But Balmer said they could do "Interoperability" which essentially means giving up the "need for compatibility".
I'm not sure that interoperability means the end of "need for compatibility." Of course, they will offer interoperability. But I'll wager its just another embrace-and-extend play in which MS plays better with MS. Sure, MS won't prevent Windows users from using Google, but I wonder if MS will try to create an integrated search tool that gets instant high market-share merely by being embedded in the OS.
Going further, what stops MS from offering integrated search products that can access MS-proprietary data structures (ASP,.net, IIS, SQL Server, etc.). With the large number of websites built for IE and run on MS server stuff, MS search could go places that Google would have a harder time following.
Many well-positioned companies have fallen before Microsoft's onslaught. Some might argue that Apple, Netscape, & Palm all made mistakes, but then all companies do. Microsoft is hard to beat given its huge marketshare and the combination of need-for-compatibility and user-apathy (how many people just use what MS provides because it is preloaded).
I hope Google isn't marginalized, but the historical data suggests otherwise.
I have sound muted on nearly all my computers -- that I can't hear them makes little difference to the OS or OS design. At worst, audible alerts need only be replaced by a flash of the menu-bar. Being blind would be a whole other matter.
The point is that some "disabilities" have little impact on OS design, other have a huge impact and each disability affect OS deisgn in different ways.
When everything is networked, the potential for commercial and criminal abuses becomes that much higher.
A phisher sends a small worm to your stereo, the stereo asks the user to re-input the password on the DRM system, the phisher collects that password and uses it to re-sell all your music (possibly making you lose the right to listen to it). Even at $0.02/song and a 5,000 song collection, the phisher gets $100 per cracked stereo.
Phishers attack one, low-level device hoping that the phished password from that device is also used on other, more important devices. How many people might use the same password on their stereo's DRM system, their refrigerator's automatic reordering system, their car's ignition system, or their bank's online account access?
Spams starts arriving on ALL audio devices -- audio pop-ups ("audiups"?) start intruding on iPODs, VOIP phones, stereos. Worse, the infection could attack anything with a sound chip. Imagine suggestive Viagra ads coming from your pop-up toaster oven.
A sleazy marketer buys access to or plants spyware in your vehicle's navigation system. You start getting pop-ups for oil-lube places or the database of locations of competitors becomes corrupted misleading the driver on their location.
Digital cameras become spam-sending zombies. Anyone who walks within bluetooth range of you suddenly finds an image file on their device that contains an ad for whatever is the latest spam du jour.
...... I'm sure there are a million other scenarios, but its early and my coffee hasn't sunk in.
The point: Cool technology, but I wonder if the core OS has needed security layers to prevent exploits like these. I wonder if the systems designers have embedded a strong sense of permissions on processes and interfaces.
The orbit of this band can't be anything but contentious. The shadow cast by this band would fall equally on both Northern and Southern hemisphere countries. Yet most of the greenhouse gas emitters (U.S., Europe, Japan, Asia, et al) are concentrated in the Northern hemisphere. The shadow would also affect equatorial countries that are not the cause of the problem.
It's an interesting solution but seems to place some burdens (e.g., ecological changes) on countries that are not the alleged cause of the problem.
Technology seems to be increasing the economic efficiency of the marketplace by supporting a type of business model arbitrage. If somebody offers something for less than it really costs or is really worth, people use technology to quickly find a way to exploit it.
For example, cell companies offer free in-system minutes to encourage friends & family to recruit new customers -- a nice little viral marketing ploy and something that, I'm sure, reduces stress in friends & family cell phone conversations. But it also creates an opportunity because those free in-system minutes are worth something if they can be somehow converted to out-of-system calls. Hence the motivations for this little hack.
Or consider the case of the single-use video camera. The unit is offered at a subsidized price (less than the true price of the camera) with the expectation that the consumer will return the camera and pay for the DVD conversion service. With a bit of hacking, though, a person can get a low-grade digital video camera for only single-use price of about $20.
Technology allows people to exploit these situations (and publish the results), much to the chagrin of the businesses that use these models. I wonder if this will drive businesses to a true pay-for-what-you-get mode of operation. No cell minutes will be free because it will be too easy to abuse free minutes. No single-use device will be as cheap -- it will require a deposit for the value of the asset.
That technology allows people to use products and services in unintended ways will force companies to change their products or business models to either lock-out unintended uses or build in a charge for the cost of those uses.
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density, which has nothing to do with hard drives. Secondly, hard drives haven't been getting any more reliable. That means all these hard drives have to be replaced every few years. It's a nightmare for long-term storage.
You are right -- Gordon Moore spoke only of trends in the number of transistors/IC. Yet his law was, if anything, about advances in the technologies of miniaturization. This miniaturization has had profound, indirect effects on storage. The same technologies that enabled semiconductor engineers to make smaller transistors have helped disk drive designers make denser drives. Smaller heads, faster electronics, and a better understanding of materials lead to advancements in both ICs and HDs.
I'm not sure what you mean about reliability. Perhaps reliability on a per-drive basis remains constant. But reliability on a per-bit basis has improved. How long would a cluster of 4,000 40 MB drives go without a failure in 1987? The reliability of 160 GB of storage has improved.
Yes, storage systems need periodic drive replacement but by the time a drive needs to be replaced, the indirect effects of Moore's Law will have made that replacement about 1/4 the price of the original drive. Thus, if storage is $1/Gb now, securing about $1.33/GB is sufficient to buy both today's storage and have the money needed to buy all subsequent replacements every 3 years in perpetuity. By 2022, a storage array of 100 servers with 6 drives each (an installation only 4 times larger on a device-count basis than the new Wikipedia installation) would provide the needed storage of 347 PB.
I think you're missing the point, which is that all that data is now much easier to lose, especially in the short term, if it's not taken care of properly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Sure, digital data can be lost easily, but it can also be copied/backed-up more easily. Assuming $0.01/page for paper copy (a gross underestimate of the cost of paper, toner, and labor for copies) and assuming 10 kB data/page (an overestimate), $10/GB (for high-end maintained storage), then cost ratio is at least 100:1 in favor of digital (and probably 1000:1). Inaccessible formats are a concern, but an automated batch process at the time of initial archiving can, at least, convert the data to some data format standard with a longer likely lifespan(e.g., plain ASCII, RTF, PDF, HTML, etc.)
Paper is its own single-point of failure concerns and the huge cost of copying makes those concerns real. Digital does add some new modes of failure (e.g., format obsolesce), but I think those are not as burdensome as the physical costs of copies.
In 1987, a Mac II came with a 40 MB drive. 17 years later, a PowerMac G5 came with 160 GB drive. This was at least 4000X improvement in storage density and price (and 1987's drive was both physically larger and more expensive than 2004's drive).
Assuming we continue the current rate of advance in storage density and price, future archivist should be able to buy a 0.64 PB drive for under $500 in 2021. A mere quarter of million dollars will provide enough space for a copy of all that stuff.
Digital technologies mean that archivists now enjoy orders of magnitude more information than they had in the past. Consider all the hallway and phone conversations or jotted notes lost in a paper-based organization versus having an archives of e-mail, IM, and sticky-note digital files.
Digital technologies mean that archivists now enjoy orders of magnitude more potential accessibility that in the past. Even if paper has greater innate archival lifespan, its physical form makes in inaccessible to all but a select monkish class of archivists colocated with their paper archives. Even the select few archivists who are allowed access to paper archives can only effectively process at best dozen documents per minute (and only a dozen per hour if they must wander the files to find randomly dispersed documents).
By contrast, digital technologies radically expand access on two dimensions. First, technology expands the number of people that can access an archive in terms of distance -- a remote researcher can have full access, including access to documents in use by other archivists. A low cost to copy documents means a wealth of information. Second, search tools provide prodigious access to the files -- searching/accessng/reading thousands or millions of documents per second.
To say we face a dark age is to presume that paper documents provided far more enlightenment and comprehensiveness of documentation than paper ever actually did.
Technology can help extend human abilities, surmount human limitation, but its no panacea.
I have no way to tell if your are "obsessed" except to ponder the relationship between the incremental time spent on technology versus the incremental benefit. If you spent an hour less on technology per week, would your quality of life be diminished? If you, instead, spent that hour on something else (a non technological hobby, interacting with friends, etc.), would your quality of life by increased? How do those balance for you?
Of course, technology may be a means for you (or other disabled people) to accomplish what others do without non-technological assistance. Then the only issue is in making sure that technology stays in the realm of means rather than becoming an end unto itself.
That is why I say technology is no panacea. It is merely a tool. As with all tools, its value is indirect -- valuable only for the things that it enables, not valuable unto itself.
We know that the black turtle-necked one hates noisy machines and I agree with him. I configured an old Powerbook 190cs to boot from a CF card in the PCMCIA slot -- wonderfully silent and much faster than booting from the HD. Of course on that old machine, the OS, a couple of applications, and some files fit nicely in only a 4 MB flash memory. In contrast, OSX, modern apps, and files will need 1024 times that space (4 GB) at a minimum and tens of GB if the person has even a modest collection of media files.
I can only hope that Samsung's technology roadmap (16 GB by 2006, 100 GB by 2008) is correct although I wonder how HD technology will have evolved over those same years.
It cracks me up, because they probably have an obsessive/compulsive, socially-maligned programmer within Secunia that just delights spending 16 hours a day trying to twist the browsers into doing what he wants. And then Secunia announces these flaws to save their reputation because nothing else is going on.
I'm sure you are absolutely right. And hopefully he'll keep doing it because you there are crackers, phishers, and criminals out there who delight in spending 16 hours a day trying to twist browsers into doing what they wants. If Secunia is a bit obsessive in their red team activities against computers, then we can hope that they uncover exploits (and motivate patching or disabling of exploitable features) before they appear in the wild.
I, for one, welcome information on what computer software and features can or cannot be trusted.
If Hollywood can do it, why can't I? I'd like my credit card numbers, SSN, etc to be unreadable outside the country (OK, I'll leave one credit card universally accessible for travel to foreign countries). In fact, I'd like to take it a step farther. I'd love some DRM on my data so that my bank can't pass it to who knows who 3rd-party companies for marketing opportunities.
I know, I know, I don't own my own data (the bank compiled it and thus the bank claims ownership of it). But a consumer can dream, can't he?
Seriously, until financial data gets some kind of DRM/coding/tracking codes/etc., it will be impossible to track who leaked or sold information and thus recover damages from irresponsible holders of consumer's data. Until the irresponsible can be found and punished (civil suits or criminal charges), no one will have much incentive to protect consumer data.
This seems inevitable as the Aibo's WiFi and webcam would seem to provide a physical network layer for ingress and an interesting target for crackers (virus-laden downloads are another means of infection).
I can just imagine Aibo spyware that relays webcam shots to who-ever. Owners will need to think twice the next time their Aibo wanders into the bathroom or bedroom.
Time to start thinking about how to deworm the Aibo.
The only number that matters in the long term is making people happy (the whole reason that we have an economy, money, IP, the RIAA, etc). If we could be producing more happy people by clamping down hard on infringers, if this produces more and better music and thus makes does a better job of satisfying a desire for music, then we should clamp down.
Excellent point! What RIAA, et al want is compensation for the happiness they provide through music that is illegally downloaded. If a person downloads a song -- even on a try-before-you-buy basis -- does not that create a small amount of happiness for the downloader? What about the iota of happiness provided by "having" a song in a collection (even if its not listened to?) Do the people that made the music or made the musician popular deserve nothing for that incremental unit of happiness they helped provide from songs that are downloaded and stored? If a person is happier because they added another 2 GB of music to their collection, shouldn't the people who provided that music receive some compensation?
The only question then is the mechanism for compensating the creators, technicians, marketers, and distributors of music. This is where we get into all the problems of DRM, subscriptions, taxes on media, fees on bandwidth, government-sponsored arts, etc. (and lots of unhappiness) Each of these crude mechanisms is an attempt to create a fair trade between those that want to listen to and keep music versus those that provide that music.
The only number that matters for purposes of affecting legislation is total *actual* losses. The MPAA's losses numbers have nothing to do with the actual losses, mostly because it's incredibly difficult to predict what would happen.
Agreed. All loss numbers require bad assumptions (e.g., each illegal download of an album = one lost CD sale or that CD sales are up = no losses). Perhaps what really matters is how much music people are listening too, how much they value that listening experience, how much music people are collecting, and how much they value that collection. To the extent that people value music that they have on disk and listen to, but do not pay for, the RIAA can declare a loss. I'm sure that loss number is lower than RIAA would claim, but much higher than proponents of illegal downloads would like to admit.
As you allude to, creating a mechanism for valuing the happiness created by the listening and collecting of music is the key. The ugly challenge is that, to date, all of the proposed mechanisms seem to create unhappiness, too. Thanks for an insightful post.
This is a classic example of bogus statistics. The two figures have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The 30% of people using legal downloads might be mutually exclusive or totally overlapping with the 40% that use illegal downloads. The numbers need not total to 100% (and could total to more than 100%).
At best we can conclude:
No greater than 70% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal) -- i.e., as much as 30% of music listeners simply don't download music.
No fewer than 40% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal).
At most, 30% use both legal and illegal downloads.
It's possible (based on this limited data) that no one does both illegal and legal downloading.
In next month's survey, both numbers could go up or down since the survey does not ask "do you ONLY download music from legal/ illegal sources." Moreover, the survey provides no estimates of volumes -- illegal downloaders could be downloading 10X or 10X less than their legal-downloading counterparts. Or people that download legal music could be the biggest "pirates" and this survey would be none the wiser.
God rest his soul, for without him, Slashdot would not be!
First, I mean no disrespect to Kilby -- he clearly was an innovator of the first order and an accomplished inventor. But to say that without him, slashdot would not have happened is to misread the broad sweep of history in general and the history of chips in particular. So many great ideas bubble out of the context of the time, not the minds of some unique person. Eras are primed for particular inventions. Even the IC was essentially invented by two independent inventors-- don't forget Robert Noyce who also "invented" the chip. Kilby's chip may have come a few months earlier, but Noyce's chip was on silicon.
At worst, without Kilby, the IC would have been delayed half a year and all of us with have slightly lower post-counts.
The article alludes to fraudulent activity starting back in mid-April leading to an investigation of this particular card processor in mid-May. That suggests that the card companies do some rather interesting statistical analyses on fraud patterns to find commonalities. In this case, they were able to detect that an unusual number of cards with fraudulent transactions had, at some point, a transaction that shared a common card processor sometime in the past.
Obviously, someone (I assume its Mastercard, Visa, etc.) is storing sufficient volume of historical transactions (including metadata such as the 3rd-party transaction processor) to analyze patterns such as this. With some 60 billion card transactions per year worldwide, this would make for a very large dataset and a very interesting analysis problem.
Opiates are CNS (Central Nervous System) depressants. This class of drugs suppresses neural activity, deadening pain and thought. In contrast, good SF stimulates thought by presenting an interesting what-if with some combination of technical and social contexts and consequences.
SF may be a mind-altering drug (perhaps a stimulant or hallucinogen), but it is not an opiate.
Getting into payment systems will expose Google to new levels of regulation that may affect user's privacy. Regulations related money laundering and anti-terrorist laws may force Google to collect and turn-over data on users of its payment service. I wonder if those rules might also force Google to turn-over other data on "customers of interest".
Having all your information (your banking, your email, your internet search activities) in one basket makes it a tempting target for government.
Oh wait, exactly how many IRS breaches have we had so far?
I doubt the IRS would be forthcoming if their was a breach (although there are the occasional articles about corrupt IRS employees). In fact, a breach would probably be classified and not be allowed to be published. In contrast, a card processing company knows that it exposes itself to greater liability if it fails to alert its partners (card issuers/banks) of a problem.
(a) they probably had names and address of everyone who showed up. any weird post-demo problems -> send FBI.
Perhaps. But if someone gets Longhorn's source code and creates exploits for its launch in late 2006, will anyone remember to check the list of March 2005 attendees. Also a suitably documented attendee could easily pass information to an undocumented outside hacker.
(b) you don't need to be on-site to attack a wifi installation. a top-quality directional antenna will work from a few miles away.
Very true (what a very unpleasant thought). Yet attacking from the outside is harder because of the longer distance, metal in the buildings, and clutter of WiFi cells in a large campus. In contrast, being in an executive conference room probably puts the hacker in close proximity to wireless networks for top executives at the company. A keyboard logger on Allchin's or Gates' laptop would be far more damaging.
(c) what's wrong with you, don't you *want* microsoft to fail?!?
Absolutely. I'm just concerned with the failure mode. If people just stop buying Microsoft products, that's great. But if hackers find a way to pull data out my bank's databases then i will not be so happy. Loss of market-share is fine, a catastrophic breach of commercial and government systems would be very very bad.
Unless Microsoft uses NO wireless on its campus or unless the walls were RF shielded, this was a very dangerous stunt. If a hacker can gain access to a Windows machine via wireless (and they can according to this account), then they would be able to (and might have) accessed wireless networks outside the meeting room but inside the corporate firewall. Range is no protection as it would be not hard to build a high-gain antenna into the lid of a hacker's laptop and orient it to pickup WiFi elsewhere on the Microsoft campus. If a hacker can gain access to an inside machine, they could plant a backdoor for later exploits including attacks on the the company's codebase.
I'm not a shareholder or a user of their products (except to the extent that the vast majority of the companies I do business with use Microsoft) but I find this an extremely irresponsible act on the company's part. If they want to try this sort of security testing, and they should, it should be done off-site or in a shielded room.
Scientific American's Amateur Scientist
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Makers of MAKE
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· Score: 3, Informative
Scientific American's Amateur Scientist has always had interesting things to make. The older columns (from before the age of lawsuits) featured more exciting things such a a 6-foot homemade rocket, atom smasher, and 20 W CO2 laser.
Slashdot Mirror
But Balmer said they could do "Interoperability" which essentially means giving up the "need for compatibility".
.net, IIS, SQL Server, etc.). With the large number of websites built for IE and run on MS server stuff, MS search could go places that Google would have a harder time following.
I'm not sure that interoperability means the end of "need for compatibility." Of course, they will offer interoperability. But I'll wager its just another embrace-and-extend play in which MS plays better with MS. Sure, MS won't prevent Windows users from using Google, but I wonder if MS will try to create an integrated search tool that gets instant high market-share merely by being embedded in the OS.
Going further, what stops MS from offering integrated search products that can access MS-proprietary data structures (ASP,
Many well-positioned companies have fallen before Microsoft's onslaught. Some might argue that Apple, Netscape, & Palm all made mistakes, but then all companies do. Microsoft is hard to beat given its huge marketshare and the combination of need-for-compatibility and user-apathy (how many people just use what MS provides because it is preloaded).
I hope Google isn't marginalized, but the historical data suggests otherwise.
I have sound muted on nearly all my computers -- that I can't hear them makes little difference to the OS or OS design. At worst, audible alerts need only be replaced by a flash of the menu-bar. Being blind would be a whole other matter.
The point is that some "disabilities" have little impact on OS design, other have a huge impact and each disability affect OS deisgn in different ways.
- A phisher sends a small worm to your stereo, the stereo asks the user to re-input the password on the DRM system, the phisher collects that password and uses it to re-sell all your music (possibly making you lose the right to listen to it). Even at $0.02/song and a 5,000 song collection, the phisher gets $100 per cracked stereo.
- Phishers attack one, low-level device hoping that the phished password from that device is also used on other, more important devices. How many people might use the same password on their stereo's DRM system, their refrigerator's automatic reordering system, their car's ignition system, or their bank's online account access?
- Spams starts arriving on ALL audio devices -- audio pop-ups ("audiups"?) start intruding on iPODs, VOIP phones, stereos. Worse, the infection could attack anything with a sound chip. Imagine suggestive Viagra ads coming from your pop-up toaster oven.
- A sleazy marketer buys access to or plants spyware in your vehicle's navigation system. You start getting pop-ups for oil-lube places or the database of locations of competitors becomes corrupted misleading the driver on their location.
- Digital cameras become spam-sending zombies. Anyone who walks within bluetooth range of you suddenly finds an image file on their device that contains an ad for whatever is the latest spam du jour.
- ...... I'm sure there are a million other scenarios, but its early and my coffee hasn't sunk in.
The point: Cool technology, but I wonder if the core OS has needed security layers to prevent exploits like these. I wonder if the systems designers have embedded a strong sense of permissions on processes and interfaces.The orbit of this band can't be anything but contentious. The shadow cast by this band would fall equally on both Northern and Southern hemisphere countries. Yet most of the greenhouse gas emitters (U.S., Europe, Japan, Asia, et al) are concentrated in the Northern hemisphere. The shadow would also affect equatorial countries that are not the cause of the problem.
It's an interesting solution but seems to place some burdens (e.g., ecological changes) on countries that are not the alleged cause of the problem.
Technology seems to be increasing the economic efficiency of the marketplace by supporting a type of business model arbitrage. If somebody offers something for less than it really costs or is really worth, people use technology to quickly find a way to exploit it.
For example, cell companies offer free in-system minutes to encourage friends & family to recruit new customers -- a nice little viral marketing ploy and something that, I'm sure, reduces stress in friends & family cell phone conversations. But it also creates an opportunity because those free in-system minutes are worth something if they can be somehow converted to out-of-system calls. Hence the motivations for this little hack.
Or consider the case of the single-use video camera. The unit is offered at a subsidized price (less than the true price of the camera) with the expectation that the consumer will return the camera and pay for the DVD conversion service. With a bit of hacking, though, a person can get a low-grade digital video camera for only single-use price of about $20.
Technology allows people to exploit these situations (and publish the results), much to the chagrin of the businesses that use these models. I wonder if this will drive businesses to a true pay-for-what-you-get mode of operation. No cell minutes will be free because it will be too easy to abuse free minutes. No single-use device will be as cheap -- it will require a deposit for the value of the asset.
That technology allows people to use products and services in unintended ways will force companies to change their products or business models to either lock-out unintended uses or build in a charge for the cost of those uses.
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density, which has nothing to do with hard drives. Secondly, hard drives haven't been getting any more reliable. That means all these hard drives have to be replaced every few years. It's a nightmare for long-term storage.
You are right -- Gordon Moore spoke only of trends in the number of transistors/IC. Yet his law was, if anything, about advances in the technologies of miniaturization. This miniaturization has had profound, indirect effects on storage. The same technologies that enabled semiconductor engineers to make smaller transistors have helped disk drive designers make denser drives. Smaller heads, faster electronics, and a better understanding of materials lead to advancements in both ICs and HDs.
I'm not sure what you mean about reliability. Perhaps reliability on a per-drive basis remains constant. But reliability on a per-bit basis has improved. How long would a cluster of 4,000 40 MB drives go without a failure in 1987? The reliability of 160 GB of storage has improved.
Yes, storage systems need periodic drive replacement but by the time a drive needs to be replaced, the indirect effects of Moore's Law will have made that replacement about 1/4 the price of the original drive. Thus, if storage is $1/Gb now, securing about $1.33/GB is sufficient to buy both today's storage and have the money needed to buy all subsequent replacements every 3 years in perpetuity. By 2022, a storage array of 100 servers with 6 drives each (an installation only 4 times larger on a device-count basis than the new Wikipedia installation) would provide the needed storage of 347 PB.
I think you're missing the point, which is that all that data is now much easier to lose, especially in the short term, if it's not taken care of properly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Sure, digital data can be lost easily, but it can also be copied/backed-up more easily. Assuming $0.01/page for paper copy (a gross underestimate of the cost of paper, toner, and labor for copies) and assuming 10 kB data/page (an overestimate), $10/GB (for high-end maintained storage), then cost ratio is at least 100:1 in favor of digital (and probably 1000:1). Inaccessible formats are a concern, but an automated batch process at the time of initial archiving can, at least, convert the data to some data format standard with a longer likely lifespan(e.g., plain ASCII, RTF, PDF, HTML, etc.)
Paper is its own single-point of failure concerns and the huge cost of copying makes those concerns real. Digital does add some new modes of failure (e.g., format obsolesce), but I think those are not as burdensome as the physical costs of copies.
In 1987, a Mac II came with a 40 MB drive. 17 years later, a PowerMac G5 came with 160 GB drive. This was at least 4000X improvement in storage density and price (and 1987's drive was both physically larger and more expensive than 2004's drive).
Assuming we continue the current rate of advance in storage density and price, future archivist should be able to buy a 0.64 PB drive for under $500 in 2021. A mere quarter of million dollars will provide enough space for a copy of all that stuff.
Digital technologies mean that archivists now enjoy orders of magnitude more information than they had in the past. Consider all the hallway and phone conversations or jotted notes lost in a paper-based organization versus having an archives of e-mail, IM, and sticky-note digital files.
Digital technologies mean that archivists now enjoy orders of magnitude more potential accessibility that in the past. Even if paper has greater innate archival lifespan, its physical form makes in inaccessible to all but a select monkish class of archivists colocated with their paper archives. Even the select few archivists who are allowed access to paper archives can only effectively process at best dozen documents per minute (and only a dozen per hour if they must wander the files to find randomly dispersed documents).
By contrast, digital technologies radically expand access on two dimensions. First, technology expands the number of people that can access an archive in terms of distance -- a remote researcher can have full access, including access to documents in use by other archivists. A low cost to copy documents means a wealth of information. Second, search tools provide prodigious access to the files -- searching/accessng/reading thousands or millions of documents per second.
To say we face a dark age is to presume that paper documents provided far more enlightenment and comprehensiveness of documentation than paper ever actually did.
Technology can help extend human abilities, surmount human limitation, but its no panacea.
I have no way to tell if your are "obsessed" except to ponder the relationship between the incremental time spent on technology versus the incremental benefit. If you spent an hour less on technology per week, would your quality of life be diminished? If you, instead, spent that hour on something else (a non technological hobby, interacting with friends, etc.), would your quality of life by increased? How do those balance for you?
Of course, technology may be a means for you (or other disabled people) to accomplish what others do without non-technological assistance. Then the only issue is in making sure that technology stays in the realm of means rather than becoming an end unto itself.
That is why I say technology is no panacea. It is merely a tool. As with all tools, its value is indirect -- valuable only for the things that it enables, not valuable unto itself.
We know that the black turtle-necked one hates noisy machines and I agree with him. I configured an old Powerbook 190cs to boot from a CF card in the PCMCIA slot -- wonderfully silent and much faster than booting from the HD. Of course on that old machine, the OS, a couple of applications, and some files fit nicely in only a 4 MB flash memory. In contrast, OSX, modern apps, and files will need 1024 times that space (4 GB) at a minimum and tens of GB if the person has even a modest collection of media files.
I can only hope that Samsung's technology roadmap (16 GB by 2006, 100 GB by 2008) is correct although I wonder how HD technology will have evolved over those same years.
It cracks me up, because they probably have an obsessive/compulsive, socially-maligned programmer within Secunia that just delights spending 16 hours a day trying to twist the browsers into doing what he wants. And then Secunia announces these flaws to save their reputation because nothing else is going on.
I'm sure you are absolutely right. And hopefully he'll keep doing it because you there are crackers, phishers, and criminals out there who delight in spending 16 hours a day trying to twist browsers into doing what they wants. If Secunia is a bit obsessive in their red team activities against computers, then we can hope that they uncover exploits (and motivate patching or disabling of exploitable features) before they appear in the wild.
I, for one, welcome information on what computer software and features can or cannot be trusted.
If Hollywood can do it, why can't I? I'd like my credit card numbers, SSN, etc to be unreadable outside the country (OK, I'll leave one credit card universally accessible for travel to foreign countries). In fact, I'd like to take it a step farther. I'd love some DRM on my data so that my bank can't pass it to who knows who 3rd-party companies for marketing opportunities.
I know, I know, I don't own my own data (the bank compiled it and thus the bank claims ownership of it). But a consumer can dream, can't he?
Seriously, until financial data gets some kind of DRM/coding/tracking codes/etc., it will be impossible to track who leaked or sold information and thus recover damages from irresponsible holders of consumer's data. Until the irresponsible can be found and punished (civil suits or criminal charges), no one will have much incentive to protect consumer data.
This seems inevitable as the Aibo's WiFi and webcam would seem to provide a physical network layer for ingress and an interesting target for crackers (virus-laden downloads are another means of infection).
I can just imagine Aibo spyware that relays webcam shots to who-ever. Owners will need to think twice the next time their Aibo wanders into the bathroom or bedroom.
Time to start thinking about how to deworm the Aibo.
The only number that matters in the long term is making people happy (the whole reason that we have an economy, money, IP, the RIAA, etc). If we could be producing more happy people by clamping down hard on infringers, if this produces more and better music and thus makes does a better job of satisfying a desire for music, then we should clamp down.
Excellent point! What RIAA, et al want is compensation for the happiness they provide through music that is illegally downloaded. If a person downloads a song -- even on a try-before-you-buy basis -- does not that create a small amount of happiness for the downloader? What about the iota of happiness provided by "having" a song in a collection (even if its not listened to?) Do the people that made the music or made the musician popular deserve nothing for that incremental unit of happiness they helped provide from songs that are downloaded and stored? If a person is happier because they added another 2 GB of music to their collection, shouldn't the people who provided that music receive some compensation?
The only question then is the mechanism for compensating the creators, technicians, marketers, and distributors of music. This is where we get into all the problems of DRM, subscriptions, taxes on media, fees on bandwidth, government-sponsored arts, etc. (and lots of unhappiness) Each of these crude mechanisms is an attempt to create a fair trade between those that want to listen to and keep music versus those that provide that music.
The only number that matters for purposes of affecting legislation is total *actual* losses. The MPAA's losses numbers have nothing to do with the actual losses, mostly because it's incredibly difficult to predict what would happen.
Agreed. All loss numbers require bad assumptions (e.g., each illegal download of an album = one lost CD sale or that CD sales are up = no losses). Perhaps what really matters is how much music people are listening too, how much they value that listening experience, how much music people are collecting, and how much they value that collection. To the extent that people value music that they have on disk and listen to, but do not pay for, the RIAA can declare a loss. I'm sure that loss number is lower than RIAA would claim, but much higher than proponents of illegal downloads would like to admit.
As you allude to, creating a mechanism for valuing the happiness created by the listening and collecting of music is the key. The ugly challenge is that, to date, all of the proposed mechanisms seem to create unhappiness, too. Thanks for an insightful post.
- No greater than 70% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal) -- i.e., as much as 30% of music listeners simply don't download music.
- No fewer than 40% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal).
- At most, 30% use both legal and illegal downloads.
- It's possible (based on this limited data) that no one does both illegal and legal downloading.
In next month's survey, both numbers could go up or down since the survey does not ask "do you ONLY download music from legal/ illegal sources." Moreover, the survey provides no estimates of volumes -- illegal downloaders could be downloading 10X or 10X less than their legal-downloading counterparts. Or people that download legal music could be the biggest "pirates" and this survey would be none the wiser.God rest his soul, for without him, Slashdot would not be!
First, I mean no disrespect to Kilby -- he clearly was an innovator of the first order and an accomplished inventor. But to say that without him, slashdot would not have happened is to misread the broad sweep of history in general and the history of chips in particular. So many great ideas bubble out of the context of the time, not the minds of some unique person. Eras are primed for particular inventions. Even the IC was essentially invented by two independent inventors-- don't forget Robert Noyce who also "invented" the chip. Kilby's chip may have come a few months earlier, but Noyce's chip was on silicon.
At worst, without Kilby, the IC would have been delayed half a year and all of us with have slightly lower post-counts.
The article alludes to fraudulent activity starting back in mid-April leading to an investigation of this particular card processor in mid-May. That suggests that the card companies do some rather interesting statistical analyses on fraud patterns to find commonalities. In this case, they were able to detect that an unusual number of cards with fraudulent transactions had, at some point, a transaction that shared a common card processor sometime in the past.
Obviously, someone (I assume its Mastercard, Visa, etc.) is storing sufficient volume of historical transactions (including metadata such as the 3rd-party transaction processor) to analyze patterns such as this. With some 60 billion card transactions per year worldwide, this would make for a very large dataset and a very interesting analysis problem.
Opiates are CNS (Central Nervous System) depressants. This class of drugs suppresses neural activity, deadening pain and thought. In contrast, good SF stimulates thought by presenting an interesting what-if with some combination of technical and social contexts and consequences.
SF may be a mind-altering drug (perhaps a stimulant or hallucinogen), but it is not an opiate.
Getting into payment systems will expose Google to new levels of regulation that may affect user's privacy. Regulations related money laundering and anti-terrorist laws may force Google to collect and turn-over data on users of its payment service. I wonder if those rules might also force Google to turn-over other data on "customers of interest".
Having all your information (your banking, your email, your internet search activities) in one basket makes it a tempting target for government.
Oh wait, exactly how many IRS breaches have we had so far?
I doubt the IRS would be forthcoming if their was a breach (although there are the occasional articles about corrupt IRS employees). In fact, a breach would probably be classified and not be allowed to be published. In contrast, a card processing company knows that it exposes itself to greater liability if it fails to alert its partners (card issuers/banks) of a problem.
(a) they probably had names and address of everyone who showed up. any weird post-demo problems -> send FBI.
Perhaps. But if someone gets Longhorn's source code and creates exploits for its launch in late 2006, will anyone remember to check the list of March 2005 attendees. Also a suitably documented attendee could easily pass information to an undocumented outside hacker.
(b) you don't need to be on-site to attack a wifi installation. a top-quality directional antenna will work from a few miles away.
Very true (what a very unpleasant thought). Yet attacking from the outside is harder because of the longer distance, metal in the buildings, and clutter of WiFi cells in a large campus. In contrast, being in an executive conference room probably puts the hacker in close proximity to wireless networks for top executives at the company. A keyboard logger on Allchin's or Gates' laptop would be far more damaging.
(c) what's wrong with you, don't you *want* microsoft to fail?!?
Absolutely. I'm just concerned with the failure mode. If people just stop buying Microsoft products, that's great. But if hackers find a way to pull data out my bank's databases then i will not be so happy. Loss of market-share is fine, a catastrophic breach of commercial and government systems would be very very bad.
Unless Microsoft uses NO wireless on its campus or unless the walls were RF shielded, this was a very dangerous stunt. If a hacker can gain access to a Windows machine via wireless (and they can according to this account), then they would be able to (and might have) accessed wireless networks outside the meeting room but inside the corporate firewall. Range is no protection as it would be not hard to build a high-gain antenna into the lid of a hacker's laptop and orient it to pickup WiFi elsewhere on the Microsoft campus. If a hacker can gain access to an inside machine, they could plant a backdoor for later exploits including attacks on the the company's codebase.
I'm not a shareholder or a user of their products (except to the extent that the vast majority of the companies I do business with use Microsoft) but I find this an extremely irresponsible act on the company's part. If they want to try this sort of security testing, and they should, it should be done off-site or in a shielded room.
Scientific American's Amateur Scientist has always had interesting things to make. The older columns (from before the age of lawsuits) featured more exciting things such a a 6-foot homemade rocket, atom smasher, and 20 W CO2 laser.