If you zoom in to where the bright light is, about 400% digital zoom with Photoshop, you can tell that the smoke is actually coming out from far below the tip of the light? It actually looks like some steam or something coming from the ground, moving up from the left side of the pole.
At least the steam/smoke part of it definitely doesn't look like anything related to this so-called "impact".
In about 2000 I started considering this as a viable option for "projects" within organizations - some sort of open contest/competition/bidding process. What I thought then was that this would lead to better quality products, more innovation through competition (and lower resulting prices), faster development time, and lower development costs.
However, that said, here are a few drawbacks I have also come to think about since then with this model:
First, from a corporate strategy point of view, does it make sense to enter a contest where you know others will be striving to create the exact same product? Competition is usually good, but if everyone is competing, and there can only be one "winner", what about all the time/money/work spent developing competing solutions that get shelved? Or worse, what if the project sponsor chooses the wrong "solution" to go with? Is this kind of a waste of economic resources?
If more and more companies decide to offer "contests" to get their projects done, eventually there could be tons of contests, and not enough people to do them. I know this is thinking WAAAAY into the future, but hey, it could happen.. kind of like "contest overload". I mean, surely many companies and organizations want to do these projects NOW, so what would the effect of an open bounty for the successful completion of a project do to actually get them done?
Wouldn't it make more sense for NASA to build more of an "open source/open development" atmosphere, helping to connect the best and the brightest from all walks of life around the world, put these projects out for anyone to bid on, and let millions work together to solve these complex problems? As an open source developer, I'd love to see this happen, even if it does sound a bit utopian and naive.
Perhaps simply modifying mail protocols (migrating away from SMTP, POP3, IMAP etc.) to more robust and secured ones would be easier than having to create a product just to limit what you can do with your own machine and network connection.
But that would be silly now, wouldn't it? Sure, it would cost a lot a migrate your mail clients and mail servers to a hypothetical industry-standard "enhanced SMTP" or something like that, but wouldn't we all be better off in the long run?
I recently graduated with a Masters in Information Systems and experienced the same exact problem. One particularly annoying thing is that many of the jobs I was close to being able to perform asked for skills in an enterprise application that I simply couldn't afford to have learned in person, aside from books about them. That brings up a good question - does learning from a book but not performing hands on count as experience these days?
My answer was, I took a job with a smaller company where they understood my position but gave me responsibility and room to grow. Of course.. less salary, but it is a good starting position. I once met the "first CIO" in the United States, Duwayne Peterson - his advice was simply to "get your foot in the door" somewhere!
At the end of the article it states that he wants to use the $1 million to restore the "Chateau de Bourcia" in France, and turn it into a mathematical research institute. Sounds like a nice gesture, when can I visit?!
Along these lines, I recently attended a rountable discussion of career trends in IT with several CIOs of large companies. They identified a few key things: 1) They know that what they are asking for now are "purple squirrels". What this means is that they are asking for something they know is very hard, if not impossible to get. 2) They stressed the importance of understanding the BUSINESS. They felt that knowing a business and IT makes you invaluable. 3) Get a higher degree. I go to one of the few graduate level Schools of Information Science in the country (http://is.cgu.edu). Or, if you already have IS skills get an MBA. 4) Most of the CIOs believe that outsourcing is just a passing trend, and that we truly have hit rock bottom of IT hiring. They feel it can only go up from here. 5) Everyone who attended this roundtable (which included people who were IT professionals but not CIOs) agreed that outsourcing is just another tool and not suitable for everything else. Knowing and learning what "everything else" is, is therefore the key to getting a job.
I thought a major premise was that private companies acting as contractors were able to produce more efficiently and cost effectively than if government produced for itself. While I have no idea how much MORE it would cost if the government did meet its own needs, I have to still wonder what exactly was the cause of these "unforseen delays and cost overruns".
I have some friends at defense contractors and from what they say, these unforeseen delays and cost overruns are commonplace, but the government just lets that slide.
So then, if I wanted a pair of shoes but the shoe manufacturer told me it was going to cost me 3x more for my shoes because "it took them longer than expected to make my shoes", what would I do about it? Isn't this the problem we face? Or is something else causing this problem?
Is the problem that we need to stand up and lobby against this poor financial & project management?
At first sight, this seemed scary - more Microsoft, more monopoly power, etc.
However, this quote reduced the fear factor for me: "Last September, Microsoft submitted its Windows Media Series 9 as a standards candidate to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)--a first for the company and a marked departure from its longtime commitment to keeping its technology proprietary".
At least they went to an appropriate standards body and are sharing this codec with the public. It's an interesting thing when a technology takes the path from proprietary to standard. Lots of technologies take the path from research -> standard, and not as many go from proprietary -> standard.
This was during the spy era of the Cold War, and it was Operation Ivy Bells. The submarine responsible was the specially outfitted USS Halibut.
As for how they actually listened in, it was not exactly picking up EMF from outside the cable. Rather, they simply tapped the copper wire by physically inserting some new wire into the cable right alongside the old wire and planting a recording device.
It's not very difficult to do, and you won't easily be detected when you do it (unlike tapping fiber cable, which can instantly be detected). What's more curious about this case is after some time, when they went back to the location, the recording devices were missing!;)
Internet-2 is a research network, not a commercial network. It is not mainly used for email, although it could be. Since it is not a commercial network, most malicious use (like SPAM) is kept to a minimum. You can read about it at the Internet-2 website.
I worked with a group that did a live videoconference over Internet-2. It was pretty stunning to walk into a room with two projectors, enormous, full-motion video of two colleagues, and you could talk to them just as if they were there with you. It wasn't that we needed 2.5 Gb per second, but the frame rate was extremely high with low packet loss.
RAD-Vision makes the hardware we used.
Videoconferencing may not sound that cool, but take my word for it - there is a wow factor when you truly feel like those other people are sitting in the room with you. Maybe you could even have two of your colleagues remotely come in and do some other demo via video feed!
Not to mention that America's Army is basically one big ADVERTISEMENT for the good old armed forces of the USofA.
Oh, for all you who want to know what it is, it's a free game first-person squad based shooter game that tries to show you the "military experience". Watch out for the subliminal messages (just kidding)!
You know, it's really quite funny. I've been away at college (for 4 years) and then graduate school (for 1 year now) and I haven't had a television for the whole time I've been away (5 years).
What's funny about that is that I have played video games (PC games) enough to have radiation burn on my eyes from staring at the screen, and for a while I did the anime/TV show watching on my computer (legal anime and a TV tuner card).
Note, that I didn't have cable when I did have TV tuner card, and that it was crappy anyway, so I hardly ever watched anything at all.
I have relied all this time on the Internet, computer games and music for pretty much all of my "media" entertainment.......and here's the kicker - I'd kill to have cable television so I could sit around wasting my life watching crap.
Hey, I'm honest! At least it would be something to do in that spare time in between everything else! Browsing the same websites over and over gets tiring after a while, and Counter-strike can only be fun for so many hours. OTOH, maybe there won't be anything good on television either... which just points out even more our insatiable need in general to simply BE ENTERTAINED.
Hehe:) That's a great reason to get out of
here! Utah it is then!
Not that I could even afford to live close to any SCO execs. Also, I might spontaneously combust if I knew I did. lol..
-6d
I completely understand and agree with your point - I recently heard that 7 million homes (roughly half) in California are built in extreme fire danger locations (after all, much of California is/used to be desert). I also live in Claremont, and I've watched the fires burn dangerously close 2 times in the past few years.
Here's my question, and I'll pose it to you and the rest of the Slashdot crowd. Ok, we all understand that it's silly to build these homes where they shouldn't go, but what happens when we have so much money that we can live in places we shouldn't? What happens, when we simply overpopulate an area and there ARE no places left to build but in these dangerous locations?
Are we going to tell ordinary people who want basically what everyone else has (a normal home, in a decent neighborhood) that they can't have it because there's nowhere else for them to live? I mean, would YOU want to be that person who can't live somewhere because there's simply no more room left? (I'm just playing devil's advocate here)
I'd love for somebody to answer that one... I for one think more urbanization would have been the answer (build UPWARDS instead of OUTWARDS) but it seems too many people are against it - they want their OWN space.
What do you all think? At some point, something has to give...
I doubt anybody will read my silly comment, but here's an interesting take on things.
I live in Southern California, and today there are 2 2000-acre fires burning less than 5 miles away from where I live. The ash is raining down - literally RAINING down. I read this morning about the "large solar flare" that's disrupting things, and how the world is heating up and the icecaps are melting etc.
Now, I'm not going to run around screaming that the world is ending, yada yada and be fatalist. But what I want to say is this: it looks and feels a lot like hell outside (hot, ashes, etc.) and if this is what overworking ourselves gets us, then I DON'T WANT IT.:P
-SixD
Violation of rule #1 of SECURITY when it comes to electronic voting systems (this is a "restricted protocol":
"Our voting system, which is part of the public commons has recently been privatized. When this happened, the counting of the votes, which must be a public process, subjected to the scrutiny of many eyes of plain old citizens, became a secret."
If any of you are security experts out there, you know that they simply should not rely on a secret process. The process should be PUBLIC, it should be PEER-REVIEWED and AVAILABLE for people to pick apart and strengthen.
There are plenty of REAL, PUBLIC voting protocols out there Diebold. Why'd you choose to privatize? I mean, they obviously realize that is a departure from the proper methodology, and yet they STILL did it?
...if in the middle of a dramatic fight scene between a squad of clone troopers and "separatists" over the "cloning laboratory", Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory jumps out with his super robot and cries "Ohhh nooo, myy labbb!!", followed by his kid sister DeeDee screaming "Dexter is a cookie!".
|D
Well, it's not so much that the slow rollout of broadband is holding up growth, it's that if extremely high speed connections (fiber for example) were rolled out TTH "to the home", we might see an explosion of new services that could be offered.
I mean, honestly, the fastest connection to the home (cable when it peaks at 3Megabits/sec or DSL at similarly high peak speeds) supports basic IP telephony and video over Internet.
On the other hand, imagine fiber connections which would bring a minimum theoretical bandwidth of 1 terabit per second (particularly with dense wave division multiplexing techniques), and now suddenly you have voice, video, data, etc. coming in through one pipe. That is both a scary thought to telecoms, and a great thought to an ordinary person (one bill, for example).
So, my point is that fiber to the curb/home would cause a frenzy in the telecom environment as well as provide an opportunity for Internet services never even possibly understood without that kind of bandwidth. Even without fiber to the home, increased reach of fiber effectively gives higher speeds longer reach.
It is true that fiber infrastructure is expensive, but make sure to realize that it's the hardware that is expensive, not the physical line. In fact, much fiber is already rolled out and cheap to access. With hardware advances in lasers and techniques, hardware could become much cheaper.
With a minimum of 1 terabit/sec coming to your individual machine (imagine the ability to download the entire Internet every SECOND), the Internet really does have some incredible possibility. That possibility should not be ruined by companies who hoard connectivity lines and wish to profit like crazy.
By the way, for general purposes, I agree that dial-up is fine. However, given more bandwidth, you almost guarantee that some users will expand what they do with the web.
I think that's why the hubbub over how to protect this future.
Slashdot Mirror
If you zoom in to where the bright light is, about 400% digital zoom with Photoshop, you can tell that the smoke is actually coming out from far below the tip of the light? It actually looks like some steam or something coming from the ground, moving up from the left side of the pole.
At least the steam/smoke part of it definitely doesn't look like anything related to this so-called "impact".
In about 2000 I started considering this as a viable option for "projects" within organizations - some sort of open contest/competition/bidding process. What I thought then was that this would lead to better quality products, more innovation through competition (and lower resulting prices), faster development time, and lower development costs.
However, that said, here are a few drawbacks I have also come to think about since then with this model:
First, from a corporate strategy point of view, does it make sense to enter a contest where you know others will be striving to create the exact same product? Competition is usually good, but if everyone is competing, and there can only be one "winner", what about all the time/money/work spent developing competing solutions that get shelved? Or worse, what if the project sponsor chooses the wrong "solution" to go with? Is this kind of a waste of economic resources?
If more and more companies decide to offer "contests" to get their projects done, eventually there could be tons of contests, and not enough people to do them. I know this is thinking WAAAAY into the future, but hey, it could happen.. kind of like "contest overload". I mean, surely many companies and organizations want to do these projects NOW, so what would the effect of an open bounty for the successful completion of a project do to actually get them done?
Wouldn't it make more sense for NASA to build more of an "open source/open development" atmosphere, helping to connect the best and the brightest from all walks of life around the world, put these projects out for anyone to bid on, and let millions work together to solve these complex problems? As an open source developer, I'd love to see this happen, even if it does sound a bit utopian and naive.
Just my 2 cents..
-6d
Perhaps simply modifying mail protocols (migrating away from SMTP, POP3, IMAP etc.) to more robust and secured ones would be easier than having to create a product just to limit what you can do with your own machine and network connection.
But that would be silly now, wouldn't it? Sure, it would cost a lot a migrate your mail clients and mail servers to a hypothetical industry-standard "enhanced SMTP" or something like that, but wouldn't we all be better off in the long run?
My answer was, I took a job with a smaller company where they understood my position but gave me responsibility and room to grow. Of course.. less salary, but it is a good starting position. I once met the "first CIO" in the United States, Duwayne Peterson - his advice was simply to "get your foot in the door" somewhere!
Good luck to you! -6d
At the end of the article it states that he wants to use the $1 million to restore the "Chateau de Bourcia" in France, and turn it into a mathematical research institute. Sounds like a nice gesture, when can I visit?!
Been there, done that... check out the REBOL Internet Operating System!
Don't bother modding my post up.
Here's the "clicky" link: Google Cache
Along these lines, I recently attended a rountable discussion of career trends in IT with several CIOs of large companies. They identified a few key things:
1) They know that what they are asking for now are "purple squirrels". What this means is that they are asking for something they know is very hard, if not impossible to get.
2) They stressed the importance of understanding the BUSINESS. They felt that knowing a business and IT makes you invaluable.
3) Get a higher degree. I go to one of the few graduate level Schools of Information Science in the country (http://is.cgu.edu). Or, if you already have IS skills get an MBA.
4) Most of the CIOs believe that outsourcing is just a passing trend, and that we truly have hit rock bottom of IT hiring. They feel it can only go up from here.
5) Everyone who attended this roundtable (which included people who were IT professionals but not CIOs) agreed that outsourcing is just another tool and not suitable for everything else. Knowing and learning what "everything else" is, is therefore the key to getting a job.
Just a few musings, maybe they'll help. -6d
I thought a major premise was that private companies acting as contractors were able to produce more efficiently and cost effectively than if government produced for itself. While I have no idea how much MORE it would cost if the government did meet its own needs, I have to still wonder what exactly was the cause of these "unforseen delays and cost overruns".
I have some friends at defense contractors and from what they say, these unforeseen delays and cost overruns are commonplace, but the government just lets that slide.
So then, if I wanted a pair of shoes but the shoe manufacturer told me it was going to cost me 3x more for my shoes because "it took them longer than expected to make my shoes", what would I do about it? Isn't this the problem we face? Or is something else causing this problem?
Is the problem that we need to stand up and lobby against this poor financial & project management?
Let's just say it MIGHT cost $1 trillion. I have always wondered, where/how exactly is all that money spent? Why does it cost so much?
At first sight, this seemed scary - more Microsoft, more monopoly power, etc.
However, this quote reduced the fear factor for me: "Last September, Microsoft submitted its Windows Media Series 9 as a standards candidate to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)--a first for the company and a marked departure from its longtime commitment to keeping its technology proprietary".
At least they went to an appropriate standards body and are sharing this codec with the public. It's an interesting thing when a technology takes the path from proprietary to standard. Lots of technologies take the path from research -> standard, and not as many go from proprietary -> standard.
This was during the spy era of the Cold War, and it was Operation Ivy Bells. The submarine responsible was the specially outfitted USS Halibut.
;)
As for how they actually listened in, it was not exactly picking up EMF from outside the cable. Rather, they simply tapped the copper wire by physically inserting some new wire into the cable right alongside the old wire and planting a recording device.
It's not very difficult to do, and you won't easily be detected when you do it (unlike tapping fiber cable, which can instantly be detected). What's more curious about this case is after some time, when they went back to the location, the recording devices were missing!
Internet-2 is a research network, not a commercial network. It is not mainly used for email, although it could be. Since it is not a commercial network, most malicious use (like SPAM) is kept to a minimum. You can read about it at the Internet-2 website.
I worked with a group that did a live videoconference over Internet-2. It was pretty stunning to walk into a room with two projectors, enormous, full-motion video of two colleagues, and you could talk to them just as if they were there with you. It wasn't that we needed 2.5 Gb per second, but the frame rate was extremely high with low packet loss.
RAD-Vision makes the hardware we used.
Videoconferencing may not sound that cool, but take my word for it - there is a wow factor when you truly feel like those other people are sitting in the room with you. Maybe you could even have two of your colleagues remotely come in and do some other demo via video feed!
Not to mention that America's Army is basically one big ADVERTISEMENT for the good old armed forces of the USofA.
Oh, for all you who want to know what it is, it's a free game first-person squad based shooter game that tries to show you the "military experience". Watch out for the subliminal messages (just kidding)!
http://www.americasarmy.com
You know, it's really quite funny. I've been away at college (for 4 years) and then graduate school (for 1 year now) and I haven't had a television for the whole time I've been away (5 years).
...and here's the kicker - I'd kill to have cable television so I could sit around wasting my life watching crap.
What's funny about that is that I have played video games (PC games) enough to have radiation burn on my eyes from staring at the screen, and for a while I did the anime/TV show watching on my computer (legal anime and a TV tuner card).
Note, that I didn't have cable when I did have TV tuner card, and that it was crappy anyway, so I hardly ever watched anything at all.
I have relied all this time on the Internet, computer games and music for pretty much all of my "media" entertainment....
Hey, I'm honest! At least it would be something to do in that spare time in between everything else! Browsing the same websites over and over gets tiring after a while, and Counter-strike can only be fun for so many hours. OTOH, maybe there won't be anything good on television either... which just points out even more our insatiable need in general to simply BE ENTERTAINED.
Hey that's a really neat link to the Japanese project, thanks for sharing it!
Hehe :) That's a great reason to get out of
here! Utah it is then!
Not that I could even afford to live close to any SCO execs. Also, I might spontaneously combust if I knew I did. lol..
-6d
Eraser,
I completely understand and agree with your point - I recently heard that 7 million homes (roughly half) in California are built in extreme fire danger locations (after all, much of California is/used to be desert). I also live in Claremont, and I've watched the fires burn dangerously close 2 times in the past few years.
Here's my question, and I'll pose it to you and the rest of the Slashdot crowd. Ok, we all understand that it's silly to build these homes where they shouldn't go, but what happens when we have so much money that we can live in places we shouldn't? What happens, when we simply overpopulate an area and there ARE no places left to build but in these dangerous locations?
Are we going to tell ordinary people who want basically what everyone else has (a normal home, in a decent neighborhood) that they can't have it because there's nowhere else for them to live? I mean, would YOU want to be that person who can't live somewhere because there's simply no more room left? (I'm just playing devil's advocate here)
I'd love for somebody to answer that one... I for one think more urbanization would have been the answer (build UPWARDS instead of OUTWARDS) but it seems too many people are against it - they want their OWN space.
What do you all think? At some point, something has to give...
-6d
All this over a stupid cat? Maybe I'd wait in a line that long if it was a penguin!
Oh, when will that day arrive....
I doubt anybody will read my silly comment, but here's an interesting take on things. I live in Southern California, and today there are 2 2000-acre fires burning less than 5 miles away from where I live. The ash is raining down - literally RAINING down. I read this morning about the "large solar flare" that's disrupting things, and how the world is heating up and the icecaps are melting etc. Now, I'm not going to run around screaming that the world is ending, yada yada and be fatalist. But what I want to say is this: it looks and feels a lot like hell outside (hot, ashes, etc.) and if this is what overworking ourselves gets us, then I DON'T WANT IT. :P
-SixD
Violation of rule #1 of SECURITY when it comes to electronic voting systems (this is a "restricted protocol": "Our voting system, which is part of the public commons has recently been privatized. When this happened, the counting of the votes, which must be a public process, subjected to the scrutiny of many eyes of plain old citizens, became a secret." If any of you are security experts out there, you know that they simply should not rely on a secret process. The process should be PUBLIC, it should be PEER-REVIEWED and AVAILABLE for people to pick apart and strengthen. There are plenty of REAL, PUBLIC voting protocols out there Diebold. Why'd you choose to privatize? I mean, they obviously realize that is a departure from the proper methodology, and yet they STILL did it?
...if in the middle of a dramatic fight scene between a squad of clone troopers and "separatists" over the "cloning laboratory", Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory jumps out with his super robot and cries "Ohhh nooo, myy labbb!!", followed by his kid sister DeeDee screaming "Dexter is a cookie!". |D
Not to mention the imminent relaunch of Napster as a legal pay-per-song service much like iTunes!
Well, it's not so much that the slow rollout of broadband is holding up growth, it's that if extremely high speed connections (fiber for example) were rolled out TTH "to the home", we might see an explosion of new services that could be offered.
I mean, honestly, the fastest connection to the home (cable when it peaks at 3Megabits/sec or DSL at similarly high peak speeds) supports basic IP telephony and video over Internet.
On the other hand, imagine fiber connections which would bring a minimum theoretical bandwidth of 1 terabit per second (particularly with dense wave division multiplexing techniques), and now suddenly you have voice, video, data, etc. coming in through one pipe. That is both a scary thought to telecoms, and a great thought to an ordinary person (one bill, for example).
So, my point is that fiber to the curb/home would cause a frenzy in the telecom environment as well as provide an opportunity for Internet services never even possibly understood without that kind of bandwidth. Even without fiber to the home, increased reach of fiber effectively gives higher speeds longer reach.
It is true that fiber infrastructure is expensive, but make sure to realize that it's the hardware that is expensive, not the physical line. In fact, much fiber is already rolled out and cheap to access. With hardware advances in lasers and techniques, hardware could become much cheaper.
With a minimum of 1 terabit/sec coming to your individual machine (imagine the ability to download the entire Internet every SECOND), the Internet really does have some incredible possibility. That possibility should not be ruined by companies who hoard connectivity lines and wish to profit like crazy.
By the way, for general purposes, I agree that dial-up is fine. However, given more bandwidth, you almost guarantee that some users will expand what they do with the web.
I think that's why the hubbub over how to protect this future.