For years I have heard 'innovation' and 'Microsoft' linked in the press as though Microsoft were some how responsible for the very concept of innovation. It is generally accepted in the world that Microsoft has produced many computing innovations. I am led to the question, "such as?"
I'm not a Microsoft employee but I do contracting work for them in Redmond. On four occassions I have offered Microsoft employees (a Project Manager, an Windows Server architect, and two Resource Kit technical writers) $100 if they could find a single, significant computing innovation that originated with Microsoft and made it to market. This wasn't a bet... I would just pay each $100 if they could find an example.
So far none of them have claimed to find one or asked for their $100. I gave each a week or two (one guy 2 months so he could ask around).
Admittedly this started out as a way to tweek Microsoft's arrogance. But, I'm REALLY curious now. Has anyone heard of a single significant computing innovation attributable to Microsoft?
The pop-up itself is a forced invocation of a process without the user's consent.
Within the last hour I was forced to reboot because I followed a link on The Onion's web site. The ad spawned 88 instances of my web browser before I gave up trying to kill them all and just powered off.
The state of Washington's computer crime laws specify that installing and running code on somebody's computer without their knowledge or consent is illegal.
This is no different from setting up a web page to insert a worm into the computers of unsuspecting visitors.
Last week I was talking to a buddy who works at Microsoft. We were talking about developing an educational game program for children. I said I wanted it to be GPL and he said he can't work on anything GPL while he's employed at Microsoft. It's grounds for immediate termination. It's in his employment contract.
I have performed an unscientific study on about 8 acquaintances (all male) comparing their skill at twitch games (reflex-based computer games) and their reported sensitivity to screen flicker.
It's my impression that the faster game players are better able to detect higher flicker rates. I searched through Science News archives and Google links but didn't find any articles regarding this.
Anybody heard of any real experiments along these lines? Maybe Air Force or NASA testing for pilots?
Currently, the FBI isn't allowed to use publications "gray literature" for investigation, much less prosecution. The FBI isn't allowed to even subscribe to magazines published by groups they might want to investigate. E.g. NAZI-skinhead-hate-group magazines. I've always found this to be an odd limitation but I assumed that, in the Byzantine world of law, there could be a logical reason.
After all, the computer world has lots of oddities that might seem nonsensical to someone unfamiliar with the details or history of a particular technology.
I am seriously concerned, however, that it looks like the CIA will resume covert investigation within the US... something that has been banned for decades. GWBush's father, when he was CIA Director, prior to being President, resisted this ruling and always wanted to eliminate the restriction. It looks like his son may succeed.
As we become a more computerized and networked society, it seems likely that the once-obvious boundaries of our country will become more blurred. For example, the NSA has been evesdropping on US phone communication without warrants for years, even though they are not allowed to gather information about the US from within the US... just like the CIA. They have gotten around this limitation by using satellites that capture signals escaping into space; mostly microwave from repeater towers.
I have no conclusions or suggestions... just a little food for thought. The most dangerous threat for any democracy is the complacency of its citizens. I am really glad to see that slashdot and other similar tools are thriving. The most dangerous threat to any despot is free communication between the people.
I hope this is not too off-topic, but I think it's interesting and it uses the same physics.
You can make passive radio frequency, RF, tags with diode arrays. Semiconductor diodes fluoresce in RF when illuminated by microwaves. The fluorescence wavelength is determined by the energy band gap of the diode. Combinations of diodes with different energy gaps fluoresce in different combinations of radio frequencies.
There is a technique for making microscopic (tens to hundreds of nanometers) dust from the surface of a silicon wafer. I forget who invented it but it's years old... you use hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and ultrasound. I think Science News did a piece on it.
Here's the part I thought of:
A very diffuse cloud of this diode dust has interesting properties. You can illuminate it from one direction with a microwave beam and you can observe the cloud with a RF receiver. Now, any sound waves in the cloud cause the RF signal from the suspended diode particles to oscillate (Doppler effect)... it's straight frequency modulation.
You can hear everything within the cloud and only sounds passing through the cloud. You just have to demodulate the RF coming from the dust.
Spread the dust through a building and you can listen anywhere in the building by controlling the volume of overlap between the microwave emitter field and the RF receiver antenna field.
I don't have the money to do this but I'll bet any one $5 that it would work.
Regular personal contact, otherwise the system needs to be completely self-explanatory for the children. At best, the programming will be non-trivial... actually, it would be revolutionary
Continuous (?) wireless link
In 3 years? Whew! That's ambitious.
But, you can usually cut project time by increasing project funding
I've been pondering this for years. I've wired some buildings for ethernet and it seems like the damn physical layer keeps changing... fat coax with vampire taps replaced by thin coax replaced by a variety of twisted pair standards that have settled out into cat5. Fiber is the new, best thing but you know that just down the road will be some new hot multimodal fiber or some genius will figure out how to pump 64 colors of laser light into a fiber and you'll be stuck because it will require a different variety of fiber.
When I was a system admin at a company with a really cool Facilities & Operations manager, he would bring me blueprints for every structural change and ask me to mark where I wanted conduit. That made both of our lives *much* easier. He said he could drop galvanized steel conduit from the ceiling to a box with a blank faceplate for $10 (some years ago) and he'd rather put in extra conduit than to have to cut holes into a finished wall.
Smart guy.
My suggestion is that you see where you can run conduit. It's more work now but your cat5 will be incredibly well shielded. Then, if you decide later that you want to replace it with fiber, no problem.
Don't forget to leave a strong cord snaked through your conduit... particularly any unused conduit so you can more easily pull stuff later.
AT&T tech support told me last night that all email sent to my @home account would be stored and then delivered to me once they are finished configuring their network and servers.
I just tried my email account and the messages are being bounced.
It looks like AT&T ran their contractual negotiations down to the wire and made no preparations for their customers. I'm an AT&T @Home customer and my email account was shut down without warning. When the service comes back up (they will not even give a time estimate) they tell me my old email address will not be valid.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
They either have not given thought to the needs of their customers or they're incompetent.
Do they not realize that people need warning to change email accounts? I have one of my domains set up to use that darn email account as the authentication method for management.
I think it could easily be argued that AT&T failed to exercise due dilligence in protecting the interests of their customers. I think that their handling of this situation is, literally, criminally negligent. I'd love to see a class action suit filed against them for their careless handling of this.
If I have correctly understood the technique that SETI uses to recognize transmissions originating from technological civilizations, they are looking for recognizible patterns in electromagnetic (EM) 'signals' collected from deep space.
This may not be a good assumption. As you increase the efficiency of your communication system, the entropy of the transmission increases. Maximum efficiency has the maximum possible information density and therefore maximal entropy.
A transmission with maximal entropy is indistinguishable from random noise.
If one assumes that there is a short period (maybe a few centuries on average) between the time when a new civilization developes radio and the time when they have fine-tuned their EM communication to maximum efficiency, then the time window for detecting these communications will be too small to be useful for us.
Unless other species are actively trying to communicate with unknown species, it seems unlikely that there would be anything out there for us (SETI) to detect.
I don't see O.S.Card being read in 50 years. It's hard to know what current authors might retain popularity. I think Arthur C. Clark is a safe bet. The best hard science in the sf genre I've seen in years comes from Greg Egan. Every story has at least one brilliant insight or alternate interpretation of science.
"SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker,
said Monday it's developed new semiconductor packaging technology that will
allow for microprocessors boasting 1 billion transistors and running at 20
gigahertz in the next six years.
"Currently, Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessor -- the primary computing engine of
personal computers and servers -- has about 42 million transistors and runs at
two gigahertz."
Assuming that the legal standards for prosecuting someone for sending encrypted email require the government to prove you have sent an encrypted message, there may be a trivial way to elude prosecution.
Argue that there is art in random data.
If we can successfully argue that we are sending random bits in our email as a form of artistic or religious expression, then there may be a (silly) way to bypass the (silly) laws.
Perfectly encrypted data, like perfectly compressed or perfectly random data has maximal entropy. Encrypted data looks random.
If someone claims you have sent an encrypted attachment to an email, claim that it's merely a file of random bits that you found to be particularly aesthetically or spiritually appealing.
They should be required to prove that it is not random data... which would require that they manage to decrypt it.
Regarding protecting the Linux community from known worms, virii, etc:
Might it be cost-effective for the Linux community to maintain a site which one could invoke to probe one's own system? Knowledgeable and conscientious (and trustworthy) Linux hackers could maintain an up-to-date array of automated exploits of known security problems.
This seems to me to be technically non-trivial but still quite possible.
The admin of any Linux system could invoke the system and then receive a report of the results... maybe the report could include suggested patches and system configuration changes.
"Like many of the Slashdot readers, I am a programmer and have been pushing out repetitive database content for about a year. The work simply doesn't stop and...."
You have options before quitting. I'm an old fart (42) and have fought many corporate battles (and even won maybe two). When you present the ultimatum that they either clean up their act or you're gone, they'll see you as an obstacle to making easy money.
If you want to persuade them, you'll need to show them with multiple sound arguments how they will make more $$ in the long run by not screwing their customers now.
If you're already thinking of leaving then you have little to lose. Set out a list of strategies to get them to change and identify each in terms of how much personal political capital you'll lose by attempting it. Then start with the ones with the lowest political cost and run the list. Just treat it as a hands-on college project in business administration.
Give up your own perspective. Your goal is to manipulate a small set (likely 3 to 5 people) of people and you can only do this by working through their motivations. It's safe to start by assuming that ego and greed are their primary motivators and then fill in your mental models of their personalities as you go along.
You'll need to give your project credibility so make a list of the changes you see that should obviously be made. Look hard for one or two 'low hanging fruit'. These will be one or two goals that you know, absolutely, you can succeed with in little time with little effort. Ideally, these will look good even if they are of little intrinsic value.
Every successful political power play is begun with a couple of flashy successes.
If, in the end, all fails... what the hell... you were going to quit anyway.
My suggestion is to try to fix the problems:
It's the ethical thing to do as an employee trying to look out for his/her company's best interests.
It's the ethical thing to do as a professional looking out for the customer's best interests.
It's logical for you to extract the greatest benefit from every professional circumstance before discarding it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a Microsoft employee but I do contracting work for them in Redmond. On four occassions I have offered Microsoft employees (a Project Manager, an Windows Server architect, and two Resource Kit technical writers) $100 if they could find a single, significant computing innovation that originated with Microsoft and made it to market. This wasn't a bet... I would just pay each $100 if they could find an example.
So far none of them have claimed to find one or asked for their $100. I gave each a week or two (one guy 2 months so he could ask around).
Admittedly this started out as a way to tweek Microsoft's arrogance. But, I'm REALLY curious now. Has anyone heard of a single significant computing innovation attributable to Microsoft?
The pop-up itself is a forced invocation of a process without the user's consent.
Within the last hour I was forced to reboot because I followed a link on The Onion's web site. The ad spawned 88 instances of my web browser before I gave up trying to kill them all and just powered off.
The state of Washington's computer crime laws specify that installing and running code on somebody's computer without their knowledge or consent is illegal.
This is no different from setting up a web page to insert a worm into the computers of unsuspecting visitors.
I think they should show up in a different color.
Better yet, have the ad color be configurable by Slashdot users... for example, I could set my ads to be white on white.
I thought that seemed unnecessarily draconain.
It's my impression that the faster game players are better able to detect higher flicker rates. I searched through Science News archives and Google links but didn't find any articles regarding this.
Anybody heard of any real experiments along these lines? Maybe Air Force or NASA testing for pilots?
After all, the computer world has lots of oddities that might seem nonsensical to someone unfamiliar with the details or history of a particular technology.
I am seriously concerned, however, that it looks like the CIA will resume covert investigation within the US... something that has been banned for decades. GWBush's father, when he was CIA Director, prior to being President, resisted this ruling and always wanted to eliminate the restriction. It looks like his son may succeed.
As we become a more computerized and networked society, it seems likely that the once-obvious boundaries of our country will become more blurred. For example, the NSA has been evesdropping on US phone communication without warrants for years, even though they are not allowed to gather information about the US from within the US... just like the CIA. They have gotten around this limitation by using satellites that capture signals escaping into space; mostly microwave from repeater towers.
I have no conclusions or suggestions... just a little food for thought. The most dangerous threat for any democracy is the complacency of its citizens. I am really glad to see that slashdot and other similar tools are thriving. The most dangerous threat to any despot is free communication between the people.
You can make passive radio frequency, RF, tags with diode arrays. Semiconductor diodes fluoresce in RF when illuminated by microwaves. The fluorescence wavelength is determined by the energy band gap of the diode. Combinations of diodes with different energy gaps fluoresce in different combinations of radio frequencies.
There is a technique for making microscopic (tens to hundreds of nanometers) dust from the surface of a silicon wafer. I forget who invented it but it's years old... you use hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and ultrasound. I think Science News did a piece on it.
Here's the part I thought of:
A very diffuse cloud of this diode dust has interesting properties. You can illuminate it from one direction with a microwave beam and you can observe the cloud with a RF receiver. Now, any sound waves in the cloud cause the RF signal from the suspended diode particles to oscillate (Doppler effect)... it's straight frequency modulation.
You can hear everything within the cloud and only sounds passing through the cloud. You just have to demodulate the RF coming from the dust.
Spread the dust through a building and you can listen anywhere in the building by controlling the volume of overlap between the microwave emitter field and the RF receiver antenna field.
I don't have the money to do this but I'll bet any one $5 that it would work.
Tracking database
PDA, accessories, shipping ($500)
Regular personal contact, otherwise the system needs to be completely self-explanatory for the children. At best, the programming will be non-trivial... actually, it would be revolutionary
Continuous (?) wireless link
In 3 years? Whew! That's ambitious.
But, you can usually cut project time by increasing project fundingI've been pondering this for years. I've wired some buildings for ethernet and it seems like the damn physical layer keeps changing... fat coax with vampire taps replaced by thin coax replaced by a variety of twisted pair standards that have settled out into cat5. Fiber is the new, best thing but you know that just down the road will be some new hot multimodal fiber or some genius will figure out how to pump 64 colors of laser light into a fiber and you'll be stuck because it will require a different variety of fiber.
When I was a system admin at a company with a really cool Facilities & Operations manager, he would bring me blueprints for every structural change and ask me to mark where I wanted conduit. That made both of our lives *much* easier. He said he could drop galvanized steel conduit from the ceiling to a box with a blank faceplate for $10 (some years ago) and he'd rather put in extra conduit than to have to cut holes into a finished wall.
Smart guy.
My suggestion is that you see where you can run conduit. It's more work now but your cat5 will be incredibly well shielded. Then, if you decide later that you want to replace it with fiber, no problem.
Don't forget to leave a strong cord snaked through your conduit... particularly any unused conduit so you can more easily pull stuff later.
Hey Dipshit
AT&T never sent me any warnings.
I do have an email from them stating that they would call me on the phone if I would suffer an interruption in service.
You don't know what you're talking about.
AT&T tech support told me last night that all email sent to my @home account would be stored and then delivered to me once they are finished configuring their network and servers.
I just tried my email account and the messages are being bounced.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
They either have not given thought to the needs of their customers or they're incompetent.
Do they not realize that people need warning to change email accounts? I have one of my domains set up to use that darn email account as the authentication method for management.
I think it could easily be argued that AT&T failed to exercise due dilligence in protecting the interests of their customers. I think that their handling of this situation is, literally, criminally negligent. I'd love to see a class action suit filed against them for their careless handling of this.
If I have correctly understood the technique that SETI uses to recognize transmissions originating from technological civilizations, they are looking for recognizible patterns in electromagnetic (EM) 'signals' collected from deep space.
This may not be a good assumption. As you increase the efficiency of your communication system, the entropy of the transmission increases. Maximum efficiency has the maximum possible information density and therefore maximal entropy.
A transmission with maximal entropy is indistinguishable from random noise.
If one assumes that there is a short period (maybe a few centuries on average) between the time when a new civilization developes radio and the time when they have fine-tuned their EM communication to maximum efficiency, then the time window for detecting these communications will be too small to be useful for us.
Unless other species are actively trying to communicate with unknown species, it seems unlikely that there would be anything out there for us (SETI) to detect.
I don't see O.S.Card being read in 50 years. It's hard to know what current authors might retain popularity. I think Arthur C. Clark is a safe bet. The best hard science in the sf genre I've seen in years comes from Greg Egan. Every story has at least one brilliant insight or alternate interpretation of science.
This is right on track with Moore's Law.
Intel Promises a Cool Billion (Transistors)
"SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker,
said Monday it's developed new semiconductor packaging technology that will
allow for microprocessors boasting 1 billion transistors and running at 20
gigahertz in the next six years.
"Currently, Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessor -- the primary computing engine of
personal computers and servers -- has about 42 million transistors and runs at
two gigahertz."
Moore's Law:
Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would
double every 18 months.
Take the money and run! It's the patriotic, the American thing to do.
Assuming that the legal standards for prosecuting someone for sending encrypted email require the government to prove you have sent an encrypted message, there may be a trivial way to elude prosecution.
Argue that there is art in random data.
If we can successfully argue that we are sending random bits in our email as a form of artistic or religious expression, then there may be a (silly) way to bypass the (silly) laws.
Perfectly encrypted data, like perfectly compressed or perfectly random data has maximal entropy. Encrypted data looks random.
If someone claims you have sent an encrypted attachment to an email, claim that it's merely a file of random bits that you found to be particularly aesthetically or spiritually appealing.
They should be required to prove that it is not random data... which would require that they manage to decrypt it.
Regarding protecting the Linux community from known worms, virii, etc:
Might it be cost-effective for the Linux community to maintain a site which one could invoke to probe one's own system? Knowledgeable and conscientious (and trustworthy) Linux hackers could maintain an up-to-date array of automated exploits of known security problems.
This seems to me to be technically non-trivial but still quite possible.
The admin of any Linux system could invoke the system and then receive a report of the results... maybe the report could include suggested patches and system configuration changes.
"Like many of the Slashdot readers, I am a programmer and have been pushing out repetitive database content for about a year. The work simply doesn't stop and...."
You have options before quitting. I'm an old fart (42) and have fought many corporate battles (and even won maybe two). When you present the ultimatum that they either clean up their act or you're gone, they'll see you as an obstacle to making easy money.
If you want to persuade them, you'll need to show them with multiple sound arguments how they will make more $$ in the long run by not screwing their customers now.
If you're already thinking of leaving then you have little to lose. Set out a list of strategies to get them to change and identify each in terms of how much personal political capital you'll lose by attempting it. Then start with the ones with the lowest political cost and run the list. Just treat it as a hands-on college project in business administration.
Give up your own perspective. Your goal is to manipulate a small set (likely 3 to 5 people) of people and you can only do this by working through their motivations. It's safe to start by assuming that ego and greed are their primary motivators and then fill in your mental models of their personalities as you go along.
You'll need to give your project credibility so make a list of the changes you see that should obviously be made. Look hard for one or two 'low hanging fruit'. These will be one or two goals that you know, absolutely, you can succeed with in little time with little effort. Ideally, these will look good even if they are of little intrinsic value.
Every successful political power play is begun with a couple of flashy successes.
If, in the end, all fails... what the hell... you were going to quit anyway.
My suggestion is to try to fix the problems:
It's the ethical thing to do as an employee trying to look out for his/her company's best interests.
It's the ethical thing to do as a professional looking out for the customer's best interests.
It's logical for you to extract the greatest benefit from every professional circumstance before discarding it.
Good luck.