Don't be fooled by the moaning and groaning over outsourcing to India. India has great technical schools and produces wonderful computer scientists and programmers. However, their output is finite and the current outsourcing boom has just about tapped out the supply there.
Salaries for Indian software engineers are escalating 30% year-on-year right now and there's a complete feeding frenzy under way as the employers struggle to keep staffed up. Growth there will come to a halt in the next year or two.
Between the inflation in wages and the pressure to revalue the rupee against the dollar, the cost advantage held by Indian outsourcers will evaporate within the next year or two. After that, the CS shortage in the US will begin to pinch badly again.
China will come on stream one of these days, but the language barrier has been proving far more of a barrier than people had expected. The impact of Chinese software engineers, who are also excellent, will be markedly less.
Finally, other parts of the world will begin to compete with the US for the outsource resources in China much more than they did in India. The Europeans are slow, but they're not stupid.
Some years ago (1966) a science fiction writer named
Bob Shaw wrote a slightly maudlin short story called "Light Of Other Days" (not the recent novel by Clarke and Baxter) that featured a material called
"slow glass." Slow glass propagates light very slowly, so you see through it what was visible to it some amount of time in the past.
Here's the story. The concept in the story is based on some homogeneous material, but that's a nit.
Here's one that's easy and fun. Get a bunch of helium-filled balloons. Carefully puncture one and inhale the helium. Then talk.
What's happening is that the helium has much lower viscosity than air and as a result your vocal cords vibrate at much higher frequencies.
You can demonstrate this easily and cheaply. For kids of the appropriate age, you can provide enough balloons that they can all try it themselves. Much fun.
some history of robotic surgery
on
Robotic Surgery
·
· Score: 1
This isn't comprehensive, but I remember some work at IBM Research starting back in he mid-1980s by a guy named Russ Taylor on robot-assisted surgery. At the time the approach was focused on ways to improve the success rates of hip replacements by improving the accuracy of size, orientation, and placement of the hole drilled in the bone for the artificial joint.
I've seen two things recently about this, namely Russ Taylor is now a professor at Johns Hopkins where he's doing more
robotic surgery stuff from the sound of things.
In addition, I ran into a bunch called Integrated Surgical Systems that cite Taylor's work, though without naming him.
Unfortunately, everything I've found on the web is written for people who have better knowledge of astronomy than I do.
My clock shows New York time but all of the charts on the web sites show Universal Time (UT)... how do I convert UT to New York time? I know that UT is approximatly the same as London time, so it should correspond to five hours earlier than local time in NY. BUT I also know that one distinction between UT and London time is that UT doesn't do the summer time/winter time (daylight saving time, standard time) tango.
I don't know the constellations (sigh). I do have a powerful pair of binoculars, but I don't know where to point them.
Any clues?
I guess this is proof of the old saw that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
When Doug Engelbart invented the mouse (back in the '60s, back when your parents were still in diapers) his original concept was that the mouse would be an all-in-one device with a chord keyboard integrated into the top.
At least one research effort that I know of then
went on to build and measure such devices, namely Nat Rochester at IBM. He built one sometime in the 1970s. It used, if I recall correctly, a KIM-1 single board computer as its controller. I managed to get one from somewhere and played with it in about 1979 or so. It was quite something.
One of the fascinating results from research with this device was that people who had never typed on a regular typewriter before could be taught to type on the chord keyboard (one handed) in about the same amount of time that it took to teach someone to use a classical QWERTY keyboard. Moreover, when they were done learning, they were just as fast and just as accurate with one hand as normal people were using the QWERTY keyboard.
I can't cite results, but I presume that similar results apply to the Dvorak keyboard.
The conclusion is that the rate-limiting mechanisms for typing are not in the keyboard, regardless of the keyboard design.
At least for any of they keyboard designs that have been tried to date. Hence, QWERTY is good enough, since no one has yet demonstrated a design that is measurably better.
Back in the late 1970s I joined IBM as a junior electronic engineer. There I had my first experience of electronic mail. IBM had an internal network called VNET that connected all of their mainframes. It supported many of the services that we think of as characteristic of the Internet today - email, instant messages, file transfer, and remote terminal access. None of these services was as well implemented or architected as the Internet, but it wasn't too shabby for 1978.
I was completely bowled over by email and used it a lot. To my dismay, however, in something like 1979 or so they renamed the program, which had been called "mail," because of concerns that the US Postal Service owned the name. The program was renamed "note" and most of us geeks thought the decision was hilariously stupid.
It's fascinating to read this article and realize that what must have been going on was an effort by the USPS to protect its "brand name" for mail. I can just imagine IBM getting a lawyer letter from the Postal Service threatening legal action if they didn't stop using the word mail.
That's not really fair. When the US passes a law like the DMCA it doesn't mean that every citizen supports it.
Same thing goes for HP. Just because one employee acts like a jerk and invokes the DMCA doesn't mean another can't oppose it. Getting a large corporation to take a stand on something like a law is very hard, and probably ought to be hard. So be realistic both about HP and about Bruce.
In addition to games, there are many other interesting things that schools can do that engage students beyond the narrow didactic models of education. One of the most impressive demonstrations of this was the work of Brian Harvey at the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts back in 1979-1982.
Brian brought a UNIX system in to the school, back when UNIX was a pretty rare beast, geeks only, and he did some pretty amazing things. One thing he did was give the students root access. What he discovered is that if you give students responsibility, they will act responsibly. There's a wonderful writeup on his web page at Berkeley.
Many important things came out of that project, though the one that will probably have the most click with this crowd is that JOVE, Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, was written by one of Harvey's students.
So, in addition to games, there are several other interesting models for getting kids engaged. I like to think that Harvey's model encompasses the ones that encourage kids to play games on the computers.
I worked on the DSN back in the late 1970s out at JPL and I spent many days and nights
in the control room for the 70m antenna, so this article brings back some memories.
You asked how often these antennas break down. While I don't know any statistics, I can give you an idea of what sorts of things make up one of these installations.
First of all, the antenna has to be pointed at the satellite that it's tracking. This is not an easy task, since the satellite is moving and it's a long way away. To make matters worse, the beam width of the antenna is damn small, so you have to point it very accurately. Doing this involves some tricky work, when you consider how much a 70 meter antenna weighs. And you can't ignore the wind in the desert, though to be fair they do stow the antenna when the wind gets above 20 or 30 miles per hour, as I recall. So in addition to having to move a lot of steel, you have to position it very accurately. Take a complex polynomial to describe the trajectory in azimuth and elevation (or is it right ascension and declination? I don't remember) and servo all that steel to track.
OK, that's the mechanics.
Now let's talk about the transmitter. The satellites you're talking to are rather far away. Remember our friend one-over-r-squared? Well, when r is large, the energy falls of a hell of a lot. So when transmitting you try to have as much power as possible. Think megawatts. Megawatts at microwave frequencies. How do you generate such power at those frequencies? You take a vacuum tube that stands about six feet high and you put a lot of current into it. You cool that sucker with a lot of water. Did I mention that the antenna is out in the middle of the desert?
OK, now you have an idea about the transmitter.
Ah, yes, the receiver. Well, the satellite can't afford to transmit a megawatt of power. If it's lucky, it can muster ten or twenty watts. At planetary distances, the energy arriving at the antenna is comparable to the amount of energy that arrives at the moon when you hold up a lit match. Not much!
How do you make a receiver that will detect a signal that weak? This is a very complicated topic, but let me summarize by noting that the key component is a superconducting maser. This is basically a chunk of copper hollowed out, evacuated, and then cooled down to a very cold temperature. In the desert.
To coordinate all of this you have to have some computers. When I last visited the control room at Goldstone it seemed pretty darn big to me. It had something like six or seven rows of 19" racks, each row with something like thirty or forty racks. That was over 20 years ago, so I might be off by a factor of two or more.
Oh, yes, how about some facilities for the people who support the installation and the project people from JPL.
And it's out in the desert. The control electronics at the big antenna are in one building and the people who drive the antenna sit in another. There's a long tunnel between the two. You're out in the desert, so keep an eye out for scorpions when you go into the tunnel. I never saw a live one, though I did see several dead ones.
So in answer to your question about maintenance, yes, there is some stuff that needs maintenance.
Back in the mid-80s I started a project to
reimplement a testing system for a major
semiconductor manufacturing company. They'd
built their test language interpreter 25 years before in mainframe assembler
and relied on it heavily. Unfortunately, between
the bizarre network of micros and minis and the
weird batch scheduler on their mainframe, the
turnaround time to analyze a megabyte of test
data was about six hours. They called me in to
evaluate a plan to put micro-mainframes out on
their manufacturing floor to run the test system
to speed things up.
I noted that the micro-mainframes would cost
them a million dollars each and that they could
run their testing language on a $5,000 PC (a
PC-AT the way they did them cost that in those
days). All they had to do was rebuild the
test language interpreter using Lex and Yacc.
So they hired me to implement
their test language interpreter in Lex and Yacc on a little UNIX system that they got for me,
which took about a month. Once I had it basically
working, I went over to the head of the development team that supported the mainframe
implementation and asked her for her regression
test suite.
She didn't understand my question, but I wasn't
fazed, since the company was very big and had its
own terminology for everything. So I explained
the use of a regression test suite and how I wanted to use it to validate my implementation
of her test language. I figured she'd say,
"Oh, you mean the ZXZ Box," or something like
that and I'd have what
I needed.
It seems to me that we should block not just child porn sites but also things that can be construed as enabling child porn. Let's start with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The folks at SRI did propose a TLD to ICANN
that they call.geo. ICANN turned them down but they're still at it.
There is a lot of overlap between the SRI.geo proposal and the stuff in the New Scientist
article.
What I find interesting is that we keep proposing
schemes for unifying GIS data but we never seem
to find a way to create the incentives to make
it happen. Most GIS data are still proprietary,
being sold and resold by consulting houses to the
original data creators and owners.
The point is that the traditional Microsoft
strategy is to add features. Features that
can be named and explained seem to be more
effective in making sales than characteristics
like "more secure" and "more stable." Probably
because the payoff for security and stability
are longer term while the payoffs for more
features can be immediate.
I've read the commentary to date and it seems to me that the entire theme is about bilateral rights.
Our word "own" is so absolute. I either own something or I don't. But what is it that I own? Do I own a copy of a book, or do I own the words in the book? If I own a physical copy of a book, do I have the right to destroy it? To give it to a friend? To lend it to a colleague? To sell it to someone else? To scribble on it? To criticize it? To quote from it? To copy it? Many of these rights are well established in the law or by traditional usage. Many of the efforts to control digital rights in the modern era are disturbing because they violate our concepts of some of the rights that we are used to having with things like books.
Clifford Lynch's piece "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World"
(http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch /) is a very thought-provoking exploration of these issues.
Anyway, the world is a lot more complicated than just "own" or "not own". Most things actually have multiple rights claimants, even including "simple" things like music.
Here are two examples - anatomical X-rays and music.
A friend of mine once told me that after our lunch meeting he was on his way over to the lab where his orthopedic X-rays had been taken. Why? Because he'd heard, accidentally, from them that they were soon going to discard his X-rays but that they'd give them to him if he came to pick them up.
Given that he's an athlete who stresses his skeleton and suffers injuries periodically, he concluded that keeping the historical record of his skeleton would be of significant value to his personal health in the long term.
Hearing this made me think about the "ownership" of the X-rays. Who owns them? Is it the lab that created them physically and had custody? Is it the doctor who ordered them in the course of treating my friend for his various injuries? Is it my friend, whose bones were depicted?
Each of these has some sort of claim. The lab has a claim because they did work to create the pictures. The doctor who ordered them has a claim because she used her professional judgement in deciding what X-rays to order and spent time and effort in evaluating them. My friend has a claim because they're of him.
Here's another example. A piece of music has quite a large number of claims on it. The person who wrote the lyrics can make a claim, as can the person who wrote the music. Sometimes they're the same person, sometimes not. The singer who sang the words has a claim. So does each musician who performed, whether as a soloist or as a backup artist. The engineers who did the recording and the mixing have claims, as does the producer.
In the music biz these claims are usually either ceded for up-front cash payments, or are spelled out in contracts.
A digital rights management system should be flexible enough to accommodate all of these examples.
This topic has been around for a very long time. I remember that back in the 1980s C. May of IBM Research published a bunch of work on a system that I think was called mimic that could take native 370 code and translate it on the fly to PowerPC code.
The reason it was interesting is because there is so much 370 binary around, either written originally in assembler or created by long dead compilers from long lost source. You young geeks may sneer at this, but wait until you get called at three in the morning by someone in Tokyo asking you to help them debug a utility that you wrote seventeen years and five jobs ago. Don't laugh, it happens.
Anyway, this thing could take 370 binaries and "run" them on a PowerPC. I don't remember the numbers, but it seemed pretty impressive... something big O average of one 370 instruction to one PowerPC instruction, which is pretty impressive when you realize that 370 is a CISC machine and PowerPC is a RISC machine.
I wasn't there, but I have been told that the
original mouse invention by Doug Engelbart (then
of SRI) was actually a device a lot like the
right-hand side of the gadget seen here.
Engelbart posited a chord-keyboard for use by
one hand with a mouse ball underneath. I remember
reading some results by Nat Rochester of IBM back
in the 1970s in which he built a chord keyboard
of exactly this sort (I got one and played with
it in my lab... it was very cool). The only
problem with the chord keyboard is that it
was no faster or easier to type with than a
regular old QWERTY box, so it died away.
Nonetheless, I'd be surprised if this invention
is patentable in light of the original Engelbart
invention which is substantially similar.
Back in the 1970s I was a practicing electronic engineer and I followed the evolution of the cellphone technology with some interest in the technical press and the journals of the time.
There was intense competition to be the architect of the cellphone standard, a competition that Motorola won. This was not surprising in light of the fact that Motorola had commercialized most of the key technical capabilities in a range of mobile radio products (police and fire radios in particular) that are still in service today.
In the bad old days each radio had a transmit and a receive frequency. When each mobile unit was on the same frequencies, they stepped on each other (remember to say over, listen before speaking, and other disciplines that still survive in the CB world). When you gave each mobile unit its own frequencies you consumed lots of bandwidth and there had to be a very big system in the central office.
Motorola solved this problem by building flexible systems that used a number of frequencies plus a special channel that was only used very briefly in the instant when you pressed the "push to talk" button. During a tiny interval when this button was pushed the mobile set would transmit a request for a channel to the central station and get a response assigning it a frequency to use, to which it would tune its transmitter. All of the mobile receivers were tuned to the same frequency, thus for N mobile sets you only needed N+3 channels (N inbound, 1 request, 1 response, and 1 central broadcast). The ability to build frequency-agile transmitters was all that it took, and Motorola mastered that.
That, in essence, is the root of first-generation cell phone systems. The only thing required to make it all work was the basic cellular architecture, the handoff system that lets you rebind from one cell to another as you move around, and little more. Microprocessors, which arrived in the early 1970s, made it possible to do all of this affordably.
I remember following the debates over the technical details of cellular systems in the early and mid 1970s and I remember two specific examples of short-sightedness that stand out in retrospect:
market projections circulated in the mid-1970s and accepted everwhere were that the entire worldwide market for cellular telephones if they were to be deployed would be a maximum of one million units, and that only by the year 2000! I remember noting sometime back in the 80s or 90s when we passed one million new units per month in the USA.
authentication was proposed for the early phones and rejected as unaffordable because of the small market size. Of course the theft of cellphone identities became quite a sport in the badguy community a few years ago and now we have phone authentication that's a little harder to fake.
A lot of the commentary in this thread seems to me to be overly paranoid. I may be a Pollyanna, but I remember the electronics of the early 1970s. The estimates that drove decisions were not unreasonable or irrational. In retrospect they didn't include Moore's law (or an appropriate corrollary for analog electonics) and as a result they were way off for capability, cost, and size, but I don't think there was a conspiracy. I don't think the AT&T bureaucracy was smart enough or paranoid enough back then to have been that scheming. They were amazingly arrogant, and that led them to dismiss things they hadn't invented or thought of themselves. They really never learned to factor in the dynamic of change, but it would be giving them far too much credit to accuse them of having enough savvy to deliberately sabotage the cellphone movement.
Ken Perlin's zooming user interfaces, which he's been working on since at least the late 1980s are among the most intrigueing and novel ways of thinking about displays that I've ever seen. He establishes the notion that every place in space is infinitely magnifiable. This lets you deal with the problem of running out of room not by adding complex nested submenus and other gui goop to your interface but instead by adding something small that you can zoom in on if you need it.
It completely liberates interfaces from the rectilinear world of the physical displays that manufacturing technologies force on us. I've never seen anything quite so remarkable.
And, by the way, he's implemented the zooming interface lately entirely in Java. The presentation that I linked in above zooming user interfaces actually demonstrates the concepts live. Try it out. You'll never look at windows the same way again.
The unspoken assumption of everyone posting to this thread, or everyone of the 5% or so that I've read, is that corporations are equivalent to people. That is, capable of volition, decision, and moral responsibility.
I think, however, that this is probably mistaken. Companies are like computers. They're machines. We confuse them with people because they're made up of people and people are involved in all of their actions. Don't be fooled, companies are machines. They can be dominated by individuals, either in reality or in perception [we don't distinguish Bill Gates from Microsoft, though we probably ought to], but the actions of the company are still those of a person. Even when the company is "managed" and has no visibly dominant individual, there are people behind the decisions. They are responsible for the morality of their actions.
Is a tape recording moral? We don't consider it to be possible. We discuss the morality of the person who wrote the words on the tape or the morality of the person who read them aloud.
But what about objects that seem to have no legitimate moral purpose - some would say guns and others would disagree. Let's try nerve gas or land mines. These objects seem to be morally negative. If that's the case, can't corporations be good or bad?
I insist that we go back to the people involved. Corporations exist in law in the US, at least, to shield their owners who may not have any power over their actions from economic responsibility for the company's actions *beyond the loss of their equity investment*. That shield is an economic and legal one, not a moral or ethical one. This is something that has recently been discovered by folks who insist that their IRA not be invested in the tobacco industry or Apartheid South Africa.
Don't blame the machines, blame the people who use them.
I had an HP LaserJet 4M (Postscript, notionally for the Macintosh market) that was fabulous. Got it back in 1992 or 1993 when it came out and ran it for six years. Great printer. I finally used it up earlier this year and bought the HP LaserJet 3100. Great printer too, BUT not suitable for Linux use. Its pluses are that it has a good scanner, a nice standalone fax, and an excellent printer. Its minus is that the protocol on the wire is proprietary and the drivers for it are only available for Windows 95, 98, and (recently) NT. From the behavior of my PC when I print (painfully slow), I surmise that the printer is very dumb with nothing even as sophisticated as PCL, much less PostScript, on the wire. I guess that the PC's CPU is doing all of the page composition work and probably sending rasters over to the printer. What comes back from the scanner is anyone's guess.
Too bad HP hasn't published a spec... *if* it had a good driver for Linux, it would be a wonderful choice.
That's true, but consider the person who innocently registers www.whatevertheheck.com only to discover that in some other part of the country, or of the world for that matter, there is a chain of WhatEverTheHeck stores and he has unwittingly stepped on their trademark. He's invested money and energy in making his web site into a going concern, only to be told that he can't keep it. If he asks to be compensated for his investment, he's guilty of cybersquatting.
Here's another scenario. Our intrepid hacker registers www.whatevertheheck.com and gets a lawyer letter from someone representing "Whatever The Hell, Incorporated" telling him that his domain name is too close and that he should cease and desist.
Finally, what do we do about the fact that there are at least two General Electric companies, one in the US and one in the UK. Which one gets to own www.ge.com? The first to register? OK, OK, bad example, I know, because the UK company is known as GEC while the US one is known as GE, so they won't collide, but I'm sure there are other examples.
Personally, I think this proposed law is misguided because US law doesn apply globally and a law of this sort will only apply if the disputants are both US entities or accept US law. This will put non-US entities at a disadvantage with respect to US entities, since they'll either have to respond to a court case in the US, very expensive, or lose. Then the winner serves papers on NSI, and the non-US entity is screwed. This will ultimately chill the attractiveness of doing business on the Internet for non-US businesses and organizations.
So, this proposed law is a waste of effort. It can't achieve its stated aim AND it has the potential to harm the Internet community. Bad law.
Slashdot Mirror
Salaries for Indian software engineers are escalating 30% year-on-year right now and there's a complete feeding frenzy under way as the employers struggle to keep staffed up. Growth there will come to a halt in the next year or two.
Between the inflation in wages and the pressure to revalue the rupee against the dollar, the cost advantage held by Indian outsourcers will evaporate within the next year or two. After that, the CS shortage in the US will begin to pinch badly again.
China will come on stream one of these days, but the language barrier has been proving far more of a barrier than people had expected. The impact of Chinese software engineers, who are also excellent, will be markedly less.
Finally, other parts of the world will begin to compete with the US for the outsource resources in China much more than they did in India. The Europeans are slow, but they're not stupid.
"Other Days, Other Eyes" (1972) is based on his earlier short story "Light of Other Days" (1966).
Here's the story. The concept in the story is based on some homogeneous material, but that's a nit.
Next project for this guy should be "slow glass."
What's happening is that the helium has much lower viscosity than air and as a result your vocal cords vibrate at much higher frequencies.
You can demonstrate this easily and cheaply. For kids of the appropriate age, you can provide enough balloons that they can all try it themselves. Much fun.
I've seen two things recently about this, namely Russ Taylor is now a professor at Johns Hopkins where he's doing more robotic surgery stuff from the sound of things.
In addition, I ran into a bunch called Integrated Surgical Systems that cite Taylor's work, though without naming him.
When Doug Engelbart invented the mouse (back in the '60s, back when your parents were still in diapers) his original concept was that the mouse would be an all-in-one device with a chord keyboard integrated into the top.
At least one research effort that I know of then went on to build and measure such devices, namely Nat Rochester at IBM. He built one sometime in the 1970s. It used, if I recall correctly, a KIM-1 single board computer as its controller. I managed to get one from somewhere and played with it in about 1979 or so. It was quite something.
One of the fascinating results from research with this device was that people who had never typed on a regular typewriter before could be taught to type on the chord keyboard (one handed) in about the same amount of time that it took to teach someone to use a classical QWERTY keyboard. Moreover, when they were done learning, they were just as fast and just as accurate with one hand as normal people were using the QWERTY keyboard.
I can't cite results, but I presume that similar results apply to the Dvorak keyboard.
The conclusion is that the rate-limiting mechanisms for typing are not in the keyboard, regardless of the keyboard design. At least for any of they keyboard designs that have been tried to date. Hence, QWERTY is good enough, since no one has yet demonstrated a design that is measurably better.
I was completely bowled over by email and used it a lot. To my dismay, however, in something like 1979 or so they renamed the program, which had been called "mail," because of concerns that the US Postal Service owned the name. The program was renamed "note" and most of us geeks thought the decision was hilariously stupid.
It's fascinating to read this article and realize that what must have been going on was an effort by the USPS to protect its "brand name" for mail. I can just imagine IBM getting a lawyer letter from the Postal Service threatening legal action if they didn't stop using the word mail.
Same thing goes for HP. Just because one employee acts like a jerk and invokes the DMCA doesn't mean another can't oppose it. Getting a large corporation to take a stand on something like a law is very hard, and probably ought to be hard. So be realistic both about HP and about Bruce.
Brian brought a UNIX system in to the school, back when UNIX was a pretty rare beast, geeks only, and he did some pretty amazing things. One thing he did was give the students root access. What he discovered is that if you give students responsibility, they will act responsibly. There's a wonderful writeup on his web page at Berkeley.
Many important things came out of that project, though the one that will probably have the most click with this crowd is that JOVE, Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, was written by one of Harvey's students.
So, in addition to games, there are several other interesting models for getting kids engaged. I like to think that Harvey's model encompasses the ones that encourage kids to play games on the computers.
You asked how often these antennas break down. While I don't know any statistics, I can give you an idea of what sorts of things make up one of these installations.
First of all, the antenna has to be pointed at the satellite that it's tracking. This is not an easy task, since the satellite is moving and it's a long way away. To make matters worse, the beam width of the antenna is damn small, so you have to point it very accurately. Doing this involves some tricky work, when you consider how much a 70 meter antenna weighs. And you can't ignore the wind in the desert, though to be fair they do stow the antenna when the wind gets above 20 or 30 miles per hour, as I recall. So in addition to having to move a lot of steel, you have to position it very accurately. Take a complex polynomial to describe the trajectory in azimuth and elevation (or is it right ascension and declination? I don't remember) and servo all that steel to track.
OK, that's the mechanics.
Now let's talk about the transmitter. The satellites you're talking to are rather far away. Remember our friend one-over-r-squared? Well, when r is large, the energy falls of a hell of a lot. So when transmitting you try to have as much power as possible. Think megawatts. Megawatts at microwave frequencies. How do you generate such power at those frequencies? You take a vacuum tube that stands about six feet high and you put a lot of current into it. You cool that sucker with a lot of water. Did I mention that the antenna is out in the middle of the desert?
OK, now you have an idea about the transmitter.
Ah, yes, the receiver. Well, the satellite can't afford to transmit a megawatt of power. If it's lucky, it can muster ten or twenty watts. At planetary distances, the energy arriving at the antenna is comparable to the amount of energy that arrives at the moon when you hold up a lit match. Not much!
How do you make a receiver that will detect a signal that weak? This is a very complicated topic, but let me summarize by noting that the key component is a superconducting maser. This is basically a chunk of copper hollowed out, evacuated, and then cooled down to a very cold temperature. In the desert.
To coordinate all of this you have to have some computers. When I last visited the control room at Goldstone it seemed pretty darn big to me. It had something like six or seven rows of 19" racks, each row with something like thirty or forty racks. That was over 20 years ago, so I might be off by a factor of two or more.
Oh, yes, how about some facilities for the people who support the installation and the project people from JPL.
And it's out in the desert. The control electronics at the big antenna are in one building and the people who drive the antenna sit in another. There's a long tunnel between the two. You're out in the desert, so keep an eye out for scorpions when you go into the tunnel. I never saw a live one, though I did see several dead ones.
So in answer to your question about maintenance, yes, there is some stuff that needs maintenance.
I noted that the micro-mainframes would cost them a million dollars each and that they could run their testing language on a $5,000 PC (a PC-AT the way they did them cost that in those days). All they had to do was rebuild the test language interpreter using Lex and Yacc.
So they hired me to implement their test language interpreter in Lex and Yacc on a little UNIX system that they got for me, which took about a month. Once I had it basically working, I went over to the head of the development team that supported the mainframe implementation and asked her for her regression test suite.
She didn't understand my question, but I wasn't fazed, since the company was very big and had its own terminology for everything. So I explained the use of a regression test suite and how I wanted to use it to validate my implementation of her test language. I figured she'd say, "Oh, you mean the ZXZ Box," or something like that and I'd have what I needed.
She said, "Gee, what a great idea!"
It seems to me that we should block not just
child porn sites but also things that can be
construed as enabling child porn. Let's
start with the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights.
There is a lot of overlap between the SRI .geo proposal and the stuff in the New Scientist
article.
What I find interesting is that we keep proposing schemes for unifying GIS data but we never seem to find a way to create the incentives to make it happen. Most GIS data are still proprietary, being sold and resold by consulting houses to the original data creators and owners.
The point is that the traditional Microsoft
strategy is to add features. Features that
can be named and explained seem to be more
effective in making sales than characteristics
like "more secure" and "more stable." Probably
because the payoff for security and stability
are longer term while the payoffs for more
features can be immediate.
I've read the commentary to date and it seems to me that the entire theme is about bilateral rights.
h /) is a very thought-provoking exploration of these issues.
Our word "own" is so absolute. I either own something or I don't. But what is it that I own? Do I own a copy of a book, or do I own the words in the book? If I own a physical copy of a book, do I have the right to destroy it? To give it to a friend? To lend it to a colleague? To sell it to someone else? To scribble on it? To criticize it? To quote from it? To copy it? Many of these rights are well established in the law or by traditional usage. Many of the efforts to control digital rights in the modern era are disturbing because they violate our concepts of some of the rights that we are used to having with things like books.
Clifford Lynch's piece "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World"
(http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lync
Anyway, the world is a lot more complicated than just "own" or "not own". Most things actually have multiple rights claimants, even including "simple" things like music.
Here are two examples - anatomical X-rays and music.
A friend of mine once told me that after our lunch meeting he was on his way over to the lab where his orthopedic X-rays had been taken. Why? Because he'd heard, accidentally, from them that they were soon going to discard his X-rays but that they'd give them to him if he came to pick them up.
Given that he's an athlete who stresses his skeleton and suffers injuries periodically, he concluded that keeping the historical record of his skeleton would be of significant value to his personal health in the long term.
Hearing this made me think about the "ownership" of the X-rays. Who owns them? Is it the lab that created them physically and had custody? Is it the doctor who ordered them in the course of treating my friend for his various injuries? Is it my friend, whose bones were depicted?
Each of these has some sort of claim. The lab has a claim because they did work to create the pictures. The doctor who ordered them has a claim because she used her professional judgement in deciding what X-rays to order and spent time and effort in evaluating them. My friend has a claim because they're of him.
Here's another example. A piece of music has quite a large number of claims on it. The person who wrote the lyrics can make a claim, as can the person who wrote the music. Sometimes they're the same person, sometimes not. The singer who sang the words has a claim. So does each musician who performed, whether as a soloist or as a backup artist. The engineers who did the recording and the mixing have claims, as does the producer.
In the music biz these claims are usually either ceded for up-front cash payments, or are spelled out in contracts.
A digital rights management system should be flexible enough to accommodate all of these examples.
And, by the way, these are the simple ones.
The reason it was interesting is because there is so much 370 binary around, either written originally in assembler or created by long dead compilers from long lost source. You young geeks may sneer at this, but wait until you get called at three in the morning by someone in Tokyo asking you to help them debug a utility that you wrote seventeen years and five jobs ago. Don't laugh, it happens.
Anyway, this thing could take 370 binaries and "run" them on a PowerPC. I don't remember the numbers, but it seemed pretty impressive ... something big O average of one 370 instruction to one PowerPC instruction, which is pretty impressive when you realize that 370 is a CISC machine and PowerPC is a RISC machine.
Engelbart posited a chord-keyboard for use by one hand with a mouse ball underneath. I remember reading some results by Nat Rochester of IBM back in the 1970s in which he built a chord keyboard of exactly this sort (I got one and played with it in my lab ... it was very cool). The only
problem with the chord keyboard is that it
was no faster or easier to type with than a
regular old QWERTY box, so it died away.
Nonetheless, I'd be surprised if this invention is patentable in light of the original Engelbart invention which is substantially similar.
There was intense competition to be the architect of the cellphone standard, a competition that Motorola won. This was not surprising in light of the fact that Motorola had commercialized most of the key technical capabilities in a range of mobile radio products (police and fire radios in particular) that are still in service today.
In the bad old days each radio had a transmit and a receive frequency. When each mobile unit was on the same frequencies, they stepped on each other (remember to say over, listen before speaking, and other disciplines that still survive in the CB world). When you gave each mobile unit its own frequencies you consumed lots of bandwidth and there had to be a very big system in the central office.
Motorola solved this problem by building flexible systems that used a number of frequencies plus a special channel that was only used very briefly in the instant when you pressed the "push to talk" button. During a tiny interval when this button was pushed the mobile set would transmit a request for a channel to the central station and get a response assigning it a frequency to use, to which it would tune its transmitter. All of the mobile receivers were tuned to the same frequency, thus for N mobile sets you only needed N+3 channels (N inbound, 1 request, 1 response, and 1 central broadcast). The ability to build frequency-agile transmitters was all that it took, and Motorola mastered that.
That, in essence, is the root of first-generation cell phone systems. The only thing required to make it all work was the basic cellular architecture, the handoff system that lets you rebind from one cell to another as you move around, and little more. Microprocessors, which arrived in the early 1970s, made it possible to do all of this affordably.
I remember following the debates over the technical details of cellular systems in the early and mid 1970s and I remember two specific examples of short-sightedness that stand out in retrospect:
A lot of the commentary in this thread seems to me to be overly paranoid. I may be a Pollyanna, but I remember the electronics of the early 1970s. The estimates that drove decisions were not unreasonable or irrational. In retrospect they didn't include Moore's law (or an appropriate corrollary for analog electonics) and as a result they were way off for capability, cost, and size, but I don't think there was a conspiracy. I don't think the AT&T bureaucracy was smart enough or paranoid enough back then to have been that scheming. They were amazingly arrogant, and that led them to dismiss things they hadn't invented or thought of themselves. They really never learned to factor in the dynamic of change, but it would be giving them far too much credit to accuse them of having enough savvy to deliberately sabotage the cellphone movement.
It completely liberates interfaces from the rectilinear world of the physical displays that manufacturing technologies force on us. I've never seen anything quite so remarkable.
And, by the way, he's implemented the zooming interface lately entirely in Java. The presentation that I linked in above zooming user interfaces actually demonstrates the concepts live. Try it out. You'll never look at windows the same way again.
The unspoken assumption of everyone posting to this thread, or everyone of the 5% or so that I've read, is that corporations are equivalent to people. That is, capable of volition, decision, and moral responsibility.
I think, however, that this is probably mistaken. Companies are like computers. They're machines. We confuse them with people because they're made up of people and people are involved in all of their actions. Don't be fooled, companies are machines. They can be dominated by individuals, either in reality or in perception [we don't distinguish Bill Gates from Microsoft, though we probably ought to], but the actions of the company are still those of a person. Even when the company is "managed" and has no visibly dominant individual, there are people behind the decisions. They are responsible for the morality of their actions.
Is a tape recording moral? We don't consider it to be possible. We discuss the morality of the person who wrote the words on the tape or the morality of the person who read them aloud.
But what about objects that seem to have no legitimate moral purpose - some would say guns and others would disagree. Let's try nerve gas or land mines. These objects seem to be morally negative. If that's the case, can't corporations be good or bad?
I insist that we go back to the people involved. Corporations exist in law in the US, at least, to shield their owners who may not have any power over their actions from economic responsibility for the company's actions *beyond the loss of their equity investment*. That shield is an economic and legal one, not a moral or ethical one. This is something that has recently been discovered by folks who insist that their IRA not be invested in the tobacco industry or Apartheid South Africa.
Don't blame the machines, blame the people who use them.
I had an HP LaserJet 4M (Postscript, notionally
... *if* it had
for the Macintosh market) that was fabulous.
Got it back in 1992 or 1993 when it came out
and ran it for six years. Great printer. I
finally used it up earlier this year and bought
the HP LaserJet 3100. Great printer too, BUT
not suitable for Linux use. Its pluses are that
it has a good scanner, a nice standalone fax, and
an excellent printer. Its minus is that the
protocol on the wire is proprietary and the
drivers for it are only available for Windows
95, 98, and (recently) NT. From the behavior
of my PC when I print (painfully slow), I surmise
that the printer is very dumb with nothing even
as sophisticated as PCL, much less PostScript,
on the wire. I guess that the PC's CPU is doing
all of the page composition work and probably
sending rasters over to the printer. What
comes back from the scanner is anyone's guess.
Too bad HP hasn't published a spec
a good driver for Linux, it would be a wonderful
choice.
That's true, but consider the person who innocently registers www.whatevertheheck.com only to discover that in some other part of the country, or of the world for that matter, there is a chain of WhatEverTheHeck stores and he has unwittingly stepped on their trademark. He's invested money and energy in making his web site into a going concern, only to be told that he can't keep it. If he asks to be compensated for his investment, he's guilty of cybersquatting.
Here's another scenario. Our intrepid hacker registers www.whatevertheheck.com and gets a lawyer letter from someone representing "Whatever The Hell, Incorporated" telling him that his domain name is too close and that he should cease and desist.
Finally, what do we do about the fact that there are at least two General Electric companies, one in the US and one in the UK. Which one gets to own www.ge.com? The first to register? OK, OK, bad example, I know, because the UK company is known as GEC while the US one is known as GE, so they won't collide, but I'm sure there are other examples.
Personally, I think this proposed law is misguided because US law doesn apply globally and a law of this sort will only apply if the disputants are both US entities or accept US law. This will put non-US entities at a disadvantage with respect to US entities, since they'll either have to respond to a court case in the US, very expensive, or lose. Then the winner serves papers on NSI, and the non-US entity is screwed. This will ultimately chill the attractiveness of doing business on the Internet for non-US businesses and organizations.
So, this proposed law is a waste of effort. It can't achieve its stated aim AND it has the potential to harm the Internet community. Bad law.