A 1-sided marketplace is one where there's a clear flow in one direction. An economy is, by definition, a flow of real wealth (EG: cars, tobacco) from places where such commodities are cheaper (such as factories and Virginia fields) towards places where they are scarcer and more expensive (such as your garage or shirt pocket). Money flows in the opposite direction.
In this sense, a marketplace is "1 sided", in that there's an inherent imbalance that makes it all work. To become rich, you have to make real wealth cheaper to come by. And the cheaper you make that real wealth, the richer you can become.
Let's assume that I am a B2B kind of guy. (I don't want to deal with "end users", I want to deal with businesses - Business 2 Business)
So I set up a high-end network. I'm going to carry massive amounts of data, and peer with existing "tier 1" providers to shuffle data with/for them. Let's just assume that I have significantly more bandwidth than Sprint or Cogent, and for this argument, I'll be a "tier 0" provider.
If I peered with Sprint/Cogent/ATT/XO in order to provide service to them, how would I get paid?
I mean, here I am, shuffling terabits of data every second for all these "tier 1" providers, at significant cost to my company. How do I not close doors as soon as my venture capital runs out?
Peering points are only "free" if the give and take for the connection is fairly equivalent. When it becomes 1-sided, the "free" cost has to balance somehow, or my company example above would fail despite providing significant value to the marketplace.
Currently, the "cost" of bandwidth is paid for by content providers, not content consumers. As a content provider, I pay nearly $1,000 per month for a 100 Mbit connection to the Internet in a high quality colo facility, at about 10 Mbit usage, while many people reading this can get a 10 Mbit connection for $40 or less.
And it has to be that bandwidth has to be 1-directional. See, if I'm a tier 0 provider, with no end-users to "pay the bill", and upload costs were equal to download costs, I wouldn't get paid for my service, even though I'm providing a valuable service. But by making the cost of bandwidth 1-directional, I can get paid for delivering a valuable service to the marketplace! The marketplace has to be 1-sided, otherwise you don't have a marketplace.
Don't worry, it's OK. The marketplace has to provide some means to operate, or it doesn't exist!
Your "Austrian School" ignores the fact that the economy is, itself, a product of government.
Think about it: economy requires money, which is printed by the gubbmint. The free exchange of money requires law, which is also provided by gubbmint. Virtually all monetary exchanges involve the use of public infrastructure, such as roads, telecommunications, water, electricity, and other amenities provided by (you guessed it!) the gubbmint.
This "libertarian ideal" of not having any gubbmint meddling is sorta like kids who wish their parents wouldn't "meddle" in the operations of the house.
Realistically in tight economic times development will stagnate, companies will stick with what they have for as long as they can and only change when they are forced too and then that change will be targeted at long term solutions, where they have the greatest control over outlays and future investment cycles.
Really? Because that's not the trend I'm seeing - at all.
As a hosted application provider, I'm finding our clients squeezing their belts, left, right, and center. They're nervous, they're scared, they're jumpy. And it seems that the more jumpy and scared they get, the more contracts we are signing, left, right and center!
See, our product is designed to cut costs by automating compliance to legal requirements. It's a hosted application, and many of our new contracts view us as a way to eliminate the cost of maintaining home-brew stuff that's low quality and costly to maintain. Our products, on the other hand, are comprehensive, well funded, and reasonably priced.
I guess you could say that there is some lock-in with our product, because although we don't want to hold anybody hostage, we're not giving away our source code, either. We certainly wouldn't hesitate to turn over our client's data on demand, (they can click-to-download most of it without ever consulting us) but our clients aren't generally the coding type, and the marketplace for our wares is almost a niche.
I believe that a good business is truly a relationship between the business and its customers. When the business truly considers the needs of its potential customers, and works to meet those needs in an efficient, professional, and competent manner, the customers really won't mind returning the favor. In our case, we almost let our customers outsource their worries to us, and we work hard to make sure that we deliver.
Not so sure about PDFs as an image format - which is exactly what you have when you use PDF to hold scanned documents. I think the more interesting point is that they feel they have an OCR package good enough to be trustworthy. I wonder if it's based on the Tesseract OCR software that they adopted a while back?
I played with it for a while, and got very poor results from the command line. Even when I made a png or bmp of a full screen single word "HELLO" in 200 pixel font with GIMP (about as perfect as input gets!) I'd often get "HEHO" or "H3H0" or god only knows what else.
Of course, this is when the project relaunch was first announced a year or two ago, I certainly hope it's better now! Looking at their web page, it does appear that there's some significant activity going on. Yay Google!
Maybe I'll try it again, and see if it's worth using yet?
you can't underestimate the power of Chinese whispers... With IE6 and IE7 Microsoft caused so much resentment amongst web developers (or the ones who built pages properly at any rate) that lots of people began some kind of crusade to get everyone they knew using a different browser.
Never been called Chinese before... but I'm one of 'em. Our web-based workflow automation product displays a dire warning message on the login screen, when it's detected that the end user is running IE:
"You are strongly advised to use Mozilla Firefox to access this product. It's a free download. Here's why!". If they click, they get a list of security holes, and usability problems with IE. There's a link provided to download FF. Nearly all of our customers have done the upgrade, and that amounts to several thousand end users. I'd wager that more than half would never have known about firefox but now use FF by default.
The only thing that is "wrong" fundamentally with the internet is the separation of DNS and the routing protocol.
This has to be one of the DUMBEST ideas I think I've ever heard of....
As an application hosting provider, we provide a very strong level of redundancy, including hot disaster recovery hosting. If anything serious were to happen to our primary hosting facility, we'd update DNS and within a few hours, our secondary hosting would become active.
By definition, the secondary hosting is in another city, on another network, through a different power company, to provide as much differentiation and minimization of downtime as possible. If you combined DNS and routing, how would this switchover happen?
Sorry. Bad idea. Bad, bad bad idea.
I could see an argument for combining PKI and DNS, and indeed, it's not only been suggested elsewhere, it's been implemented. Obviously, there's a good case to make, here.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
This is perhaps the "elevator pitch" but in reality there is much, much more to it than just this.
1) Other comments have posted about rolling power outages - these electric cars will help *prevent* rolling power outages! The truth is that the power grid is massively overbuilt. There is about 25% of the grid built to handle perhaps 12 hours of usage per year - the dreaded mid-summer air conditioning spike. These cars "talk" to the grid. They charge when power is plentiful (eg: at night) and can even backfeed into the grid if there's a shortage. The result is that they make better, more consistent, and more even use of the grid 24x7, while also providing embedded resiliency.
2) The cars are rented. You pay for usage. Yeah, much like the cell phone model. But because of this, you don't have to worry about batteries, you don't have to worry about mechanic bills, and the cost for usage (per mile) is less than your existing car, anyway. Since nearly all cars are either financed or leased nowadays, anyway, the effect on the consumer is negligible. Day-to-day, you wouldn't notice the difference!
3) The reason why electric cars bomb is the dreaded long trip. Even with 250 or so miles per charge, roughly equivalent to most cars' "full tank" range, the electric cars to date are utter fail for trips that are farther. You have to find a place to charge. You have to wait 4-8 hours. Etc. But with these electric cars, you can swap batteries in less time than it would take to fill the tank on your existing car. The problem of replacing batteries just.... goes away.
I'm not just sold on this plan. I'm sold and sold and sold. I wish California would jump on board - I'd finally have a good reason to replace my aging (but perfectly operational) 10 year old 200,000 mile Saturn SL2!
If you are smart about security, keep your mouth shut. There's not much you can do, except yourself be a target.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Some time ago I found a gapingly large security whole in a major credit card company's online credit card processing system when I was being paid to implement an online shopping cart system. It was a terrible, nasty security hole - bad enough that I could have purchased anything I wanted to at any vendor's website that used this gateway for FREE, without the use of any special "hacking toolz", just a browser and a text editor.
The kind of thing that you see most commonly at the Daily WTF.
So I wrote a detailed email, indicating that I was recommending against this company to my client, along with explicit details, step by step, for how to completely compromise their gateway. I also included specific details for how the security hole could have been completely mitigated. I sent this email to every account that I could find/think of at the company, including abuse@, sales@, customerserver@, postmaster@, webmaster@, etc as well the reps that I'd been working with to that point, cc my client.
My client canceled the account with said company and moved to one with a much more secure API. Having done my duty by protecting my client, I promptly forgot all about the original credit card processing company.
Over a year later, long after I forgot completely about the original credit card company, I got a phone call, from a very agitated-sounding gentleman on the phone. He verified my identity, then asked me questions about the security hole. My only verbal response to him was something like: "Everything I know is in the email I sent to you, the email speaks for itself. A qualified software engineer could read it and should know exactly what to do.". But he wasn't happy with this. He asked me if I'd tried to use the security hole, and I said nothing. He then started this rant, going on and on about how it really wasn't a security hole, and how it's really not a problem. Over and over, he repeated himself.
Finally, he threatened to sue me if I disclosed the security hole to anybody else, and hung up the phone.
The point being? Having been given the problem on a silver platter, with details, implementation details, and a detailed description of how to fix the problem, their "solution" was to yell at and threaten me, the discloser. Never mind the fact that the knowledge needed to compromise their gateway was public information. (their documentation was freely downloadable)
As a professional in either security and/or the digital arts, you frequently find yourself in the unenviable position of seeing the emperor stark naked in front of the crowds. It's not a pleasant experience. Merely helping somebody can be grounds for attack the weak whose fear stems from their misunderstanding - all too often, they confuse the message with the messenger.
What's retarded is just how easy it is to show that your understanding of law is deficient. I clocked myself: a legal definition of what legally constitutes a person took me almost exactly 14 seconds, including the time it took to launch a new tab in Firefox to do the searching in.
Not checking your information is idiotic in this age of freely available information; you'd do well to double-check yourself next time so you don't look like a pompous (but wrong) doofus.
And for those of you too lazy to click the above link, a corporation IS legally considered a "person" in a number of contexts, as defined by a LEGAL dictionary. Don't confuse "person" with Natural Person which is more in line with your comments.
Seriously, a lot of things with MS are just power games. The MS keys on your keyboard are an example. By my best estimate, about 1% of users ever use them for anything not an accident.
Actually, I find them quite useful. When I plug my Microsoft keyboard into my Mac Mini, the MS keys work the same as the "Apple" key. For this, they are quite useful. Otherwise, they're just a sorry way to bring up the start menu, which any moron would use the mouse for since navigating the start menu by keyboard is so horrendous...
What about a PC emulating a VT-100 terminal? What about a browser that reads a language in many ways similar to ANSI?
Seriously, folks.
As a developer of web-based workflow automation solutions, web-based is definitely the way to go. It's quick, simple, high-performance, nothing to install, cross platform, centralized, easily administered, and on, and on, and on...
For our type of product and problem set, doing *any* of it client-side is the problem! Software the coordinates the activities of many people *should* be network-based, because it's about a network of people. And if you take a look at many of your spreadsheets, word documents, and the like, you'll find that a large percentage of them are, in fact, "human network" administration tools done badly.
EG: Memos that need to be circulated, and signed by all staff for compliance. Memos should be circulated via the employee login to the system. When they've read it, they hit a checkbox and click the "submit" button. Then it's easy to see compliance by querying a database. (and maybe producing a simple table showing who has/hasn't checked the box) Rather than pay a staffie to go around and do compliance with a bunch of checksheets, you pay a programmer to do it once - for every memo that will need to be circulated thereafter.
EG: Sales figures obtained verbally from many staff members that are to be summarized before the planning meeting at 10:00. Sales figures should be queried directly from the invoice database to eliminate user error and forgotten transactions. It should be generated on demand DURING the meeting at 10:00, not compiled 48-60 hours in advance on Friday!
Thin client is here, has been here, and has been growing in use for some time when you consider that the client itself is irrelevant if the protocol (HTTP) is thin enough. And it is.
Nowadays, most money exists only because of debt, and the nature of debt is such that you can never pay it all off because of interest. Watch the video link above...
It's like when you are driving a car, if you are driving a car with lots of seats so that you can take your kids to school, you are probably counting Libraries of Congress while using 10-40 oil. But if you use Kerosene instead, and drive a truck instead, you'll make twice as many tri--
Your comments implying the driving slower may be more dangerous is laughable - like the tales told of people who got into accidents while trying to buckle their seatbelt.
As the average speed of the US driver has climbed, the death toll has risen as well - both in absolute numbers and in average deaths per mile travelled. There is no evidence that driving slower is more dangerous, notwithstanding your own personal feelings in the matter. And if somebody driving slow in front of you is enough to make you drive in a risky manner, you really shouldn't be driving, should you?
You don't need a certificate authority to use SSL. SSH works fine without a Certificate Authority. The only value that a Certificate Authority provides is in positively identifying/validating a participant that you didn't previously validate.
The protocol I mentioned requires no certificate, since the public key is being copy/pasted with a mechanism that is otherwise trusted.
But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made.
Some years back, I read an article in an old magazine (I think it was a 1960's Popular Science) about a new method of blowing glass resulting in "near unbreakable" bottles. It went on excitedly for page, after page, talking about the new era of safety that this kind of glass could behest - glass that doesn't easily break - you could drop your soda or medicine bottle and it wouldn't shatter!
Intrigued, I spent an entire afternoon at the local University library trying to figure out exactly what happened to this miraculous technology! I even did some searching (AltaVista) on the then new-fangled Internet. The truth rather surprised me...
This "breakthrough" technology that had gone invisible was part of my everyday life, including the bottle of Diet Coke I was then slurping from! It had become so common that virtually nobody produced the old-fashioned fragile bottles and glass anymore!
That's why it works to have coffee tables with glass counter tops. That's why restaurants can get away with the sterile, easily cleaned, hard-to-scratch glass overlays on their tables. Next time you are at a corner market and see the glass countertop with the items for sale inside, think about that article in the ancient Popular Science article.
Once breakthroughs actually become available, they don't seem like breakthroughs - they quickly just become part of the landscape, and people don't notice them, anymore. This is why the "Intelligent Design" idiots can get out of their incredibly complex, affordable, high-tech SUVs and then announce that Science has it all wrong. Once it's routine, it no longer seems like such a big deal.
Proof? Affordable, thin-film photovoltaics is still largely considered a "breakthrough" technology. But there's a company doing it now, today, affordably. Alas, while they are growing as fast as they are able, all their production capacity is already sold to germany. I'd suggest you read up on it.
High tech is introduced slowly. At first, the high engineering cost can only be paid in niche markets where the return on investment is fat. But as the original engineering cost gets paid back, and as the technology itself is matured and tested, the cost of implementation drops rapidly, so that it applies to more and more and more niches. By the time it's available for common Joes like you and me, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, and we are left wondering "where are the breakthroughs?" from our satellite/GPS navigated, MP3 playing, fuel-injected, ABS-brakes protecting, vulcanized rubber-tired, air-conditioned, hybrid gas/electric, high-tech wonder machine.
Where are the breakthroughs? Look at the beer bottle in your trashcan.
Seriously. We've had a number of standards with names like "Wired Equivalency Protocol" and "Wifi Protected Access" and yet they seem to be falling, one-by-one, to relatively trivial attacks. I'm not saying that WPA is as bad as WEP, but how come they can't copy/paste something as good as good old-fashioned SSL?
SSL has withstood the tests of time, over, and over, and over, and over again. SSL is the gold standard for encryption. It's used on every HTTPS website, it's used for SSH, it's used as part of kerberos, IMAPS, POPS, TLS, and just about every other good-quality security tool.
So why are wireless chipset manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel, when it's widely known that these kinds of wheels are FRIGGEN HARD to re-invent well?
Start with normal, unencrypted wireless. Getting that to work was solved long ago. Embed an SSL engine into your wireless device, with a randomly generated private key. Provide a means to access the public key, and copy/paste that key into your high security wireless driver. If you want to be paranoid, your local driver generates a private/public key pair as well, and that can be copy/pasted to your wireless device.
Done! Now you *KNOW* that if you are accessing the Internet through the driver, you are doing so through the correct wireless hotspot. Who cares about wireless MITM attacks at that point? The SSL protocol *ASSUMES* that there are MITM attempts, and foils them quite effectively, over the equally open and unsecured Internet.
Seriously, folks. This is a problem that was solved over a decade ago. Why are we doing this again?
If this is an introduction class, remember that your goal is to introduce, not indoctrinate. You aren't teaching and "advanced algorithms" class, you are showing your students a bit about programming what you can do with it.
Starting them off on something that introduces the subject of programming is a good idea, but I wouldn't even start them off on PHP, Python, BASIC, or Pascal, I would start them off on Scratch. It's a product of MIT, it's free, open-source, cross platform, and does an amazing job of showing the basics of event-driven programming. Even to the area of variables, iterations, etc.
Oh, and you can usually get somebody started in 10 minutes or so. It's quite a site to see somebody program a multi-player game full-on with scratch in an afternoon.
I would introduce increasing challenges in Scratch for the first month or so, so that people get a clear understanding of how variables, callbacks, math functions, and algorithms are used before introducing them to a more "real" programming language.
Of course, YMMV, I have no idea what context and environment you are really dealing with...
If OoO tried to be daring for once, and adopted a completely new set of paradigms, rather than mimicking MS Office, they might actually have a compelling product. For now, though, it's a second-rate knockoff of an already mediocre product.
You misunderstand what OoO is trying to be. They do NOT WANT to have an innovative, exciting product. They want a stable, reliable, cross-platform office product that's "good enough". They want to commoditize Microsoft Office. That's it.
It doesn't have to be "exciting" or "pretty", it just has to be good enough, compatible enough, and cheap enough (free) that people don't bother paying $500 for a copy of MS Office. And, around here, it's succeeded. We don't give many marketing presentations, so the fact that there are small incompatibilities with Office is a non-issue. We need to read documents created in Word, and OoO 2.x does that nicely. (except for DocX, and those who use DocX usually apologize for not saving in Word/2000 format)
It's not to say that they want OoO to suck, but they are going to be very, very conservative with features that aren't compatible with the "other" office software.
Slashdot Mirror
A 1-sided marketplace is one where there's a clear flow in one direction. An economy is, by definition, a flow of real wealth (EG: cars, tobacco) from places where such commodities are cheaper (such as factories and Virginia fields) towards places where they are scarcer and more expensive (such as your garage or shirt pocket). Money flows in the opposite direction.
In this sense, a marketplace is "1 sided", in that there's an inherent imbalance that makes it all work. To become rich, you have to make real wealth cheaper to come by. And the cheaper you make that real wealth, the richer you can become.
Let's assume that I am a B2B kind of guy. (I don't want to deal with "end users", I want to deal with businesses - Business 2 Business)
So I set up a high-end network. I'm going to carry massive amounts of data, and peer with existing "tier 1" providers to shuffle data with/for them. Let's just assume that I have significantly more bandwidth than Sprint or Cogent, and for this argument, I'll be a "tier 0" provider.
If I peered with Sprint/Cogent/ATT/XO in order to provide service to them, how would I get paid?
I mean, here I am, shuffling terabits of data every second for all these "tier 1" providers, at significant cost to my company. How do I not close doors as soon as my venture capital runs out?
Peering points are only "free" if the give and take for the connection is fairly equivalent. When it becomes 1-sided, the "free" cost has to balance somehow, or my company example above would fail despite providing significant value to the marketplace.
Currently, the "cost" of bandwidth is paid for by content providers, not content consumers. As a content provider, I pay nearly $1,000 per month for a 100 Mbit connection to the Internet in a high quality colo facility, at about 10 Mbit usage, while many people reading this can get a 10 Mbit connection for $40 or less.
And it has to be that bandwidth has to be 1-directional. See, if I'm a tier 0 provider, with no end-users to "pay the bill", and upload costs were equal to download costs, I wouldn't get paid for my service, even though I'm providing a valuable service. But by making the cost of bandwidth 1-directional, I can get paid for delivering a valuable service to the marketplace! The marketplace has to be 1-sided, otherwise you don't have a marketplace.
Don't worry, it's OK. The marketplace has to provide some means to operate, or it doesn't exist!
Your "Austrian School" ignores the fact that the economy is, itself, a product of government.
Think about it: economy requires money, which is printed by the gubbmint. The free exchange of money requires law, which is also provided by gubbmint. Virtually all monetary exchanges involve the use of public infrastructure, such as roads, telecommunications, water, electricity, and other amenities provided by (you guessed it!) the gubbmint.
This "libertarian ideal" of not having any gubbmint meddling is sorta like kids who wish their parents wouldn't "meddle" in the operations of the house.
It's just naive.
Realistically in tight economic times development will stagnate, companies will stick with what they have for as long as they can and only change when they are forced too and then that change will be targeted at long term solutions, where they have the greatest control over outlays and future investment cycles.
Really? Because that's not the trend I'm seeing - at all.
As a hosted application provider, I'm finding our clients squeezing their belts, left, right, and center. They're nervous, they're scared, they're jumpy. And it seems that the more jumpy and scared they get, the more contracts we are signing, left, right and center!
See, our product is designed to cut costs by automating compliance to legal requirements. It's a hosted application, and many of our new contracts view us as a way to eliminate the cost of maintaining home-brew stuff that's low quality and costly to maintain. Our products, on the other hand, are comprehensive, well funded, and reasonably priced.
I guess you could say that there is some lock-in with our product, because although we don't want to hold anybody hostage, we're not giving away our source code, either. We certainly wouldn't hesitate to turn over our client's data on demand, (they can click-to-download most of it without ever consulting us) but our clients aren't generally the coding type, and the marketplace for our wares is almost a niche.
I believe that a good business is truly a relationship between the business and its customers. When the business truly considers the needs of its potential customers, and works to meet those needs in an efficient, professional, and competent manner, the customers really won't mind returning the favor. In our case, we almost let our customers outsource their worries to us, and we work hard to make sure that we deliver.
The result? Rapid growth, and customers who rave!
Not so sure about PDFs as an image format - which is exactly what you have when you use PDF to hold scanned documents. I think the more interesting point is that they feel they have an OCR package good enough to be trustworthy. I wonder if it's based on the Tesseract OCR software that they adopted a while back?
I played with it for a while, and got very poor results from the command line. Even when I made a png or bmp of a full screen single word "HELLO" in 200 pixel font with GIMP (about as perfect as input gets!) I'd often get "HEHO" or "H3H0" or god only knows what else.
Of course, this is when the project relaunch was first announced a year or two ago, I certainly hope it's better now! Looking at their web page, it does appear that there's some significant activity going on. Yay Google!
Maybe I'll try it again, and see if it's worth using yet?
you can't underestimate the power of Chinese whispers... With IE6 and IE7 Microsoft caused so much resentment amongst web developers (or the ones who built pages properly at any rate) that lots of people began some kind of crusade to get everyone they knew using a different browser.
Never been called Chinese before... but I'm one of 'em. Our web-based workflow automation product displays a dire warning message on the login screen, when it's detected that the end user is running IE:
"You are strongly advised to use Mozilla Firefox to access this product. It's a free download. Here's why!". If they click, they get a list of security holes, and usability problems with IE. There's a link provided to download FF. Nearly all of our customers have done the upgrade, and that amounts to several thousand end users. I'd wager that more than half would never have known about firefox but now use FF by default.
The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
The unix "strings" command extracts ASCII text. ASCII is, itself, an open standard. Underscoring your point: standards rule!
The only thing that is "wrong" fundamentally with the internet is the separation of DNS and the routing protocol.
This has to be one of the DUMBEST ideas I think I've ever heard of....
As an application hosting provider, we provide a very strong level of redundancy, including hot disaster recovery hosting. If anything serious were to happen to our primary hosting facility, we'd update DNS and within a few hours, our secondary hosting would become active.
By definition, the secondary hosting is in another city, on another network, through a different power company, to provide as much differentiation and minimization of downtime as possible. If you combined DNS and routing, how would this switchover happen?
Sorry. Bad idea. Bad, bad bad idea.
I could see an argument for combining PKI and DNS, and indeed, it's not only been suggested elsewhere, it's been implemented. Obviously, there's a good case to make, here.
But mixing routing and DNS? WTF?
Don't forget the venerable Star-Trek actor for Worf (Michael Dorn) who flies an F-86 military jet.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
This is perhaps the "elevator pitch" but in reality there is much, much more to it than just this.
1) Other comments have posted about rolling power outages - these electric cars will help *prevent* rolling power outages! The truth is that the power grid is massively overbuilt. There is about 25% of the grid built to handle perhaps 12 hours of usage per year - the dreaded mid-summer air conditioning spike. These cars "talk" to the grid. They charge when power is plentiful (eg: at night) and can even backfeed into the grid if there's a shortage. The result is that they make better, more consistent, and more even use of the grid 24x7, while also providing embedded resiliency.
2) The cars are rented. You pay for usage. Yeah, much like the cell phone model. But because of this, you don't have to worry about batteries, you don't have to worry about mechanic bills, and the cost for usage (per mile) is less than your existing car, anyway. Since nearly all cars are either financed or leased nowadays, anyway, the effect on the consumer is negligible. Day-to-day, you wouldn't notice the difference!
3) The reason why electric cars bomb is the dreaded long trip. Even with 250 or so miles per charge, roughly equivalent to most cars' "full tank" range, the electric cars to date are utter fail for trips that are farther. You have to find a place to charge. You have to wait 4-8 hours. Etc. But with these electric cars, you can swap batteries in less time than it would take to fill the tank on your existing car. The problem of replacing batteries just.... goes away.
I'm not just sold on this plan. I'm sold and sold and sold. I wish California would jump on board - I'd finally have a good reason to replace my aging (but perfectly operational) 10 year old 200,000 mile Saturn SL2!
If you are smart about security, keep your mouth shut. There's not much you can do, except yourself be a target.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Some time ago I found a gapingly large security whole in a major credit card company's online credit card processing system when I was being paid to implement an online shopping cart system. It was a terrible, nasty security hole - bad enough that I could have purchased anything I wanted to at any vendor's website that used this gateway for FREE, without the use of any special "hacking toolz", just a browser and a text editor.
The kind of thing that you see most commonly at the Daily WTF.
So I wrote a detailed email, indicating that I was recommending against this company to my client, along with explicit details, step by step, for how to completely compromise their gateway. I also included specific details for how the security hole could have been completely mitigated. I sent this email to every account that I could find/think of at the company, including abuse@, sales@, customerserver@, postmaster@, webmaster@, etc as well the reps that I'd been working with to that point, cc my client.
My client canceled the account with said company and moved to one with a much more secure API. Having done my duty by protecting my client, I promptly forgot all about the original credit card processing company.
Over a year later, long after I forgot completely about the original credit card company, I got a phone call, from a very agitated-sounding gentleman on the phone. He verified my identity, then asked me questions about the security hole. My only verbal response to him was something like: "Everything I know is in the email I sent to you, the email speaks for itself. A qualified software engineer could read it and should know exactly what to do.". But he wasn't happy with this. He asked me if I'd tried to use the security hole, and I said nothing. He then started this rant, going on and on about how it really wasn't a security hole, and how it's really not a problem. Over and over, he repeated himself.
Finally, he threatened to sue me if I disclosed the security hole to anybody else, and hung up the phone.
The point being? Having been given the problem on a silver platter, with details, implementation details, and a detailed description of how to fix the problem, their "solution" was to yell at and threaten me, the discloser. Never mind the fact that the knowledge needed to compromise their gateway was public information. (their documentation was freely downloadable)
As a professional in either security and/or the digital arts, you frequently find yourself in the unenviable position of seeing the emperor stark naked in front of the crowds. It's not a pleasant experience. Merely helping somebody can be grounds for attack the weak whose fear stems from their misunderstanding - all too often, they confuse the message with the messenger.
What's retarded is just how easy it is to show that your understanding of law is deficient. I clocked myself: a legal definition of what legally constitutes a person took me almost exactly 14 seconds, including the time it took to launch a new tab in Firefox to do the searching in.
Not checking your information is idiotic in this age of freely available information; you'd do well to double-check yourself next time so you don't look like a pompous (but wrong) doofus.
And for those of you too lazy to click the above link, a corporation IS legally considered a "person" in a number of contexts, as defined by a LEGAL dictionary. Don't confuse "person" with Natural Person which is more in line with your comments.
Um... Source hosting? Online docs? Revisioning?
Back to SourceForge!
Seriously, a lot of things with MS are just power games. The MS keys on your keyboard are an example. By my best estimate, about 1% of users ever use them for anything not an accident.
Actually, I find them quite useful. When I plug my Microsoft keyboard into my Mac Mini, the MS keys work the same as the "Apple" key. For this, they are quite useful. Otherwise, they're just a sorry way to bring up the start menu, which any moron would use the mouse for since navigating the start menu by keyboard is so horrendous...
Thanks Microsoft!
Is a VT-100 terminal a "thin client"?
What about a PC emulating a VT-100 terminal? What about a browser that reads a language in many ways similar to ANSI?
Seriously, folks.
As a developer of web-based workflow automation solutions, web-based is definitely the way to go. It's quick, simple, high-performance, nothing to install, cross platform, centralized, easily administered, and on, and on, and on...
For our type of product and problem set, doing *any* of it client-side is the problem! Software the coordinates the activities of many people *should* be network-based, because it's about a network of people. And if you take a look at many of your spreadsheets, word documents, and the like, you'll find that a large percentage of them are, in fact, "human network" administration tools done badly.
EG: Memos that need to be circulated, and signed by all staff for compliance. Memos should be circulated via the employee login to the system. When they've read it, they hit a checkbox and click the "submit" button. Then it's easy to see compliance by querying a database. (and maybe producing a simple table showing who has/hasn't checked the box) Rather than pay a staffie to go around and do compliance with a bunch of checksheets, you pay a programmer to do it once - for every memo that will need to be circulated thereafter.
EG: Sales figures obtained verbally from many staff members that are to be summarized before the planning meeting at 10:00. Sales figures should be queried directly from the invoice database to eliminate user error and forgotten transactions. It should be generated on demand DURING the meeting at 10:00, not compiled 48-60 hours in advance on Friday!
Thin client is here, has been here, and has been growing in use for some time when you consider that the client itself is irrelevant if the protocol (HTTP) is thin enough. And it is.
Yeah, funny, all that jazz. But there's more than an element of truth to your jesting. The reality is that if we ever actually tried to get out of debt, it would destroy our economy and not for the reasons that seem obvious.
Nowadays, most money exists only because of debt, and the nature of debt is such that you can never pay it all off because of interest. Watch the video link above...
Don't forget:
UAC: The program pcadv.exe is trying to make changes to your computer. [Accept][Deny]
UAC: The program pcadv.exe is trying to make changes to your registry. This is rarely acceptable. [Accept][Deny]
Norton Antivirus: A program is trying to make changes to your registry. If you do not recognize "pcadv.exe", you should click "No". [Yes][No][Details]
(click [Details])
A program is trying to write changes to a Registry Key. If you don't recognize "pcadv.exe" you should click "No".
(click No)
Popup: PC Advisor: You have been successfully upgraded! Click the [Error Processing Directive] button to restart your computer! [Cancel]
It's like when you are driving a car, if you are driving a car with lots of seats so that you can take your kids to school, you are probably counting Libraries of Congress while using 10-40 oil. But if you use Kerosene instead, and drive a truck instead, you'll make twice as many tri--
-Oh wait-wrong window!-
Want to improve fuel economy? The Mythbusters hath provided the way...... Don't think that this fuel economy doesn't come at the cost of safety, however...
Your comments implying the driving slower may be more dangerous is laughable - like the tales told of people who got into accidents while trying to buckle their seatbelt.
As the average speed of the US driver has climbed, the death toll has risen as well - both in absolute numbers and in average deaths per mile travelled. There is no evidence that driving slower is more dangerous, notwithstanding your own personal feelings in the matter. And if somebody driving slow in front of you is enough to make you drive in a risky manner, you really shouldn't be driving, should you?
I was talking about setting up a wifi hot spot. SSH is definitely dependent on SSL/TLS, but doesn't use certificates. Look for "For many of its cryptography features, OpenSSH relies on the non-GPL'd OpenSSL library...."
Kerberos uses a dual-key system similar to SSL, but replaces the Certificate Authority in realtime.
You don't need a certificate authority to use SSL. SSH works fine without a Certificate Authority. The only value that a Certificate Authority provides is in positively identifying/validating a participant that you didn't previously validate.
The protocol I mentioned requires no certificate, since the public key is being copy/pasted with a mechanism that is otherwise trusted.
But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made.
Some years back, I read an article in an old magazine (I think it was a 1960's Popular Science) about a new method of blowing glass resulting in "near unbreakable" bottles. It went on excitedly for page, after page, talking about the new era of safety that this kind of glass could behest - glass that doesn't easily break - you could drop your soda or medicine bottle and it wouldn't shatter!
Intrigued, I spent an entire afternoon at the local University library trying to figure out exactly what happened to this miraculous technology! I even did some searching (AltaVista) on the then new-fangled Internet. The truth rather surprised me...
This "breakthrough" technology that had gone invisible was part of my everyday life, including the bottle of Diet Coke I was then slurping from! It had become so common that virtually nobody produced the old-fashioned fragile bottles and glass anymore!
That's why it works to have coffee tables with glass counter tops. That's why restaurants can get away with the sterile, easily cleaned, hard-to-scratch glass overlays on their tables. Next time you are at a corner market and see the glass countertop with the items for sale inside, think about that article in the ancient Popular Science article.
Once breakthroughs actually become available, they don't seem like breakthroughs - they quickly just become part of the landscape, and people don't notice them, anymore. This is why the "Intelligent Design" idiots can get out of their incredibly complex, affordable, high-tech SUVs and then announce that Science has it all wrong. Once it's routine, it no longer seems like such a big deal.
Proof? Affordable, thin-film photovoltaics is still largely considered a "breakthrough" technology. But there's a company doing it now, today, affordably. Alas, while they are growing as fast as they are able, all their production capacity is already sold to germany. I'd suggest you read up on it.
High tech is introduced slowly. At first, the high engineering cost can only be paid in niche markets where the return on investment is fat. But as the original engineering cost gets paid back, and as the technology itself is matured and tested, the cost of implementation drops rapidly, so that it applies to more and more and more niches. By the time it's available for common Joes like you and me, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, and we are left wondering "where are the breakthroughs?" from our satellite/GPS navigated, MP3 playing, fuel-injected, ABS-brakes protecting, vulcanized rubber-tired, air-conditioned, hybrid gas/electric, high-tech wonder machine.
Where are the breakthroughs? Look at the beer bottle in your trashcan.
Seriously. We've had a number of standards with names like "Wired Equivalency Protocol" and "Wifi Protected Access" and yet they seem to be falling, one-by-one, to relatively trivial attacks. I'm not saying that WPA is as bad as WEP, but how come they can't copy/paste something as good as good old-fashioned SSL?
SSL has withstood the tests of time, over, and over, and over, and over again. SSL is the gold standard for encryption. It's used on every HTTPS website, it's used for SSH, it's used as part of kerberos, IMAPS, POPS, TLS, and just about every other good-quality security tool.
So why are wireless chipset manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel, when it's widely known that these kinds of wheels are FRIGGEN HARD to re-invent well?
Start with normal, unencrypted wireless. Getting that to work was solved long ago. Embed an SSL engine into your wireless device, with a randomly generated private key. Provide a means to access the public key, and copy/paste that key into your high security wireless driver. If you want to be paranoid, your local driver generates a private/public key pair as well, and that can be copy/pasted to your wireless device.
Done! Now you *KNOW* that if you are accessing the Internet through the driver, you are doing so through the correct wireless hotspot. Who cares about wireless MITM attacks at that point? The SSL protocol *ASSUMES* that there are MITM attempts, and foils them quite effectively, over the equally open and unsecured Internet.
Seriously, folks. This is a problem that was solved over a decade ago. Why are we doing this again?
If this is an introduction class, remember that your goal is to introduce, not indoctrinate. You aren't teaching and "advanced algorithms" class, you are showing your students a bit about programming what you can do with it.
Starting them off on something that introduces the subject of programming is a good idea, but I wouldn't even start them off on PHP, Python, BASIC, or Pascal, I would start them off on Scratch. It's a product of MIT, it's free, open-source, cross platform, and does an amazing job of showing the basics of event-driven programming. Even to the area of variables, iterations, etc.
Oh, and you can usually get somebody started in 10 minutes or so. It's quite a site to see somebody program a multi-player game full-on with scratch in an afternoon.
I would introduce increasing challenges in Scratch for the first month or so, so that people get a clear understanding of how variables, callbacks, math functions, and algorithms are used before introducing them to a more "real" programming language.
Of course, YMMV, I have no idea what context and environment you are really dealing with...
My $0.02 of free advice.
If OoO tried to be daring for once, and adopted a completely new set of paradigms, rather than mimicking MS Office, they might actually have a compelling product. For now, though, it's a second-rate knockoff of an already mediocre product.
You misunderstand what OoO is trying to be. They do NOT WANT to have an innovative, exciting product. They want a stable, reliable, cross-platform office product that's "good enough". They want to commoditize Microsoft Office. That's it.
It doesn't have to be "exciting" or "pretty", it just has to be good enough, compatible enough, and cheap enough (free) that people don't bother paying $500 for a copy of MS Office. And, around here, it's succeeded. We don't give many marketing presentations, so the fact that there are small incompatibilities with Office is a non-issue. We need to read documents created in Word, and OoO 2.x does that nicely. (except for DocX, and those who use DocX usually apologize for not saving in Word/2000 format)
It's not to say that they want OoO to suck, but they are going to be very, very conservative with features that aren't compatible with the "other" office software.