'... In order to implement some parts of the.NET standard there would be some "use" of MS patents (I'm talking about ASP.NET and ADO.NET in particular)....'
Semagic client, which does lots of useful stuff for me
yeah I spotted this just today (and appreciated the significance). For example ecto (commercial blog client) which acts as a binary client supporting multiple blog api's. Thus theres a sort of binary revenge here because the web based systems have their minuses (until I tried out gmail).
I must say though users are voting with their dollars - enough even to move binary boys such as Joel and Miguel rethink.
The key difference is that with a server based model you have a simplified platform (browser) compared to targeting an operating system (MS Windows) with a binary.
What is the difference in approach with your kit and say Steve Manns? Admittantly your system is commercial consumer grade where constraints of market and production play a big part in releasing product. But Manns research and production into wearable computers (wearcomp: tapping into his right eye) has been around for ages.
... Go to Wikipedia's Forking FAQ. There are directions for creating your own Wikipedia clone. The software. The settings. The content. It's all there: Free, open, legal....
granted you can get access to the code, content AND have the ability to use the information. But your forgetting the costs associated with hosting and running hardware.
Wikipedia is reliant on Noblesse Oblige. Looking at the Wikipedia Foundation Inc is set up as a non profit organisation and according to its benefactors page is actively seeking funds to operate and expand.
The Wikipedia foundations agenda for wikipedia is ambitous.
'... maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge....' [
To execute these objectives require fundraising of some sorts. The question I ask is if wikipedia does a deal with google in line with their aims will google try to use this ready made information source to generate revenue? And what steps will they take to avoid *non-payers* accessing wikipedia - hence the reference to the *commons*. The advantage wikipedia has over say the news groups or the domain registration is they have a voice (wikipedia foundation) and a solid license (gpl release of software and data).
So yes you can take the code and data but delivering the wikipedia service is another matter.
The mag might be a dinosour, the writer a hack but history has a habit of repeating (Tragedy of the Commons., Garrett Hardin, 1968.). Especially in the face of plunderers.
ground truth is something I'm interested in. Is the image on the map the same as on the ground. Well it looks like the company supplying the google data has priorities else where.
'...
NAVTEQ digital map data is built on the roads of the world. Five hundred NAVTEQ field researchers from over 100 offices drive millions of meters of the road network each year... These field teams are constantly verifying and updating the database, not only in terms of road geometry, but also in details... [NAVTEQ Difference - www.navteq.com promo information.]...'
I agree the readability of the information is better than most - if scant attention to the *quality* of the *changing* data is not addressed (500 people truth checking the entire US - let alone the major cities) the service will be substandard for all but the routine point to point navigation.
Your reply is accurate but I dont like it after many a time trying to explain technical and *not so technical* stuff to people with blank stares.
I dont believe your post really answers the question by itself. But in conjunction with the parent post it is more than adeqate. Why?
The mismatch between the question and the correct technical answer and the answer the poster may accept or understand for me this illustrates the difference between the "knows" and the "dont knows". I've come up with an idea that I use often to deliver technical messages. I call it the *eggyolk* concept. Its certainly not unique but it serves me well.
Eggyolk explanation
Soft gooey and yolky on the inside, the simple message. The outside white bit (albumin), the technical message (context to facts) and finally the shell, the concrete facts. Why does it work?
Detail looses people
Many people do not wont detail. Through lasiness, inability or time constrained, they dont want detail. Instead they are more interested in snippits of information from coversations. This may go some of the way to explain the popularity of blogs compared to say newspapers and technical reports. So the eggyolk idea is to find a information snippit that links to deeper information hidden within.
A good example may be the *Dummies* of books - (Consults, 'DOS for dummies'). Technical details wrapped in bullet points, clear language and graphic design.
As for how paranoid you should be read about the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman and his Phils articles on data privacy and paranoia.
From ciphirebeta '... Once the code is stable and we've had independent code audits, we'll publish the source code. We're releasing a security product, and we believe - along with legions of other security aware developers - that transparency is key to trust building...'
This is the bit I dont like. Read the from the master himself, Philip Zimmermann - the one who was under 3 year investigation by US customs. Reading through Phils articles, I came across Beware of Snake Oil. It makes for good reading when evaluating if the product is worth the effort.
My question is if you cant read the source (massive assumption given few know how to write and implement encryption) how do you know if the code is implemented correctly?
'... With universities forced increasingly to find creative new ways of fundraising, Melbourne Uni took an unprecedented step. It set up a new company, Melbourne IT, to run the.com.au names operation and, in December 1999, floated the body on the stock market. The stock rocketed far above the listing price....[ABC 4 Corners, Domain Games, 05/06/2000, Stephen McDonell]
So when you say....
... Melbourne IT are very much a corporate entity now. They have share holders, and have a large emphasis internally on sales (much to the dismay of the employee I know). This so called "weekend rule" could be applied to many many other corporates as well.... The notion that this situation was bred from some type of government "weekend rule" is ridiculous.
I have a bit of a hard time thinking the core of the organisation retains its *sheltered* workshop origins. Of course MelboureIt is not exactly a *squeaky clean organisation* as they make out to be. Those with long enough memories remember the share allocation irregularities that resulted in the Domain Games story by ABC 4 Corners investigation.
...
Four Corners explores the Melbourne IT float and asks whether the university may have undersold its domain names monopoly, which had been essentially a public asset. Is it better that such an asset is in public or private hands?...[ABC 4 Corners, Domain Games, 05/06/2000, Stephen McDonell]
...
The report also examines whether "hot floats" like Melbourne IT are executed to the benefit of a well-heeled and well-connected clique, with the "mums and dads" left out of the picture, or whether the Government's vision of a shareholders' democracy holds true..."[ABC 4 Corners, Domain Games, 05/06/2000, Stephen McDonell]
For the non-Australians, a investigative story by 4 Corners is equivalent to say UK BBC, Horizon or US PBS or CBS 60 Minutes expose. As a *public listed company* it is not something you look forward to. I may be wrong, maybe it is just plain incompetence.
'... The fact that useless software (and products in general) that does not make you nicer, more knowledgeable, or more intelligent can generate so much revenue is beyond common sense...'
I must admit I've got Mac envy here because of what 'Delicious' can do. I spotted it of oreillynet a while ago. Like most developers I collect lists of information both electronic and physical. Having a tool that allows you to join disjoint sets of information and find them fast is pretty desirable. It makes for less searching. If I can find things faster it gives me more time to read/learn.
What I like also about this company is the ideas its coming up with. Aside from software what about the work environment. Food, drink, places to sit/talk, Internet connection. All at a low cost. Bet you will not find ideas like running your operation from a tech laden coffee shop in any Ivy League BS (Business School) case study.
'... would be interesting to compare the first 3 years' budgets of Ximian and OSAF....'
origally evolution was the result of 17 full time coders, 150K+ KLOC (I see refereces to 750K but I'm pretty sure evolution pre release was about 1/4 of this) and a year and a half in development. The sad story is that Ximian had trouble making money out of Evolution and hence the exchange connector.
The promise I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.
Free the data This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).
Updated Agenda? For the younger/.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?
...
A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters....
Release early and often Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.
Alternative So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.
lessons It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.
'... This is a prime example why public funded software ought to be open source...'
Here's an example of a coroporate exploit of externality. The film, The Corporation which is being shown in Aus at the moment details how companies avoid responsibility. The company developing the software has passed the *cost* of defects and inability to operate as required to the the client, the FBI. In turn funded by the US tax payer.
Counter to this it the poor technology management at the FBI. Is there really such a technology and project management and *knowledge gap* ?
*250,000 units for sale
*NTSC only (forget it if you have a PAL TV)
*games include ~ 30 original legally released games ported
*128K RAM, 2M ROM
*256 colours
*SID sound, 3 voices
Robert also suggests enterprising hackers can "... solder on a serial port..." for that true C64 feel keyboard and drive
flying around in fast airplanes qualifies you to evaluate the density of trans-terrestrial asteroids and their ecological impact
no you missed my point. Having been to the moon, worked on the moon and having time to reflect on the implications of *no earth* does. Dont take a snippet out of context.
Yes John Young is some old retired *guy*. But he's a reminder of a generation of real acheivers. Forget the awards and look at what he has actually done:
Born in depression era America he graduated from Georgia Tech in Aero class of '52, (for all you pre college persons - it's one of the harder enginering courses), while his armed service combat record only mentions service in Korea on DD-558, Young flew Crusader and Phantom test pilot missions evaluating weapons systems, breaking speed records at 3000 and 25,000 ft. He retired as a Caption after 25 yrs Navy service in '76.
Youngs Nasa career started in '62, flying Gemini 3 missions in '65 with Gus Grissom (remember Grissom, Commander of Apollo 1 which tragically burnt on the PAD), Gemini 10 in '66, CMMP on Apollo 10 in '69 (test run for Apollo 11 in - so thats around the Moon), Apollo 16 in '72 (with Ken Mattingly who missed his ride with Apollo 13 - so he has worked on the lunar surface for his day job), Commander of STS-1 (that the first shuttle flight) in '81, Commander of STS-9 Spacelab in '83. Was backup in Gemini 6, Apollo1, Apollo 7, 13, 17.
In summary 15,000 hrs training, 15100 hrs in flight hours and 835 hrs in 6 space flights.
He's some *retired guy* all right. He is one of only 12 people who have walked, worked and lived on the moon. That give him a unique insight into this area. He has seen how puny Earth is from space and realises how human existance is not something to be taken for granted. You can read more about his bio here.
'... President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology...'
why use gps? I wonder what the *opponents* would use GPS for? GPS is great for finding unknowns, like your current position or a position you want to navigate towards. But you dont need GPS for locating a known like a city or infrastructure.
sps, pps Back in my undergrad days I remember that GPS had 2 modes of usage: standard positioning service (sps) that degraded the information (lat and long, elevation and time) by 5%. Remember for nav 5% of anything is a lot. This is commonly used by the public. Precise positioning system (pps) is about 5 times more accurate than the sps in lat/long and elevation and about 2/3 more accutate in time. This is the restricted military version. It is more accurate and has various counter measures to avoid being compromised and is restricted in use.
availability The kicker is that pps requires the use of restricted kit, encryption and hardware. It can be made unusable through encryption.
... The Precise Positioning Service (PPS) is a highly accurate military positioning, velocity and timing service which will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis to users authorized by the U.S. P(Y) code capable military user equipment... [1]
why shutdown so why the shutdown? does this mean the *opponents* have access to GPS pps hardware and encryption? If the pps GPS was being interfered with (a real possibility) then you might expect some anti spoofing counter measures.
How would they use it? Is GPS being used not only to position but time events? Personally I doubt it as a 50c quartz watch does just as good a job.
My bet the reason for shutting down withing the US is to avoid marine navigation. The only way the US can avoid opponents using ships is to turn off GPS as a last ditch attempt.
references:
[1] NavStar GPS Operations, USNO NAVSTAR Global Positioning System.
observations Theres some interesting observational research,
Oscillations and Chaos in Ant Societies, R.V. Sole, O. Miramontes, and B.C. Goodwin, J. Theor. Biol. 161, pp.343-357, 1993.
In David Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance, Brian Goodwin (author also of, HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS) made some interesting observational discoveries with ants. Synchronous emergent behaviour arose when individual *chaotic* ants reached a certain density. Goodwin concluded that...
... living near the edge of chaos gives systems, the complex systems, maximal adaptability, the capacity to respond adaptively to a constantly changing and unpredictable world... Brian Goodwin, The Sacred Balance, Episode 1, Journey into New Worlds.
limitations
But there are limitations in trying to model living systems with computers. Some things just happen in nature that cannot be modelled. I remember reading BartKosko (Fuzzy thinking) and in it he describes how modelling animals nature for example doesn't take into account things like breaking bones. Sure you could assign probability of a bone breaking, describe the forces on the bone when it breaks. But in nature it just happens.
'... You can see this dark streak almost every day in southern california, or almost anyplace that has contrails visible in the sky. When the contrail goes between you and the sun, you can see a dark band coming down from it. Watch for it!...'
there are no mention of the direction of the streak or the location of the photograph taken. but suprise suprise I see B52's regularly fly (thursdays at 0700 and 1600) a route E-NNW and visa versa which I presume is changeover crews to/from Diego Garcia (Camp Justice) leaving contrails. So it is possible that such trails exist on non comercial traffic routes. In the absence of commercial traffic at this height/direction (above 35'000 ft) If you not aware of the time/directions you may mistake it for something else.
iPod has been a savior of Apple. The hardware has actually been driving sales of downloaded music and this fact has not been unnoticed by the business world. Hence the term, *iPod killer*.
Users typically spend a bity of time creating, transferring their music titles to the pod. But what happens at the end of the hard drive life? I wonder what steps a typical user has taken to backup their 40/80 Gb of music?
Will they be tempted to save their 40Gb to hard drive before any hardware problems occur? What is the MTBF of the iPod? [www.ipodhacks.com, iPod Boot Disk Burnout, 20,000 hrs]
Will the cost offset the user disatisfaction? Or will enough users purchased the next version with suitable upgrade of their music lists?
Slashdot Mirror
The patented libs in different part of build tree and ready to be yoinked at the first sniff of patent wars. Its amazing how the same stuff seems to popup. I posted about this in Mono: A Developer's Handbook (SEP2004).
yeah I spotted this just today (and appreciated the significance). For example ecto (commercial blog client) which acts as a binary client supporting multiple blog api's. Thus theres a sort of binary revenge here because the web based systems have their minuses (until I tried out gmail) .
I must say though users are voting with their dollars - enough even to move binary boys such as Joel and Miguel rethink.
I'll second that. Read about Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad and thats pretty much what the dog was designed for when I was working for sausage back in '95.
The key difference is that with a server based model you have a simplified platform (browser) compared to targeting an operating system (MS Windows) with a binary.
What is the difference in approach with your kit and say Steve Manns? Admittantly your system is commercial consumer grade where constraints of market and production play a big part in releasing product. But Manns research and production into wearable computers (wearcomp: tapping into his right eye) has been around for ages.
found a forum on the DISR site. Why dont you post the question there?
bravo... those are great arguments. I miss this on slashdot :)
granted you can get access to the code, content AND have the ability to use the information. But your forgetting the costs associated with hosting and running hardware.
Wikipedia is reliant on Noblesse Oblige. Looking at the Wikipedia Foundation Inc is set up as a non profit organisation and according to its benefactors page is actively seeking funds to operate and expand.
The Wikipedia foundations agenda for wikipedia is ambitous.
To execute these objectives require fundraising of some sorts. The question I ask is if wikipedia does a deal with google in line with their aims will google try to use this ready made information source to generate revenue? And what steps will they take to avoid *non-payers* accessing wikipedia - hence the reference to the *commons*. The advantage wikipedia has over say the news groups or the domain registration is they have a voice (wikipedia foundation) and a solid license (gpl release of software and data).
So yes you can take the code and data but delivering the wikipedia service is another matter.
The mag might be a dinosour, the writer a hack but history has a habit of repeating (Tragedy of the Commons., Garrett Hardin, 1968.). Especially in the face of plunderers.
I agree the readability of the information is better than most - if scant attention to the *quality* of the *changing* data is not addressed (500 people truth checking the entire US - let alone the major cities) the service will be substandard for all but the routine point to point navigation.
I think I'll journal more on this topic.
Your reply is accurate but I dont like it after many a time trying to explain technical and *not so technical* stuff to people with blank stares.
I dont believe your post really answers the question by itself. But in conjunction with the parent post it is more than adeqate. Why?
The mismatch between the question and the correct technical answer and the answer the poster may accept or understand for me this illustrates the difference between the "knows" and the "dont knows". I've come up with an idea that I use often to deliver technical messages. I call it the *eggyolk* concept. Its certainly not unique but it serves me well.
Eggyolk explanation
Soft gooey and yolky on the inside, the simple message. The outside white bit (albumin), the technical message (context to facts) and finally the shell, the concrete facts. Why does it work?
Detail looses people
Many people do not wont detail. Through lasiness, inability or time constrained, they dont want detail. Instead they are more interested in snippits of information from coversations. This may go some of the way to explain the popularity of blogs compared to say newspapers and technical reports. So the eggyolk idea is to find a information snippit that links to deeper information hidden within.
A good example may be the *Dummies* of books - (Consults, 'DOS for dummies'). Technical details wrapped in bullet points, clear language and graphic design.
As for how paranoid you should be read about the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman and his Phils articles on data privacy and paranoia.
This is the bit I dont like. Read the from the master himself, Philip Zimmermann - the one who was under 3 year investigation by US customs. Reading through Phils articles, I came across Beware of Snake Oil. It makes for good reading when evaluating if the product is worth the effort.
My question is if you cant read the source (massive assumption given few know how to write and implement encryption) how do you know if the code is implemented correctly?
So when you say ....
I have a bit of a hard time thinking the core of the organisation retains its *sheltered* workshop origins. Of course MelboureIt is not exactly a *squeaky clean organisation* as they make out to be. Those with long enough memories remember the share allocation irregularities that resulted in the Domain Games story by ABC 4 Corners investigation.
Those interested can read from the ABC 4 Corners investigation and some other snippits from the Auditors General report.
For the non-Australians, a investigative story by 4 Corners is equivalent to say UK BBC, Horizon or US PBS or CBS 60 Minutes expose. As a *public listed company* it is not something you look forward to. I may be wrong, maybe it is just plain incompetence.
I must admit I've got Mac envy here because of what 'Delicious' can do. I spotted it of oreillynet a while ago. Like most developers I collect lists of information both electronic and physical. Having a tool that allows you to join disjoint sets of information and find them fast is pretty desirable. It makes for less searching. If I can find things faster it gives me more time to read/learn.
What I like also about this company is the ideas its coming up with. Aside from software what about the work environment. Food, drink, places to sit/talk, Internet connection. All at a low cost. Bet you will not find ideas like running your operation from a tech laden coffee shop in any Ivy League BS (Business School) case study.
origally evolution was the result of 17 full time coders, 150K+ KLOC (I see refereces to 750K but I'm pretty sure evolution pre release was about 1/4 of this) and a year and a half in development. The sad story is that Ximian had trouble making money out of Evolution and hence the exchange connector.
The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.
Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).
Updated Agenda? /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?
For the younger
Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.
Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.
lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.
Here's an example of a coroporate exploit of externality . The film, The Corporation which is being shown in Aus at the moment details how companies avoid responsibility. The company developing the software has passed the *cost* of defects and inability to operate as required to the the client, the FBI. In turn funded by the US tax payer.
Counter to this it the poor technology management at the FBI. Is there really such a technology and project management and *knowledge gap* ?
*250,000 units for sale
*NTSC only (forget it if you have a PAL TV)
*games include ~ 30 original legally released games ported
*128K RAM, 2M ROM
*256 colours
*SID sound, 3 voices
Robert also suggests enterprising hackers can "... solder on a serial port ..." for that true C64 feel keyboard and drive
References[1] www.aroundmyroom.com/blog/images/c64dtv/index.htm
[2] groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.sys.cbm/msg/7e6
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Volkerding
Well done Patrick. Looks like I'll be forking out for the commercial slack.no you missed my point. Having been to the moon, worked on the moon and having time to reflect on the implications of *no earth* does. Dont take a snippet out of context.
Yes John Young is some old retired *guy*. But he's a reminder of a generation of real acheivers. Forget the awards and look at what he has actually done:
Born in depression era America he graduated from Georgia Tech in Aero class of '52, (for all you pre college persons - it's one of the harder enginering courses), while his armed service combat record only mentions service in Korea on DD-558, Young flew Crusader and Phantom test pilot missions evaluating weapons systems, breaking speed records at 3000 and 25,000 ft. He retired as a Caption after 25 yrs Navy service in '76.
Youngs Nasa career started in '62, flying Gemini 3 missions in '65 with Gus Grissom (remember Grissom, Commander of Apollo 1 which tragically burnt on the PAD), Gemini 10 in '66, CMMP on Apollo 10 in '69 (test run for Apollo 11 in - so thats around the Moon), Apollo 16 in '72 (with Ken Mattingly who missed his ride with Apollo 13 - so he has worked on the lunar surface for his day job), Commander of STS-1 (that the first shuttle flight) in '81, Commander of STS-9 Spacelab in '83. Was backup in Gemini 6, Apollo1, Apollo 7, 13, 17.
In summary 15,000 hrs training, 15100 hrs in flight hours and 835 hrs in 6 space flights.
He's some *retired guy* all right. He is one of only 12 people who have walked, worked and lived on the moon. That give him a unique insight into this area. He has seen how puny Earth is from space and realises how human existance is not something to be taken for granted. You can read more about his bio here.
why use gps?
I wonder what the *opponents* would use GPS for? GPS is great for finding unknowns, like your current position or a position you want to navigate towards. But you dont need GPS for locating a known like a city or infrastructure.
sps, pps
Back in my undergrad days I remember that GPS had 2 modes of usage: standard positioning service (sps) that degraded the information (lat and long, elevation and time) by 5%. Remember for nav 5% of anything is a lot. This is commonly used by the public. Precise positioning system (pps) is about 5 times more accurate than the sps in lat/long and elevation and about 2/3 more accutate in time. This is the restricted military version. It is more accurate and has various counter measures to avoid being compromised and is restricted in use.
availability
The kicker is that pps requires the use of restricted kit, encryption and hardware. It can be made unusable through encryption.
why shutdown
so why the shutdown? does this mean the *opponents* have access to GPS pps hardware and encryption? If the pps GPS was being interfered with (a real possibility) then you might expect some anti spoofing counter measures.
How would they use it? Is GPS being used not only to position but time events? Personally I doubt it as a 50c quartz watch does just as good a job.
My bet the reason for shutting down withing the US is to avoid marine navigation. The only way the US can avoid opponents using ships is to turn off GPS as a last ditch attempt.
references:[1] NavStar GPS Operations, USNO NAVSTAR Global Positioning System.
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html
or maybe that was Richard Dawkins in Climbing Mount Improbable. Both are worthy reads on emergent modelling.
observations
Theres some interesting observational research, Oscillations and Chaos in Ant Societies, R.V. Sole, O. Miramontes, and B.C. Goodwin, J. Theor. Biol. 161, pp.343-357, 1993.
In David Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance, Brian Goodwin (author also of, HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS) made some interesting observational discoveries with ants. Synchronous emergent behaviour arose when individual *chaotic* ants reached a certain density. Goodwin concluded that ...
simulation
You can see a simulation of the ants behaviour begin modeled here. You can find more about cellular automata and ants by Akira Kageyama. The source code (java) is here.
limitations
But there are limitations in trying to model living systems with computers. Some things just happen in nature that cannot be modelled. I remember reading Bart Kosko (Fuzzy thinking) and in it he describes how modelling animals nature for example doesn't take into account things like breaking bones. Sure you could assign probability of a bone breaking, describe the forces on the bone when it breaks. But in nature it just happens.
there are no mention of the direction of the streak or the location of the photograph taken. but suprise suprise I see B52's
regularly fly (thursdays at 0700 and 1600) a route E-NNW and visa versa which I presume is changeover crews to/from Diego Garcia (Camp Justice) leaving contrails. So it is possible that such trails exist on non comercial traffic routes. In the absence of commercial traffic at this height/direction (above 35'000 ft) If you not aware of the time/directions you may mistake it for something else.
iPod has been a savior of Apple. The hardware has actually been driving sales of downloaded music and this fact has not been unnoticed by the business world. Hence the term, *iPod killer*.
Users typically spend a bity of time creating, transferring their music titles to the pod. But what happens at the end of the hard drive life? I wonder what steps a typical user has taken to backup their 40/80 Gb of music?
Will they be tempted to save their 40Gb to hard drive before any hardware problems occur? What is the MTBF of the iPod? [www.ipodhacks.com, iPod Boot Disk Burnout, 20,000 hrs]
Will the cost offset the user disatisfaction? Or will enough users purchased the next version with suitable upgrade of their music lists?