A traffic monitoring network around all the major UK roads, and a talking SatNav that uses the data to route people around traffic jams as they happen. See here. Yours for around $1200 plus a $230/year subscription at current conversion rates - and it can optionally do speed camera warnings and stolen vehicle tracking too.
Takes an average of 10 minutes to spot a jam with the current coverage (28,000 sensors on 9,000 miles of roads if my memory serves me right).
Over 10 car manufacturers fit this as an optional extra this side of the pond. 30,000 units (in a vehicle population of over 23,000,000) sold to date - still way to go.
Server Share in this part of Europe (UK) is 68% Red Hat, 26% Novell SUSE, 6% others. I've seen other reports that claim 92% Red Hat share based on "commercial" implementations buying subscriptions. The more surprising thing is that if you graph penetration by size of company and by industry, the coverage of "Linux" matches that of Novell Netware within +/- 1% in all dimensions.
But Solaris? Still a long stretch before you can put it into the same "market share" sentence as Windows and Linux. But then you have to start somewhere, and pray that enough people breath your exhaust fumes to raise it to a status of "an alternative". Way to go...
I once chaired a security meeting at a large UK telco, and was seated in a chair with a grandstand view of a device that let people into a very secure area of the building if they allowed it to examine their iris.
Seemed to work impressively until three people showed up at the door, one spied into the iris reader, door opened and the other two just tailgated through.
Nor me. If Solaris really did go open source the way most people understand it, the useful bits of code would find it's way into all the various Linux distributions in pretty short order.
This process failed for me - I got a dependency conflict as the final step was trying to reconcile a couple of Xorg libraries needed to build the GIMP. So, I now have Azureus downloading the CD ISOs - and will burn them later ready to do an "upgrade".
Ian W.
... the supposition I heard a few years back that the EMF generated from a nuclear bomb would knock out the avionics of any US plane in the same theatre? About the only thing left flying would be MiGs apparently - and the USAF don't have (m)any of those in service.
I also remember the latest british anti-aircraft batteries in the Falklands that were deadly to inbound aircraft - but only if they came into range one at a time.
More lives probably got saved by buying the right people off rather than aiming smart bombs at their subordinates. A very low tech solution:-)
Ian W.
No-ones arrived when an ad gets published with one shot in one newspaper; in commercial terms, that's what one very famous, world acclaimed direct marketing expert calls "a bad case of corporate masturbation".
What's the real objective that we're trying to achieve? If you can't afford to repeat, repeat, repeat, then there are probably many more productive things you can do with the money.
That apart, I'm about to send out A2-sized Red Hat configuration deskpads to IT resellers this side of the pond, and have offered free space to put something related to Mozilla on it (given it is part of every Red Hat distribution). So far, no-one can give me anything I can use on it:-(
I'd be delighted to put any Mozilla ad on it if someone could rustle one up - or point me at one I can use.
The reasons ASPs failed before was that the economics depended on selling the same software infrastructure to multiple customers - when in reality everyone wanted it customised to their own individual needs.
That's why most ASP conferences featured ASPs selling heavily to one another, with few or no customers present - they sussed it straight away. It took a market correction to finally rinse most of the vendors out.
Ian W.
If my memory serves me right (having seen where the pointer goes on a map when no GPS signal is arriving in a navigation unit), co-ordinates (0,0) is in the sea south of Nigeria.
Am I the only one thinking "why don't they just put a bridge over the intersection?". Achieves all the goals of the simulation and is more disaster tolerant too...
The IWF blocklist contains material that violates any of 3 categories (see http://www.iwf.org.uk/). Criminal Racism, Content that violates the UK Obscene Publications Act, and pornography depicted with victims under 16. So erect sex organs and racist rants are also in those stats.
So, while I abhor any type of child porn, I also abhor people who throw out sound bites that are unrepresentative of the data provided. Hands up anyone that can say what percentage of the traffic was child related? Thought so...
No....the sites blocked are specifically child porn sites.
They've been seen by the Internet Watch Foundation and classified.
If you go read the web site of the authors of the block list (www.iwf.org.uk), you'll notice that the list also contains sites adjudged to contain content that falls foul of the UK Obscene Publications Act, or contains content adjudged to be criminal racism.
Unless the classifications are segregated (which they don't appear to be), the headline about child porn is just for the tabloids.
One gotcha is that almost all (if not all) bluetooth mobile handsets currently sold in Europe only allow one active bluetooth connection. So, if you're using that bluetooth powered "hands free" kit (a lot of people do), this Fiat/MS thing won't get a look in.
Besides, I thought Fiat had an agreement with Trafficmaster (see www.smartnav.com/demo) to do telematics services in Italy. Now, that would be impressive if they mixed the two; one head start is that the Smartnav Server (that remotely downloads the routes, and plots paths around traffic jams) is already built on Microsoft technology - not just Windows, but MapPoint too.
I had a boss who reckoned "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado" were airport books. I even summarised both books on a single sheet of A4 a few years back (http://www.minsystems.co.uk/download if you want your own copy of the pdf). Every time he asked for one concrete example of someone who'd applied the methodology end-to-end, we couldn't find anyone who had. Email to the Chasm Group also go no response:-(
Of the 5 core developers of the VAX/VMS V1.0 kernel, 2 were female. Nancy Kronenberg and Cathy Morse if my memory serves me right.
Alongside David Cutler, Richard Hustvedt and another Richard that went to Microsoft via Apple (Pink). Oops, maybe 6 developers - Andy Goldstein on the file system.
I'm also a bit surprised that someone who is seriously trying evaluate Linux and get a sound card to work didn't try either Mandrake or Red Hat.
The Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital I stuck in my Fedora FC1 box did work - once i'd worked out how to enable my Gnome-resident speaker icon (editing one line in a system config file) and unticking the "mute" setting after a reboot.
In most other ways (including printing), it's as near to instant pudding as you can get.
Getting Mozilla browser plugins working for Java, Flash and Acrobat take some doing and is currently more difficult than on Windows - but everything seems to be heading in the right direction.
Well, until you try to share that working Linux printer with any Windows XP boxes on the same LAN. I've been at it for three days so far, and I think I need some real help. Looking at Google searches on the same error messages, it looks like i'm far from alone:-}
It was Digital Research's next generation CP/M - called Concurrent CP/M. Allowed 4 different tasks to be run simultaneously, and for the user to hot switch between them (and each task had the full screen real estate while it was running).
It's use in niches like cash tills came much later - after Charlie Chaplin had washed the Rainbow (and lots of other non-IBM PCs) aside.
In fact, there was a 5th screen that just listed the tasks running in the other 4...
Gates demo'd a Windowing system to us at DEC (albeit in Reading, UK) in May 1983 - on the Compaq Plus he carried in. At the time, the car parks at dealers were full of people getting demos of the Apple Lisa, VisiOn and (later) Quarterdeck DesQ.
The first question he asked everyone was when they were going to drop CP/M and use DOS instead.
Meanwhile, the management in LJ02 (Barry James Folsom and co) were happy to wait for CCPM and it's 4 hot-switchable tasks it could run, and largely ignore MS-DOS.
They got back to the instruction Olsen gave them ("to produce a machine to run industry standard software, whatever it was") a bit later. At the time, they thought it would be a Motorola 68K box running CCPM or some kind of UNIX derivative. The success of PC-DOS dictated otherwise...
Ian W.
Another "Ray Ozzie is the guy who created Lotus Notes" sound bite. And there was me thinking Len Kawell and Tim Halvorsen were the original thought leaders for what became Iris Associates (Len did Notes-11, predecessor of VAX Notes, at DEC; I only remember Tim's name on the microfiche for SHOW DEVICE/FILES in VAX/VMS 2.0).
Len credited "The Network Nation" by Hiltz and Turoff as a source of inspiration for his work on Notes at DEC.
Does Ray ever attribute their contribution?
Next time you're in the USA, buy one. I queued at the Apple Store in Palo Alto the day it started shipping, and the whole works (with arm band and dock) cost me less than GBP180. And it works fine, charging itself off my PC's firewire port.
I only wish the iTunes Music Store would open up so we this side of the pond could get at it. I reckon there are no more than 2-3 decent tracks on most of my CD's I rate, am tired of feeding CDs into my PC, and could use listening to some audio books:-)
Most people who see it are impressed to bits. Good work, Apple.
I remember a piece of excellent work done by Claire Enders (who used to do strategy work for EMI Music before setting up her own consultancy - Enders Analysis) on the effect of P2P services on the UK music industry.
The bottom line was that everyone made more money, consumers got more choice, and sampling (and buying) of CDs got distributed over a wider cast of artists. The only exposure was with the top few artists at each of the top 5 record labels, which she thought would be very influential on the way the industry would behave. Unfortunately, a significant share of most record labels profits come from very few artists.
Given the way things played out, she was right on the button. And it remains the only analysis i've ever seen that was based on raw numbers rather than "industry sponsored views"...
You don't need to hide anything if all that's visible is one button - like the one i've got in my car (which is also the best selling device by a long way in the UK - it's integrated with the road traffic network sensor cameras here and routes you around any major traffic jams that occur in real time).
Just talks you to your destination (UK equivalent of zip code, nearest ATM, nearest gas station, any business in Yellow Pages, etc). Around $800 for the installed unit, $200/year for all the navigation services (which includes the cost of all phone calls made by the unit), $120/year for optional speed camera warnings, and $170/year for optional stolen vehicle tracking.
See Smartnav Flash Demo. A lot of different auto manufacturers this side of the pond fit these as dealer fit options.
If internal rumor control at Digital was accurate, then Apple were talking to DEC about Alpha a long time before IBM/Motorola got any look-in. One VP of DEC's Semiconductor Business called Bob Palmer (in the days when he stopped the executive flip-flops between 32 and 64 bits for the chip) apparently had his hair all over the floor after KO decided not to go with it.
Fast forward several years on, all the best Alpha engineers went to Intel or to AMD.
Testament to DEC the business plan suggesting that over half the world went to a David N Cutler architected OS while the rest went to UNIX actually happened. It'd have been even better still if the company had survived to see it happen!
Contingency recruiters, who get paid to fill a slot and will mailshot you CV everywhere to get the "we introduced person x to you first, so pay the fee please".
And retainer recruiters, who are paid to find a shortlist of people for a fixed fee, even if the employer doesn't end up taking them on.
If you're job hunting, the general technique is to write to all the target companies you're looking at directly, tell a few retainer recruiters you're looking, and generally to avoid contingency recruiters like the plague.
Recommended book is "Rights of Passage" by John Lucht. If you ignore the promotion of his own Internet site, you'll see how different parts of the recruitment industry work, and the advice in there is very good - for high-ticket price job hunters anyway. IMHO of course...
About two years ago, I proposed a project to build a UDDI directory covering every web site "in" Europe. We reckoned it would cost around $3 million and 18 months to get to full flight, including adding new sites as they popped up (and allowing people to reclassify themselves if needed). This was to include geocoding so that we could return search results in order of proximity to the end user (when most people here look up Yellow pages, they typically look for local suppliers first).
There are some fairly inexpensive geocoding products around that can map any European postal address to longitude/latitude (some places like Eire don't have ZIP codes implemented, and in other places like Spain, the geography covered by a single code is quite big. For the UK, a postcode covers around 10 houses).
The main issues are having enough elves (University Students with sector expertise - most asked to be paid in Amazon vouchers!) to verify the machine guessed classifications - there are around 14,000 categories to choose from). And to be able to handle situations where one web site maps onto a list of 600 local stores (often hidden behind the scenes in a database), or to know the size of geography each serves.
At the time, the telco where I worked got hit with the bursting bubble, and all the funds for more speculative projects dried up overnight.
I wonder how much effort it would take for Google to become *the* definitive UDDI directory now?
Slashdot Mirror
Takes an average of 10 minutes to spot a jam with the current coverage (28,000 sensors on 9,000 miles of roads if my memory serves me right).
Over 10 car manufacturers fit this as an optional extra this side of the pond. 30,000 units (in a vehicle population of over 23,000,000) sold to date - still way to go.
Ian W.
But Solaris? Still a long stretch before you can put it into the same "market share" sentence as Windows and Linux. But then you have to start somewhere, and pray that enough people breath your exhaust fumes to raise it to a status of "an alternative". Way to go...
Ian W.
Seemed to work impressively until three people showed up at the door, one spied into the iris reader, door opened and the other two just tailgated through.
Nor me. If Solaris really did go open source the way most people understand it, the useful bits of code would find it's way into all the various Linux distributions in pretty short order.
This process failed for me - I got a dependency conflict as the final step was trying to reconcile a couple of Xorg libraries needed to build the GIMP. So, I now have Azureus downloading the CD ISOs - and will burn them later ready to do an "upgrade". Ian W.
... the supposition I heard a few years back that the EMF generated from a nuclear bomb would knock out the avionics of any US plane in the same theatre? About the only thing left flying would be MiGs apparently - and the USAF don't have (m)any of those in service. I also remember the latest british anti-aircraft batteries in the Falklands that were deadly to inbound aircraft - but only if they came into range one at a time. More lives probably got saved by buying the right people off rather than aiming smart bombs at their subordinates. A very low tech solution :-)
Ian W.
What's the real objective that we're trying to achieve? If you can't afford to repeat, repeat, repeat, then there are probably many more productive things you can do with the money.
That apart, I'm about to send out A2-sized Red Hat configuration deskpads to IT resellers this side of the pond, and have offered free space to put something related to Mozilla on it (given it is part of every Red Hat distribution). So far, no-one can give me anything I can use on it :-(
I'd be delighted to put any Mozilla ad on it if someone could rustle one up - or point me at one I can use.
Ian W.
The reasons ASPs failed before was that the economics depended on selling the same software infrastructure to multiple customers - when in reality everyone wanted it customised to their own individual needs. That's why most ASP conferences featured ASPs selling heavily to one another, with few or no customers present - they sussed it straight away. It took a market correction to finally rinse most of the vendors out. Ian W.
If my memory serves me right (having seen where the pointer goes on a map when no GPS signal is arriving in a navigation unit), co-ordinates (0,0) is in the sea south of Nigeria.
Ian W.
So, while I abhor any type of child porn, I also abhor people who throw out sound bites that are unrepresentative of the data provided. Hands up anyone that can say what percentage of the traffic was child related? Thought so...
Ian W.
If you go read the web site of the authors of the block list (www.iwf.org.uk), you'll notice that the list also contains sites adjudged to contain content that falls foul of the UK Obscene Publications Act, or contains content adjudged to be criminal racism.
Unless the classifications are segregated (which they don't appear to be), the headline about child porn is just for the tabloids.
One gotcha is that almost all (if not all) bluetooth mobile handsets currently sold in Europe only allow one active bluetooth connection. So, if you're using that bluetooth powered "hands free" kit (a lot of people do), this Fiat/MS thing won't get a look in. Besides, I thought Fiat had an agreement with Trafficmaster (see www.smartnav.com/demo) to do telematics services in Italy. Now, that would be impressive if they mixed the two; one head start is that the Smartnav Server (that remotely downloads the routes, and plots paths around traffic jams) is already built on Microsoft technology - not just Windows, but MapPoint too.
I had a boss who reckoned "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado" were airport books. I even summarised both books on a single sheet of A4 a few years back (http://www.minsystems.co.uk/download if you want your own copy of the pdf). Every time he asked for one concrete example of someone who'd applied the methodology end-to-end, we couldn't find anyone who had. Email to the Chasm Group also go no response :-(
Are there real life examples in this 2x2 book?
Ian W.
Of the 5 core developers of the VAX/VMS V1.0 kernel, 2 were female. Nancy Kronenberg and Cathy Morse if my memory serves me right. Alongside David Cutler, Richard Hustvedt and another Richard that went to Microsoft via Apple (Pink). Oops, maybe 6 developers - Andy Goldstein on the file system.
I'm also a bit surprised that someone who is seriously trying evaluate Linux and get a sound card to work didn't try either Mandrake or Red Hat.
:-}
The Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital I stuck in my Fedora FC1 box did work - once i'd worked out how to enable my Gnome-resident speaker icon (editing one line in a system config file) and unticking the "mute" setting after a reboot.
In most other ways (including printing), it's as near to instant pudding as you can get.
Getting Mozilla browser plugins working for Java, Flash and Acrobat take some doing and is currently more difficult than on Windows - but everything seems to be heading in the right direction.
Well, until you try to share that working Linux printer with any Windows XP boxes on the same LAN. I've been at it for three days so far, and I think I need some real help. Looking at Google searches on the same error messages, it looks like i'm far from alone
Know any good Samba diagnosis how-to guides?
Ian W.
It was Digital Research's next generation CP/M - called Concurrent CP/M. Allowed 4 different tasks to be run simultaneously, and for the user to hot switch between them (and each task had the full screen real estate while it was running).
It's use in niches like cash tills came much later - after Charlie Chaplin had washed the Rainbow (and lots of other non-IBM PCs) aside.
In fact, there was a 5th screen that just listed the tasks running in the other 4...
Ian W.
Gates demo'd a Windowing system to us at DEC (albeit in Reading, UK) in May 1983 - on the Compaq Plus he carried in. At the time, the car parks at dealers were full of people getting demos of the Apple Lisa, VisiOn and (later) Quarterdeck DesQ. The first question he asked everyone was when they were going to drop CP/M and use DOS instead. Meanwhile, the management in LJ02 (Barry James Folsom and co) were happy to wait for CCPM and it's 4 hot-switchable tasks it could run, and largely ignore MS-DOS. They got back to the instruction Olsen gave them ("to produce a machine to run industry standard software, whatever it was") a bit later. At the time, they thought it would be a Motorola 68K box running CCPM or some kind of UNIX derivative. The success of PC-DOS dictated otherwise... Ian W.
Another "Ray Ozzie is the guy who created Lotus Notes" sound bite. And there was me thinking Len Kawell and Tim Halvorsen were the original thought leaders for what became Iris Associates (Len did Notes-11, predecessor of VAX Notes, at DEC; I only remember Tim's name on the microfiche for SHOW DEVICE/FILES in VAX/VMS 2.0). Len credited "The Network Nation" by Hiltz and Turoff as a source of inspiration for his work on Notes at DEC. Does Ray ever attribute their contribution?
Next time you're in the USA, buy one. I queued at the Apple Store in Palo Alto the day it started shipping, and the whole works (with arm band and dock) cost me less than GBP180. And it works fine, charging itself off my PC's firewire port. I only wish the iTunes Music Store would open up so we this side of the pond could get at it. I reckon there are no more than 2-3 decent tracks on most of my CD's I rate, am tired of feeding CDs into my PC, and could use listening to some audio books :-)
Most people who see it are impressed to bits. Good work, Apple.
I remember a piece of excellent work done by Claire Enders (who used to do strategy work for EMI Music before setting up her own consultancy - Enders Analysis) on the effect of P2P services on the UK music industry.
The bottom line was that everyone made more money, consumers got more choice, and sampling (and buying) of CDs got distributed over a wider cast of artists. The only exposure was with the top few artists at each of the top 5 record labels, which she thought would be very influential on the way the industry would behave. Unfortunately, a significant share of most record labels profits come from very few artists.
Given the way things played out, she was right on the button. And it remains the only analysis i've ever seen that was based on raw numbers rather than "industry sponsored views"...
You don't need to hide anything if all that's visible is one button - like the one i've got in my car (which is also the best selling device by a long way in the UK - it's integrated with the road traffic network sensor cameras here and routes you around any major traffic jams that occur in real time).
Just talks you to your destination (UK equivalent of zip code, nearest ATM, nearest gas station, any business in Yellow Pages, etc). Around $800 for the installed unit, $200/year for all the navigation services (which includes the cost of all phone calls made by the unit), $120/year for optional speed camera warnings, and $170/year for optional stolen vehicle tracking.
See Smartnav Flash Demo. A lot of different auto manufacturers this side of the pond fit these as dealer fit options.
If internal rumor control at Digital was accurate, then Apple were talking to DEC about Alpha a long time before IBM/Motorola got any look-in. One VP of DEC's Semiconductor Business called Bob Palmer (in the days when he stopped the executive flip-flops between 32 and 64 bits for the chip) apparently had his hair all over the floor after KO decided not to go with it.
Fast forward several years on, all the best Alpha engineers went to Intel or to AMD.
Testament to DEC the business plan suggesting that over half the world went to a David N Cutler architected OS while the rest went to UNIX actually happened. It'd have been even better still if the company had survived to see it happen!
Contingency recruiters, who get paid to fill a slot and will mailshot you CV everywhere to get the "we introduced person x to you first, so pay the fee please". And retainer recruiters, who are paid to find a shortlist of people for a fixed fee, even if the employer doesn't end up taking them on. If you're job hunting, the general technique is to write to all the target companies you're looking at directly, tell a few retainer recruiters you're looking, and generally to avoid contingency recruiters like the plague. Recommended book is "Rights of Passage" by John Lucht. If you ignore the promotion of his own Internet site, you'll see how different parts of the recruitment industry work, and the advice in there is very good - for high-ticket price job hunters anyway. IMHO of course...
About two years ago, I proposed a project to build a UDDI directory covering every web site "in" Europe. We reckoned it would cost around $3 million and 18 months to get to full flight, including adding new sites as they popped up (and allowing people to reclassify themselves if needed). This was to include geocoding so that we could return search results in order of proximity to the end user (when most people here look up Yellow pages, they typically look for local suppliers first).
There are some fairly inexpensive geocoding products around that can map any European postal address to longitude/latitude (some places like Eire don't have ZIP codes implemented, and in other places like Spain, the geography covered by a single code is quite big. For the UK, a postcode covers around 10 houses).
The main issues are having enough elves (University Students with sector expertise - most asked to be paid in Amazon vouchers!) to verify the machine guessed classifications - there are around 14,000 categories to choose from). And to be able to handle situations where one web site maps onto a list of 600 local stores (often hidden behind the scenes in a database), or to know the size of geography each serves.
At the time, the telco where I worked got hit with the bursting bubble, and all the funds for more speculative projects dried up overnight.
I wonder how much effort it would take for Google to become *the* definitive UDDI directory now?