are made in China. Here in Silicon Valley, we have people making bamboo cases for them, and cheap plastic things to hold them on dashboads with suction cups.
Until this, few phones sent your audio to a third party. The telco had to have the audio stream, but they don't store it. Telcos are regulated in this area. Even for wiretaps, US telcos don't store audio; they forward it in real time to law enforcement or security agencies.
Then Apple comes along. It starts storing all your audio and recognizing as much of it as possible, escaping liability through a vague EULA. That has to be a concern. How do you know when it's listening? And will you know when Apple changes the rules to something like "we collect all your voice input to improve the quality of voice recognition"?
This is a fairly common scam. Using it to steal Lego bricks puts you in the "American's Dumbest Criminals" category. How did this clown get to be a VP of SAP?
That's pretty well the whole point of this operation, letting the senior people cash out.
Right. The insiders sold $9 billion in stock. Facebook, Inc, only raised $7 billion. Accel Partners sold about 25% of their Facebook stock. DST Group (Russia) sold 37% of theirs.
Facebook is probably worth around $10 a share. Even that assumes 10% growth for the next 10 years, which is rather good. It's entirely possible that Facebook may not be a big deal as social moves to mobile.
Clearly, the DoD criteria for military movies don't include the movie making any sense. The U.S. Navy supported "Battleship".
A Navy vs. aliens movie might make sense. "Battleship" isn't it. (It does beat "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966), but it cost about 100x as much to make.) One based on a board game is an indication that Hollywood really is out of ideas. They've already done all the fairy tales (there are two Snow White movies this year), all the top-tier comic book characters, many of the second-tier comic book characters, and have made sequels to almost everything that ever turned a profit. ("Police Academy 8" is in development.)
Now this is how a real board looks. All the outward facing connectors are on one edge. The connectors are of types suitable for external connections, properly mounted hard to the board. The board has mounting holes.
There will probably be additional models. Note that the silk screen shows spaces for two more ICs that aren't populated here.
True. I was at one point involved in converting the Stanford AI Lab archives from 6250BPI tape to a file server. People were loading tapes for weeks. As soon as a tape was loaded, the data went over the Internet to a file server at IBM Almaden for format conversion. The transmission of a tape only took a few seconds. Of course, both IBM Almaden and Stanford have major backbone connections.
Huh? Huai'an city is not in Hainan. It's in Jiangsu province, about 100km west of Shanghai. Hainan is an island off the southern coast of China, near Vietnam.
The China Daily article says there are two separate projects. Foxconn is both building this plant in Huai'an and starting up a new manufacturing base down in Hainan. The Hainan facility is not necessarily Apple-oriented.
Prior to 2003, he would have been reporting a crime in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, or Virginia.
Quit whining about patents. If they're doing it the way I think they're doing it (see previous post), they've solved a very tough problem in acoustic processing. That's a significant invention. Without a patent, it would be ripped off by game console manufacturers and TV makers.
They have a little wireless device sitting below the screen that supposedly can sense the position of individual fingers of a hand above it. That tells us something.
One interesting option is using the monitor's speakers for ultrasound and putting some microphones in the pickup. Now you have two emitters some distance apart, and some number of detectors close together. That configuration is powerful enough to image. See "One-handed gesture recognition using ultrasonic Doppler sonar" People have been fooling around with this sort of thing for years, but nobody has really nailed the problem yet. It's similar to the problem of emulating bat sonar. Part of the trick, I expect, is that the system measures both effects on the direct path from speaker to microphone and on the path which involves a reflection from the screen. That gives you the distance-from-screen information.
The Apple Thunderbolt monitor they're using has two high-frequency speakers, a subwoofer, a microphone, and a camera. It's not clear how much of that complement they're using for positional data.
Perhaps many of you were too young to remember the dot.bomb era when shares rose hundreds of % not long after the IPO.
Yes. The biggest run-up ever after the IPO was VA Linux, the parent company of Slashdot. LNUX opened at $30 and went up to $320 on the first day. Then it went into a screaming dive, and a few years later it was around $5. The company had only two profitable quarters in its whole history.
Facebook is at least profitable. But the market cap is far, far too big for its revenue. Worth a P/E of 92? No way.
Most liquid-fueled launchers have had this capability. It's important for any multi-engine launcher, in case not all the engines start. It's usually considered a requirement for man-rating a launch system.
The last time I ordered a desktop PC, it was from Central Computers, a computer chain with a clue. I ordered it without crapware, and the invoice actually said "no crapware". Very nice.
Central Computers, though, is a local SF bay area chain, based in Silicon Valley. They do mail order, but they assume you know what you want. The order menu starts with "select AMD or Intel", and the operating system menu has "No operating system" as an option, which reduces the price by $109.95,
The previous generation of flat sorting machine.
The new flat sorting machine. The mechanical problems of sorting large volumes of flats of varied size and thickness with flapping loose pages have finally been solved. But it doesn't matter. Putting ads on glossy paper and shipping them to people who don't really want them much is a dying industry.
The USPS really wants to get out of the deal for the flat sorting system, because the flats business (mostly catalogs and magazines) is declining. Mail volume overall peaked in 2006, and has been in a screaming dive since then. The USPS doesn't need a new generation of flat sorting machinery. But the USPS signed a firm fixed-price contract for the gear, and they're stuck with it.
Paper mail, as a business, is tanking."We forecast U.S. postal volumes to decrease from 177B pieces in 2009 to around 150B
pieces in 2020 under business-as-usual assumptions. Notably, volumes will not revisit the
high-water-mark of 213B pieces in 2006 -- on the contrary, the trajectory for the next 10
years is one of steady decline, which will not reverse even as the current recession abates.
Expressing the decline in terms of pieces per delivery point highlights the challenge: we
project pieces per household per day to fall from four pieces today to three in 2020 --
driven by decreasing volumes delivered to an increasing number of addresses." That's the optimistic scenario - recession over in 2012, no "Do Not Mail" bulk mail opt-out legislation. It's also from a 2010 study that didn't really consider the move to smartphones.
This is getting to be like the car industry in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, automobiles were a mature technology, and all the manufacturers had roughly the same feature set (V8 engine, automatic transmission, sedan and convertible options). So the era of over the top styling began. (1959 Cadillac tailfin). That's where computing seems to be going.
Previously, we just had the progression of case colors from beige to black to white to grey and back to beige again, on about a 10 year cycle. It's about time for Apple to announce a grey iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
Most electronic payment systems have very short lives.
France used to require government approval for children's names when registering births. This was a francophone thing, not a uniqueness thing. But it could have been expanded to use a uniqueness check. Corporation and D/B/A names have to be unique within their jurisdiction.
Names in China used to be disambiguated by asking "What is your village?" This is no longer very helpful.
Low usage by 18-24 year olds may be due to heavy unemployment in that group. Social networking is fine for getting people together to go out, but if you have to organize anything complex, you need a more persistent medium. Try organizing something more complex than meeting at a bar over SMS. Even trying to organize something over Facebook is tough. It's fine for casual chat, but the "everything scrolls off" approach is no good when there are actual tasks to do and track.
For big, complex, highly structured projects, there are decent collaboration tools. Open source projects have had forums systems coupled to bug trackers coupled to source code management for years. There are comparable systems for specific problems, like Autodesk Vault for mechanical engineers and Alienbrain for game developers. Tools for medium-sized loose collaboration have been built, but haven't developed big followings. (Google Wave was supposed to be usable for that.) Those still tend to be run via e-mail.
There's also the problem that single-source "cloud" services tend to go away after a few years. If you were using Google Wave for anything important, you were screwed. This sounds like a case for an open source project, but open source will never get "user friendly" right.
As one of the people who was active in TCP design back then (see my RFCs), this article sounds weird.
First, the ARPAnet was not "the Internet". The ARPAnet was a closed backbone network, with flow control and guaranteed delivery of packets. When hosts talked directly to ARPAnet nodes (IMPs), the backbone provided reliable transport. When Ethernet to ARPAnet gateways were created, the possibility of packet loss in gateways appeared, and congestion packet loss became a problem.
The TCP/IP implementation from Berkeley in BSD wasn't the first; it was about the fourth. We at Ford Aerospace used 3COM's UNET, which was a very early TCP/IP. I had to overhaul it, adding ICMP. UDP, congestion control (that's why I have those RFCs on network congestion), and checking for invalid packets. After that it could talk reliably over fast or slow links and to other valid implementations. We had a real "bit bucket"; all packets that didn't meet the spec were logged, and I used to check that every day and send out notes to other TCP implementers. Mark Crispin at Stanford was responsible for the PDP-10/DEC-20 implementation, and we talked a lot as we made two very different implementations play well together. I was impressed with Mark; unlike many developers today, he never blamed someone else when his end was at fault. I once sent a packet to Stanford which caused the implementation there to crash the mainframe, and I apologized to him. He wrote back that it was his fault if his mainframe crashed, not mine.
The Berkeley people had originally assumed that TCP/IP would use Ethernet as a backbone and didn't worry too much about interoperability with other TCP implementations. Berkeley UNIX up to 4.3BSD could barely operate over a slow or congested link, and interoperated badly with other TCP implementations. The initial release of 4.3BSD would only talk to DEC-20 implementations for 4 hours out of every 8, because the sequence number arithmetic in BSD had been botched. (I had to fix that, which was a painful 3 days.)
Van Jacobson was responsible for bringing the BSD TCP up to an acceptable level of behavior under heavy traffic. That was a few years later, around 1988.
3COM discontinued UNET in the early 1980s, since UC Berkeley, funded by the Government, was giving away a comparable product. Ford Aerospace got out of networking because they only did DoD work, and networking was going commercial. I left Ford Aerospace, and networking, in 1986 because a friend of mine had started up a little company to do CAD software, and it was becoming successful.
John Nagle
It seems to me that you could do a p2p certificate authority where a certificates trust is based on the number of people who trust the cert as well as a past history of your trusts.
As someone else pointed out, that's Moxie's other project, Convergence. The trouble with "web of trust" schemes like that is fake "people", i.e. dummy accounts. Dummy account generators have trashed Craigslist, turned Hotmail into a reply service for spammers, garbaged Gmail, filled Google+ with fake accounts, and created vast numbers of bogus Yelp reviews. See my paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social." for the details of who does that dirty work.
The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be outsourced.
One app for the left, and one app for the right.
I have a TechShop membership, and have spent a lot of time there. What goes on there is mostly not all that high-tech. Most of it is hobby artwork. Some people are repairing cars. Others are making furniture. The electronics facilities are basic and little used. Much of the machine shop usage is by pros from companies nearby that need some machining done.
At times, it's rather pathetic. iPhones and iPads are made in China. Here in Silicon Valley, we have people making bamboo cases for them, and cheap plastic things to hold them on dashboads with suction cups.
Medical devices should not have Internet access.
Receiving time from a GPS receiver is much safer. That's a broadcast signal with a fixed message format.
Until this, few phones sent your audio to a third party. The telco had to have the audio stream, but they don't store it. Telcos are regulated in this area. Even for wiretaps, US telcos don't store audio; they forward it in real time to law enforcement or security agencies.
Then Apple comes along. It starts storing all your audio and recognizing as much of it as possible, escaping liability through a vague EULA. That has to be a concern. How do you know when it's listening? And will you know when Apple changes the rules to something like "we collect all your voice input to improve the quality of voice recognition"?
This is a fairly common scam. Using it to steal Lego bricks puts you in the "American's Dumbest Criminals" category. How did this clown get to be a VP of SAP?
That's pretty well the whole point of this operation, letting the senior people cash out.
Right. The insiders sold $9 billion in stock. Facebook, Inc, only raised $7 billion. Accel Partners sold about 25% of their Facebook stock. DST Group (Russia) sold 37% of theirs.
Facebook is probably worth around $10 a share. Even that assumes 10% growth for the next 10 years, which is rather good. It's entirely possible that Facebook may not be a big deal as social moves to mobile.
Clearly, the DoD criteria for military movies don't include the movie making any sense. The U.S. Navy supported "Battleship".
A Navy vs. aliens movie might make sense. "Battleship" isn't it. (It does beat "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966), but it cost about 100x as much to make.) One based on a board game is an indication that Hollywood really is out of ideas. They've already done all the fairy tales (there are two Snow White movies this year), all the top-tier comic book characters, many of the second-tier comic book characters, and have made sequels to almost everything that ever turned a profit. ("Police Academy 8" is in development.)
Now this is how a real board looks. All the outward facing connectors are on one edge. The connectors are of types suitable for external connections, properly mounted hard to the board. The board has mounting holes.
There will probably be additional models. Note that the silk screen shows spaces for two more ICs that aren't populated here.
It's even assembled in Great Britain.
Timestamp: 5/22/2012 12:06:38 PM Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Security error" code: "1000" nsresult: "0x805303e8 (NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR)" location: "http://www.so.cl/ Line: 185"]
That site has such intrusive code that Firefox 12 with high security settings won't even display it.
True. I was at one point involved in converting the Stanford AI Lab archives from 6250BPI tape to a file server. People were loading tapes for weeks. As soon as a tape was loaded, the data went over the Internet to a file server at IBM Almaden for format conversion. The transmission of a tape only took a few seconds. Of course, both IBM Almaden and Stanford have major backbone connections.
Huh? Huai'an city is not in Hainan. It's in Jiangsu province, about 100km west of Shanghai. Hainan is an island off the southern coast of China, near Vietnam.
The China Daily article says there are two separate projects. Foxconn is both building this plant in Huai'an and starting up a new manufacturing base down in Hainan. The Hainan facility is not necessarily Apple-oriented.
Prior to 2003, he would have been reporting a crime in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, or Virginia.
Quit whining about patents. If they're doing it the way I think they're doing it (see previous post), they've solved a very tough problem in acoustic processing. That's a significant invention. Without a patent, it would be ripped off by game console manufacturers and TV makers.
They have a little wireless device sitting below the screen that supposedly can sense the position of individual fingers of a hand above it. That tells us something.
One interesting option is using the monitor's speakers for ultrasound and putting some microphones in the pickup. Now you have two emitters some distance apart, and some number of detectors close together. That configuration is powerful enough to image. See "One-handed gesture recognition using ultrasonic Doppler sonar" People have been fooling around with this sort of thing for years, but nobody has really nailed the problem yet. It's similar to the problem of emulating bat sonar. Part of the trick, I expect, is that the system measures both effects on the direct path from speaker to microphone and on the path which involves a reflection from the screen. That gives you the distance-from-screen information.
You probably could get 0.2mm of resolution if you sampled the microphones at 2MHz or so. Bats have roughly that resolution.
The Apple Thunderbolt monitor they're using has two high-frequency speakers, a subwoofer, a microphone, and a camera. It's not clear how much of that complement they're using for positional data.
Perhaps many of you were too young to remember the dot.bomb era when shares rose hundreds of % not long after the IPO.
Yes. The biggest run-up ever after the IPO was VA Linux, the parent company of Slashdot. LNUX opened at $30 and went up to $320 on the first day. Then it went into a screaming dive, and a few years later it was around $5. The company had only two profitable quarters in its whole history.
Facebook is at least profitable. But the market cap is far, far too big for its revenue. Worth a P/E of 92? No way.
More fresh meat for the game companies who need armies of overworked and underpaid programmers.
I've never seen a launch aborted this late before.
Space shuttle abort after main engine start, 1984.
Mercury-Redstone launch abort after main engine start, 1960. (This is the famous "launched the escape tower launch.)
Most liquid-fueled launchers have had this capability. It's important for any multi-engine launcher, in case not all the engines start. It's usually considered a requirement for man-rating a launch system.
The last time I ordered a desktop PC, it was from Central Computers, a computer chain with a clue. I ordered it without crapware, and the invoice actually said "no crapware". Very nice.
Central Computers, though, is a local SF bay area chain, based in Silicon Valley. They do mail order, but they assume you know what you want. The order menu starts with "select AMD or Intel", and the operating system menu has "No operating system" as an option, which reduces the price by $109.95,
The previous generation of flat sorting machine. The new flat sorting machine. The mechanical problems of sorting large volumes of flats of varied size and thickness with flapping loose pages have finally been solved. But it doesn't matter. Putting ads on glossy paper and shipping them to people who don't really want them much is a dying industry.
The USPS really wants to get out of the deal for the flat sorting system, because the flats business (mostly catalogs and magazines) is declining. Mail volume overall peaked in 2006, and has been in a screaming dive since then. The USPS doesn't need a new generation of flat sorting machinery. But the USPS signed a firm fixed-price contract for the gear, and they're stuck with it.
Paper mail, as a business, is tanking. "We forecast U.S. postal volumes to decrease from 177B pieces in 2009 to around 150B pieces in 2020 under business-as-usual assumptions. Notably, volumes will not revisit the high-water-mark of 213B pieces in 2006 -- on the contrary, the trajectory for the next 10 years is one of steady decline, which will not reverse even as the current recession abates. Expressing the decline in terms of pieces per delivery point highlights the challenge: we project pieces per household per day to fall from four pieces today to three in 2020 -- driven by decreasing volumes delivered to an increasing number of addresses." That's the optimistic scenario - recession over in 2012, no "Do Not Mail" bulk mail opt-out legislation. It's also from a 2010 study that didn't really consider the move to smartphones.
This is getting to be like the car industry in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, automobiles were a mature technology, and all the manufacturers had roughly the same feature set (V8 engine, automatic transmission, sedan and convertible options). So the era of over the top styling began. (1959 Cadillac tailfin). That's where computing seems to be going.
Previously, we just had the progression of case colors from beige to black to white to grey and back to beige again, on about a 10 year cycle. It's about time for Apple to announce a grey iPhone.