Secondly I don't see any references as to the encryption used - it's a MS-specific blackbox as far as I can tell. Considering MS's shaky history of security implementations & the general problem of closed-source encryption this isn't particularly comperable to Apple's Open Source implementation of an outside published standard written by broad coalition of interested users.
Finally what uses this? Win2k has literally thousands of API's, some excellent, some half-baked, some simply broken or braindead, many overlapping or redundant. Having an API is one thing, using it or getting it used is another, particularly in the archeology that is Win2k.
Under MacOS 9 & 10 the Keychain is availiable from within the Finder, the Chooser, it's more modern implementation the Network Browser, the en/de-cryption applets, MS's Internet Explorer, most FTP clients including Interarchie & Fetch plus numerous other applications.
First off this is *news*? Did anyone expect a wireless mouse or kb to encrypt? While it's likely possible to do some sort of encryption between the transmitter & the reciever I don't see how keys would easily be synchronized.
Furthermore devices like this invariably end up stepping on each other's toes. They're fine if you're the only user in the building but when the secretary upstairs gets one you end up getting who-gets-the-bandwidth glitches or worse yet finding thier mousing on your screen (or "Iieeeeyyhahh - my cursor is posessed!")
Of course one key thing to ask yourself is if you care that someone could decode your mouse or kb.
In the office as I noted these things are of limited utility, at least if you're in a geek-dense area. At home the question is how many folks are in range and how many could possibly care.
In my neighborhood the average age is 60-something and of a definite non-technical bent. Frankly I doubt there's so much as an active ham in the neighborhood much less anyone with enough geek-tendencies to scan, identify, then decode my mouse or keyboard.
The same with the odds of there being another comperable device - I can count the cable-modem users by looking at the wires and there are 4 of us in two blocks (and from sniffing I know I'm 90% of the traffic.)
Yeah unsecured wireless devices aren't a good thing to use in a secure environment, but again, that's *news?
Darwn is the base of MacOS X. Yes it's OpenSource. Yes it's freely avialable, Apple even hosts the servers & has engineers assigned to porting it to non-Apple platforms (to wit the x86.)
That said there's a long distance between Darwin & MacOS X. Carbon, Quartz, Aqua, QuickTime, Classic - all are critical parts of MacOS X that aren't in Darwin. Without them Darwin is an interesting BSD variant with a Mach-based kernel, reworked IO & some nifty OO & "Frameworks" support and innovative configuration-files-settable-via-XML technology.
That doesn't a clone make. Indeed it's debatable if Apple could themselves easily make a clone-able Mac at this point. So much of MacOS X (not Darwin) is PPC-specific and relies so heavily on Apple hardware implementations it might not be easily possible.
Sure Next was ported many times & MacOS X has inherited much of that flexibility but since then there's been massive rewrites. It's likely that most of everything above Darwin might require a lot of work now move to another architecture or even motherboard design, there appear to be lots of assumptions made in the design.
Sure there are always rumors of MacOS X running on x86/Alpha/etc. chips and there was a Rhapsody release that was cross-platform as well as stories of a beta MacOS 8 runnable on an IBM RS6000 but at this point it seems unlikely that the MacOS X now out there could be easily moved to either an Intel-standard motherboard architecture (BIOS/ Northbridge/Southbridge etc.) or to another workstation architecture using OpenFirmware etc.
Possible: Yes.
Easily Achieved: No
Possible by someone other then Apple? No
First of all it needs to be pointed out Apple has been supporting encryption in their products for several years now.
One of the features of MacOS 9 has been the ability to encrypt any file via a set of system-level services. A second feature has been the ability to use a "Keychain" service where passwords & other information can be securely stored & automatically retrieved by authorized applications. A third feature has been the ability to use a Voiceprint as a password.
Here are a number of examples of how these features can be used:
Macs running MacOS 9 and greater support Multiple Users. Thus folks can (or must) log in in order to access their materials. This login can be accomplished via typed password or Voiceprint. Macs with access to an appropriate server can store individual preferences on the server and these can used applied from client Macs as the user logs in.
In order to encrypt or decrypt a file under MacOS 9 and greater on need simply drag-and-drop the file/folder/drive to the encryption application. This service can also be called from within any application utilizing the cryptographic API's.
Utilizing the "Keychain" any program can store or retrieve settings, passwords and other secured bits of information. Thus instead of saving one's web-account passwords in an easily read text file they're stored encrypted in a file where explicit authorization must be given for access. The same for the other various servers one might utilize regularly or occasionally - their login information and passwords can be stored under a single master-password and applied at need.
Now, lots of folks are going to start reading this and trying to imagine lots of ways they could break this, the possible downsides, etc. Yes, it's not completely foolproof. On the other hand it's a lot better then many other OS's offer, particularly when you realize it's widely supported throughout the OS and by many (most?) applications. Furthermore it seems fairly well thought out and after being out in the field a bit it seems to be working well.
It's good to see Apple is finally documenting the same hooks in MacOS X. Presumably by completely opening the material a better evaluation of the processes can be made and improvements implemented by third parties. Furthermore since it's a standard promulgated by a number of companies all in the security field this has a good chance of being implemented in a wide range of products.
It would also be great if other OS development folks could take this code and use it to compare/contrast their own efforts in this direction and use them to improve themselves, possibly even work towards adopting some common material where the specs are vague.
Finally, before going and making wild-assed assumptions based on how you assume this stuff is implemented or blue-skying on it's possible flaws howzabout investing the 10 minutes and actually getting the facts first, not wasting all of the rest of ours time? This is all Open Source and it's well documented so it's not up to everyone else to teach you: Go read it for yourself.
Would the new AT&T 2000i public phones be more susceptible to vandalism? No more so then any of it's predecessors.
Fancy public phones with display, card reader, keyboard & such are common fare in US airports, big hotels, convention facilities, etc. Often you'll see a bank of a dozen or so standard public phones with one or two fancy ones at the end, invariably one extra-low for folks in mobile chairs.
The fancy phones seem more of a decorating thing then a regularly used amenity. Indeed aside from using their card-reader to charge calls (which could be done by keypad as well so not a real-big win there) I can't recall ever having used their extra features nor seen anyone else ever use them. Perhaps they'll be more popular with the web-browser since kiosks for this are also quite common in the same environments, including browser-kiosks from AT&T.
However back to vandalism no, these phones don't sem to suffer unduly. Of course they're usually in fairly secure places where vandals would be quickly noticed & apprehended. Like I said: Airports, hotels, convention centers - not out on some dark stretch of rural highway or even a suburban bus-stop. Furthermore they're fairly rugged already, I can't imagine any casual attempts to damage them would succeed (perhaps chewing gum in the data-port.)
Just to keep on informing-the-folks theme many Canadian phones already have built in card-readers and 20-character/2-line displays; here's a link to Bell Canada's standard payphone.
While the i model of this phone may be new the phone itself is based on a decade old design that's been widely distributed. Hotels, airports, convention centers have been sporting variations on "full featured" phones to (from what I've seen) little appreciation. "Sexy phones" are a standard spec. for impress-the-user facilities but honestly I've rarely seen them taken advantage of.
Indeed the only thing I see new/different about the "2000i is the LCD instead of CRT & opening up it's browsing capability. While that's nice I don't see it being particularly different from the already ubiquitious web-browser kiosks already out there, including the ones from AT&T.
Frankly the most interesting thing about this might be it's IR port. While the "Infra-Red Port" is listed in phone diagram it's not in the specs. If the phone is able to look like a standard device to cellphones/laptops/palmtops then it might be very interesting indeed.
As to the folks whining about potential durabilty issues & such - have you really never seen one of these, never walked by the phone-bank at an airport, convention center, hotel, etc. where there's usually 1 or 2 of this phone's kin at the end of the bank? Take a look the phone's spec-page where it notes it's previous 2000-sans-i incarnation. These aren't new phones & AT&T knows a bit about building rugged hardware - trust me these will hold up to most general abuse & aren't stuck out by the side of the road anyway.
It is already extracted from the air, at roughly US$0.10/Liter which covers the cost of the equipment & handling plus some profit.
Liquid Nitrogen is used in LOTS of processes and has a well established production infrasructure. Indeed if you were to call a local distributer you'd find they likely deliver to most of the research, manufacturing & medical facilities around you; those they don't likely have on-site production.
If liquid-Nitrogen cooling cables takes off you'll likely see sales of modular production facilities increase but I doubt the overall economics will change: This is pretty basic & well established stuff.
As noted numerous times what we breath is ~75% Nitrogen (unless you live in LA, Denver or Dallas then check today's stats.) It's pretty much inert in the conditions most of us are familier with and would be so in the environment around a cooled-cable break.
Indeed if one had to dump something in the atmosphere this would be most folks #1 choice followed by pure water.
The biggest danger would be freezing something important like a bodypart from extended immersion. However since liquid Nitrogen behaves like most liguids and doesn't do anything funny it's not hard to understand/predict & it does evaporate easily.
There is no technical defense for what they've done
Well, none unless one wants to remove many of the more arcane constraints of MBR. Frankly everyone who knows anything about drives and layouts agrees MBR was obsolete over a decade ago and should been retired back then.
Furthermore for most users this won't be a big deal, certianly not for Jane-hobbyist. If you actually bothered to do a bit of research you'll discover that this implementation is fairly backwards-amendable except for some high-end configurations where it's unlikely to be an issue anyhow.
Finally, hard drives retail for ~US$100/20GB, anyone installing XP is likely to be able to pony up the cash. This change won't affect ye olde 486s.
This would be something for the DOJ to investigate...
By your logic is any hardware advancement possible or shall the industry remain forever stuck in 1980's technology? At least Apple moved to OpenFirmware along with the rest of the workstation market or is that somehow part of an evil plot too?
I can tell you, other than the Kindergarden level GUI (that looks like it was designed by Miss Shirley for Romper Room) there is NO advantage over 2000 at all. The new GUI has been found to be VERY annoying to most of the experienced network admins/engineers who have been testing it in my lab.
Ahh, so it's not StUdLy enough for yeah, huh? Luckly you'll be able to change the chrome to a camoflauge background and Matrix-themes to assauge your offended aesthetics.
This move to "break" the MBR is nothing but the usual Microsoft anti-competitive malice at it's worst.
Debunked.
Just as the new `Doze 2000 SP2 broke most popular software firewalls on the market
Yeah, patching things Baaaaadddd... right.
Simply put, Microsoft is more interested in protecting their marketshare...
Doi!
...than in giving the market what it wants:
1. An OS that is stable.
2. An OS that is secure.
The market gets what it buys. IS Depts & consumers continue to buy on sizzle & psuedo-feature sets then MS will continue selling it to them. It built a megacompany so they're doing something right.
Sony is prepping more then just a "converged" PC-desktop, apparently they've also got a wireless tablet in the wings too. See this syndicated article for more information.
Summarized it details a wireless tablet PC that can stream audio & video from a "base station". Who wants to bet that these are two halves of a whole? The next step will be Sony TV's that can also have wireless capability and can display video from the base station.
Suddenly you'd have a PC/TV/DVR/Music system that would work on your desktop, in the livingroom with the whole family, or in your lap out on the back deck, all wireless & all from a name-brand consumer electronics company.
Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
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So what's it like living out back in a shack? And how are you online anyhow, big telecom corporations control the net infrastructure...
I'm sorry but your avoidence strategy seems half-baked. Last I checked Z-Rays weren't radiating from my TV set into my brain, or at least not any more then leak from the text megapublishers.
Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
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Gotta agree with the other AC: Why'd you bother posting?
Yeah, 99% of all good stories are in books - not.
You somehow feeling smug? Guess what - there's some good stuff on TV too.
Films. News broadcasts. Drama. Comedy. Current events. I don't know what things are like where you are but I enjoy my Discovery Channel programs, CBC's "Counterspin", "The Passionate Eye", PBS's "Charlie Rose", not to mention Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" the other night. Plus my sweetie laughs himself silly at "Allie McBeal".
Books are a great thing, I've got two rooms full of 'em & loved reading most of them. However they're not the only medium. TV, film, live performance, all have their strengths and all have their jewels.
You've got a choice: Buy a TV / hard drive / solid-state-music-player / whatever that has encryption or don't buy one.
Most folks, all things being equal, will purchase the unfettered product.
The way manufactures, content folks etc. prevent this is by getting laws set preventing non-encrypted hardware. This is the case with DAT, DVD, etc.
However this is not yet the case with television and isn't likely to be. The public is getting wise to these tricks and lawmakers are starting to clue into the changing attitudes.
Furthermore this isn't putting limits on a new technology but attempting to reign in an existing one.
US Congress-critters are getting tired of feeling like TV's-patsies giving away spectrum and receiving nothing in return, no HDTV, no additional services. To now attempt to require content-protection on TV sets, that ain't gonna fly.
This hits Joe Sixpack in the couch with his remote in hand & as powerful as the lobbyist's are they don't match a nation of TV junkies.
Don't expect to see this sort of law get passed easily; it's too easy to make a cause cellebre against. It'll be an uphill battle & a very highly publicized one. I for one don't think it'll make it.
Without a law the model breaks down. Gonna buy a new TV set with all the new features? Manufacturers will quickly discover that the models with content-protection don't sell and those without do.
Are TV manufacturers in the business of protecting IP (except for Sony?) No - they just want to sell as many boxes as possible and don't have any stake what you do with 'em.
Short term: Companies will try to get away with anything they can. The long-term: In this case they probably won't but it'll be a fight. In the meantime get ready to write your own Congress-critters & tell them how you expect them to go on this issue.
This isn't worth going into medical definitions over. The short answer is that many previously serious illnesses are no longer a great concern in most of the middle-class USAian world described in the article.
Rubella, Whooping Cough, Smallpox, Typhus, Meningitis, Scarlet Fever, Tetanus, Syphilis, Polio, Pneumonia, Diarrhea, Fever and a 1001 other maladies both major & minor are now generally non-fatal and of little concern to most of us.
Whether this is due to mass-vaccination, individual vaccination, palliative care or direct remediation isn't the issue and to argue is only playing inane semantic games: The point is that they're no longer nearly the danger they were in the 1940's.
Common infections we treat routinely and without thought today were deadly dangerous then. Take a look at the survival rates from those years after surgery due to infection - daunting indeed. Fevers were to be feared, diarrhea was life-threatening.
Today the only thing comparable in the first world would be HIV/AIDS. Ebola and other exotics remain that. In the past a pandemic would sweep the world every generation or so killing some percentage of the human population: We haven't suffered one in three generations now.
I think the real proof is that folks are left quibbling over colds & flues and not recounting deaths in their immediate families. We're the first generation not to have first hand knowledge of a pandemic; for the folks of the 1940's (from where this article was written) epidemics & pandemics were a real and immediate threat. To them the quarantine sign was something they were terribly familiar with.
11. Shop at home via TV (the Internet) Or just good ole shop-on-TV like so many channels are now.
Misses:
3. Cheap electrical heating
I live in Quebec where elsctrical heating is comparitively cheap & ubiquitious.
This is a location-depandant one.
7. Widespread use of nuclear generating stations in Canada and South America Ontario has a large nuclear program, gets much it's power from it. Indeed
a suprising amount of the US NE's power comes from nuclear; for example 30%
in Vermont.
10. Use of lightweight metals in large building construction Well, lighter. The steels used today are greatly improved over what was
availiable in the 50's. Furthermore we use metals more widely in construction
now then previously for things like floor decking.
11. Use of plastics to construct houses Vinyl siding? Vinyl floors? PVC piping? Latex housepaints? OSB walls made
with plastics-based stabilizers? Tyvek sheeting? Plastics-based construction
adhesives used in place of nailing? Plastic foam underfloor layers?
12. One multipurpose unit to handle a home's hot water, heating and cooling Heat pump? Or many newer houses have an underfloor circulated hot-water
system fed from a common heater that also supplies domestic hot water.
18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen" There's a chain of very successful grocery stores in France that specializes
in just this. Furthermore compared to our grandparent's time (50 years = 2.5
generations) the amount of pre-prepared food we eat is enormous. Indeed we
all know folks who live on hot-pockets & Lean Cuisine for long periods of
time.
22. Using computers to generate forecasts (people still make the calls) People still make the final call but their decision-making is very
heavily influenced by computerized data-collection and modelling
27. Cars burning denatured alchohol as their primary fuel Used in Latin America, also gasahol & added plant-derived fuels found
in the USA.
30. Easy cures for bacterial diseases such as TB Compared to 1950? Absolutely yes.
31. Physical signs of aging no longer apparent
Retinol A? Rogaine? Botox? Facelifts & other cosmetic surgery (now suprisingly
common)?
32. Widespread cures for viral disease
Compared to 1950? Again absolutely yes.
You're looking for a system like what you're used to, CVS. That's an automated solution suitable to maintaining computer-code (plain text.) Here parts are checked in & out by coders, reviewed other coders & managers, builds produced, used by QA, etc.
Documentation folks are used to a different work-flow model. Traditionially there are copy writers, graphic artists, layout folks, and layers of editors. Their workflow is folders, or in the computer-age their representation, directories.
They're analogous models but there are differences. In writing & graphics the latest version is not always the best. Content, as you've learned, can come from many sources and in different formats. Materials are used & reused in bewildering permutations. While automaton systems exist (and are at least as sophisticated as CVSs) they require much more customization.
Frankly you're the wrong person for the job.
While you may have been great at organizing materials and workflow in your field you're now outside of it. It's a different culture (albiet possibly dysfunctionial in this case) and for you it's terra incognita. The tools are different, the processes are different, the constraints are different, the end products are different.
The best strategy would be to bring in someone knowledgable in documentation to evaluate the current staff & systems and make some suggestions, possibly implement them. If things have gotten to be "a complete mess" then there's undoubtably a number of problems and deus ex machina won't fix them.
The problem could well be poor organization. It could as well be unqualified staff, understaffing, poor management, lack of support from other parts of the company, bad technology choices, etc.
You're not really qualified to judge any of these, good as you may be in your area and in spite of the general problem-solving and management skills you might have. It's as if one of these folks were asked to come in and help shape things up when the R&D folks are late writing a release.
Indeed if it were me (and I've been invited to undertake similar projects in my career) I'd decline this "opportunity". What you're being asked to do has nothing to do with your competencies. Indeed if the only point is congruence is familiarity with CVS then the bosses would be better suited - they do more general writing and live more in the world of memos & Powerpoint slides.
You were hired to code. Presumably you're good at that. You weren't hired to analyze business processes, research & specify documentation automation systems nor to implement them. Finally, if you do this you'll be the guy for this in the future, any issues regarding it will end up on your desk from now on. Is that where you want your job to go?
Even though MacOS X 10 is finally released Apple considers it to still be a beta product - witness Apple's not shipping it installed on Macs until July.
Thus Apple is recognizing that the folks running MacOS X right now aren't the the usual it-came-in-it crowd. These folks have gone out and paid US$120 for Mac OS X and installed it before any "business case" could be made.
In reponse Apple is serving these early-adopters by releasing everything as it is developed. These folks want the very-latest & greatest, paid for it, and Apple will give them what they want; at least until the rest of their market begins to catch up.
What's been put out so far? Really nothing more then re-incorporating some material from the beta releases that weren't cleared in time for the Golden Master. A few bug-fixes, a minor update or two bringing things like MacOS X iTunes up to par with it's MacOS 9 cousin.
The important thing to realize is that these are 10.0n patches, minor minor things. For Wintel folks they'd be the little items that appear on the Windows Update pages or hidden in MS's tech bulletins. For *nix folks they're the little stuff that gets updated every week.
All of these are available to MacOS folks using the built-in Software Update service. Indeed different sets of updates are available to both the MacOS X & MacOS X folks at about comparable frequency.
The update service can be set to run on various simple schedules (days of week & time) as either prompted or unprompted installs. Of course it can also be run manually whenever the user wants to or not set and not used.
Presumably in July when Apple holds it's big rollout of installed MacOS X the frequency of updates will begin to slow. At that time most folks are hoping Apple's work on an updated packaging system will be ready to implement and as part of it a more sophisticated update service will be used.
As part of a next-gen update service some sort of major/minor change hierarchy is expected to be implemented as well as opening the updates to non-Apple packages (currently these have been mostly second-tiered to Apple's free-to-Mac's iDisk service.)
All of this will likely appear as part of the rumored MacOS 10.5 for the installed release. This will also coincide with a predicted across-the-board hardware refresh and at that time Apple will presumably begin their big MacOS X advertising push (notably quiet so far.)
So, back to the original question - is Apple releasing too many minor patches too often? Probably not considering who the MacOS X user base is right now and what they're likely looking for. Come July this will all begin to change and presumably then so will Apple's update-system.
"The financial investment in such a project would dwarf all other civil engineering to date." You obviosly haven't heard of the big dig....
I'm well aware of Boston's "Big Dig" Central Artery / Tunnel Project - I lived in Boston for many years & still contract there.
The $14 Billion of the "Big Dig" wouldn't cover the development & deployment of the spacecraft required much less their operation or the actual construction of the Space Elevator.
Good to see the old towne hasn't become any less provincial.
Capturing a NEO is a lovely idea. However that would also require the development of yet more exotic technologies of which we're only now beginning to dream of.
NEO's would need to be surveyed; we need a better understanding of their composition & structure.
A factory capable of working autonomously in micro(nano?)-gravity & vacuum must be designed (humans would be another order of problems.)
The factory would then need to be launched & assembled in orbit, then somehow transported to the candidate NEO (which generally have a very high delta-v in regards to Earth.)
This factory would then be required to install itself, deploy collection systems & begin refining local materials.
We have to assume that the local materials would be suitable for the type of production required.
Some sort of motor would need to be constructed or installed and the orbit of the NEO shifted to match that of Earth/Moon system.
The NEO would steered (safely) in such a manner it can be captured (safely!) around Earth in an orbit relatively undisturbed by lunar effects & presumably geosynchronous.
Once in place the cable would need to be deployed in a controlled fashion.
The cable would be required to have a number of fantastic properties including:
Flexibility
Durability
Incredible tensile strength
Resistance to corrosion from upper & lower atmospheric gasses
Be unaffected by solar radiation
Be unaffected by the Van Allen belts
Possess whatever electrical characteristics are required
Possess whatever magnetic properties are required.
Be flawless or at least capable of withstanding flaws.
Then of course the lower end would have to deal with atmospheric & electrical conditions as it is constructed then finally navigated to it's tether point.
Finally the entire structure must be safer then virtually anything ever before designed by humanity because of course any failure on it's part could be a catastrophe of a scale never before seen by mankind.
The political & financial will to undertake such a project would need to be built & sustained for many years.
Somehow I find that a very daunting list of requirements.
I'm not knocking the NEO idea, I'm just pointing out it's not a slam-dunk of a solution.
Please no one glibly answer "nanotechnology". Even if we could build the basic parts required there are still the command, control, and power-requirements of a nanotechnology-solution that promise to be at least as difficult as building the darn things. Answering "by clicking our heels together 3 times" would be as honest an answer at this point.
First of all the esteemed Kim Stanley Robinson is only the latest in a long series of authors to discuss Space Elevators, indeed their pedigree goes back to the 1940's. Arthur C. Clarke was the first to bring them to wide attention in his novel "The Fountains of Paradise".
Space Elevators work by orbiting synchronously with the Earth. Indeed due to their stationary nature they're often referred to as "beanstalks" (Jack and the...) There are other designs where they instead act as a giant rotating spar slicing down through the atmosphere and back up again but the most popular is where they're tethered (anchored is probably too strong a word) somewhere on or near the Earth's equator.
Many designs truncate the outer-end of the cable, instead substituting some sort of counterweight such a captured asteroid. For vertical transport sealed cabins would be used for passengers, unsealed would do for hardy cargo. The technologies wouldn't be very exotic, indeed they could be built today by anyway halfway competent Jr. Technical School.
Most designs have the cabins ascend & descend using electric motors (none using winches & cables found in the more traditionial elevators.) The motors themselves needn't be anything special, anything that can lift the cabin in 1G would do fine. Another alternative would be some sort of magnetic drive, Lawrence Livermore's Inductrak being one good candidate.
Power requirements would be fairly modest & using the electric motors as electrical generators on the down trip could recover much of the power used. A single large power station would be enough with today's technologies, or possibly several solar satellites using future technology.
However there are a couple of fundamental problems that are evident even from this far away.
Carbon nanotubes have thus far only been created in very short lengths. Scaling them up hasn't been achieved yet.
There isn't a good mechanism for bonding, braiding, or otherwise welding together the nanotubes.
The mechanical, electrical & chemical properties of the tubes are still being studied. They may prove to be unsuitable for this application.
Carbon is flammable, be it as lumps of coal or as diamonds or as nanotubes.
However recently other materials then carbon have been formed into nanotubes so it may not be the only choice.
We don't have a way to get the construction materials into orbit from where to begin building. An expansion of space shipping by several orders of magnitude for an extended period of time would be required to ferry up an elevator's components from the planetary surface.
As others have pointed out the dangers of a disrupted elevator would be significant, indeed catastrophic.
The financial investment in such a project would dwarf all other civil engineering to date. While the payoffs could well be incredible the risk would be great & the markets unproven.
Space Elevators may well indeed prove in the long term the best way to get between orbit & a planetary surface. However they're a way off in terms of materials alone not to mention finances & other practicalities. Even if we were to develop a magic fiber tomorrow with all of the necessary properties it would be several decades before we'd be in a position to use it. That said it's never too soon to start laying the groundwork.
I purposely didn't look up & embed URLs into this: Clearly you're already online if you're reading this so paste the interesting bits into your favorite search engine and look up the nouns yourself.
First I'd suggest researching the market you're going into./. is great for geek-stuff but what you need are Aussie-dollar numbers, and locally relevant ones at that. (Many/.'ers are unaware there are countries outside the US borders with their own internal markets, pricing, laws, etc.)
First find out more about your potential competition. Call them up and ask for a technology description. Use local newsgroups & find some talky techies, get more detail. Possibly pose as a customer with detailed needs, get more information (be careful here - this could be a legal problem that would come back & bite you.) Now find a couple more similar ISPs around and discover what they use, how they charge, etc. Try & determine how healthy they are.
Details you'll be wanting are the technical specs but also how many customers do they have, what do they charge residential customers, what do they charge commercial customers, how many of each type of customer do they have, exactly what services do they offer, etc.
Now look at their upstream suppliers. Who are these companies using for upstream feeds? What is it costing them? What services are available? Try & determine if there are non-compete clauses in place.
Next familiarize yourself with the local applicable telecom laws. What rules govern the ISPs? What rules govern the phone companies you'll be working with?
Finally what are the conditions of the local infrastructure & economy? Are the phone-lines in such poor shape that disconnects are inevitable? Are there enough customers to support a robust ISP or is so-so service all that makes sense economically?
As many/.'ers will tell you in most parts of the world the PTT's are successfully killing off their competition. Presumably you'll be competing with your own local phone service, offering an alternative to their ISP (assuming they have one.) Do you think you'll be able to work with them? Have others been able to work with them?
With all of the groundwork in place consider if you can take on the job, or at least catalyze it / make a profit somehow.
Are you competent to start or run an ISP? Do you have access to folks who would be interested in going in with you, helping flesh out the plans into a working set of papers and if you were to somehow set up shop could / would they take positions in it? Can you develop & pitch a business plan? What would make investors likely to give you money, help you get started?
Finally once you've got all of the numbers in place will it be possible to make a profit or would you be better off spending your time on something else? Will you be able to put together the capitol, the technology, the support, the services, the advertising, the billing, the relationships in order to make this fly? Do you have what all of this takes?
Frankly I think the days of the Mom 'n pop ISP are over, muscled out by bigger companies with more capital, advantages of scale & connections.
Where I do see smaller ISP's making a comeback is in boutique-ISPs where specialized services are offered & overhead is kept low by expecting the customers to be technically proficient & help themselves. These geek-only services are often low-key & word-of-mouth deals run as a sideline by some enterprising local geeks. Things they offer are lots of access to some good webservers, gamer-services, IRC servers, newsfeeds, etc. These seem to make a reasonable profit but are self-limiting, probably won't support anyone directly.
Aside from that the big boys seem able to starve or crush their competition with often the issue coming down to which one hates less - the cable company or the phone company? In rural areas it comes down to the phone company or the satellite company but either way it's two giants.
Pacemakers generally maintain logs & are externally programmable, heve been so for years. This is used to fine tune their responses, to check the battery state, etc. They don't run an OS, at least not in the sense of Win/Mac/'nix, they're dedicated purpose devices.
There is no wire protruding out of a person's body, all communication is done via a small radio transmitter/reciever and a dedicated piece of hardware (though doubtless this could be duplicated on a PC.)
The pacemaker would presumably report in a two-stage process. Either a dedicated-purpose device or a reciever/transmitter (possibly connected serially/USB) would use a coded signal to cue the pacemaker to broadcast it's logs. These would be recorded on the dedicated device or a home PC and then transmitted online to the central site.
There the records (I'm guessing here) could be analyzed for warnnig signs, dangerous trends, etc. Likely if they exceed some threshold a flag will be set and a specialist will review the information.
I can't imagine any scenario where the pace-maker would ever transmit directly to an online site; there simply isn't the power available for that sort of direct telemetry. Therefore no sort of direct atttack, DOS or otherwise would be possible.
On the outside chance that remote reprogramming of the pacemaker were allowed I would be concerned, and of course there should be concerns over the security of one's uploaded logs, but from what's reported the whole situation seems very safe if possibly not entirely private.
Frankly I think you would do well to invest the 5 minutes to do a search, read a pacemaker FAQ & answer the rest of your own questions on your own.
Electric-chalkboards are a dime a dozen - talk to your purchasing person.
Frankly I'd not approach it from "I like Linux how can we use it" direction but rather from "What are my researchers comfortable with and how can I support that?" As you noted this is about collaboration; you're going to need to interoperate with a large number of systems not under your control.
With that in mind your goal is likely to be platform independence, not Linux-specific solutions. Standard protocols, not specific "solutions".
As part of that you'll presumably want a system that supports both pen-based graphics (the classic "scribbled on a napkin") as well as more structured mathematical layout (as used by TeX, MathML or Mathematica.) Really you'll need whatever folks express themselves most easily in. For voice the telephone is universal & standardized, video has a number of reasonable standards with some degree of interoperability.
Personally I'd invest in a good computing infrastructure, encourage the researchers to network with their peers & discover solutions that suit them, or failing that undertake to write/sponsor an open tool that would facilitate the collaboration you're looking for.
Whatever the case I'd wait until I was in place, see what's being used now, how effective it is and what directions present themselves. Your user base is likely to have some strong opinions and presumably has some experience with what works for them and what doesn't.
(f it were up to me I'd look into some sort of Wiki system that supports mathematical notation - hit a search engines for details, here's one hit: http://allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Math_symbols. That & again, good telephones.)
How times a week do most folks get an email from someone announcing they've stopped using me@this_isp.com and are now using me@that_isp.com, please update your address book...
Frankly stable addresses are a great thing, too often they turn over, become difficult to track, etc.
Since most degree-granting instutions are more stable them most dotcoms this is an appreciated service. In return for the occasionial spam from the school one gets a stable address.
The accounts aren't forced on anyone, they're a voluntary sign up folks are free to take advantage of. They're usually not real accounts either but rather fowarding services, thus there's no storage-space or connectivity issues.
Send mail to bubba@alum.beerdrinker.edu and it'll automagically get redirected to beerswiller@hotmail.com. Should Bubba decide to change to AOL our hypothetical graduate need only update the service at alum.beerdrinker.edu in order to get all of his email now forwarded to idrinkspud@aol.com, no need to mass-email all of his drinking buddies.
Once the email is forwarded one is of course free to treat it as any other email: filter-to-death, file-and-ignore, whatever. want to kill it completely? Then just cancel the service or redirect it to a dead account.
ps Other places offer like services, off the top of my head I can think of the Association for Computing Machinery & bigfoot.com. One is presumably around for the long-term, the other, well we'll see how their business model works out...
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Secondly I don't see any references as to the encryption used - it's a MS-specific blackbox as far as I can tell. Considering MS's shaky history of security implementations & the general problem of closed-source encryption this isn't particularly comperable to Apple's Open Source implementation of an outside published standard written by broad coalition of interested users.
Finally what uses this? Win2k has literally thousands of API's, some excellent, some half-baked, some simply broken or braindead, many overlapping or redundant. Having an API is one thing, using it or getting it used is another, particularly in the archeology that is Win2k.
Under MacOS 9 & 10 the Keychain is availiable from within the Finder, the Chooser, it's more modern implementation the Network Browser, the en/de-cryption applets, MS's Internet Explorer, most FTP clients including Interarchie & Fetch plus numerous other applications.
Furthermore devices like this invariably end up stepping on each other's toes. They're fine if you're the only user in the building but when the secretary upstairs gets one you end up getting who-gets-the-bandwidth glitches or worse yet finding thier mousing on your screen (or "Iieeeeyyhahh - my cursor is posessed!")
Of course one key thing to ask yourself is if you care that someone could decode your mouse or kb.
In the office as I noted these things are of limited utility, at least if you're in a geek-dense area. At home the question is how many folks are in range and how many could possibly care.
In my neighborhood the average age is 60-something and of a definite non-technical bent. Frankly I doubt there's so much as an active ham in the neighborhood much less anyone with enough geek-tendencies to scan, identify, then decode my mouse or keyboard.
The same with the odds of there being another comperable device - I can count the cable-modem users by looking at the wires and there are 4 of us in two blocks (and from sniffing I know I'm 90% of the traffic.)
Yeah unsecured wireless devices aren't a good thing to use in a secure environment, but again, that's *news?
That said there's a long distance between Darwin & MacOS X. Carbon, Quartz, Aqua, QuickTime, Classic - all are critical parts of MacOS X that aren't in Darwin. Without them Darwin is an interesting BSD variant with a Mach-based kernel, reworked IO & some nifty OO & "Frameworks" support and innovative configuration-files-settable-via-XML technology.
That doesn't a clone make. Indeed it's debatable if Apple could themselves easily make a clone-able Mac at this point. So much of MacOS X (not Darwin) is PPC-specific and relies so heavily on Apple hardware implementations it might not be easily possible.
Sure Next was ported many times & MacOS X has inherited much of that flexibility but since then there's been massive rewrites. It's likely that most of everything above Darwin might require a lot of work now move to another architecture or even motherboard design, there appear to be lots of assumptions made in the design.
Sure there are always rumors of MacOS X running on x86/Alpha/etc. chips and there was a Rhapsody release that was cross-platform as well as stories of a beta MacOS 8 runnable on an IBM RS6000 but at this point it seems unlikely that the MacOS X now out there could be easily moved to either an Intel-standard motherboard architecture (BIOS/ Northbridge/Southbridge etc.) or to another workstation architecture using OpenFirmware etc.
Possible: Yes.
Easily Achieved: No
Possible by someone other then Apple? No
Darwin does not MacOS X make.
One of the features of MacOS 9 has been the ability to encrypt any file via a set of system-level services. A second feature has been the ability to use a "Keychain" service where passwords & other information can be securely stored & automatically retrieved by authorized applications. A third feature has been the ability to use a Voiceprint as a password.
Here are a number of examples of how these features can be used:
- Macs running MacOS 9 and greater support Multiple Users. Thus folks can (or must) log in in order to access their materials. This login can be accomplished via typed password or Voiceprint. Macs with access to an appropriate server can store individual preferences on the server and these can used applied from client Macs as the user logs in.
- In order to encrypt or decrypt a file under MacOS 9 and greater on need simply drag-and-drop the file/folder/drive to the encryption application. This service can also be called from within any application utilizing the cryptographic API's.
- Utilizing the "Keychain" any program can store or retrieve settings, passwords and other secured bits of information. Thus instead of saving one's web-account passwords in an easily read text file they're stored encrypted in a file where explicit authorization must be given for access. The same for the other various servers one might utilize regularly or occasionally - their login information and passwords can be stored under a single master-password and applied at need.
Now, lots of folks are going to start reading this and trying to imagine lots of ways they could break this, the possible downsides, etc. Yes, it's not completely foolproof. On the other hand it's a lot better then many other OS's offer, particularly when you realize it's widely supported throughout the OS and by many (most?) applications. Furthermore it seems fairly well thought out and after being out in the field a bit it seems to be working well.It's good to see Apple is finally documenting the same hooks in MacOS X. Presumably by completely opening the material a better evaluation of the processes can be made and improvements implemented by third parties. Furthermore since it's a standard promulgated by a number of companies all in the security field this has a good chance of being implemented in a wide range of products.
It would also be great if other OS development folks could take this code and use it to compare/contrast their own efforts in this direction and use them to improve themselves, possibly even work towards adopting some common material where the specs are vague.
Finally, before going and making wild-assed assumptions based on how you assume this stuff is implemented or blue-skying on it's possible flaws howzabout investing the 10 minutes and actually getting the facts first, not wasting all of the rest of ours time? This is all Open Source and it's well documented so it's not up to everyone else to teach you: Go read it for yourself.
Fancy public phones with display, card reader, keyboard & such are common fare in US airports, big hotels, convention facilities, etc. Often you'll see a bank of a dozen or so standard public phones with one or two fancy ones at the end, invariably one extra-low for folks in mobile chairs.
The fancy phones seem more of a decorating thing then a regularly used amenity. Indeed aside from using their card-reader to charge calls (which could be done by keypad as well so not a real-big win there) I can't recall ever having used their extra features nor seen anyone else ever use them. Perhaps they'll be more popular with the web-browser since kiosks for this are also quite common in the same environments, including browser-kiosks from AT&T.
However back to vandalism no, these phones don't sem to suffer unduly. Of course they're usually in fairly secure places where vandals would be quickly noticed & apprehended. Like I said: Airports, hotels, convention centers - not out on some dark stretch of rural highway or even a suburban bus-stop. Furthermore they're fairly rugged already, I can't imagine any casual attempts to damage them would succeed (perhaps chewing gum in the data-port.)
Just to keep on informing-the-folks theme many Canadian phones already have built in card-readers and 20-character/2-line displays; here's a link to Bell Canada's standard payphone.
Indeed the only thing I see new/different about the "2000i is the LCD instead of CRT & opening up it's browsing capability. While that's nice I don't see it being particularly different from the already ubiquitious web-browser kiosks already out there, including the ones from AT&T.
Frankly the most interesting thing about this might be it's IR port. While the "Infra-Red Port" is listed in phone diagram it's not in the specs. If the phone is able to look like a standard device to cellphones/laptops/palmtops then it might be very interesting indeed.
As to the folks whining about potential durabilty issues & such - have you really never seen one of these, never walked by the phone-bank at an airport, convention center, hotel, etc. where there's usually 1 or 2 of this phone's kin at the end of the bank? Take a look the phone's spec-page where it notes it's previous 2000-sans-i incarnation. These aren't new phones & AT&T knows a bit about building rugged hardware - trust me these will hold up to most general abuse & aren't stuck out by the side of the road anyway.
Liquid Nitrogen is used in LOTS of processes and has a well established production infrasructure. Indeed if you were to call a local distributer you'd find they likely deliver to most of the research, manufacturing & medical facilities around you; those they don't likely have on-site production.
If liquid-Nitrogen cooling cables takes off you'll likely see sales of modular production facilities increase but I doubt the overall economics will change: This is pretty basic & well established stuff.
Indeed if one had to dump something in the atmosphere this would be most folks #1 choice followed by pure water.
The biggest danger would be freezing something important like a bodypart from extended immersion. However since liquid Nitrogen behaves like most liguids and doesn't do anything funny it's not hard to understand/predict & it does evaporate easily.
Well, none unless one wants to remove many of the more arcane constraints of MBR. Frankly everyone who knows anything about drives and layouts agrees MBR was obsolete over a decade ago and should been retired back then.
Furthermore for most users this won't be a big deal, certianly not for Jane-hobbyist. If you actually bothered to do a bit of research you'll discover that this implementation is fairly backwards-amendable except for some high-end configurations where it's unlikely to be an issue anyhow.
Finally, hard drives retail for ~US$100/20GB, anyone installing XP is likely to be able to pony up the cash. This change won't affect ye olde 486s.
By your logic is any hardware advancement possible or shall the industry remain forever stuck in 1980's technology? At least Apple moved to OpenFirmware along with the rest of the workstation market or is that somehow part of an evil plot too? Ahh, so it's not StUdLy enough for yeah, huh? Luckly you'll be able to change the chrome to a camoflauge background and Matrix-themes to assauge your offended aesthetics. Debunked. Yeah, patching things Baaaaadddd... right. Doi! The market gets what it buys. IS Depts & consumers continue to buy on sizzle & psuedo-feature sets then MS will continue selling it to them. It built a megacompany so they're doing something right.Summarized it details a wireless tablet PC that can stream audio & video from a "base station". Who wants to bet that these are two halves of a whole? The next step will be Sony TV's that can also have wireless capability and can display video from the base station.
Suddenly you'd have a PC/TV/DVR/Music system that would work on your desktop, in the livingroom with the whole family, or in your lap out on the back deck, all wireless & all from a name-brand consumer electronics company.
I'm sorry but your avoidence strategy seems half-baked. Last I checked Z-Rays weren't radiating from my TV set into my brain, or at least not any more then leak from the text megapublishers.
Yeah, 99% of all good stories are in books - not.
You somehow feeling smug? Guess what - there's some good stuff on TV too.
Films. News broadcasts. Drama. Comedy. Current events. I don't know what things are like where you are but I enjoy my Discovery Channel programs, CBC's "Counterspin", "The Passionate Eye", PBS's "Charlie Rose", not to mention Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" the other night. Plus my sweetie laughs himself silly at "Allie McBeal".
Books are a great thing, I've got two rooms full of 'em & loved reading most of them. However they're not the only medium. TV, film, live performance, all have their strengths and all have their jewels.
Media-bigot is as inane as OS bigot.
Most folks, all things being equal, will purchase the unfettered product.
The way manufactures, content folks etc. prevent this is by getting laws set preventing non-encrypted hardware. This is the case with DAT, DVD, etc.
However this is not yet the case with television and isn't likely to be. The public is getting wise to these tricks and lawmakers are starting to clue into the changing attitudes.
Furthermore this isn't putting limits on a new technology but attempting to reign in an existing one.
US Congress-critters are getting tired of feeling like TV's-patsies giving away spectrum and receiving nothing in return, no HDTV, no additional services. To now attempt to require content-protection on TV sets, that ain't gonna fly.
This hits Joe Sixpack in the couch with his remote in hand & as powerful as the lobbyist's are they don't match a nation of TV junkies.
Don't expect to see this sort of law get passed easily; it's too easy to make a cause cellebre against. It'll be an uphill battle & a very highly publicized one. I for one don't think it'll make it.
Without a law the model breaks down. Gonna buy a new TV set with all the new features? Manufacturers will quickly discover that the models with content-protection don't sell and those without do.
Are TV manufacturers in the business of protecting IP (except for Sony?) No - they just want to sell as many boxes as possible and don't have any stake what you do with 'em.
Short term: Companies will try to get away with anything they can. The long-term: In this case they probably won't but it'll be a fight. In the meantime get ready to write your own Congress-critters & tell them how you expect them to go on this issue.
Rubella, Whooping Cough, Smallpox, Typhus, Meningitis, Scarlet Fever, Tetanus, Syphilis, Polio, Pneumonia, Diarrhea, Fever and a 1001 other maladies both major & minor are now generally non-fatal and of little concern to most of us.
Whether this is due to mass-vaccination, individual vaccination, palliative care or direct remediation isn't the issue and to argue is only playing inane semantic games: The point is that they're no longer nearly the danger they were in the 1940's.
Common infections we treat routinely and without thought today were deadly dangerous then. Take a look at the survival rates from those years after surgery due to infection - daunting indeed. Fevers were to be feared, diarrhea was life-threatening.
Today the only thing comparable in the first world would be HIV/AIDS. Ebola and other exotics remain that. In the past a pandemic would sweep the world every generation or so killing some percentage of the human population: We haven't suffered one in three generations now.
I think the real proof is that folks are left quibbling over colds & flues and not recounting deaths in their immediate families. We're the first generation not to have first hand knowledge of a pandemic; for the folks of the 1940's (from where this article was written) epidemics & pandemics were a real and immediate threat. To them the quarantine sign was something they were terribly familiar with.
Hits:
Misses:
Biggest miss?
Documentation folks are used to a different work-flow model. Traditionially there are copy writers, graphic artists, layout folks, and layers of editors. Their workflow is folders, or in the computer-age their representation, directories.
They're analogous models but there are differences. In writing & graphics the latest version is not always the best. Content, as you've learned, can come from many sources and in different formats. Materials are used & reused in bewildering permutations. While automaton systems exist (and are at least as sophisticated as CVSs) they require much more customization.
Frankly you're the wrong person for the job.
While you may have been great at organizing materials and workflow in your field you're now outside of it. It's a different culture (albiet possibly dysfunctionial in this case) and for you it's terra incognita. The tools are different, the processes are different, the constraints are different, the end products are different.
The best strategy would be to bring in someone knowledgable in documentation to evaluate the current staff & systems and make some suggestions, possibly implement them. If things have gotten to be "a complete mess" then there's undoubtably a number of problems and deus ex machina won't fix them.
The problem could well be poor organization. It could as well be unqualified staff, understaffing, poor management, lack of support from other parts of the company, bad technology choices, etc.
You're not really qualified to judge any of these, good as you may be in your area and in spite of the general problem-solving and management skills you might have. It's as if one of these folks were asked to come in and help shape things up when the R&D folks are late writing a release.
Indeed if it were me (and I've been invited to undertake similar projects in my career) I'd decline this "opportunity". What you're being asked to do has nothing to do with your competencies. Indeed if the only point is congruence is familiarity with CVS then the bosses would be better suited - they do more general writing and live more in the world of memos & Powerpoint slides.
You were hired to code. Presumably you're good at that. You weren't hired to analyze business processes, research & specify documentation automation systems nor to implement them. Finally, if you do this you'll be the guy for this in the future, any issues regarding it will end up on your desk from now on. Is that where you want your job to go?
Thus Apple is recognizing that the folks running MacOS X right now aren't the the usual it-came-in-it crowd. These folks have gone out and paid US$120 for Mac OS X and installed it before any "business case" could be made.
In reponse Apple is serving these early-adopters by releasing everything as it is developed. These folks want the very-latest & greatest, paid for it, and Apple will give them what they want; at least until the rest of their market begins to catch up.
What's been put out so far? Really nothing more then re-incorporating some material from the beta releases that weren't cleared in time for the Golden Master. A few bug-fixes, a minor update or two bringing things like MacOS X iTunes up to par with it's MacOS 9 cousin.
The important thing to realize is that these are 10.0n patches, minor minor things. For Wintel folks they'd be the little items that appear on the Windows Update pages or hidden in MS's tech bulletins. For *nix folks they're the little stuff that gets updated every week.
All of these are available to MacOS folks using the built-in Software Update service. Indeed different sets of updates are available to both the MacOS X & MacOS X folks at about comparable frequency.
The update service can be set to run on various simple schedules (days of week & time) as either prompted or unprompted installs. Of course it can also be run manually whenever the user wants to or not set and not used.
Presumably in July when Apple holds it's big rollout of installed MacOS X the frequency of updates will begin to slow. At that time most folks are hoping Apple's work on an updated packaging system will be ready to implement and as part of it a more sophisticated update service will be used.
As part of a next-gen update service some sort of major/minor change hierarchy is expected to be implemented as well as opening the updates to non-Apple packages (currently these have been mostly second-tiered to Apple's free-to-Mac's iDisk service.)
All of this will likely appear as part of the rumored MacOS 10.5 for the installed release. This will also coincide with a predicted across-the-board hardware refresh and at that time Apple will presumably begin their big MacOS X advertising push (notably quiet so far.)
So, back to the original question - is Apple releasing too many minor patches too often? Probably not considering who the MacOS X user base is right now and what they're likely looking for. Come July this will all begin to change and presumably then so will Apple's update-system.
Ironically the USA didn't recognize other countries copyrights & patents for many years, much like 3rd world countries are doing today.
Isn't history annoying, always resisting attempts to mythologize it with awkward little facts?
I'm well aware of Boston's "Big Dig" Central Artery / Tunnel Project - I lived in Boston for many years & still contract there.
The $14 Billion of the "Big Dig" wouldn't cover the development & deployment of the spacecraft required much less their operation or the actual construction of the Space Elevator.
Good to see the old towne hasn't become any less provincial.
Somehow I find that a very daunting list of requirements.
I'm not knocking the NEO idea, I'm just pointing out it's not a slam-dunk of a solution.
Please no one glibly answer "nanotechnology". Even if we could build the basic parts required there are still the command, control, and power-requirements of a nanotechnology-solution that promise to be at least as difficult as building the darn things. Answering "by clicking our heels together 3 times" would be as honest an answer at this point.
Space Elevators work by orbiting synchronously with the Earth. Indeed due to their stationary nature they're often referred to as "beanstalks" (Jack and the...) There are other designs where they instead act as a giant rotating spar slicing down through the atmosphere and back up again but the most popular is where they're tethered (anchored is probably too strong a word) somewhere on or near the Earth's equator.
Many designs truncate the outer-end of the cable, instead substituting some sort of counterweight such a captured asteroid. For vertical transport sealed cabins would be used for passengers, unsealed would do for hardy cargo. The technologies wouldn't be very exotic, indeed they could be built today by anyway halfway competent Jr. Technical School.
Most designs have the cabins ascend & descend using electric motors (none using winches & cables found in the more traditionial elevators.) The motors themselves needn't be anything special, anything that can lift the cabin in 1G would do fine. Another alternative would be some sort of magnetic drive, Lawrence Livermore's Inductrak being one good candidate.
Power requirements would be fairly modest & using the electric motors as electrical generators on the down trip could recover much of the power used. A single large power station would be enough with today's technologies, or possibly several solar satellites using future technology.
However there are a couple of fundamental problems that are evident even from this far away.
- Carbon nanotubes have thus far only been created in very short lengths. Scaling them up hasn't been achieved yet.
- There isn't a good mechanism for bonding, braiding, or otherwise welding together the nanotubes.
- The mechanical, electrical & chemical properties of the tubes are still being studied. They may prove to be unsuitable for this application.
- Carbon is flammable, be it as lumps of coal or as diamonds or as nanotubes.
- However recently other materials then carbon have been formed into nanotubes so it may not be the only choice.
- We don't have a way to get the construction materials into orbit from where to begin building. An expansion of space shipping by several orders of magnitude for an extended period of time would be required to ferry up an elevator's components from the planetary surface.
- As others have pointed out the dangers of a disrupted elevator would be significant, indeed catastrophic.
- The financial investment in such a project would dwarf all other civil engineering to date. While the payoffs could well be incredible the risk would be great & the markets unproven.
Space Elevators may well indeed prove in the long term the best way to get between orbit & a planetary surface. However they're a way off in terms of materials alone not to mention finances & other practicalities. Even if we were to develop a magic fiber tomorrow with all of the necessary properties it would be several decades before we'd be in a position to use it. That said it's never too soon to start laying the groundwork.I purposely didn't look up & embed URLs into this: Clearly you're already online if you're reading this so paste the interesting bits into your favorite search engine and look up the nouns yourself.
First find out more about your potential competition. Call them up and ask for a technology description. Use local newsgroups & find some talky techies, get more detail. Possibly pose as a customer with detailed needs, get more information (be careful here - this could be a legal problem that would come back & bite you.) Now find a couple more similar ISPs around and discover what they use, how they charge, etc. Try & determine how healthy they are.
Details you'll be wanting are the technical specs but also how many customers do they have, what do they charge residential customers, what do they charge commercial customers, how many of each type of customer do they have, exactly what services do they offer, etc.
Now look at their upstream suppliers. Who are these companies using for upstream feeds? What is it costing them? What services are available? Try & determine if there are non-compete clauses in place.
Next familiarize yourself with the local applicable telecom laws. What rules govern the ISPs? What rules govern the phone companies you'll be working with?
Finally what are the conditions of the local infrastructure & economy? Are the phone-lines in such poor shape that disconnects are inevitable? Are there enough customers to support a robust ISP or is so-so service all that makes sense economically?
As many /.'ers will tell you in most parts of the world the PTT's are successfully killing off their competition. Presumably you'll be competing with your own local phone service, offering an alternative to their ISP (assuming they have one.) Do you think you'll be able to work with them? Have others been able to work with them?
With all of the groundwork in place consider if you can take on the job, or at least catalyze it / make a profit somehow.
Are you competent to start or run an ISP? Do you have access to folks who would be interested in going in with you, helping flesh out the plans into a working set of papers and if you were to somehow set up shop could / would they take positions in it? Can you develop & pitch a business plan? What would make investors likely to give you money, help you get started?
Finally once you've got all of the numbers in place will it be possible to make a profit or would you be better off spending your time on something else? Will you be able to put together the capitol, the technology, the support, the services, the advertising, the billing, the relationships in order to make this fly? Do you have what all of this takes?
Frankly I think the days of the Mom 'n pop ISP are over, muscled out by bigger companies with more capital, advantages of scale & connections.
Where I do see smaller ISP's making a comeback is in boutique-ISPs where specialized services are offered & overhead is kept low by expecting the customers to be technically proficient & help themselves. These geek-only services are often low-key & word-of-mouth deals run as a sideline by some enterprising local geeks. Things they offer are lots of access to some good webservers, gamer-services, IRC servers, newsfeeds, etc. These seem to make a reasonable profit but are self-limiting, probably won't support anyone directly.
Aside from that the big boys seem able to starve or crush their competition with often the issue coming down to which one hates less - the cable company or the phone company? In rural areas it comes down to the phone company or the satellite company but either way it's two giants.
There is no wire protruding out of a person's body, all communication is done via a small radio transmitter/reciever and a dedicated piece of hardware (though doubtless this could be duplicated on a PC.)
The pacemaker would presumably report in a two-stage process. Either a dedicated-purpose device or a reciever/transmitter (possibly connected serially/USB) would use a coded signal to cue the pacemaker to broadcast it's logs. These would be recorded on the dedicated device or a home PC and then transmitted online to the central site.
There the records (I'm guessing here) could be analyzed for warnnig signs, dangerous trends, etc. Likely if they exceed some threshold a flag will be set and a specialist will review the information.
I can't imagine any scenario where the pace-maker would ever transmit directly to an online site; there simply isn't the power available for that sort of direct telemetry. Therefore no sort of direct atttack, DOS or otherwise would be possible.
On the outside chance that remote reprogramming of the pacemaker were allowed I would be concerned, and of course there should be concerns over the security of one's uploaded logs, but from what's reported the whole situation seems very safe if possibly not entirely private.
Frankly I think you would do well to invest the 5 minutes to do a search, read a pacemaker FAQ & answer the rest of your own questions on your own.
Frankly I'd not approach it from "I like Linux how can we use it" direction but rather from "What are my researchers comfortable with and how can I support that?" As you noted this is about collaboration; you're going to need to interoperate with a large number of systems not under your control.
With that in mind your goal is likely to be platform independence, not Linux-specific solutions. Standard protocols, not specific "solutions".
As part of that you'll presumably want a system that supports both pen-based graphics (the classic "scribbled on a napkin") as well as more structured mathematical layout (as used by TeX, MathML or Mathematica.) Really you'll need whatever folks express themselves most easily in. For voice the telephone is universal & standardized, video has a number of reasonable standards with some degree of interoperability.
Personally I'd invest in a good computing infrastructure, encourage the researchers to network with their peers & discover solutions that suit them, or failing that undertake to write/sponsor an open tool that would facilitate the collaboration you're looking for.
Whatever the case I'd wait until I was in place, see what's being used now, how effective it is and what directions present themselves. Your user base is likely to have some strong opinions and presumably has some experience with what works for them and what doesn't.
(f it were up to me I'd look into some sort of Wiki system that supports mathematical notation - hit a search engines for details, here's one hit: http://allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Math_symbols. That & again, good telephones.)
Frankly stable addresses are a great thing, too often they turn over, become difficult to track, etc.
Since most degree-granting instutions are more stable them most dotcoms this is an appreciated service. In return for the occasionial spam from the school one gets a stable address.
The accounts aren't forced on anyone, they're a voluntary sign up folks are free to take advantage of. They're usually not real accounts either but rather fowarding services, thus there's no storage-space or connectivity issues.
Send mail to bubba@alum.beerdrinker.edu and it'll automagically get redirected to beerswiller@hotmail.com. Should Bubba decide to change to AOL our hypothetical graduate need only update the service at alum.beerdrinker.edu in order to get all of his email now forwarded to idrinkspud@aol.com, no need to mass-email all of his drinking buddies.
Once the email is forwarded one is of course free to treat it as any other email: filter-to-death, file-and-ignore, whatever. want to kill it completely? Then just cancel the service or redirect it to a dead account.
ps Other places offer like services, off the top of my head I can think of the Association for Computing Machinery & bigfoot.com. One is presumably around for the long-term, the other, well we'll see how their business model works out...