The main reason is exactly that; lack of money, people, and resources. FBI agents that I've met are all bright, hard-working people, who work for wages that are higher than local police departments, but lower than corporate jobs.
Despite the hollywood image, there is no war room full of MIT and CalTech graduates in T-shirts controlling a massive array of satellites, communications gear, and directing an endless supply of sunglass-wearing thugs.
It takes a long time to get approval, get funds, and get PO's cut - often, years. Technology can change a lot, and few people would argue that networking applications and products have developed even faster than the CPU marketplace. Ethereal and a $9 NIC now have more capability and a better user interface than the Network General Sniffer I coughed up $20 grand for a few years ago. If I kept the reciept, can I get a refund?;-)
I used panix extensively along with world.std.com Way Back When. Panix was actually in operation earlier than 1989, since I remember having an account on it as early as 1987 or 1988, but they didn't have a full-time dedicated connection at the time, just an on-demand dial up (from NYU?). "bang-style" addressing was still common at the time (you needed the network map to route your email correctly!!)
But, if you were a bit of a tinkerer, you got a shell account, a couple megs of storage, and access to both a reasonably good menu-driven BBS as well as the ability to work directly with the OS, for about $9 a month, which was a very attractive alternative to the $6-per-hour Compuserve, or the $12-per-month (but very limited) Prodigy services.
Panix has always been a tech-savvy ISP with members who are often recognized experts in law, politics, and technology. I remember they were one of the first to try to spread to other cities, but I think they pulled back when they realized that it took away from the neighborhood they had built.
Correct, and there's still the possibility for users to post irrelevant links in their sig lines or whatnot. The good aspect is that this takes away the motivation for the mass-posting that is most destructive across blogs.
In the end, it may end up giving moderators a little more time back to actually moderate, rather than just running off the creeps.
Agreed. I had two Tivo units (a series-2 40 hour box and the pioneer elite unit with the 120-hour drive) Both of them had the absolute best user interface in any technology product that I've ever seen.
But it was about $20 a month for the two boxes, plus the cost of programming itself. Ouch.
When the local cable co came out with hi-def PVR's for four bucks a month (over the price of a regular box)... I cancelled my Tivo service. Interface isn't nearly as pretty, and the program guide isn't as slick, and the remote is not nearly as good as the best-remote-ever "peanut" that Tivo had. But I can record two shows at the same time - even in hi-def, and watch a third. It never screws up a channel change, and if it breaks, I tell them to come replace it at no charge to me.
Tivo tried to sell a box when it should have sold software and design.
The buzzword-laden product descriptions are universal, even in consumer products - even if the terms are slightly different. My experience is that if a sales rep doesn't have much information to go on (i.e. what the actual problem is and what's requested) they go with whatever they have.
Most companies, even the "usual suspects" when it comes to vagueness, will be responsive to customers who know what they want to do, even if they're not sure how to do it. But, there are some reps who have tried to put on an hour-long monologue when all I want is cost per (workstation, user, megabit, whichever). The only time I actually lost my temper at a sales guy is when he tried to slide in a pretty huge price increase 40 pages back into a 50-page fluff presentation.
I guess part of the reason for the buzzword phenomenon is that people have often made a purchase decision (about software, a car, a television) and they just want to hear what a good decision they are making.
I've done a variant on this in my own neighborhood.
During the last block party, I pulled aside the other guys in the neighborhood and asked them to switch channels; we now all do very nicely on throughput.
Maybe everybody else has dopey neighbors, but all of mine have passwords and keys on their routers, and I'm the only real "network" guy on the block.
FWIW, 802.11a does get MUCH faster throughput, and does not have the interference problems from microwave ovens, cordless phones, etc. Down side is, it's expensive, and the range is about half of 802.11b - at least in my house.
That would be mildly amusing. What would be side-splittlingly funny is if someone posted the AC's home address, credit card #'s, DOB, mother's maiden name, bank account details...
Agreed. I used to look forward to Leo and Patrick, they were a terrific pair, and combined some old-school industry knowledge with the perspective of younger gamers who are hearing about Pong from their parents.
They got interesting people on the show to interview, and the information they had was original - not just the same dreck from CNN and Yahoo being read by people who had zero knowledge of the field.
I can understand the reasoning; 30-40 year olds aren't exactly the group that makes advertisers go ape, or at least not the same advertisers that G4/TTV is pitching to.
Note to producers: A lot of your viewers actually enjoyed watching TSS with their kids - he's figuring out which Mario game he wants next, and I'm wondering what kind of cool stuff Leo and Yoshi are going to come up with. Not any more, alas....
... after Walter Mossberg (WSJ's technology columnist) gave out a strong recommendation to use Firefox, describing IE as a fundamentally compromised product implemented in an insecure OS.
Ouch.
I still have to use IE for a couple of sites - mostly ones inside my own company. And that's fine; I trust my own IT people and my own HR department. But using IE to casually browse the web just seems like a very bad idea.
I sometimes have to find equipment installations in unfamiliar areas, and during off-hours. It isn't exactly a pleasant feeling driving down a poorly-lit street looking for a poorly-marked address, working off a map that may or may not be correct. I would LOVE to be able to call up someone at the office and say "am I at the right place?"
The teamsters *have* to fight it; if they ever portray any change as being beneficial for their membership, they give up the bargaining position and their cut of cost savings or profits that are available. That's simply what they do for a living. It doesn't have anything to do with whether the change is good or bad.
RSA dongles seem like a step in the right direction, but it sure is a pain. Just for my work, I need to carry one RSA dongle, two "swipe cards", and remember (best guess) seven passwords, have a list of codes, lock combinations, and several plain old keys. It's a pain.
Biometrics - thumbprints and the like - seem like the best alternative, but the few examples I've used so far have been very finicky, and mostly used as a second layer of authentication with an access card or code.
One thing that is going to make this move quickly is the financial incentive - a few million per month in credit fraud, and some congressman getting ID theft is a pretty strong incentive to be creative.
This is a really exciting field. Much of this data already exists in different forms. Combine that with a way to adapt information based upon events, such as a broken-down car or construction closing a lane, then put on top of that the ability to pack cars together 10 feet apart at 50mph safely.
All of a sudden you don't need to widen a freeway by two lanes because the existing one can be used much more efficiently. Pollution and gas consumption goes down because a car running at 50 uses a lot less energy than one which is going 0-60-0-60-0-60, even with a hybrid.
On top of that, you save a lot of money avoiding the most avoidable fender-benders, and probably saving more than a few people from death or serious (and expensive) injury.
And you get to leave for work 10 minutes later without worrying about being late. What's not to like?
When you write a check for $8 worth of groceries, you're inconveniencing me. That's not a crime, and it's only marginally rude.
Information does have value. If you disagree with that statement, go ahead and post your name, address, DOB, SS#, and mother's maiden name here. Your credit card numbers, along with the validation code on the back would be a plus.
(no, I won't hold my breath)
Fines have no effect on thieves, and it's dubious that they'd provide any value to any community in the proposed service. Do *you* want this guy handling your mom's medical records as a hospital *cough* "volunteer"?
Unfortunately, most of the huge chunks of unlit fibers are business fiascos. An example was Enron Broadband; they had HUGE chunks of fiber, but between city pairs which were almost useless.
Dark, uncommited fiber between useful places is more scarce. While there was a big surplus back in late 2000, a lot of that has been eaten up by increased demand. Cable and telcos have a lot of metro fiber which got laid (stop smirking) in the late 90's and is starting to get lit up for things like video on demand - all those patch panels which were blank for years are starting to look busy.
Solaris has wider support in the commercial arena, with applications like Oracle. Yes, some of them also support linux, but my (limited) experience is that IT managers are more comfortable signing off on Solaris than they are on linux.
That said, Linux has a smoother learning curve, especially in areas of system administration and setup. Add in a wide variety of distributions oriented to different users and applications, and you have the formula for an OS that will still be going strong years from now.
Sun is in a difficult place; it's lost much of the hardware market to Dell, HP, and IBM. Their attempt to "close" Solaris several years ago frustrated a lot of customers and sent them off to Windows NT/2000 or Linux.
My two cents, it's all good. Keeps Microsoft working hard to stay ahead on one front, and gives a lot of new development ideas and paths for the more technical user.
I once started a big argument when I pointed out that churches make more money off pr0n than probably any single company.
No, I'm not talking about the contributions from outraged blue-haired ladies. I'm talking about the nifty lease payments that thousands of churches get by renting out a corner of their property to SBC, Verizon, Sprint, Level3, and others. All those nondescript concrete squares are filled with piles of Cisco, Fujitsu, and Nortel gear dedicated to providing a highly reliable stream of pr0n to the neighborhood.
It's one of those wonderfully convenient arrangements which ensures that the pr0n supply is plentiful, the church can draw a good crowd, Cisco's stock goes up a buck, and Senator Bedsore is guaranteed re-election.
I think it's actually the opposite - the commercial-size shipments of medications don't tend to have tamper-resistant caps and other features. What this allows is quick checking of shipments, so they know immediately that there's 600 units of some medication in the crate, and the computer can start auto-dialing people who are waiting to have prescriptions filled.
Considering that it might save a pharmacist even a few minutes per day, it more than pays for itself immediately.
As usual, it also should cause a nice bump in the sale of tin-foil hats for the black helicopter crowd.
The xbox, IIRC, runs a stripped-down version of the NT 4.0 kernel. There's very little to stop MS from adding a basic web browser and other capabilities to the xbox... but some good reasons not to: Internet appliances are generally not well recieved by the press, and have much higher support costs than gaming consoles.
Current HD's are quite capable of handling the very mild bumps and such that a vehicle goes through. Even the worst shaking and jarring you get from a pothole are far less than a typical laptop must handle being dropped an inch onto a desktop.
What concerns me much more, is this idea of connecting up an 802.11 card to the car. How long will it be till my car alarm gets a virus, making it scream "H4VE Y0U TR1ED HERBAL V1AGRA? FREE 5AMPLE!" to pedestrians.
I've got one of the same boxes. Luckily I happen to be in a city which, surprisingly, has a lot (16?) HD channels on cable. Some are better than others - Fox, for example, broadcasts very little in HD, while CBS and NBC have almost their entire prime-time schedule in 1080i 16x9.
HBO and SHO both have two HD channels - and SHO typically does letterboxed 2.35:1 while HBO usually does pan-and-scan 16x9 (but their telecine work is good enough that I am very happy with it.
My only grouse about time warner's HD box is that the menu/navigation is not as incredibly intuitive as Tivo, and their remote has too many buttons for my taste.
Being able to record two hi-def shows while watching a third... No complaints at all about that.:-)
One of my servers, running at idle, eats up 210 watts.
Fire up seti@home on both CPU's, and the power consumption goes up to almost 400 watts. There's also a significant increase in heat output, but I can't quantify that.
In other words, it could take that well-planned server cluster install and push your power consumption over what you have (typically 2 20amp feeds per rack) and easily overwhelm an already strained cooling solution.
Long story short.. I don't care if you wash my car and fill up the tank when you bring it back; I'd still call the cops and have you locked up for using it without my permission. It isn't your property to use as you wish.
there's not much you can do. After a relatively short time, strong odors will permeate the many slightly porous surfaces. A very thorough de-greasing, and a very thorough blasting with compressed air to remove dust (which traps a lot of odors) may help.. but it's going to be really, really, really hard to get them to pass muster in a non-agricultural office setting.
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I don't get it. If they have a better product that's more reliable, simpler to use, and cheaper, why would they still use the old one?
The main reason is exactly that; lack of money, people, and resources. FBI agents that I've met are all bright, hard-working people, who work for wages that are higher than local police departments, but lower than corporate jobs.
;-)
Despite the hollywood image, there is no war room full of MIT and CalTech graduates in T-shirts controlling a massive array of satellites, communications gear, and directing an endless supply of sunglass-wearing thugs.
It takes a long time to get approval, get funds, and get PO's cut - often, years. Technology can change a lot, and few people would argue that networking applications and products have developed even faster than the CPU marketplace. Ethereal and a $9 NIC now have more capability and a better user interface than the Network General Sniffer I coughed up $20 grand for a few years ago. If I kept the reciept, can I get a refund?
I used panix extensively along with world.std.com Way Back When. Panix was actually in operation earlier than 1989, since I remember having an account on it as early as 1987 or 1988, but they didn't have a full-time dedicated connection at the time, just an on-demand dial up (from NYU?). "bang-style" addressing was still common at the time (you needed the network map to route your email correctly!!)
;-)
But, if you were a bit of a tinkerer, you got a shell account, a couple megs of storage, and access to both a reasonably good menu-driven BBS as well as the ability to work directly with the OS, for about $9 a month, which was a very attractive alternative to the $6-per-hour Compuserve, or the $12-per-month (but very limited) Prodigy services.
Panix has always been a tech-savvy ISP with members who are often recognized experts in law, politics, and technology. I remember they were one of the first to try to spread to other cities, but I think they pulled back when they realized that it took away from the neighborhood they had built.
Glad to see they're still making noise.
Correct, and there's still the possibility for users to post irrelevant links in their sig lines or whatnot. The good aspect is that this takes away the motivation for the mass-posting that is most destructive across blogs.
In the end, it may end up giving moderators a little more time back to actually moderate, rather than just running off the creeps.
Agreed. I had two Tivo units (a series-2 40 hour box and the pioneer elite unit with the 120-hour drive) Both of them had the absolute best user interface in any technology product that I've ever seen.
But it was about $20 a month for the two boxes, plus the cost of programming itself. Ouch.
When the local cable co came out with hi-def PVR's for four bucks a month (over the price of a regular box)... I cancelled my Tivo service. Interface isn't nearly as pretty, and the program guide isn't as slick, and the remote is not nearly as good as the best-remote-ever "peanut" that Tivo had. But I can record two shows at the same time - even in hi-def, and watch a third. It never screws up a channel change, and if it breaks, I tell them to come replace it at no charge to me.
Tivo tried to sell a box when it should have sold software and design.
The buzzword-laden product descriptions are universal, even in consumer products - even if the terms are slightly different. My experience is that if a sales rep doesn't have much information to go on (i.e. what the actual problem is and what's requested) they go with whatever they have.
Most companies, even the "usual suspects" when it comes to vagueness, will be responsive to customers who know what they want to do, even if they're not sure how to do it. But, there are some reps who have tried to put on an hour-long monologue when all I want is cost per (workstation, user, megabit, whichever). The only time I actually lost my temper at a sales guy is when he tried to slide in a pretty huge price increase 40 pages back into a 50-page fluff presentation.
I guess part of the reason for the buzzword phenomenon is that people have often made a purchase decision (about software, a car, a television) and they just want to hear what a good decision they are making.
I've done a variant on this in my own neighborhood.
During the last block party, I pulled aside the other guys in the neighborhood and asked them to switch channels; we now all do very nicely on throughput.
Maybe everybody else has dopey neighbors, but all of mine have passwords and keys on their routers, and I'm the only real "network" guy on the block.
FWIW, 802.11a does get MUCH faster throughput, and does not have the interference problems from microwave ovens, cordless phones, etc. Down side is, it's expensive, and the range is about half of 802.11b - at least in my house.
That would be mildly amusing. What would be side-splittlingly funny is if someone posted the AC's home address, credit card #'s, DOB, mother's maiden name, bank account details...
Agreed. I used to look forward to Leo and Patrick, they were a terrific pair, and combined some old-school industry knowledge with the perspective of younger gamers who are hearing about Pong from their parents.
They got interesting people on the show to interview, and the information they had was original - not just the same dreck from CNN and Yahoo being read by people who had zero knowledge of the field.
I can understand the reasoning; 30-40 year olds aren't exactly the group that makes advertisers go ape, or at least not the same advertisers that G4/TTV is pitching to.
Note to producers: A lot of your viewers actually enjoyed watching TSS with their kids - he's figuring out which Mario game he wants next, and I'm wondering what kind of cool stuff Leo and Yoshi are going to come up with. Not any more, alas....
... after Walter Mossberg (WSJ's technology columnist) gave out a strong recommendation to use Firefox, describing IE as a fundamentally compromised product implemented in an insecure OS.
Ouch.
I still have to use IE for a couple of sites - mostly ones inside my own company. And that's fine; I trust my own IT people and my own HR department. But using IE to casually browse the web just seems like a very bad idea.
I sometimes have to find equipment installations in unfamiliar areas, and during off-hours. It isn't exactly a pleasant feeling driving down a poorly-lit street looking for a poorly-marked address, working off a map that may or may not be correct. I would LOVE to be able to call up someone at the office and say "am I at the right place?"
The teamsters *have* to fight it; if they ever portray any change as being beneficial for their membership, they give up the bargaining position and their cut of cost savings or profits that are available. That's simply what they do for a living. It doesn't have anything to do with whether the change is good or bad.
RSA dongles seem like a step in the right direction, but it sure is a pain. Just for my work, I need to carry one RSA dongle, two "swipe cards", and remember (best guess) seven passwords, have a list of codes, lock combinations, and several plain old keys. It's a pain.
Biometrics - thumbprints and the like - seem like the best alternative, but the few examples I've used so far have been very finicky, and mostly used as a second layer of authentication with an access card or code.
One thing that is going to make this move quickly is the financial incentive - a few million per month in credit fraud, and some congressman getting ID theft is a pretty strong incentive to be creative.
This is a really exciting field. Much of this data already exists in different forms. Combine that with a way to adapt information based upon events, such as a broken-down car or construction closing a lane, then put on top of that the ability to pack cars together 10 feet apart at 50mph safely.
All of a sudden you don't need to widen a freeway by two lanes because the existing one can be used much more efficiently. Pollution and gas consumption goes down because a car running at 50 uses a lot less energy than one which is going 0-60-0-60-0-60, even with a hybrid.
On top of that, you save a lot of money avoiding the most avoidable fender-benders, and probably saving more than a few people from death or serious (and expensive) injury.
And you get to leave for work 10 minutes later without worrying about being late. What's not to like?
When you write a check for $8 worth of groceries, you're inconveniencing me. That's not a crime, and it's only marginally rude.
Information does have value. If you disagree with that statement, go ahead and post your name, address, DOB, SS#, and mother's maiden name here. Your credit card numbers, along with the validation code on the back would be a plus.
(no, I won't hold my breath)
Fines have no effect on thieves, and it's dubious that they'd provide any value to any community in the proposed service. Do *you* want this guy handling your mom's medical records as a hospital *cough* "volunteer"?
Unfortunately, most of the huge chunks of unlit fibers are business fiascos. An example was Enron Broadband; they had HUGE chunks of fiber, but between city pairs which were almost useless.
Dark, uncommited fiber between useful places is more scarce. While there was a big surplus back in late 2000, a lot of that has been eaten up by increased demand. Cable and telcos have a lot of metro fiber which got laid (stop smirking) in the late 90's and is starting to get lit up for things like video on demand - all those patch panels which were blank for years are starting to look busy.
Solaris has wider support in the commercial arena, with applications like Oracle. Yes, some of them also support linux, but my (limited) experience is that IT managers are more comfortable signing off on Solaris than they are on linux.
That said, Linux has a smoother learning curve, especially in areas of system administration and setup. Add in a wide variety of distributions oriented to different users and applications, and you have the formula for an OS that will still be going strong years from now.
Sun is in a difficult place; it's lost much of the hardware market to Dell, HP, and IBM. Their attempt to "close" Solaris several years ago frustrated a lot of customers and sent them off to Windows NT/2000 or Linux.
My two cents, it's all good. Keeps Microsoft working hard to stay ahead on one front, and gives a lot of new development ideas and paths for the more technical user.
I'm convinced that the nerfing of bards prevents more pregnancies than any abstinence program. /me returns to grinding level 41
I once started a big argument when I pointed out that churches make more money off pr0n than probably any single company.
No, I'm not talking about the contributions from outraged blue-haired ladies. I'm talking about the nifty lease payments that thousands of churches get by renting out a corner of their property to SBC, Verizon, Sprint, Level3, and others. All those nondescript concrete squares are filled with piles of Cisco, Fujitsu, and Nortel gear dedicated to providing a highly reliable stream of pr0n to the neighborhood.
It's one of those wonderfully convenient arrangements which ensures that the pr0n supply is plentiful, the church can draw a good crowd, Cisco's stock goes up a buck, and Senator Bedsore is guaranteed re-election.
Praise the lord and pass the kleenex, halleluja!
I think it's actually the opposite - the commercial-size shipments of medications don't tend to have tamper-resistant caps and other features. What this allows is quick checking of shipments, so they know immediately that there's 600 units of some medication in the crate, and the computer can start auto-dialing people who are waiting to have prescriptions filled.
Considering that it might save a pharmacist even a few minutes per day, it more than pays for itself immediately.
As usual, it also should cause a nice bump in the sale of tin-foil hats for the black helicopter crowd.
Win98? You are a sadist indeed.
The xbox, IIRC, runs a stripped-down version of the NT 4.0 kernel. There's very little to stop MS from adding a basic web browser and other capabilities to the xbox... but some good reasons not to: Internet appliances are generally not well recieved by the press, and have much higher support costs than gaming consoles.
.... Broadcast Enabled Digital Personal Area Network.
Current HD's are quite capable of handling the very mild bumps and such that a vehicle goes through. Even the worst shaking and jarring you get from a pothole are far less than a typical laptop must handle being dropped an inch onto a desktop.
What concerns me much more, is this idea of connecting up an 802.11 card to the car. How long will it be till my car alarm gets a virus, making it scream "H4VE Y0U TR1ED HERBAL V1AGRA? FREE 5AMPLE!" to pedestrians.
I've got one of the same boxes. Luckily I happen to be in a city which, surprisingly, has a lot (16?) HD channels on cable. Some are better than others - Fox, for example, broadcasts very little in HD, while CBS and NBC have almost their entire prime-time schedule in 1080i 16x9.
:-)
HBO and SHO both have two HD channels - and SHO typically does letterboxed 2.35:1 while HBO usually does pan-and-scan 16x9 (but their telecine work is good enough that I am very happy with it.
My only grouse about time warner's HD box is that the menu/navigation is not as incredibly intuitive as Tivo, and their remote has too many buttons for my taste.
Being able to record two hi-def shows while watching a third... No complaints at all about that.
One of my servers, running at idle, eats up 210 watts.
Fire up seti@home on both CPU's, and the power consumption goes up to almost 400 watts. There's also a significant increase in heat output, but I can't quantify that.
In other words, it could take that well-planned server cluster install and push your power consumption over what you have (typically 2 20amp feeds per rack) and easily overwhelm an already strained cooling solution.
Long story short.. I don't care if you wash my car and fill up the tank when you bring it back; I'd still call the cops and have you locked up for using it without my permission. It isn't your property to use as you wish.
there's not much you can do. After a relatively short time, strong odors will permeate the many slightly porous surfaces. A very thorough de-greasing, and a very thorough blasting with compressed air to remove dust (which traps a lot of odors) may help.. but it's going to be really, really, really hard to get them to pass muster in a non-agricultural office setting.
Now, I've got this Corvette for sale, you see...