I suspect that much of the perceived "insecurity" of the net stems from people's experience with spam, e-mailed viruses, and phishing. Redesigning the protocol to prevent spoofed headers would go a long way to reduce spam (or at least make it easier to filter). We get about 75 spams a day that claim to come from our domain or mail server IP.
The other major source of the perceived "insecurity" of the net is due to the insecurity of end-user devices (and end-users themselves), but that a harder issue to tackle.
The larger problem is that the internet was designed during an innocent era when all the devices on the net were assumed trustworthy. Secure.mil or collegial.edu networks never had even consider issues such as spam, spyware, DDoS, DNS poisoning, IDN spoofing, etc.
What's more relevant is to compare the cost of building the plant to the money you can make by running the plant over its planned lifetime. That's the relevant figure of merit for a nuclear power plant, and I think it's the relevant one for an OTEC plant as well.
Absolutely! The cost of the plant must not exceed the total value of the energy provided by the plant. The efficiency does enter into this calculation because these plants extract such a small percentage of the heat energy latent in the water.
The problem is that fossil fuels are artificially subsidized.
True. All energy sources have additional costs and benefits that are not evident in the market price. For example, this technology might have environment impacts or land-use impacts that are not fully costed into the plant price. These ocean thermal plants also release CO2 into the air (brought up from the depths), although not as much as does a fossil fuel plant.
The efficiency of these system is extremely low because the temperature difference is so miniscule. For thermodynamic efficiency purposes temperatures are measured in Kelvin and temperature differences are only a few percent. The maximum efficiency of these plants in an ideal world is only 6%. When you account for the very large amounts of energy needed to pump huge volumes of water, the real efficiency is only 2-3%. This FAQ covers this and other issues.
850 GB is a 1 MB/sec, 8 hours per day, for an entire month.
With disks such as this, we may never have to erase anything again. Every web-page that I have ever visited could be cached. Every "save" of every document could be retained for version control. Every change of a config file could be retained for roll-back.
The only thing we need is a OS/file system that automatically retains everything, organizes it, and keeps pointers to the DVD backup (replaced monthly).
Yes, IBM may be profitable now, but that means nothing. IBM depends on long-term trends and long-term plans. If the company can't win service contracts or lets Dell get corporate contracts for servers, the impact isn't noticeable for several quarters or even years. That is why IBM is taking action now.
The point is that smart companies don't wait for trouble, they solve problems before anyone thinks they have a problem. If anything, IBM may even be late to the "solving" stage. Q1 2005 was not pretty for IBM because the future prospects looked dimmer than expected.
I fear there are bigger reasons why people won't be traveling through wormholes. First, biologically tissues are far too fragile for the intense gravitational, electromagnetic and radiation fields that are likely to come with these phenomena. Second, biologically systems (and the attendant life support systems) are far too bulky. Creating a wormhole is uniform over the size of a person or ship will be extremely difficult. Even if the hole is big enough for a person, the center of the wormhole will likely stretch space in ways severely different from the edges of the hole. Macroscopic objects would be shredded.
Why is there always the presumption that a system with an x86 CPU will be PC compatible?
I agree with you that Apple does not necessarily have to go PC compatible. But there are two very strong reasons that Apple would only buy Intel CPUs as part of a conversion to PC-compatible hardware.
First, Apple has always suffered from the "its more expensive" criticism (some, including I, disagree that Apple is more expensive, but that's beside the point of public perception). Adding an Intel chip will do nothing for Apple's costs (may even increase them). Only if Apple goes PC compatible will it gain access to ultra-low prices associated with Intel hardware. Apple will never beat Dell at the low-cost PC game, but could co-opt Dell's economies of scales by releasing OS X for x86.
Second, Apple gains access to a massive install base of PCs. Apple sells only 3 million machines per year versus worldwide PC production of 200 million machines per year. I'd bet there are more than half a billion PCs that have the heft needed to run Tiger (from what I have seen, Tiger can run on a 400 MHz G3). If just 3% of those PCs converted, Apple sells 15 million copies of Tiger immediately and another 6 million copies per year afterward. This, alone, would triple Apple's marketshare. Given the high gross margins on software (vs hardware), Apple could afford to lose some hardware sales. But this is only possible if Apple sells a true PC-compatible version of OS X.
It's just Apple trying to get better terms/service from IBM (think Dell's "talks" with AMD)
It will be the death of Apple's hardware division
Apple will have a hard time supporting the myriad boards, chipsets, and peripherals of PCs
Piracy/sharing (pick your preferred new-speak term) will mean a revenue-less expansion of the install base
That said, Apple's done some strange moves in the past. If PC users can just buy OS X86 for $99, they might give Mac a try. It wouldn't take that high conversion rate for OS software profits to easily replace hardware profits. I'd bet that Apple makes nearly as much profit on a sale of Tiger as it does on the sale of it slower-end machines.
Two mice provide 4-D of smooth motion. And you get another 2-D of coarser motion with scroll wheels. This would have applications beyond games as I have seen (but can't find) experiments in the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) literature on the superiority of dual-cursor interfaces.
they have an unlimited supply of virtually atmosphere-unimpeded solar energy
Yes and no, unfortunately. Unless they put the installation where they get almost perpetual sun they are going to face a long night every lunar month. The plus side of the polar regions might be the availability of hydrogen, which might be in the form of water (easily separated in to O2 and H2) or in some other form. Hydrogen could be used to help reduce the lunar rock oxides to release the oxygen. Of course, perching a moonbase on the peak of the mountain might be tricky.
I wonder how these ventures will work out. The transition from being an independent OSS project to being a captive part of a services organization can't be easy. Holding customers' hands as they deploy last-year's release is very different from writing the next bit of cool code.
The solution will be to find a management staff that can balance software development tasks versus providing services -- keeping both the project personnel and the customers happy. I'm guessing that they will do this by putting project people into "guru" positions and doing the bulk of the sales and service work with an army of hired underlings.
The challenge is to rip those oxygen atoms from the silicon and calcium atoms. This is hard because they are tightly bound. Moreover, I doubt NASA would be interested in any process that consumes some other non-moon-available chemical (trading 5 lbs oxygen for 10 lbs of a reducing agent). I suspect that some sort of electrolysis might do the trick, but even that might be outside the power budget.
HK has been using a contactless cash card since 1997 called Octopus It's proprietary RFID system (built before the standard appeared), that seems to work quite well for public transport and retail.
Apple and IBM? Google will join the ranks of successful technology companies? No way!
Both Apple and IBM were much stronger companies 10-15 years ago. IBM owned the IBM-PC market, but let the platform get away from them. Apple used to have 12% marketshare and dominate the education market. I'm not belittling their current "success" of IBM, Apple, et al, except to say that these companies are well off their peak.
But you are right. Google won't dissappear, although they might be bought by someone such as Lotus and Netscape were. Like these other examples, Google will continue. The question is can they dominate an industry where the platform is controlled by MS?
Just buy a 6-pack of fake fingers with identical prints. Leave one next to each player, give them to your friends, etc. Time to trademark and register phakephinger.com
Many once dominant companies have slipped in the face of Microsoft's monopolistic control of the PC desktop. Did these companies make mistakes? Sure. But was Microsoft flawless in its products and execution? No! What enabled MS to dominate was not technological superiority in an innovation or performance sense, but control of a platform.
If a company controls a platform where compatibility with that platform is essential/valued, then that company has a massive advantage against any other potential competitor. Unless PC-compatibility becomes unnecessary, Google will join the ranks of companies such as Lotus, Apple, Palm, Netscape, and IBM.
The Trust Rating system is intriguing if it were carried a bit further. In conjuction with a built-in malware detector, every Netscape user could be feeding information to the Trust Rating DB. If a popular site is hijacked or infected, then as soon as one Netscape user accesses it, the system would detect the attempted malware activites, alert the Trust Rating system, and alert all subsequent users. The result is an internet immune system based on distributed detection.
I wonder if the ultimate version of this system is a DNS with Trust-Rating lookup process. Instead of using a plain-jane DNS, the browser would use a special DNS that returns both the IP and the trust-rating of that IP. Overloading DNS with a few bits of trust data would reduce the overhead of calling two DB for each web page access (DNS and Trust Rating).
Virtual boxen will catch a wide array of exploits, but may miss some. For example, it sounds like they look for attempts to create executables on disk, so a RAM resident nasty might escape notice. Also, some exploits many only work on "real" machines such as those proposed for exploiting hyperthreading.
The point is that to the extent that the virtual XP box fails to emulate ALL the features of real hardware, there will be some room for doubt. Despite this misgiving, I commend Microsoft for tackling this problem.
The U.S. FTC "do-not-call" list worked wonders for phone spam for our household. We used to get at least 40 phone spams per month and now get less about 3 per month. Perhaps it could be employed to reduce the volume of spam, too.
To prevent contributing to spammers' DB of addresses, the list could be handled on a query-only basis. It's not fool proof, but any spammer caught with an HD full of "do-not-email" names would be in for a world of hurt.
I'm sure this proposal will get the obligatory "why this won't work" form letter, but then what solution to spam doesn't have a a long list of problems.
I've never understood how BPL even made it to the trial stage. Any EE with two brain cells is going to recognize that putting broadband HF/VHF carriers on unshielded power lines is a recipe for interference to many licensed radio services. See that wire going down the road? It's a fscking antenna, you moron!
Absolutely! We can only assume that the power providers were so desperate to jump on the dot-com bandwagon that the MBAs overpowered the EEs.
Back in the day (1983), I used a CAD system that had a light pen pointer and a true vector display. The CAD software drew the picture by plotting the electron beam on a circular CRT screen (i.e., it did not use a raster scan). The base of the desk-sized console had a massive rack of boards that converted the line list into vector scan deflections. The pen (you touched the pen directly to the screen) had a small hole and photodiode that monitored the timing of the trace to determine what you were pointing at.
To me, the Psion 5 series is the ultimate PDA. It has a full suite of Office and PIM applications, compact size, a usable keyboard, decent screen size, and stellar battery life (35 hrs on-time with off-the-shelf AAs). Detractors might point to the lack of hand writing recognition, color, and MP3 playing, but I have absolutely no use or interest in those features (apparently, I am in a very small minority).
Currently, there is absolutely nothing on the market that is remotely as good as the 5 series -- everything these days sucks in battery-life or keyboard or both.
For many applications, the location of the server is not that important. Servers could be relocated to a cooler climate (avoiding the overhead of air-conditioning) or to an area of lower-cost electricity (e.g., Norway has aluminum smelters that take advantage of low-cost hydropower). At the very least, the server could be collocated at a nearby power plant to reduce transmission losses. One could also look into cogeneration -- using the heat of the server to warm water that is then used for another industrial process.
All medications are experimental for three fundamental reasons:
Clinic research is not statistically adequate: testing a medication on 10,000 people will not catch adverse side effects that kill 1-in-20,000 (e.g., kill 1,500 per year when 30 million peapl take the drug). Aspirin given to millions of children for more than 100 years before discovering Reyes syndrome.
Genetic variations: People aren't genetically uniform. A drug that tests safe and effective on Chinese patients may kill Caucasians (and the Chinese and Caucasians are hardly genetically uniform). For childhood leukimia, there are currently 3 different drugs and they use genetic testing to determine which one to use (the wrong one is lethal).
Environmental factors: The other substances that you ingest affect drug behavior. Two different drugs may be metabolized via that same pathway and thus if you take both, it slows the the processing of the drug (may increase or decrease the drug's effects). Foods also affect the results. For example., grapefruit deactivates certain digestive enzymes that otherwise limit absorption of some drugs (e.g., you get a higher dose of the medicine if you take it with grapefruit juice).
The point is that there's rarely enough data and too many genetic and environmental variations to judge all the effects. No medicine is ever proven safe. At best, you can create statistical confidence estimates on the likelihood of adverse reactions, but the genetic and environmental factors make these hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that much of the perceived "insecurity" of the net stems from people's experience with spam, e-mailed viruses, and phishing. Redesigning the protocol to prevent spoofed headers would go a long way to reduce spam (or at least make it easier to filter). We get about 75 spams a day that claim to come from our domain or mail server IP.
.mil or collegial .edu networks never had even consider issues such as spam, spyware, DDoS, DNS poisoning, IDN spoofing, etc.
The other major source of the perceived "insecurity" of the net is due to the insecurity of end-user devices (and end-users themselves), but that a harder issue to tackle.
The larger problem is that the internet was designed during an innocent era when all the devices on the net were assumed trustworthy. Secure
What's more relevant is to compare the cost of building the plant to the money you can make by running the plant over its planned lifetime. That's the relevant figure of merit for a nuclear power plant, and I think it's the relevant one for an OTEC plant as well.
Absolutely! The cost of the plant must not exceed the total value of the energy provided by the plant. The efficiency does enter into this calculation because these plants extract such a small percentage of the heat energy latent in the water.
The problem is that fossil fuels are artificially subsidized.
True. All energy sources have additional costs and benefits that are not evident in the market price. For example, this technology might have environment impacts or land-use impacts that are not fully costed into the plant price. These ocean thermal plants also release CO2 into the air (brought up from the depths), although not as much as does a fossil fuel plant.
The efficiency of these system is extremely low because the temperature difference is so miniscule. For thermodynamic efficiency purposes temperatures are measured in Kelvin and temperature differences are only a few percent. The maximum efficiency of these plants in an ideal world is only 6%. When you account for the very large amounts of energy needed to pump huge volumes of water, the real efficiency is only 2-3%. This FAQ covers this and other issues.
Yes, you can get energy, but not much.
850 GB is a 1 MB/sec, 8 hours per day, for an entire month.
With disks such as this, we may never have to erase anything again. Every web-page that I have ever visited could be cached. Every "save" of every document could be retained for version control. Every change of a config file could be retained for roll-back.
The only thing we need is a OS/file system that automatically retains everything, organizes it, and keeps pointers to the DVD backup (replaced monthly).
I bet the mercury vapors in the fluorescent tubes scrambled their brains enough to convince them this was a good idea.
Yes, IBM may be profitable now, but that means nothing. IBM depends on long-term trends and long-term plans. If the company can't win service contracts or lets Dell get corporate contracts for servers, the impact isn't noticeable for several quarters or even years. That is why IBM is taking action now.
The point is that smart companies don't wait for trouble, they solve problems before anyone thinks they have a problem. If anything, IBM may even be late to the "solving" stage. Q1 2005 was not pretty for IBM because the future prospects looked dimmer than expected.
I fear there are bigger reasons why people won't be traveling through wormholes. First, biologically tissues are far too fragile for the intense gravitational, electromagnetic and radiation fields that are likely to come with these phenomena. Second, biologically systems (and the attendant life support systems) are far too bulky. Creating a wormhole is uniform over the size of a person or ship will be extremely difficult. Even if the hole is big enough for a person, the center of the wormhole will likely stretch space in ways severely different from the edges of the hole. Macroscopic objects would be shredded.
Why is there always the presumption that a system with an x86 CPU will be PC compatible?
I agree with you that Apple does not necessarily have to go PC compatible. But there are two very strong reasons that Apple would only buy Intel CPUs as part of a conversion to PC-compatible hardware.
First, Apple has always suffered from the "its more expensive" criticism (some, including I, disagree that Apple is more expensive, but that's beside the point of public perception). Adding an Intel chip will do nothing for Apple's costs (may even increase them). Only if Apple goes PC compatible will it gain access to ultra-low prices associated with Intel hardware. Apple will never beat Dell at the low-cost PC game, but could co-opt Dell's economies of scales by releasing OS X for x86.
Second, Apple gains access to a massive install base of PCs. Apple sells only 3 million machines per year versus worldwide PC production of 200 million machines per year. I'd bet there are more than half a billion PCs that have the heft needed to run Tiger (from what I have seen, Tiger can run on a 400 MHz G3). If just 3% of those PCs converted, Apple sells 15 million copies of Tiger immediately and another 6 million copies per year afterward. This, alone, would triple Apple's marketshare. Given the high gross margins on software (vs hardware), Apple could afford to lose some hardware sales. But this is only possible if Apple sells a true PC-compatible version of OS X.
- It's just Apple trying to get better terms/service from IBM (think Dell's "talks" with AMD)
- It will be the death of Apple's hardware division
- Apple will have a hard time supporting the myriad boards, chipsets, and peripherals of PCs
- Piracy/sharing (pick your preferred new-speak term) will mean a revenue-less expansion of the install base
That said, Apple's done some strange moves in the past. If PC users can just buy OS X86 for $99, they might give Mac a try. It wouldn't take that high conversion rate for OS software profits to easily replace hardware profits. I'd bet that Apple makes nearly as much profit on a sale of Tiger as it does on the sale of it slower-end machines.Two mice provide 4-D of smooth motion. And you get another 2-D of coarser motion with scroll wheels. This would have applications beyond games as I have seen (but can't find) experiments in the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) literature on the superiority of dual-cursor interfaces.
they have an unlimited supply of virtually atmosphere-unimpeded solar energy
Yes and no, unfortunately. Unless they put the installation where they get almost perpetual sun they are going to face a long night every lunar month. The plus side of the polar regions might be the availability of hydrogen, which might be in the form of water (easily separated in to O2 and H2) or in some other form. Hydrogen could be used to help reduce the lunar rock oxides to release the oxygen. Of course, perching a moonbase on the peak of the mountain might be tricky.
I wonder how these ventures will work out. The transition from being an independent OSS project to being a captive part of a services organization can't be easy. Holding customers' hands as they deploy last-year's release is very different from writing the next bit of cool code.
The solution will be to find a management staff that can balance software development tasks versus providing services -- keeping both the project personnel and the customers happy. I'm guessing that they will do this by putting project people into "guru" positions and doing the bulk of the sales and service work with an army of hired underlings.
The challenge is to rip those oxygen atoms from the silicon and calcium atoms. This is hard because they are tightly bound. Moreover, I doubt NASA would be interested in any process that consumes some other non-moon-available chemical (trading 5 lbs oxygen for 10 lbs of a reducing agent). I suspect that some sort of electrolysis might do the trick, but even that might be outside the power budget.
HK has been using a contactless cash card since 1997 called Octopus It's proprietary RFID system (built before the standard appeared), that seems to work quite well for public transport and retail.
Apple and IBM? Google will join the ranks of successful technology companies? No way!
Both Apple and IBM were much stronger companies 10-15 years ago. IBM owned the IBM-PC market, but let the platform get away from them. Apple used to have 12% marketshare and dominate the education market. I'm not belittling their current "success" of IBM, Apple, et al, except to say that these companies are well off their peak.
But you are right. Google won't dissappear, although they might be bought by someone such as Lotus and Netscape were. Like these other examples, Google will continue. The question is can they dominate an industry where the platform is controlled by MS?
Just buy a 6-pack of fake fingers with identical prints. Leave one next to each player, give them to your friends, etc. Time to trademark and register phakephinger.com
Many once dominant companies have slipped in the face of Microsoft's monopolistic control of the PC desktop. Did these companies make mistakes? Sure. But was Microsoft flawless in its products and execution? No! What enabled MS to dominate was not technological superiority in an innovation or performance sense, but control of a platform.
If a company controls a platform where compatibility with that platform is essential/valued, then that company has a massive advantage against any other potential competitor. Unless PC-compatibility becomes unnecessary, Google will join the ranks of companies such as Lotus, Apple, Palm, Netscape, and IBM.
The Trust Rating system is intriguing if it were carried a bit further. In conjuction with a built-in malware detector, every Netscape user could be feeding information to the Trust Rating DB. If a popular site is hijacked or infected, then as soon as one Netscape user accesses it, the system would detect the attempted malware activites, alert the Trust Rating system, and alert all subsequent users. The result is an internet immune system based on distributed detection.
I wonder if the ultimate version of this system is a DNS with Trust-Rating lookup process. Instead of using a plain-jane DNS, the browser would use a special DNS that returns both the IP and the trust-rating of that IP. Overloading DNS with a few bits of trust data would reduce the overhead of calling two DB for each web page access (DNS and Trust Rating).
Virtual boxen will catch a wide array of exploits, but may miss some. For example, it sounds like they look for attempts to create executables on disk, so a RAM resident nasty might escape notice. Also, some exploits many only work on "real" machines such as those proposed for exploiting hyperthreading.
The point is that to the extent that the virtual XP box fails to emulate ALL the features of real hardware, there will be some room for doubt. Despite this misgiving, I commend Microsoft for tackling this problem.
The U.S. FTC "do-not-call" list worked wonders for phone spam for our household. We used to get at least 40 phone spams per month and now get less about 3 per month. Perhaps it could be employed to reduce the volume of spam, too.
To prevent contributing to spammers' DB of addresses, the list could be handled on a query-only basis. It's not fool proof, but any spammer caught with an HD full of "do-not-email" names would be in for a world of hurt.
I'm sure this proposal will get the obligatory "why this won't work" form letter, but then what solution to spam doesn't have a a long list of problems.
I've never understood how BPL even made it to the trial stage. Any EE with two brain cells is going to recognize that putting broadband HF/VHF carriers on unshielded power lines is a recipe for interference to many licensed radio services. See that wire going down the road? It's a fscking antenna, you moron!
Absolutely! We can only assume that the power providers were so desperate to jump on the dot-com bandwagon that the MBAs overpowered the EEs.
Back in the day (1983), I used a CAD system that had a light pen pointer and a true vector display. The CAD software drew the picture by plotting the electron beam on a circular CRT screen (i.e., it did not use a raster scan). The base of the desk-sized console had a massive rack of boards that converted the line list into vector scan deflections. The pen (you touched the pen directly to the screen) had a small hole and photodiode that monitored the timing of the trace to determine what you were pointing at.
To me, the Psion 5 series is the ultimate PDA. It has a full suite of Office and PIM applications, compact size, a usable keyboard, decent screen size, and stellar battery life (35 hrs on-time with off-the-shelf AAs). Detractors might point to the lack of hand writing recognition, color, and MP3 playing, but I have absolutely no use or interest in those features (apparently, I am in a very small minority).
Currently, there is absolutely nothing on the market that is remotely as good as the 5 series -- everything these days sucks in battery-life or keyboard or both.
For many applications, the location of the server is not that important. Servers could be relocated to a cooler climate (avoiding the overhead of air-conditioning) or to an area of lower-cost electricity (e.g., Norway has aluminum smelters that take advantage of low-cost hydropower). At the very least, the server could be collocated at a nearby power plant to reduce transmission losses. One could also look into cogeneration -- using the heat of the server to warm water that is then used for another industrial process.
- Clinic research is not statistically adequate: testing a medication on 10,000 people will not catch adverse side effects that kill 1-in-20,000 (e.g., kill 1,500 per year when 30 million peapl take the drug). Aspirin given to millions of children for more than 100 years before discovering Reyes syndrome.
- Genetic variations: People aren't genetically uniform. A drug that tests safe and effective on Chinese patients may kill Caucasians (and the Chinese and Caucasians are hardly genetically uniform). For childhood leukimia, there are currently 3 different drugs and they use genetic testing to determine which one to use (the wrong one is lethal).
- Environmental factors: The other substances that you ingest affect drug behavior. Two different drugs may be metabolized via that same pathway and thus if you take both, it slows the the processing of the drug (may increase or decrease the drug's effects). Foods also affect the results. For example., grapefruit deactivates certain digestive enzymes that otherwise limit absorption of some drugs (e.g., you get a higher dose of the medicine if you take it with grapefruit juice).
The point is that there's rarely enough data and too many genetic and environmental variations to judge all the effects. No medicine is ever proven safe. At best, you can create statistical confidence estimates on the likelihood of adverse reactions, but the genetic and environmental factors make these hard to do.