I called Representative Blumenauer's phone number and talked with Mr. Willy
Smith there. I didn't know that members of Congress cannot be recalled.
Apparently no one in Rep. Blumenauer's office has any technical
knowledge whatsoever. That's what Willy Smith told me. Apparently no one in
that office realizes that their complete ignorance could possibly be a
concern.
Mr. Smith told me, "Representative Blumenauer has never done heart
surgery. Does that mean he cannot introduce health care legislation?"
First, Representative Blumenauer knows a lot about heart surgery if he has
read news reports over the last 20 years. He knows, for example, that heart
surgery often fails. He knows the sociology of heart surgery because he has
heard his friends and family talk about it.
Second, yes, if he doesn't thoroughly understand something, he should
not make expensive proposals about it, especially since it seems that no one
in his office wants to learn. Certainly that is the impression I got from Mr.
Smith. Although we had a friendly, respectful conversation, nothing I said
seemed to make any difference to him.
Wi-Fi and RFID are entirely voluntary technologies. They depend for
their operation on the idea that the users want the technology to work. When
the GPS on a United Parcel Service delivery truck fails, the central office
can call the driver on his cell phone. The driver will be happy to say where
he is. Failures are unfortunate, but soft and friendly.
Tracking the location of every car is NOT a voluntary use. Any
failure or accidental interference would be a reason for a court case.
Mr. Smith told me that many people say very negative things about
legislation introduced by Representative Blumenauer and other senators and
representatives. So, why should he listen to me, he implied. Good point.
People are, at present, saying very negative things about President
Obama's health care bill. Generally what they say is poorly expressed. But
certainly they have some reason for complaint. President Obama is trying to
accomplish something in a way that is socially impossible. Hillary Clinton tried
another confused bill, and her ideas were rejected, also. However, although many people don't like the health care bill, no one seems to think that President Obama intends to profit personally.
One of the problems with Representative Blumenauer's actions
concerning the 2009 H.R. 3311 bill is that, to a lot of knowledgeable people, they
look like criminal fraud. He has taken money from companies that sell GPS
technology. He is proposing that those companies get a huge amount of taxpayer
money, for a study. That means that the companies can spend taxpayer
money, but they don't have to produce anything useful. Maybe a study could
cost $100,000. But $145 MILLION? For something that any technically
knowledgeable person knows immediately cannot work well? That looks like
criminal behavior.
Can Representative Blumenauer be ignorant of the fact that people
don't want to be tracked everywhere they drive? Certainly, people think, he cannot
be that ignorant. Therefore, they think, when he completely ignores the issue of privacy,
he must understand what he's doing.
"They'd never be that dishonest, money-grubbing, or plain ol' stupid."
Hacked GPS: "All this year, driving in Costa Rica, where there are no U.S. taxes."
Government to a grandmother with an old car, worth less than the failing GPS: "I see you've been driving on a restricted military reservation. You will go to jail. And what's this about you driving in Borneo?"
Fraud Alert: This is my best understanding. This is a new part of a very old effort. I remember protesting it many years ago.
There is some company in Oregon that expects to sell the equipment that would track miles. Quote from the article: "Honeywell International, for example, is a major manufacturer RFID equipment. The company also happens to be the second biggest contributor in the current cycle to Blumenauer's Political Action Committee..."
The mileage-tracking would download data remotely, using the same radio wave band used by wi-fi, or close. Every car would have the new equipment. A little aluminum foil over your car's antenna would stop the functioning of the system.
Quote from the article referenced by Slashdot: "... the report urged a mandate for all drivers to install GPS tracking devices that would report driving habits to roadside Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) scanning devices." How long would it be until a hacker reported that his vehicle was in Canada? Maybe, "Oh, yes, yesterday I was driving in the Kamchatka peninsula, after a long trip around the moon."
The biggest problem is that even the study would be extremely expensive for taxpayers ("... $154,500,000 for research and study into the transition to a per-mile vehicle tax system...") The second biggest problem is that buying the equipment would make Blumenauer's friends rich and taxpayers poor. The third problem is that it wouldn't work. There would be many, many failures in the equipment.
If that is true, it is fraud, an attempt to profit by using government power to do something bad for everyone, and US Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) should be recalled as soon as possible, and barred from ever again participating in politics.
Often the actions of the U.S. government seem shockingly corrupt.
Someone would get the money, "$154,500,000 for research and study", even if no working system were produced.
You said, "No one else comes close to their [Sun]
throughput/watt..." Could you supply some evidence of that?
You said, "Consider the I^2R loss in the cables between PCs,..." The resistive loss is trivial, because the current is very small.
You said, "... consider the heat generated by 1000 power
supplies..." Google does not use separate power supplies for each
computer. Also, the power supply loss is the same, per watt of delivered
power. Sun and Google both have highly efficient power supplies.
You said, "... you have thousands of CPUs idling hot while they're
waiting for I/O." Can you supply some evidence that Google's idling
performance is worse than Sun's? I can see no obvious reason for that. I
suppose Google puts computers in standby during periods of low use.
Yes, but that makes everyone do the work, not just one person, and in this case, it takes a considerable amount of reading to realize who is the originator.
You missed the point. Opening and closing tabs and windows reliably demonstrates the problems in Firefox. Those problems cause a variety of symptoms. Event handling problems should be fixed, even if they don't cause problems for most users. Users have consistently reported those problems for more than 8 years!
People who do a lot of research about products to buy, like myself, often cannot make decisions in one session. We like to keep numerous windows and tabs open until we can resolve all the issues. That makes Firefox crash.
Some people use browsers much more heavily than others.
That doesn't make sense. IE had had a long, long, long list of very serious vulnerabilities. Literally billions of dollars have been lost because of sloppy coding in past versions of IE.
The results about memory use were nonsense, as now mentioned in a revised
version of the article.
Also, Firefox has bugs in its event handling, apparently. If you open
a large number of Window and tabs, and keep opening and closing tabs over a
period of hours, eventually Firefox will crash. Firefox has had that problem
for many years.
Firefox also apparently has problems with its cache handling,
apparently. For example, here is a comment to the Lifehacker.com story
referenced in the Slashdot summary:
"Firefox 3.5 seems to get slower for me over time. It was really
crawling the other day so I got the latest chrome and it seems blazing fast.
"I'll have to try some of the tricks to clean up FF. I'm sad to see it
falling behind in speed because I like so many FF features."
If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm
guessing that people will abandon Firefox. There seems to be no hope that
Mozilla Foundation will ever be managed well.
(I like seeing ads, I just don't like flashing, moving ads.
"Marketing" people are amazingly ignorant, in my experience; they often don't
realize that annoying people is not a good way to get customers.)
Another story: Men were given a huge meal of food they love. After eating, they did less well on tests.
Even more: Men were subjected to adversarial behavior from women who were being seductive, but had no interest in the men. The men responded with confusion, and later did less well on tests.
"I think that they will find many of them have the same sets of mutations. The reason is that I believe that many of these mutations are from virus[es], not from random mutations."
That would be an interesting direction of investigation.
Quote from the press release:"Fortunately, most of these [mutations] are harmless and have no apparent effect on our health or appearance." They don't know that. That is ENTIRELY speculation.
I'm guessing that dogs are expensive, compared to using machines. Dogs need human handlers, and continuous care.
One of the ideas is to check millions of people routinely. Machines could be available in grocery stores, for example. At present both dogs and machines are too expensive for routine checks, however.
P.R. Alert: This Slashdot story is a public relations release. The misleading Slashdot summary says, "Other sources have picked up the story...". In reality, they are inserting press releases everywhere they can, and the kind of work being done is not new.
It was proven long ago that dogs can smell chemicals associated with cancer. For example, see this 2006 article in National Geographic News, Dogs Smell Cancer in Patients' Breath, Study Shows. That's part of what started the present interest in making a machine to detect cancer.
This February 2007 article is more interesting: Compact lung-cancer breath test may be possible. Quote: "The test uses 36 chemical dots that react to telltale compounds in a person's breath. The dots change colour when exposed to compounds that signify the presence of lung cancer."
Even Oprah's magazine had article in June 2009 about dogs sniffing cancer and making machines to imitate dogs: Sniffing Out Cancer. Quote: "The researchers are collaborating with scientists at the University of Maine, who are trying to mimic the dogs' cancer-sniffing abilities with laboratory machines." Another quote: "So far, the Pine Street Foundation dogs have done 25,000 scent trials for ovarian cancer."
Slashdot: Not quite as current as Oprah? Old news for nerds who were playing video games and wouldn't know the difference?
Many researchers are doing similar work. For example, see the February 2008 article, The Cancer Breathalyzer. Quote: "Dr Yousef... believes that the breath test will provide a more convenient and rapid method for diagnosing serious diseases than blood or urine analysis, and will require minimal medical intervention."
"What the hell is going on at the Oracle website, for example?"
Here is a guess: The technically knowledgeable people are paid to develop products. Management considers them too expensive to document what they do.
Instead, Oracle management hires marketing people to supervise the development of the web site and documentation. The marketing people have no interest in technology -- none. They are bored with their jobs. They secretly think that technically knowledgeable people are inferior. They do, however, learn some buzz-words so that they can pretend that they understand.
The marketing people don't believe technical communication is important. They have seen numerous examples of people being able to use Oracle products even though the documentation is poor. The web site and product manuals are either almost useless or written for people who already understand the products. Editing for clarity is very limited.
The writers are hired as consultants. When a writer doesn't understand something, he or she just doesn't document it, or gives a limited explanation.
Quote (Title): "Get Maximum Performance With ROI of 100%" Translation: Meaningless.
Quote (First sentence): "Oracle provides an integrated management solution for managing Oracle database with a unique top-down application management approach." Translation: Meaningless. A "management solution for managing a management approach"? But... It's "integrated"! And, notice the grammatical error. It should be "managing Oracle databases".
When I see trash like that I feel sad. I sometimes think I should contact the board of directors and ask to be CEO, so that the company will have adult supervision. I'm being sarcastic, but I really do feel genuinely sad about corporate self-defeat.
More sarcasm: Will the combination of Oracle and Sun be called "Snoracle"?
Seriously: Will PostgreSQL eventually be the world's most popular database software? To me, those two quotes from the Oracle web site are a very effective ad for PostgreSQL.
Another reason most open-source projects get no press is that they are very poorly communicated in every way. An example is LaTeX. It requires two paragraphs in the Wikipedia article to explain just the name.
Another example is GIMP. One of the meanings of gimp is "cripple".
Another example is UltraVNC. UltraVNC is excellent. The UltraVNC web site is a mess.
The open source experience is often "It's free, but you must spend a very frustrating week learning how to use it." Those who write for publication don't have a week to understand a project, and they don't want to write about something that would frustrate their readers.
If Oracle does not want Sun hardware, what Sun software does Oracle want?
My theory about why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the
last few years is that the highly reliable hardware Sun
Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use
consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant. The excellent
2008 book Planet Google describes Google's experiences on page 54:
"For about $278,000 in 2003, [Google] could assemble a rack with 176
microprocessors, 176 gigabytes of memory, and 7 terabytes of disk space. This
compared favorably to a $758,000 server sold by the manufacturer of a
well-known brand, which had only eight multiprocessors, one-third the memory,
and about the same amount of disk space."
It's true that Sun hardware is more reliable than consumer-grade hardware. However, neither are completely reliable. Both require fault-tolerant software. Also, consumer-grade hardware has become very reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny.
I called Representative Blumenauer's phone number and talked with Mr. Willy Smith there. I didn't know that members of Congress cannot be recalled.
Apparently no one in Rep. Blumenauer's office has any technical knowledge whatsoever. That's what Willy Smith told me. Apparently no one in that office realizes that their complete ignorance could possibly be a concern.
Mr. Smith told me, "Representative Blumenauer has never done heart surgery. Does that mean he cannot introduce health care legislation?" First, Representative Blumenauer knows a lot about heart surgery if he has read news reports over the last 20 years. He knows, for example, that heart surgery often fails. He knows the sociology of heart surgery because he has heard his friends and family talk about it.
Second, yes, if he doesn't thoroughly understand something, he should not make expensive proposals about it, especially since it seems that no one in his office wants to learn. Certainly that is the impression I got from Mr. Smith. Although we had a friendly, respectful conversation, nothing I said seemed to make any difference to him.
Wi-Fi and RFID are entirely voluntary technologies. They depend for their operation on the idea that the users want the technology to work. When the GPS on a United Parcel Service delivery truck fails, the central office can call the driver on his cell phone. The driver will be happy to say where he is. Failures are unfortunate, but soft and friendly.
Tracking the location of every car is NOT a voluntary use. Any failure or accidental interference would be a reason for a court case.
Mr. Smith told me that many people say very negative things about legislation introduced by Representative Blumenauer and other senators and representatives. So, why should he listen to me, he implied. Good point.
People are, at present, saying very negative things about President Obama's health care bill. Generally what they say is poorly expressed. But certainly they have some reason for complaint. President Obama is trying to accomplish something in a way that is socially impossible. Hillary Clinton tried another confused bill, and her ideas were rejected, also. However, although many people don't like the health care bill, no one seems to think that President Obama intends to profit personally.
One of the problems with Representative Blumenauer's actions concerning the 2009 H.R. 3311 bill is that, to a lot of knowledgeable people, they look like criminal fraud. He has taken money from companies that sell GPS technology. He is proposing that those companies get a huge amount of taxpayer money, for a study. That means that the companies can spend taxpayer money, but they don't have to produce anything useful. Maybe a study could cost $100,000. But $145 MILLION? For something that any technically knowledgeable person knows immediately cannot work well? That looks like criminal behavior.
Can Representative Blumenauer be ignorant of the fact that people don't want to be tracked everywhere they drive? Certainly, people think, he cannot be that ignorant. Therefore, they think, when he completely ignores the issue of privacy, he must understand what he's doing.
For those who want to protest, Representative Blumenauer's phone number is (503) 231-2300. Anyone can protest, but this is Blumenauer's district.
More about the bill: H.R. 3311.
Blog coverage: OpenCongress.
More coverage: H.R. 3311 is an oxymoron.
"They'd never be that dishonest, money-grubbing, or plain ol' stupid."
Hacked GPS: "All this year, driving in Costa Rica, where there are no U.S. taxes."
Government to a grandmother with an old car, worth less than the failing GPS: "I see you've been driving on a restricted military reservation. You will go to jail. And what's this about you driving in Borneo?"
MOD PARENT UP, not down.
Fraud Alert: This is my best understanding. This is a new part of a very old effort. I remember protesting it many years ago.
There is some company in Oregon that expects to sell the equipment that would track miles. Quote from the article: "Honeywell International, for example, is a major manufacturer RFID equipment. The company also happens to be the second biggest contributor in the current cycle to Blumenauer's Political Action Committee..."
The mileage-tracking would download data remotely, using the same radio wave band used by wi-fi, or close. Every car would have the new equipment. A little aluminum foil over your car's antenna would stop the functioning of the system.
Quote from the article referenced by Slashdot: "... the report urged a mandate for all drivers to install GPS tracking devices that would report driving habits to roadside Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) scanning devices." How long would it be until a hacker reported that his vehicle was in Canada? Maybe, "Oh, yes, yesterday I was driving in the Kamchatka peninsula, after a long trip around the moon."
The biggest problem is that even the study would be extremely expensive for taxpayers ("... $154,500,000 for research and study into the transition to a per-mile vehicle tax system...") The second biggest problem is that buying the equipment would make Blumenauer's friends rich and taxpayers poor. The third problem is that it wouldn't work. There would be many, many failures in the equipment.
If that is true, it is fraud, an attempt to profit by using government power to do something bad for everyone, and US Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) should be recalled as soon as possible, and barred from ever again participating in politics.
Often the actions of the U.S. government seem shockingly corrupt.
Someone would get the money, "$154,500,000 for research and study", even if no working system were produced.
Thank you for your response.
..." The resistive loss is trivial, because the current is very small.
You said, "No one else comes close to their [Sun] throughput/watt..." Could you supply some evidence of that?
You said, "Consider the I^2R loss in the cables between PCs,
You said, "... consider the heat generated by 1000 power supplies..." Google does not use separate power supplies for each computer. Also, the power supply loss is the same, per watt of delivered power. Sun and Google both have highly efficient power supplies.
You said, "... you have thousands of CPUs idling hot while they're waiting for I/O." Can you supply some evidence that Google's idling performance is worse than Sun's? I can see no obvious reason for that. I suppose Google puts computers in standby during periods of low use.
Yes, but that makes everyone do the work, not just one person, and in this case, it takes a considerable amount of reading to realize who is the originator.
Skrommel ZoneSize, do a text search of the page.
Who makes ZoneSize? Link?
Change of subject: This is the REAL link, apparently.
Yes, but annoying an entire category of customers, a category that has plenty of money, is not good marketing.
The flashing tries to substitute for real creativity in designing the ads. There is a way to have a broader appeal.
You missed the point. Opening and closing tabs and windows reliably demonstrates the problems in Firefox. Those problems cause a variety of symptoms. Event handling problems should be fixed, even if they don't cause problems for most users. Users have consistently reported those problems for more than 8 years!
People who do a lot of research about products to buy, like myself, often cannot make decisions in one session. We like to keep numerous windows and tabs open until we can resolve all the issues. That makes Firefox crash.
Some people use browsers much more heavily than others.
That doesn't make sense. IE had had a long, long, long list of very serious vulnerabilities. Literally billions of dollars have been lost because of sloppy coding in past versions of IE.
The results about memory use were nonsense, as now mentioned in a revised version of the article.
Also, Firefox has bugs in its event handling, apparently. If you open a large number of Window and tabs, and keep opening and closing tabs over a period of hours, eventually Firefox will crash. Firefox has had that problem for many years.
Firefox also apparently has problems with its cache handling, apparently. For example, here is a comment to the Lifehacker.com story referenced in the Slashdot summary:
"Firefox 3.5 seems to get slower for me over time. It was really crawling the other day so I got the latest chrome and it seems blazing fast.
"I'll have to try some of the tricks to clean up FF. I'm sad to see it falling behind in speed because I like so many FF features."
If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm guessing that people will abandon Firefox. There seems to be no hope that Mozilla Foundation will ever be managed well.
(I like seeing ads, I just don't like flashing, moving ads. "Marketing" people are amazingly ignorant, in my experience; they often don't realize that annoying people is not a good way to get customers.)
Network Console on Acid.
Typical self-defeating open-source project title. *grin*
As you said, when you try to order one, it says, "The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid. "
Very interesting, if it were $30.
CORRECTION: This story is worthless.
Another story: Men were given a huge meal of food they love. After eating, they did less well on tests.
Even more: Men were subjected to adversarial behavior from women who were being seductive, but had no interest in the men. The men responded with confusion, and later did less well on tests.
"I think that they will find many of them have the same sets of mutations. The reason is that I believe that many of these mutations are from virus[es], not from random mutations."
That would be an interesting direction of investigation.
Quote from the press release: "Fortunately, most of these [mutations] are harmless and have no apparent effect on our health or appearance." They don't know that. That is ENTIRELY speculation.
"... modern high-density batteries pack a heckuva lotta energy into a tiny package."
Such batteries should use fuses or circuit breakers. Circuit breakers prevent your house from burning when someone overloads the wall power.
I'm guessing that dogs are expensive, compared to using machines. Dogs need human handlers, and continuous care.
One of the ideas is to check millions of people routinely. Machines could be available in grocery stores, for example. At present both dogs and machines are too expensive for routine checks, however.
P.R. Alert: This Slashdot story is a public relations release. The misleading Slashdot summary says, "Other sources have picked up the story...". In reality, they are inserting press releases everywhere they can, and the kind of work being done is not new.
... believes that the breath test will provide a more convenient and rapid method for diagnosing serious diseases than blood or urine analysis, and will require minimal medical intervention."
It was proven long ago that dogs can smell chemicals associated with cancer. For example, see this 2006 article in National Geographic News, Dogs Smell Cancer in Patients' Breath, Study Shows. That's part of what started the present interest in making a machine to detect cancer.
This February 2007 article is more interesting: Compact lung-cancer breath test may be possible. Quote: "The test uses 36 chemical dots that react to telltale compounds in a person's breath. The dots change colour when exposed to compounds that signify the presence of lung cancer."
This February 2007 article gives more information about how it is done: US Scientists Prototype Breath Test For Lung Cancer
Even Oprah's magazine had article in June 2009 about dogs sniffing cancer and making machines to imitate dogs: Sniffing Out Cancer. Quote: "The researchers are collaborating with scientists at the University of Maine, who are trying to mimic the dogs' cancer-sniffing abilities with laboratory machines." Another quote: "So far, the Pine Street Foundation dogs have done 25,000 scent trials for ovarian cancer."
Slashdot: Not quite as current as Oprah? Old news for nerds who were playing video games and wouldn't know the difference?
Many researchers are doing similar work. For example, see the February 2008 article, The Cancer Breathalyzer. Quote: "Dr Yousef
Other researchers are studying the possibility of using blood tests to detect cancer. See the December 2007 article, Study points to possibility of blood test to detect lung cancer.
Here is a November 2005 research paper that surveys some of the issues of early detection of cancer: The Progress and Promise of Molecular Imaging Probes in Oncologic Drug Development.
"What the hell is going on at the Oracle website, for example?"
Here is a guess: The technically knowledgeable people are paid to develop products. Management considers them too expensive to document what they do.
Instead, Oracle management hires marketing people to supervise the development of the web site and documentation. The marketing people have no interest in technology -- none. They are bored with their jobs. They secretly think that technically knowledgeable people are inferior. They do, however, learn some buzz-words so that they can pretend that they understand.
The marketing people don't believe technical communication is important. They have seen numerous examples of people being able to use Oracle products even though the documentation is poor. The web site and product manuals are either almost useless or written for people who already understand the products. Editing for clarity is very limited.
The writers are hired as consultants. When a writer doesn't understand something, he or she just doesn't document it, or gives a limited explanation.
Oracle web site page chosen completely at random: Oracle Database Management Packs.
Quote (Title): "Get Maximum Performance With ROI of 100%" Translation: Meaningless.
Quote (First sentence): "Oracle provides an integrated management solution for managing Oracle database with a unique top-down application management approach." Translation: Meaningless. A "management solution for managing a management approach"? But... It's "integrated"! And, notice the grammatical error. It should be "managing Oracle databases".
When I see trash like that I feel sad. I sometimes think I should contact the board of directors and ask to be CEO, so that the company will have adult supervision. I'm being sarcastic, but I really do feel genuinely sad about corporate self-defeat.
More sarcasm: Will the combination of Oracle and Sun be called "Snoracle"?
Seriously: Will PostgreSQL eventually be the world's most popular database software? To me, those two quotes from the Oracle web site are a very effective ad for PostgreSQL.
CORRECTION: Should have been UltraVNC.
Another reason most open-source projects get no press is that they are very poorly communicated in every way. An example is LaTeX. It requires two paragraphs in the Wikipedia article to explain just the name.
Another example is GIMP. One of the meanings of gimp is "cripple".
Another example is UltraVNC. UltraVNC is excellent. The UltraVNC web site is a mess.
The open source experience is often "It's free, but you must spend a very frustrating week learning how to use it." Those who write for publication don't have a week to understand a project, and they don't want to write about something that would frustrate their readers.
Where do each excel?
If Oracle does not want Sun hardware, what Sun software does Oracle want?
My theory about why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the last few years is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant. The excellent 2008 book Planet Google describes Google's experiences on page 54: "For about $278,000 in 2003, [Google] could assemble a rack with 176 microprocessors, 176 gigabytes of memory, and 7 terabytes of disk space. This compared favorably to a $758,000 server sold by the manufacturer of a well-known brand, which had only eight multiprocessors, one-third the memory, and about the same amount of disk space."
It's true that Sun hardware is more reliable than consumer-grade hardware. However, neither are completely reliable. Both require fault-tolerant software. Also, consumer-grade hardware has become very reliable.