Passport was doomed to fail, not because you or I disliked it but for a much more simple reason.
The MS idea was that all transactions would be arbitrated via Passport, thus of course they would have the ability to charge a commision. The end game here is of course that online transactions would therefore all result in payment to MS, with MS having the ability to offer lower cost online credit than Amex, Visa et al.
It was amazing in its presumption, it was in fact the biggest ever salami scam attempt. Liberty works differently by giving control to the individual, this is great for Amex et al as the identification piece will be their credit-cards (notice the smart chip already on Amex Blue?) which make them even more useful.
This was big business v MS, and MS lost when faced with all of the banks, consumer giants like Sony, and underneath it all a simple technology stack based on....
Liberty is explicitly about de-centralised control, you have the id, possibly a "smart-card" credit card. It does the identification then passes credentials to others to allow you access.
Ummm and the ones produced next week will be the same, and every run was checked. They didn't find any exceptions to their theory, but again this doesn't meant that there are none. Have Handspring confirmed that FlashROM is standard... nope.
And in terms of butt ugly, sure it beats Palm but does it beat... http://www.symbian.com/news/2002/soneric-p800-2.ht ml or http://www.symbian.com/news/2001/nokia7650-feat.ht ml ?
This isn't _standard_ on all of the Treo's and is only used in certain manufacturing runs, so some of the things tried here could fail, or screw up the system you have. So in the specs they don't mention it as the use of FlashROM was down to a costing decision on a paticular run (maybe they bought in bulk to support other products, or had left over elements that could be incorporated).
This is like assuming that just because one PC has a paticular motherboard with paticular tweeks that every PC has that.
The number plate is "owned" by the DVLA, while you can buy it and have "ownership" at the end of the day the DVLA can revoke it so it ceases to become valid, and travelling with an invalid number is illegal.
In lots of other cities in the UK, issue with London is that there are people so stupid that they will still insist on driving their cars in rather than mixing with the "masses" on public transport.
Personally I look on this as a tax on the rich who refuse to ride on public transport. Now if they only had decent cycle lanes for bikes and bladers I'd miss out on the tube section of my journey.
As a reference for our US cousins, it takes in rush hour around 20 mins to go from the 'burbs into the centre if you take the tube, it takes around an hour if you drive.
This sounds nice but would result in your car being illegal and therefore subject to a fine much greater than the £5 you are trying to avoid.
A simpler answer in a city which has the oldest underground system would be... to use public transport. As someone who uses it every day it amazes me that people don't go totally postal waiting in queues all the time in their cars.
Example: Saturday night going from St. James' to Charing Cross, we got out of the cab at the end of the Mall (which is not pronounced Maul) and walked the rest as it would have taken three times as long in the cab.
London is not a city designed for cars, and personally I'm all in favour of scaming the stupid who insist on driving.
Outmoded business model ?.COM had a simple business model
a) Get a VP to give you x million dollars
b) Spend x million dollars with a view to breaking even in 4 years (normal.com time scales)
c) After spending x million in 1 year ask VP for y million to cover you for the next 3 years
d) Spend y million, or float and get y+z million
e) NEVER EVER MAKE A PROFIT
f) Go Bust
This is nothing about "new" and "old" business models, its about "bollocks" and "business".
In the 1980s and 90s Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison demonstrated that someone could become number 1 by being smart and having a business that MADE A PROFIT. During the.com boom people like Sun, IBM et al made a fortune out of the "new" economy, Gates, Jobs and Ellison made even more.
A small guy can set up a business and become number 1, especially in the tech sector, but at the end of the day profitable businesses are what stay in business..com was about mystical ideas of "future" sales, where your mother would buy everything over the internet but NOT AT THE SAME SHOPS THAT HAVE GIVEN HER GREAT SERVICE FOR 20 YEARS.
Do you go back to the same shop often ? Does their service mean you would go to them in another State ? The same principle applies, but.com muppets won't admit that its true.
Strange isn't it how all those old farts stuck out at those old companies, the IBM's, the GE's, Lockheed et al. And the "bright" young things disappear for 2 years....
2 years later the "bright" young things come back to the office that is still there, still profitable and still delivering.
And the "bright" young thing doesn't see that maybe its actually a hard job to deliver decent software and that experience counts, and talent counts more. And most of all doesn't think
"All of these guys here could have worked for a.com with their experience..... but they didn't"
The art of these guys is seeing a fuck-up happening and getting the hell away from it. Whereas the "bright" young things believed in a new economy that would replace everything that went before and that the whole world order would fall and eToys would beat Toys R Us, where "TedsOfficeSupplies.com" would beat Staples and of course where Abercrombie and Gap would be destroyed by Boo.com.
In terms of who is bright, I don't think the lightbulbs are with the young.
At what stage will these advances in data storage become pointless. Getting a HD that can store 100Gb is possible today. These advances mean that today we can store 14 or so DVD movies on a single drive, in future, and we are only talking 10 years here. You will be able to store "Blockbusters" entire collection on your hard-drive.
So there must come a point where financially there is no reason to buy a bigger drive because consumers cannot use it up.
Now big business and the military will always be able to use it up. As will scientists and universities. But for the consumer this is talking about the day where your MP3 player stores millions of albums and is the size of a credit card... question is "how will you plug in the headphones"
One person can use binoculars, a whole organisation can use a networked camera. And record for ever what you have done even if it wasn't at all suspicious.
The "camera" is an Electro-magnetic sensor so it can see what you are typing, and can read the email that you are reading on your screen.
Not wanting badly regulated security agencies spying on you is not a case of doing some thing wrong, its a case that these agencies have a history of "bending" or breaking the laws themselves to justify their budget or opinions.
Sad to say that goverment is not of the people, by the people, for the people anymore. "interests" are at work and normal people are refered to as "collatoral damage".
Lets face it the resolution on sats up in space and the number of CCTV cameras around means that the scope of privacy is getting smaller and smaller. Security systems inside your home with video cameras connected to a central hub ? No problems if you want it.
You are being watched most of the day by cameras, and connect this up to a fundamentally flawed idea like facial recognition to find terrorists and you have a wonderful vision of hell.
The reality was that it was doing this every night as it had something going with a cute Ford Focus, it just decided to risk it in the day and got caught. Exactly the same as any teenager, just with more lubricants.
Is good speakers. You can't have one without the other. So what if your Sound Card is 100% buzzword compliant with 128bit 9GHz output, if your 2 cents piezo buzzer is connected to it the its a waste of space. Equally if you are playing Quake 3 and just want surround sound then there isn't much point in the card without the speakers in the right places.
For most people a basic card will, shock horror, do everything they want these days when allied to a decent set of speakers. So much of this is upgrade hype driven rather than actually reality. I've had a creative 5:1 set up for a few years now and why should I upgrade ? I listen to music mostly on the train and at work from my laptop on headphones so what would it get me. And what extra would I _really_ get for a 3D game ? Rather than marketing hype.
Get good speakers, get an okay sound card and buy lots of RAM.
If you want a top of the range sound system, buy seperates don't buy a PC.
The point of "no silver bullet" and "still no silver bullet" and indeed the awesomely brilliant Mythical Man Month is that no one thing will ever be the silver bullet and that the most important thing are the people. Doing one of these things won't help but doing all of them certainly will. Peer review doesn't replace compilers though, its about bugs not semantic and syntactic errors.
Fred Brooks was and is right, but that doesn't mean the processes of good software engineering are wrong, just that its a combination that will deliver success with smart people.
the best way to deflect it would be hiding your identity
Put simply you cannot hide identity and be a trusted partner in a transaction. And the cost of setting up "trust" mechanisms should be understated, I can generate my own CA and own X509s from openssl. How will you know what CA to trust ? Commerical ones cost money.
The European standards body that does this stuff has its results here and one to note is the abysmal results on this MPV. I quote The Voyager did so badly in the frontal impact that it earned no points, making it the worst of the group by some margin. The body structure became unstable and the steering column was driven back into the driver's chest and head.
So while there may be concerns about these cars if all cars had to get decent scores in these tests that it would ensure that everyone was safe. As it is the gap between the worst and the best is enough to make the fuel inside it only one of the considerations in safety.
Why not Symbian, QNX/a> or any of these ? This unhealthy obsession of "one size fits all" that abounds in the Linux world is exactly the sort of thing that people on Slashdot complain about the Microsoft world. You can't shoehorn these things without getting a poorer product as a result.
Wouldn't it be a better open source project if someone did what Linus did when he wanted to build an Open Source Unix and do the same for a proper RTOS ? By viewing Linux as the "only" solution it turns into the old "everything is a nail if you only have a hammer" discussion.
News for Nerds would be detailing what is happening in the RTOS and embedded world, rather than just being "News about Linux" to the detriment of better technologies. I know it sounds like a rant, but people like Wind River really do know what they are doing, this isn't a crappy Microsoft driven arena, this is where people really do know their shit, and the customer will not accept failure as part of the package.
While everyone will shout and scream "I don't want AT&T to maintain my cable modem", but when the line gets dropped and AT&T need to diagnose the problem they will apply the first rule of problem resolution
"The user is a moron, the fault is at their end"
This involves them doing the standard, is your modem turned on, is it working, is the green light flashing.... you don't have a green light, oh its your own modem, so how do you tell if thats working ?
So it does cost them money in terms of call and tech support. They have to have special call centre scripts, new diagnosis procedures etc etc.
And your cable modem might have a bug which buggers their network.
How old is the PS1, very old, and its still selling if you can be the last man standing in this game then you can start doing things like
Selling it to Car manufacturers to entertain kids (they've done that)
Try and replace the SNES on those lucrative airline contracts.
And many more, PS1 is still selling pretty well out there, and there are still Games, Moore's law says the power increases... not the quality. While the graphics get better, and sometimes the playing gets better but... well Tomb Raider II is still cool to play.
Last man standing in the current war will get to own even more than the PS1 is currently looking at.
This is in the interface, rather than an implementation, and you won't get the code to the impl, so what does it do ?
/**
* Get the Bug description for the given Id
* @pre id must be > 0 and less than BugList.lastId(), the highest bug number
* @post The return must not be null
* @invariant does not change the number of bugs
*/
Well that is the comment block, not all of it because there is some OCL in there, but I thought I'd leave something for Google. The point is that the description describes exactly what the method does, it also says what the caller must do or face the consequences, and what the caller can rely upon when the method returns.
And for any one who says comments aren't required if you write the code well enough... you are a muppet. Interaction via interfaces is a basic tennent of coding,.h files anyone ? You shouldn't have to look at the code.
Slashdot Mirror
Passport was doomed to fail, not because you or I disliked it but for a much more simple reason.
The MS idea was that all transactions would be arbitrated via Passport, thus of course they would have the ability to charge a commision. The end game here is of course that online transactions would therefore all result in payment to MS, with MS having the ability to offer lower cost online credit than Amex, Visa et al.
It was amazing in its presumption, it was in fact the biggest ever salami scam attempt. Liberty works differently by giving control to the individual, this is great for Amex et al as the identification piece will be their credit-cards (notice the smart chip already on Amex Blue?) which make them even more useful.
This was big business v MS, and MS lost when faced with all of the banks, consumer giants like Sony, and underneath it all a simple technology stack based on....
Java
Liberty is explicitly about de-centralised control, you have the id, possibly a "smart-card" credit card. It does the identification then passes credentials to others to allow you access.
Very nice, very sweet, very personal.
Ummm and the ones produced next week will be the same, and every run was checked. They didn't find any exceptions to their theory, but again this doesn't meant that there are none. Have Handspring confirmed that FlashROM is standard... nope.
t ml or http://www.symbian.com/news/2001/nokia7650-feat.ht ml ?
And in terms of butt ugly, sure it beats Palm but does it beat... http://www.symbian.com/news/2002/soneric-p800-2.h
Look at the area that London covers, look at the area that Boston covers... look at the difference in population density then ask yourself this...
HOW THE HELL COULD STREET PLANNERS WHO BUILT THE STREETS OVER 1000 YEARS AGO ADAPT THEM TO CARS.
This isn't _standard_ on all of the Treo's and is only used in certain manufacturing runs, so some of the things tried here could fail, or screw up the system you have. So in the specs they don't mention it as the use of FlashROM was down to a costing decision on a paticular run (maybe they bought in bulk to support other products, or had left over elements that could be incorporated).
This is like assuming that just because one PC has a paticular motherboard with paticular tweeks that every PC has that.
The Treo is still butt ugly mind.
But then I thought about that when I bought the house :-)
The number plate is "owned" by the DVLA, while you can buy it and have "ownership" at the end of the day the DVLA can revoke it so it ceases to become valid, and travelling with an invalid number is illegal.
In lots of other cities in the UK, issue with London is that there are people so stupid that they will still insist on driving their cars in rather than mixing with the "masses" on public transport.
Personally I look on this as a tax on the rich who refuse to ride on public transport. Now if they only had decent cycle lanes for bikes and bladers I'd miss out on the tube section of my journey.
As a reference for our US cousins, it takes in rush hour around 20 mins to go from the 'burbs into the centre if you take the tube, it takes around an hour if you drive.
This sounds nice but would result in your car being illegal and therefore subject to a fine much greater than the £5 you are trying to avoid.
A simpler answer in a city which has the oldest underground system would be... to use public transport. As someone who uses it every day it amazes me that people don't go totally postal waiting in queues all the time in their cars.
Example: Saturday night going from St. James' to Charing Cross, we got out of the cab at the end of the Mall (which is not pronounced Maul) and walked the rest as it would have taken three times as long in the cab.
London is not a city designed for cars, and personally I'm all in favour of scaming the stupid who insist on driving.
me-first is old school business ?
.COM had a simple business model
.com time scales)
.com boom people like Sun, IBM et al made a fortune out of the "new" economy, Gates, Jobs and Ellison made even more.
.com was about mystical ideas of "future" sales, where your mother would buy everything over the internet but NOT AT THE SAME SHOPS THAT HAVE GIVEN HER GREAT SERVICE FOR 20 YEARS.
.com muppets won't admit that its true.
Outmoded business model ?
a) Get a VP to give you x million dollars
b) Spend x million dollars with a view to breaking even in 4 years (normal
c) After spending x million in 1 year ask VP for y million to cover you for the next 3 years
d) Spend y million, or float and get y+z million
e) NEVER EVER MAKE A PROFIT
f) Go Bust
This is nothing about "new" and "old" business models, its about "bollocks" and "business".
In the 1980s and 90s Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison demonstrated that someone could become number 1 by being smart and having a business that MADE A PROFIT. During the
A small guy can set up a business and become number 1, especially in the tech sector, but at the end of the day profitable businesses are what stay in business.
Do you go back to the same shop often ? Does their service mean you would go to them in another State ? The same principle applies, but
Strange isn't it how all those old farts stuck out at those old companies, the IBM's, the GE's, Lockheed et al. And the "bright" young things disappear for 2 years....
.com with their experience..... but they didn't"
2 years later the "bright" young things come back to the office that is still there, still profitable and still delivering.
And the "bright" young thing doesn't see that maybe its actually a hard job to deliver decent software and that experience counts, and talent counts more. And most of all doesn't think
"All of these guys here could have worked for a
The art of these guys is seeing a fuck-up happening and getting the hell away from it. Whereas the "bright" young things believed in a new economy that would replace everything that went before and that the whole world order would fall and eToys would beat Toys R Us, where "TedsOfficeSupplies.com" would beat Staples and of course where Abercrombie and Gap would be destroyed by Boo.com.
In terms of who is bright, I don't think the lightbulbs are with the young.
At what stage will these advances in data storage become pointless. Getting a HD that can store 100Gb is possible today. These advances mean that today we can store 14 or so DVD movies on a single drive, in future, and we are only talking 10 years here. You will be able to store "Blockbusters" entire collection on your hard-drive.
So there must come a point where financially there is no reason to buy a bigger drive because consumers cannot use it up.
Now big business and the military will always be able to use it up. As will scientists and universities. But for the consumer this is talking about the day where your MP3 player stores millions of albums and is the size of a credit card... question is "how will you plug in the headphones"
One person can use binoculars, a whole organisation can use a networked camera. And record for ever what you have done even if it wasn't at all suspicious.
The "camera" is an Electro-magnetic sensor so it can see what you are typing, and can read the email that you are reading on your screen.
Not wanting badly regulated security agencies spying on you is not a case of doing some thing wrong, its a case that these agencies have a history of "bending" or breaking the laws themselves to justify their budget or opinions.
Sad to say that goverment is not of the people, by the people, for the people anymore. "interests" are at work and normal people are refered to as "collatoral damage".
Lets face it the resolution on sats up in space and the number of CCTV cameras around means that the scope of privacy is getting smaller and smaller. Security systems inside your home with video cameras connected to a central hub ? No problems if you want it.
You are being watched most of the day by cameras, and connect this up to a fundamentally flawed idea like facial recognition to find terrorists and you have a wonderful vision of hell.
The reality was that it was doing this every night as it had something going with a cute Ford Focus, it just decided to risk it in the day and got caught. Exactly the same as any teenager, just with more lubricants.
Is good speakers. You can't have one without the other. So what if your Sound Card is 100% buzzword compliant with 128bit 9GHz output, if your 2 cents piezo buzzer is connected to it the its a waste of space. Equally if you are playing Quake 3 and just want surround sound then there isn't much point in the card without the speakers in the right places.
For most people a basic card will, shock horror, do everything they want these days when allied to a decent set of speakers. So much of this is upgrade hype driven rather than actually reality. I've had a creative 5:1 set up for a few years now and why should I upgrade ? I listen to music mostly on the train and at work from my laptop on headphones so what would it get me. And what extra would I _really_ get for a 3D game ? Rather than marketing hype.
Get good speakers, get an okay sound card and buy lots of RAM.
If you want a top of the range sound system, buy seperates don't buy a PC.
The point of "no silver bullet" and "still no silver bullet" and indeed the awesomely brilliant Mythical Man Month is that no one thing will ever be the silver bullet and that the most important thing are the people. Doing one of these things won't help but doing all of them certainly will. Peer review doesn't replace compilers though, its about bugs not semantic and syntactic errors.
Fred Brooks was and is right, but that doesn't mean the processes of good software engineering are wrong, just that its a combination that will deliver success with smart people.
Within so few sentences...
countermeasure: webs of trust & md5 hashes
and
the best way to deflect it would be hiding your identity
Put simply you cannot hide identity and be a trusted partner in a transaction. And the cost of setting up "trust" mechanisms should be understated, I can generate my own CA and own X509s from openssl. How will you know what CA to trust ? Commerical ones cost money.
The European standards body that does this stuff has its results here and one to note is the abysmal results on this MPV. I quote The Voyager did so badly in the frontal impact that it earned no points, making it the worst of the group by some margin. The body structure became unstable and the steering column was driven back into the driver's chest and head.
So while there may be concerns about these cars if all cars had to get decent scores in these tests that it would ensure that everyone was safe. As it is the gap between the worst and the best is enough to make the fuel inside it only one of the considerations in safety.
Why not Symbian, QNX/a> or any of these ? This unhealthy obsession of "one size fits all" that abounds in the Linux world is exactly the sort of thing that people on Slashdot complain about the Microsoft world. You can't shoehorn these things without getting a poorer product as a result.
Wouldn't it be a better open source project if someone did what Linus did when he wanted to build an Open Source Unix and do the same for a proper RTOS ? By viewing Linux as the "only" solution it turns into the old "everything is a nail if you only have a hammer" discussion.
News for Nerds would be detailing what is happening in the RTOS and embedded world, rather than just being "News about Linux" to the detriment of better technologies. I know it sounds like a rant, but people like Wind River really do know what they are doing, this isn't a crappy Microsoft driven arena, this is where people really do know their shit, and the customer will not accept failure as part of the package.
While everyone will shout and scream "I don't want AT&T to maintain my cable modem", but when the line gets dropped and AT&T need to diagnose the problem they will apply the first rule of problem resolution
"The user is a moron, the fault is at their end"
This involves them doing the standard, is your modem turned on, is it working, is the green light flashing.... you don't have a green light, oh its your own modem, so how do you tell if thats working ?
So it does cost them money in terms of call and tech support. They have to have special call centre scripts, new diagnosis procedures etc etc.
And your cable modem might have a bug which buggers their network.
ARM are a smallish bunch of guys based in the UK, they "think" for a living, then sell the ideas to the rest of the industry.
So IP based companies can work, and leave the heavy lifting to others.
In the world of outsourcing this is a common model, and ARM are probably the best examples of how to be an ideas company.
How old is the PS1, very old, and its still selling if you can be the last man standing in this game then you can start doing things like
Selling it to Car manufacturers to entertain kids (they've done that)
Try and replace the SNES on those lucrative airline contracts.
And many more, PS1 is still selling pretty well out there, and there are still Games, Moore's law says the power increases... not the quality. While the graphics get better, and sometimes the playing gets better but... well Tomb Raider II is still cool to play.
Last man standing in the current war will get to own even more than the PS1 is currently looking at.
A couple of words, OCL
This is in the interface, rather than an implementation, and you won't get the code to the impl, so what does it do ?
/**
* Get the Bug description for the given Id
* @pre id must be > 0 and less than BugList.lastId(), the highest bug number
* @post The return must not be null
* @invariant does not change the number of bugs
*/
Well that is the comment block, not all of it because there is some OCL in there, but I thought I'd leave something for Google. The point is that the description describes exactly what the method does, it also says what the caller must do or face the consequences, and what the caller can rely upon when the method returns.
And for any one who says comments aren't required if you write the code well enough... you are a muppet. Interaction via interfaces is a basic tennent of coding,