microsoft is a company sitting on 25 billion dollars. they apparently sold $3-4 billion in bonds? they are *raising* prices during some of the worst economic times that a lot of people of have seen.
it's like they have a pressing need for more than $30 billion?
for a company that needs to sell operating systems to maintain their future, it doesn't make sense.
several years ago 'neural nets' were the big thing and they were thinking that they could make them 'learn' and do useful things.
i always thought that traffic control would be an interesting application. if a computer could look at video of an intersection (and streets leading to the intersection) and figure out where cars were and weren't, you could make traffic lights a lot less annoying.
so our CAPTCHA might be a picture/video of cars and a request to count them?
many years ago apple made a *huge* push in k-12 to get apple stuff out there. why? when these kids graduated, a lot of them had experience with apples and some had experience with only apples. it was a long term investment.
any software that gets uses on the olpc system will not make a difference *today* or *tomorrow*, but down the road it might.
one observation: it will start with educational software. if there are millions of these units out there, there will need to be software for teaching stuff. getting in that market will probably get you into the educational market in developed countries. if you want to see this in action, watch what textbook publishers do to get into the california and texas schools. once in these states, they tend to push into other states from there.
if the olpc project 'works', these children will grow up and this software is going to be what computers are all about.
about 1990-1992 or so, i worked for a regional retailer that sold computers, printers, etc from a number of vendors including hp, ibm, toshiba, epson. one of the problems we had was a high rate of doa equipment from ibm. we felt that the doa rate was too high, especially on monitors and printers. an ibm rep said that the proprinter doa rate was only 2%. 2 out of a hundred. i mentioned that any company making tvs or vcrs would be out of business with a 0.02 out of box failure rate. the rep seemed to think that 2% was O.K. they had a high rate of problems with monitors too. the 8513 ended up with a 4 year warranty. but what was one of the most gross failures of customer support that i ever saw was when ibm decided to not do immediate replacement of doa monitors. if you paid (a lot of money) for your monitor, took it home, opened up the box, plugged it in, and it didn't work, too bad. you brought it back and it was sent away for warranty work. which was several days to a week.
ibm reps never understood why a customer would get stuff other than ibm. even when we told them about stuff like this. they lived in their own little world until it imploded.
it seems that when companies get 'so' big, there seems to be warping of reality for them. i would bet there are some people at microsoft that were very unhappy to admit to this.
if this is not a bad choice of words, then every time the system has to be reloaded, rebuild, etc, etc, you will get to 'relicense' your music. i would expect the outcry from this alone to bite them in rear end when (if) it happens.
one of the questions i've always had is about insurance. if the data is tied to specific hardward and that hardware is lost/destroyed/damaged and the data is unavailable, is the insurance industry ready to cover the cost of 're-buying' the data?
my bank (banc/bank one) was purchased/merged with chase last year. when it was bank one, the online account usage was very straightforward. no problems.
new bank (chase), new TOS. a couple of key things caught my eye: a) i had to give them an email address to get web access to my account. b) they would send me stuff to that address. c) if i wanted the chase spam to stop, i would lose the access to the web interface to my account. d) if their email bounced i would lose access to the web interface.
i decided i didn't like their attitude. so i didn't sign up. i go visit an atm and check my balance there. i wonder what costs them more.
but my point is that chase opens the door because they state that THEY will be sending you email. i am curious if this provides them with more legal risk.
I realized that BartPE could be a handy tool for cleaning up stuff. if nothing from the hard drive is in memory when bart is running, it can't stop tools running under bart from cleaning the crud out.
I also realized that with the many plug-ins that bart has, you could make a fairly usable static system with it. it gets infected? reboot. it gets questionable? reboot.
They also created a language called Ada that was a replacement for Cobol. Everyone thought that the DoD requiring new programming in Ada would cause the replacement of COBOL programming Everywhere.
however, two of the things most overlooked about classes are a) the ability of the instructor (hopefully) to help you build the picture that makes you understand something. books have a hard time doing that. b) let you see a different perspective from your classmates. the people around you have different way of looking at things that is very similar to why programmers sometimes find it helpfull to have other people look at their code for the sneaky bug.
it will slow people down. maybe long enough to recover the data or somehow make it less useful (change ids, passwords, etc). even good encryption will eventually fail. the best you can do is to make it difficult.
on a positive note, someone suddenly looking for breaking tools might catch some attention. on a negative note, something encrypted tends to be a big red flag that says 'look at me, i was important enough to protect'.
and one final thought: it you look at the care and attention that people pay to to security, it would not surprise me if most encrypted systems would be compromised by user stupidity (social engineering).
the human eye has a simple lens that provides focus on a curved (convex) surface. the good focus is right in the center and your eye moves around to maintain focus on whatever you're looking at.
a regular camera Lens has many elements (glass pieces). even if you could make the glass 'variable', there would still be an amazing amount of complexity to make a clean sharp image on a flat surface (film or sensor).
a lot of the ms strategy involves people not being exposed to linux and being able to make a comparison. i would beleive that the last thing microsoft really wants is for someone running xp pro to fire up a free version of vpc and running linux to see what is looks like and how it works.
so i don't understand.
the point was being able to recover stuff and return it to earth in a non-crispy fashion. there was a lot of stuff that went up in the cargo bay and came back in the cargo bay that would have had a really tough time on a parachute landing.
it also occurs to me that i have a really funny picture somewhere of a probe that was supposed to decelerate via parachutes and the photo is of it halfway into the dirt in the desert. 'cause the chute was mis-implemented.
I have several times wondered if the loss of 'putting together coherent thoughts" capability came before the loss of 'good grammar and spelling'.
I have heard from many people that they read documents from people that have perfect spelling and grammar but make no sense. they don't even have the stupid stuff that would indicate that the writer of the document was letting spell and grammar check do all the work.
who are the 'authorities' here? suppose that i find a company using the offending products and they did not apply the patch. who do i call? i'm pretty sure that it's not the sheriff... the fbi?
or do i contact the patent holder and what would his remedy be?
it doesn't relate to criminal activities, but a large number of states have self generated easement laws. depending of state, if you are tresspassing (travelling/building/etc) for x number of years in a non-hidden fashion, you gain some legal usage righst. if i remember from the course where i learned this, it was 7 years in some states to 20 in others. it seemed to be in response to absentee landlords. so there is some history of reasonable management of your property.
however, a better example might be attractive nuisance laws that require special protection/security of 'dangerous' stuff like backyard pools. many cases where 'one fence' was deemed not being secure enough to prevent the neighboorhood kids from getting in and drowning. again, this is civil and not criminal.
so if gramma gets sued by abc-corp because her ip address is noted in a dos attack. show us what precautions you took to prevent this????
i can't tell you how many times i've expressed the dangers to people. if you don't have anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewalls, and etc these are the risks. and they don't beleive. if you look at the large campaigns (at least in certain areas of the U.S.) to get people to wash their hands on a regular basis, it appears that people are disbelieving of germs also.
how do you fix this?
there is amazing evidence that the use of seat belts in autos reduces your probability of dying in a colision. but we still have to make laws to make people wear seat belts.
so far there has been no real cost to a computer user for being stupid. with the exception of lost data, nothing bad is going to happen. if laws get passed that state your are responsible for your computers actions in dos attacks or if your computer is hijacked and made into a child porn depot, things might change.
what is pro today can become very much consumer tomorrow. canon has a 16mp camera now and i would expect in less than 2 year that they will have 25mp. the $7500 (wiping drool off) camera will be $2500 (an estimate) then and $1000 2 years later. etc.
and i bet there is plenty of room for sensors to get better.
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microsoft is a company sitting on 25 billion dollars. they apparently sold $3-4 billion in bonds? they are *raising* prices during some of the worst economic times that a lot of people of have seen.
it's like they have a pressing need for more than $30 billion?
for a company that needs to sell operating systems to maintain their future, it doesn't make sense.
e
several years ago 'neural nets' were the big thing and they were thinking that they could make them 'learn' and do useful things.
i always thought that traffic control would be an interesting application. if a computer could look at video of an intersection (and streets leading to the intersection) and figure out where cars were and weren't, you could make traffic lights a lot less annoying.
so our CAPTCHA might be a picture/video of cars and a request to count them?
eric
if you want fantasy to become science fiction (or science?), read "there will be dragons" by john ringo.
this is an amazing book (start of a series) if you have ever played d&d.
e
you should watch some mythbusters!
i think they managed 12 or 13 folds.
of course they started with a sheet of paper the size of a house and made the last fold with the help of heavy machinery!
eric
does anyone remember Creative Computing?
eric
The Pirate Bay of the Caribbean ?
Antigua could be a major hosting site for torrents...
many years ago apple made a *huge* push in k-12 to get apple stuff out there. why? when these kids graduated, a lot of them had experience with apples and some had experience with only apples. it was a long term investment.
any software that gets uses on the olpc system will not make a difference *today* or *tomorrow*, but down the road it might.
one observation: it will start with educational software. if there are millions of these units out there, there will need to be software for teaching stuff. getting in that market will probably get you into the educational market in developed countries. if you want to see this in action, watch what textbook publishers do to get into the california and texas schools. once in these states, they tend to push into other states from there.
if the olpc project 'works', these children will grow up and this software is going to be what computers are all about.
this could be very interesting for ms and apple.
eric
about 1990-1992 or so, i worked for a regional retailer that sold computers, printers, etc from a number of vendors including hp, ibm, toshiba, epson. one of the problems we had was a high rate of doa equipment from ibm. we felt that the doa rate was too high, especially on monitors and printers. an ibm rep said that the proprinter doa rate was only 2%. 2 out of a hundred. i mentioned that any company making tvs or vcrs would be out of business with a 0.02 out of box failure rate. the rep seemed to think that 2% was O.K. they had a high rate of problems with monitors too. the 8513 ended up with a 4 year warranty. but what was one of the most gross failures of customer support that i ever saw was when ibm decided to not do immediate replacement of doa monitors. if you paid (a lot of money) for your monitor, took it home, opened up the box, plugged it in, and it didn't work, too bad. you brought it back and it was sent away for warranty work. which was several days to a week.
ibm reps never understood why a customer would get stuff other than ibm. even when we told them about stuff like this. they lived in their own little world until it imploded.
it seems that when companies get 'so' big, there seems to be warping of reality for them. i would bet there are some people at microsoft that were very unhappy to admit to this.
e
if this is not a bad choice of words, then every time the system has to be reloaded, rebuild, etc, etc, you will get to 'relicense' your music. i would expect the outcry from this alone to bite them in rear end when (if) it happens.
one of the questions i've always had is about insurance. if the data is tied to specific hardward and that hardware is lost/destroyed/damaged and the data is unavailable, is the insurance industry ready to cover the cost of 're-buying' the data?
eric
may come from the people who stand to lose the most. and it's not the users or the banks. it's the (real) people selling stuff.
imagine what would happen to ebay and paypal if 20% of the transactions went away due to fear?
between ebay, paypal, amazon, & a hugh number of serious ecommerce sites (barnes&noble, etc) i could see them working on a solution for this.
if i had to stop doing online transactions, my life would go on. amazon would hurt. a lot.
eric
my bank (banc/bank one) was purchased/merged with chase last year. when it was bank one, the online account usage was very straightforward. no problems.
new bank (chase), new TOS. a couple of key things caught my eye: a) i had to give them an email address to get web access to my account. b) they would send me stuff to that address. c) if i wanted the chase spam to stop, i would lose the access to the web interface to my account. d) if their email bounced i would lose access to the web interface.
i decided i didn't like their attitude. so i didn't sign up. i go visit an atm and check my balance there. i wonder what costs them more.
but my point is that chase opens the door because they state that THEY will be sending you email. i am curious if this provides them with more legal risk.
eric
to boot a computer that's not booting, this seems to be a computer that boots boots?
e.
I realized that BartPE could be a handy tool for cleaning up stuff. if nothing from the hard drive is in memory when bart is running, it can't stop tools running under bart from cleaning the crud out.
I also realized that with the many plug-ins that bart has, you could make a fairly usable static system with it. it gets infected? reboot. it gets questionable? reboot.
e
They also created a language called Ada that was a replacement for Cobol. Everyone thought that the DoD requiring new programming in Ada would cause the replacement of COBOL programming Everywhere.
Where is Ada now?
eric
books are important.
however, two of the things most overlooked about classes are a) the ability of the instructor (hopefully) to help you build the picture that makes you understand something. books have a hard time doing that. b) let you see a different perspective from your classmates. the people around you have different way of looking at things that is very similar to why programmers sometimes find it helpfull to have other people look at their code for the sneaky bug.
eric
it will slow people down. maybe long enough to recover the data or somehow make it less useful (change ids, passwords, etc). even good encryption will eventually fail. the best you can do is to make it difficult.
on a positive note, someone suddenly looking for breaking tools might catch some attention. on a negative note, something encrypted tends to be a big red flag that says 'look at me, i was important enough to protect'.
and one final thought: it you look at the care and attention that people pay to to security, it would not surprise me if most encrypted systems would be compromised by user stupidity (social engineering).
eric
the human eye has a simple lens that provides focus on a curved (convex) surface. the good focus is right in the center and your eye moves around to maintain focus on whatever you're looking at.
a regular camera Lens has many elements (glass pieces). even if you could make the glass 'variable', there would still be an amazing amount of complexity to make a clean sharp image on a flat surface (film or sensor).
eric
a lot of the ms strategy involves people not being exposed to linux and being able to make a comparison. i would beleive that the last thing microsoft really wants is for someone running xp pro to fire up a free version of vpc and running linux to see what is looks like and how it works.
so i don't understand.
eric
a HUGH amount of the reason that TCP/IP won that battle is because it was an open standard.
the point was being able to recover stuff and return it to earth in a non-crispy fashion. there was a lot of stuff that went up in the cargo bay and came back in the cargo bay that would have had a really tough time on a parachute landing.
it also occurs to me that i have a really funny picture somewhere of a probe that was supposed to decelerate via parachutes and the photo is of it halfway into the dirt in the desert. 'cause the chute was mis-implemented.
eric
I have several times wondered if the loss of 'putting together coherent thoughts" capability came before the loss of 'good grammar and spelling'.
I have heard from many people that they read documents from people that have perfect spelling and grammar but make no sense. they don't even have the stupid stuff that would indicate that the writer of the document was letting spell and grammar check do all the work.
eric
who are the 'authorities' here? suppose that i find a company using the offending products and they did not apply the patch. who do i call? i'm pretty sure that it's not the sheriff... the fbi?
or do i contact the patent holder and what would his remedy be?
eric
it doesn't relate to criminal activities, but a large number of states have self generated easement laws. depending of state, if you are tresspassing (travelling/building/etc) for x number of years in a non-hidden fashion, you gain some legal usage righst. if i remember from the course where i learned this, it was 7 years in some states to 20 in others. it seemed to be in response to absentee landlords. so there is some history of reasonable management of your property.
however, a better example might be attractive nuisance laws that require special protection/security of 'dangerous' stuff like backyard pools. many cases where 'one fence' was deemed not being secure enough to prevent the neighboorhood kids from getting in and drowning. again, this is civil and not criminal.
so if gramma gets sued by abc-corp because her ip address is noted in a dos attack. show us what precautions you took to prevent this????
this is where i think this all ends up.
eric
*unbelieving*!!
i can't tell you how many times i've expressed the dangers to people. if you don't have anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewalls, and etc these are the risks. and they don't beleive. if you look at the large campaigns (at least in certain areas of the U.S.) to get people to wash their hands on a regular basis, it appears that people are disbelieving of germs also.
how do you fix this?
there is amazing evidence that the use of seat belts in autos reduces your probability of dying in a colision. but we still have to make laws to make people wear seat belts.
so far there has been no real cost to a computer user for being stupid. with the exception of lost data, nothing bad is going to happen. if laws get passed that state your are responsible for your computers actions in dos attacks or if your computer is hijacked and made into a child porn depot, things might change.
eric
what is pro today can become very much consumer tomorrow. canon has a 16mp camera now and i would expect in less than 2 year that they will have 25mp. the $7500 (wiping drool off) camera will be $2500 (an estimate) then and $1000 2 years later. etc.
and i bet there is plenty of room for sensors to get better.
eric