Speaking as a European, I'd like to congratulate the United States on its latest airliner.
Seriously. 50% of the A380 subassemblies come from the USA. Boeing is playing the "it's an evil foreign plot to topple American dominance of the aerospace industry!" card, but that's just self-serving FUD. Remember, for each $280M A380 that sells, American companies pick up 50% of the assembly work. Similarly, large chunks of Boeing's products come from EADS, BAE systems, and other non-American contractors.
So let's get over the jingoistic flag-waving and evaluate this rather impressive piece of hardware on its actual merits, shall we?
A lot of non-SF writers -- journalists included -- have this weird idea that to write about something like AI, you need to do your research by visiting the AI department at your local university and pestering a couple of professors for an afternoon.
I don't work that way. I especially don't do things like that simply to provide a scene for a journalist to write about. It's disrespectful. Not to mention being a waste of said academics' time.
If you want to find out about AI you do a CS degree and a module in AI, at a minimum. Then you stay current by reading the literature, talking to your mates about the PhDs they're working on, talking to people on the net, and so on. At least, that's how I went about it. (Big screaming clue: I didn't study at Edinburgh, although Edinburgh is indeed a very important centre for AI in the UK.)
Unfortunately this reality doesn't fit the format for a PopSci article, in which a firm understanding of, say, Bayesian expert systems or constraint-based reasoning could be acquired by an SF writer by a process akin to osmosis, in the course of one rainy spring afternoon... as long as said SF writer is standing on the holy ground of a university AI department.
So I got written up as a "facts? don't trouble me with facts!" know-nothing.
doesn't anyone see the gross similarity between the rapture and the singularity?
Yup. Ken McLeod calls it "the rapture of the nerds", and he's not wrong. (Cory and I grabbed that phrase and recycled it as the title for a novella bound in with issue #2 of Argosy because it seemed so apposite.) Millenialism is nothing new, as students of Norman Cohn will be aware...
On the other hand, it makes a great hook to hang a story on, doesn't it?
(Which is why, now it's snowballed to the point of generating articles in Popular Science and threads on slashdot, I'm swearing off it and going in search of something new to strip-mine for fiction...)
Incidentally, I liked the part where Stross declines to meet real AI researchers, because he doesn't care about real technology developments. That's certainly part of the issue -- these guys only read and write for their own little cult.
Um, no: I declined to be dragged around the AI department at the local university here because (a) I don't have any contacts there (note the emphasis on local in local university -- it's not one of the universities I studied at) and (b) I didn't feel like being part of a dog'n'pony show organized for the benefit of PopSci's readers.
Remember: the article you're commenting on reflects the opinions of the journalist who wrote it. Contents may settle after shipping, etcetera.
Funnily enough, I didn't get paid to write that. All you get if you're asked to blurb a novel is the advance copy of a book that isn't published yet -- and the opportunity to say "sorry" if it doesn't push your buttons.
Re:A Colder War
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"A Colder War" was a dry run for a novel.
That novel, "The Atrocity Archives", is due out in hardcover in the US this April/May.
Re:Author website
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm told I'm cited as the primary source for the verb "to slashdot" in the Oxford English Dictionary corpus. (They're after printed sources, not online ones, so this is rather unfair -- I didn't invent the verb-backformation, after all.)
I don't use/. reader personality traits in my fiction. But I do read/. daily -- as I have done for some years -- and use it as a fertile source of pointers to new ideas. (If I use any net personality types in my fiction it's from usenet -- which I've been reading since about 1989. All of human life is there, kinda-sorta, including both saints and the sorts who live under rocks.)
Added bonus factoid: Singularity Sky was written on Linux and MacOS/X boxen, using Vim. Formatting was done using POD macros, and the source was kept under RCS control (CVS is massive overkill for novels). The output files (in RTF and PDF) were finally generated using some command line tools and a makefile I knocked together...
... Then I had to find a box running Microsoft Word in order to import the files and save them in the file format the publisher wanted. (And people wonder why I wash my hands compulsively?)
If you want to read more of my stuff, there are some (older) stories on my fiction pages.
If you want to know when the sequel, "Iron Sunrise", is due out (and the other books I've got coming), see my books FAQ.
And there is of course the obligatory weblog, but because it's CGI-mediated and my server's decidedly on the elderly side I'm not going to post the URL here. (If you want it badly enough and you're clueful you'll find it:)
I worked for SCO from 1991 through 1995, back before Caldera was even founded.
Since then I've made two major career shifts: from techpubs sideways into software development, then after about six years of that I downshifted completely and turned to freelance writing. Because I'm self-employed and not really doing anything in the software industry any more I'm reasonably well insulated from the damage Caldera has done to SCO's former reputation, but if I find the pickings are thin and have to go looking for contract tech authoring work I may have a problem. A big problem.
I have been tempted to sue SCaldera for defamation, given that they've basically turned my biggest technical writing CV bulletpoint into sewage. But if it comes to it, I'll basically target my CV. Non-software companies get the unvarnished SCO checkmark, while companies where an interviewer might have heard of Ransom Love's antics will get a footnote.
But in the long term, SCO is nothing more than a footnote. There is no job for life any more, and we're moving increasingly away from having a single career for life, too. Who lists jobs they held more than a decade ago for less than one year on their CV any more? The odds are high that any skills involved are long obsolete. Similarly, SCO won't blight current employees' work history forever.
I'm going to second the vote for vi -- although I use Vim rather than a traditional vi.
I write for a living. I sell novels. The lifespan of a novel is over a decade -- if it's a successful one, several decades. I don't dare use proprietary storage formats that may become inaccessible in five or ten years: plain text with embedded markup is essential. And markup in a simple macro format I can roll my own parser for if I need to -- I currently use POD format as it's rich enough for writing novels as well as Perl documentation.
But I still have to keep a copy of Microsoft Word to hand. Because the publishers I deal with want an electronic copy for their typesetters these days, and they expect everyone to use Word, despite its gross inadequacies as a novelist's tool (untameable Autocorrect, insane file-format lock-in, stupid reliance on mouse over keyboard, and all).
The Solex motorized bicycle was common as muck in France from 1945 to 1988 (these days you can buy new ones made in Hungary). It is exactly the same principle -- a two-stroke motor driving the front wheel. You can buy 'em in the US here for $1049. They weigh 62 lbs, and perform about as well as this joker's bike is claimed to, but manage to get 200 miles per gallon -- not bad for a 1945 design!
Basically, all he's succeeded in doing is cutting the weight in half (over a 60-year-old design) and halving the gas mileage.
Obligatory disclaimer: I worked for SCO from 1991 to 1995. I was in the techpubs team working on SCO OpenServer 5, released in mid-1995. So I think I have some insight into SCO's corporate culture as it then was...
Kids, the company that filed this lawsuit is not SCO.
Engineers at SCO were bolting together PC based UNIXes back before Linus got started. From the late 1980's, they inherited Xenix -- a descendant of AT&T System 7. In 1988 they bought the rights to AT&T SVR3.2 (for an eye-watering sum -- in 1994, each box SCO sold was encumbered with about $200 in royalty payments to other companies). By 1992, SCO UNIX 3.2.4 was a cash cow, and they needed something new.
I'd rate the rot as having set in by late 1991. Before then, SCO was an exceedingly cool place to work -- one of the early UNIX start-ups, SCO was the outfit with the hot tub in the courtyard of the original company offices and the source of numerous interesting legends. There was a lot of cross-fertilization with SGI and Sun at the engineering level back in the late 80's, and some of that survived into the 1990's. But the ACE Initiative killed it dead -- led to a 15% downsizing in 1991, when SCO was forced to admit that it couldn't market Open Desktop against Windows and hope to win. Then there was a string of bad decisions that effectively doomed the company to ossification and slow decline.
First there was the decision to build OpenServer in the first place. Then when SVR4 appeared to be making ground and SVR4.2 (UnixWare 1) came out, there was IIRC a quiet attempt to clone the SVR4 kernel. (The AT&T copyright declarations were retained in the headers, but by 1995 SCO's main product bore about the same relationship to SVR3.2 that a heavily customized rice burner bears to a showroom model.)
But SCO was, at this point, still a real software company. The UNIX dev team had more than 200 engineers working in it. Then the rot set in for real...
(Historical aside: I first met Linux in 1993, as the system a bunch of SCO's engineers were running on their home machines. But when I left in early 1995, there was an attitude of complete denial in SCO's management -- Linux was a toy system that could never be relevant.)
Anyway. Why did I leave?
The main warning to me that the company was probably not a good long term career bet happened three months ahead of the functional freeze on OpenServer. One lunchtime managers came around our cubicle farm and pitch-forked us into coaches, drove us for two hours around the M25 motorway, and dragged us into a hotel at Heathrow where we were given glasses of grape juice and ushered into a theatre. The lights dimmed, the sound system came up playing "Things Can Only Get Better" (gack!) and the board of directors ran on stage punching their air. The occasion? It was to announce the retirement of the CEO and his replacement by the CFO (yes, the head bean counter). Said CFO promised to grow SCO's revenue base from $200M/year (in 1995) to $1Bn/year by 2000. I took one look at this stage, considered the Linux box (1.2 kernel) back home, and went back to my cubicle and started updating my resume.
There's a point to this long, discursive ramble. After I left SCO, I kept an eye on it. Sales didn't do well, although the Tarantella middleware product -- Doug Michel's pet, after the board panicked, kicked out the accountant, and invited him back -- did okay. The UNIX dev team languished, became an appendix to HP and IBM with Monterey, and in the end was downsized repeatedly until it no longer existed. Finally, SCO split in two.
The important corporate bit now follows. SCO had two arms; the Tarantella middleware arm, which was doing okay, and the UNIX arm, which was in a death-spiral. As I understand it, SCO Inc sold the UNIX arm to Caldera (then flush with IPO dollars), renamed itself to Tarantella Inc, and is presumably doing okay, albeit as a smaller software company in a different field. Caldera retained some of SCO's UNIX marketing and sales staff, but basically treated SCO's software as a cash cow. Caldera were set up with lots of money by Ray Noorda, but don't seem to have had a clue how to sell software. And the company now known as SCO is actually Caldera.
So what's going on?
Caldera has always been a money hole. Caldera peaked at something like 4% of the market for shrinkwrapped Linux distros, and never quite seemed to get the engineering side together. While Redhat's contribution is well-known, and SuSE have done a lot of solid engineering work (much of which is GPL'd -- the device drivers, for example -- rather than the much-more-visible and proprietary admin GUI), who remembers what Caldera tried to add to the community? (Yes, they tried to build yet another admin front end -- in the end, nobody else bothered using it.) Caldera basically targeted the commercial market before it was ready to buy Linux. Then they bought a sadly run-down product from SCO, and failed to promote it effectively. That's because Caldera still think they're selling software licences, rather than support and services. Now nobody wants to buy their licences (when they can pick up something equivalent for free) they're trying to attach a cost to the free stuff.
It's somewhat sad that SCO's name is being dragged through the mud this way; it feels like someone I knew who's been dead for years just clawed their way out of the graveyard mud and began shambling around town looking for brains to chow down on.
... The US government is currently spending about $6Bn building a deep nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Despite vast uncertainty over whether it's possible to seal high level waste underground for a period of kiloyears without it leaking. Disposal in space would be preferable -- but the reliability of current launch systems militates against this.
Enter the space elevator.
Basically, if we build a space elevator we get an answer to the long-term nuclear waste disposal problem, as a nearly-free side effect: a problem expensive enough to justify such a construction project in its own right, before we look into speculative items like 3He mining or space tourism.
Think about it. What they really need to clean up the Chernobyl site in the Ukraine would be a bacterium that (a) is radiation resistant (a bunch of pre-existing candidates are already known), and (b) selectively concentrates certain elements (probably you'd need a couple of strains; one for the actinides such as plutonium, and a couple of others for the lighter stuff -- IIRC there's still a lot of caesium 131 knocking around the Zone).
Just build big bioreactors and feed megatons of topsoil into them. The end product should be clean
soil and very, very radioactive [dead] bacteria, which can be treated as concentrated high level waste.
(This would also come in handy in parts of Nevada and at the US military nuclear sites, where the problem is dealing with radioisotopes dispersed in the soil and ground water.)
Like a rather large number of people, I have atopic eczema. This means that patches of my skin get red, sore, and swollen, then subsequently dry out and turn flaky and opaque before falling off. It's unsightly, sometimes painful, and itches like hell -- but it's not infectious. Nor is it curable. (Spot the "opaque" bit. That's important, in the context of this gadget.) The only treatments we've got for it are palliative, and it can be triggered by stress, allergies, or other environmental. factors. Finally, just for fun, one of the commonest parts of the body to be affected is... the palm of the hand.
So now a visible percentage of the population are now going to be intermittently locked out of their computers by a stress-related illness. Isn't technology great?
Hardware, not software, is what the Zaurus needs
on
Zaurus Software Reviews
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Speaking as a [new] Zaurus owner, the one thing I'd give my right foot for is a Think Outside folding keyboard, or equivalent. Just something I can plug
the Zaurus into and use for touch-typing.
The Zaurus keyboard is better than nothing, but it's not good enough -- and handwriting input isn't what I want. 90% of what I do with a laptop when I'm on the move is concerned with text, and the Zaurus with a folding external keyboard and a spare battery would actually replace a laptop for most purposes. So where are the hardware add-ons?
Hey, nobody warned me that I was going to be slashdotted!
Incidentally,I have it on good authority that the Oxford English Dictionary is going to cite "Lobsters" as the first use of slashdot as a verb -- turns out that the OED editors have still got this quaint prejudice in favour of hardcopy, so being in a book in the British Library (or US Library of Congress) gets you into the OED, and being on slashdot itself doesn't.
Here's a nasty theory: if the amendment, as drafted, is passed, it will make life virtually impossible for investigative journalists. If you want to dig into malfeasance or corruption in an NHS trust, local parish council, or just about any government department, under the revised RIPA terms even a low-level administrator can order your phone tapped, your email monitored, and generally track all your incoming information. Which undermines the ability of journalists to protect their sources.
In addition to phone and internet taps, the RIP Act covers private CCTV footage (there are over two million private CCTV cameras in the UK). This could potentially allow affected agencies to visually monitor journalists on their way to appointments with sources -- or to
demand tape of meetings in order to identify sources. Basically, if this measure passes, anonymous whistle-blowing will become seriously difficult.
The last Conservative administration encountered a deluge of corruption scandals in their fourth election term; these were partly a result of genuine corruption, but also partially the consequence of the British press scenting blood in the water and homing in on every rumour. This measure sounds to me like New Labour, in conjunction with the Home Office, battening down the hatches and tightening the screws in order to reduce leaks.
The bar in question is "The Guildford Arms" in Edinburgh, yours trully features in that sequence under his own name... and weirdly, I'm on the Hugo list too (under "best novelette").
The reason for this mess is that the SF writing field in Scotland is very small, and the number of Scottish SF writers who have an interest in weird politics and extropianism is even smaller.
Let me get this straight: they stuck a bugging
device in the headboard of the Chinese premier's
bed so they could listen in on
pillow talk?
Gee, I'd love to join the Mile High Club when I'm in my eighties, too!
(Clue: if Tony Blair had a VIP transport of
his own, this theory might make sense. But Chinese heads of state seem to get the office on
account of having outlived all their grandchildren...)
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"The attitude here in London is mostly anti-Euro,
as Brits object to this new prospect of
continental government. We've been independent
for this long, and under no means do we want to
be governed by someone higher than the
Parliament" --
It is precisely this attitude that makes me ashamed to be British.
Vive la EU!
Seriously:
There's a widespread assumption in the UK, and
most widespread among the Euroskeptics, that
we are unequivocally better than everyone else
and that their ways of doing things are worse.
I don't buy it. Doing someone else down is the nastiest expression of
patriotism, and usually conceals a narrow-minded
reluctance to scrutinise one's own actions.
Yes,
the banking currency-conversion objection is
valid: and so are the issues to do with non-anonymity of large-denomination notes.But
the exchange rate doesn't fluctuate
wildly -- the Pound is typically locked to
within +/- 0.1% of the Euro.
Personally, I'm looking forward to using the same currency whether at home or abroad. And I'm
looking forward to the opportunity to vote for tighter integration with the EU.
UOSat got there first ...
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Baltimore Sun didn't do their research
very well -- the University of Surrey, in
England, has been doing exactly this since
the mid-EIGHTIES, with their UoSAT series
of minisatellites.
UoSAT-1, if I remember correctly (details are
sparse on the net) was build on a budget
of 60,000 as a student project and
piggybacked into orbit on an Ariane-4 comsat
launch. A number of subsequent UoSATs are part
of the OSCAR series of radio amateur satellites,
and a commercial spin-off of the University,
SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited)
build and sell minisats in the 200-500Kg rangefor commercial purchasers; see, for
example,
this report of the launch of UoSAT-12 (from 1999).
Your $15 CD's are sold in the UK, an EU member
state, for 15 -- at the current exchange rate, that's US $22.
Note that in many cases these CD's are pressed and packaged locally. Imports are flagged as such
and typically sold for upwards of 20.
The artists typically see only about 10% of the
gross price -- the rest is divvied up along the
supply chain, with the lion's share going to the
record companies.
If you haven't already read it, read
Courtney Love does the math on Salon, where she explains precisely where the money goes...
Note that widespread police cameras aren't a
qualitative change in a society: you are already
under surveillance by the police whenever you
go forth in public.
The nature of the change is quantitative,
in that it puts more police eyeballs out there
on the street.
Essentially it's a force multiplier for law enforcement.
(Of course, as a general commented, "quality troops beat ordinary ones every time, but quantity has a quality all of its own".)
If you want to prevent abuse, what you need is a right to privacy in public. That is: rather than making it a specific offense to stalk someone, there should be a general right not to be stalked (or monitored) without cause.You also need to ensure that law cams are not introduced without stringent regulation over who can monitor them and what they can do with the output -- which also needs to be subject to the rules of evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a European, I'd like to congratulate the United States on its latest airliner.
Seriously. 50% of the A380 subassemblies come from the USA. Boeing is playing the "it's an evil foreign plot to topple American dominance of the aerospace industry!" card, but that's just self-serving FUD. Remember, for each $280M A380 that sells, American companies pick up 50% of the assembly work. Similarly, large chunks of Boeing's products come from EADS, BAE systems, and other non-American contractors.
So let's get over the jingoistic flag-waving and evaluate this rather impressive piece of hardware on its actual merits, shall we?
A lot of non-SF writers -- journalists included -- have this weird idea that to write about something like AI, you need to do your research by visiting the AI department at your local university and pestering a couple of professors for an afternoon.
I don't work that way. I especially don't do things like that simply to provide a scene for a journalist to write about. It's disrespectful. Not to mention being a waste of said academics' time.
If you want to find out about AI you do a CS degree and a module in AI, at a minimum. Then you stay current by reading the literature, talking to your mates about the PhDs they're working on, talking to people on the net, and so on. At least, that's how I went about it. (Big screaming clue: I didn't study at Edinburgh, although Edinburgh is indeed a very important centre for AI in the UK.)
Unfortunately this reality doesn't fit the format for a PopSci article, in which a firm understanding of, say, Bayesian expert systems or constraint-based reasoning could be acquired by an SF writer by a process akin to osmosis, in the course of one rainy spring afternoon ... as long as said SF writer is standing on the holy ground of a university AI department.
So I got written up as a "facts? don't trouble me with facts!" know-nothing.
doesn't anyone see the gross similarity between the rapture and the singularity?
Yup. Ken McLeod calls it "the rapture of the nerds", and he's not wrong. (Cory and I grabbed that phrase and recycled it as the title for a novella bound in with issue #2 of Argosy because it seemed so apposite.) Millenialism is nothing new, as students of Norman Cohn will be aware ...
On the other hand, it makes a great hook to hang a story on, doesn't it?
(Which is why, now it's snowballed to the point of generating articles in Popular Science and threads on slashdot, I'm swearing off it and going in search of something new to strip-mine for fiction ...)
Incidentally, I liked the part where Stross declines to meet real AI researchers, because he doesn't care about real technology developments. That's certainly part of the issue -- these guys only read and write for their own little cult. Um, no: I declined to be dragged around the AI department at the local university here because (a) I don't have any contacts there (note the emphasis on local in local university -- it's not one of the universities I studied at) and (b) I didn't feel like being part of a dog'n'pony show organized for the benefit of PopSci's readers. Remember: the article you're commenting on reflects the opinions of the journalist who wrote it. Contents may settle after shipping, etcetera.
Funnily enough, I didn't get paid to write that. All you get if you're asked to blurb a novel is the advance copy of a book that isn't published yet -- and the opportunity to say "sorry" if it doesn't push your buttons.
"A Colder War" was a dry run for a novel.
That novel, "The Atrocity Archives", is due out in hardcover in the US this April/May.
You can pre-order it from Amazon.com here.
I'm told I'm cited as the primary source for the verb "to slashdot" in the Oxford English Dictionary corpus. (They're after printed sources, not online ones, so this is rather unfair -- I didn't invent the verb-backformation, after all.)
I don't use /. reader personality traits in my fiction. But I do read /. daily -- as I have done for some years -- and use it as a fertile source of pointers to new ideas. (If I use any net personality types in my fiction it's from usenet -- which I've been reading since about 1989. All of human life is there, kinda-sorta, including both saints and the sorts who live under rocks.)
Added bonus factoid: Singularity Sky was written on Linux and MacOS/X boxen, using Vim. Formatting was done using POD macros, and the source was kept under RCS control (CVS is massive overkill for novels). The output files (in RTF and PDF) were finally generated using some command line tools and a makefile I knocked together ...
Hi there.
If you want to read more of my stuff, there are some (older) stories on my fiction pages.
If you want to know when the sequel, "Iron Sunrise", is due out (and the other books I've got coming), see my books FAQ.
And there is of course the obligatory weblog, but because it's CGI-mediated and my server's decidedly on the elderly side I'm not going to post the URL here. (If you want it badly enough and you're clueful you'll find it :)
Since then I've made two major career shifts: from techpubs sideways into software development, then after about six years of that I downshifted completely and turned to freelance writing. Because I'm self-employed and not really doing anything in the software industry any more I'm reasonably well insulated from the damage Caldera has done to SCO's former reputation, but if I find the pickings are thin and have to go looking for contract tech authoring work I may have a problem. A big problem.
I have been tempted to sue SCaldera for defamation, given that they've basically turned my biggest technical writing CV bulletpoint into sewage. But if it comes to it, I'll basically target my CV. Non-software companies get the unvarnished SCO checkmark, while companies where an interviewer might have heard of Ransom Love's antics will get a footnote.
But in the long term, SCO is nothing more than a footnote. There is no job for life any more, and we're moving increasingly away from having a single career for life, too. Who lists jobs they held more than a decade ago for less than one year on their CV any more? The odds are high that any skills involved are long obsolete. Similarly, SCO won't blight current employees' work history forever.
I write for a living. I sell novels. The lifespan of a novel is over a decade -- if it's a successful one, several decades. I don't dare use proprietary storage formats that may become inaccessible in five or ten years: plain text with embedded markup is essential. And markup in a simple macro format I can roll my own parser for if I need to -- I currently use POD format as it's rich enough for writing novels as well as Perl documentation.
But I still have to keep a copy of Microsoft Word to hand. Because the publishers I deal with want an electronic copy for their typesetters these days, and they expect everyone to use Word, despite its gross inadequacies as a novelist's tool (untameable Autocorrect, insane file-format lock-in, stupid reliance on mouse over keyboard, and all).
Basically, all he's succeeded in doing is cutting the weight in half (over a 60-year-old design) and halving the gas mileage.
Kids, the company that filed this lawsuit is not SCO.
Engineers at SCO were bolting together PC based UNIXes back before Linus got started. From the late 1980's, they inherited Xenix -- a descendant of AT&T System 7. In 1988 they bought the rights to AT&T SVR3.2 (for an eye-watering sum -- in 1994, each box SCO sold was encumbered with about $200 in royalty payments to other companies). By 1992, SCO UNIX 3.2.4 was a cash cow, and they needed something new.
I'd rate the rot as having set in by late 1991. Before then, SCO was an exceedingly cool place to work -- one of the early UNIX start-ups, SCO was the outfit with the hot tub in the courtyard of the original company offices and the source of numerous interesting legends. There was a lot of cross-fertilization with SGI and Sun at the engineering level back in the late 80's, and some of that survived into the 1990's. But the ACE Initiative killed it dead -- led to a 15% downsizing in 1991, when SCO was forced to admit that it couldn't market Open Desktop against Windows and hope to win. Then there was a string of bad decisions that effectively doomed the company to ossification and slow decline.
First there was the decision to build OpenServer in the first place. Then when SVR4 appeared to be making ground and SVR4.2 (UnixWare 1) came out, there was IIRC a quiet attempt to clone the SVR4 kernel. (The AT&T copyright declarations were retained in the headers, but by 1995 SCO's main product bore about the same relationship to SVR3.2 that a heavily customized rice burner bears to a showroom model.)
But SCO was, at this point, still a real software company. The UNIX dev team had more than 200 engineers working in it. Then the rot set in for real ...
(Historical aside: I first met Linux in 1993, as the system a bunch of SCO's engineers were running on their home machines. But when I left in early 1995, there was an attitude of complete denial in SCO's management -- Linux was a toy system that could never be relevant.)
Anyway. Why did I leave?
The main warning to me that the company was probably not a good long term career bet happened three months ahead of the functional freeze on OpenServer. One lunchtime managers came around our cubicle farm and pitch-forked us into coaches, drove us for two hours around the M25 motorway, and dragged us into a hotel at Heathrow where we were given glasses of grape juice and ushered into a theatre. The lights dimmed, the sound system came up playing "Things Can Only Get Better" (gack!) and the board of directors ran on stage punching their air. The occasion? It was to announce the retirement of the CEO and his replacement by the CFO (yes, the head bean counter). Said CFO promised to grow SCO's revenue base from $200M/year (in 1995) to $1Bn/year by 2000. I took one look at this stage, considered the Linux box (1.2 kernel) back home, and went back to my cubicle and started updating my resume.
There's a point to this long, discursive ramble. After I left SCO, I kept an eye on it. Sales didn't do well, although the Tarantella middleware product -- Doug Michel's pet, after the board panicked, kicked out the accountant, and invited him back -- did okay. The UNIX dev team languished, became an appendix to HP and IBM with Monterey, and in the end was downsized repeatedly until it no longer existed. Finally, SCO split in two.
The important corporate bit now follows. SCO had two arms; the Tarantella middleware arm, which was doing okay, and the UNIX arm, which was in a death-spiral. As I understand it, SCO Inc sold the UNIX arm to Caldera (then flush with IPO dollars), renamed itself to Tarantella Inc, and is presumably doing okay, albeit as a smaller software company in a different field. Caldera retained some of SCO's UNIX marketing and sales staff, but basically treated SCO's software as a cash cow. Caldera were set up with lots of money by Ray Noorda, but don't seem to have had a clue how to sell software. And the company now known as SCO is actually Caldera.
So what's going on?
Caldera has always been a money hole. Caldera peaked at something like 4% of the market for shrinkwrapped Linux distros, and never quite seemed to get the engineering side together. While Redhat's contribution is well-known, and SuSE have done a lot of solid engineering work (much of which is GPL'd -- the device drivers, for example -- rather than the much-more-visible and proprietary admin GUI), who remembers what Caldera tried to add to the community? (Yes, they tried to build yet another admin front end -- in the end, nobody else bothered using it.) Caldera basically targeted the commercial market before it was ready to buy Linux. Then they bought a sadly run-down product from SCO, and failed to promote it effectively. That's because Caldera still think they're selling software licences, rather than support and services. Now nobody wants to buy their licences (when they can pick up something equivalent for free) they're trying to attach a cost to the free stuff.
It's somewhat sad that SCO's name is being dragged through the mud this way; it feels like someone I knew who's been dead for years just clawed their way out of the graveyard mud and began shambling around town looking for brains to chow down on.
Enter the space elevator.
Basically, if we build a space elevator we get an answer to the long-term nuclear waste disposal problem, as a nearly-free side effect: a problem expensive enough to justify such a construction project in its own right, before we look into speculative items like 3He mining or space tourism.
Just build big bioreactors and feed megatons of topsoil into them. The end product should be clean soil and very, very radioactive [dead] bacteria, which can be treated as concentrated high level waste.
(This would also come in handy in parts of Nevada and at the US military nuclear sites, where the problem is dealing with radioisotopes dispersed in the soil and ground water.)
So now a visible percentage of the population are now going to be intermittently locked out of their computers by a stress-related illness. Isn't technology great?
The Zaurus keyboard is better than nothing, but it's not good enough -- and handwriting input isn't what I want. 90% of what I do with a laptop when I'm on the move is concerned with text, and the Zaurus with a folding external keyboard and a spare battery would actually replace a laptop for most purposes. So where are the hardware add-ons?
Incidentally,I have it on good authority that the Oxford English Dictionary is going to cite "Lobsters" as the first use of slashdot as a verb -- turns out that the OED editors have still got this quaint prejudice in favour of hardcopy, so being in a book in the British Library (or US Library of Congress) gets you into the OED, and being on slashdot itself doesn't.
Here's a nasty theory: if the amendment, as drafted, is passed, it will make life virtually impossible for investigative journalists. If you want to dig into malfeasance or corruption in an NHS trust, local parish council, or just about any government department, under the revised RIPA terms even a low-level administrator can order your phone tapped, your email monitored, and generally track all your incoming information. Which undermines the ability of journalists to protect their sources.
In addition to phone and internet taps, the RIP Act covers private CCTV footage (there are over two million private CCTV cameras in the UK). This could potentially allow affected agencies to visually monitor journalists on their way to appointments with sources -- or to demand tape of meetings in order to identify sources. Basically, if this measure passes, anonymous whistle-blowing will become seriously difficult.
The last Conservative administration encountered a deluge of corruption scandals in their fourth election term; these were partly a result of genuine corruption, but also partially the consequence of the British press scenting blood in the water and homing in on every rumour. This measure sounds to me like New Labour, in conjunction with the Home Office, battening down the hatches and tightening the screws in order to reduce leaks.
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
The bar in question is "The Guildford Arms" in Edinburgh, yours trully features in that sequence under his own name
The reason for this mess is that the SF writing field in Scotland is very small, and the number of Scottish SF writers who have an interest in weird politics and extropianism is even smaller.
Gee, I'd love to join the Mile High Club when I'm in my eighties, too!
(Clue: if Tony Blair had a VIP transport of his own, this theory might make sense. But Chinese heads of state seem to get the office on account of having outlived all their grandchildren ...)
It is precisely this attitude that makes me ashamed to be British.
Vive la EU!
Seriously:
There's a widespread assumption in the UK, and most widespread among the Euroskeptics, that we are unequivocally better than everyone else and that their ways of doing things are worse.
I don't buy it. Doing someone else down is the nastiest expression of patriotism, and usually conceals a narrow-minded reluctance to scrutinise one's own actions.
Yes, the banking currency-conversion objection is valid: and so are the issues to do with non-anonymity of large-denomination notes.But the exchange rate doesn't fluctuate wildly -- the Pound is typically locked to within +/- 0.1% of the Euro.
Personally, I'm looking forward to using the same currency whether at home or abroad. And I'm looking forward to the opportunity to vote for tighter integration with the EU.
UoSAT-1, if I remember correctly (details are sparse on the net) was build on a budget of 60,000 as a student project and piggybacked into orbit on an Ariane-4 comsat launch. A number of subsequent UoSATs are part of the OSCAR series of radio amateur satellites, and a commercial spin-off of the University, SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited) build and sell minisats in the 200-500Kg rangefor commercial purchasers; see, for example, this report of the launch of UoSAT-12 (from 1999).
Note that in many cases these CD's are pressed and packaged locally. Imports are flagged as such and typically sold for upwards of 20.
The artists typically see only about 10% of the gross price -- the rest is divvied up along the supply chain, with the lion's share going to the record companies.
If you haven't already read it, read Courtney Love does the math on Salon, where she explains precisely where the money goes ...
The nature of the change is quantitative, in that it puts more police eyeballs out there on the street.
Essentially it's a force multiplier for law enforcement.
(Of course, as a general commented, "quality troops beat ordinary ones every time, but quantity has a quality all of its own".)
If you want to prevent abuse, what you need is a right to privacy in public. That is: rather than making it a specific offense to stalk someone, there should be a general right not to be stalked (or monitored) without cause.You also need to ensure that law cams are not introduced without stringent regulation over who can monitor them and what they can do with the output -- which also needs to be subject to the rules of evidence.