Let's see, one of the characteristics of life is the capablity for self-replication. Also note that the U.S. Patent Office has granted protection for DNA sequences for bioengineered organisms as intellectual property.
It would figure. Just when I'm considering quitting doing real work and going into management, this happens. It'll be bad enough trying to build an empire with a serf shortage, but competency makes it even tougher to rule with an iron fist!
My pointy hair is starting to hurt. I think I'll find someone to motivate before taking my afternoon nap.
The article assumes that computer users actually go outside on occasion. If the EPA simply subsidized bandwidth, we'd never bother. Subsidizing the video game industry to drive prices down would create more computer users. Eventually, everyone would just stay indoors all the time. Problem solved.
Of course, the human would quickly go extinct at that point (for obvious dating/hygine issues), but I just think of that as Mother Nature getting her turn at bat.
On the Swissair issue, I recall hearing some time back (maybe 6 mo. after the crash) that there was charring, etc. in the IFE system but that it looked old - it did not contribute to the crash. I've only skimmed the more recent reports (including your link), but they seem to say the same thing - the IFE installation was sloppy and thus put the plane at risk but did not cause the crash. I will read deeper, so apologies in advance if further reading shows me wrong.
As to the DC accessory jacks, they do involve ceritification and but they still concern me. Even with surge protection, circuit breakers, etc. it's inevitable that some guy's flakey laptop is going to cause an electrical fire someday. If it's confined to the laptop, all well and good (except for the guy's scorched privates and the associated frivilous lawsuit). But if it got into the aircraft's electical system (no need to get far - just under a seat, perhaps), the stakes skyrocket.
Of course, the root concern of all this is EMI from wireless devices. I still stand by my position that most consumer electronic devices are poorly shielded and bleed all over the spectrum, especially in a failure mode. It isn't even the "wireless" part of the equation that bothers me, really. It's all the other electronics (displays, etc.) that have all the bleed problems specifically because they aren't designed to put out a signal at a given frequency. DC power jacks are going to make EMI even worse because they encourage the use of more devices longer. The $64,000 question, of course, is still open: does that EMI have an impact on flight safety? And the fact is that nobody knows.
The company I work for makes in flight entertainment equipment - video projection equipment, in seat audio and video, etc. Even though our equipment serves no role in the safety of the aircraft (so called "Class D" equipment), the FAA makes all our boxes go through very rigorous testing for EMI, vibration, and flamability. Some of the testing can get pretty absurd: I once had to do a software load on a prototype so it could be signed off as being in a flight configuration before it was thrown into an incinerator to test for toxic gasses. All this elaborate testing also skyrockets our costs - a two year obsolete IFE video tape player is going to cost you five to ten times as much as an up to date commercial model.
In all our testing, the FAA took the view that it was not their responsibility to prove that something was unsafe - it's the manufacturer's responsibility to prove that their product isn't. This is the real reason airlines are so paraniod about cellphones, etc. Unless Nokia spends $500K+ per model to certify that there's absolutely no way the device can produce interference even in a failure mode (and provides every consumer with an embossed certificate to that effect), your flight attendant will be asking you politlely to shut the thing off.
There is, of course, always the possibility of a sea change. Perhaps the manufacturers will begin doing real testing of their devices for EMI, although that will increase costs (although much less than for IFE equipment because the volume would be higher). However, that would have to happen on every device manufactured anywhere and require the user to show some kind of certification to the airline. Perhaps the FAA will require even better shielding on critcal equipment, but that implies retrofitting every piece of equipment on every commercial aircraft in the world. Or maybe the FAA will simply come under political pressure to relax their safety requirements, but that will end the second a plane goes down for any non-obvious reason and a herd of lawyers appears screaming "I told you so!"
Unless there is a paradigm shift on one of these fronts (none of which are really palatable), you will see more and more restrictive policies on the use of consumer electronics in the cabin.
Until then? Simple. Leave your laptop powered off and read a book. Maybe you'll learn something...
PS - A pretty amusing cartoon appeared in the New Yorker peripherally related to this topic once. Check it out here.
Three quickies. The first two are a little specialized, but the third is pretty stand alone:
The kneejerk answer is the same one that was kicking around when I was in college in the 80's: efficiency. Obviously, anything you would even contemplate coding in assembly due to speed concerns should not use any unnecesary overhead. In fact, in highly optimized code even procedural programming is a mistake (although those situations are even rarer). As to how one would code OO in assembly, see below...
Inavailabity of tools: I have seen many embedded projects that use legacy compilers that do not support OO or have very poor OO support (i.e. pre ANSI C++). Often the tools can't be upgraded because they are no longer supported or it's just not in the budget. Under those circustances, some developers are tempted to kludge an OO looking design on top of a procedural structure - lots of function pointers hanging everywhere to simulate class methods, fields in structures identifying types to support run time polymorphism - all the things the compiler is supposed to do for you. You wind up with a design that's more complex, not less, because you have to implement the OO underpinnings as well as what you're trying to do in the first place.
There are, naturally, exceptions. UNIX pioneered drivers in C with general purpose routines referenced via pointers - basically a base class (stream or block driver) with subclasses having device specific code embedded in class methods. Taking it much further than that would be a horrible mess, though.
Finally, the biggest mistake in implementing an OO solution (IMHO) is when there is little reuse of components (aka: forcing an OO solution on a non-OO problem). I worked with an OO advocate who pushed a scheme of representing our entire system as objects: a status light would invoke a message method in a dumb router box which would invoke a method in our method in our platform to build the core message, wrap onion-esqe headers around a message structure and then shove the structure down into a driver. While it was really cool to be able to put "box1.router2.statuslight[22].blink();" in your code, the fact was that none of the boxes had anything in common. Every one had a different structure for messages and different timeout issues. As a result, nothing inherited from anything and none of the code ever got reused within the platform. Worse, there were no upgrade efforts on other platforms, so the stuff wouldn't get reused there either. Basically, the whole thing was just a bunch of procedures hanging off an object framework - we never got any advantages of OO but we still got all the headaches of implementing an OO design (i.e. objects all over the place, many of which were just shells to allow others to be invoked in certain ways and didn't contribute to functionality).
Jack Ganssle had a great metric in one of his seminars: Reuse of code is not cost effective until it has been used five times. You often see developers trying to do the right thing and make reusable libraries, etc. only to see the effort abandoned around the third iteration. That's because coding for the general case is often tough and requires a lot of testing that you'd never do if you were just coding up for a single project (ask anyone who's coded a driver or library that stays in house for use on a few projects and one that actually goes out to customers as a COTS solution). I believe OO is a lot like that: If it's a design you're going to conceievably be reusing five times, code that puppy as objects to give you a nice, clean interface. Otherwise, don't try it unless your design lends itself strongly to objects that can be reused within the scope of your current project.
In the words of Dennis Miller, though, I could be wrong...
Marvelous quote. It should be printed on a t-shirt and passed out to every software company...
Well, now that you've mentioned it, I have set up a little online store for those shirts and copyrighted the phrase. My VC's and I are still looking for a logo, though. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
Before that, though, you'll need to answer a little question: How would you move a manhole cover to Mount Fuji?
"Cult" is the operative word here. I've never had the opportunity (honor? misfortune?) to interview with Microsoft proper, but I've dealt with a handful of companies that used these techniques and almost all of them did it poorly. There was always a conceit of "Golly, I'm so clever - show me that you are." This, despite the fact that the lame puzzle was recognizably pulled from a brainteaser book instead of being homegrown.
Ask me about structure layout, how to optimize a function, when and where I've used OO inhereitance to enhance a design and when it's a horrible idea to use OO at all. Ask me how I'd deal with an abusive coworker or a boss with a substance abuse problem. Don't waste my time asking about manhole covers and pretending your company is like Microsoft. You're not. Get over it.
It's reminicent of what I call the Hemmingway Effect. Ask anyone who absolutely loathes Hemmingway's writing and they'll immediately rant about the imitators who ape the original but do a poor job of it. Remember a few years ago when every half assed film student thought he was the next Tarrentino? Even if the original is any good (and I'll leave that an open question with regards to the folks in Redmond), the imitators are enough to turn mild dislike into full fledged hatred.
Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft. The puzzle cult is yet another example of this.
To follow the Nebula race or pretty much anything about the SF or Fantasy trade, you just can't beat
LocusMag, the online version of Locus. Some reviews (the print version is known for the most exhaustive reviews of SF - anything printed anywhere gets at least a mention), but the big emphasis is on fandom, awards
(not just the Hugos & Nebulas), opening and closing of new markets, and ongoing trends (check out
this piece on how SARS, war, and economic changes are turning our world into one that SF readers will find familiar).
It also has a
disturbingly complete necrology of recently deceased members of the SF community. It seems like every other headline is "So & so dies," but that's to be expected with all the graying pulp era artists, writers, and fans.
the market share for winCE is, in fact, dropping like a stone
I've got Windows CE on my resume and I'm getting 3-5 unsolicited calls/EMAILs weekly for headhunters looking for CE guys. We work with a CE house that is buried. I won't say CE's market share will overcome VxWorks anytime soon, but for anything with a GUI display or that's web enabled, it's a very valid choice.
WinCE was 50 bucks, which is a lot of money in an embedded product.
First, I'd need to verify with our contract guys to be sure, but I believe we're paying more on the order of $10/licence. $50 sounds a lot more like embedded XP to me (which we're using in other products). Also, we're running an x86 with no BIOS, so BIOS royalties go away. In anycase, while recurring cost is a big issue, for lower volume products (say under 100K) the savings in initial software development costs (our biggest item here) recoups.
Now, before you say "Low volume, what a cop out!" I need to point out that there's an enormous amount of embedded development out there that meet this critera. Go to a trade show and you'll find at least half of the atendees are not building VCRs or PDAs but niche products - medication inventory trackers embedded within pharmacy carts, portable diagnostic equipment for high voltage power lines, or (in my case) in flight entertainment systems. You won't find any of these things at your local Best Buy, but there's more than enough demand for them to support these lower volumes. I agree that this was not MS'es initial goal, and it makes me wonder if they'll ever turn their back on CE because of that, but for the moment CE looks quite healthy to me.
(Caveat - the below post may be mildly off topic because it is more about criminal investigation than general snooping that the FA addresses. While I'm still concerned about my private info getting collected long before a court is involved, I still need to ask a question. Moderate as you see fit).
O.K. I'm about to do something that's foolhearty at best, something I curse when I see others doing it. I'm going to ask for a legal opinion on/.
Specifically, doesn't any evidence handed over to a court have to meet the same standards for it's collection before being used in legal procedings? Wouldn't this apply whether collected directly by a police officer (i.e. physical evidence at a crime scene), forwarded under subpoena (cops show up at my ISP with a warrant), or volunteered by a private citizen (my soon to be ex-wife's private investigator handing over a videotape to a judge)? Why would private citizens under contract to the authorities be any different: either they're deputized (and thus actually police officers and subject to the same rules) or they're just private citizens (who can't use subpoenas, warrants, etc. like cops can).
Let's see if I have this straight:
1) Leaders for open source projects are elected.
2) The election is held electronically.
3) The server recieving and tallying those votes is running open source software.
4) Thus, the firewalls, auditing utilies, and other security measures on that server are possibly written by the very same people who are doing the voting or perhaps even the candidates themselves.
With that in mind, can we really be sure Michlmayr received all those votes or is he just really good at coding back doors?
</tongue firmly planted in cheek>
(In all seriousness, though, congrats to Martin and all the other candidates. You've got a lot more courage than I, taking on a task that big. Best of luck!)
Kinky sex? 'Fraid my mind wasn't there. I was actually thinking about an old Three Stooges episode where they invent a fountain pen that can write while submerged in whipped cream. I think script had thme make a fortune as a result.
I would normally take some time to chastise you on the fact that you assosciated whipped cream & kinky sex, but you caught the EMP bit and, on reflection, if you're fooling around with some guy's wife and whipped cream is involved, you dang well better be armed for your own protection. (*GRIN*)
Thanks for the response and, yes, I did read it (I'm a fan of/. messages). I particularly like your final points. While I'd been thinking primarilly about reliability in terms of traditional environmental factors (temp, humidity, dirt) I hadn't even contemplated EMP. An excelent catch.
(I also wonder if EMP might conceivably be an issue with non military users - I can imagine a Larry Niven style story about a gang of bank robbers with an EMP generator in a briefcase. Very unlikely, but still enough to make a police chief wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat).
As you imply, though, it's going to have to offer benefits of some sort (weight? cost? ability to shoot when submerged in a vat of whipped cream? - whatever) well beyond anything that of traditional automatic/semiautomatic designs before companies are going to sink the years of development into matching relaibility. And note that I said "companies" - plural. Unless the market is big enough to support competing firms, you won't see big strides in design (nothing feeds inovation like a competitor breathing down your neck).
Maybe the new paradigm will catch on. But I'd have to see a lot stronger case for the benefits before I sank any of my money into a firm working on it.
The Atlantic had a fantastic piece called "Tales of the Tyrant" about Sadaam Hussein's daily routine, his background, and his motivation. It dispels a lot of the myths about him, but leaves a chilling impression about what he's really like.
A long read, but well worth it if you can spare the time. And, heck, it's Friday. You're not going to get any work done anyway.
I'd been expecting this all along, after all the heat CNN took for their coverage of the first Gulf War in Kuwait City. Specifically, they were criticized because the Iraqis could use the video feeds to traget their Scuds (i.e. see that it landed X short of such & such landmark). No surprise that the Iraqis learned that lesson themselves now that Baghdad's the target.
Reading the story, though, that doesn't appear to be the motivation for this latest move (the invasion is a "fabrication"? Give me a break!). Also, the coalition has enough intelligence to not need CNN pictures for targeting purposes. Still, I'm kinda surprised that they chose to let CNN stay in the first place, even if they had expected to feed them their own propoganda.
First, in rereadng, I realize the part of he post you point out was a gross exageration. My apologies. I should have clarified it along the lines of "...complex machines which through innovation and very high cost of resources and lives have been simplified and become reliable."
Another poster made a remark similar to yours about the AK-47. And I agree with you both while still standing by my original (well, clarified) comment. As I said in the other response, the amount of "design evolution" (as I call it) to fine tune your HK until it is as reliable as it is was substantial. Innovation after innovation, tweek after tweek. Over years this evolved into a design that is very reliable. For this reason I would argue that if you gave a gun designer in 1920 all our modern technology and asked him to come up with something like your HK he would produce an unreliable monstronsity. It is only those years of tweeking that current designs come into their own.
(Clipping from my other post...) In the case of this new gun, though, it will need to show promise from the earliest designs that it can outperform established designs in some sustantial manner or it will never catch on. After all, with 400+ years of conventional firearm technology, you need to give ample evidence before a soldier or policeman will gamble his life on innovation.
P.S. Thank you for replying! I really like getting thoughtful criticism.
You actually hit the nail on the head - the genius of the AK-47 is its reliability and ease of prodction. As I understand it (and I am far from a firearm expert, so apologies in advance if I'm wrong), previous machine guns were touchy and many designs to this day are just as bad. The AK-47 was the exception when it was invented and you could probably argue that most reliable designs to this day owe a lot to the -47, if only for their design philosophy if not actual parts of the design.
The point I was trying to make was that the amount of "design evolution" (to coin a term) that it took to get to the AK-47 was considerable. For that matter, the amount of work it took to get from Renisance bronze cannons to artillery in Napoleon's era that were slightly less likely to kill the crew than the enemy was also considerable. In both cases, the rewards were substantial and inovators were willing to take the risks.
In the case of this new gun, though, it will need to show promise from the earliest designs that it can outperform established designs in some sustantial manner or it will never catch on. After all, with 400+ years of conventional firearm technology, you need to give ample evidence before a soldier or policeman will gamble his life on innovation.
The machine sounds nightmarishly complex to me (although, in the design's defense, any semiautomatic weapon is a touchy, sickeningly complex machine - an internal combustion engine that uses ammunition as fuel [well, almost - that description is only completely true for full automatics]). If they find a market for this where it it proves to be superior to conventional designs, it'll still take years to hammer out the bugs. No surprise - the history of firearms is littered with the bodies of soldiers and policemen whose guns jammed or blew up at inopportune times.
If this gets fielded, I suspect we'll be seeing it crop up in the RISKS Newsletter more than once.
So what if they invented writing? Every culture has its contributions to world history and culture. What of Aztec culture when the Conquistadores (sic) conquered? Or the German Medieval sites that were wiped out by stray WWII bombs when the Allies bombed the Nazis? For that matter, what of the loss of a McDonalds in Moscow by a Chechen bomber? Is any of that bloodshed any less or more tragic because of the assosciated loss to world culture?
To argue that a war should or should not be fought based on possible damage to historic artifacts is foolish. While such damage is a tragedy, it is nothing to the loss of human life. Personally, I'd be more concerned about the life of the night watchman at an archeological site than all the artifacts buried there.
You can argue whether war with Iraq is justified, whether it will (or will not) in the long run save more lives than it will take. You can argue about the U.S. motives for the war or any of a thousand other things, but the decision to go to war or not should have nothing to do with a people's historic contributions or lack thereof.
While the preservation of artifacts should enter the discussion about how to prosecute a war (i.e. don't intentionally shell that museum), it is today's people that should be the concern - Iraqis, their neighbors, and the rest of the world community.
Everything else - ancient batteries or modern oilfields - they're just things.
capabilities for invention, either done by machine or augmented by them, will surpass what can be done by humans without them
I know the discussion is specifically about augmenting intellectual efforts, but when taken in a broader context the concept you put forward actually describes the entire process of invention itself. The classic example is that it is impossible to smelt iron without techniques and tools developed for bronzeworking, but it hardly began or ends there. Anyone who's played Sid Meyers' Civilization or watched Burke's Connections on PBS knows how interwoven the fabric of invention is (imagine trying to manufacture vacuum tubes without assembly lines or refined metals or algebra). The fact that we're simply leveraging these gizmos called "computers" for that aim is just another step in the process.
As to keeping up with technology and using it wisely, I'm sure that every bronzeworker in Rome was scared spitless the first time they saw what an iron blade could do. They adapted, though, and so will we. You can argue if using those iron blades to spill so much blood was a wise use of the technology, but the Roman Empire also brought us stuff like sanitation and roads. All blessings are part curse and all curses are part blessing.
Again - This is not a slam against your comments. I liked your post. This is just a random observation while my PC is busy compiling...
...if only certain other booksellers would show that same conscience...
<redundant rant>
A business in this era of consolidation purging it's records, thus disabling itself from selling you more crap in the future via Spam or (at a minimum) junk mail? The only way that would work is if they were only in the business of selling books. That isn't going to happen as long as they can afford a consultant who can whisper fairy tales about that mythic beast "synergy" in the CEO's ear.
Face it. Most businesses these days are not what they claim to be on their signs - booksellers, grocers, bakers. They're many businesses lumped together under one roof that are just as comfortable selling you your morning coffe or a cemetary plot. Thanks to consolidation, only multiheaded hydras survive. And sometimes, the customers suffer instead of benefiting.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. Replication... intellectual property... replication... intellectual property...
Juristictional issues notwithstanding, how long do you think it'd be before the RIAA puts a stop to this?
My pointy hair is starting to hurt. I think I'll find someone to motivate before taking my afternoon nap.
Well, I just blew a mod point - had meant to MOD it "underrated" but clicked wrong. Fortunately, this reply will delete the mod. Apologies...
</kicks self for typos making lame joke even lamer>
Of course, the human would quickly go extinct at that point (for obvious dating/hygine issues), but I just think of that as Mother Nature getting her turn at bat.
As to the DC accessory jacks, they do involve ceritification and but they still concern me. Even with surge protection, circuit breakers, etc. it's inevitable that some guy's flakey laptop is going to cause an electrical fire someday. If it's confined to the laptop, all well and good (except for the guy's scorched privates and the associated frivilous lawsuit). But if it got into the aircraft's electical system (no need to get far - just under a seat, perhaps), the stakes skyrocket.
Of course, the root concern of all this is EMI from wireless devices. I still stand by my position that most consumer electronic devices are poorly shielded and bleed all over the spectrum, especially in a failure mode. It isn't even the "wireless" part of the equation that bothers me, really. It's all the other electronics (displays, etc.) that have all the bleed problems specifically because they aren't designed to put out a signal at a given frequency. DC power jacks are going to make EMI even worse because they encourage the use of more devices longer. The $64,000 question, of course, is still open: does that EMI have an impact on flight safety? And the fact is that nobody knows.
In all our testing, the FAA took the view that it was not their responsibility to prove that something was unsafe - it's the manufacturer's responsibility to prove that their product isn't. This is the real reason airlines are so paraniod about cellphones, etc. Unless Nokia spends $500K+ per model to certify that there's absolutely no way the device can produce interference even in a failure mode (and provides every consumer with an embossed certificate to that effect), your flight attendant will be asking you politlely to shut the thing off.
There is, of course, always the possibility of a sea change. Perhaps the manufacturers will begin doing real testing of their devices for EMI, although that will increase costs (although much less than for IFE equipment because the volume would be higher). However, that would have to happen on every device manufactured anywhere and require the user to show some kind of certification to the airline. Perhaps the FAA will require even better shielding on critcal equipment, but that implies retrofitting every piece of equipment on every commercial aircraft in the world. Or maybe the FAA will simply come under political pressure to relax their safety requirements, but that will end the second a plane goes down for any non-obvious reason and a herd of lawyers appears screaming "I told you so!"
Unless there is a paradigm shift on one of these fronts (none of which are really palatable), you will see more and more restrictive policies on the use of consumer electronics in the cabin.
Until then? Simple. Leave your laptop powered off and read a book. Maybe you'll learn something...
PS - A pretty amusing cartoon appeared in the New Yorker peripherally related to this topic once. Check it out here.
There are, naturally, exceptions. UNIX pioneered drivers in C with general purpose routines referenced via pointers - basically a base class (stream or block driver) with subclasses having device specific code embedded in class methods. Taking it much further than that would be a horrible mess, though.
Jack Ganssle had a great metric in one of his seminars: Reuse of code is not cost effective until it has been used five times. You often see developers trying to do the right thing and make reusable libraries, etc. only to see the effort abandoned around the third iteration. That's because coding for the general case is often tough and requires a lot of testing that you'd never do if you were just coding up for a single project (ask anyone who's coded a driver or library that stays in house for use on a few projects and one that actually goes out to customers as a COTS solution). I believe OO is a lot like that: If it's a design you're going to conceievably be reusing five times, code that puppy as objects to give you a nice, clean interface. Otherwise, don't try it unless your design lends itself strongly to objects that can be reused within the scope of your current project.
In the words of Dennis Miller, though, I could be wrong...
Well, now that you've mentioned it, I have set up a little online store for those shirts and copyrighted the phrase. My VC's and I are still looking for a logo, though. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
Before that, though, you'll need to answer a little question: How would you move a manhole cover to Mount Fuji?
</tongue in cheek>
Ask me about structure layout, how to optimize a function, when and where I've used OO inhereitance to enhance a design and when it's a horrible idea to use OO at all. Ask me how I'd deal with an abusive coworker or a boss with a substance abuse problem. Don't waste my time asking about manhole covers and pretending your company is like Microsoft. You're not. Get over it.
It's reminicent of what I call the Hemmingway Effect. Ask anyone who absolutely loathes Hemmingway's writing and they'll immediately rant about the imitators who ape the original but do a poor job of it. Remember a few years ago when every half assed film student thought he was the next Tarrentino? Even if the original is any good (and I'll leave that an open question with regards to the folks in Redmond), the imitators are enough to turn mild dislike into full fledged hatred.
Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft. The puzzle cult is yet another example of this.
It also has a disturbingly complete necrology of recently deceased members of the SF community. It seems like every other headline is "So & so dies," but that's to be expected with all the graying pulp era artists, writers, and fans.
I've got Windows CE on my resume and I'm getting 3-5 unsolicited calls/EMAILs weekly for headhunters looking for CE guys. We work with a CE house that is buried. I won't say CE's market share will overcome VxWorks anytime soon, but for anything with a GUI display or that's web enabled, it's a very valid choice.
WinCE was 50 bucks, which is a lot of money in an embedded product.
First, I'd need to verify with our contract guys to be sure, but I believe we're paying more on the order of $10/licence. $50 sounds a lot more like embedded XP to me (which we're using in other products). Also, we're running an x86 with no BIOS, so BIOS royalties go away. In anycase, while recurring cost is a big issue, for lower volume products (say under 100K) the savings in initial software development costs (our biggest item here) recoups.
Now, before you say "Low volume, what a cop out!" I need to point out that there's an enormous amount of embedded development out there that meet this critera. Go to a trade show and you'll find at least half of the atendees are not building VCRs or PDAs but niche products - medication inventory trackers embedded within pharmacy carts, portable diagnostic equipment for high voltage power lines, or (in my case) in flight entertainment systems. You won't find any of these things at your local Best Buy, but there's more than enough demand for them to support these lower volumes. I agree that this was not MS'es initial goal, and it makes me wonder if they'll ever turn their back on CE because of that, but for the moment CE looks quite healthy to me.
O.K. I'm about to do something that's foolhearty at best, something I curse when I see others doing it. I'm going to ask for a legal opinion on /.
Specifically, doesn't any evidence handed over to a court have to meet the same standards for it's collection before being used in legal procedings? Wouldn't this apply whether collected directly by a police officer (i.e. physical evidence at a crime scene), forwarded under subpoena (cops show up at my ISP with a warrant), or volunteered by a private citizen (my soon to be ex-wife's private investigator handing over a videotape to a judge)? Why would private citizens under contract to the authorities be any different: either they're deputized (and thus actually police officers and subject to the same rules) or they're just private citizens (who can't use subpoenas, warrants, etc. like cops can).
Just wondering.
Let's see if I have this straight:
1) Leaders for open source projects are elected.
2) The election is held electronically.
3) The server recieving and tallying those votes is running open source software.
4) Thus, the firewalls, auditing utilies, and other security measures on that server are possibly written by the very same people who are doing the voting or perhaps even the candidates themselves.
With that in mind, can we really be sure Michlmayr received all those votes or is he just really good at coding back doors?
</tongue firmly planted in cheek>
(In all seriousness, though, congrats to Martin and all the other candidates. You've got a lot more courage than I, taking on a task that big. Best of luck!)
Kinky sex? 'Fraid my mind wasn't there. I was actually thinking about an old Three Stooges episode where they invent a fountain pen that can write while submerged in whipped cream. I think script had thme make a fortune as a result.
I would normally take some time to chastise you on the fact that you assosciated whipped cream & kinky sex, but you caught the EMP bit and, on reflection, if you're fooling around with some guy's wife and whipped cream is involved, you dang well better be armed for your own protection. (*GRIN*)
(I also wonder if EMP might conceivably be an issue with non military users - I can imagine a Larry Niven style story about a gang of bank robbers with an EMP generator in a briefcase. Very unlikely, but still enough to make a police chief wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat).
As you imply, though, it's going to have to offer benefits of some sort (weight? cost? ability to shoot when submerged in a vat of whipped cream? - whatever) well beyond anything that of traditional automatic/semiautomatic designs before companies are going to sink the years of development into matching relaibility. And note that I said "companies" - plural. Unless the market is big enough to support competing firms, you won't see big strides in design (nothing feeds inovation like a competitor breathing down your neck).
Maybe the new paradigm will catch on. But I'd have to see a lot stronger case for the benefits before I sank any of my money into a firm working on it.
No. No. I just can't do it. I thought I couldn't stoop any lower and here I am still trying.
Mod me down. I know better but can't stop myself.
A long read, but well worth it if you can spare the time. And, heck, it's Friday. You're not going to get any work done anyway.
Reading the story, though, that doesn't appear to be the motivation for this latest move (the invasion is a "fabrication"? Give me a break!). Also, the coalition has enough intelligence to not need CNN pictures for targeting purposes. Still, I'm kinda surprised that they chose to let CNN stay in the first place, even if they had expected to feed them their own propoganda.
Another poster made a remark similar to yours about the AK-47. And I agree with you both while still standing by my original (well, clarified) comment. As I said in the other response, the amount of "design evolution" (as I call it) to fine tune your HK until it is as reliable as it is was substantial. Innovation after innovation, tweek after tweek. Over years this evolved into a design that is very reliable. For this reason I would argue that if you gave a gun designer in 1920 all our modern technology and asked him to come up with something like your HK he would produce an unreliable monstronsity. It is only those years of tweeking that current designs come into their own.
(Clipping from my other post...) In the case of this new gun, though, it will need to show promise from the earliest designs that it can outperform established designs in some sustantial manner or it will never catch on. After all, with 400+ years of conventional firearm technology, you need to give ample evidence before a soldier or policeman will gamble his life on innovation.
P.S. Thank you for replying! I really like getting thoughtful criticism.
You actually hit the nail on the head - the genius of the AK-47 is its reliability and ease of prodction. As I understand it (and I am far from a firearm expert, so apologies in advance if I'm wrong), previous machine guns were touchy and many designs to this day are just as bad. The AK-47 was the exception when it was invented and you could probably argue that most reliable designs to this day owe a lot to the -47, if only for their design philosophy if not actual parts of the design.
The point I was trying to make was that the amount of "design evolution" (to coin a term) that it took to get to the AK-47 was considerable. For that matter, the amount of work it took to get from Renisance bronze cannons to artillery in Napoleon's era that were slightly less likely to kill the crew than the enemy was also considerable. In both cases, the rewards were substantial and inovators were willing to take the risks.
In the case of this new gun, though, it will need to show promise from the earliest designs that it can outperform established designs in some sustantial manner or it will never catch on. After all, with 400+ years of conventional firearm technology, you need to give ample evidence before a soldier or policeman will gamble his life on innovation.
If this gets fielded, I suspect we'll be seeing it crop up in the RISKS Newsletter more than once.
To argue that a war should or should not be fought based on possible damage to historic artifacts is foolish. While such damage is a tragedy, it is nothing to the loss of human life. Personally, I'd be more concerned about the life of the night watchman at an archeological site than all the artifacts buried there.
You can argue whether war with Iraq is justified, whether it will (or will not) in the long run save more lives than it will take. You can argue about the U.S. motives for the war or any of a thousand other things, but the decision to go to war or not should have nothing to do with a people's historic contributions or lack thereof. While the preservation of artifacts should enter the discussion about how to prosecute a war (i.e. don't intentionally shell that museum), it is today's people that should be the concern - Iraqis, their neighbors, and the rest of the world community.
Everything else - ancient batteries or modern oilfields - they're just things.
I know the discussion is specifically about augmenting intellectual efforts, but when taken in a broader context the concept you put forward actually describes the entire process of invention itself. The classic example is that it is impossible to smelt iron without techniques and tools developed for bronzeworking, but it hardly began or ends there. Anyone who's played Sid Meyers' Civilization or watched Burke's Connections on PBS knows how interwoven the fabric of invention is (imagine trying to manufacture vacuum tubes without assembly lines or refined metals or algebra). The fact that we're simply leveraging these gizmos called "computers" for that aim is just another step in the process.
As to keeping up with technology and using it wisely, I'm sure that every bronzeworker in Rome was scared spitless the first time they saw what an iron blade could do. They adapted, though, and so will we. You can argue if using those iron blades to spill so much blood was a wise use of the technology, but the Roman Empire also brought us stuff like sanitation and roads. All blessings are part curse and all curses are part blessing.
Again - This is not a slam against your comments. I liked your post. This is just a random observation while my PC is busy compiling...
A business in this era of consolidation purging it's records, thus disabling itself from selling you more crap in the future via Spam or (at a minimum) junk mail? The only way that would work is if they were only in the business of selling books. That isn't going to happen as long as they can afford a consultant who can whisper fairy tales about that mythic beast "synergy" in the CEO's ear.
Face it. Most businesses these days are not what they claim to be on their signs - booksellers, grocers, bakers. They're many businesses lumped together under one roof that are just as comfortable selling you your morning coffe or a cemetary plot. Thanks to consolidation, only multiheaded hydras survive. And sometimes, the customers suffer instead of benefiting.