Hint. Take one of the unencrypted image formats - with a relatively simple image, encrypt everything but the image header - display. You'll probably be able to tell what the image was.
Compressed encrypted files on the other hand are pretty close to maximum entropy.
My favorite demonstration of why ECB is almost always the wrong choice for block modes of operation, regardless of the algorithm, can be seen in the Tux series of pictures on this page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation It's a great picture to show people when they don't understand why "just encrypt the data" isn't secure enough, and why they need a competent cryptographer.
But for this discussion, notice that your eyes can not detect a pattern in the encrypted data, even though the source is an uncompressed BMP file.
If the stenographic data is added before compression, it must survive the lossy compression. Since these lossy compression algorithms are designed to keep only the subjectively relevant information, the stenographic data will be subjectively relevant (i.e. clearly visible).
The thing is, porn with random blocky looking artifacts and halos and funny colors is still porn. Most people would say "oh, another crappy internet porn video" and keep a copy of it anyway, because it's porn! During the heyday of analog scrambled Playboy channel, how many teenage boys watched the scrambled channels anyway? Exactly.
You could hide the entire contents of "Jihad for Dummies" in one of those movies and you'd still get a million downloads on youporn.
I think the thing is that unless a lot of people start going around with huge files of random bits, that it's hard to hide more than the smallest things. Even a 50mb wav file can only contain a very small fraction of that amount of information without making it obvious. Likewise a full mov[i]e isn't going to be that much better.
Actually, if the full movie were "Battlefield Earth", I think the random bits would have a much higher chance of being better than the movie.
If your jpgs look like everybody elses jpgs both visually and under close analytical scrutiny they aren't going to bother you.
But steganographic data stored in images (all kinds of images, not just JPGs) is detectable analytically. I would suspect our TLFs (Three Letter Friends) can easily spot steganography in images, especially given privately developed steganographic analysis software like outguess exists today.
I would also suspect they do it on a massive basis, checking images on eBay, Picasa, flickr, photobucket, etc. The TV news has already squawked about "terrorist messages hidden in pictures on eBay." Without further clarification I can't tell if they meant that they detected steganography; or if they meant a guy was selling a book, the picture of which was an opened page written in Arabic that said "start the jihad on the 20th".
If I were pulling images to look for hidden messages, and if I had the resources of the TLFs, I'd run them through an OCR program, a stego detect program, an image verifier program (because no image file contains random data) and I'd probably be looking at all kinds of analysis, such as testing the JPG quantization for consistency with the tables from the same brand of camera claimed in the EXIF info.
Can I analyze all your hard drive picture files while you stand in line in airport security? Not realistically. But can I start analyzing your on-line pictures as soon as you buy a plane ticket? That's a lot more realistic.
Fair enough. I'll be happy to agree that we're only at a local maximum, and accept your position that a new Renaissance awaits our 10th+ generation grandchildren; and that it will be better than anything we have today.
Perhaps I didn't define it well enough. First, I believe the peak to be the 20th and 21st centuries, the 200 year span of human history we're living in. Right now the planet is more wealthy than ever, with more wealthy people on it than ever, and we're smack in the middle of it. It's a glorious time to be here. But we have a huge population of poor people, and they need to get in on this wealth, too, before we have a global outbreak of class warfare.* So our first task should be to finish feeding the poor of the globe, and begin raising their standards of living. That's going to take a lot of resource sharing, which may mean fewer luxuries for the rest of us. Right now, the West consumes a huge share of the planet's resources per capita, somewhere on the order of 5 to 25 times that of the average earthling. To level the playing field, either we find ways to improve production by orders of magnitude, or we give up something in exchange. We're straining to produce incremental improvements as it is (a 41 MPG average hybrid instead of a 27 MPG internal combustion car just isn't enough.) So I don't see the magic coming out of the manufacturing sector.
Sure, we'll eventually tap nuclear power again on a large scale, along with solar, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, and every other alternate source of energy. And we'll figure out how to store energy to keep powering our cars. Energy, I think we'll get that one figured out.
But those cars are going to get more numerous, and the energy will have to be shared a lot more than it is now.
That's because the population keeps growing at an accelerated pace. In about a hundred years, unless population growth is checked by means most people would find abhorrent, there won't be enough space for us and our current means of food production. Real bovine-origin steaks? Only for the elite. The rest of us are likely to end up on algae and cloned meat. Is that "progress"? Not according to Kohath in his posts above. But I think it's progress if it wards off the starvation of billions, so there's still room to disagree.
Arable land is one of those resources we must run out of. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "Invest in real estate. They stopped making it." Are we going to till the Amazon until there's nothing left? (Of course, why would we stop today?) But then what, after the jungles run out? I expect we'll eventually truck dirt and pipe water to sunny deserts like New Mexico, Arizona, the Gobi, the Sahara, and feed another ten to twelve billion people or so. That's what, 2080? What about 2090? 2100? Who knows, perhaps giant floating barge-farms where we hydroponically grow food in the ocean. But even if we can muster the equipment and the resources to instantly create arable land out in the ocean like they did in Dubai, and build energy-neutral desalinization plants, we won't be able to keep it up as fast as the population grows.
And all this assumes a Spaceship Earth full of rational people driven to the common goal of the betterment of humanity. Instead, we've got batshit crazy extremists everywhere that are trying to bomb the hell out of each other's infidels and separatists, and warlords vying for entire ungoverned states in Africa and Asia. For now, instead of feeding the world, we're still focused on killing each other, while the "leaders" of this country spend their time debating decimal points of health care as if they're making profound progress.
It's really easy to think that civilization hasn't peaked, especially when you live in Seattle, or Chicago, or anywhere that is six thousand miles from the shitholes where half the world are still peasants living in fear and/or hunger. Get them all into functional societies with food and water, and spacious, bug-free housing, and full employment, and 0.8 cars per person, and flat screen TVs, and all the niceties the rest of the West takes for granted, and I'll say "you win." And I'll even grant you that it's happening in India and China. But not fast enough in the rest of the
but you had plentiful cheap electricity, grow lights stacked to the ceiling....
If you had grow lights stacked to the ceiling, you could raise something a lot more profitable than algae, and use the money to buy a sammich that at least tastes good.
Like anything else, it's a first step. The first internal combustion engines didn't put out 320 HP, either. It'll take time for new iterations to evolve it into a better product than this guy is pitching. And getting it started now is the only way to get those next iterations going.
Those potential improvements would include not only the size and energy input types of things, but improvements to the palatability of the finished product. I'm not saying that they'll ever produce a steak-like substance with it, but maybe they can produce enough food to feed a cow to get us some tasty steaks. (Cows are horribly inefficient food sources, by the way, requiring at least a 10:1 feed-to-meat ratio.) Or maybe if cloned meat ever becomes commercially viable, algae could be the feed needed to grow it.
And I know you want things to get "better", but "better" is not sustainable. Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption. You may want even more for yourself, but it's got to come from somewhere. From here on out as the population grows and available land shrinks, as non-renewable energy sources run down, things are not likely to get "better" by your definition. But perhaps we can slow the decay, and that might be good enough to call it "progress" by some measures.
I agree with you that advertising it with the words "your own urine" does not help sell it, except maybe to a few eco-fruitbats. That's why real businesses hire marketing people. Even a C-average-marketing-degree kid fresh from college would know "Grow your own food with urine!" is not a particularly effective slogan.
One problem I realized after watching the scene with the guy is the video compression artifacts can be different between the two cameras. Even if the sensors were perfectly aligned with each other and the optics, the MPEG compression could be different because the values at each pixel will still be slightly different due to the differences in exposure levels. Different pixel values can cause different compression schemes to be invoked in each block, which will result in weird combinations of aliasing. I think this may have been partly responsible for the shimmer on his denim jacket.
But an entire school year spent in front of a keypunch machine, submitting jobs to an IBM 370, when there were rooms full of 3270 terminals all over the place? No thanks. I dropped that class that afternoon.
I'd been programming on terminals for several years before college, and one of my first college classes required us to punch cards as well. I'll say it's worth the experience, once, but you did the right thing in avoiding a whole year of it.
In some respects, punch cards are to teaching programming as film is to teaching photography. The problem is that the cost of any operation is high (you had to wait hours for your results in the case of punch cards, just as film was very expensive) so you did things differently. You'd waste hours of time scouring your deck for syntax errors. Or you'd take only one photo of an interesting scene, saving those other 35 exposures for other interesting scenes.
With digital photography, you can take a dozen shots with different settings in hopes that one will turn out spectacular. With compilers being virtually instant, practices like test driven development are possible, where you write a test, bang out some code to pass it, then move on.
I always think it's good to know about the past, but that doesn't mean we should remain stuck living in it.
The best machinist analogy I can come up with is claiming an old bridgeport with a PDP-8 CNC controller reading gcode off papertape somehow magically produces higher quality parts than my current Linux/EMC2 controller system, which I find unlikely.
A better analogy would be to say that a cam actuated system somehow magically produces higher quality parts than a CNC machine with linear actuators. And all other things being equal, that's a pretty silly statement.
Therefore, I suspect "all other things" are not equal.
Perhaps the linear actuators in the CNC equipment are rigidly fixed to operate in one particular fashion and no other. I would suspect that long ago the makers of "the best lace" added novel mechanical levers and arms to get their machines twisting fancy knots that no other lace-makers knew how to twist.
It's probably not that card operation makes them better, but that these particular machines are overloaded with extra parts that makes them do stuff nobody else's machines ever did.
A "screw machine" is the name of an automated lathe, and while they can certainly produce screws, they're often used to make all kinds of cylindrical metal parts. They are not limited to making just screws. We used them to make everything from locomotive fuel injectors to hex-socketed screwdriver shafts.
We also made plenty of screw-threaded items, but never just ordinary "raw" screws. Other, simpler machines, such as the ones you described, had long ago taken over that task.
Screw machines are indeed awesome, once they're set up properly. Watching them run is like watching a mechanical ballet. And for what they do, they can be a cheap way to do it. A CNC machining center ties up half a million dollars of electronics and servos but it gets you producing parts after only a few hours to set up the machine. A six spindle mechanical screw machine takes about 40 hours to get properly set up, but it ties up a much cheaper machine while it runs.
There are a lot of problems with screw machines. The biggest is setting them up properly. You've got to get the speeds and feeds just right (which means a big inventory of cams), your tooling has to be rigid, is often custom, and you don't get all the cool benefits of CNC like automated broken tool replacement. You need a skilled operator who knows how to set them up and keep them running. They're not as flexible either: some operations (like peck drilling) are more difficult, and may require custom cut cams or expensive tool attachments. The big advantage is the run-time cost of the screw machine is much lower. And they're efficient: a multiple spindle screw machine can turn out parts four or five times faster than a single tool CNC machine.
It really depends on the lot size and on the operations to the parts to be made. If you're producing lots of small runs of intricate parts, the flexibility of the CNC machine will make it cheaper since you spend less time setting it up. If you're producing giant runs of identical simple parts over a long period of time, a screw machine will have much lower operational costs.
I worked in the 1980s at a shop that had a dozen multiple spindle screw machines, and one of my tasks was developing a screw machine estimating program. The primary problems we faced then were retaining the skilled operators, and the fairly low efficiency of the machines due to constant maintenance issues (tool sharpening, quality control, etc.) By the year 2000 the owner had sold off the last of the multiple spindle machines in favor of all CNC gear. The mechanical beasts simply weren't as profitable for the bulk of his work, which was primarily short runs. Long runs had already moved overseas.
People who buy swamp land are conned -- they don't actually get what they think they're getting.
In reality, Disney conned the people around Orlando when they originally bought the swamp land. By having middlemen do the purchasing, and not announcing they were building a giant theme park, they were able to buy up miles of swamp land for about one percent of the price they would have had to pay if they had announced they were buying it all to build Disneyworld.
I believe the original poster should have used a different analogy, such as "I have a bridge I would like to sell you." At the dawn of the 20th century, many cons were run selling "shares" in the Brooklyn Bridge.
Of course if someone were trying to sell you swampland in Florida today, along with the rumor of "Disney is opening another theme park right here, and this land will be worth a million dollars an acre in a year" then you can be reasonably sure it's a con.
The difference between the computing industry and the other industries you mentioned is that computing is hundreds of years younger, and thus changing orders of magnitude faster.
I have a huge problem with this. The computing industry is younger, but I don't think it's changing that much faster - a lot of "new" concepts are just recycled old concepts! Albeit wrapped slightly differently. E.g. are dumb terminals and thin clients that much different?
I don't mean to offend, Mr. Early Career Developer, but I'd say it's changed a whole lot faster than you've experienced. When I was working on my undergraduate CSci degree, microcomputers were just coming into being. Concepts like Object Oriented programming were still research topics, and not in common use in industry. Design patterns were 15 years from being discovered and formally recognized as such. Agile was 20 years from existence. And I'd say that Test Driven Development as a design philosophy is still not mainstream enough, especially in non-IT industries. Even if it was magically adopted tomorrow, will something newer like Behavior Driven Design supersede it next year? Contract based programming? It's still very much in flux.
The reason we can't just drop generic "engineering" principles on software engineering is that mature components are still not standardized. We're getting there, and we've made great strides in the last 10 years or so, but it's going to take a lot more time. And there are hundreds of competing methods all of which claim to be the Next Big Thing. Everything you look at in our field still has some shortcomings or design flaws that make them less than perfect. We've achieved Plug and Play interfaces in certain limited domains: USB, PCI, and SCADA are great hardware examples. WSDL and HTTP are good software examples. But note that the technological ones are the easiest. There's still not a viable plug'n'play stream for piecing together an entire enterprise full of applications, for example. Microsoft and Sourceforge and Canonical provide a lot of useful pieces, but still not complete domain solutions.
Even those that do have end-to-end solutions available still have problems, bug-fixes, patch versions, etc. Not to mention a vast pile of existing legacy systems that are firmly entrenched in any company older than the technology you're selling.
If we were in another field, such as civil engineering, we'd have tables of components and materials and capacities and math formulae to help successfully weld a bunch of I-beams together into the shape of Canary Wharf. We have bits and pieces of that today, but nothing with the rigor that the physical sciences have enjoyed for decades.
What is this "AM" of which you write? Is it related to that unused setting on my home stereo, or that collection of unprogrammed numbers labeled "AM" on my car stereo?
Joint task forces are not always a bad thing. Because they take a lot of resources, they're usually only created to deal with major repeat crime activity, such as gang violence or organized theft rings. And with many eyes watching, the ability for either the local cops or the federales to operate extra-legally is diminished. The local cops give up some control when federal agents step in, so it's not in their best interests to jump in bed with the FBI on every little crime.
Sure, there's still the bond of brotherhood and it's not like they'd rat each other out, but a bad local cop would be less likely to beat up a perp right in front of an FBI agent.
Teaching to industry is the job of a trade school, not of a university. But it's surprising how many people (including students and especially their parents) don't understand the distinction.
And I see a lot of lateral moves. Some companies are loading up on VMWare hosted on a nice fat Linux box, but use it to replace a dozen physical Windows servers by hosting a dozen virtual Windows clients.
Even if nothing else changes, a lateral move to Windows Server 2008 today means that in 2013 these same virtual boxes will pay for new licenses to migrate to Windows Server 2013. The spice must flow.
But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?
Because they make their living off of providing proprietary software, and to be more precise, they are living off of incremental improvements to existing proprietary software. And the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for good quality software.
What I think has happened is Microsoft sees the pace of the open source threat is making it less of a risk than they once thought. People still buy machines pre-loaded with Windows, and they pick up a copy of Office Home & Student edition for their kids to use in school. The price is low enough that most of them can afford it. And business licensing still rakes in truckloads of cash.
Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.
On the other pan of the scale, it costs Microsoft a lot in terms of money and goodwill to do battle with people who just want to give away free software to poor kids in Africa. P.R.-wise that's an unwinnable battle. It's best to smile and nod, and pat the little ESR-wannabees on the head and say "that's a good boy, go out and play with your GNU friends, the grown-ups want to sell Mommy and Daddy some real software."
If Ballmer is now B.F.F. with Open Source, you can bet that they've done the math and this works out better for them on the bottom line.
No-one can manage with just a size 2 Phillips - you can't even open a can of paint.
Turn in your geek card. A real geek would think outside of the limiting parameters of "screwdriver", "paint can lid", and "pry", and do something else to get the paint out, such as piercing the side of the can with the #2 Phillips screwdriver. Or, knowing he lacked a flathead screwdriver, the geek would buy paint in a different container.
Of course, spilling paint all over the place would be a probable outcome, but we're talking about geeks here, not painters. That'd happen even if he had a flathead screwdriver.
You have to go further. I'm already telling everyone that I'll never buy another Apple product, and I recommend they don't buy Apple either.
"But what about the fabled Apple Quality?" It's just that -- a fable. The quality is simply not evident, as the iPhone crashes as often as any other phone I've owned (and that's been true ever since I owned it.) I gave it a full year trial of just Pure Apple Software because I didn't personally think the phone should be that bad, but it was. After convincing myself that their software was no better than average, I decided it was safe to jailbreak it. The hardware quality is fair in some respects (the external parts of the phone are still in good condition), but the digitizer has weak spots no better than my decade old Palm device. Battery life is for crap, and is getting worse rapidly because I have to charge it twice a day, and thanks to Apple's "pay us for stuff you should be able to do for free" model, I can't replace the battery. I used to carry a spare charged battery for my Motorola phone, and changed it out every few days when it ran down at an inconvenient time, but I can't do that with the iPhone. No micro SD slots, no standard mini/micro USB port, and the expensive-to-replace stock proprietary Apple cables are poorly constructed with ineffective strain reliefs.
These are all 3GS failings, and don't count their much publicized engineering flaws with the 4G phone.
Moving on to the desktop software, iTunes is a piece of crap on the Windows platform, insinuating itself like a malware rootkit, installing Quicktime, bonjour, some other Apple TV services, and trying to dupe users into installing Safari. It's worse than the drive-by malware downloads, because at least I can avoid those. The iTunes interface is like a temperamental 16-year-old child's first programming project, insisting that it knows better than you how it should behave. And it refuses to cooperate with external music applications, firm in the unshakable arrogant belief that you would never want to use anything but iTunes.
And then there are the restrictions, which have chafed from day 1. No OBEX. No tethering. No Firefox, with no ad blocking add-ins to Safari. And this gets to my #1 complaint: AVRCP wouldn't respond to my Bluetooth headphones when I'd hit skip track/previous track. Seriously? Turns out it's part of another "pay-us-for-nothing" gimmick -- docking players have to pay Apple for a remote control chip license, and Apple was afraid they'd use Bluetooth to bypass their Apple tax. Discovering that was literally the straw that broke the camel's back. So for a $3 chip, Apple has inconvenienced me for the last time. I really want them to know that their greed is causing me to tell everyone I know to stay the hell away from Apple everything. And as the family's resident technology expert, they listen to me. I've already personally cost them five lost iPhone sales.
No, it's a sub average phone with an incredibly well designed user interface (on the phone, not iTunes.) Couple that with Apple's horseshit restrictions, Apple's corporate "f*ck-you-customers" attitude, and the intolerable Apple fanbois and apologists, and the whole thing stinks out loud. I can't wait for this phone's contract to be over and done, and get to an Android based platform. And I am telling everyone who will listen, from family, friends, and neighbors to co-workers, don't buy the iPhone -- it's a poor device with an undeserved reputation.
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"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press 3."
-- Alice Kahn
Maybe the Senate was far more forward thinking than any of us give them credit for.
No, they don't. That's the one flaw.
Hint. Take one of the unencrypted image formats - with a relatively simple image, encrypt everything but the image header - display.
You'll probably be able to tell what the image was.
Compressed encrypted files on the other hand are pretty close to maximum entropy.
My favorite demonstration of why ECB is almost always the wrong choice for block modes of operation, regardless of the algorithm, can be seen in the Tux series of pictures on this page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation It's a great picture to show people when they don't understand why "just encrypt the data" isn't secure enough, and why they need a competent cryptographer.
But for this discussion, notice that your eyes can not detect a pattern in the encrypted data, even though the source is an uncompressed BMP file.
If the stenographic data is added before compression, it must survive the lossy compression. Since these lossy compression algorithms are designed to keep only the subjectively relevant information, the stenographic data will be subjectively relevant (i.e. clearly visible).
The thing is, porn with random blocky looking artifacts and halos and funny colors is still porn. Most people would say "oh, another crappy internet porn video" and keep a copy of it anyway, because it's porn! During the heyday of analog scrambled Playboy channel, how many teenage boys watched the scrambled channels anyway? Exactly.
You could hide the entire contents of "Jihad for Dummies" in one of those movies and you'd still get a million downloads on youporn.
I think the thing is that unless a lot of people start going around with huge files of random bits, that it's hard to hide more than the smallest things. Even a 50mb wav file can only contain a very small fraction of that amount of information without making it obvious. Likewise a full mov[i]e isn't going to be that much better.
Actually, if the full movie were "Battlefield Earth", I think the random bits would have a much higher chance of being better than the movie.
If your jpgs look like everybody elses jpgs both visually and under close analytical scrutiny they aren't going to bother you.
But steganographic data stored in images (all kinds of images, not just JPGs) is detectable analytically. I would suspect our TLFs (Three Letter Friends) can easily spot steganography in images, especially given privately developed steganographic analysis software like outguess exists today.
I would also suspect they do it on a massive basis, checking images on eBay, Picasa, flickr, photobucket, etc. The TV news has already squawked about "terrorist messages hidden in pictures on eBay." Without further clarification I can't tell if they meant that they detected steganography; or if they meant a guy was selling a book, the picture of which was an opened page written in Arabic that said "start the jihad on the 20th".
If I were pulling images to look for hidden messages, and if I had the resources of the TLFs, I'd run them through an OCR program, a stego detect program, an image verifier program (because no image file contains random data) and I'd probably be looking at all kinds of analysis, such as testing the JPG quantization for consistency with the tables from the same brand of camera claimed in the EXIF info.
Can I analyze all your hard drive picture files while you stand in line in airport security? Not realistically. But can I start analyzing your on-line pictures as soon as you buy a plane ticket? That's a lot more realistic.
Fair enough. I'll be happy to agree that we're only at a local maximum, and accept your position that a new Renaissance awaits our 10th+ generation grandchildren; and that it will be better than anything we have today.
Perhaps I didn't define it well enough. First, I believe the peak to be the 20th and 21st centuries, the 200 year span of human history we're living in. Right now the planet is more wealthy than ever, with more wealthy people on it than ever, and we're smack in the middle of it. It's a glorious time to be here. But we have a huge population of poor people, and they need to get in on this wealth, too, before we have a global outbreak of class warfare.* So our first task should be to finish feeding the poor of the globe, and begin raising their standards of living. That's going to take a lot of resource sharing, which may mean fewer luxuries for the rest of us. Right now, the West consumes a huge share of the planet's resources per capita, somewhere on the order of 5 to 25 times that of the average earthling. To level the playing field, either we find ways to improve production by orders of magnitude, or we give up something in exchange. We're straining to produce incremental improvements as it is (a 41 MPG average hybrid instead of a 27 MPG internal combustion car just isn't enough.) So I don't see the magic coming out of the manufacturing sector.
Sure, we'll eventually tap nuclear power again on a large scale, along with solar, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, and every other alternate source of energy. And we'll figure out how to store energy to keep powering our cars. Energy, I think we'll get that one figured out.
But those cars are going to get more numerous, and the energy will have to be shared a lot more than it is now.
That's because the population keeps growing at an accelerated pace. In about a hundred years, unless population growth is checked by means most people would find abhorrent, there won't be enough space for us and our current means of food production. Real bovine-origin steaks? Only for the elite. The rest of us are likely to end up on algae and cloned meat. Is that "progress"? Not according to Kohath in his posts above. But I think it's progress if it wards off the starvation of billions, so there's still room to disagree.
Arable land is one of those resources we must run out of. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "Invest in real estate. They stopped making it." Are we going to till the Amazon until there's nothing left? (Of course, why would we stop today?) But then what, after the jungles run out? I expect we'll eventually truck dirt and pipe water to sunny deserts like New Mexico, Arizona, the Gobi, the Sahara, and feed another ten to twelve billion people or so. That's what, 2080? What about 2090? 2100? Who knows, perhaps giant floating barge-farms where we hydroponically grow food in the ocean. But even if we can muster the equipment and the resources to instantly create arable land out in the ocean like they did in Dubai, and build energy-neutral desalinization plants, we won't be able to keep it up as fast as the population grows.
And all this assumes a Spaceship Earth full of rational people driven to the common goal of the betterment of humanity. Instead, we've got batshit crazy extremists everywhere that are trying to bomb the hell out of each other's infidels and separatists, and warlords vying for entire ungoverned states in Africa and Asia. For now, instead of feeding the world, we're still focused on killing each other, while the "leaders" of this country spend their time debating decimal points of health care as if they're making profound progress.
It's really easy to think that civilization hasn't peaked, especially when you live in Seattle, or Chicago, or anywhere that is six thousand miles from the shitholes where half the world are still peasants living in fear and/or hunger. Get them all into functional societies with food and water, and spacious, bug-free housing, and full employment, and 0.8 cars per person, and flat screen TVs, and all the niceties the rest of the West takes for granted, and I'll say "you win." And I'll even grant you that it's happening in India and China. But not fast enough in the rest of the
but you had plentiful cheap electricity, grow lights stacked to the ceiling ....
If you had grow lights stacked to the ceiling, you could raise something a lot more profitable than algae, and use the money to buy a sammich that at least tastes good.
Like anything else, it's a first step. The first internal combustion engines didn't put out 320 HP, either. It'll take time for new iterations to evolve it into a better product than this guy is pitching. And getting it started now is the only way to get those next iterations going.
Those potential improvements would include not only the size and energy input types of things, but improvements to the palatability of the finished product. I'm not saying that they'll ever produce a steak-like substance with it, but maybe they can produce enough food to feed a cow to get us some tasty steaks. (Cows are horribly inefficient food sources, by the way, requiring at least a 10:1 feed-to-meat ratio.) Or maybe if cloned meat ever becomes commercially viable, algae could be the feed needed to grow it.
And I know you want things to get "better", but "better" is not sustainable. Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption. You may want even more for yourself, but it's got to come from somewhere. From here on out as the population grows and available land shrinks, as non-renewable energy sources run down, things are not likely to get "better" by your definition. But perhaps we can slow the decay, and that might be good enough to call it "progress" by some measures.
I agree with you that advertising it with the words "your own urine" does not help sell it, except maybe to a few eco-fruitbats. That's why real businesses hire marketing people. Even a C-average-marketing-degree kid fresh from college would know "Grow your own food with urine!" is not a particularly effective slogan.
One problem I realized after watching the scene with the guy is the video compression artifacts can be different between the two cameras. Even if the sensors were perfectly aligned with each other and the optics, the MPEG compression could be different because the values at each pixel will still be slightly different due to the differences in exposure levels. Different pixel values can cause different compression schemes to be invoked in each block, which will result in weird combinations of aliasing. I think this may have been partly responsible for the shimmer on his denim jacket.
But an entire school year spent in front of a keypunch machine, submitting jobs to an IBM 370, when there were rooms full of 3270 terminals all over the place? No thanks. I dropped that class that afternoon.
I'd been programming on terminals for several years before college, and one of my first college classes required us to punch cards as well. I'll say it's worth the experience, once, but you did the right thing in avoiding a whole year of it.
In some respects, punch cards are to teaching programming as film is to teaching photography. The problem is that the cost of any operation is high (you had to wait hours for your results in the case of punch cards, just as film was very expensive) so you did things differently. You'd waste hours of time scouring your deck for syntax errors. Or you'd take only one photo of an interesting scene, saving those other 35 exposures for other interesting scenes.
With digital photography, you can take a dozen shots with different settings in hopes that one will turn out spectacular. With compilers being virtually instant, practices like test driven development are possible, where you write a test, bang out some code to pass it, then move on.
I always think it's good to know about the past, but that doesn't mean we should remain stuck living in it.
The best machinist analogy I can come up with is claiming an old bridgeport with a PDP-8 CNC controller reading gcode off papertape somehow magically produces higher quality parts than my current Linux/EMC2 controller system, which I find unlikely.
A better analogy would be to say that a cam actuated system somehow magically produces higher quality parts than a CNC machine with linear actuators. And all other things being equal, that's a pretty silly statement.
Therefore, I suspect "all other things" are not equal.
Perhaps the linear actuators in the CNC equipment are rigidly fixed to operate in one particular fashion and no other. I would suspect that long ago the makers of "the best lace" added novel mechanical levers and arms to get their machines twisting fancy knots that no other lace-makers knew how to twist.
It's probably not that card operation makes them better, but that these particular machines are overloaded with extra parts that makes them do stuff nobody else's machines ever did.
A "screw machine" is the name of an automated lathe, and while they can certainly produce screws, they're often used to make all kinds of cylindrical metal parts. They are not limited to making just screws. We used them to make everything from locomotive fuel injectors to hex-socketed screwdriver shafts.
We also made plenty of screw-threaded items, but never just ordinary "raw" screws. Other, simpler machines, such as the ones you described, had long ago taken over that task.
Screw machines are indeed awesome, once they're set up properly. Watching them run is like watching a mechanical ballet. And for what they do, they can be a cheap way to do it. A CNC machining center ties up half a million dollars of electronics and servos but it gets you producing parts after only a few hours to set up the machine. A six spindle mechanical screw machine takes about 40 hours to get properly set up, but it ties up a much cheaper machine while it runs.
There are a lot of problems with screw machines. The biggest is setting them up properly. You've got to get the speeds and feeds just right (which means a big inventory of cams), your tooling has to be rigid, is often custom, and you don't get all the cool benefits of CNC like automated broken tool replacement. You need a skilled operator who knows how to set them up and keep them running. They're not as flexible either: some operations (like peck drilling) are more difficult, and may require custom cut cams or expensive tool attachments. The big advantage is the run-time cost of the screw machine is much lower. And they're efficient: a multiple spindle screw machine can turn out parts four or five times faster than a single tool CNC machine.
It really depends on the lot size and on the operations to the parts to be made. If you're producing lots of small runs of intricate parts, the flexibility of the CNC machine will make it cheaper since you spend less time setting it up. If you're producing giant runs of identical simple parts over a long period of time, a screw machine will have much lower operational costs.
I worked in the 1980s at a shop that had a dozen multiple spindle screw machines, and one of my tasks was developing a screw machine estimating program. The primary problems we faced then were retaining the skilled operators, and the fairly low efficiency of the machines due to constant maintenance issues (tool sharpening, quality control, etc.) By the year 2000 the owner had sold off the last of the multiple spindle machines in favor of all CNC gear. The mechanical beasts simply weren't as profitable for the bulk of his work, which was primarily short runs. Long runs had already moved overseas.
People who buy swamp land are conned -- they don't actually get what they think they're getting.
In reality, Disney conned the people around Orlando when they originally bought the swamp land. By having middlemen do the purchasing, and not announcing they were building a giant theme park, they were able to buy up miles of swamp land for about one percent of the price they would have had to pay if they had announced they were buying it all to build Disneyworld.
I believe the original poster should have used a different analogy, such as "I have a bridge I would like to sell you." At the dawn of the 20th century, many cons were run selling "shares" in the Brooklyn Bridge.
Of course if someone were trying to sell you swampland in Florida today, along with the rumor of "Disney is opening another theme park right here, and this land will be worth a million dollars an acre in a year" then you can be reasonably sure it's a con.
The difference between the computing industry and the other industries you mentioned is that computing is hundreds of years younger, and thus changing orders of magnitude faster.
I have a huge problem with this. The computing industry is younger, but I don't think it's changing that much faster - a lot of "new" concepts are just recycled old concepts! Albeit wrapped slightly differently. E.g. are dumb terminals and thin clients that much different?
I don't mean to offend, Mr. Early Career Developer, but I'd say it's changed a whole lot faster than you've experienced. When I was working on my undergraduate CSci degree, microcomputers were just coming into being. Concepts like Object Oriented programming were still research topics, and not in common use in industry. Design patterns were 15 years from being discovered and formally recognized as such. Agile was 20 years from existence. And I'd say that Test Driven Development as a design philosophy is still not mainstream enough, especially in non-IT industries. Even if it was magically adopted tomorrow, will something newer like Behavior Driven Design supersede it next year? Contract based programming? It's still very much in flux.
The reason we can't just drop generic "engineering" principles on software engineering is that mature components are still not standardized. We're getting there, and we've made great strides in the last 10 years or so, but it's going to take a lot more time. And there are hundreds of competing methods all of which claim to be the Next Big Thing. Everything you look at in our field still has some shortcomings or design flaws that make them less than perfect. We've achieved Plug and Play interfaces in certain limited domains: USB, PCI, and SCADA are great hardware examples. WSDL and HTTP are good software examples. But note that the technological ones are the easiest. There's still not a viable plug'n'play stream for piecing together an entire enterprise full of applications, for example. Microsoft and Sourceforge and Canonical provide a lot of useful pieces, but still not complete domain solutions.
Even those that do have end-to-end solutions available still have problems, bug-fixes, patch versions, etc. Not to mention a vast pile of existing legacy systems that are firmly entrenched in any company older than the technology you're selling.
If we were in another field, such as civil engineering, we'd have tables of components and materials and capacities and math formulae to help successfully weld a bunch of I-beams together into the shape of Canary Wharf. We have bits and pieces of that today, but nothing with the rigor that the physical sciences have enjoyed for decades.
directly from Steve Jobs keynote and only readable with authenticated apps.
Nice try at a first post. Too bad it took you two-prior-posts worth of time to get it approved through the App Store.
why no AM as well?
What is this "AM" of which you write? Is it related to that unused setting on my home stereo, or that collection of unprogrammed numbers labeled "AM" on my car stereo?
Joint task forces are not always a bad thing. Because they take a lot of resources, they're usually only created to deal with major repeat crime activity, such as gang violence or organized theft rings. And with many eyes watching, the ability for either the local cops or the federales to operate extra-legally is diminished. The local cops give up some control when federal agents step in, so it's not in their best interests to jump in bed with the FBI on every little crime.
Sure, there's still the bond of brotherhood and it's not like they'd rat each other out, but a bad local cop would be less likely to beat up a perp right in front of an FBI agent.
Teaching to industry is the job of a trade school, not of a university. But it's surprising how many people (including students and especially their parents) don't understand the distinction.
And I see a lot of lateral moves. Some companies are loading up on VMWare hosted on a nice fat Linux box, but use it to replace a dozen physical Windows servers by hosting a dozen virtual Windows clients.
Even if nothing else changes, a lateral move to Windows Server 2008 today means that in 2013 these same virtual boxes will pay for new licenses to migrate to Windows Server 2013. The spice must flow.
Exterminate!!
But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?
Because they make their living off of providing proprietary software, and to be more precise, they are living off of incremental improvements to existing proprietary software. And the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for good quality software.
What I think has happened is Microsoft sees the pace of the open source threat is making it less of a risk than they once thought. People still buy machines pre-loaded with Windows, and they pick up a copy of Office Home & Student edition for their kids to use in school. The price is low enough that most of them can afford it. And business licensing still rakes in truckloads of cash.
Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.
On the other pan of the scale, it costs Microsoft a lot in terms of money and goodwill to do battle with people who just want to give away free software to poor kids in Africa. P.R.-wise that's an unwinnable battle. It's best to smile and nod, and pat the little ESR-wannabees on the head and say "that's a good boy, go out and play with your GNU friends, the grown-ups want to sell Mommy and Daddy some real software."
If Ballmer is now B.F.F. with Open Source, you can bet that they've done the math and this works out better for them on the bottom line.
No-one can manage with just a size 2 Phillips - you can't even open a can of paint.
Turn in your geek card. A real geek would think outside of the limiting parameters of "screwdriver", "paint can lid", and "pry", and do something else to get the paint out, such as piercing the side of the can with the #2 Phillips screwdriver. Or, knowing he lacked a flathead screwdriver, the geek would buy paint in a different container.
Of course, spilling paint all over the place would be a probable outcome, but we're talking about geeks here, not painters. That'd happen even if he had a flathead screwdriver.
You have to go further. I'm already telling everyone that I'll never buy another Apple product, and I recommend they don't buy Apple either.
"But what about the fabled Apple Quality?" It's just that -- a fable. The quality is simply not evident, as the iPhone crashes as often as any other phone I've owned (and that's been true ever since I owned it.) I gave it a full year trial of just Pure Apple Software because I didn't personally think the phone should be that bad, but it was. After convincing myself that their software was no better than average, I decided it was safe to jailbreak it. The hardware quality is fair in some respects (the external parts of the phone are still in good condition), but the digitizer has weak spots no better than my decade old Palm device. Battery life is for crap, and is getting worse rapidly because I have to charge it twice a day, and thanks to Apple's "pay us for stuff you should be able to do for free" model, I can't replace the battery. I used to carry a spare charged battery for my Motorola phone, and changed it out every few days when it ran down at an inconvenient time, but I can't do that with the iPhone. No micro SD slots, no standard mini/micro USB port, and the expensive-to-replace stock proprietary Apple cables are poorly constructed with ineffective strain reliefs.
These are all 3GS failings, and don't count their much publicized engineering flaws with the 4G phone.
Moving on to the desktop software, iTunes is a piece of crap on the Windows platform, insinuating itself like a malware rootkit, installing Quicktime, bonjour, some other Apple TV services, and trying to dupe users into installing Safari. It's worse than the drive-by malware downloads, because at least I can avoid those. The iTunes interface is like a temperamental 16-year-old child's first programming project, insisting that it knows better than you how it should behave. And it refuses to cooperate with external music applications, firm in the unshakable arrogant belief that you would never want to use anything but iTunes.
And then there are the restrictions, which have chafed from day 1. No OBEX. No tethering. No Firefox, with no ad blocking add-ins to Safari. And this gets to my #1 complaint: AVRCP wouldn't respond to my Bluetooth headphones when I'd hit skip track/previous track. Seriously? Turns out it's part of another "pay-us-for-nothing" gimmick -- docking players have to pay Apple for a remote control chip license, and Apple was afraid they'd use Bluetooth to bypass their Apple tax. Discovering that was literally the straw that broke the camel's back. So for a $3 chip, Apple has inconvenienced me for the last time. I really want them to know that their greed is causing me to tell everyone I know to stay the hell away from Apple everything. And as the family's resident technology expert, they listen to me. I've already personally cost them five lost iPhone sales.
No, it's a sub average phone with an incredibly well designed user interface (on the phone, not iTunes.) Couple that with Apple's horseshit restrictions, Apple's corporate "f*ck-you-customers" attitude, and the intolerable Apple fanbois and apologists, and the whole thing stinks out loud. I can't wait for this phone's contract to be over and done, and get to an Android based platform. And I am telling everyone who will listen, from family, friends, and neighbors to co-workers, don't buy the iPhone -- it's a poor device with an undeserved reputation.