It's all in the marketing. Edison wanted to transmit power commerically as DC, whereas our buddy Tesla insisted on AC. Tesla was proven right (can you imagine having to buy light bulbs by your distance from the power plant?), but Edison went on to merge into one of today's largest corporations while Tesla faded away.
Marconi had the exciting project because he took it somewhere. Tesla pushed the barriers more than any man of his time but he stunk at follow-through.
He gave a presentation [..] about his work with GNU Radio, which is, bar none, the single most exciting software project in existence today.
Marconi had the most exciting hardware project of his day. This is refinement, and arguably not even inspired refinement. I've been interpreting EM radiation as digital information for more than a year using freely downloadable software.
My company has two database applications that drive it. One is a multimillion dollar Oracle Financials implementation that handles the billing, GL, and payroll interfaces. The other is a multithousand dollar in-house PHP/MySQL app that handles all the sales tracking, inventory, history, and reporting.
Which database has more uptime? Faster response? Most flexible to our business needs?
I have a hard time feeling "ignorant" or as a "follower" when the kind of success we've had takes place. We evaled several other databases (including running the app out of the Oracle database, PostgreSQL) but the MySQL option worked best.
We walked in skeptics... we designed the app and schema around the limitations. After a year we built some consistancy checks that scanned the database content for problems, and that was the biggest waste of programming time so far on the project.
Now, I'd never try to build a financials app using MySQL in its current incarnation. But when someone goes on about how MySQL is good for nothing, I have sit back and think about how a database that has driven the business for two years and hasn't had even a minute of unscheduled downtime in that time is at all flawed for the application we're using it.
This is like Ford suing the Insurance Institute of America for rating a car low in side collision performance and publishing that fact.
Does the owner/user/whatever-licensing-condition of a product be in a position of being a criminal for determining the safety of that product? Or for publishing that concern?
Do these companies honestly expect hackers to fear a DMCA suit when they share their exploits?
Follow this to it's conclusion and it makes for pure insanity. This starts to sound like gun control, where instead of protecting the victims, we accidentally wind up helping the criminals when they know the exploits and the admins don't.
Paul Olson on this list shows a rather odd claim that a bomb took down the airplane he was on. The NTSB report shows:
"Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder, National Transportation Safety Board computer simulation, and human performance data (including operational factors) from the United Airlines flight 585 accident shows that they are consistent with a rudder reversal most likely caused by a jam of the main rudder power control unit servo valve secondary slide to the servo valve housing offset from its neutral position and overtravel of the primary slide."
And also concludes:
"USAir flight 427 did not experience an in-flight fire, bomb, explosion, or structural failure."
If as an amateur investigator I can determine this in under 10 minutes, how am I supposed to rate the impartiality and investigative tenacity of this list if the one entry I decide to check turns out to be misrepresented? If the NTSB is part of the conspiracy why is it not mentioned?
I believe this "education process" is misunderstood. What they're refering to is the executives figuring out that being able to control the market through physical media is obsolete. Try to force the market into a new format and you'll just push even more people to the black market.
The music industry's arrogance towards their own customers is incredible. Imagine if Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, etc. all said that their programs will only install on new computers in MetaData format media and if you had legacy media you'd just have to buy it new. Or they told you they wouldn't honor upgrades unless you bought new licenses by a certain date (oops, beat me to that idea).
Not to spoil the party of those people looking for free broadband... but this strikes me as very silly for two reasons:
1) There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in 802.11b. Are all of the transmitter sites going to occupy just one of those, or will they use all of them to overlap and maximize coverage? How will this interact with private WLANs?
2) 802.11b is a stepping stone to future wireless LAN/WAN/etc technologies and a primitive one at that. Building a whole infrastructure around it is crazy. (see also: the reason North America is still on CDMA/TDMA)
I've seen a large number of projects crop up locally trying to connect all kinds of things with 802.11b... government facilities, hospitals, etc. Even my company is using it now to link our buildings. It's going to be very crowded with only 3 channels and no one to coordinate the whole mess.
The metaphor is closer to comparing a group that builds an XT from spare parts and having it boot up in DOS compared to a new P-4 out of the box from a store running SETI@home. Would anyone claim the P-4 user was crazy when he could have cobbled together the XT for so much less?
Besides the fact that without the research that went into producing the 30% efficiency panels, the 5% panels would not be as cheap as they are. Show me a group that launches a same technology/capability/longevity bird for reduced price and then we're talking.
Back in the old days before Napster, and when MP3 was more likely a bad TV drama about Military Police than a music format, it was BBS-like with people setting up FTP and WWW sites with their MP3 files for download. These slowly aggregated into larger FTP/WWW sites for bandwidth considerations that in turn were aggregated by search engines because it was damn hard to find any particular song you wanted on one of 1,000 sites.
As it went from smaller sites to larger sites, the servers had to be supported by bigger and bigger pipes which requires companies/schools/etc to donate the bandwidth (knowingly or otherwise). And bingo, they were now targets for destruction.
You can't have the advantages of hiding in the woods while also being easy to find, at least using traditional technologies. The old way worked great if you were just looking for random music, but that was about it.
So we're going to employ an army people to look at pictures and exclude false positives, only find the xx% of terrorists that we know about an will pose for pictures but wait... we're still going to miss and let some amount of terrorists we know about onto airplanes while we hold up 10,000 travellers a year that looked enough like the terrorists for the human comparitor to raise the flag.
And in the meantime, the terrorists hijak a bus and put a bomb on it that goes off if it goes less than 80mph because we didn't deploy this at bus stations.
In a thresholding process, you develop a tradeoff of false positives and false negatives. If you are willing to accept false negatives you can crank down false positives to nearly zero so every positive is a true positive.
The problem is that as you crank down the allowable false negatives, the number of false positives increases faster and faster until you're effectively deciding everything is a positive (depending on the evaluator).
If you decide in advance the number of false negatives you can allow is zero (or in this scenario, zero known terrorists get on planes)... you've just dictated that your false positives will be so much higher than the number of true positives that you'll spend as much effort on the test as if you just required everyone to have an FBI background check prior to getting on a plane.
And more to the article's point, you can detect every known terrorist but you'll miss every unknown terrorist. And there are many, many more unknown ones than known ones. Which makes the whole test pointless for defeating terrorism.
As you've on, the security aspects of a standard like this are on a separate logical layer than the transmission medium. To say that spread spectrum is inherently more secure is silly since any security has to be implemented in the data that's being transmitted.
They could make cards that didn't have a promiscuous mode, but at the end of the day, you could create a receiver and decoder yourself to defeat that since it's all just blips in the spectrum. If the receiver can hear it and it's transmitted unidirectionally it's crazy to think that no one else could hear it.
This whole thing sounds like a marketing droid cooked it up.
From the employer's perspective, "programming" is only half the equation. There's also a good dose of engineering and design which most programmers don't have any intrinsic sense of. Formal education only reinforces the 'hack-to-completion' method because the typical education method is to write, one after one, small programs the authors never see or use again. I'm not saying that you are one or the other, my point is just that people don't often express in their resumes any design/software engineering skills.
The other thing that everyone is guilty of is throwing things on their resume they have marginal experience with. The medical profession has gotten very good at having strict specialties... and that's something the computer industry needs to work on. Looking at IT/IS resumes would make you believe everyone is an expert at every buzzword. Even more -- everyone can manage a team of 15 and implement with the best of them. It just doesn't add up.
I believe that is the core problem really -- IT/IS resumes are in the majority so grossly overstated or inspecific that the person hiring off them has to create arbitrary filters. And one of them is to knock off the list anyone junior grade. I'm guilty of that, but at the end of the day if the junior grade asks for as much compensation as the rest of the crowd....
I've always thought they should redefine the second to something more rational since there are 86,400 of them in a day. Make it an even 100,000 units, notate it in kilo"units" and would have 100 "major segments" each about 15 current minutes in length. Which happens to be the smallest unit most people make times in anyways.
And I'm not even a proponent of the metric system but the way time is measured is really whacked. Change the second... change the months. I'm all for it.
While obviously it isn't going to happen, seeing as the government has paid the bill... maybe there should be a massive reduction in fees that will bring the demand up to the point of realizing profitability. After all, if they have enough money to operate now certainly their variable costs are now under control (it's not like they are going to launch any more birds).
Unless it was never commercially feasible to begin with.
Either their primary market is going to be with wineries, or their super-secret client area is just a ploy to make their web-site effort seem bigger. Not uncommon, though they could have at least hidden the example script they are using with a better password than "test"....
Another protest page on Space Debris makes good points and very, very bad points. It calls probes like Cassinni and the Voyagers "Space Debris" that with no way to make it back to earth become interplanetary garbage.
The point about useless satellites in Earth orbit is far more sensible until the author suggests that advanced civilizations might use "miniature black holes" to clean them up. If you thought running an RTG close to the Earth was bad, imagine containing a black hole in the Earth's orbit (or rather, the Earth in orbit of the black hole!).
Coming from research (granted not Nasa-level research), the academic world of research is about politics and grant money... not about progress. Given this guy's list of achievements he's probably not a crackpot. And while that doesn't mean he's right, not giving him a second chance shows what really drives these missions.
And making matters worse, having ex-Nasa researchers call him names is very unprofessional. But I wouldn't expect anything less... that sort of nonsense drove me to the corporate world where useful results are rewarded. Without the evil communists to push our space program forward we've been all too content to sit in park.
Proof by Necessary Requirement
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
1: An operating system is the collective name for an abstraction layer which allows software at a "higher" level to interface with i/o devices through functions.
2: There exists programs which you can reading this page (output) and writing back onto it (input) and those programs do not interface with the hardware directly.
3: THEREFORE, if the program works, there must be an operating system in the mix.
4: It is possible to post a reply to this article on a computer only running "UNIX" and a second client program as in statement (2).
5: THEREFORE, if (1) is the definition of an operating system, UNIX must be an operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all in the marketing. Edison wanted to transmit power commerically as DC, whereas our buddy Tesla insisted on AC. Tesla was proven right (can you imagine having to buy light bulbs by your distance from the power plant?), but Edison went on to merge into one of today's largest corporations while Tesla faded away.
Marconi had the exciting project because he took it somewhere. Tesla pushed the barriers more than any man of his time but he stunk at follow-through.
He gave a presentation [..] about his work with GNU Radio, which is, bar none, the single most exciting software project in existence today.
Marconi had the most exciting hardware project of his day. This is refinement, and arguably not even inspired refinement. I've been interpreting EM radiation as digital information for more than a year using freely downloadable software.
My company has two database applications that drive it. One is a multimillion dollar Oracle Financials implementation that handles the billing, GL, and payroll interfaces. The other is a multithousand dollar in-house PHP/MySQL app that handles all the sales tracking, inventory, history, and reporting.
Which database has more uptime? Faster response? Most flexible to our business needs?
I have a hard time feeling "ignorant" or as a "follower" when the kind of success we've had takes place. We evaled several other databases (including running the app out of the Oracle database, PostgreSQL) but the MySQL option worked best.
We walked in skeptics... we designed the app and schema around the limitations. After a year we built some consistancy checks that scanned the database content for problems, and that was the biggest waste of programming time so far on the project.
Now, I'd never try to build a financials app using MySQL in its current incarnation. But when someone goes on about how MySQL is good for nothing, I have sit back and think about how a database that has driven the business for two years and hasn't had even a minute of unscheduled downtime in that time is at all flawed for the application we're using it.
This is like Ford suing the Insurance Institute of America for rating a car low in side collision performance and publishing that fact.
Does the owner/user/whatever-licensing-condition of a product be in a position of being a criminal for determining the safety of that product? Or for publishing that concern?
Do these companies honestly expect hackers to fear a DMCA suit when they share their exploits?
Follow this to it's conclusion and it makes for pure insanity. This starts to sound like gun control, where instead of protecting the victims, we accidentally wind up helping the criminals when they know the exploits and the admins don't.
Paul Olson on this list shows a rather odd claim that a bomb took down the airplane he was on. The NTSB report shows:
"Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder, National Transportation Safety Board computer simulation, and human performance data (including operational factors) from the United Airlines flight 585 accident shows that they are consistent with a rudder reversal most likely caused by a jam of the main rudder power control unit servo valve secondary slide to the servo valve housing offset from its neutral position and overtravel of the primary slide."
And also concludes:
"USAir flight 427 did not experience an in-flight fire, bomb, explosion, or structural failure."
If as an amateur investigator I can determine this in under 10 minutes, how am I supposed to rate the impartiality and investigative tenacity of this list if the one entry I decide to check turns out to be misrepresented? If the NTSB is part of the conspiracy why is it not mentioned?
Next crackpot in the line please...
I believe this "education process" is misunderstood. What they're refering to is the executives figuring out that being able to control the market through physical media is obsolete. Try to force the market into a new format and you'll just push even more people to the black market.
The music industry's arrogance towards their own customers is incredible. Imagine if Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, etc. all said that their programs will only install on new computers in MetaData format media and if you had legacy media you'd just have to buy it new. Or they told you they wouldn't honor upgrades unless you bought new licenses by a certain date (oops, beat me to that idea).
Not to spoil the party of those people looking for free broadband... but this strikes me as very silly for two reasons:
1) There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in 802.11b. Are all of the transmitter sites going to occupy just one of those, or will they use all of them to overlap and maximize coverage? How will this interact with private WLANs?
2) 802.11b is a stepping stone to future wireless LAN/WAN/etc technologies and a primitive one at that. Building a whole infrastructure around it is crazy. (see also: the reason North America is still on CDMA/TDMA)
I've seen a large number of projects crop up locally trying to connect all kinds of things with 802.11b... government facilities, hospitals, etc. Even my company is using it now to link our buildings. It's going to be very crowded with only 3 channels and no one to coordinate the whole mess.
The metaphor is closer to comparing a group that builds an XT from spare parts and having it boot up in DOS compared to a new P-4 out of the box from a store running SETI@home. Would anyone claim the P-4 user was crazy when he could have cobbled together the XT for so much less?
Besides the fact that without the research that went into producing the 30% efficiency panels, the 5% panels would not be as cheap as they are. Show me a group that launches a same technology/capability/longevity bird for reduced price and then we're talking.
Back in the old days before Napster, and when MP3 was more likely a bad TV drama about Military Police than a music format, it was BBS-like with people setting up FTP and WWW sites with their MP3 files for download. These slowly aggregated into larger FTP/WWW sites for bandwidth considerations that in turn were aggregated by search engines because it was damn hard to find any particular song you wanted on one of 1,000 sites.
As it went from smaller sites to larger sites, the servers had to be supported by bigger and bigger pipes which requires companies/schools/etc to donate the bandwidth (knowingly or otherwise). And bingo, they were now targets for destruction.
You can't have the advantages of hiding in the woods while also being easy to find, at least using traditional technologies. The old way worked great if you were just looking for random music, but that was about it.
So we're going to employ an army people to look at pictures and exclude false positives, only find the xx% of terrorists that we know about an will pose for pictures but wait... we're still going to miss and let some amount of terrorists we know about onto airplanes while we hold up 10,000 travellers a year that looked enough like the terrorists for the human comparitor to raise the flag.
And in the meantime, the terrorists hijak a bus and put a bomb on it that goes off if it goes less than 80mph because we didn't deploy this at bus stations.
In a thresholding process, you develop a tradeoff of false positives and false negatives. If you are willing to accept false negatives you can crank down false positives to nearly zero so every positive is a true positive.
The problem is that as you crank down the allowable false negatives, the number of false positives increases faster and faster until you're effectively deciding everything is a positive (depending on the evaluator).
If you decide in advance the number of false negatives you can allow is zero (or in this scenario, zero known terrorists get on planes)... you've just dictated that your false positives will be so much higher than the number of true positives that you'll spend as much effort on the test as if you just required everyone to have an FBI background check prior to getting on a plane.
And more to the article's point, you can detect every known terrorist but you'll miss every unknown terrorist. And there are many, many more unknown ones than known ones. Which makes the whole test pointless for defeating terrorism.
As you've on, the security aspects of a standard like this are on a separate logical layer than the transmission medium. To say that spread spectrum is inherently more secure is silly since any security has to be implemented in the data that's being transmitted.
They could make cards that didn't have a promiscuous mode, but at the end of the day, you could create a receiver and decoder yourself to defeat that since it's all just blips in the spectrum. If the receiver can hear it and it's transmitted unidirectionally it's crazy to think that no one else could hear it.
This whole thing sounds like a marketing droid cooked it up.
The other thing that everyone is guilty of is throwing things on their resume they have marginal experience with. The medical profession has gotten very good at having strict specialties... and that's something the computer industry needs to work on. Looking at IT/IS resumes would make you believe everyone is an expert at every buzzword. Even more -- everyone can manage a team of 15 and implement with the best of them. It just doesn't add up.
I believe that is the core problem really -- IT/IS resumes are in the majority so grossly overstated or inspecific that the person hiring off them has to create arbitrary filters. And one of them is to knock off the list anyone junior grade. I'm guilty of that, but at the end of the day if the junior grade asks for as much compensation as the rest of the crowd....
And I'm not even a proponent of the metric system but the way time is measured is really whacked. Change the second... change the months. I'm all for it.
Unless it was never commercially feasible to begin with.
Good find in any case.
The point about useless satellites in Earth orbit is far more sensible until the author suggests that advanced civilizations might use "miniature black holes" to clean them up. If you thought running an RTG close to the Earth was bad, imagine containing a black hole in the Earth's orbit (or rather, the Earth in orbit of the black hole!).
And making matters worse, having ex-Nasa researchers call him names is very unprofessional. But I wouldn't expect anything less... that sort of nonsense drove me to the corporate world where useful results are rewarded. Without the evil communists to push our space program forward we've been all too content to sit in park.
2: There exists programs which you can reading this page (output) and writing back onto it (input) and those programs do not interface with the hardware directly.
3: THEREFORE, if the program works, there must be an operating system in the mix.
4: It is possible to post a reply to this article on a computer only running "UNIX" and a second client program as in statement (2).
5: THEREFORE, if (1) is the definition of an operating system, UNIX must be an operating system.
Isn't this a repeat?