The June 8,2004, Wall Street Journal carried an article on "Airports Clash With Airlines Over Wi-Fi"(sorry, I don't have a link). Airlines want to use Wifi for both customer lounges and for wireless IT services -- think wireless data terminals for scanning and tracking baggage. But the airport terminal operators claim they own the airwaves and have the right control and sell wifi access.
This could impact regulation of WiFi in the U.S. As the article pointed out: If the FCC takes action, it could have broader implications for Wi-Fi's dissemination. That's because the airlines are asking the FCC a crucial question: whether a landlord has the right to bar tenants from setting up individual Wi-Fi networks. "This is about landlord-tenant rights and whether a landlord can dictate to a tenant how you use unlicensed frequencies," says Laura Smith, president of the Industrial Telecommunications Association, which has asked the FCC for guidance on behalf of the airlines.
I wonder if other building owners will outlaw tenant's wifi setups in favor of selling access to a landowner-run wifi networ.
An associated Press article questions the commercial viability of WiFi in the U.S. Said one company that recently left the business after building only one hot spot, "Management believes that only Wi-Fi equipment manufacturers are currently successful in generating profits in the Wi-Fi industry, and service providers have yet to develop a profitable business model," With the ubiquity of computers in business, the modest price of broadband, and the very low price of WAPs, it seems that more people and businesses are simply giving WiFi away, leaving service providers with no profits.
how long will it be before we start seeing the cable companies (such as Comcast) start dropping their prices to levels which compete directly with dial-up?"
When the companies stop seeing 43% growth. People obviously like the broadband at current prices. If you have a hot product, why lower the price? When growth stagnates, then the companies will start gettng aggressive -- adding services or reducing prices to either make new customers or steal customers from rivals.
In the long run, doubt that broadband will ever be the same price as dial-up because it both costs more and is more valuable to customers.
I created this sort of system in Hypercard for a massive stack development project. With abotu 50,000 lines of script in hundreds of stakc object, finding "TODO"s was a real pain so I made my own search & task list tool. A search tool on a card for developers found todo tokens in the stack's scripts and listed them for me. Double clicking a list item took me to the item. The thing also had a visitation counter so I could see which items I'd done.
The little tool was actually more versatile than the Microsoft system because I could search, list, and visit on any token (it search scripts for a string) - great for finding all the places that used a certain variable or accessed a particular stack feature. It also had a pull-down list for sorting the "task list" in several different ways. Other tools let me quickly visit "Next" and "Previous" or cull the list by deleting task list items that met different criteria.
The only thing different from my stack search tool and the patent is that my little tool did not change the script code in response to anything. But I suspect that someone with "ordinary skill in the art" could easily have do that.
The reason I avoid Windows (beside the questionable business tactics of the company) comes from my own and my friends experience with the products. But mostly, its my experience with the horrible, inconsistent design of Office and occasional bouts of Window's use. Its obvious that MS has lots of coders and that they each do their little bit in total isolation from each other. Add viruses (more than 30 per day in May) and I see absolutely no reason to switch.
My one, recent , experience with Windows was trying to get a peripheral (with Windows-only drivers) connected so I could use it. On a totally fresh install of Windows, I discovered that inserting an IBM PCMCIA-to-CF card adapter hosed the system so badly, I had to wipe the drive (the fault persisted across a normal reinstall of the OS). Funny how my all of my Macs (from a old 190 powerbook to a newer Pismo) handled the IBM adapter perfectly with no driver software, no configuration, and no hiccups, while software from IBM's former partner barfed chunks.
I've also watched friends, highly intelligent friends who are profession Windows developers, struggle with their systems -- accepting that they will have to reinstall (and probably reformat) at least once or twice a year. In contrast, in nearly 20 years of Mac usage, I've only been forced to reinstall the OS once (and have never been forced to reformat a drive).
I'm sure some have had spotless experiences with Windows and I'm sure some have had horrible experiences with Mac. But my experience has shown me that Macs just work and work well when compared to the alternatives.
I know I don't own the cheapest, most popular computers, but then I've never owned the cheapest most popular cars either.
The analysis of the Witty worm (discussed on/. here ) used a massive darknet subtending 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space. This gave them an excellent sample size for analyzing the behavior of the worm.
All of the bills use a simple pattern of 5 small circles in a vaguely cross-shaped pattern (see the article). Any new bill could use this pattern too, so you would not have to update your software.
Technology such as this reduces the value of virus-created owned boxes. The creators of viruses that want to create spam-spewing machines would find their spam spewer useless. During the infection phase, the virus-spreading emails would get the infected box tagged and blocked. During the usage phase, the virus-creator/spam sender would find that the owned box is useless because all the messages get blocked.
This tech does not preclude malaciously-motivated viruses, but it does reduce the profit potential of creating spam networks.
So what you're proposing, and please, correct me if I am mistaken, is that one should gather all one's sensitive pieces of data: credit card numbers, passwords, and the like, and compile them all into a plaintext set of firewall or IDS rules? Where would one store this treasure trove of sensitive information, conveniently gathered into one place for ease of use? Perhaps I have missed a critical component of your plan, which I'm sure isn't nearly as patently insane as it sounds.
Your point is a very good one. Each "security" feature adds another potential weakness to a system - witness the Witty worm for a recent example of new vulnerabilities created by security.
You are right about leaving critical data in plain text. The system would use a hashing system that compares hashed key values to a hash of running network data stream. The hash would be coded off a password and use a suitable one-way hash function that does not allow knowledge of the password to permit unhashing of the stored key values (think public key crypto).
Also, those with double-layer tin-foil hats might only enter partial substrings from key account numbers, passwords, etc. (e.g. the last 8 digits of a social security number). One could even create a simple non-useful code string such as "this string should never appear in outgoing network data" -- typing this in occassionally would catch the send activities of keyboard loggers. Innocuous, but unique strings could also be used inside files or in filenames to detect directory and file snooping.
Are the logged keystrokes of most of these viruses transmitted in the clear? If so, then couldn't one create a outbound traffic monitor that watched for certain key character strings (such as passwords, account numbers, etc.) and if the monitor see sensitive data strings in clear text, it would halt the transmission and alert the owner. This could also be used to halt snooping of files and directory structures -- just create a file with a monitor-prohibitted file name and contents.
As a side benefit, the system would also catch insecure site logins - seeing which websites are asking for unencrypted sensitive data such as passwords.
Early versions of some film scanner software that I worked on were terribly slow. A quick profile of the running code showed that about 10% of the time was spent in a little piece of code called TtoF(). This code parsed and coverted text into floats.
The earliest versions of the software did not convert key preference/calibration/setup files into internally stored numerical values -- instead, anytime the code needed a calibration/setup value, it went to the file, read it, and converted it. Needless to say, that "feature" was quickly corrected.
That's not as bad as an early VAX image processing program that prepped newly allocated file space by setting all the bytes to zero, one byte at a time.
Internet distribution can be set up by almost anyone with a minimal funding, while getting in a traditionnal distribution circuit costs a lot and requires a non trivial minimal volume.
If animators setup their own distribution channel on the internet, they will bypass the 'buyers' as you call them who can't accurately judge quality and popularity, and allow the market to directly rate and buy quality stuff. That is how internet distribution can help, not the industry, but the animators/creators, and that is the point of it
In theory, yes. But three issues mean that online distribution won't solve the problem.
First, most animators have neither the time, skills, nor interest to create their own distribution company. Instead, some people would become online distributors that handle the animators creations - these new distributors would become buyers -- creating the same old problems.
Second, online may have very low costs, but it also has very low revenues. The result is that, in the writing world, online publishers have much lower pay rates than do print publishers.
Third, the biggest unsolved problem is the winner-take-all syndrome. Would many people pay $1 to download a single film? Probably yes, but only if it was a "good" film. Although thousands of animators may be creating thousands of films, only few hundred become well-known each year (say 10%). Out of that hundred, only the top few 10s of films (1%) become really popular. Only the best-of-the-best (1%) make much money and that leaves 9% of films that may barely break-even and 90% films that dont make money at all. Better distribution won't change the limited attention span of people or their desire to only pay for the best-of-the-best.
I do agree with you that online distribution can bring anime to a wider audience at a lower cost point. But I still think that the industry will remain a buyer's market with too many animators competing for too few eyeballs.
4. Establish good working relationships with customers, customize the codebase for them. (Customers == people who want customized work.)
How does GPL treat for-pay customized code in terms of what must be released in the open to the public vs. can be kept closed and confidential? If a customer pays to add highly proprietary features added to a GPL codebase, does GPL force the release of that code? Can a company that is using GPL code contract with its contirbuting development community to make closed-source customizations of GPL code under an NDA? If the customer with the customized GPL-derived code then sells that software to their customers or franchisees, does that force the release of the code?
I'm just wondering how the open/GPL world of free software interfaces with the closed world of proprietary business innovations.
Internet distribution could help the industry, but I suspect it won't help the animators.
I suspect that Anime suffers from the same curse as does writing, music, photography, art and other creative endeavors -- too many people are willing to do it for free or at minimal pay. Outsourcing isn't too blame, although it contributes to the problem.
If you look at the pitiful amounts that most newspapers, magazines, and book publishers pay, you will see that its is impossible to earn a decent wage in most creative work. Yes, some famous writers, photographers, artists, film makers, and musicians earn good money for creating the best of the best, but they are an exception.
I'm not sure what drives this phenomenon but it could be the: 1) too many people are willing to work for pennies to see their name in print, 2) buyers (publishers/distributors) can't accurately judge quality/popularity so they refuse to pay, 3) perceptions that anyone can write/take photos/make music, so why pay much for it.
The point is that its a buyers market in most creative businesses and that won't change with internet distribution.
What I'm saying is capitalism and robots can not co-exist.
I see no reasons why robots cannot exist within and maintain a capitalist society. Capitalism is just an economic system for allocating resources within a massive distributed multiagent environment --whether those agent are human or artifical is beside the point. Why couldn't a specialized robot sell its services/labor and use that money to invest in new equipment for itself and buy needed supplies (e.g., fuel, CPU time, lubricants, etc.). Why couldn't a group of robots form an organization that buys raw materials, makes stuff, and sells the product of their work to other robots?
I suspect that what you are really saying is that humans and robots cannot coexist because Moore's Law is much faster than Darwin's law.
Strategic value of Oxygen?
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I believe Cisco (aka the Bandwidth Growers Association) likens enterprise IT fabric to oxygen -- its just something you must have to keep the business running. Like oxygen, IT is now taken from granted.
For myself and my wife, we could not do what we do or earn what we earn without the Internet or our Macs.
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
How about equating this in term of life-hours destroyed? A murder takes, at most, 872,000 hours (100 years) of one person's life. But a virus creator takes hours from each of millions of people's lives. The total "life lost" is worse with computer viruses.
Moreover, I'd argue that the victim's life destroyed by virus/worm/trojan infections is far worse than murder as it is more a prolonged torture rather than a quick end.
Hanging a Fresnel Lens in front of a white wall projects a nicely focused image of the room onto the wall. Depending on the arrangement of the room and windowage, its poosible to watch the world pass by on projected image. The optimum distance from wall to lens is approximately the focal length (or a little farther if the subject is close to the lens.
Just make sure the sun never gets to the lens or it will burn an arc across the wall.
Here in the UK, the Tesco and Waitrose supermarket chains have been taking orders over the net and delivering the goods by truck for several years. It's no longer remarked upon as being anything special.
Its nothing new on this side of the pond either. We used a pre-Web/pre-internet online grocery delivery service back in around 1992 (the online component was a BBS dial-up connection which let you enter your order via a TTY terminal app).
Tesco were the first to realise that using their regular staff picking goods off the shelves of their regular supermarkets was a low-investment and very cost-effective way of linking orders to delivery trucks.
Thats how the circa 1992 service did it too.
This is the part that does never made sense to me. Although shop-from-shelf does not require the billions in investments that WebVan made in customized pick-n-pack distribution centers, the labor costs are much higher. Unless Tesco charges higher item prices, I don't see how they are making money on the venture. Most online grocery services charge what seems like a token delviery fee that cannot possibly pay for the labor of the shopper or the driver, let alone pay for the truck, advertising, customer support, etc.
Speed sensing would seem to be useful for anticounterfeiting - the chip could determine if it is being run at higher than rated speed. Either that, or the chip could use the clock rate to detect power-saving modes - disabling parts of the chip when the clock rate drops.
What's Intel using the allegedly patented tech for?
I'm surprised that the investors pulled the plug because they must have known, from the start, about the high cost of a nationwide roll-out. Thus, the investors must have learned that subcription volumes are too low to create a going concern. Giving that Cometa was had lower subscription rates, that fact bodes ill for commerical WiFi.
I'm especially surprised that Intel, one of Cometa's investors, let the venture go under. Intel seems to be giving away WiFi chips to help sell Centrino CPUs and would seem an ideal deep pocket to support a low-cost commercial WiFi network (road warriors with high-end Intel laptops see a win-win for Intel/Cometa). Either Intel thinks that WiFi does not need Cometa (because WiFi is thriving) or Intel realizes that WiFi is not going to generate sufficient returns through high-margin chip sales.
Although I approve of anything that can stem the tide of spyware (and wear LL Bean), I do question the company's grounds for suing. In some ways Claria's popups could be likened to trespassing in an LL Bean store caring a banner for a competing retailer. Yet this analogy suggests that LL Bean (for example) owns the computer of people visiting its site.
I can envisage legitimate services that could be caught by this. For example, I can imagine a service that watches webpages and provides warnings to the user of malware links, scams, etc. Such a service would be effectively outlawed by this precedent. If LL Bean suceeds, then no service or piece of software has any right to process an LL Bean page and trigger any other actions than the ones that LL Bean approves of.
I want to get rid of spyware (although I have yet to see any on my Mac yet) but wonder about the precedent this lawsuit sets and what it means for consumers rights.
Actually it's the other way around: You CANNOT build 'quantum' repeaters, and switches/routers would be pretty hard without being able to read the stream(reading it would change the data inside the stream, which is a big no-no).
You may be right, but CANNOT is pretty strong language. I can see that one cannot "read" the data without collapsing the wavefunction, but I wonder if one cannot create further entanglements that copy the information or otherwise permit manipulation of the data streams inside a sealed Schroedinger box.
This means it's a point-to-point solution without any intermediaries. Only the receiver's hardware can read the quantum channel. So no, the quantum channel is not vulnerable to snooping at all.
This is why quantum encryption is useless. It only works if both the sender and the recipient happen to have a dedicated quantum-fiber hardline between them. With no way to switch or route a connection, the system needs O(N^2) lines that connect every possible sender to every possible recipient.
Remember that only the key is exchange on the quantum channel, the rest is done over normal classical channels.
Hmmmm.. . I'm now imagining a franchise retail operation (McQuantalds? PhotonBucks?) that lets two people exchange private keys that they then use for communications on the normal internet. A limited number of franchise outlets could maintain a full complement of secure connections to other outlets.
Yet the system is still vulnerable at the edges. Anything between the magic quantum modem (an entangler/de-entangler or enden?) and the user is the weak link -- being vulnerable to all manner of attacks and snooping (keyboard loggers, backdoors, etc.). The quantum stuff only secures a fraction of the channel.
Although quantum crypto secures the fiber, it does nothing for the equipment on either end. Routers, switches, ISP mail servers, etc. remain accessible.
Until Linksys sells a consumer quantum WAN interface, CISCO sells quantum Layer 3 switches, and all the telcos fiber-up with quantum crypto repeaters, the whole system is vulnerable to snooping.
Unless you count WalMart/Lindows as embedded, the only business model that seems remotely geared toward consumer desktop is a subscription model. I can see how Linux provides multiple sound business models for b2b, but wonder if any company can make money off consumer desktop linux.
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The June 8,2004, Wall Street Journal carried an article on "Airports Clash With Airlines Over Wi-Fi"(sorry, I don't have a link). Airlines want to use Wifi for both customer lounges and for wireless IT services -- think wireless data terminals for scanning and tracking baggage. But the airport terminal operators claim they own the airwaves and have the right control and sell wifi access.
This could impact regulation of WiFi in the U.S. As the article pointed out: If the FCC takes action, it could have broader implications for Wi-Fi's dissemination. That's because the airlines are asking the FCC a crucial question: whether a landlord has the right to bar tenants from setting up individual Wi-Fi networks. "This is about landlord-tenant rights and whether a landlord can dictate to a tenant how you use unlicensed frequencies," says Laura Smith, president of the Industrial Telecommunications Association, which has asked the FCC for guidance on behalf of the airlines.
I wonder if other building owners will outlaw tenant's wifi setups in favor of selling access to a landowner-run wifi networ.
An associated Press article questions the commercial viability of WiFi in the U.S. Said one company that recently left the business after building only one hot spot, "Management believes that only Wi-Fi equipment manufacturers are currently successful in generating profits in the Wi-Fi industry, and service providers have yet to develop a profitable business model," With the ubiquity of computers in business, the modest price of broadband, and the very low price of WAPs, it seems that more people and businesses are simply giving WiFi away, leaving service providers with no profits.
how long will it be before we start seeing the cable companies (such as Comcast) start dropping their prices to levels which compete directly with dial-up?"
When the companies stop seeing 43% growth. People obviously like the broadband at current prices. If you have a hot product, why lower the price? When growth stagnates, then the companies will start gettng aggressive -- adding services or reducing prices to either make new customers or steal customers from rivals.
In the long run, doubt that broadband will ever be the same price as dial-up because it both costs more and is more valuable to customers.
I created this sort of system in Hypercard for a massive stack development project. With abotu 50,000 lines of script in hundreds of stakc object, finding "TODO"s was a real pain so I made my own search & task list tool. A search tool on a card for developers found todo tokens in the stack's scripts and listed them for me. Double clicking a list item took me to the item. The thing also had a visitation counter so I could see which items I'd done.
The little tool was actually more versatile than the Microsoft system because I could search, list, and visit on any token (it search scripts for a string) - great for finding all the places that used a certain variable or accessed a particular stack feature. It also had a pull-down list for sorting the "task list" in several different ways. Other tools let me quickly visit "Next" and "Previous" or cull the list by deleting task list items that met different criteria.
The only thing different from my stack search tool and the patent is that my little tool did not change the script code in response to anything. But I suspect that someone with "ordinary skill in the art" could easily have do that.
The reason I avoid Windows (beside the questionable business tactics of the company) comes from my own and my friends experience with the products. But mostly, its my experience with the horrible, inconsistent design of Office and occasional bouts of Window's use. Its obvious that MS has lots of coders and that they each do their little bit in total isolation from each other. Add viruses (more than 30 per day in May) and I see absolutely no reason to switch.
My one, recent , experience with Windows was trying to get a peripheral (with Windows-only drivers) connected so I could use it. On a totally fresh install of Windows, I discovered that inserting an IBM PCMCIA-to-CF card adapter hosed the system so badly, I had to wipe the drive (the fault persisted across a normal reinstall of the OS). Funny how my all of my Macs (from a old 190 powerbook to a newer Pismo) handled the IBM adapter perfectly with no driver software, no configuration, and no hiccups, while software from IBM's former partner barfed chunks.
I've also watched friends, highly intelligent friends who are profession Windows developers, struggle with their systems -- accepting that they will have to reinstall (and probably reformat) at least once or twice a year. In contrast, in nearly 20 years of Mac usage, I've only been forced to reinstall the OS once (and have never been forced to reformat a drive).
I'm sure some have had spotless experiences with Windows and I'm sure some have had horrible experiences with Mac. But my experience has shown me that Macs just work and work well when compared to the alternatives.
I know I don't own the cheapest, most popular computers, but then I've never owned the cheapest most popular cars either.
The analysis of the Witty worm (discussed on /. here ) used a massive darknet subtending 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space. This gave them an excellent sample size for analyzing the behavior of the worm.
All of the bills use a simple pattern of 5 small circles in a vaguely cross-shaped pattern (see the article). Any new bill could use this pattern too, so you would not have to update your software.
Technology such as this reduces the value of virus-created owned boxes. The creators of viruses that want to create spam-spewing machines would find their spam spewer useless. During the infection phase, the virus-spreading emails would get the infected box tagged and blocked. During the usage phase, the virus-creator/spam sender would find that the owned box is useless because all the messages get blocked.
This tech does not preclude malaciously-motivated viruses, but it does reduce the profit potential of creating spam networks.
So what you're proposing, and please, correct me if I am mistaken, is that one should gather all one's sensitive pieces of data: credit card numbers, passwords, and the like, and compile them all into a plaintext set of firewall or IDS rules? Where would one store this treasure trove of sensitive information, conveniently gathered into one place for ease of use? Perhaps I have missed a critical component of your plan, which I'm sure isn't nearly as patently insane as it sounds.
Your point is a very good one. Each "security" feature adds another potential weakness to a system - witness the Witty worm for a recent example of new vulnerabilities created by security.
You are right about leaving critical data in plain text. The system would use a hashing system that compares hashed key values to a hash of running network data stream. The hash would be coded off a password and use a suitable one-way hash function that does not allow knowledge of the password to permit unhashing of the stored key values (think public key crypto).
Also, those with double-layer tin-foil hats might only enter partial substrings from key account numbers, passwords, etc. (e.g. the last 8 digits of a social security number). One could even create a simple non-useful code string such as "this string should never appear in outgoing network data" -- typing this in occassionally would catch the send activities of keyboard loggers. Innocuous, but unique strings could also be used inside files or in filenames to detect directory and file snooping.
Does the idea still sound insane?
Are the logged keystrokes of most of these viruses transmitted in the clear? If so, then couldn't one create a outbound traffic monitor that watched for certain key character strings (such as passwords, account numbers, etc.) and if the monitor see sensitive data strings in clear text, it would halt the transmission and alert the owner. This could also be used to halt snooping of files and directory structures -- just create a file with a monitor-prohibitted file name and contents.
As a side benefit, the system would also catch insecure site logins - seeing which websites are asking for unencrypted sensitive data such as passwords.
Early versions of some film scanner software that I worked on were terribly slow. A quick profile of the running code showed that about 10% of the time was spent in a little piece of code called TtoF(). This code parsed and coverted text into floats.
The earliest versions of the software did not convert key preference/calibration/setup files into internally stored numerical values -- instead, anytime the code needed a calibration/setup value, it went to the file, read it, and converted it. Needless to say, that "feature" was quickly corrected.
That's not as bad as an early VAX image processing program that prepped newly allocated file space by setting all the bytes to zero, one byte at a time.
Internet distribution can be set up by almost anyone with a minimal funding, while getting in a traditionnal distribution circuit costs a lot and requires a non trivial minimal volume.
If animators setup their own distribution channel on the internet, they will bypass the 'buyers' as you call them who can't accurately judge quality and popularity, and allow the market to directly rate and buy quality stuff. That is how internet distribution can help, not the industry, but the animators/creators, and that is the point of it
In theory, yes. But three issues mean that online distribution won't solve the problem.
First, most animators have neither the time, skills, nor interest to create their own distribution company. Instead, some people would become online distributors that handle the animators creations - these new distributors would become buyers -- creating the same old problems.
Second, online may have very low costs, but it also has very low revenues. The result is that, in the writing world, online publishers have much lower pay rates than do print publishers.
Third, the biggest unsolved problem is the winner-take-all syndrome. Would many people pay $1 to download a single film? Probably yes, but only if it was a "good" film. Although thousands of animators may be creating thousands of films, only few hundred become well-known each year (say 10%). Out of that hundred, only the top few 10s of films (1%) become really popular. Only the best-of-the-best (1%) make much money and that leaves 9% of films that may barely break-even and 90% films that dont make money at all. Better distribution won't change the limited attention span of people or their desire to only pay for the best-of-the-best.
I do agree with you that online distribution can bring anime to a wider audience at a lower cost point. But I still think that the industry will remain a buyer's market with too many animators competing for too few eyeballs.
4. Establish good working relationships with customers, customize the codebase for them. (Customers == people who want customized work.)
How does GPL treat for-pay customized code in terms of what must be released in the open to the public vs. can be kept closed and confidential? If a customer pays to add highly proprietary features added to a GPL codebase, does GPL force the release of that code? Can a company that is using GPL code contract with its contirbuting development community to make closed-source customizations of GPL code under an NDA? If the customer with the customized GPL-derived code then sells that software to their customers or franchisees, does that force the release of the code?
I'm just wondering how the open/GPL world of free software interfaces with the closed world of proprietary business innovations.
Internet distribution could help the industry, but I suspect it won't help the animators. I suspect that Anime suffers from the same curse as does writing, music, photography, art and other creative endeavors -- too many people are willing to do it for free or at minimal pay. Outsourcing isn't too blame, although it contributes to the problem. If you look at the pitiful amounts that most newspapers, magazines, and book publishers pay, you will see that its is impossible to earn a decent wage in most creative work. Yes, some famous writers, photographers, artists, film makers, and musicians earn good money for creating the best of the best, but they are an exception. I'm not sure what drives this phenomenon but it could be the: 1) too many people are willing to work for pennies to see their name in print, 2) buyers (publishers/distributors) can't accurately judge quality/popularity so they refuse to pay, 3) perceptions that anyone can write/take photos/make music, so why pay much for it. The point is that its a buyers market in most creative businesses and that won't change with internet distribution.
What I'm saying is capitalism and robots can not co-exist.
I see no reasons why robots cannot exist within and maintain a capitalist society. Capitalism is just an economic system for allocating resources within a massive distributed multiagent environment --whether those agent are human or artifical is beside the point. Why couldn't a specialized robot sell its services/labor and use that money to invest in new equipment for itself and buy needed supplies (e.g., fuel, CPU time, lubricants, etc.). Why couldn't a group of robots form an organization that buys raw materials, makes stuff, and sells the product of their work to other robots?
I suspect that what you are really saying is that humans and robots cannot coexist because Moore's Law is much faster than Darwin's law.
I believe Cisco (aka the Bandwidth Growers Association) likens enterprise IT fabric to oxygen -- its just something you must have to keep the business running. Like oxygen, IT is now taken from granted.
For myself and my wife, we could not do what we do or earn what we earn without the Internet or our Macs.
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
How about equating this in term of life-hours destroyed? A murder takes, at most, 872,000 hours (100 years) of one person's life. But a virus creator takes hours from each of millions of people's lives. The total "life lost" is worse with computer viruses.
Moreover, I'd argue that the victim's life destroyed by virus/worm/trojan infections is far worse than murder as it is more a prolonged torture rather than a quick end.
Hanging a Fresnel Lens in front of a white wall projects a nicely focused image of the room onto the wall. Depending on the arrangement of the room and windowage, its poosible to watch the world pass by on projected image. The optimum distance from wall to lens is approximately the focal length (or a little farther if the subject is close to the lens.
Just make sure the sun never gets to the lens or it will burn an arc across the wall.
Here in the UK, the Tesco and Waitrose supermarket chains have been taking orders over the net and delivering the goods by truck for several years. It's no longer remarked upon as being anything special.
Its nothing new on this side of the pond either. We used a pre-Web/pre-internet online grocery delivery service back in around 1992 (the online component was a BBS dial-up connection which let you enter your order via a TTY terminal app).
Tesco were the first to realise that using their regular staff picking goods off the shelves of their regular supermarkets was a low-investment and very cost-effective way of linking orders to delivery trucks.
Thats how the circa 1992 service did it too.
This is the part that does never made sense to me. Although shop-from-shelf does not require the billions in investments that WebVan made in customized pick-n-pack distribution centers, the labor costs are much higher. Unless Tesco charges higher item prices, I don't see how they are making money on the venture. Most online grocery services charge what seems like a token delviery fee that cannot possibly pay for the labor of the shopper or the driver, let alone pay for the truck, advertising, customer support, etc.
Speed sensing would seem to be useful for anticounterfeiting - the chip could determine if it is being run at higher than rated speed. Either that, or the chip could use the clock rate to detect power-saving modes - disabling parts of the chip when the clock rate drops.
What's Intel using the allegedly patented tech for?
I'm surprised that the investors pulled the plug because they must have known, from the start, about the high cost of a nationwide roll-out. Thus, the investors must have learned that subcription volumes are too low to create a going concern. Giving that Cometa was had lower subscription rates, that fact bodes ill for commerical WiFi.
I'm especially surprised that Intel, one of Cometa's investors, let the venture go under. Intel seems to be giving away WiFi chips to help sell Centrino CPUs and would seem an ideal deep pocket to support a low-cost commercial WiFi network (road warriors with high-end Intel laptops see a win-win for Intel/Cometa). Either Intel thinks that WiFi does not need Cometa (because WiFi is thriving) or Intel realizes that WiFi is not going to generate sufficient returns through high-margin chip sales.
Although I approve of anything that can stem the tide of spyware (and wear LL Bean), I do question the company's grounds for suing. In some ways Claria's popups could be likened to trespassing in an LL Bean store caring a banner for a competing retailer. Yet this analogy suggests that LL Bean (for example) owns the computer of people visiting its site.
I can envisage legitimate services that could be caught by this. For example, I can imagine a service that watches webpages and provides warnings to the user of malware links, scams, etc. Such a service would be effectively outlawed by this precedent. If LL Bean suceeds, then no service or piece of software has any right to process an LL Bean page and trigger any other actions than the ones that LL Bean approves of.
I want to get rid of spyware (although I have yet to see any on my Mac yet) but wonder about the precedent this lawsuit sets and what it means for consumers rights.
Actually it's the other way around: You CANNOT build 'quantum' repeaters, and switches/routers would be pretty hard without being able to read the stream(reading it would change the data inside the stream, which is a big no-no).
You may be right, but CANNOT is pretty strong language. I can see that one cannot "read" the data without collapsing the wavefunction, but I wonder if one cannot create further entanglements that copy the information or otherwise permit manipulation of the data streams inside a sealed Schroedinger box.
This means it's a point-to-point solution without any intermediaries. Only the receiver's hardware can read the quantum channel. So no, the quantum channel is not vulnerable to snooping at all.
This is why quantum encryption is useless. It only works if both the sender and the recipient happen to have a dedicated quantum-fiber hardline between them. With no way to switch or route a connection, the system needs O(N^2) lines that connect every possible sender to every possible recipient.
Remember that only the key is exchange on the quantum channel, the rest is done over normal classical channels.
Hmmmm.. . I'm now imagining a franchise retail operation (McQuantalds? PhotonBucks?) that lets two people exchange private keys that they then use for communications on the normal internet. A limited number of franchise outlets could maintain a full complement of secure connections to other outlets.
Yet the system is still vulnerable at the edges. Anything between the magic quantum modem (an entangler/de-entangler or enden?) and the user is the weak link -- being vulnerable to all manner of attacks and snooping (keyboard loggers, backdoors, etc.). The quantum stuff only secures a fraction of the channel.
Although quantum crypto secures the fiber, it does nothing for the equipment on either end. Routers, switches, ISP mail servers, etc. remain accessible.
Until Linksys sells a consumer quantum WAN interface, CISCO sells quantum Layer 3 switches, and all the telcos fiber-up with quantum crypto repeaters, the whole system is vulnerable to snooping.
Unless you count WalMart/Lindows as embedded, the only business model that seems remotely geared toward consumer desktop is a subscription model. I can see how Linux provides multiple sound business models for b2b, but wonder if any company can make money off consumer desktop linux.
Any thoughts?